 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming to this book launch and discussion around this book, The Building. And though it's a book, it's The Building. It's a project that was really started by Jose Adawit, who is a member of our faculty here at adjunct professor of design, also a graduate of the AAD program and currently finishing his PhD at Princeton. The project began in 2014 as two symposia held here at Columbia University and at the Architectural Association. And these two events brought together a number of historians, theorists, architects, PhD candidates, both from Europe and the United States to really think about the question of whether a building could be considered a form of knowledge, and if so, in which way. And so each participant that came to those symposia was asked to pick a building and to discuss it along those lines. As a result of the symposia, the project was developed into a book that was published in November 2016 by Lars Müller. And many of the figures that attended the symposium, but others also participated in the volume. And the volume was really cast with a very particular idea to spur architectural thinking into a new level within the humanities and social sciences. And Jose can talk a little bit more about what his ambitions were there. But some of the people that contributed to the book were Penelope Dean, Stan Allen, John McMurray, Peg Rawls, Sylvia Levin, Amanda Risser-Lawrence, Vera Bulman, Enrique Walker, Michael Meredith, Cynthia Davidson, Joan Ockman, Mary McLeod, Mario Carpo, Alejandro Saerapolo, Andrew Benjamin, Dora Epstein-Jones, K. Michael Hayes, Philip Ersprung, and others. Because I could just spend all afternoon writing the list. Quite an amazing list. Basically, the top minds and the top architects in the world today brought together around this reconsideration of the building. Amal Andraos, our dean, contributed to the book. She's going to be speaking today, together with everyone that was invited, had to be a dean. That was a prerequisite for the invitation. Dean Stan Allen and Bernard Schuming. And they're going to be joined in conversation by Jose Arauiz. And I'm going to have the pleasure of moderating the discussion. So they're going to expand a little bit on their contribution to the book as a way to get us thinking about this book. And it's important. And I'll be very happy to take your questions as we go. We're going to first hear from them. They're going to give brief presentations of about 10 minutes each. And then we're going to gather together over here for a conversation. So without further ado, I want to first introduce Jose Arauiz, who's really behind this whole, I can't call it a book. It's really this whole enterprise. So Jose, welcome. All right. Well, thank you very much, Jorge, for your kind introduction and for agreeing to moderate today. I have to say, I'm also very grateful to Amal, Stan, and Bernard, not only for participating in today's event, for contributing to the book, but actually even more importantly, probably for supporting this project from the beginning. So probably without them, we would have no the building today. Thanks, Paul and Laila, from Events for Coordinating. And thank you, everybody, for coming. All right. Well, Jorge already said a few of the things that I was going to mention at the beginning. For those of you not familiar with the entire sequence, the building is basically a four-year discursive project, which we started in 2014 with the organization of two symposia, one at the Digital Association, second one at the AA, continued in the fall of 2015 with the seminar I taught on the topic, and then with the production of the book between 2015 and 2016. And then lastly, throughout 2017, we're doing a number of lectures and panel discussion events basically across the country, across the US in the spring, and then across Europe in the fall. Not so much to only assess the results of the project, but actually, more importantly, to keep fostering the conversation about the project's agenda. So basically, the initial diagnosis was rather simple, and it was undeniably tied to my biography. I was studying my PhD a few years ago. And as I was becoming more and more fascinated by the intellectual expansion that I was being exposed to, at the same time, it became more and more apparent to me that there wasn't a lot of discussion about architectural design within a scholar circles in architecture. So maybe it was just me. So I kind of shared this view with other colleagues, faculty, and so on. And everybody kind of agreed. So that meant that there was a kind of repressed quality to the issue, perhaps. Let's bring it to the surface. Let's gather historians, theorists, PhD candidates, along with architects themselves, to kind of discuss that which is supposed to establish the common ground for everybody, which is architectural thinking as a form of knowledge with the building as the object, the excellence of architectural thinking. So I've brought a few pictures to show you guys about the two symposities. Which was the one at DAA, sort of a classical, same-year format with the people like John MacMorrow, with Tom Weaver, Adrian Forte, you see there, Mario Carpo, Marino Laturi, Mark Cassin's, Brett Steele. So pretty much everybody that made it. It was very lively, kind of, again, old style, heated debates around the issue. Second one at Columbia, slightly more larger conference-like with Enrique, with Stan, with Amanda, Jorge, Michael Meredith, Bernard, who happened to be in the audience just as his Lerner Hall was being presented by Aaron White, who may be in the audience today, I don't know. Joan Aukman, presenting Frank Gehry's Louis Vuitton building, Sylvia Leibin, Zara Polo, and so on and so forth, Michael Young. And then I think I'm putting also three of the, three pictures of some of the events that have happened after the publication of the book. So this is with Andrea Tavares at the Lisbon Architectural Biennale. And last December, this will be large, just last month in the city. And this was just a few weeks ago at MIT with Ana Miljaki, Rafi Sigl, Amanda Rizzo Lorenz, Michael Hayes. So we get to the meat of the presentation. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to very briefly articulate the kind of main aspects of the theoretical amateur of the project. But I'm not going to elaborate on any of them because this is basically a 45 to a minute to an hour lecture which I'm gonna compress into 15 minutes. That means that some of the prepositions are going to basically come across as more controversial than they really are. So maybe that's a good thing for discussion afterwards. But again, I'm just going to briefly articulate them. So first, that the building is a necessary condition for a contribution to knowledge in architecture. That means that, of course, we can write about and discuss about many other things, bills and rental agreements, investors, animal species, and a number of other things. But those things will be relevant to architecture only so far as they relate to a building of some sort or a group of buildings. Whether the building is in the foreground or in the background. Now, the necessary condition that is to say that which needs to be there for something to be the case would be different if the target were urbanism, product design, furniture design, exhibition design, and so on and so forth. Now, this distinction between disciplines is in no way an attempt to assert boundaries or to retreat or to withdraw into one's own autonomy or interior, but actually, it's the exact opposite. And in other words, interdisciplinary processes are rooted in difference. So typically, we tend to emphasize the zones, the areas in common, the overlaps between different fields, between different disciplines. But I would like to suggest that actually, in order for us to be able to fully comprehend interdisciplinary processes and the result, we actually have to first comprehensively account for the differences that underpin each and every one of those fields. So in other words, interdisciplinary processes are rooted in difference. Now, as a result of the theoretical turn of the 1960s, which again, I'm not gonna explain at all, but some of you may be familiar with, architectural history and theory started to import concepts, terms, and theoretical frameworks from fields outside of architecture. So there was this tendency to import from the outside that is still, in my view, very much present today. Now, in parallel to that trend, to that tendency, but starting a little bit later around the mid-1970s, the architectural object grew more and more unstable as it began to appear in more and more geysers. So something that you might call the building as tendency. So the building as the verification of power structures, the building as the locus of phenomenological content, the building as a vehicle for the study of the phenomenology of perception, the building as something else. Now, in no way, these two trends are bad. So in no way am I being critical of those. On the contrary actually, thanks to those two trends that we enjoy today an increasing sophistication of not only architectural history and theory actually, but architecture as a whole. Now, the issue here in my view is that the flip side of those trends is that the architectural object itself appears more often as a medium through which to tap into concerns and issues that strictly speaking belong to other domains of knowledge and practice, if not as altogether absent, rather than as itself a realm of research. As a realm of research in its own right. So starting out from that diagnosis, the main goal of this project is basically, again, not to overturn those, but to balance out, to balance them out a little bit. So that defines the twofold agenda that we were after. One was to discuss what it means for a building to embody a historically significant contribution in terms of a design aspect, a design move, or a concept relevant to the reading of buildings in general. So in other words, to not only have the building as, but also the building as a realm of research. And then secondly, to venture ways in which