 Welcome everyone. We're going to start the session. As you know, we're super happy to have Lydia Calipoliti that also it's everywhere now because she was just appointed as a professor at the Cooper Union and we're very happy for this and kind of very with huge envy for Cooper. The session is going to be introduced by Asraf Aptala and also moderated by Alexander Wood. Thank you so much, Andres, and we are very pleased to have Lydia Calipoliti today and very thankful to her for sharing some of her work with us, which I find and I'm sure you do agree with me, like, very rich, intriguing, and very thought-provoking. Lydia holds a PhD from Princeton University, a master's degree in design and building technology from MIT and a diploma in architecture and engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Lydia's career takes on many forms. Perhaps echoing the very philosophy of her work, Lydia's practice migrates across disciplinary boundaries and transforms from one medium to another. From the realm of design studio to academic teaching, from conducting research, and creating exhibitions to publishing articles and books. As a practicing architect and an engineer, Lydia designed and built a number of projects in Greece and held different positions in several offices in the US. Currently, she runs in collaboration, The Practice and A Cycle, which a design and writing studio in Brooklyn, and which she shared with me that it's a combination of two words. The Greek word, Anarchiclosis, which means recycling, and the English word, recycling. As an academic, Lydia taught many design studios, history theory seminars, environmental technology classes in various US schools, including Saracuse University, Pratt Institute, RPI, and Cooper Union, where she was also a senior associate as the Institute for Sustainable Design. She taught also classes here at Columbia University, CGSAB, and she was also the director of Columbia's global network program in Greece. Currently, as she shared with us and as Andrea has pointed out and congratulations, she has been appointed an associate professor at Cooper Union. But that's not all. Lydia is so many things. As a curator, Lydia's work has been exhibited in a number of international and US venues including the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Design Biennale, the Chinzen Biennale, the Royal Academy of British Architects, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture here in New York. The exhibition as a medium has been central to Lydia's work, I argue, and to its objective of engaging a wider audience in an activist manner that instigates action, motion, and change, or what she simply calls immersive scholarship. In fact, two of Lydia's books echoed Redux, Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, which was a special issue of Architecture Design Magazine published in 2011, and Architecture of Closed World, or What is the Power of Shit, published in 2018, which we read excerpt from this week, were both held as exhibitions at the Storefront in 2010 and 2016, respectively, prior to taking the book for math. In addition to books, Lydia has published widely in various international and Greek magazines, such as Log, E-Flux, Architecture Design, Praxis, Domus, Volume, and the list can go on and on. She's also the recipient of numerous awards, I'll mention just a few, the Silver Medal in the W3 International Awards for Digital Innovation in Environmental Awareness, the Honorary Award at the 14 Webby Awards from the International Academy for Digital Arts and Science, and an Honorable Mention from the Independent Jury of the Shenzhen Biennale, among many others. In her work, Lydia critically engages with a wide array of epistemological fields and aims at destabilizing their secure disciplinary confinements, from ecology, technology, psychoanalysis, and socio-politics to design architecture and urbanism. She invites us to rethink many of the pressing and current issues and, in a way, move beyond our long-held assumptions, particularly concerning archaeological design and environmental discourse. One of the central issues I take that Lydia's work aims at problematizing is this notion of self-sufficiency, autonomous living, and co-efficiency, which have dominated the discussion on environmental sustainability since at least the early 1970s, if not since the post-war era and the onset of the Cold War. Architecture, as Lydia argues, was not immune to this discussion, as she contends under the weight of a growing ecological crisis in the 1970s, architecture dissolved into, and I quote, no more than a transparent membrane, end of quote, a membrane that carefully creates and manages a supposedly secure and sustainable world inside, while shielding against the threatening environment outside. Nonetheless, and contrary to conventional discourse on environment and sustainability, Lydia contends that such a spatial and mental model of an assumed equilibrium between input, intake, and gain on the one side versus output, waste, and excretion on the other is but a fantasy of a net-zero game. It is a fantasy that's while appealing to natural domesticity and ecological efficiency is in fact sustained by technological mediation and in acts a mechanism of control and socio-political uprooting from one's own surroundings. This, Lydia calls, synthetic naturalism, where concept of metabolism are displaced from the wilderness sphere into architecture. According to Lydia, what these enclosed bubbles of living have to manage is not simply the environment inside or the threat outside, but rather and more precisely the anxiety and difficulties stemming from the production of waste or what she calls shit, which challenges the stability of these closed walls and their assumed equilibrium. Lydia asserts that we all live in such enclosed worlds. These constructed bubbles do not only encompass our physical living environment, but they also contain our way of thinking and imagination, hiding from our view the world outside. In protest, Lydia challenges us to think beyond the bubble, develop a new kind of criticism, and reassert the power of shit. As she puts it, possibly shit is our only way out, and we can say out of this enclosed world. I look forward to a great talk and to a very fruitful discussion afterwards, and it's my great pleasure to introduce Lydia Calopoliti. Please join me in welcoming her. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for this amazing introduction. It was so thoughtful, and I'm really looking forward to your comments. This auditorium has always intimidated me, so I would very much like you to agree or disagree after this talk. And a huge thank you to my friend and colleague, Andreas Hake, whose work I admire, and you're so lucky to have him as your instructor. Super honored to be here. So after the thank yous, I'll begin with sharing the reason of my being here. And I'm mostly here to present the work of my recent book, The Architecture of Closed Worlds, which is kind of a comfortable title. It echoes the architecture of well-tempered environments by Rainer Bannam, the architecture of whatever you wish, which is a kind of the comfortable part of the title, which is accompanied by the discomfortable title, or what is the power of shit? And this was a kind of intentional coupling in the framework of this book, because as much as we want to speak of sustainability and environmental issues as kind of ideas of ameliorating our environments and reusing resources in an efficient way, there are so many levels to and connections to the way that these issues are performed in our built environment. And I hope to reveal some of these complexities today that are hidden in this book. But I will start with a very simple question. What is a closed world? And how do I interpret a closed world within the framework of this book? I'm not the first person that invented the term. It was used actually in a book by an amazing historian of science, Paul Edwards. His book was called A Closed World. And he wrote, and I quote him, that a closed world is radically divided against itself, turned inexorably inward without frontiers or escape. A closed world threatens to annihilate itself, to implode as a bubble from the inside. And when Edwards uses that term, that kind of idea of total containment and sealing, he speaks of something very different. He makes a revisionist account of post-war computing in North America. But I'm examining a parallel, but a divergent kind of history that shares the same principles, however, in its core. A kind of generation of contained microcosms, the idea of replicating the earth as a contained microcosm in its totality, in its resources, which a series of experiments which forge what I call a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness, from nature, excerpted and transposed to the domain of cities and buildings. And, of course, this idea of a world in a bottle, which is what you see on the screen, is nothing new to architects. This is a sample of a famous Viennese group. Maybe all of you or some of you know it, House Druckerkow. They did these kind of bubbles in their heads and bubbles coming out from buildings. It's called Einstück Natur, A Piece of Nature. It was presented originally in 1973 in an art fair in Cologne and then became the cover of the Italian Casabella magazine in 1976. And it really represents, just like this famous image, Buckminster Fuller and Soji Sadau's Dome over Manhattan in 1960 and the famous bubble of Rainer Bannum, the environmental bubble. The idea of concealment, the idea that the environment is no longer something that we can preserve and we look at it as a fossil, as something that we have lost and we need to