 Good evening, everybody. For those of you getting ready to charrette, it's fantastic you came down. This lecture got moved from Halloween for various reasons, and it was amazing that we were able to jump. It now runs right up against final reviews, but knowing Yong Ho Chang and his wife and partner, Li Xiaolu, I think this will be a very inspiring lecture, so I feel like it's wonderfully timed. I want to thank our Dean, Andres Hyake, for making this possible today. It was Waping Wu, our interim dean last spring, met with Yong Ho just casually, and got to know each other a little bit, and Waping suggested that Yong Ho come to lecture. Andres became dean in the summer and then completed that transaction very nicely and very cordially, as Gali Asomanov, who is here somewhere, and myself to do a follow-up. This semester, the lectures I've attended, the questions that came out of the audience were amazing. I could quote them, and I actually intended to, but I heard at Immanuel Admusu's lectures questions about myth and autobiography, which actually blew my mind. I texted Sanford Quinter, who's sitting here, that someone had brought up Dana Haraway during the Brown Labor. Dana Haraway was a major author in Sanford's Book Incorporations, but so I think Gali probably do a better job than I about holding back and letting the questions come from the audience. But as a precursor, I wanted to take a minute to help introduce Yong Ho Cheng, and this slide has been up for a moment so we can actually move it. Yong Ho is a partner with his wife, Li Jia, in Beijing-based practice, but has a history in academia, which is, and architectural practice, that is not entirely uncommon, but is extraordinarily devoted to both sides. And over the years, I have full confession, I met Yong Ho in 1985 and have been great friends with him ever since. I don't like those personal kind of introductions for a public lecture, but here it's unavoidable. But I can say that, having known Yong Ho all those years, we continually circle back to try and understand the influences on us collectively, he and I together, Li Jia, but also just on having spent so much time in architecture schools with the aspiration of practice. And I will say very clearly that I think Yong Ho, despite prolific practice now for 30 years, is really still often sorting out what he thinks about things, even under this immense pressure of realizing them. And he's done this at Berkeley, at Rice, at MIT, where he served as chair and head, and as a visiting professor at all the major schools around the world, and is continually doing this. He and I, you might call it nostalgia, I think it's better than that, but we go back and remember what was Horst Riddle saying at Berkeley, and did we understand it, or those Chris Alexander lectures, did we understand them, and is it, should we go back to that? So it's not nostalgia so much as really trying to sort out these influences. But I think he, when I introduced Yong Ho to Wei Ping last spring, I suggested that this is somebody who I think is both at the cutting edge of practice, but nonetheless continually reflecting on education, and of course has had major roles in education, so I don't mean to make it seem as if he hasn't. The Yong Ho, I know, I feel a cliche to do this, but he did a project when he was fresh out of school, based on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and I was there, I saw the project happen, and that model is a picture today on his bookcase in Manhattan. But one thing about the film, aside from the fact that it's architectural and ocular and perspectival and full of drama and it's high art, and it's also popular media, all of these things are really in Yong Ho's lexicon, to go from post-structuralism to comedy. Hitchcock is, in some cases, shows up, and in this one picture here, he shows up in the film. And aside from the fact that it's Hitchcock and Yong Ho has specific interest in that, I've often felt that what really made him timely and continues to make him timely tonight, hopefully we get into the new things, was that he was reflecting on being in and out of the scene. He's the author of the project and he's in the project, and I think, you know, architecturally speaking, the last 30 years, we have all returned to this over and over again, post-structuralist questions about authorship and control and power versus critiquing, having said authority, and meanwhile having to find the agency to build. When Yong Ho returned to Beijing in 1995, I guess, full-time, was back and forth, but really, people thought of, I thought of Yong Ho, and I think most people thought of Yong Ho as somebody who was quite happy drawing. This is one of his drawings from the later years in Berkeley. He later built this, but a kind of exquisite practice of drawing paper architecture, and one wasn't entirely sure that it wouldn't stay there. I've kind of stayed there more than I should have. But Yong Ho returned to Beijing. The first project was a bookstore where the bookcase is moved on a bicycle wheel, and this kind of mix of like the cerebral and the popular, the vernacular, and the heady, I think a more menacing project, perhaps the third police station. I always thought of this as a kind of Duchampian bicycle wheel, but I won't go into that now. Yong Ho can resort to ways to describe his work as straight out of his life as a young child and young man in China before he came to the U.S. as a result of the Cultural Revolution, landing at Ball State University in Indiana, and then later Berkeley. But here, a project in a journal that Steve Hall, myself, Yehuda Saffron, and Andrew McNair created and edited, a commitment to dim sum. There's a humor there, but a seriousness. This was 32, one of the many things Yong Ho has worked on in the States over the years. I think we did 13 issues, largely on computers at Steven's office. It got more rigorous when we had an editorial help from Daniela Fabricius. Samford might know that. But then, on the other end of it, the Yong Ho that's harder for me to understand, even though I've known him for so long, is the Yong Ho that does projects like this. And I can understand it literally, but tonight maybe we're going to be there more in the talk, and this little preamble is helpful or not. But this is not one building by Yong Ho, but many. He did all of them. And Li Xia, I'm sure, knowing Li Xia, I think that's probably very much Li Xia, making that happen. There's also interspersed, very innovative work around material. Yong Ho warns people all the time to not lose sight of architecture in the face of big urban questions. This was work putting concrete into fiberglass tubes and using, I guess, while you were chair at MIT, using maybe MIT-demanded research from you. But actually realizing that. The Yong Ho, I most recently really watched in a lecture. I've seen several in the last few years. But back in 2013, I was in Shanghai and attended a lecture. You must have had 1,000 people listening at an auditorium on the Huangpu River. Part of a project we were all involved in. And you showed Sigford Leverence and urgently told 1,000 young architecture students that they should not lose sight of the small. And this was contextualized in the massive urbanization of China 30 years into that. And maybe that will come up tonight. We, I'm assuming you learned about Sigford Leverence from Lars Larra for Stanley Sedowitz at Berkeley, two immensely influential professors, very gifted designers, but people that set a milieu that I think Yong Ho had a lot gained immense amount from, as did I and of course many. Returning to China, well-known project, the Split House. Purposely shown only vaguely here, but it shows in a model. This is rammed earth construction. What isn't obvious, and maybe we'll see it tonight, is that it's kind of at the bottom of a giant hill like a dam. And as much as it's a vernacular and serious work about place, it's also precarious. And I think like much of the work we're going to see is saying, yes, I'm in practice, but I'm not normal. And that's in fact part of the name of the company. So this is not intended to be followed, but Yong Ho graduated from Ball State University later, he already had pretty much a degree in architecture from China. His father was the architect for the museum on the Tiananmen Square. But after the Cultural Revolution, he and his brother came to the United States, landed at Ball State, then Berkeley. In questions, I might bring some of these things up, but the School of Architecture of Berkeley was founded in 1959 there and read, it was only a few years later that the world came undone in the 60s, and Berkeley really kind of perhaps followed suit. But in that aftermath, that school, which is a school I dearly love, was really pluralistic and diverse, and to get through it, you really could tap into unbelievable professors, but you had to build some identity for yourself. A lot of that happened by going over to Bilstau Books, where the books were expensive, but you could read them. And Steve Hall worked at Bilstau Books, just as a young man. Just prior to moving back to China, Yong Ho taught at Rice. His home is there at the Red Arrow, it was about four doors down from the Chinese Consulate, so maybe we should have seen it coming, that he wasn't gonna stay at Rice much longer, and he took off. So I asked him today for something personal, this is Yong Ho skating at Michigan, and that is Lee Sankatora in the front, so he does know how to have fun. And at the end of the semester, I thought it was worthwhile showing some of that. So that makes it possible for my questions really to be already queued up. But this is somebody who's got three and a half decades of experience across building and teaching where to begin with a career like that. We'll now leave it up to Yong Ho to tell us what he wants to do in this room. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Michael. Now that you did the lecture, maybe I should introduce you. But anyway, I'll have some slides and I'll pick up the conversation you started and then maybe evolve into a discussion or something I'm really focusing on today. Anyway, so you see a peculiar graphic design that what should I use to click? Is that on the keyboard? Okay, yeah. So what do you see here is not for today. I thought I wanted to show you because that would make a point. If we did a lecture on the original date, which is the Halloween night, of course. But the point I like to make is that, so what you see here is not form follows function, but rather the other way around. Is function or rather content follows form, which is something I'll talk shortly. And then of course, we're back to normal, so you'll see the title again. So where I'd like to start, I already mentioned, is this very important slogan suggested by the American architect Louis Sullivan. However, today I would ask this question. Let me show you why that question is relevant, perhaps even important. So first of all, I'd like to define the word form. Because I'm not only using the definition of form as what you'll find in Oxford English dictionary, which is figure, shape, appearance, and also could be a structure, system, and organization. I'm defining it according to the traditional Chinese poem, which is discipline. There's one word we use in Chinese, literally it means discipline. So what it means is that it's a set of rules you set up for a poem, to be poem. So here you see, so there are four lines, of course, and each line has five characters. And then beyond that, the pitch of every single character, there are four of them, is dictated. You can't pick a word with the wrong pitch. And then it rhymes. So I'm going to read it in Chinese just for giving you a little flavor, how it sounds. So, Wenxing Cai Wei Liang, Xiang Mao Jie Wei Yu, Bu Zhi Dong Li Yun, Qu Zuo Ren Jian Yu. What the poem talked about in translation, as you can see directly, actually it's about the building of a building. So imagine if we talk about it, we meaning architects, it could be done all in a very everyday language, or professional jargons. But only when you have these set of rules, the lu, our form rather, the form enables words become poetry. And then the question I have is that, would a form enable building to be architecture? So we'll find out. So this is an image probably you have seen hundreds of times, thousands of times. You're probably pretty tired of. But anyway, so what I like to suggest is that it's a question. So what is the form of a glass house? We may think about glass, the material, we may think about the steel frame for the Fung's house. They are all pretty important. But the most important thing is transparency. Because of transparency, the house has to be extroverted towards outside as well as inside. So a glass house by nature cannot have rooms, because anything in the middle would block transparency. And of course, Mies didn't have rooms or rather almost didn't have any rooms. There is a core with two bathrooms and a mechanical room. I would imagine Mies probably hated that it's existence, but had to have it. You know, it's a compromise. And then for Philip Johnson, the same story is open both to the outside and to the inside. Of course, no rooms, it's a one-room building in a way cylindrical form or shape for a bathroom. And that bit of obstruction to transparency, the bathroom, probably Johnson didn't want it anyway either. So what is a glass house? If I could diagram it, would it be pure or rather an absolutely pure space? So that makes a glass house a glass house. The dotted line is an area, again, architects, we don't want it, probably better we have to have it. So without it would be the true essence of a glass house. And then a glass house with four rooms is an oxymoron. It doesn't make sense because you can't have rooms or really, so that's again something. So Michael already introduced the vertical glass house. That was one of the glass houses I designed while I was teaching at Berkeley in 1991. And I didn't have a client, I didn't have a site, I didn't have an office. But I was thinking of glass house at that time already. In this case, I wonder how a glass house could be urban because Farnsworth and Johnson's house, they were in beautiful landscape. So the transparency is horizontal. It's possible that the house would be very open yet wouldn't have problem with privacy. And then in the city, I think because they're going to be neighbors, they're going to be density so that the glass house may need to go the other way. So here you see a four floors from the left is a basement level. There's a heater and also the plumbing. What Michael didn't know, he didn't know everything, right? He sounds like he knows everything. Actually, school didn't teach me how to draw the plumbing right. So I went down to this hardware store, picked up a book, not William Stott's, but his hardware, which taught me how to draw correctly all the hardware anyway. So the second drawing from the left is the ground floor. So you enter from that floor. And then that's where you get the facilities such as the bathtub and toilet and so on. And the further moving up is the floor with furniture. And then on the top level is a double high space where a person could meditate and so on. So it's the more spiritual space in the house. That was in 1991, and then you saw that drawing. What's interesting was that I didn't realize actually I was putting rooms inside the house, of course vertically. So the basement is one room and then there's a bathroom. There is a furniture room and there is an empty room. So it's a glass house with rooms. And it looks like this from the outside and then the inside. So who's a client? I imagined a third century Chinese poet and thinker, his name is Liu Lin, to be my client. The reason was that he was so poor that when he came home every time, he would take off the only clothes he had, a robe, and put it outside the state naked. And then he famously said when he had a visitor question, he's nudity, and he said, the sky and the earth is my house. And then this piece of architecture is my clothes. So why should I wear anything? So very philosophical. And then our photographer, he was really inspired by the story. And so he posed naked here. Both figures are our photographer. And then you'll see him later on in all of our projects naked, of course. And then, of course, I'm challenging the oxymoron. Why can't a glass house have rooms? Could it, is there a way rather to really create a glass house with rooms? So I tried again this time. I was interested in putting a cruise form double layered glass wall inside of a house. So that a glass house would have four rooms. This is the initial drawings I made again in 1991. I don't draw like this anymore. I don't have time, it's very time consuming. Maybe that's just an excuse. But anyway, so at that time, I was thinking the living room should be bigger, the bathroom, the smallest, and so on. So later on I realized they could all have the same size. And also I actually realized Mr. Johnson had a problem turning the corner for his house with the eye column in the glass. So the corner, I didn't point that out, I'm sorry, but the corner eye column is half exposed to the outside, half covered by the glass. So maybe I could solve that problem on the way too, is to pull the structure back into the house in the form of four pieces of low bearing walls. Meanwhile, in close rather the glass house with a garden or courtyard wall so that a glass house in some way is also introverted rather than purely extroverted. So I did all these moves. And then after 31 years I drew the house initially and it was built. And then the cruise form shape is important only in such a way. This is an exhibition we did. These ranch finders is part of the installation. And when you see the cross, actually it's about aiming on to a mark of course of a cruise form shape. As you see here, it doesn't have any religious connotations. But still people may think, hey, there is something Holly, so we try to photograph it in a different way. But it appears to say no, so anyway, it's really about an experience. To see four spaces, which I was on the construction site, a kid all of a sudden showed up. It's about these kind of visual connections and then it could happen inside. So that's from last week. And the house is pretty much done and the furniture is not in. And then so you can see the four rooms, they are of the same shape, of course, a size. Visually it's still one building and yet they are rooms. So I was probably a little bit like solving a mathematical problem and say, let's try to solve this oxymoron. And then when you look down to the ground level, it's all laboratories. But don't also be misled by me. Lab here meaning this kind of research, cooking for instance. So it's a lab for making food. And then here you see the load bearing wall is pushed in so that you can see a perfect glass corner. And then here you see again the bathroom. For privacy we decided to have curtains so when needed you can close the bathroom up. And that's the outside. The glass house is on top level, again the laboratory downstairs. And then on the right is a staircase to go up to the residential part. So anyway what's interesting for me is that after all this effort to imagine this quarter space and so on. And actually I did do a diagram which is totally unnecessary because that diagram existed since at least the beginning of 19th century is waiting for some architects to really use it. So from the first column from the left, the fourth one is right there. And then of course you'll probably find Mr. John Haydeck's favorite diagram is up there too. Oh it's the second one from the top. So anyway, so in fact from that period of course this is in France. So this diagram got a different name which is Partie. They are not meant to be anything stylistic but rather like the form of the Chinese poetry is a set of rules you can take, you can select and use. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. That's some kind of intelligence often that today we forget. We like to think that we could start a design from NASA as sort of a mental Tableau Rasa. But actually there's so much there already we could explore and take advantage. So I'm going to talk about one I used before I knew the drawing so now I'm smarter. I can go into the drawing and look around. It's the second one, I'm sorry the first one on the second row. I called that one Triptych. Triptych is a box with drawing inside, you know in the church you open up like that. So it's something like this. So actually you're going to see two versions, one is later but I got built earlier. So there's analytical set of plans which is an exploration of what this Triptych plan may do and we end up building the one on the right, the lowest one on the right. And then by doing so it's not only a formal gesture for the sake of doing it but rather to keep the trees in its place. And then of course creating a courtyard and Michael mentioned something maybe I should explain. So he saw the house as a dam because the water would have run down the slope of course and then passing through the house. I made the glass in the entry lobby transparent so that actually you can even see the water going through the house. So conceptually it is very much like a dam. And then of course this is the older version and now it's finishing up the Triptych house for a scholar. So I had to imagine the client. It's not very interesting, it's a scholar and a video artist. Probably the roadside, I would rather the people I admire very much. So here you'll work on one side which is on the right hand side, I'm sorry on the left hand side for you, and then on the right hand side is where you live. And then in the middle this is from the outside. So in the middle is a court and then there are two inverted porches on the ground level so that actually there is a hidden cross in this case. So you see one space which is the court in the middle with of course a little island in the middle goes one direction and perpendicularly and then you see the porches making the cross that way. So anyway the building in the back, I'm sorry that you don't see the entirety of it. It's actually a beautiful art museum by Avro Siza, the dark building. So and this is downstairs again a kitchen and then you go upstairs and you into the living room and then of course you have to go down and cross a courtyard to go into a very classic or even classical library is dark with eventually a lot of books. So the idea is that the life of the scholar gets reorganized a little bit and then you need to experience outdoor and you need to really compare the differences of these two spaces which structures the daily life of a scholar and then the third one is for a visual artist. It's the one with something poking out on the wall. That's the end of a beam. So this is the beam house you may say and then you see the beam comes in and goes through the entire studio and then this is in the studio and then actually the beam is walkable. So one can walk on top of the beam to look at her work or his work be it sculpture or a big painting on the wall so like that and then look out onto the landscape and then on one side of this again cruise form beam where you stand is where the staircase is and then you cross the entire length of the beam to reach your little study and then if you take the staircase and then you go upstairs there is a terrace and on your left hand side and there is a kitchen and dining so you can have friends over and have a party on the on the roof terrace like that and the last one is a house with an inverted roof and and this one also opens to the little town square in the middle like that so basically you see a studio site and then on the other side there is a mezzanine which is the living quarters so basically the beam or the roof they started again to suggest a different ways of living so in the end it's not so much having an idea of how to live and then you design this particular space or this piece of architecture rather you have the idea of the space of the architecture first and then started to imagine how to really live there and work there and then you see our dear photographer again and this is through that door by the way right right there there you go yeah I bet he probably actually took a shower but anyway so four parties now from the arrow photo you can you can tell and then four piece of architecture four different ways of living so form follows function or function follows form it's still a question and however let me take you one step further it's a different notion so let's say nobody follows anyone but rather could form creates content still doing diagrams of parties this one again back to a quarter square however I turned the cross in the middle 45 degrees cut out the central portion of the space so it's not going to be for a triangular room but rather a courtyard house and this is a traditional courier house in Beijing and it's pretty much similar to the one I grew up in and today if we look at it the cultural value of it is undeniable and questionable however as far as life in there and we have some issues one is that when you go from one room to another you'll always go through the courtyard it's not the most convenient and it it rains it you know as we all know it's too cold or too warm and so on so that it really would make the everyday life a little inconvenient and then when we open the door either in the winter or in the summer you lose energy that wouldn't be the way we think about how a house should be organized in terms of the issue of energy so we saw for a small site the house might be like this one first of all we of course have the courtyard in the middle in in a decent size the size of spaces in architecture of course is super important the traditional house typically is 10 meter by 10 meter and then this is a small lot so we could have it six meters by seven meters it's a little smaller but not too small so at the expense of the depth of the room so we decided the only way to make the house work again is to imagine a different lifestyle in this case is to live around the clock so in the morning you're on the west side so you have breakfast there the morning sun will come in and then with the sun you'll move to the north in the afternoon you you're on the eastern side you are having more sunlight and then in the evening and you have the dining space on the south it's darker and you can entertain friends so basically the whole idea here is making a loop of a space or rather living space just again it's a not only a one space house you've heard that term when I talk about the glass house and I would like to suggest this is a glass house so you'll see this is the house from the outside if the facade means mask here you'll see a true layer mask and then once you go in it's like this it is a traditional courtyard house you may say still but yet if you look at the continuous glass elevation around the courtyard you may realize this is the farm's workhouse turned totally inside inward so it's a glass house within a more traditional house and that's once you enter that facade from a hutong and alleyway and then you'll go through this space and then you are in this looping living space and then in the morning and then the west side and you're going around with the light to the north and to the east and then in the evening so you're looking at the southern wind of the house and there are things we didn't or couldn't possibly program so when I'm saying that we like to imagine lifestyle it's really a suggestion or a imitation to our clients would you like to try to live in a certain way and in this case our best clients not the parents but the kids they love the house that's why they do it there are two boys and a girl they love to run around the courtyard inside of course this is the one evening you see the kids running the parents either cooking or entertaining some guests who are the architects as you can see here and then because of the structure we designed we ended up with some very strange details we are still trying to digest if there's something else could be done but you see the traditional tiles and then the steel structure would create such a corner together so here again designing the space of the house and the act of programming the spaces are two acts of design actually very much merged together so here I like to jump into a particular problem of of these kind of spatial diagrams or parties this one I don't know if it's really just called aggregation oh I missed an hour there I'm sorry anyway see the problem of aggregation is pretty straightforward so you have the repetition of one standard unit and it's a diagram on the top left and you have the idea and then of course with the number of repetitions in any case you wouldn't need a circulation space so you may have a double loaded corridor as on your upper right hand corner and then you go down is the double loaded corridor double loaded corridor