 I'm really happy to welcome you to this online space, which is also online in the way each of us is performing. So it's this connection of the offline and the online that we're getting used to. So this is part of kind of also a collective experiment and we're learning every day from this. I'm really happy that we're also connecting to this experience that Lila is accumulating these days. But this is the climate summit. And this has to do with something that of course is happening. I'm going to share my screen now in the world, but also something we're sensitive to in G-SAP, in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of Columbia University. My name is Andres Hake, and I'm the director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program and Ashley Professor at G-SAP. And G-SAP has a great focus on climate summit. And Dina Malangaos named climate crisis the ground zero of architecture now. And within this frame, we've been discussing climate also as something that has to do with design and that is actually helping us to understand what is design now and also connecting with society at large and expanding our practices and something that moves from the tiny scale of cells and genes and molecules to the scale of the planet. And of course climate is not something new. It's actually in the origins of many forms of architecture. And it's very much something that is been determined through relational schemes and the way different systems work together. And something that of course is redefining the way we understand the societal and the connection of humans and non-humans is actually in the center in many ways of the development of the modern world and the way meteorology, but also hydro commons were brought together as a way to expand colonial empires but also to develop the whole culture of modernity, the notions of technology that we inherited from them and the notions of media even that as Bernard Seville has explained that we were part of but also the notions of the world itself and its geography and the way we even think of bodies and bodies as social agents. So all from this perspective, we can also understand what is the way we need to relate that we are called to relate to contemporary defiance in ways that of course are not only requesting responses from society as a large for from us as citizens but also from us as designers and thinkers and architectural players and urban and non-urban players. And but the way this again, a reality that could be described on a satellite image relates to tiny realities that are happening at the scale of microscopes. Or the way this turn into a coordination and also a fright between many, many different technologies many of them architectural or the ones that we could identify as architectural is also questioning the way we can practice. How can we practice in such a relational paradigm in a climate paradigm in which basically even do alive like the work of on Italian leans that the studio folder having developed in the last 10 years, which basically even the door the drawing of this red line became an issue that is highly affected. And also is an agent in the making of reality in the making of climate in the making of nations in the making of the space in which not only humans but societies at large operate. And this is what basically we're exploring today. We're really happy to welcome in this space not only people across the programs of GESAP that I'm really happy that we were together here but also we have an audience that is also participated by people from the university of Pennsylvania and of course, Penn Design mostly but also from Barmer College, the Cooper Union and probably more. And this panel that we're going to be convening to that we're convening today is also highly diverse. As diverse is probably the approaches to climate now in design or at least a section of that diversity probably but we're very excited to be operating here in exploring these forms of entanglement and in itself a discussion of togetherness in the same way kind of rethinking togetherness in panels and activities like this. The format is going to be quite agile we will have a battery, let's say a 14, five minute presentations. We will be quite strict with time for the sake of also having a discussion at the end we apologize in advance for the great effort that we're requesting from everyone but we will have probably a very intense discussion at the end and I totally advise everyone to take notes. So any single question on our topic that you want to discuss, we can address it at the end and it's very important that we will allow like now we're requesting everyone to remain silent and with their cameras off but those that are presented but at the end we will allow, we will ask actually those that want to make questions to switch on their microphones and unmute themselves. So we hope that it will be also very likely discussed. So this is a session that has been organized by Laila that already was introduced by myself and Ciaoshi Chen. Ciaoshi will be presenting each individual speaker and we can start. Okay, so hi everybody. Thanks again for coming and really looking forward to hearing everybody's presentations and the discussion afterwards. So first up, we're very lucky to have Daniel Barber who is at UPenn right now and also runs the PhD program there. His latest book is Modern Architecture and Climate designed before air conditioning with his and now he's gonna talk about imagining the planetary interior and please start. Great, yeah. Thank you. Thanks again. I'm trying to share my screen as I'm talking here. Thank you to Andres and Ciaoshi and others for setting this up. Appreciate especially the invitation to my students. I'm teaching a course this semester on history and theory of architecture and climate. So this is a great chance for us to engage in this discussion. So I know a number of them are here. Welcome to them as well. Just to dive right in, my premise today is I hope pretty