contain it and re-synthesize it within an enclosed world. But the idea of a closed world is very much tied to the history of Utopia and the complexities that all that history entails. Our canonical understanding of Utopia is actually close to the idealization of a closed system, a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter and energy. In the Cold War period, this idea reappears through the re-enactment of whole earth systems. And there are numerous examples of that with the kind of prime example being Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. What might resonate with our climate today, nevertheless, is that the idealization of closed systems is no longer explicitly about environmental and material resources, but it is also related to informational resources, the closure of data and capital, and the way that we perceive the world through social media. So the idea of containment and closure is not just about energy, but about a kind of enlarged cultural imagination that I will also try to address today. Closed worlds are no longer poetic metaphors for lost Utopias. They have become profitably real. And you see here a kind of snapshot of the famous playtime movie by Jacques Taty in 1976. But it is representative of the concept of indoor environments, which are in fact politically charged spaces that reflect social ideas and culturally specific standards of taste and judgment. Confined within artificial enclosures, environmental control has enforced biased standards of life, even though in most cases these standards institutionalize absurd criteria that homogenize ideas of comfort and well-being for the interiority of the human race. In many ways, closed worlds are power structures beyond else that maintain and manage constancy over bodies and psyches. The establishment of thermal equilibriums in interior spaces since the 1950s, sequestered comfort zones held within narrow ranges, reflects an understanding of the body as a tool within a constant atmospheric medium in order to control and predict its behavior and growth. And of course, this is an old psychrometric chart by the Carrier Corporation that was a major stakeholder in establishing the idea of psychrometric charts, which are applied in every kind of building, hotel in this city and many others, where comfort is this narrow range of combination of different parameters of levels of moisture, heat, and so forth. And this is where we have to live, all of us, even if bodies are different. It is precisely this mechanical vision of biology that gives life a specifically modern character. If organisms, either people or plants are examined explicitly as mechanical structures, serving a physical equilibrium, one cannot account for the complexity or for the beauty of life. In the book, I argue that the history of 20th century architecture, design and engineering has been strongly linked to the conceptualization and production of closed systems. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space, closed systems speak of the transference of life using architecture as a medium and a vessel to secure a compulsive cycling of matter, energy, data, and capital. The projects documented in the book represent entirely different antithetical political agendas. They range from military experiments from NASA and the Navy to expand our sovereignty to foreign territories that have not been previously occupied, to counter-cultural experiments and the homesteading movement, the nostalgia of the homesteading movement in the 1970s throughout the oil crisis, to the more recent and dubious concept of ecological tourism and environmental capitalism. In every sense, all of these systems are real, they have been applied, they are not speculative projects, and invested in the strangeness of the real. They are experimentally implemented rather than based upon speculations. So how does one write this type of nonlinear history is one question that I asked myself in terms of structuring this book. Rather than a linear text in the book, I examine, redesign, and reimagine an archive. An archive which I see not as a static object that contains historical documents, but as an immersive space and a living collection, where existential ideas about world orders migrate throughout different architectural and spatial typologies. Contrary to a linear text, a reconfigured archive allows multiplicity, simultaneity, and disruption. It allows the reader to travel between different times, places, and objects of investigation, enabling multiple connections and complex affinities between themes, concepts, and ideas that are not limited to a single place, era, author, or type. A reconfigured archive can produce new interconnected categories out of archival boxes, a universe of multitudes that does not necessarily need to be transcribed in linear time. I see the use of history as a creative and generative medium for contemporary concerns in design education practice, one that does not only promote public engagement with historical material, but also makes evident that in the history of ideas discourses get recycled. Closed worlds are not the only, materials are not the only things that are getting recycled in closed worlds. Ideas are very similar to this type of cycling. Concepts emerge as allegedly new, though ideas undergo long journeys of migration from one epistemological field to another. Contrary to a building, a drawing, or a book, the archive and the database is a distinctive disciplinary category of an architectural object that empowers new forms of authorship based on the extrusion of evidence to an event that lingers between reality and fiction. And I use a cheesy example to make my point here, bear with me for one paragraph. I use an example that I use to conceptualize time is the history of large-scale galaxies. As far as we know, when we observe a distant galaxy, we see it as it was when light has left it, not as it is today. So our understanding of the universe is perplexing and partial at best, since the only thing that we have to understand what it is is a form of time machine that allows us to see the past through investigation and observation. Some people doubt whether we can ever know what the universe was like billions of years ago, but actually the real problem is knowing what it is like right now. I find this cosmological metaphor very empowering because it implies the end of history as a knowledge of the present looking into the past. It offers an alternative reading of architectural history as a reconstruction project of what is selectively illuminated out of let's say an archive of events in order to fabricate multiple versions of present states based on fragments of the past. But to witness this journey of ideological migration happening throughout the book's pages, I will showcase three case studies analyzed in some relative depth and extract points for a manifesto on the power of shit. And I will start with let's say the most famous example that refies the idea of what a closed world might be that most of you might be aware of, the biosphere 2 which was built and sealed in 1991 and the concept of self-organization versus Darwinian evolution. Biosphere 2 remains the largest and most famous closed ecological system that has ever been built. Its purpose was originally to test the viability of a biologically regenerative artificial environment and to support human habitation in space as a prototype earth colony in case the earth would be destroyed. It was built by a company self-proclaimed space biospheres venture which was a partnership between a guy called Ed Bass that was a philanthropist and a businessman and John Allen who was a systems ecologist and environmentalist. Biosphere 2 supported two missions with the first team of researchers entering the facility in 1991 locked from the exterior world for two years and 20 minutes. The team produced their own food and air supply within a heavily sequestered series of ecosystems. During the entire experiment all of the crew's waste including waste from their domesticated animals was recycled through natural low-tech filtration methods. Biosphere 2 is very famous because it failed spectacularly and very publicly. The first mission was notorious for technical and operational failures especially for not creating enough oxygen. After six months oxygen absorption fell down by six percent which is extremely significant statistical number in terms of the kind of daily life of the inhabitants and their levels of cognition. If you don't have enough oxygen your brain stops functioning in the same way and there are many theories why oxygen was depleted the most prominent one being that while concrete was curing in the facility it was absorbing the concrete of it was absorbing the oxygen of the air and that's why the levels dropped by six percent. Other theories have to do with soil bacteria and so forth but this was a main problem with eventually leading to having to pump oxygen to sustain the crew inside. Along with the poor interior air quality unanticipated species like cockroaches and this weird tawny crazy ant thrived within and the biospharians for unknown reasons certain species could just reproduce longer in a geometric rhythm relative to others. Along with that the biospharians suffered from hunger throughout the residency throughout the two years and this is one biospharian Raleigh Lee Walford losing about 13 percent of his body mass throughout his mission inside the biosphere. The second mission became infamous for mutiny and public feuds among different stakeholders involved in the facilities manager. This is John Allen the philosopher and scientist who started arguing in a very grave way with Ed Bass the financier the person