buildings can trigger terms, concepts, and even more ambitiously theoretical frameworks that potentially could be applicable outside the boundaries of architecture. So in other words, that the tendency to import could begin to coexist with architecture's capacity to export outside. Now, a number of other things that I would like to say, again, by way of just propositions to put on the table, is to say that a building is not formed. Or at the very least, the building is not only formed. That means that a return to the building or not a return actually, but an emphasis on the building is not an emphasis on form. I think I would like to suggest that at the very least, a building is some combination of form and program. Some combination of a three-dimensional material organization made up of a number of elements and relationships, so what we tend to call form, that is capable of housing a number of or the site of human activities or human-related activities. So even if the human is not there, such as in storage buildings or infrastructural buildings. So that means, again, I'm kind of holding back. I'm not elaborating. But that may suggest, for example, social by definition. So a building is not only formed now. The other question I think that's important to bring up here, especially in architecture, is this distinction between discursive and representational knowledge. Now, if this was electron and metaphysics and this was school of philosophy or whatever, this distinction would be a little bit reductive. But I think for architectural purposes it's going to be potentially helpful, which is to say, well, discursive knowledge is the kind of knowledge that involves premises, narratives, judgments, assessments, concepts, ideas, conclusions, inferences, as channeled through thought and expressed through language. Channeled through thought and expressed through language versus representational knowledge, which is the kind that we mobilize constantly in architecture because of the nature of design. And that is the one that involves drawings, images, models, and so on. So in so far as the building as a book is not a building, the building is a book, then, of course, it concerns discursive knowledge. Now, at the same time, many of the authors in the book, if not the vast majority of them basically, they mobilize representational knowledge in order to be able to produce discursive knowledge. So that's the kind of mechanics for this transition between one and the other or the kind of interplay between the two. So we begin to see that one could suggest that an architectural thinking is the practice of producing discursive knowledge through the analysis, discussion, and conceptualization of aspects that belong, that define two inextricably related regimes. On the one hand, the regime of design, the design process, which we might call, you will, architectural design thinking as a subset of architectural thinking. And then on the other hand, the regime of the outcome of such a process, that is to say the regime of the building. So in slightly broader times, then, turns out that architectural thinking is a distinct domain, a distinct, clearly unique domain of discursive knowledge whose attributes reach well beyond form and aesthetics. Again, an emphasis on the building is not an emphasis on form and aesthetics by any stretch of the imagination. And one could argue that many of those attributes actually are relatable to at least ontology, technology, and several modes of logic and phenomenology. Again, I'm not elaborating on any of this, but maybe later on in the discussion we can say something more. No. Another important distinction to make in my view is this one between specificity and autonomy. Again, unfortunately I cannot elaborate, but basically the bottom line is that an emphasis on architectural thinking is in no way an emphasis on autonomy because by definition, architectural thinking is not autonomous, right? At least in the way we've come to understand the term autonomy in architecture, let's say within the past 40 years through the Italian sort of trend on the American one. However, it is obvious enough, I think that architectural thinking is a specific domain of knowledge, right? In so far as the production, the design process, as well as the outcome of such a process, the building, features a number of particularities, right? A number of specific features and traits that make them fundamentally different from a novel, a music, sorry, a piece of music, piece of literature, right? A number of other things that you can create, right? Notwithstanding the analogies that you can then establish between the different medians. So you could argue then that while autonomy is definitely grounded in specificity, specificity does not imply autonomy, right? So basically what this project tries to do, the building is to capitalize on architectural specificity and non-autonomy, this combination, in order to produce this phrase, which is perhaps the key phrase of the entire project, architectural specific yet generalizable knowledge, right? That is to say the kind of knowledge that is specifically rooted in architectural thinking and yet at the same time could have potential and impact outside of the boundaries of the discipline. So to talk a little bit about the structure of the book fairly quickly, the main section comprises brief texts on 30 case studies built or designed within the last 25 years that were grouped under these six labels, elements, host, content, context, reference and technology, which are at once undeniably tied to architecture, right? But at the same time I understand elemental enough to be relevant to fields outside of architecture, right? Now, second section, longer critical essays by five authors reflecting on this question of the building as a form of knowledge, partly through reflections on the project's agenda and the materials, the rest of the materials within the book, right? So part of the idea with these words to kind of keep the conversation going throughout the pages of the book, not only restricted to the symposia themselves. And then thirdly, a very important section on where five authors reflect on the importance of this renewed interest in the building in the context of architectural education today. All right, so first part of the presentation, second part of the presentation I wanna run very quickly through this. I'm gonna share with you guys five examples from the book where you'll see how authors spoke to the first part of the agenda and then five other examples where a number of other contributors spoke to the second part of the agenda, right? So Penelope, I think, for example, talking about Fujimoto's Any House, she says a number of things but the one that I would highlight is the fact that for her this building is related to other losses round plan and what it does is that it basically dismantles the round plan by evacuating the wall and then creating what she calls platform plan, right? So that is the way in which she argues how this building actually materializes this addition to a particular lineage within design. Because in these cases from the ADA, discussing Ensemble Studios travel house, for those of you who don't know this project, basically the idea is to dig a hole in the earth, then fill it up with hay, then pour in the concrete, remove the earth around, then have a calf eat away at the hay to get the interior of the building. So basically the idea is that instead of designing a building, what you do is you prescribe the construction process in such a way that you escape the strict rules of representation, right? So in concrete projects what you usually get is a cast that is introduced to eliminate uncertainty, right? To try to control exactly the appearance of the project, right? Here the opposite is the case. The cast is introduced with a kind of intentional roughness to have a kind of unpredictability in terms of the result. That's the specific contribution of this building, right? John McMorrow writing about MBRDB's Expo 2000 pavilion, he argues that this building enacts and modification of the so-called 1909 theorem, which you see on the left is a huge steel structure supporting different suburban plots, as identified by Ram Kujas in Delirious New York, and he argues, John McMorrow argues that while the delirious version of the 1909 theorem privileged the semantic and environmental autonomy of every level, of every plan, here what they do is that they benefit from the surpluses and excesses of the different floors to actually turn the building into an operative mechanism, right? So the heat given off of one floor is used to cool the next, and then the water flows through, right? So basically it reconnects environmentally what previously used to be autonomous, right? So in that manner it kind of materializes a principle of inter-connection through separation and integration, right? This one you guys are familiar with, related all the way back to the Amazon Domino paradigm, and the idea is that this is also a case of a free plan where plates, facades, and structural elements are independent from one another, and here the contribution is that we're formally used to have these mass solid columns, then here they are burst into this hollow set of tubes basically which are able to house the vertical flows of the building, right? So another specific contribution in terms of design placed within a particular historical lineage, right? And then lastly, Mark Rousseau from Etihad arguing that contribution of Santa's Rolex Center lies in what he calls the management of thresholds, right, the management of thresholds, right? Luminous, acoustic, energetic, distributional, a number of different ways through which this project basically merges together zones for verbal exchange with zones for total silence while doing away with the necessity for vertical dividers for the most part, right? I mean, they are replaced with 18 artistic pretension, a floating screed and a carpet which creates these long topographical horizons, right? Which effectively divide up the different soundscapes within the building, right? And then lastly, the for the most ambitious part