straightforward to begin to think about how interiors, conditioned spaces in general emerge as a planetary phenomenon. On the one hand, of course, we think of interiors generally as defined by their sort of isolation by their boundaries. They are discreet, distinct, cut off from each other and to varying degrees from the increasingly unpredictable climate. And furthermore that the interior that we tend to design for is one that is defined by the provision of comfort. And I'll just sort of pause here to say two things. Briefly, one is that I'm just gonna kind of be running through a number of images as we go without referring to them directly just to kind of keep us thinking through this question around the planetary interior, but also to say that I haven't quite gotten my head around kind of rethinking some of these questions of interiors and thermal conditions and comfort relative to the fact that we're now all sort of stuck in our interior spaces in a way that we wouldn't have been a month ago and hopefully won't be a month from now. Anyway, so it's to say that the interior is also the design space where fossil fuel fed HVAC systems encounter cultural aspirations, where they meet this desire for comfort, where petroleum produces a space of consistency and predictability. So the point is that however distinct and isolated they may be from the perspective of carbon emissions, these sort of millions of interior spaces around the world can be seen to aggregate towards a collective impact on geophysical systems. The thermal conditions of the interior then, this is my sort of proposal relative to this question of the planetary interior, the thermal conditions of the interior become a crucial site for collective engagement, the planetary interior as a space of contestation. So what I hope we can begin to do is sort of imagine a different sort of spatial political formation, right? Both kind of think back to before air conditioning sort of took command, if you will, around mid-century to see the designs of the planetary interior once again as a space for creativity, right? To sort of begin to reimagine those thermal conditions, open them up for architectural engagement, a space for ideas to resist or reduce comfort even, right? To communicate across indeed this tether between the isolated interior and the kind of global accumulation that we experience relative to carbon emissions. So clicking through against some images from another time, a past, an architectural past that bears strong resonance on the prospects for the future as an indication that in fact our life in conditioned interiors is a relatively new phenomenon, right? I mean, air conditioning has only been the sort of main way of living, if you will. I mean, geographically uneven, no doubt, but for the past 50 or 60 years. So a sort of recent branch on the trajectory of socio-geophysical relations, hopefully by beginning to review the design of some of these thermal interiors before HVAC, we can also imagine the sort of post-carbon planetary condition. So as the thermal interior becomes a planetary space everywhere, but not universal, and with consequences that further complicate local, regional, and global effects, planetary starts to account for both the world system of capital and the geophysical dynamics of earth systems, and all of this unevenness of beginning to think about the planetary, sorry, to conceptualize this planetary interior with attention to different scales, according to new understandings of different causal relationships, again, marching across this sort of membrane that protects these discrete spaces from a more sort of global perspective, allowing the planet, the concept of the planetary interior to provide both a circuitous and also direct route and kind of thinking through and determining the future of human life on earth in a condition where the practice of architects and others are increasingly focused on understanding and making tangible these multi-scalar and abstract connections. So if we stay focused on that, right, and articulate the importance of this aggregated space of the planetary interior as a new sort of space for the design imaginary, new kind of life, a new set of relationships between social and biotic systems. Emphasizing, again, this is my sort of last point to just sort of play this out, that architecture sits at the interface, right, it is the medium, it is the mechanism, it is both the material and symbolic substrates of this range of new ideas about how societies can engage with dramatic patterns, collective attention to the thermal conditions of the planetary interior is of increasing urgency. Even more so today, perhaps, which is to say today, Wednesday, April 15th, as we negotiate the carbon terms of our extended isolation. Thanks for your attention. Look forward to the rest of the day. Thank you. And next we have Jorge Oteropios, artist, architect, preservationist, director of the historic preservation program at GESAP. Voila. Okay, so I thank you for the invitation. I wanted to shift the conversation slightly to talk a little bit about aesthetics and to talk about aesthetics in relationship to the ethics that normally go with discussions about climate change. And in doing so, I want us to think about aesthetics also as maybe a new way to think about architecture because I think when we discuss architecture, the aesthetics tend to be from across the street. And I want us to maybe think a little bit about architectural aesthetics maybe one centimeter away from the building and to talk about surface. And I want to show you a building and I want to show you some artwork that I did in relation to this building. This is the Doge's Palace in Venice. And you can see a picture that was taken by John Ruskin and his assistant Hobbs in 1945. And on the right, a 2009 picture that I took of the same corner of the Doge's Palace. Without getting in too much to the history as to why this building and so on, what I really want to call your