who was giving the money basically. The latter camp the money camp claimed that Allen and his group that they called the cult were compromising the scientific validity of the experiment and they asked Bass took action in hiring the now controversial white nationalist Stephen Bannon to run space biospheres ventures. The involvement of Bannon who was at the time manager of Bannon and co-investment banking in Beverly Hills was detrimental. With Bass and Bannon's endorsement the second team of biospherians who entered the facility 1994 were ambushed by federal marshals. The two men had concluded that the founding management team including Allen and his cult had to go so they took them out and in retaliation the new crew that was put by Bannon and Bass was sabotaged by previous biospheres by opening the airlocks of the biosphere claiming the security claiming health concerns over the inhabitants they were later arrested. The mission was compromised and it ended soon thereafter but Bannon had an open quarrel with biospherian Abigail Ailing who was responsible for ocean ecosystems and their quarrel was originally published in the Tucson citizen in 1996 but resurfaced in the presidential elections of 2016 disclosing a series of threats insults and accusations of sexual harassment. Arguably the the material problems of the first mission were rendered a social and political problems in the second and final human mission. Both events revealed that the idea of dynamic equilibrium of material exchange in an arbitrarily chosen part of the earth's biosphere cannot just set in spontaneously. Redundancy of species and the logic of inclusiveness did not automatically lead to the cybernetic equilibrium that Allen so earnestly desired. The battle between Allen and Bass is very important because it exposes a dichotomy in environmental politics that between the idealization of self-organization and the brutality of Darwinian evolution which was directly transposed to social order and policy. In many ways biosphere 2 exhibits a mythology of consensus based on natural principles and furthers the belief that equilibrium should be translated to social policy and societal values. As a living experiment the biosphere 2 demonstrated that the limits of sustainability and the risks associated with closed ecosystems remain largely unknown. So one thing that we can take from that is that closed worlds are a form of hysteria. After years of research on self-reliance Stuart Brand the creator of the whole earth catalogue confessed that the idea of energy autonomy is a kind of hysteria. Brand's kinship between the closed system and the hysteric body is critical if we think of Freud's definition of hysteria as a physiological internal modification of the nervous system. To describe symptoms of hysteria Freud spoke of closure as a type of modification that affects an organism alone instead of one that affects an organism and its surroundings. Psychoanalytically this corresponds to a stage called the proto psyche at which an organism has control over nothing except for itself. Ultimately it functions like an ad hoc closed system that regenerates materials out of what is available within its systemic bodily borders. A second kind of derivative conclusion from this short case study is that closed worlds do not imply that the earth wants to be held within our hands. We are not its caretakers. The idea of circularity of resources has fostered a perception of earth holding. A progeny of earth photographs held gently and affectionately by human hands as if the earth is a wounded creature that needs care. This is a very anthropomorphic perception of the earth as an endangered living species that is cute and sentient as a being that needs to be petted by humans us its conquerors but it is delusional as it positions our species at the center of all pivotal planetary developments. Our perception of the earth as one interconnected world as an image that promotes unity and balance is no longer the case. Unilateral strategies for divergent problems in the ideological belief that the metabolism of the planet may become the foundation for technology culture and design is no longer applicable. The whole earth catalog is not so whole anymore or never was whole to begin with. So from the biosphere which was a project of substantial venture capital we're going to look into a project that uses minimal resources a counter-cultural project in California the integral urban house in the 1970s and it was conducted by an underground community group a domestic organization in an urban setting envisioned by its founders in a fairly naïve way as a healthy natural cyclical ecosystem. The project was initiated by Helga and William Olkovsky and funded by the non-profit organization Farralones Institute which was founded by Sim Vanderen who is considered a pioneer in environmental design and was the state architect of California at the time. The project was a typical house in Berkeley California which was retrofitted by the Farralones Institute to a highly productive test bed for self-reliance, resource renewal and recycling of waste materials. What was mostly interesting to me while investigating that case study was the connection of the inhabitants to the house with what I call an umbilical cord. The house needed constant maintenance and the dwellers were linked to the house in a very corporeal way. The ecosystem of the house was linked to a community of stakeholders each playing a specific role in a larger scheme of actions according to its founders it was significant to repeatedly explain an action plan of life to all the members and commit to specific behavioral protocols before inhabiting the house. This format of habitation brings me to an important point that the occupant of a closed world is in many ways its guinea pig. This is what Back Minister Fulder called himself in an essay and a little tiny book that he calls guinea pig B, B referring to Bucky. But a guinea pig is a subject that does not observe and speculate on possible outcomes rather it is willful to insert its bodily parts into a living experiment. The closed world dweller is therefore its feeder and its caretaker. He or she monitors it closely and safeguards its operation. And some examples are these people Auguste Picard a French balloonist who reached he was the first person to reach the stratosphere and sealed himself in a hermetically sealed steel gondola almost reaching his death alone with his assistant in order to reach that altitude. Evgeny Shepalev a Russian cosmonaut the first human to remain in a closed system containing only chlorella which is a very common type of algae as the only bioregenerative component that he would eat for 90 days. And British architect Graham Kane who is the person featured in this diagram positioning himself as the producer of feces of fecal matter basically that it becomes extremely essential for the house's sustenance who never left the house that he designed and built because if he would leave the house would get sick it's biotechnical systems would degenerate and die. So while ecological systems of the post-war period portrayed the inhabitant as an indispensable part of a building ecology currently this image is dismissed it has become a disenfranchised narrative. Environmental concerns promote a conservationist type of ethic and a list of cautionary daily practices of scarcity and yet there is nothing more visceral as a participatory spatial experience than the scientist voluntary containment inside the premises of a closed world. The ambition overall of the house that we're talking about the integral urban house was not to change the system holistically but to reorient waste as a productive byproduct that fosters different pathways or more possibilities for each cycle of resources. Food production yielded from the management of organic and inorganic waste was key to the integral urban house as well as to several other domestic experiments at the time that heralded the idea of self-reliance from the grid of supplies. Making food from shit was the ultimate aspiration carried through daily tedious repetitive and dirty routines like sorting composting mixing mulch for vegetation and animal feed crops. With these aims in mind the space of the house was nurtured and dependent on the subtle fluctuations of material phase changes and the growth of living substances. To achieve these challenging material conversions the institute researched on thermophilic bacteria that has the potential to create protein from the waste of livestock and informing bacteria soups which can break down cellulosic waste into protein from animal feed. This type of research was not only conducted by counter-cultural groups but by major industrial stakeholders like what you see on the screen which is general electric in their ongoing effort to chemically engineer bacteria that perform efficient tasks like eating toxins found in petroleum. Specifically this bioengineer Ananda Chakrabarti who was a microbiologist and a genetic engineer and worked for GE in 1972 developed a man-made living organism which combined features of several strains of pseudonomous bacteria that eat toxins found in petroleum. He attempted to patent the bacteria and the patent office rejection led to a famous United States Supreme Court case known as the case Diamond versus Chakrabarti on whether genetically modified organisms could be patented. The court ruled in Chakrabarti's favor stating that the fact that these microorganisms are alive and they were engineered is without any legal significance for the purposes of the patent law. The court case nevertheless did raise ethical questions as to whether where life begins and what are the ethics