sounds like something generic for the students you may not realize because its popularity rather it's actually has dominated architecture and our life our life collectively for centuries is no joke someone would have born in a hospital with double loaded corridor and then went to kindergarten elementary school high school college or in double loaded corridor building and then you end up working in an office during the day in a double loaded corridor building and went home for double loaded corridor apartment it's a sad life so we for years now it's not easy it's not easy we we put up a fight with this particular party if I may say and then I personally had the really the luck to experience maybe the best double loaded corridor building in the world which is in trust Italy is the center for pure theoretical physics and in the department for mathematics is this diagram the lower left one so the rooms are tiny for the for the mathematicians probably no bigger than than the lantern yet the corridor became this huge open public space so there are cafes there are ping-pong tables there are all the things so I think the idea is very powerful when you have this tiny little personal space you'll have to be in the public space and and then of course subverted all together the notion of a double loaded corridor so we the project I'd like to show is the meson deletion the china house in paris we won the competition and then I gave you a little bit of history so about a hundred years ago 1920 so it's 102 years ago the parisian government wanted to create some places for students to live otherwise as you know the left bank there's only universities and research institutions and so on there's this you have to rent like any person in paris actually compete with them to get a place to live so and then again the parisian government invited all countries in the world to build a dormitory for for their students and other students the deal is that you'll build the building you gave to paris as a gift and you can have 70 percent of the rooms for the students from your own country and 30 from all over and from France even from paris and then so our side is over on the right right upper right hand corner and then in the 1930s and there was a Chinese architecture student in paris for his graduation project he imagined a house for Chinese students his name is Yubing Li and he is long gone and he had a rather short life so there are a lot of answered questions one of them why he imagined a dormitory that big is 300 rooms and then the famous swish house by Kurbo 45 rooms okay swish uh our swishland was was uh our still is a smaller country but anyway it's interesting that he organized possibly uh was probably not very interesting so for me the problem is the double loaded corridor you can imagine in in this building and then meanwhile kurbo did single loaded corridor so that not only in the rooms there's going to be sunlight and view even in the corridor there's light air and view because kurbo's concern is very contemporary he was thinking of the health of the residents so I thought maybe we should really take on that that clue which is you know healthy life for for for the students and then this is again is single loaded corridor but made literally into a loop so put those to put kurbo and it's called the earth building too low in chinese together so I I did a a sketch like that and that's kind of a strange shape actually is uh okay that's a photo of the model and then it's it's from the site because actually in the original site that whole area you see were the for sports facilities there's a soccer field and and basketball course and so on and then in order to be able to accommodate more countries they actually push the sports field up and then created three lots and then there's a new tunisian pavilion next to the chinese pavilion and a franco phone or pavilion altogether three new buildings so it's kind of a difficult shape really to to accommodate the building interestingly what we got from our clients is a number of rooms 300 so after all these years so we're back to 300 rooms and then what what you can see is that it got to be a because it's a single loaded corridor it got to be a little taller building a storage but we created a garden in the middle so when the people move around in this case it's around this garden and and then everyone all the students would look out and then were we happy with the single loaded corridor not exactly because the repetition would would make a building uh not as lively perhaps it's a simple a formal problem so we decided to use the exterior wall to create a reason so it looks like this that's like a week ago we were on the construction site and I mean well we had to give identity to a rather cultural identity to this building in the early days the japanese pavilion would have a traditional pitch curved linear roof and so on but we thought maybe we could use the craft of making the building as the message for cultural identity so we used the break it's not from china that was the idea but it turned out to be very complicated and then we picked a french break oh this is not the french this is a chinese break we were learning from the the different ways of laying break from the traditional chinese buildings and then this is the southern facade facing the periphery if you are familiar with paris it's the ring road this is the southeast corner of periphery so that's the facade and then this is a very traditional way of making a cantilever in china in chinese it's called diesel and that's what you see there and then inside the courtyard our garden and then there's a staircase with a take you all the way to the rooftop since 2008 around 1809 president sarkozy had a grand paris plant and then pretty much demanded all the public buildings should have the rooftop open as for a landscape and then of course we obliged and then here you can see the i-photography far away so anyway that's that and then i'm getting into something it's for me it's probably very important is how the the content in this case could interact with form so that form and the content are both created at the same time we had a a project to design an art museum for the first abstract painter in china his name is wu dayu most people in china probably don't know the name at all here since 1950s he lost his job as a teacher as a professor so he taught at the china academy of art today in hanzhou and he went home and stayed in his uh tiny little attic about 10 square meters and did paintings of this side postcard size thousands of them and this is one of them and so the uh an art dealer decided to build an art museum for for him eventually didn't work out so now we call the museum the no-name art museum but actually it was for him and he was also a poet this poet it may look similar to the the first the one i i showed at the very beginning but actually this is a classical slash modern poem although the lines are consistent and you you see a number of words actually seven characters also typical to classical poems but yet these poems is very different there's no rhymes and there's no this kind of a dictation of of pitches and then the content is really about an experience in architecture or i guess the word architecture didn't show up anywhere so it's about the interaction between shadow and figure time and space and about the poet himself moving without a sound and then of course as he said he's in and out this contradiction darkness of the light i was very much inspired and then and i i saw the limitation of diagram of space i decided to try to diagram time for a change and this is based on a french philosopher julien's book on time the book is about a comparison of eastern time and western time so on top is the western time and as according to i'm paraphrasing julien here so the idea is is the observer of time is outside of time so he's looking at the beginning and the end of time and then time can be evenly divided it goes to one direction so it's a objective time but what's interesting about this objective time is that there there's past there's future and there's no present western philosopher is trying to solve that problem now for centuries but anyway no there there are some possibilities but we we leave it there and the chinese time or eastern time according to france wajolian is the a subjective time so the observer is inside of the time so you don't see the beginning and the end and most importantly that the person is moving towards time while time is coming towards you so in in this case there's only present no past no future it's very important for me is not if i agree with his philosophy or not if time can be as objective or sorry subjective as julien suggested and there's a chance to design it so the whole question is actually both time and space one is truly subjective actually you can design it so you don't always measure the space you experience the space it's as simple as that so this is a traditional chinese garden bridge all these zigzagging is about enlarge the space because you spend more time crossing it the water must be wider and then so the space is bigger talk that we use a single point perspective as the device which is like a wedge shape and to organize the entire museum so what do you see us some in the plan of course you see the the tapering happen this way but also sometimes like that and so on and then the whole idea is not so much to make the museum bigger or smaller but to say maybe in the end you realize both time and space are immeasurable you can measure them that the measurements is a itself just a tool a device so we we use in the optimistic way perhaps so here is the same wall it's