attention to is just how dirty the building was on the left and how stained with pollution. I think one of the biggest difficulties in the discussion about climate change is this idea about visualizing climate change. And for us, how to visualize it I think has a lot to do with seeing actual physical effects of climate change. There is, in my view, no better long-term environmental sensor of the damaging effects of climate change than old buildings and buildings in general. And so I would encourage everyone to design buildings that can monitor their environment on a very physical scale. Because what we've been doing for the past, well, I'd say two centuries, is cleaning the effects of climate change on buildings such that they are invisible to us. So you can see in 2009, in the 1990s, this building is on a 30-year cycle of cleaning. So it gets stained and then it gets cleaned. And so we look at buildings and we look at our heritage and our environment as if pollution never happened. And so with that in mind is why I looked at this building and for the Venice Biennale, I cleaned the last wall of the building which was not cleaned. And here you can see this is, you see this arch of limestone is clean and this is a little bit darker over here that's not clean. It's the only piece of the building that wasn't cleaned because nobody can see it. This is from Piazza San Marco. It's hidden away from tourists so nobody can see it. Therefore, nobody wanted to pay to clean it. So we did some tests here. You can see the difference between this pollution and clean. And so it's really this difference that I want us to focus on because in that microscopic record is the history of pollution. Now, here's the process whereby I spray some latex on top of the building and as the latex dries it absorbs all of the pollution in the building and here's the final artwork and relationship to the old building. Now, I learned something new with every one of the buildings that I work on and I discover new things. And so what I wanted to point out here is this black line. You see these black lines over here? So these came out in the transfer of the dust to this artwork and we weren't expecting them. We had no idea. Now, if you look at where they're coming from, the mortar joints in these stones over here. And as it turns out, the mortar between the stones had fallen off and at a certain point somebody had repaired that and actually painted the mortar black in order to match the old polluted surface. And so this is intentional pollution and this is let's say unintentional pollution. This is man-made, artistically produced black stain and this over here is actually just dust. So I went and asked my colleagues in Venice about this and I was working over here on the left and they said, well, come over here on the right and come to see the scaffolding that we're working on. You see this scaffolding over here, they were working on the building. This is the procuratia nove. This is the design by Scamozzi of the 18, 1580s and this over here is the design by San Sovino of the 1530s. What's interesting is in the 19th century after the Napoleonic Inventions, this building was actually painted to look as if it was polluted in the same way that that mortar joint was painted to look as if it was polluted. And you can see the difference here. After the restoration, they ran some tests and they realized that this was actually a different, a varnish essentially that was put on the building. Now we speculated as to why and of course, one of the speculations is that because Venice lived off of British tourists and British tourists were coming down from London which was black from pollution and they were complaining that Venetian buildings didn't look old enough. So Venetians very craftily started painting their new buildings to look older. And so the decision was made to keep the pollution on this building because it was painted on by an artist. And so here we're investigating, looking that a little bit closer. That's an up close view of that arcade. And here you can again see the difference between the painted pollution and the cleaned up building. And so I just wanna raise this question because it is to me very interesting that when we talk about pollution we think of it as an unintentional product and therefore something that shouldn't be on architecture and something to be removed. But with the minute that we start thinking about it as an intentional product, as an artistic product as having some sort of aesthetic intentionality then we begin to relate to it very differently and begin to preserve it. And so that's what I would like to put forward for our discussion today. How could we begin to think about architecture as intentionally creating a space for pollution to settle on it, to become an environmental register so that we can make an architecture that allows the public to see the effects of pollution as opposed to an architecture that hides the effects of pollution as so much glass curtain wall architecture does today. So I'll stop right there. Okay, thank you so much Jorge. Next we have Kevin Haifam who is a EMARC alumni from GSAP. Hi, I'm Kevin Haifam and I'm here to present to you my projects on a concept called planetary acupuncture and we're gonna be quite fast. So for this project I'm interested in the establishment of a formalized nomenclature for the concept of planetary acupuncture. Planetary scale intervention that redistributes or maximizes a set of global environmental or biopolitical conditions. The architecture here framed via the contradictory forces compelling the implementation of large scale infrastructural works and the ways that they can be informally subverted as heterotopic spaces, attempts to reveal and exacerbate invisible complex processes that exist in the world. So for a speculative site of the scheme we propose as a testing site the complex precarious natural and political systems currently at play within the Semitic field located in the