involved in pre-engineering the autonomy of microorganisms. It is also silently introduced into the field of design and building a field of semi-autonomy or disobedience of matter. Now it is a fact that shit can be turned into food and that Graham Kane or the Farrellones Institute were not so delusional after all. Nevertheless with the introduction of these questions into the field of architecture and design one inevitably accepts that if ecological houses are in fact digestive machines they're sometimes disobedient. This is what autonomy means in many respects. Even though ecosystems are mostly simulated as robust similar circular systems where waste equals food in an endless series of cycles and sub-cycles the idea of self-sufficiency is compulsive and hysteric in the will to ceaselessly generate new life from shit. Therefore to write a counter history to optimize circular economies in material conversions one needs to look at shit because only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life be somewhat useful. Shit forces us to look at questions of ecology viscerally via the raw ecology of our bodies and the understanding that recycling is not simply a statistical problem that we can relay to the management of urban resources but also a basic bodily reality affecting the water and the air we breathe. Our unwanted odorous and degenerate bodily products have been described as technically powerful and worthy. They can generate methane meaning power if treated properly then recycling shit to money is as much a subject of theoretical analysis as a factual constituent of capitalist production. Waste needs to go away and this very process of purging transporting and carrying waste into oblivion into a place that we cannot see and we do not wish to see is extremely profitable for those who manage and transfer their raw materials. According to Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandoor Forenzi money is dehydrated filth made to shine an example is New York City the beating heart of global finance and culture which creates an enormous amount of poo. As reporter Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian a couple of years ago a substantial amount of the city's shit is expelled to Alabama causing major stink methane clouds 900 miles away. The treated sewage euphemistically known in the industry as biosolids travels by a poo train to a landfill west of Birmingham, Alabama causing what the locals call the death smell. In Alabama the avalanche of northern poo is part of a wider concern over the environmental risks for residents particularly the impoverished and people of color. The dismissal of the environmental concerns of Alabama residents mostly residents of overwhelmingly African-American communities has been reported as a case of civil rights and environmental racism. Let us not forget that beyond a material shit also indicates a general state of incoherency degeneration and malevolence. It indicates a stage where information is so finely grained and scattered that it cannot form identifiable bonds. In the shit stage information is unrefined and randomly grained and it is interrelational loss or incohesion between bits and parts that defines its degenerate condition. So from shit to happiness or the architecture of compulsive happiness and now we're going to look at a third and final case study EPCOT an abbreviation for experimental prototype community of tomorrow which was Walt Disney's dream project. It never manifests the way that he has dreamt it but it is known today as Disneyland. EPCOT was a controlled sanitized and protected circular city providing not only a new theme park of entertainment and leisure but new living patterns for what Disney wanted to see as happy dwellers. Disney actually truly believed in happiness that happiness could be designed through technology and more specifically by regulating pollution trash ventilation and electricity to offer comfort and leisure to his happy dwellers. The Disney ideal just like this image that is possessed by Mickey Mouse in a theater offered an uncomplicated wholesome idea of entertainment inside Disney's own pre-engineered fantasy of the world. An idea which was as much a closed world as the physical city that he conceived himself. EPCOT has been critiqued largely for subsuming the history of utopia from Claude Nicoladeau to Ebenezer Howard from the American city beautiful movement of the 1890s to Victor Gwen's urban models along with the added benefits of improving air quality and weather comfort. It was a living laboratory in a technology showroom for future cities exactly at the moment when cities around the world were decaying and disintegrating. In EPCOT each house had its own fuel cells and was connected to a centralized waste collection system water supply and living farm using swamp plants and filtering plants. The city was also connected via this defunct notion of the monorail running through the center and tying all parts of the property. But most importantly the city center was meant to be enclosed in a climatically controlled dome. This is exactly Disney saw that from Minister Fuller and he copied it in this project as well. It never was built but it was the intention. Disney has been largely critiqued by architectural and cultural critics for his earnest belief in controlling human emotions through the sovereignty of territory and in the pursuit of happiness as a game of managing comfort and human physiology. This is one of the very well known critiques. Mickey Mouse the dictator which was written by Royston Lundau who was a teacher a tutor at the architectural association of London at the time writing about the complexity of cities and basically transposing ideas of early cybernetics and closed living systems for urban development. But going back to Disney he was fascinated by astronauts and the perception of life as a feedback loop of input and output as the process of combustion and oxidation which was very widespread in the design of the space suit as a life support system which is something that Disney was clearly interested in and in the understanding of trauma following war. So here's Disney here's Mickey Mouse as an astronaut and these are some well known NASA diagrams for understanding the idea of the space suit and the body as a kind of flow chart of input and output of what goes in and out in a very machining version of life. Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist Victor Frankl in his best selling book Men's Search for Meaning written after his stay at a Nazi concentration camp argued that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing their ability to find meaning in the most trivial repetitive and mechanical tasks of life in his own words happiness could not be pursued it must ensue and could in fact ensue from the meaning of sustaining life throughout a series of problem-solving challenges. Similarly according to the American magazine for the design of environment in 1973 the biggest achievement of the Walt Disney world was not the leisure centers but the pollution control system which is what you see on the screen and the invention of what Disney titled the utilidors which is that channel below ground that carries waste and uses actually pneumatic tubes to transport waste in very big distances. An underground network of tunnels contained a series of systems to handle the waste that the park can produce in an entirely circular closed system and this is exactly this exact system has been applied in Roosevelt Island if you go there's there are utilidors below the Roosevelt Island that are used with pneumatic tubes to to carry waste to the ends of the island that then get picked up by by a ferry. I will show this first before making my point. This idea the the utilitor served to idealize the idea of circularity but revealed a deeply rooted problem of deduction in environmental representation which is visualized almost exclusively with the use of arrows as you see on your screen. Since the 1960s ecologist Howard Odom's energy systems language has instrumentalized ecosystems as well as human agency in terms of input and output. This representational language for ecological simulation models is derivative directly from electronic circuits and has become a primary tool for architects to visualize performance and energy flow. Arrows though legible remove a type of drawing agency that is critical to our field. Could alternative notation systems and fields effectively replace arrows given that arrows point only to the end goal of conversions but say very little about the process of recycling itself. The Chilean biologist Francisco Varela argued that cognitive systems cannot be understood explicitly on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. Thus the language of environmental representation represents a process of interlinked threads while these threads and processes are trying to develop a relationship with themselves. In the environment perception is seen as a cognitive process of hypothesis formation not as a simple prescription or reflection of pre-given information. A closed world along with its dwellers is a new type of unbalanced ecosystem model susceptible to the shortcomings of digestion. What remains a paradox is the manner in which this questionable model imbued with a vitalism of a digestive stomach has prevailed as the mainstream model of what we now call a net zero habitat opposing energy loss. In this light it is critical to question to what degree resource conservation strategies are sustainable forms of practice and also recognize how impossible ideas become institutionalized through a series of bureaucratic mechanisms that are eventually labeled as eco-friendly