of the agenda, wasting which these buildings could trigger terms or concepts which could impact fields outside of architecture, taking Stan Allen's piece on Masini and Tunio's moussak. He argues that the project's accomplishment is not so much to resolve contradictions or make deductive statements as it is to suspend and dissolve apparent oppositions, right? So if you actually extract the last bit, the suspend and dissolve apparent oppositions, that is a statement that resonates with reality situations and discursive problems way beyond architecture, right? Specifically, if we were to develop it into something more of a longer reflection or a theoretical framework, right? Statement born into the analysis of a building that could potentially have an impact outside, right? Similarly, I think Santiago from GSD, writing about the typical suburban American house, he argues that there are a number of formal features in these otherwise completely anodyne houses, which for him represent a totally new way of organizing a set of things, right? So not only rooms, but also people, information and well, anything you can possibly imagine, items, right? And he calls this model, this organizational model, super urban, like since super urban space. And for him, this could have actually epistemological consequences, right? So in other words, again, it's an organizational model which is specifically architectural as born into a building, but then could be expanded into more of a way of understanding reality more generally outside of architecture, right? Third, a beautiful concept in my view, architectural sameness put forward by Amanda Risa Lorenz. She says that, you know, asking the question, how can we talk about architectural sameness in our field over the last five or 10 years? There's been a search of terms around copies, quote quotations, dupli textures, derivatives, allusions and so on, but she argues that we lack a theoretical framework to differentiate between these related and yet non-identical terms, right? Now, if we think of sameness, the idea of sameness, it turns out that it resonates directly with fields such as photography, for example, or art history, right? And even all the way to metaphysics, right? Where they have been discussing identity and difference for millennia, basically, right? So again, an ocean born into architecture which could have an impact beyond. Interestingly also, idea of architectural iconolatry as opposed to iconicity put forward by Alejandra Buquilla from the ADA, she says that OMA's Dubai Renaissance is a building which has the property of being capable of absorbing and then projecting any meaning, right? As opposed to just a reduced set, right? So it does function as an icon as against what Rem says, it is an icon in many different ways, but it has that particular property. In other words, iconolatry is basically, for her, the quality of, you know, when a building's very conditioned as an icon, is defined by its unstable semantic identity, right? By its unstable semantic identity, right? Its capacity to absorb and project many meanings. Now, furthermore, she says that this is a specific condition of 21st century capitalism in architecture, right? This idea of iconolatry has seen unstable meanings for a building, right? So again, for folks interested in questions of meaning or representation beyond architecture, this notion of iconolatry just taps directly into their concerns. And then last but not least, Andru Benjamin, he's a philosopher, actually, that's why there's no images there, and this one is a little more complicated, but basically, he loved that probably, hopefully. The idea that, basically, a building is always two buildings, right? A building is always the result of a set of networks that precede its conception and its construction, but at the same time, it is the naturalization of a set of internal networks, right? As in purely disciplinary, such as program, communication, construction, and so on, right? So he wants to say that the latter set of networks, the ones that are internal to the building, can be thought of as a countermeasure, as he posted, which is a way of othering the global, right? A way of reconceptualizing the set of networks that precede the building, right? Never as in standing counter to the global, that's why I have issues with the counter bit. He says, never as in standing counter to the global, you can't do that, he says, but as in reconceptualizing, right? As in establishing some kind of communication to challenge what precedes or what creates the real possibility for the design of buildings. Okay, so getting to the end now, just wanted to share with you guys, these are some 60 notions, concepts that are featured and that appeared in the book and that have a strictly to do with architectural thinking. If you actually look at them closely and analyze what they mean, you realize that it is a very sophisticated domain, right? Like I think it is very sophisticated, right? It sounds as though a zooming in, you know, a kind of emphasis on specificity is a kind of narrowing down, but it turns out that in a certain sense, it is the exact opposite, right? But there is so much there, right? So much so that you can totally envision picking out a number of these or even just one and develop again a system of thought that could impact not only like, you know, fields within the humanities and the social sciences, but actually, you know, computer sciences or the culture of Silicon Valley, which are already beginning to use terms that have an architectural charge, right? So, and that's the way in which this project, as I show you to end a number of pages from the book, the idea that growing actually discursive capacities from within and then ignite its potential to expand its limits and audiences is the way in which we can bridge the gap in our view between history and theory on the one hand and studio culture and practice on the other hand. And for that to be the case, as Laura Epstein-Johns puts it in the book, the history and theory project would have to be extended, actually, as opposed to contracted, which is the opposite of what it seems like again. This is a retreat to the building, but it's actually the opposite. So, in that somewhat paradoxical note, I'm going to end leaving Bernard's beautiful image here and thank you for listening and... It's always a pleasure to be back at Columbia and you don't wanna thank Amal and Jose and, you know, in a much larger sense, Bernard, as well. It's a pleasure to share the stage with these old friends and colleagues. So, yeah, I didn't want so much to reiterate my original contribution to the book, but really respond to the sort of larger project of the book that Jose has just laid out there. And I wanna say that I was very, very sympathetic to this project from the very first time that Jose contacted me about participating in the conferences and I was supportive of the book. At the time, the project seemed to offer a kind of refreshing corrective, this idea of returning to concrete things in the world as opposed to what can at times seem to be our field sort of endless preoccupation with discourse and dancing around the object of architecture by way of text, media, sociology, politics, or activism. At the same time, I think that Dora Epstein-Jones spoke for a lot of us in her piece in the book. When she asked the question, what exactly has happened in our discipline that it has become radical and strange for architects to talk about buildings? And this is a passage that was cited by Jose's introduction, it briefly flashed by in his slides, but I think it's worth repeating. She writes, how strange is it to hold a series of conferences and to work with such fervor to produce an ambitious book on buildings in architecture? What turn of events brought us to this moment? What disciplinary weirdness must have transpired to force the center to snap back into our attention and to require of all things a weighty discussion? Now, the published version of her text is slightly different, but like Jose, I like this earlier version of the text, because I think the way in which she articulates this problem in terms of center and periphery is quite intelligent. For a long time, it seemed plausible that you could revitalize that, which was at the center of our discipline, the building, by reference to things at the margin, to reference by text, journals, exhibitions, whole series of related disciplines, from philosophy to politics to sociology to landscape to media, energy and environmental studies. But I think precisely the disciplinary weirdness that Dora Epstein-Jones is pointing to is that what was once at the center is now with a margin, so buildings are somehow now with a margin and all of those other things are at the center of our discipline. So hence the, I think, necessary and useful corrective of this project to put the building back at the center of discussion. Okay, so, but what I wanna do today is push back a little bit on that and say, is it really so easy to just simply put the building back into the center of the discussion? And the implied opposition, I think motivating the project between discourse and the building I think needs to be opened up a little bit. What I wanna suggest in very, very simple terms is there are a lot of things in the world that qualifies architecture that can't be circumscribed within the somewhat limited term of the building. And that we serve the discipline better by being attentive to the expanded field of architectural possibilities rather than narrowly focusing on the building as the ultimate object of architecture. Now it's interesting because Jose and I had discussions along this line sort of early in the project actually and one result of that, I'm trying to find the laser pointer, well, I don't need it, there was a typographical convention that was proposed early on with a lower case T and an upper case B, so it wouldn't be so much the building but just the building. Wasn't ultimately picked up but I thought it was a clever way to navigate this question of the singularity of the building. Now, in reference to my colleagues, two canonical projects, I