longer on the left and probably shorter on the on the right because of the exaggeration of the perspective or the shortening of the perspective and then I'll show you another space the one on the right that that little wedge so this is one direction the other direction two two distinctly different experiences this one it's meant to be a water court because the project was semi abandoned so they never did the landscape nor the interior so it's like this for now here is how to let the passersby to look in that space the wall has been lifted up another pond which is not there and then very much exaggerated the perspective more of that and then the curvilinear space meant to really disrupt this this reading of a classical perspective a triangular space inside of the gallery eventually hopefully and then the shallowest space and then a transparent space made with clay tiles the tea house so anyway here what I'm suggesting is that the temporal and the spatial experience is the content it's been designed but not the the practical needs of uh the spaces so that designing that experience and of course the form are really the the same act this in in our rather the same coin of two sides so anyway and here is the another art museum and this time is the only time actually we were able to help the client to make a decision on the site selection the clients really didn't ask us to help him with that he picked a nice big flat piece of land in the development zone outside of the old city so when I saw it I thought that why people shouldn't make an effort to go to see art some of these folks probably are not really exposed to art in their life much in the past so maybe we should be more proactive let's bring the art into the city to near where the population is and then the client bought the idea so in the center of the old city is a river so our building our museum should be a bridge and then can see the bridge allow the cultural facility to connect the fabric on both sides of the river and this is the traditional covered bridge in China the virtual of a covered bridge is very different from an open-air bridge it's place people would go there to order people to go there to meet with friends and play chess and maybe the kids would go there and do something so there are vendors in these bridges sell little snacks and so on so it's like a salon like really a linear square so we liked very much that idea and then we really introduce it here here you see the bridge as the architectural design goes on the bottom there's a steel bridge because the material actually was recommended by the water bureau steel would allow the maximum amount of flat water to go through and the members of the steel would also cut the the tree branches and so on to to really make the the the flood not an issue so the lowest point of the building already is above the 50 year watermark uh flood mark so anyways on the top is the concrete bridge and with a painting gallery inside between the two bridges is a great exhibition hall it's like mostly three spaces in in this bridge or building so it looks like this you see a steel bridge for pedestrians and then the art museum on top and this is the pedestrian bridge so when people pass through it and eventually actually I'll show you people can can stay if you want and and also can go up to the museum so the question we had was that what if people still don't go to the art museum is there any way to bring art closer so what we decided to do is to have two huge skylights on the floor of the art museum so if you look up you'll see something you like and then maybe next time you would go into the art museum so that's that some folks on the bridge the big exhibition hall exhibition a painting gallery empty and full and then there are two entrances to the art museum because it's a bridge one side the other side and then go in from one side there's a elevation difference so staircase to take you into the painting gallery and then come back down from the staircase like that so that's that so that was about selecting the site first because some of the site was suggested by the architects we also helped the client to imagine how to program the bridge becomes a mixed use bridge passing of the bridge and then going into the art museum here is the last project I'd like to present it's again less rare now but that was the first time the client invited us to participate in programming the building in a particular way basically the question the president of this art university china academy of art in the hanzhou he said to the three finalists for the design competition he said you all architects who who teach on the side could you help us to imagine the educational system of this campus and that's what I did so I couldn't help but to put in my experience teaching here in the US and some also in China but also it's about my experience teaching architecture so I made a number of suggestions here with this again a big diagram so hands-on experience is very important for all students not because you are studying art even if you're studying something else to use hands and the brain together I thought it was very important and not to say that I learned so that's the model of MIT actually there's men's men's but anyway so in the early years the first two years so that becomes something important and then what you learn so you learn the typical drawing that's fine and maybe programming with using your computer also important but every student should learn architecture is architecture is part of the general education at this campus so I was fantasizing because who knows if we're gonna win or lose the competition so you know I mean as well so anyway and then for the upper years it's all about structuring the learning and teaching of courses around research topics and then because it's so much about making not only just reading or writing the students should live upstairs of the studio so they can come down in the middle of the night to work on their projects and go up to take a nap whenever they want and then within the dormitories students can organize hobby clubs by themselves as courses because they may realize of course they're interested in but not offered by the school and then they would somehow organize and make it into a course and earn a credit as well so on and so forth and we did win the competition so that was our design of the campus so there is a math building for studios covering as much as possible the land so of course it's a piece of wetland and then you see the water being capped and then I couldn't help to diagram the experience of going through the studio and this is a photograph showing if you look in one of the base of the studio your turn right and your turn left so that would be the experience here is a section so you see the studio all the way across the entire campus and that's the first stage one is completed inside of the studio you see the the number of bays and number of layers and then your typical bay would look like this north facing windows very traditional and on the outside on the second floor roof there actually there's a whole pedestrian circulation system the courtyards so we also thought about since we programmed this space so we better think more about the folks who are actually trying to design this building for what they were what's their transportation and so on and then students in 1935 they dress up like that and then some are American architects they they dress like of Maybach by the way wizard the wizard designed that robe himself that's what I heard that's true right and Richardson was not as inventive to just put on big monk robe but anyway so that's that that project now is being kind of a slow one yeah we're gonna pick up and do it and then so they probably would have this kind of a V E calls our own food and here is the reality of these kids in the dormitory and every other floor of the dormitory there's a big public space and then hobby clubs now they're all together 12 this is the wire first one the archery club every student has to study architecture so there are so many students so they make collectively make a model of the campus that they are designing um the way they would engage they would own uh the the campus normal traditional classes studio for work and for exhibition is constantly rotating more formal exhibitions by the end of semester and continue in the studio and then of course we didn't expect some badminton going on in there because of the height it worked out very well and then stage performance um film and then on the outside of the studios and they are places for people again to have life they may take a a cigarette and our artists look at their iPhones and so on so so between the outside and inside not only there is semi-covered space but rather places again for some people events to unfold and inside of the dormitory because the lower level are fully connected with the studio so you can see all their work and and the the rather the chaotic condition of the studio started to to invade into the dormitory which of course is perfectly all right so at this campus the first class starts at 8 30 in the morning so students now get up at 8 15 and they just like go downstairs that's it and what about what about a few things but what about breakfast oh maybe i should tell you see this kind of a pretty clean uh facade actually is a mask again because in china typically students wouldn't use a dryer they use washer so they like to put up their along dress up in the balcony so here you see okay so wash clothes is one issue and then breakfast back to breakfast so that's what uh now uh they have so they don't have time for the canteen so they are vendors