or even worse as green. The question I would like to leave you today is whether this is a deviant story of architectural history and I believe it is not. In many ways closed roles is like a death wish of the design object and this is a review a kind of critique that I have received of the book specifically Mimi Zeiger wrote this from aropolis magazine that the projects represented in the book show feats of science engineering and technology with architecture merely playing a part and it is true that in many projects closed world manifest a type of death wish of the of the object itself yet architecture is not replaced altogether with science and engineering it is displaced in some ways from a field that shapes the use and form of the physical world to a sensorial immersive environment that copies and simulates the metabolism and experiential aptitudes of the natural world so far the role of building technology has been to insulate spaces from environmental flows this method suggests a moral discipline that protects buildings against disease transferring an ideological framework of Protestant theology and ethics to the micro realm of materials nevertheless in a new reality which is inundated with sudden climatic changes methane gas clouds and oceanic islands of decomposed debris a new role is cast to the notion of environment instead of the environment being an inactive static and historicized context of an architectural object the environment quite literally becomes the object of design itself and again is this deviant story of architectural history it is also not a deviant story of architectural history because closed worlds beyond material and energy resources reflect the modern human subject which is immersed in a carefully curated replication or reverberation of the world as a pre-engineered fantasy inside the unimaginable carcass of bits of information that we encounter every day in our lives the only way to navigate is relative to oneself or as french philosopher quintine meyesu has put it in a relational loss with context our need for embeddedness in the world and the ecosystem might already in fact be obsolete in psychoanalysis this closure corresponds to an ontogenetic and philogenetic stage of the of development at which the organism has control over only itself discharging output as input and in many ways it becomes a self-referential reality in this new world we are possibly in dire need of a new kind of criticism of new ways to fathom with ideas of interiorization and methods to break barriers in the way that we narrate stories through the design of our environments as well as the shaping of our reality if every bit of fact is designed in the world of post truth the role of the architect albeit unwittingly has expanded to more than shaping the physical world and the aesthetic and experiential aptitudes of our daily existence in many ways it has become of civilizational value we need to investigate monitor and document the strangeness of the real to invent an architecture completely devoted to the problems of the real but not one that is unaware of its uncertainty and complexity shit and goals are existence in more ways than we want to observe and acknowledge it is not about constructing fictions and fantasies but about closely observing conducting forensic analysis asking questions and instrumentalizing our findings in a new way possibly shit is our only way out thank you i just wanted to start by saying that i think that this book the exhibition in the project that you presented is a really wonderful example of a type of architectural history that creates a usable past to shape future practice there's a long rich history of this type of scholarship you mentioned reiner bannum's work i think he's probably the most famous example in particular i thought it was really powerful the way that you connected sort of long-standing interest of ours in the history of utopianism more recent scholarship perhaps in the history of environmental or ecological design with these great pressing contemporary debates on sustainability on climate change and so just to start with to start our discussion of i was wondering if you could say more maybe to continue on with your conclusion about what is there a call to action or more maybe less less aggressively is there something in particular that you think that this project brings to the education of architects or even architectural practice today and just is it okay if i reiterate some of the things that i said to you earlier today yeah okay thank you thank you alexander i'm very happy to see you here um after as many years you were my student 10 years ago so in a new capacity this is this is really wonderful to have you ask me questions about the book um now that we have shared that um what is the call to action and definitely this book is is a critique um and and a kind of call to see things that we are not necessarily seeing seeing in the way that we apply lessons of sustainability into environmental technology and building design and it's definitely to kind of bring attention to the existence of closed roles even though we can agree that closed worlds might be it might have a derogative meaning that the way that we construct building in terms of energy and material resources is in fact a closed roles that the kind of idea of a spaceship that sustains life within systemic borders that cannot be surpassed has migrated to the way that hotels that you cannot open windows to the way that temperatures are maintained at equal levels in many headquarters around uh metropolitan environments uh leading to many problems even though they save energy with with sensors and that's that's one way to to to make a critique the other way to make a critique is to understand the idea of closure interiorization as a kind of cultural phenomenon into the way that we perceive understand and reconstruct reality through what what journalists call the echo chamber through the way that we receive information in social media so not only do we do we construct closed roles in the way that we build architecture but we also perceive the world as a kind of closed world so it is a call to action in in many ways to uh to kind of break some barriers and uh and develop new kinds of mechanisms and critique now exactly how we do that is not just opening a window and it's not just you know um i was talking to somebody with um from norman foster firm and and i'm like well why don't why don't you just use operable windows and and they were saying well you know how complicated it is with these like hundreds of sensors to have operable windows like and how many regulations in terms of safety and and so forth so it is a large theme that that connects to to wide applications of contemporary practice not only in in the way that we culturally perceive the world through echo chambers and social media but at the same time it has it has multiple meanings and just because it has so many multiple meanings i was i was very interested in that in in that topic but the call to action is to kind of counter the effect of closure or to to witness it at least to see it and try to find ways to understand and reconstruct interiorization as a kind of practice or kind of see the hidden paradoxes within the within the the kind of realm of sustainability that answers your your question yeah in my session today we are having an interesting discussion about um the resonances of this debate it's sort of different levels of architectural engineering and building practice um i don't want to create stereotypes but i i think that there's a certain type of professional activity that as you say builds closed worlds because that's what the market is asking for but they don't necessarily even think or understand about these larger historical social cultural resonances i don't think that they would even use the term closed world obviously there's a second sort of line of activity that sort of does obviously see the problem with creating these sealed environments that are mechanically serviced and sort of accepts the cultural expectation of like thermal comfort but is trying to do it more sustainably my one reading of of the of the text is that you are proposing that we think even deeper uh obviously we we need to become aware of this sort of long historical evolution of this type of manufactured environment and most probably we also need to sort of change course but that there's there's something else there that the the call to action is is as one of my students said that they didn't want to hear about green design or green building um mean either yeah yeah so i don't know if that's a fair characterization out of these three i just made these up these three lines but that which is realized well i i discussed that the unit like you said that the closed world even though you present these sort of experimental utopian projects that is a an accurate characterization of much of the production of the building industry i find it interesting that you use these sort of extreme examples when i suppose you could have used i mean a picture of my mom and dad's house that they build out of a southern living catalog which is a house in south carolina but it's you know it's only habitable because of air conditioning i wanted to this is this is very true i wanted to use examples which are not part of our canonical architectural historiography not because they're unknown and because i wanted to show them but but blend them with canonical examples of architectural historiography let's say the smith's house of the future for example which we all know um but but really include within one arena very very diverse things that are geared by similar existential ideas and show the