southeast of Greenland. There exist myriad opportunities to apply the conceit of planetary acupuncture here as a semi-clature is rapidly thinning and contributing more and more to global climate change. To that end, I would like to introduce the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that addresses issues faced by Arctic governments and peoples contributing $165 billion a year to the development of aid and infrastructure in Greenland alone. The Arctic Council's intentions often are interpreted as contrary to its actions due to the complex often contradictory initiatives that influence it. This project seeks to take advantage of these entanglements. So to establish the project a currently proposed primitive dam to engineer and cool the glacier is deposited along the sea bed of the fjord. Stretching miles across the floor and changing the ecologies and conditions of the fjord around the glacier and thus creating a series of favorable and speculative conditions for a series of interventions for planetary acupuncture. So this is the first and most basic opportunity. Greenlandic warming increased precipitation and the reduction of permafrost have exposed cultural artifacts in the region. Research shows that Norse explorers once lived and died in the Sermolec. Their ruins and the ruins of their agrarian society buried beneath earth, ice and snow. Simultaneously warming has introduced agriculture to the region and conflicts exist between fertile and cultural landscapes. So the agropolis and acropolis here is extended over the site and doubles both as an infrastructure of cultivation and archeological preservation. Outposts are placed around the periphery of the site to observe the surroundings and zones are established to cultivate different forms of flora by minutely controlling nutrients and atmospheric conditions. A large research center is included to maintain and study the nascent landscape. The intervention is at once a site for research, preservation and containment. Agency and power are granted to both introduce plant life and rocks, ground, soil as plant species are cultivated in order to stabilize the ground and prevent displacement. So this is the second opportunity. In the Sermolec fjord, arctic biodiversity is placed under immense strains due to increased competition among cold weather adapted animals and animals from southwardly regions migrating more and more north, such as mackerel which who disturbed the delicate arctic ecosystem in the fjord. Additionally, material infrastructures in the region cause infrastructural tensions. So this intervention called the aphrodisiac amplifier looks at the opportunity for planetary acupuncture embodied within the potential of an arctic research station and how the physical infrastructures and thermodynamic requirements of research can be appropriated for more enterum or illicit uses for various agents present within the fjord's ecology. So appropriating the infrastructures and dynamics of research and material exploitation, the interventions re-imagine an artificial ecology where a new parable of hedonism exists. The intervention seeks to appropriate the infrastructures of extraction and research to provide favorable reproductive conditions and provide an explosion of diabetoricity. So this is the third opportunity for planetary acupuncture. The arctic zone is seen as embodying a set of conditions which are extremely favorable in the maintenance of data servers. The data server typologically can be called naturally via a controlled exposure with the environment. The imperativeness of data in the global economy has recently assisted in directing political agency to entire regions of microstates. So this intervention, terror and form are positioned in an isolated region, proposes a data archive for arctic histories and research cooled by glacial freshwater and air that would redistribute climate change and energy to a focused area to create a new series of interpolated ecologies introducing subversion and optimism into such a scheme. The architecture is articulated as an architecture of energies positing how energy can be contained and appropriated to establish a variegated landscapes and biomes which in turn operate as testing grounds for new climactic and ecological imaginaries. This intervention, appropriating the infrastructures and dynamics of data collection reimagined artificial ecology where a new parable of climate redistribution can exist. And this is the fourth opportunity. The sunlight fjord is also of note to all of the processes of carbon sequestration, carbon dissolution and direct carbon capture as it was discovered by arctic researchers in the mid-2010s that carbon can be stably reallocated to basaltic and igneous rocks but being present within the fjord. So this intervention, the altered carbon compound reimagines how chemical processes on a minute level can be exacerbated with architecture in order to provide a series of multiferous benefits for multiple agents present in the fjord and across the globe. Over the course of thousands of years, the carbon dioxide injected into the ground as a result of these aforementioned processes will become calcium carbonates and will seep to the surface usable by local organisms and plankton present in the fjord. And it is hoped that these agents will flourish their and establish their own localized post-anthropocene ecologies. And this is the fifth and final opportunity presented. So these five interventions querying ecology operate as five imaginary cosmologies of climate redistribution and a reality where climate change is seen as inevitable. Where entire paradigms of nature, ecology, society, politics, et cetera, and to be reconstructed and redesigned. These five interventions of planetary acupuncture minimize environmental, social, political damage and redistribute and reimagine a series of potential benefits. These interventions of planetary acupuncture establish territories where different logics and desires