don't think either one of these are buildings. I don't think there's anybody in the audience who would say they're not architecture though. So this is sort of my starting point. Now, I also want to say this is not necessarily a recent phenomenon. This is not something that actually happened since the 60s. If we go back to the source, if we go back to Vitruvius, how many of Vitruvius's 10 books on architecture really deal with buildings? Well, bear with me a little bit. Let's go through the 10 books, okay? Book one is about the education of the architect and the city. Book two is about the dwelling house and materials. Book three is about temples and proportions. Book four is about the orders. Book five is actually about public buildings, treasuries, prisons, theaters, baths, et cetera. Maybe the only book really dedicated to buildings. Book six goes back to houses and villas. Book seven goes back to materials. Book eight is about water. It's about how to find water. It's about leveling devices that use water but also about aqueducts and wells. Book nine is entirely devoted to astrology. I'm waiting for the NAAB criterion on astrology. Book 10 is devoted to machines and implements. Hoisting machines, water clocks, catapults and siege engines. So we know, for example, that in the Renaissance, fortifications was a major part of the expertise of the architect and including things like catapults and siege engines and my favorite, the tortoise where many soldiers with the armaments become a kind of single mechanized body. So what I really want to just do today, very briefly, is to argue that, and I think it's historically accurate to say, that the building is actually a relatively small subset of what might largely be called architecture. So I've put together a few images and proposed a few categories, hopefully for the discussion, architectural objects that are not buildings. Call this a kind of partial and necessarily incomplete taxonomy of architecture beyond the building. From my own perspective, of course, one place you have to start is landscape. This is Aspland's Woodland Cemetery. And of course, landscape gets more interesting when it starts intersecting with infrastructure. So building like Weissman-Fredi's Olympic Sculpture Park. This is a building that was talked about in the conference. Again, I'm not really sure you would call Yokohama Port Terminal a building. It's a piece of urban infrastructure and an artificial landscape. Now, I talked about Menciatunyon in my presentation. This is a more recently finished project of theirs. The project is this. It's the Museum of the Royal Collections in Madrid. Again, it's not something you could sort of draw a line around and say this is the building. It's the kind of reconstruction of a piece of urban infrastructure to create a platform and house the collection. And of course, there are many examples of urban infrastructure. Nervi's Port Authority garage terminal here off the George Washington Bridge, pieces of urban infrastructure. The category that David Billington from Princeton refers to as structural design. This is Nervi. And of course, there are fantastic examples of engineering design that certainly utilize all of the components of architectural knowledge that Jose was talking about. But again, not sure you would strictly speaking describe this as a building. And I think that's something we can talk about as the discussion goes forward. And then of course, you have moments like this where you say, okay, if Mies intervenes within one of these structures and creates a kind of secondary enclosure, does that bring it more into the realm of architecture as opposed to engineering? But still, again, I'm not sure we would call this a building. Or those sort of intersections of infrastructural pieces with building. So the Crystal Bridge project here, there's a very important category that becomes very much, I think, a part of contemporary discussions through things like biennials of the pavilion. A pavilion as a kind of experimental test bed for architects, sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary, very often temporary. And one of my favorite examples, of course, is Mendes de Rochas, Brazilian pavilion in Osaka. Buildings which are permeable, that are simply sort of creation of artificial environments, Cedric Crisis Aviary and the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden. There's another phenomenon that happens in the later part of the 20th century when a building gets so big that it can't be understood as a kind of singular building. So I think for me, the paradigm of that is the Astrodome, this vast interior space where the interior then takes on the characteristics of an exterior. Or to put that in more of an architectural context, Artigasch's Faculty of Architecture in San Paolo. When you visit this building, there is no distinction between inside and outside. The exterior space simply flows into the inside and it creates a series of platforms that house the school of architecture. But it's very difficult to say, again, what's inside, what's outside, where does the building begin, where does the building end? Or to, let's say, move a little bit more into the realm of kind of popular culture, Charles de Gaulle Airport or the Bonaventure Hotel, these interior worlds where it's really more about the articulation of the organization of the space within the interior than it is about the object that we would identify as the building. The problem of the sort of monument versus the fields, you knew the fields was coming when you invited me. You think, I think of the famous Adolf Los, quote, that the only part of architecture that belongs to art is the tomb and the monument. And the way that somebody like Peter Eisenman, I think, is trying to push back against the singularity of the monument by the dissolution of the monument into a kind of endless field. Or buildings that operate through that sort of field like, endless field like interior. An ancient example like the court of a mosque or a recent example, relatively recent example, like the Palace of the Assembly by La Couricier. In both cases it seems to me it's much more about the kind of field like condition of the interior than it is the building itself as a kind of object with an inside and an outside. I also thought of Aldo Rossi's concept of urban artifacts, things that persist over a very long period of time in the city. His famous analysis of the Plaza Rajonid in Padua, and then can absorb a whole different series of programs over time. So the building becomes a kind of scaffold for series of different programs over time based on its formal specificity. And of course the idea that as architects we not only design single buildings, we design urban assemblages. And that sort of choreography of the many pieces is at least as much a part of the architect's expertise as it is the design of a single building. And then finally, it seems to me very interesting the design of the void itself. Of course the classic example of this, the Palais Royale in Paris, which I'm quite certain that Raymond Abraham had in mind for his Lael project. In the 60s, 70s, 70s this was, 80s even, maybe early 80s. Thank you, thank you, 70. And a building that was mentioned in the conference, Monet's Diagonal. When again, when a building gets to be so big that it can't simply be understood as one building, but as a kind of fragment of the city itself, this famous example in Seoul, Korea, or a kind of hybrid, the Climente de France in Algiers, built from, I have to check my notes, 54 to 57, Fernand Pouillon, which it seems to me is a kind of hybrid between the mega form and the urban void. So really that's my contribution. I mean, it's certainly not a complete list, but I just wanted to show a few examples, projects that I like, that I thought could kind of open up this discussion and suggest in a way that what Jose calls architectural knowledge has actually always been a fairly mixed and contaminated form of knowledge that encompasses many things that are dedicated to being concrete, real constructions in the world, but not necessarily simply singular buildings. So thank you. Thank you Jose, thank you Stan. Since I'm under the pedagogical sort of rubric a little bit and my contribution was actually inspired by a student project and I always have faith that students often bring us some of the most interesting questions. So in the interest of time, I will read from my text, but I think it will echo very much also some of the questions that Stan is posing. So in a recent review, well, not so recent anymore, I have thesis projects at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, notice I am noting another school. I had the pleasure of sitting in on the presentation of one beautiful project which triggered for me the sense not only of how far architectural education in the United States leading coastal schools in particular had shifted from what some still might term a traditional core, but also how much further it's still needed to go and how many possibilities and territories remain to be explored for architecture and for architectural thinking, discourse and practice. The project designed by Nam Joom Kim and entitled Storehouse of the Earth was meant to enlist architecture to simultaneously register the melting of glass shears by collecting and making visible large amounts of recorded data, while also preserving large swath of ice from melting. This is the glass here. Taking inspiration from the monitoring infrastructure which has developed in the last century to measure, compile and disseminate standardized data on glass here fluctuations across the world, as well as the recent deployment of large-scale blankets to protect ice from rising temperatures such as for their own glass here in the Alps. So here you can see the big cover. The project seemed to productively move away from the usual probing of architecture's disciplinary boundaries to focus instead on the problem of the building to ask what constitutes a building today, what form it could take, how or what it could perform, for whom or what it should shelter and at what scale, and what new inside-outside