similarities of these things so by bringing a kind of science experiment that has all of these like you know tons of steels of boxes in melissa uh where melissa is a micro ecological life support system in barcelona which you know you might think has nothing to do with architecture but the research that you know if you read let's say what they're doing it's being directly transposed the building industry for sustainability reasons so i wanted to show the proximity of of these canonical non-canonical examples of examples that pertain to the kind of leftist ideology and examples that are military examples that are about you know conquering land and and new frontiers and and have this kind of mix of of antithetical cases that are that are triggered by by by similar perception of of of life a similar perception of existentialism but but you're absolutely right it is not just about saying oh our buildings are closed we should we should open the windows but really about tracking the kind of you know migration of ideas throughout this variety and diversity of of of experiments and understanding what we're doing today and how we may apply things differently not just how we may critique but how we may develop um different routes of of how we construct environments today so actually i would like to pick up on this i would like to like ask you a question and i would i'm interested to see if you would agree with me or not and maybe i mean regarding this call of action and you are saying that it's not just about opening a window but in other words it's not just about trying to connect what's inside the bubble with what's outside so i wonder if you would agree about maybe the way forward is to try to find architecturally or geometrically a new type of topology because you in your presentation you problematize the arrow as you know implying this closed circles with no waste with with nothing that cannot be accounted for but i think also the same problem is and problematization can be extended to the sphere itself and i would like to you know build on this question by touching on things that you addressed largely psychoanalysis and capitalism because of course as you know i mean one of the definition of the hysterical condition which is a condition of neurosis it that's it expresses on the bodily level what can not be expressed on the consciousness or the thought level right yes yes yes so in this way it kind of suggests a very interesting relation between the shit produced inside the bubble and the construction of the membrane around the bubble because in a way we can look at it as the membrane is but a reflection to our incapacity or incapability of dealing with the shit inside and i wonder if you would agree even if we extend that to the example of trump and uh saturday night life did you see that i actually i saw it here but i didn't see the i i wish i have seen an actual i live in brooklyn so maybe i'm in the in that bubble you should all see this yeah if you haven't seen saturday this is just for visitors they would please yeah if you have not seen saturday night live the bubble 2017 watch it it's it's it's hilarious now i'll explain why no no but just to build on that and to bring it down to more concrete uh terms so if we think about a new topology and maybe if we think of the bubble as uh an expression of our incapability or our uh incapacity to deal with the deadlock inside the bubble so we can say for example and i wonder if you agree or not so the effort maybe should not be about trying to reach outside the bubble but to examine the problem inside the bubble that produced the bubble in the first place so in the trump example i mean if i can take that maybe the problem is not just simply to reach out to the people who live outside the bubble and elected trump but to question what was wrong in our liberal system that produced someone like trump equally also when we think about the ecological problem i wonder if you'd agree also maybe instead of focusing on a new technology or new ways of countering the ecological crisis maybe one way to think about it is to move instead inward and focus on the social organization under capitalism i wonder what would you think it's a brilliant brilliant um let's say review of of what i would hope to say which you have said not me um and um i i love your your comment about like you know you know subconsciousness and and shit and and all that because when i was reading when i was mandated like yourselves to read the six volumes of Freud psychoanalysis as a phd student um you know it really fascinated me the structure of the subconscious um is free floating energies that that it's so spatial like that that's what fascinated me in psychoanalysis that there's a spatial dimension you could almost diagram um the the concepts and the subconscious was basically these free floating energies that are almost like you know like in an in an air flow that somehow coagulate and form kind of like free form substances that are new which is which is hysterical and you know what if what if shit was structured in a similar way like that that's that's amazing it's amazing to think about um but but that's maybe too theoretical uh for the time being like it can be a theoretical analysis which i find extraordinarily interesting and brilliant um in a real sense like the one of the main problems is that we the the kind of infrastructural problem right of carrying waste into oblivion and this is a major problem that cities face because you know a huge part of climate crisis is actually carrying the waste where it has to go like the transportation of of material that train that goes to alabama and you know it's not just that train it's like several trains that do other things and and and several kind of trends and that takes a lot of energy and it has a path and nobody wants it to pass um if you have watched does anybody watch billions the series um it's a series in in in show time and these billionaires um to raise stock prices of of one they they redirected the the the death train the death smell train of poo to go to a governor da da da da and they the whole economy of the country just changed because of the rerouting of of that train so all of these questions right that that the way that infrastructure is placed in urban environments could change if you had let's say micro grids that would contain matter in like you know federated networks that would do something with it it would take money to build it but it would we would not waste all that energy to transport it I don't know like thousands of miles away and cause all of this environmental destruction so so dealing with that matter within an urban environment kind of like free-floating energies or subconscious or shit is is extremely important for cities to think about right and and and this is this is very technical right I have an underlying dormant I would say background and in building science and and it is it is possible because it doesn't have to smell like it could you could genetically engineer um algae to create flower smells and digestive tanks and and there are solutions to this problem um but but I think that it's it's you know it is both a theoretical but a technical problem and that's what fascinates me that's such a theoretical problem is so much linked to you know daily practice and life and that these these things can can can converge but it is definitely not just about opening the windows it is definitely about rethinking in a kind of in its entirety um the the idea of infrastructure and handling of waste and not just like not losing thermal loss I think that there's there's a really huge problem with uh thermal loss and reducing thermal loss has done a tremendous disservice to architectural practice from the oil crisis and because you know due to the oil crisis buildings were called not to lose energy um maintain energy they sealed themselves in and um and that has created a kind of paradigm or a model um of of not losing and of of of creating these these types of of environment I think that I I think that you know it's it's extremely important to think of other models and it's not just it's not a typology I would say which is a formal typology um so it's not just like a sphere like usually we think of the bubble the representation of the dome the sphere I I see that in a very different way I think of of of a kind of typology of dissemination of matter in a in a micro and macroscopic scale and and I think it's hugely important for us to think in in that way thank you I think I mean we have so many questions but I think maybe it's time to open it to to the students or the audience uh right here thank you leader for a very fantastic lecture and very rich uh also I appreciate a lot the images the visual regions of the presentation I have a kind of very simple question I think uh what is for you the role of metaphors in the design of of cloud over closed world and by metaphors I mean if you consider closed world being representation of complex environments they rely on oversimplification of complex processes and organizations so basically they kind of like symbolic or metaphorical understanding a reality uh or they say original references a reality in which they open which they're based on so I wonder how we can you quoted the Mimi Zeiger review of your book and saying that architectures some outplays a secondary role in the design of closed world if compared to science and technology but maybe we can consider a lot of architectures that kind of discipline and the approach the attitude that can bring a metaphorical understanding of space and organization into the shape of closed world somehow how the history and evolution of different metaphors of a simplified