set up breakfast right outside the studio so on their way they can pick up uh in chinese it's xiaobing it's like a breakfast pancake and then just go in it and eat and then students also take on our building in a number of ways and this is uh they they turned our building back into a line drawing by doing projection and projecting whatever the best one the best one i'd rather my favorite is the next one so i hope they will realize it sooner or later i guess um i'm suggesting that when you do architecture certain way you may help them to open up uh to to uh some possibilities so now the second stage is in full swing should be then uh next year before september for sure and then back to the beginning of the talk so what about party what about form and content and so on it's a an ongoing investigation so this building here we started with the structure so it's sort of like a paper fan shape um actually because i do a lot of a really uh um boxy uh rectangular square buildings and then my partner really uh doesn't like the idea and she uh suggested that we we be a little more adventurous so i i obliged and now for the space show organization here it is rather uh maybe i shouldn't say organization it's the disorganization of the space so basically we we turned the building in such a way that there are three connected space looking out in different directions so what is the program for this space from the name you will get an idea this building is called faculty student activity center so they don't our clients don't have a clue yet how to use it and then with this university also you may want to know that uh we used only half of the typical uh budget of a campus in china it's 4 000 rmb per square meter uh why so low because the university uh when they budgeted the project they made a mistake they couldn't change so we had to work with it so anyway so here you can see the possibility maybe for a new space it was somehow uh may may may be dictated by the the structure and then it would also lead to a new program so the connection of the two projects and the content and form at this moment uh is where it is thank you see like this i think of gropius's total theater rather than this frontality um thank you can we jump right in oh yeah okay thank you very much it wasn't too long it probably was it was too long no it wasn't i was too long it was perfect um stefan uh who is one of the associate deans here who in ministers events was encouraging me to make sure we left enough time so there isn't that much time i maybe i'll ask one question and hand it over and then quickly get to the audience uh there's so many people here who know young ho and lija but also like i say the student questions have been amazing um young ho i i'm trying to figure out how to you're very disarming and i say that is uh both like somebody who just first time i've heard you give a full lecture at gsap i think it's the first time you've ever done that you've been on panels here before but he's never uh had the room like this before and i'm thinking of some of the lectures this semester have been like that they're kind of old fashioned frankly in an era of panels more than full-blown lectures uh so you had time to kind of build something up there as a friend and and colleague you are disarming in the sense that you often seem to be having so much fun and delight that it's it's hard to them want to kind of go back to the critique side but earlier today uh while i was texting young ho and asking is this accurate i've reminded asked i said you did read role on barth carefully right and uh and i'm assuming death of the author people in the room probably don't know this work but but you wrote back saying yes yes absolutely and it was a big influence so i don't need to bring up role on barth to do this but as you progress through this today the i don't know what the audience saw um but the i was thinking you go through form and content you take us back to like elemental aspects of being in school and show us they're not so elemental at all you mentioned at one point you said if we worked this out we might have a chance to design something you didn't mean professionally you meant that there might be enough intellectual work done or insight or creativity that there's something new to do like you earn this possibility to do something and you often disaggregated that from the client you in fact said i imagine the client even when you had a real client and uh when i was getting somebody told me mesas client was philosophy and i went whoa but you reminded me of that today but when you got to the part where you decided you were designing the time in the space and the one passage was uh the building doesn't effectively know the person is there they don't make a sound or a trace and at that point you're describing eastern and western time i'm thinking of samford who spent so much time trying to take us there at rice but without me i think like a scholar of those issues even though i care about them what was on my mind often was is there a point and where you really move into abstraction and i'm thinking quite literally alfred bar in the show at moma that i think inaugurated moma he described malevich is more abstract than kandinsky and frank stellar will say well kandinsky is more abstract and he literally says it kandinsky is more abstract than says on and he shows you why so in your case when the students drew on your building there yeah and sort of they were sort of re-abstracting it back but not to sound critical they they gave us a good view of the very thick concrete floor right so so is lija also demanding that your floors get thinner or that your building can get more abstract i also kept thinking of jocometti the palace at 3 a.m. that you're putting a person into the building and you're trying to get the building in effect to disappear but you're also demanding that the syntax and structure of the building be dealt with i mean this is like an old-fashioned conversation but i think he kind of demanded i am old-fashioned well you're yeah but you're building modern china so you're you're hardly old-fashioned so yeah for your question uh abstraction is the big question yeah yes yes and that's yeah for me it's an important question i uh i actually don't use that word that much in lectures but i think a lot and only once a couple of years ago at GSD Scott Cohen was a person all of a sudden mentioned you like abstraction very much don't you because it's not that easy to see i think in my way of thinking abstraction is very important and the the the set of references like my love it for is always there but yet when that abstraction is being materialized into building and then the the tatonics of the building tend to take over so it makes me think that uh it's not so much a white box would make an abstract building but a well thought out a clean kind of a set of relationships of a building may maybe at this point for me would uh would be the expression of abstraction i'm not making much sense no but just to add but fragment and then really give it maybe the galley in the audience is you also i've always believed but i see it more tonight you spend a lot of time producing a quasi-theorem before you act and you you know i don't know enough about this work so long time ago and i was an architect not a linguist but the the degree to which you know there was gnome chomsky and uh george leikhoff at berkeley like all the work on not denying the presence of syntax yet at the same time of course wanting to cause it to evaporate at times that's where i'm going and i feel as if you are kind of triggering that i was thinking of the haydack essay out of time and into space uh from the 80s the tension and compression may have therapeutic value to the docile but the question remains i'm pretty close to the accurate here what happens when tension exceeds compression things kind of turn inside out and he was discussing harpenter center but so the at carpenter center the physicality isn't gone the tension and compression he was describing as effectively kind of coming undone and flipping inside out anyway i don't mean to take you through references that are coming from a different era but my question would be and this is not the right moment to do it this this insistence on the facts of architecture and then the role of the theorem the imagination and the exceeding of the limits that was that was really there in that moment of i think heading into saying you're designing the time and the space no longer the form in the content that's where i felt like you were heading okay um well it was an amazing lecture thank you so much a lot of very interesting and revealing moments of uh your architecture and your life and so uh my question is at um there are some students in in the audience and they probably have some of the questions that you had at some point and what i'd like you to tell us is there was a moment where you were in the United States and you decided to go back to china and establish your firm and you called your firm atelier and so would you um tell us i know that time comes at us rather than we go through time so i i am uh of your of the thought that um that we are always in the present but can you tell us that moment where you made a decision to um to take one by forcation on your life um tell us a bit about that all right uh actually it's very easy but uh it's this it's a pretty long story uh so what happened was that um you know i said some of the buildings i showed today were designed in 1991 um i was at berkeley i wanted to have a 10-year track job i didn't get it so i was wondering what's gonna happen next um but back in my mind i wanted to do one