boundary it might draw in the age of climate change and the Anthropocene. Building on the long legacy of architecture as infrastructure, the project consisted of an ensemble of different buildings, each one designed to stand alone as well as to interact with the other structures as they perform together this double act of recording and preserving. Amongst the various buildings, connecting pipes and systems, two structures stood out. On the one hand of the ensemble was a sphere designed as an underground library for the gradual collection of seeds, a process which would occur as the ice melted above ground and which would be revealed together with the uncovered spherical archive as the ice melted. And on the other side of the ensemble, a large sheet of canvas-like fabric stretched horizontally across an ice-rich eight kilometer long and designed to protect the ice below from the rising temperatures as it mitigated the process of the melting. The project's interest could be registered on multiple levels. While somewhat underdeveloped as a student thesis, it nevertheless was able, as student projects often are, to pose more important questions and point to more radical positions than any real building could aspire to. In many ways where the project opened up was a renewed questioning of the relationship between architecture and building. Between building and architecture, at once questioning its past evolution, critiquing its current state and imagining new possibilities for its transformation in the future. To trace the relationship between architecture and building, the project first succeeded through its presentation as performance as well as through the performance of its striking architectural representations. The large section and plan drawings as well as the representation of time through narrative video projected onto a cast model to convince the audience, us, that the ensemble of proposed interventions were undeniably at once building an architecture. So the discursive part turns the building into architecture. Enlisting a wide range of precedents from the endless archive that has become architectural history, each structured echoed a past architectural proposition while also enacting a new infrastructural purpose. The Seed Collection building was moved away from its status as pure engineering by layering the narrative of time, the ice melting onto its formerly abstracted sphere, rendered in the manner of Boulez, fantastic architectural projections, typical of our contemporary condition of mash-up of architectural references. More interestingly even was the monumental sheet of fabric stretched over the glass year to protect it, echoing the large-scaled environmental interventions of Christo and Jean Claude, such as the wrapped coast in particular, the glacier blanket turned the artist's fabric coverings into a roof for the earth, operating at the scale of the land to become an entirely stealth skin able to create a new interiority for the ice and rocks below and a new boundary between the earth and the heating atmosphere around and beyond it. Even as both structures commanded their simultaneous status as building and as architecture through the series of formal narrative and historical tropes they enlisted, they remained unsettling for both architecture and building. Throughout the entire presentation and across all of the drawing boards, the narrative videos or the model was a radical absence of human life. These structures were not designed to shelter humans nor were they designed at a human scale or to register the scale of human occupation whether in space or in time. Instead they were conceived at one end to house one of the smallest form of organic life, the seed, and on the other designed to shelter one of the largest-faced changing geological territory, the glacier. As a project polemically posed the charged questions of why we should build today, what and for whom, how and at what scale, it displaced the anthropocentric nature of both building and architecture even as it imagined itself designed to render the survival of the human species possible. Rather than take building as a stable entity and as a stabilizer of architecture's disciplinary boundaries, the project stabilized instead an understanding of architecture as shelter and as environment with buildings being one possible scale of environment and questioned at what spatial and more importantly temporal scale we needed to think and operate today. Moving beyond the bigness fever that has seen all iconic buildings of our recent past bloat in both scale and size, storehouse of the earth enlisted all the knowledge ushered by this extra large scale as well as by the infrastructural and technological complexity it has commanded to propose through the design of new types of buildings with other new scale sites, forms and programs, a new architecture with radically altered spatial and temporal geological scale at once shifting the relationship between a human centric inside outside to one between the earth and the atmosphere as a new condition of climate change. At a time when architecture and by extension architectural education has moved even beyond its expanded field to find itself not only liberated from contingent and anachronistic disciplinary edges but also newly empowered as a form of knowledge whose analytical drawing and design skills render it a synthetic discipline able to engage the world in new and important ways. It seems that the building has remained in contrast utterly conservative as it continues to exist in architects discourse and imagination as a decontextualized monolithic synthetic and detached anthropocentric object all too often used to recast architecture back into its reactionary ways. Like the millions of balls that were designed to be dropped one summer, a few summers ago onto the surface of a California reservoir to create a protective layer against evaporation. The glacier blanket radicalizes the building for today undermining all its expected parameters from the question of its time, scale, site, technology, materiality to that of its purpose or subject to open up new possibilities for architecture as a multi-layered wrapper able to take on multiple forms and perform at multiple scales to shelter the earth and create a new kind of human less interiority. It is an important invitation to rethink and radicalize the building again neither as pretext for interpretation nor as frame to stabilize architecture but as a purposeful actor whose altered parameters can transform and ensrange both building and architecture anew. So I mean this project was just interesting for me because it was during many of the things that I think Stan was mentioning, it wasn't really a building, the subject of it wasn't humans, it wasn't the scale of it wasn't human. But it was finding a new purpose for building so that on the one hand I thought its program was quite interesting in terms of what should buildings house today and to kind of re-engage with the question of building as infrastructure in new ways. But also at the presentation it was a presentation and so the discursive side, the drawings, I mean as Reinhold Martin says, architects don't build as much as they draw so that hinge between the building and the discourse is quite critical and without it I think you don't really get to architecture and I think the project did that to a certain extent as well. And just kind of thinking a little bit about I do think that architects have been using buildings to look at the world. I think the kind of the list of concepts that you articulated, I mean from Jameson who was able to articulate let's say postmodernism as a result of spatial reflection, et cetera, in the Portman building or even Ram Kulhas' project on the city that it really built on using. So in some ways it does seem to me that the reason why I think architectural discourse and theory is so strong at this time it's because of our ability to think architecturally through certain problems and so maybe this project is an invitation to rethink the building with the same excitement as we do the contemporary condition. Anyway, so this was my kind of contribution in terms of I guess not taking for granted what a building is, which I, you know, echoing stands continuing to probe representation but also continuing to probe the relationship between architecture and building as not immediately knowable, let's say. So thank you. Thank you. So thank you all for really provocative presentations and what a great way to really begin to expand on this book and open up some of the questions that it raises. I suppose that we could start sort of, well, as we lined up, I'm gonna hope that you will speak now. That's actually the first functional use of that scarf. I've always seen it as a decorative thing, but now I know. No, that was really great. But let me ask you, I'm sorry, by asking you a question that you launched us with this idea that building's a form of knowledge, the basic idea. True or false? Architecture is a form of knowledge. Buildings are not. I mean, they're plenty of buildings, they're good buildings, they're bad buildings and make quite a distinction between architecture and building. Either the building is a manifesto and that's quite an interesting one. The, I even think it is interesting that I used to say architecture is a form of knowledge, but you say architectural thinking is a form of knowledge, which is not quite the same, but we're getting into details. The issue is really, the one that I would want first to address is the one of import-export. You take it into consideration when you bring autonomy and specificity. And indeed, we have seen, throughout the recent history of architecture, I'm talking now simply not to go too far about the 70s, the 80s, when there were people who were saying that architecture is architecture and it's only within architecture that we are going to find anything worth knowing about architecture. And there were those who were thinking that no, architecture belonged to a larger whole that could communicate with other disciplines and other fields of knowledge, rather, and that that's intertextuality between