understanding of reality can shape closed words yeah um thank you for your very very interesting and intelligent question which I'm not sure how to address um in my mind I I categorize metaphors in different ways um and I'm extremely prone that's not necessarily the right way to go this is just how I I think um I'm very adverse to the use of metaphors as formal symbols so when when you know the way that traditional post-modernism has used formal irony and the way that you know Kalatrava will use a kind of metaphor as a kind of formal gestural form so I'm that that I'm very adverse to but I think that the idea of a metaphor is fundamental to life in general like we knowledge becomes more accessible with the use of metaphors and when I use metaphors with my children they understand things better they can relate and make connections better and I think that knowledge and the perception of the world is propagated through the use of metaphors so when metaphors are used not in a kind of visual or formal capacity but they're used to kind of propagate ideas and processes um I think they're extraordinarily useful at the same time they're very dangerous as well because they persist in in you know perpetuating stereotypes in eternity even if stereotypes don't work so the stereotype of the circle let's say right the idea that that resources can be cycled endlessly which has started from I don't know like medieval times with the idea of like circular movement which was an impossibility that becomes recycling and then which is something digestible to everybody it really brings scientists to do the same experiment over and over and over and over and over again in different epistemological settings even if it doesn't work in any of them and this is extraordinarily interesting to witness and to see that an existential desire is is you know gearing science and technology to for centuries to perform the same kinds of experiments despite data and so it's it's really like I stand divided I stand divided in terms of how I see metaphors because they're useful to broadcast knowledge to a broad audience um but they're also carriers of impossible ideas that persist in human history hello thank you for your presentation I want to ask you would you consider your work in close words as a direct or indirect critique critique to current established environmental and ecological trending concepts such as lead certification or this greenwashing propaganda yes yes I definitely yes I I think I'm not you know I'm among many others um that have critiqued greenwashing the the kind of banal use of the word sustainability um and you know this has been largely critique it's not just me um and um I think the this particular piece of work is much more focused on bringing certain subtleties to focus in how we understand sustainability in complexity of relationships and interrelationships between you know capitalism psychoanalysis as as you mentioned and the way that sustainability has been used to veil the ethics of environmentalism in favor of capital I'm not the first to say that I'm like among you know hundreds and thousands of critics that that have spoken of this but I'm trying to do that specifically through um a specific kind of history of transposing scientific experiments to canonical architectural case studies and historiography thank you very much for a wonderful talk and the work is really great I have two um a two-part comment question first is I wonder if you've thought about this the closed world in relation to Brenner Brenner's term global urbanization so is there is our level at which the closed world of these particular experiments also gives you a window onto this idea that the world actually is remains closed at a global level politically socially economically and ecologically perhaps and the second part of that question comes back to the call call to action I'm wondering if you have any comments on the Green New Deal um thank you for your question um yes uh in terms of the first question of uh the closed world as a kind of metaphor for for a global model I would I would think it is it is very much I think I think of of of the world as a kind of one global interior um that um that this study uh pertains to I mean as a critique of this not not as an as an advocation of of this idea and um of basically speaking of this is a global project for sure it is not limited to certain geographic boundaries I think that and and it is also a call to um understand that this idea of interiorization is migrating in different geographical boundaries like if you think of the ski centers in Dubai of entire malls that create hyper reality in China that have oceans and create their own climates and so forth it is very much a project that that speaks of the hubris of of late capitalism and the way that we are constructing environments as and buildings as artificial types of of nature and how we understand that and how we relate that as architects I think that's that's extremely important right because it it really you know creates these these models of of gigantic global interiors um and this idea of interiorization by denying you know the the connectivity of the urban fabric and and so forth so it is an issue that that that I think architecture should address call to action in the Green New Deal um I like the squad and AOC very much and and I I like the the the Green New Deal and I was actually asked to to write about it but I but I never I never had the time to do it um I think I think there there are so many filters and barriers between the way that design mechanisms are translated to policies um and there are so many kind of translation processes involved and um I think that the Green New Deal is a wonderful initiative which at some points is utopian and it needs to be addressed but um my one my one point is that throughout this process of translation design mechanisms get evaporated and design is is translated into a series of checklist and points that created the problem in the first ways when lead started um it was applied as a checklist to one particular building that is included in the book the BN I am epicenter um which was a university building and it was a series of of equipment of machinery that would that would let's say verify ratios and statistical information and I think after that point in the establishment of the lead program as a kind of checklist all of comparative sustainability criteria have become points in checklists and um then there that created a kind of internal bureaucratization which created this the the scientists that you know know the checklist points and it is a special profession that designers that hire these people but don't know how to deal with them in a kind of inherent disciplinary way and I think that if there if there needs there needs to be an alternative model of how the the Green New Deal should be applied and I think architects need to get involved to say not just have this many kilowatts per hour by by this to evaporate but you know if you were to punch a hole through a building what would that do to the thermal comfort of that building and and and and I think that that kind of organization you know the whole kind of process of bureaucratization um is is is creating there's no directness of the way that things can be applied and a lot of information gets lost in the way just one small point thank you I I I would think that as educators we um um we want to be suspicious of the the green washing phenomenon and thus the Green New Deal has to overcome internal resistance of the profession or the schools perhaps as much as political resistance which is obviously much bigger and problematic but just a small thing the the architectural lobby um issued at an edited version of the Green New Deal resolution which I it's I think it's online and they point to similar worries about bureaucratization and to the professionalization of green policies to depoliticize them so I just I think the students might want to understand that it's still a very live and changing uh very general document um which um is necessary and I think that the contrast with the kind of experiments you're seeing here and the kind of call to action in very specific ways uh it's it's it's right now it's it's happening and and people shouldn't realize that it's not something to just watch but check out the architectural lobby check out the Green New Deal sites and realize that this is uh an active political resistance to the dumbing down of any notion of the longevity that we hope the planet can sustain thank you for that I haven't read it but I will hi there um so thank you for your time by the way and um I so if we interpret perhaps um these closed system as an attempt for the architect to assert control over the environment um and we're living in a world that through climate change and these other things is going to become an increasingly uncontrollable and hazardous place to be um and therefore the market is going to be expecting more and more and creating a feedback loop for these systems where uh you know closed systems and uh are going to be desired do you have any advice to recommend to young architects and future architects of how outside the academic setting we can stand up to some of the market values to um create open systems and things that perhaps aren't going to be desired by uh you know the the the powers that be in in the scenario um there definitely isn't one way to do this and um I think that intentionally the idea of a closed world and the way that I have structured this enlarged project is not one thing right it's not just about sealed buildings and energy loss it's it's it's not just about regeneration of resources but it just in my mind it