thing because after already eight years of doing paper architecture i wanted to build to build but i don't know uh there's no way for me to have a client in the u.s. it seemed that way and then uh uh Li Jia and i we were traveling in europe on a scholarship and um and for all the practical reasons we ended up back in beijing in spring 1993 for a chinese new year and then a friend of a relative of Li Jia came in and just to say hi and he didn't really know what we do anyway and he asked you know we told him we're architects and he said immediately hey you can design the building and then we got our first project as in uh uh the city of Shantou it was called uh an entertainment center which was a casino so what i'm telling you is that it's not entirely uh you know accidental we started the practice we wanted to build but it's quite incidental the way we started and then uh uh we did a series of projects and then all of them got built uh went very far and then i went to houston to join michael to teach i was sent for the indian so anyway and then after three years going back and forth between houston and and beijing uh we decided to practice full-time that was a more serious more informed uh uh decision so i guess the question behind your question is that we would really do it if we know how hard it was the answer probably is no it was so hard if if we knew it was that hard i probably just gonna stay in the us teaching more or what so but anyway and then whenever we wanted to give up there's a little progress being made little hope popped up and so on and we just kept going fantastic let's it's yeah it's not a question in tonight's lectures as much as i've known you a long it's the first time i saw in a way the theorizing or the theorems and the working it out in the head from durand for example and right when you said and haydeck did this one i was thinking quarter house half house three court but i made the connection assuming you might without that time not building it seems to be part of the way you have survived the intensity of building is by in fact being able to hold the values in as part of your imagination and you said that over and over tonight i imagined i imagined i imagined and uh that that to me was quite remarkable no i i appreciate the 80 years i just if i didn't get the opportunity i would i wouldn't go on somehow but i already was anxious yeah that period of time massimo scolari and like raymond abraham and so many people who deeply valued working with an imagined proposition which we know is levious woods and yes exactly so i hope we haven't killed the enthusiasm of your questions there's a hand there's a um thank you professor chong it's an amazing lecture i we i believe we're all very inspired i have one question um i can see that in a lot of the projects that you proposed it kind of have a minimum um definition of utilization so that allows for the reinterpretation and redefinition of your space that fall that function follows the form so how do you imagine the potential or intention of um kind of having a urban or a more massive skill of that adapt adaptation when maybe the buildings or architecture has has to have more um definition of the usage that's actually a very interesting question and we uh we put it this way first of all so i i talked about today that form may not follow function or it could be the other one and so on but what's interesting is that space and structure could be really an independent notion altogether it doesn't really require uh a content to begin with so in the past uh when one solomon had that slogan he was referring specifically uh to the new or modern uh industrial buildings the form follows function and the production of something would follow the workshop space if it probably did i i don't think i i would say uh solomon got it wrong but those spaces because they're just open base like the liangzhu xiao yuan uh the campus i show that they are open to other uses so i think sometimes it's the space sometimes the structure we design today should give the possibility of reuse a chance so it doesn't matter what it is so now a factory is turning into cultural facilities housing and so on and so forth but it wasn't meant for that but it's open big space so typically today for housing i believe that the the housing units the structural system is probably not the appropriate one because it makes the rooms are are too close and too small so there's that's another a big story there's a dutch guy his name uh john he was also a chair of department of architecture MIT before what's his name he did he actually invented a harbour i can yes he invented the the open building system it's very very interesting and relevant today and so remember that's john harbour i can take a look thank you for that presentation there's so much work that we see that you've created which is really incredible to see in his trajectory i think what's striking to in the images of the architecture is something that's very visible yet maybe not as visible unless you start to see it and i think it really comes through in the materiality right so there's a lot of wood form concrete there's a lot of specialized bricklaying there's a lot of you know hand crafted tiles and all of these materials which are very expressed have a really high content of labor attached to each of the materials and how they're expressed and there's a monumentality to all the architecture i wonder if you could speak a little bit on your choices of how you know in terms of making a design how how do you sort of decide how to coalesce the making of something to the expression of something in the very you know in a very real material and procedural way first of all for for ourselves as architects the materiality is very important because today we live in two worlds we live in the virtual worlds of of technology as well as the old old fashioned tangible reality so it's very important to think that architecture would have a reason to be around because as an architect i have been asked god knows how many times why do we still need architecture because we have the virtual world my answer is this the the the tangible world can be different and architecture can make it as a more intense experience so the weight the texture the color it goes on and should give us something very different than what what do we see on the computer screen even maybe on virtual reality or cargo or something so from that particular standpoint i think that architecture should not be a smooth like like a thin surface and then to work with the construction team it's a different story since we have been practicing for almost 30 years next year will be our 30th anniversary and then i find that on one hand it's very hard to convince the construction workers to learn and a lot of them don't but on the other hand some can get really interested and not only they learn they become really an aura partner in crime or something we work together to maybe to to to improve upon even invent certain things so and also uh sometimes the the project manager for the client could be uh uh someone which would share our interests and even ideal it's a long process but after 30 years we know us some people know we can call them and ask them questions how can we pour the concrete in a certain way and then maybe questions about other materials and and so on you're working with the building institutes though oh they they they are terrible you're on video okay they don't they don't care much but i think you have the project yeah it was one it was one project but you the concrete in the fiberglass too yeah we work with the university on that and you yeah and there's much more to the idea i assume you wouldn't show it tonight but that was that was you specifically looking at building technique systems yeah embodied energy do you do you enjoy building do you do you do you like building very much that's the only reason to stay in architecture right yeah when i go to a construction site it's full of problems right but i still love it yeah exactly i can tell yeah yeah and working in the office every day is not as exciting but to go to the construction site different story let me want to say one thing that design institutes we need to collaborate with all the time yeah they are the hardest souls to get them inspired or interested i don't know why because somehow they they are like just machines i don't mean to critique it i saw steven's linked hybrid drawings that proceeded going to the design institute and came back but maybe there's a conversation there but i think samford quinter had a question so this is my second lecture uh that i've seen of yours the first one was like the first weeks that we arrived in uh texas together and what i found fascinating was just how similar some of the things are that i saw today but also how long it took me before i realized that so the question i want to ask you michael sent us off into a kind of a meditation on um on abstraction but what strikes me so strongly in your work and which blew me away when i first saw your presentation in 1991 is hitchcock and the rigor when you showed us the square poem the five by four characters i realized that's what hitchcock did in rear window he set up a situation and he said let's play it out but what's fascinating about your work and michael invokes it when he talks about the humor the joy and also the perversity is intimacy and um you know and witnessing and the idea of always uh participating psychologically in places in the entire field like you're an eye but somehow you're forced into an intimacy with other things so i know you're fascinated by this stuff whether you speak about it or not i don't