of the land are protected and overlaid and are like their sites, places at once of survival and pleasure, authority and subversion where the man-made and the natural are allowed to blur. And these are five interventions for planetary acupuncture. Great. Thank you so much, Kevin. Next up, we have Louie and Xin Lu from the AD program at GSAP. Our project is called Soft Boundary because of the global warming and, sorry, because of the global warming and the melting of the ice cap, thermal rise is an urgent issue for the cold city across the world. The East River Park in Lower Manhattan is the lotus elevation in the island and it has been flooded many times in the past decades. Currently, New York City government has decided to close the park for the next three years and they are going to bury the entire park to leave it up as one seawall which might not be the best solution for the city and its village neighborhood. Manhattan actually was originally a big marshland after the city was built. It has been landfilled twice by garbage in 1880 and water ruins in 1930. Due to sea level rising, the soil is gradually submerged by sea water. In that case, the soil can't drain well and the soil pH will go up because too much salt in the water will sanitize the soil. Most of the existing plants in East River Park as a result will not survive. So as many animals such as squirrels, worms and microorganisms. Should we let it die? No, we found that plants living in the marshes can sustain high humidity and high salinity and marshes can also provide benefits such as improving soil and cleaning pollutants. So we start to wonder what is land, what is the soil, what could be the better connection between the land and the water? Instead of building the wall, we are continuing the history of the site. This project is about adding layers of soil collected as sediment from the river until a marshland was built that is created, hacking Williamburg Bridge in order to operate the shoreline. And in flexible infrastructure while being installed on the bridge foundation to reduce the river current speed and direct the soil sediment. This inflatable device achieved compared to other infrastructure before they are made of 1% fabric and 99% air. The assembly process could be finished within couple hours. So compared to what proposed for the East River Park, which is required to close the park for three years, our proposal will be much beneficial for the neighborhoods. Collection device is a moving infrastructure that transfers the sediment from the river to the land. It's performed like a crab with a big tongue and linear moving. And the feet of this shipping machine are very flexible, which is for me to adapt to different topographic conditions. The sediments are contained in wood rings where they dry and reproduce as rich organic matter. The idea of the wood rings comes from the surrounding community gardens. We would invite the East River Park neighbors to join us in this project by constructing the rings and maintaining the soil. They can continue their community garden practices here and get more garden space once the mountains are created. A computer operated system built under the bridge will release different types of seeds according to the data from the sensors and environmental condition. This soft boundary between the river and urban developments works on both sides. As community garden or other facility on one side and the marshland on another, which can be a reliable response to the sea level rise in other areas of the city. Soft boundary creates a sediment collector to transform the park into a marshland as a response to sea level rise, a process which will be complete by year 2100. Thanks to both. Next up, we have Madison Story from the Historic Preservation Program at GSAP. Ibrahim, are you ready to present? Maybe you could go before Madison. Okay, so this project was initiated in the IsoLion Studio, given by Marco Ferrari this summer. I focused on the IsoNet for 50%, which is a line on a map connecting points that have the same average percentage of cloud units and that crosses through the North American continent. I will start first with this and let me know if you don't hear the sound. We're doing to our energy should never be forgotten. The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. And something I wanna make clear to the media, we have among the cleanest and sharpest crystal clean. You've heard me say that when crystal clean, air and water anywhere on earth. So clouds provide a revealing indication of the complexities of this crystal clear air. A cloud accumulates is a visible mass of minute droplets in the atmosphere of a planetary body. And they might inevitably disappear with a rapid increase in temperature due to the climate crisis. The US Energy Administration estimates in 2017 that the US emitted 5.1 billion metric tons of energy related carbon dioxide, which approximates to 15% of global emissions. Computer models led by Schneider at Caltech explained that if CO2 reaches 1,200 parts per billion, which is three times the current level and which we are going towards, then these very high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide could suppress the formation of clouds. And clouds play a significant role in the heating and in the cooling of the planet. This project is a series of speculative potentials injected in the continental landscape. I'll try to briefly point out to some of them. These potential operate in what Bruno Latour calls the critical zone. And the clouds are in medias chess. They are in the midst of things. And they reveal the political implications of these clouds above, under, and sometimes floating in our heads. So I first went looking for this perfect American sky tracing a history all the way from the American Revolution to rally campaigns in the US. And this is an F goes from New York City to Alaska. And this helped me identify kind of four clouds, the power cloud, the corrupted cloud, the