has so many applications with constructions of of reality as well how do you as young architects engage I think that um I there's a couple of things like I think there's an investment today in what I called in my talk the strangeness of the real which is very different from the avant-garde from the post-war which I have done my phd on which was about the fantastical utopian city if that project which there's so much you know critique work books on archizum superstudio um archigram all of these you know famous projects of that time the kind of big bang of of the enlargement of the discipline was about fantasy projection and a kind of imagination of what life could be right now I think the call is hidden layers of reality that we don't see and and I think that that's where the game can potentially be of great interest to young architects and to to witness to observe monitor and connect kind of like a forensic analysis of what these types of connections are not to speculate of what you know the new future city is in Ridley Scott's movie but to to really document kind of hidden connections and try to see where are the small ways in which we can be actors of change in in these scenarios right because if you work in foster right and you find a way to have operable windows by reducing costs you become an actor of that small change you become a small agent of change within that enlarged game it's through these small actions and this idea of understanding different layers that that I think is is is where the game lies and you know there's something I don't know do we have time okay there's something I was thinking about like a it's something to write in my next article which I still haven't gotten a chance a chance to do but I was thinking you know somebody asked me about the the kind of section of the biosphere like if you go to the biosphere and I went to the biosphere last summer as a super pregnant woman like that was it's it's a very very difficult thing to do because I think I was eight months pregnant and I had to go down there was like this upper level which was the biosphere which was these forests with humidity and all that and then you had to go down to the technosphere and you had to go through air locks and you know you got pushed by air and all of that stuff and the technosphere was a labyrinth of pipes that sustained the kind of wilderness let's say above and it was this extreme use of the section of you know a world that is entirely contained but a representation of different climates around the world and then below this labyrinth of machines and this lung I've never seen anything like this if you if please go if you have the chance to be in Arizona it's amazing the lung was this huge thing that was like vibrating and was sustaining air from not imploding the biosphere from the inside and and I was thinking of this section right how could it be that there's such a division between what we want to see and the underlayer of reality like how is it that in buildings there's this the mechanics of it is always like in the hidden part and the mechanical engineers do it and of course I'm not saying something original right now Rainer Bannum said it in 1969 or whatever he published the architecture of the well-timbered environment but there's such a clear division between the the visible in the and the kind of underworking which is parallel to the way that social media works at the same time right you know your feed and then the algorithms below your feed that make your echo chamber visible so I think it's it's that is the boundary that needs to be broken that the kind of crossings between these zones right the underlayers and the layers above and of course as a young architect that's not something that you can do to like cross the layers but I think it's extremely important to see that this is this is where this is not just the biosphere but it's our reality on many levels in the way that buildings are designed and in the way that that we get our feed from social media so I think this is something to think about and yeah if you can go see the biosphere do it because it will hit your mind immediately we have time for one more question yes please thank you thank you very much for for the lecture it was very interesting since this is a final question if you could articulate or generalize what is the intention of your work in general is it exploring the issue of the issue for a new vocabulary or advice to the industry or just the narration of a story for a better future uh why is it what's your intention what is what I'm sorry what is what is what is my intention of your work in general is it an advice for the industry or is it to create explore a new vocabulary or is it to have a better future or what's what's the arrival of the work many many all of the above I would say but also that all of the things that you said I'm hoping that they're that they're objectives of of this work it's also for me it was very important to write a history book in a different way um in a way that is inherent within disciplinary ways of understanding architectural design not as a cultural history let's say of the climate crisis not as saying these are the examples historically and write a kind of linear text but in understanding complexities because I think that there's a division today academically in the way that history is written by cultural historians or art historians in an art historian way and in the way that architects can write history and there is a division and this division is addressed in many institutions and you know some institutions say architects write theory they don't write history and historians can write history I think that in the field of environmental design environmental politics design there's a thickness which cannot be addressed by cultural history or art history it needs to address building technology climate change physical phenomena and that all love all of these layers of information create a thickness which is extremely important to grasp in the way that you address these problems historically and theoretically and that's my let's say underlying hope to address this kind of division of history and theory and to um to kind of bring together things that should not be have been brought together like building technology facts and psychoanalysis or you know science facts and history theory I think that you know the collision of of of these disciplines can potentially address the thickness of the problems that we're facing today I think we have just one more question make an exception I mean Popok is very rich and you know it's definitely we cannot thank you all the question but so one more hello um referring to a part of the reading in 1960s the first ecological houses and communities were living experiments rather than measured objects uh they heavily involved the architect or builder in powering the house which needed constant maintenance um I think which eventually led to the failure of the system so my question is in this case what is the limit or range for such systems like to continue or like to end you mean can can you rephrase your question like I'm sorry I don't really understand okay like maybe in your own words if you can okay so um um in the ecological houses they had a vision but then um it um it required a lot of like involvement of the architects or the builders to be involved in the system and that it it kind of uh it was kind of um kind of hard for the architects like to be involved this much so this has kind of led to the failure of the ecological houses so my question is um in such cases what is the limit for such systems to continue or to end um I hope I'm not I hope I haven't said anywhere that the involvement was of the architect led to the failure of the ecological house it was it it that's not that was not the point what I meant to say uh and hopefully that was one of the points was that there was a kind of um very corporeal connection between the architect and the the habitation of the thing that that he or she designed and and that was something very different from our current perception of um of the college and sustainability where the the human subject is not a part of that ecosystem um and it was not meant to like the the kind of text was not meant to highlight that the involvement the physical labor and caretaking of the architect led to the failure of the system but that it was so educational important and interesting and should be part of our discourse that the architect and was was part of of his or hers own experiment that it was inserting itself inside the experiment that was that was designed rather than being an observer outside the system this is something that if you if you read the history of cybernetics this is this is you know 101 cybernetics like that first order cybernetics you observe a system as an outside as an outside um let's say agent and in second order cybernetics you are you know the observer is part of the system that that it is observing right and I think we this kind of outside is creating a distance between the object of making and and the actor and I'm suggesting the reinsertion of the subject inside the the building does that make sense so I think on this note I mean we will end and thank you so much for a very engaging and very lively thank you so much for having me and I think maybe the the last word would be like maybe your call for action for us I mean it couldn't be better than trying to show the complexity of the problem because and maybe you are inviting us not to find an easy way out by showing the complexity and not undermining the weight of the problem that's the best call of action yes okay thank you so much thank you so much for having me thank you