architecture, theater, cinema, literature, science, chaos, theory, et cetera, et cetera, was something which was totally appropriate. The problem was that those two camps were militant about their view and instead of using common sense, would simply take it as an opportunity to assess or to assert, rather, their stylistic difference. Some called themselves post-modernists when they were actually dealing with a lot of collages and others met. In reality, it was never that simple. We all know that architecture can never be alone for a very simple reason. It is, by definition, part of culture to start with. The words that we use as architects are the same words as we use in society. Talk about the pyramid of power or the labyrinth of sensation or the columns of whatever, the doors of wisdom, et cetera. The number of architectural metaphors that are being used in everyday life is the first form of import that society has taken from architecture. So architecture is, in a sense, already part of society. Simultaneously, I can turn it the other way around and say that typology would never have existed without the natural sciences, rather, dealing with classification of species in organic science or you can make other examples. So in other words, that type of exchange always exists and this is good. And I will always, I remember one time in Barcelona being chanted out of the lecture hall because I was showing examples of La Villette in making film parallels and people at the back of the audience say architecture is architecture, architecture is architecture. Not cinema, not theater, not whatever. You must not confuse everything. So it's not a question of confusion. It's a question simply that intelligence and knowledge inevitably tends to intersect. If you take engineering, you cannot do good architecture without some understanding of engineering and it's another science and in another discipline. So that's one issue. The other issue is, of course, that you could very well consider that they were indeed excesses at a certain moment in time when the borrowing from other disciplines became a sort of disguise and certainly you can take it from sociology in the 60s to, from Derrida to Delors during a certain period to other phenomena. But those, I think, are completely secondary ones. The reason why, when I showed these first images of burning the books, I really get worried when architects stop bring that discourse about architecture, is architecture, building is building and stop talking and stop writing. The most important moment in architecture thinking has been when architects themselves took their pen and wrote about architecture. The plan libre is a concept, but it goes also with the writing of Le Corbusier at the time when Louis Caen talks about servant and serving spaces. These are architectural concepts, but he also turns them into an argument and into a manifesto. So we must do that. So on this subject of the relationship between architecture and building, which you raise, you know, you began by saying, no, the building's not a form of knowledge. It's architecture as a form of knowledge, and then it was sort of your launching salvo. I wanted to turn to Stan and have you reflect a little bit on that question because you had us think about building as a subset of architecture was the way you described it. And so, I mean, obviously every great architect had to deal with this question of the relationship between architecture and building precisely because they don't go out with a hammer and put the frames together. But could you tell us a little, how do you respond to Bernard's conceptualization of the distinction? Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're too far apart. I mean, first of all, that was a brilliant performance, by the way, it's like the advice that they give to young writers, show, don't tell, right? And you sort of performed the lecture, which was great. So, yeah, I was thinking about, when Bernard was talking, I think it's Pevesner in his big history of European architecture who starts off, he says Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, a bicycle shed is a building. Now, it's kind of an odd place to start, right? Because if Lincoln Cathedral is a Gothic construction that's a product of anonymous master builders, it's not really architecture in the sense that we've come to think of since Alberti and the definition of architecture as a liberal art, which is, I think, sort of where this distinction comes from. And I think there's also, I mean, we're today probably reluctant, I mean, I think if we designed a bicycle shed we would probably call it architecture today. Paul Lewis gave his students a bicycle shed to design in a studio recently at Princeton and there were some pretty sophisticated architectural versions of bicycle sheds. So that's not a very easy way to make that distinction either. But I'm certainly in agreement with Bernard it's more probably to say architecture is a form of knowledge than the building is a form of knowledge. I mean, if you're a writer, you don't say the book is a form of knowledge, right? It's more that the practice of writing is a form of knowledge, right? And, you know, again, I just want to argue for... if architecture is a form of knowledge, it's a form of knowledge that encompasses many, many different things. It encompasses technical expertise, it encompasses drawing expertise, it encompasses a knowledge of building, and one way in which it can be expressed is in the form of buildings. And, you know, again, I'm totally sympathetic with Jose that it's worthwhile to sort of remind everyone that the concrete form of building as a kind of thing in the world is, you know, it's worthwhile refocusing attention on that, but, you know, I just want to underscore that point that it's only part of that sort of broad scope of what constitutes architectural knowledge. So, you know, this is sort of, I imagine, daunting for everyone in the room to think of so much knowledge, you know? Rest assured, you don't need it all to get your degree before you graduate. And that was good. I was going to ask you about that, because, you know, you raise the NAB standards, right, of how much knowledge do you actually... And one of the things that I found very interesting in all of the presentations was that the traditional, one would imagine, when you see a bicycle shed or a cathedral, is a discrete object. And it has, you know, more like a big sculpture, let's say, even. And none of the projects that you showed were that. Even the Athens Museum, which is one of my favorite buildings, precisely because it's not complete unless you're actually looking at the Parthenon somehow, that it's really... The building doesn't quite end where it does. But Amal, you raised a question in terms of... Where this... The dilation of the boundaries, you shifted us from space to time, and you talked about how the building is having a temporal depth, and that that, in your mind, had shifted somehow today, that the practice today in terms of how we think of the building's relation, temporality, is different now. And could you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, I think that... I guess, well, I should say that, you know, and it's a conversation that we've had, and I think in your own work, it is quite interesting, which is architects used to be concerned with time, and then with the kind of acceleration, and the architect, you know, architecture as image, you know, there's a kind of frozen moment where these buildings are consumed as images. But in fact, what's interesting, what I thought was interesting in this project and triggered sort of other ideas is, you yourself, Jorge, always say, a building is only one moment in which all the pieces are together, right? I mean, the Parthenon is dispersed as a disassembled body across museums, and yet we still have it as an idea, as a kind of singular building, but time has dispersed it, and today we're thinking about questions of embodied energy. The building is one moment where all these pieces are assembled in a certain way, but in fact, to trace that, you know, what the parts, where have they been, and where are they going, I think is bringing a new dimension, whether it's as a result of environmental concern or as a result of trying to think, you know, across scale or the scale of climate change, so I think time re-engaging with this question of time is quite interesting and, you know, to rethink the building today. To, for me, I don't take the building as granted. I guess that was, so it's not, yes, there's a relationship of architecture to building, which, you know, without discourse, without representation, without writing, you know, that doesn't, you know, architecture, building is not architecture, but I think this may be an important time to rethink the building, and, you know, your examples were very much that, but also to expand the definition of building or to question what should we build for, or for whom, I mean, we had a fantastic conversation yesterday in Bernard's seminar, you know, of the new Herzog and the Maroon sort of icon, you know, I forget the name, but the kind of the old and the new, and, you know, it's a residential tower, you know, the essay that talks about Oma's revolving tower saying iconology today is shifting meaning. How is it shifting meaning? It's a luxury tower. Like it's a pretty stable, late capitalist meaning. Like it's not, you know, so it's not, in my mind, you can't project multiple meanings. Yeah, Herzog and the Maroon want us to project multiple meanings and the facade is incredibly beautiful, but it's a very stable meaning. So are there other places where we can perform building? Are there other territories? Are there other, you know, subjects of buildings that we should care for species? You know, take the bicycle, extend it to the seed, you know, so that's one idea, I think. And then the other is, I guess what I love about the manifesto of the building, for me, if it's a rappel à l'ordre, it doesn't work. If it's a manifesto to bridge, again, discourse and practice, then yes, that's where we need to go. I think we need to re-stitch that gap and