know after all these years i don't know but i think it would be great if you did tonight so i i was suggesting that i'm not perverted enough perverse is different every time i use that word people get angry perverse just means you know let's say dangerously playful thank you but the truth is to make a presentation like tonight in a year a little more and try to make sense of not all of our work of course but a great number of work together it's actually a challenge i kind of enjoy it but it's not an opportunity to do self psychoanalysis on the side as well maybe this my conservatism uh yes it is so anyways i have three brief questions oh okay first one builds on that amazing question uh because i saw that kind of uh hitchcock in the in the subtext here hitchcocks uh one of his main uh tropes is the macguffin which is the object which everyone is looking for which has no implication no real importance but sets the plot going and i somehow feel that you're you're you find these macguffins and and everything starts running on its own but then you catch up with it second that's the question about the macguffin the second is form follows function was not invented by sullivan it was invented by Horatio Grino in 1856 and i believe not we're la la duke no no earlier grino is a bit earlier oh okay if i'm not wrong can maybe you'll correct me uh and i believe uh but i'm fascinated by the idea that you're inverting this but grino is an interesting figure because he seems to be a sculptor originally if my memory serves me so in a funny way form following function for him function would be something about the aesthetic as well as the living and the so there's something very interesting going back in the genealogy of that and the third thing that was sort of haunting this besides the hitchcock and reversal of form follows function for me was louis kahn because you mentioned the immeasurable and louis kahn said we start with the immeasurable we then as architects go to the measurable and then we must get back to the immeasurable that's what i feel about your work even more than the reversal of the form function and even more than the macguffin what do you think i think you're pretty much right thank you thank you disarming disarming and conservative hello professor chang i'll give a little bit background about myself i'm graduate students here from come here and i come from china as well and uh my boyfriend and i now we currently we are building uh like seven floors around 86 square meters housing in hu chi min setting right now and sorry i take a note so like we are too young like ambitious entrepreneurs looking forward to build so many buildings that uh offer to young people's can uh live in we would like to build the affordable and small rooms offered to young people such as college students or the people who just entered to the working place in hu chi min city vietnam but we were struggling to find the samples like do you have any architectures works examples that could recommend to us like based on our situations thank you it's like it's too much like yeah it's just like i'm asking about like do you have any um work examples that could recommend to us uh we can you know we can mirror ourselves to feel like um affordable housing before yeah in yes in vietnam yeah i'm afraid thank you you can talk on the side but if i gather you're also looking for support for enthusiasm which yeah which he would be terrific at yes housing is uh it's taught here at clumbia yes yes so maybe you should take a course it's a big subject very important one yeah yeah it was founded by kenneth and richard plums more like more like 40 kenneth is uh kenneth and steve and no young hope quite well other quick i think we have time for one or two more stephen will try to she has a microphone already yeah just a quick question so basically um the architecture for um liuling really um kind of like impressed with me because um for i know like for his time that he was kind of like retreated to bamboo grooves in order to get away from the political disarray and then also um you were doing the scholar house which you recognize that for the maybe the literati today in china they will have to um condition themselves among two set of lives the um the the study room and the the medine life routine this kind of like conflict between the two lifestyles and then i guess um as a future chinese architect in the future i wonder how do you think we could condition our inner space inner space with the other political conflicts outside and also i guess it's also very interesting to to see how um like um your house for liuling was actually um built with concrete that isolated the residents from the outside world whereas liuling was um choose a bamboo groove that is actually in the natural setting so i guess this also um this nuance also really um resonates with me um so yeah all right i i guess what you're asking is uh if uh like certain materiality such spatial quality uh are are perhaps more practical or more uh desirable um actually all i presented they are uh not the only solution you have to understand so a house could be very open you know i i'm into a glass house but it could be partially open or entirely closed and so on it depends on a number of things uh view is one of the criteria and and also could a house open and again like the vertical glass house you know upward and and so on for material is it's also about choices for instance actually i like to get back to concrete so we have thought about doing less concrete buildings for years now but since concrete is the most available cheapest and mature uh technology it's very hard not to use it and then what do we do so we tried the fiberglass uh stars a little bit and and and a number of other things now we're doing uh and also engineered wood and so on however um the world is changing pretty fast this year uh it's about two three months ago um have you ever heard of uh old bell price not no bell price old bell price is a price given out by some uh institution in danmark this year the winning uh uh the the price is given to some young people who invented a way to extract uh carbon from the process of making cement now that's fantastic news all the things we have accumulated for the past 30 years how to make concrete better we can use it again without much guilt so it doesn't mean that we're not going to try other stuff but concrete is back on uh on our list as a possibility and so uh um I I think don't don't look in for a party for both of you up there don't look for a singular answer and yeah look around and and you you'll find something not only it's good for the world in one way or another and you truly actually are are interested in I don't think one could do something just for for the the rightness of that thing the correctness of that thing you also have to to love it probably that actually goes first you love it and then you also do the right thing that would be a lot better so I'm gonna look towards our dean we're over time should we but should I why don't we allow one more question and I know there's more than that but or if there are maybe there isn't another question there we go yes there's uh young ho is also in town and coming to some review so you will be able to talk to him in always thank you for the amazing lecture and I will just ask a very short questions so I saw you using Chinese poem and the metaphor of like the rhythm in your Chinese poem as to how to translate that into architecture so my question is in your perspective how to create a rhythm in architecture and space thank you how how to create how to create a rhythm in architecture and space because I saw you're using Chinese poems and the rhythm of the poems as a reason thank you thank you first of all I'd like to say because I saw a lot of Asian faces here I think today everyone of us is culturally a hybrid right you have to you have to accept that because otherwise you're you're going to go back to at least 100 years to the 20th century maybe even 19th century because that's how we learn how we grow up and how we end up so there is no I think a a set way for you to say we're to start a project so for me a lot of things I'm interested in but I know so little I wouldn't dare to talk about here at Columbia in fear that there are a lot of people who know a lot more than I do because one of the example is Bach's music it's huge I listen to my wife and I we listen to to Bach not every day but at least every week the the the miraculous thing is that Bach lived 300 years ago in Germany worked in the church had two uh tankies so oh 21 come on oh okay I'm sorry I'm sorry what I'm suggesting is that I had in my life is totally different and I'm far away from that era and and the the the habitat Bach lived and worked but that doesn't stop me to live Bach's music so that's what's important so that a particular poem one way is a big big poet in Tang dynasty as we all know I try very hard to to like his poems but I only like that one tell you the truth it's not like I don't like poems I do but I I one way is not a someone I love that much but you know that poem was about architecture about making buildings so it inspired me the same thing for Wudai most of his poems I read to search for something that could help me but pretty much only that one did the trick whereas now so that that's the message so you're Chinese you're going to be exposed to a lot of Chinese culture that's fantastic and then you are here also you're going to expose to a lot of other cultures what about the film culture what about Hitchcock and so on so be very open and then you're going to have a very exciting life ahead I think that's a perfect closing and