fossil cloud, and the water cloud. This IZONF passed through a series of the highest CO2 emitters in the region, such as New York or Kentucky. And research show that high CO2 levels affect cognitive abilities. And when I overlaid the voting patterns in the last year's elections to the CO2 emissions per state, high CO2 meant impaired decision making. This is what I call the power cloud. The next cloud is the fossil cloud. It's a cloud that is neither nor. It is a cloud yet to come. It is a mushroom cloud in Nevada. And it is a cloud generated, a cloud generated in cold storage in Ashburn, Virginia. And it's also embedded in institutionalized forests that can measure through sensors, the CO2 coverage produced by trees and that are controlled by data centers. So the third one is the water cloud. This is a potential storage of water used at the continental divide to harvest clouds and fog. It also acts at the nation scale, revealing through this crystal clear glass monument, the seamless equal divide of rainwater collected by reservoirs at each side of the US-Canada border. Also establishing cloud reserves is a potential to essentially, they would consist of a territory that encompasses the stratosphere as part of the national park. And this might be the only way we'll be able to preserve these endangered species. The corrupt cloud is the first cloud induced by human activity. It is a cloud that forms in the industrial CO2 emitter towns in the US and kind of migrates and ends up in the Sahara desert in Africa and this cloud migrates in the kind of larger world atmosphere participating in what we know as the climate crisis injustice. So before we looked at the world and the sky upwards and through satellite now we look at the world downwards and the shift articulates clouds today. And I would just like to end with this. We're all at home and our relationship to the exterior is through our windows. And this ISONF reveals the constant contradiction in the sky. When I look up or rather out now, I see aerosols, I see Zeus, I see the crystal clear treaty, I see monumentality, ephemerality, perhaps lots of hope, look out, look up. Thank you. Thank you, Ibrahim. I'm just going to go ahead and share Madison's file and we will be ready to start for Madison's presentation. All right, so hi everybody. Thanks for bearing with me through the tech issues. Red Hook Brooklyn has been juggling in equity development and environmental justice since the mid 19th century due to its waterfront location and history as an industrial hub. But it now faces the paradox of being a community that suffers from spatial inequality and that's hard hit by climate events like 2012's Hurricane Sandy while having historically been a contributor to ecological damage. Red Hook's history can't be forgotten even as our global society moves into this design oriented future of climate reparation, mitigation and adaptation. Next please. So I'm going to present some data that's been gathered and spatialized by my peers and I as a part of GSAP Spring 2020 Historic Preservation Studio 2 to demonstrate how Red Hook can serve as a model community regarding the importance of understanding the change of landscapes and community over time before beginning an evidence-based design process. Preservation plays a critical role in understanding spatial and social responsibilities, allowing the tools of preservation to be used to understand the past to ensure that designs encompass just responses to issues of climate and housing. Next please. Red Hook is located on Brooklyn shoreline bordered by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway to the east and by water to the northwest and south. Because of this waterfront location as well as the construction of the Atlantic Basin in the 1840s shown here in green and the Erie Basin in the 1880s showing blue, the neighborhood became one of our most successful shipping ports in the country by the mid-19th century. Next please. Through significant historical research, it was found that this led to an influx of dock workers and longshoremen moving into the neighborhood, many of whom lived in either a known shantytown shown in dark gray on this map or an informal housing located in Red Hook's marshy low-lying areas that were slowly infilled with garbage shown on this map in light blue. This area is now home to the Red Hook houses, a large-scale public housing project that was built in the mid-20th century. Next please. Consequently, Red Hook shoreline has experienced drastic expansion and hardening over the course of its history, which can be seen in this graphic of the neighborhood's changing coastline over time. This resulted in the creation of porous land on a high water table that's inherently vulnerable. Next please. This can be seen in flood maps from 2012's Hurricane Sandy. And while this was the most extreme flooding event in Red Hook's recent history, it hasn't been the only one. In fact, small floods occur in the neighborhood extremely regularly due to the combined effects of the high water table resulting from the neighborhood's infilled land and its combined sewer system. Consequently, Red Hook residents must choose to adapt to the flooding or they must leave. It's vital to keep in mind though that about 73% of the neighborhood's residents live in the Red Hook houses. Like other community members, Red Hook houses residents were drastically impacted by Hurricane Sandy. Unlike other community members though, they may not have the resources to leave the area. Next please. The neighborhood has also been contributing to pollution through the many industries that moved in as waterfront industry declined. These industries included a lead smelting plant and oil company and numerous waste transfer stations. Waste incinerators were also located in the Red Hook houses as well as in the neighboring areas, Governors Island and Gowanus. These industries weren't supported by Red Hook residents with one resident complaining in 1951 of being