recreate that feedback loop. And would you, maybe since you're guilty, we will not, we don't want you to confess anything, that's for later. But is there, in your exploration of the subject and your frustration, you know, because you began with a frustration and I think that's really interesting to recognize one's frustrations because when you do, you sort of understand your desire also. And I think that there is a part of it in this that there is a desire for the building or that building is a channel for desire of some sort and you're recognizing that that desire not being satisfied in some way. Now you told us that that frustration came from what historians and theorists have done. But in the presentations today, there was a lot of frustration also on the state of things. And so could you comment, having gone through the book, what are the sort of frustrations that you've seen and the authors that you've worked with? What can we have a sort of theory of the building as a type of frustration? In other words, that this is not a satisfaction of that frustration and a sort of, but this sort of cultivating of it because it seems like all of the, there was, I don't, you know, maybe you disagree but I'll just start to put it in those terms. Since you began with that frustration. I was expecting to get psychoanalyzed today. It's on. It's on? Okay. Yes, so that frustration is true and it came exactly because this relationship between discourse and design, just as Amal was saying in the last bit of her reflection, wasn't fully realized in my view and I wanted to grow its potential as much as we could, right, basically. I was looking at other disciplines at the time and saw that this relationship between one of their main, let's say, object of study, whether it is the sign in semiology or the human psyche in psychoanalysis and then the power that that object of study had to actually grow into something much larger was greater than what we were achieving within architecture, right? So in a certain sense, there was a kind of interdisciplinary intention already by establishing this comparison at the beginning. Now, that's one issue. The other issue is in terms of the frustration within the pages of the book, the second part of your question. I think hearing your presentation today, what I realize is that the key perhaps problematic term is object, right? Because one tends to associate object with a kind of self-contained condition, right? This idea of objecthood that actually Sylvain Levin picks up on in her essay. Now, I should say in my defense, I guess, that the proposition I suggested actually did not contain this self-contained quality for a building, right? So in a certain sense, I was proposing an expanded definition of the building, right? So this is disappointing because I'm not feeding the controversy any further, right? But basically, I would agree very much with both Amal and Stan that many other categories and types of buildings they were proposing actually do fall within the category of a building as proposed in the book, right? So something like a set of elements in three dimensions, materially constructed, right? The houses set of human activities or human-related activities necessarily. So except for perhaps the Urban Project, which I think calls upon a different set of specificities to it, which to me fall more on the side of urban thinking and perhaps the landscape one, which is also perhaps a slightly different issue. All other examples, to me, are actually fall within the category of building as suggested in the book. So it's the object that perhaps shouldn't be there. That's one thing. And then very quickly, it is true we did not account for the issue of time in these reflections on building. It really makes me think whether time, whether just an instant or an eternity, actually half or could have an impact on this theory of what a building is, right? With a good conditional understanding. It's missing them. Bernard, you wanted to respond? It's not a response. It's actually extending your question to Jorge. It's since, okay, there is architecture which takes the form of built architecture, which takes the form of buildings. You sort of vaguely know what it is. But when you write about buildings, it's something else or about architecture. There are many, many ways to do so. And so my question to you is, how does the writing in the book, the building, differs from the writing that I will find either in regular architectural magazine, architectural record, any architectural magazine that you can think of which have very formulaic articles, how they present, like when you go to architecture, they ask programs about doing architectural criticism and they tell you how to structure the piece. There are also a certain type of writing that you will find in log, for example, the more academic form of writing. How do you see a new approach to architectural thinking which has to be to go through the medium also of writing? How do you see it developing? The reason why I asked the question, and probably that's the reason why I showed my second set of slides, the one about the two buildings which are, I was very flattered, which are mentioned in the book. My interest in those buildings were fundamentally different from the interest of the two writers. Nothing wrong with that. But what interests me is how do you determine the angle to the story, as a journalist would say, in terms of achieving what you're trying to achieve? Yeah, well, I mean, that's a very difficult question. I mean, for me to kind of improvise now on the flight, but what I would say is that the main difference is methodological, I would argue. There are two types of pieces in the book if we don't consider the longer essays because those are like a different animal. One has more to do with what you would find in mediums like Locke, for example, speculative reflections on the building but still sort of subconsciously tied to design, in a sense, versus a more sort of scholarly approach to the writing of buildings which does not necessarily take that into account and uses a number of, let's say, argumentative tricks and sort of connections of different thoughts, which belong very specifically to, you know, what scholars tend to do in their writings, which I think is a separate thing. So I was particularly more interested in the latter than the former because the former we see in mediums like Locke, for example. The latter we don't see that often because even though there are exceptions, of course, and there are some cases out there, it is not so common for scholars to write about contemporary architecture precisely because of the very definition of history. I mean, we are told you should not write about anything that's at least 25 years old because otherwise you lose your historical perspective. So part of the interest with this project, methodologically from the outset, was to actually have historians write about contemporary architecture, hence the definition of the time frame. So that's when you begin to see certain things happening in the writing itself which are not so common. When you get people like John Ockman or Sylvia or Mary or incredibly brilliant thinkers and historians forced in a way, quote unquote, forced to write about contemporary architecture. Yeah, but I probably meant something the way the best parallel that I can make is in the arts. Think of Clement Greenberg versus Rosalind Krauss. They talk about different things, but above all, they don't write in the same way. They have a very clear slant about what they are going to write about and how. And that's where suddenly there is an ideological dimension to the writing. In other words, a selection of subject matter, what belongs to the subject matter and what is thrown away. So that's why I'm asking you as someone who is a producer of thought how you're going to make this distinction or is that part of the intent? Can I step in here? I don't see frustration in this book. I mean, I think that's actually one of the kind of interesting things that I think when you present the project, you present it as a reaction to certain trends in the discipline and we've got to push back on that. And I have to say as a participant in the conference I was a little bit nervous, right? Do I really want to be part of this? What could be seen as almost a kind of reaction, right? And you go to the conference, you read the book. I don't think you feel that at all. I think what you see is here is a really interesting cross-section of projects and practices that trigger a whole series of ideas and interpretations and map out a whole series of new possibilities. So again, I think the project, I mean, in a funny way, if Bernard was saying, well, the building speaks for itself, in some ways the book speaks for itself, simply in the diversity of projects that are looked at, the different kinds of interpretations, even the last slide you showed, the concepts that have been produced out of the essays themselves. So I think there's another... I mean, if I've been a little bit critical kind of pushing back on the concept, I would say where I'm 100% behind the project is to say that I think too often there's this idea that the building is the outcome of a whole series of ideas, processes, and concepts, and the building stands as the illustration of those ideas. It seems to me that part of what's motivating this project is the idea that actually start from the building, don't worry what were the author's intentions, what was its genealogy, so on, start from the building, how can that trigger a new series of ideas, concepts, projects that are future-oriented, not backward-oriented. Because the other thing that seems to me about that is that's what we all do as architects, right? That when you showed the Fujimoto project and said it's a response across time to Lose's idea of the round plan, Fujimoto is in conversation with Lose. So architects are in conversation with the past not only through writing, but through what we do in our buildings. And I think to that extent, the book is sort of enabling of that kind of ongoing disciplinary conversation. Is it a one-way conversation? Because Lose is not writing back, is he? No, but I mean, look. He's the perfect client. We could say, for example, I mean differently because of Peter Eisenman's readings of Taranti. So it's destabilizing that object. Yes, it's a one-way conversation. But that's a perfect segue because I wanted to ask Amal about the notion of stabilization. You just brought up this question of destabilization of the past. And you talked about the building as a frame for stabilizing architecture or as a pretext for interpreting architecture. And you were critical of that, that the building should not be used as a frame for stabilizing architecture. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you mean? Yeah, sure. I think that it's exactly what Stan is talking about. The nervousness of, you don't want the building to be a return to the core, rappel alorve, enough of this expansion. I think you want to continue to probe the building so that you can continue to probe architecture and it's a kind of ongoing conversation. So I think in the sense of the ongoing conversation, the book really invites us for this ongoing conversation. There's this idea that let's not stabilize anything, but let's engage in a conversation. Let's re-engage in writing. And I think, Bernard, I'm more interested in your writings and Ram's writing and Stan's writing. As architects writing, then I have to read Rosalind Krauss or Claremont Greenberg. I think that the book, yes, of course we should invite historians. Please be interested again in us. Contemporary practitioners and historians today, at least the new generation will tell you, we want to do our thing here, but so why not have architects write as architects? And I think that because it is a specific form of knowledge and a specific form of design, thinking that can also translate in the kinds of concepts that list these words because it does seem to me that a lot of... You mentioned John McMurray or Benelope Dean. I haven't read the essays, but I'm imagining they're giving us tools to advance architecture through the reading of architecture, through writing it. And I think that invitation is... So it's not about stabilizing, it's about actually continuing to dig in and engage in dialogue and exchange, right? Bernard, do you want to respond to that? I thought it was great that it's a big book that's called The Building, and it made me think of Victor Hugo, that somehow the book will kill the building and whether this is the last, you know, finally, right? The sort of... Right? So back to you for a second, and then I want to open it up to questions, so if you have some, please raise your hand, because I thought it was really wonderful the way in which you tried to navigate this anxiety about the rappel à l'ordre, you know, that there is a... Even the idea of bringing it up, right? It seemed to... One has to preface it by all these disclaimers, right? We're not doing this and we're not doing that, and please be aware that we... Right? So you did say, though, that you saw the building as a realm of research. And so now research happens in the archive and it happens in the library. So tell us how do you see, just in very simple terms, the building as a realm of research? Is it because you said there's new theoretical frameworks? You gave us some old ones, typology, and so on and so forth, right? For looking at buildings, for researching buildings, coming out of this book, do you see clearly some new frameworks for researching the building, like lenses through which we should be looking and researching buildings, or is that still something that's in formation? No, I mean, I would say it's very much information up to this point. It is true that I haven't actually analysed the building... Sorry, the book beginning to... From this particular point of view, it's one that you're asking me now. But in terms of realm of research, what I had in mind is a kind of focus on the building as an identifiable reality, basically. That's what I meant by a realm of research in its own right, regardless of your methodology, whether you access it through archival materials or through any other means, through drawings or through discourses or through representation, the idea was to focus on the building as an identifiable object of study. That's when, again, one has to be careful with the use of the term object, object as in a material reality existing out there with very clear contours versus here just the building as an object of study, regardless of its contours being closed off or open. So that was just the intention there, versus, let's say, approaching a number of different realities within architecture which are very important and relevant that do not necessarily consider the building as the main focus of research. That was basically the approach. That's in terms of the methodology now. The emphasis was on the conceptual side of things, obviously. So basically what Stan was talking about just earlier, the idea that buildings can trigger concepts and interpretive frameworks that could have an impact outside. That was the specific lens. Are there questions? There's one in the background over there. Do you want to ask it? Just speak loud. I'll try to get to your question. So it's more of a comment that you want to elicit. Okay, so let's hear. That's a question for Stan, I think. Maybe. If I understand the question and I tend to agree with you as, again, as a kind of, I think less as a concern for practicing architects but more as a concern for sort of scholars and historians that there is in fact very, very little attention to how architecture is actually made. For most scholars and historians, it's kind of black box. There's a set of drawings and there's a building, there's an object, but what are the discussions in an office? How are the different technologies of drawing and representation involved in making architecture? So, yeah, I mean, to the degree that your question kind of implies a kind of anthropology of design practice, that seems to me really rich and interesting for scholars, but I don't see it having a big impact on architects as practitioners. Maybe we need to be more self-aware about, you know, how the conditions that we make our work is affecting the work, but it seems to be more a question for scholars or historians. There are other thoughts or questions in the audience? It made me think of when you talk about objects and you talked about the humanities, one of the things that has been going on in the humanities is this turn towards objects, this sort of rediscovery, oh yes, there are objects. One of the... You presented this in the West Coast already at Syarq? Not a Syarq, but in LA. In LA, you're going to... So, I'll be curious, for example, to think about object-oriented ontology, for example. You know, at Syarq there's a lot of interest in that, the sense that objects are agents in a field, the sort of legacy of Latour. The question or the comment made me think of this, you know, the sort of impact of sociology in architecture, sort of. And now the return, because you were interested in the letter that architecture sends back to sociology. What would that letter say? I mean, when you go to LA, I would imagine you'll get an audience with a lot of people really sort of steeped in that. We'll be seeing your discussion about the object through that lens. Well, a couple of things. I think it makes me think of the fact that that's the part of the project which is not completely fulfilled, in a way. In other words, that is how this project is just a project proposal. If it was able to exactly answer that question, then the project would be fulfilled. So we have to see exactly how buildings can trigger these epistemological frameworks or discursive frameworks such that they can be impactful for, for example, sociology, that is to be seen. Now, in terms of triple O, I think they would like the fact that in a way buildings in this book are seen as discursive agents. So as having their own voice, let's say, within discourse and as in our, you know, us trying to basically exploit the potential for buildings to do that, actually. Now, I'm not sure if they would be very comfortable with the other agents doing the exploiting or the igniting being the human himself, right? Because they basically would like for everything to be, you know, limited to the domain of objects themselves. So I can anticipate an interesting discussion as to the two sides of the equation. In other words, can mean the literal way in which they want to see it would be something like, well, buildings by themselves can actually, you know, generate something like a discursive domain with a capacity to impact other fields. Now, is that possible without the human interpretation or without the human agency, without the human intellect? Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but I do want to... One last thought. I just want to pursue something that you initiated, Stan. When you mentioned PEVS and the bicycle shed, one way to look at it, of course, is simply to say that a cathedral without a concept is not architecture. A bicycle shed with a concept is architecture. But that's not really the point that I want to make. PEVS, John Somerson, Siegfried Gideon, Reina Banham, Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vittle, each had a major impact and influence on architecture. Books do play a role, right? And so the question is, how come there's no Somerson, Gideon, Banham, Frampton, Vittle at this time around? Well, on that note, although it's hard to stop there, maybe you don't see them, but I think there are some really forceful voices in discourse. But that might be the subject of the next conversation. The good thing is there's a number of other conversations happening that you're organizing around the book, around the world. This is very much a world tour to open up this discourse. And so it's not very often that you get these three extraordinary figures together to discuss their work and to discuss the book. So I want to thank you all for participating in this panel, but also you, Jose, for making it all possible and for giving us the spur to launch this conversation. So thank you all.