deluge in smoke right now and oil smoke that gives one a choking, suffocating feeling. Next please. Contemporary community data surveys conducted by my peers in the Historic Preservation Program have revealed that today's residents are proud of their neighborhood's industrial heritage as it uniquely combines preservation with social equity issues, partly because what is culturally trying to be preserved is a new form of industrial heritage and an idea of working heritage. They have no interest in bringing on industrial uses into the neighborhood's waterfront areas, nor can they as the neighborhood remains owned for industrial uses ranging from light or M1 to heavy or M3 industry. Next please. Through exploration of social and environmental context at an urban scale is not preservation in the traditional sense, the use of preservation tools to explore change over time tells a critical story about the community that must be taken into consideration during future design processes. In Red Hook, any design that addresses flooding without addressing the neighborhood's inherent physical vulnerability, the historic distribution of housing, industry and the contemporary community's connection to the past will succeed only in displacing the neighborhood's longtime residents or would otherwise produce only a temporary fix for the neighborhood's flooding by failing to address its inherent vulnerability. Thank you. Great, thank you so much Madison. Next up we have Jamie Lindsay from the Cooper Union. So this project that I'm talking about today when viewed in the context of this climate discussion aims to expand our understanding of climate in order to address it better in the future. It's a new project that started at the beginning of April and therefore it's ongoing, but it's a body of work created in response to the current health crisis that we face around the world that we're all so familiar with now. The crisis has already had an impact on climate in ways that we couldn't have anticipated only two months ago, which signals that our conversation on climate will move beyond material ramifications and data and start to address emerging aspects impacting how we will live together today, what our bodies are in space and in relation to each other and to the environment. So the work that I show will examine these topics through the lens of the public space in particular the urban park. When we entered the crisis a few weeks ago, I was glued to the news kind of like everyone else has been recently and became interested in how the park was acting as a microcosm of the social changes brought on by the pandemic. In the urban context, but particularly in New York, people really needed to escape their homes and were going to the park in order to do so, but bringing their fears and anxieties about social distancing with them and the new norms of how we're all living together today. New Yorkers were reporting though that the park was one of the last places where they could really feel like they were New Yorkers, where they could feel a sense of community still and where they could be alone together. And of course, the park is more important now than ever in terms of its health benefits, the ability of nature to decrease stress and anxiety being among these benefits. So I began to think about how parks in the future might be designed to address new concerns about social distancing and have started to look closely at a field of study called proxemics, which is literally the science of social distancing beginning in the 1960s. And from there, I started to think of what some basic elements of the park might be in this new future and whether it's possible to create a kind of kit of parts that could be deployed in different arrangements across the urban landscape to create a new occupiable park surface. So it began with the most basic and somewhat predictable unit, the kind of six-foot bubble that you can see here, if you can see my mouse, but thinking about how it might start to take form in different ways, how it might start to tilt or become convex or concave and move away from that just flat predictable surface, how it might start to change geometry in terms of our thinking about isolation, not just being isolated individuals, but couples or families or groups of people who are isolated together to keep us all safe and how it could still, some kind of system like this might still be able to hold some architectural components of the park that we know like benches and stairs and then start to address problems in some of the parks today, like drainage. Obviously, if we're talking about climate flooding has been a big part of a lot of the parks along the edges of Manhattan. In particular, I've been researching a lot about Riverside Park and then how this kind of kit of parts might start to become spatial and occupiable through different types of programs and different types of more three-dimensional arrangements and occupations. And when you kind of put this all together, what I'm thinking about what starts to populate the surfaces of those six-foot dimensions, this project was really about using architecture to visualize safety and to not think about the project in terms of each disk being occupied by just a single individual but really allowing architecture to help us understand, help us measure our bodies in relation to other bodies in space to keep everybody safe. So it's basically just a visualization of some of the social distancing topics that we've been following so closely in the last few weeks. And then starting to move the project into the realm of thinking about if we're really going to consider a park like this in the future, how does that change our relationship to nature? Do we become immersed in nature or are we viewing nature from a distance and still keep remaining a little bit separate? And part of that answer depends on whether or not certain types of organic surfaces can actually carry the virus or not and whether those surfaces are safe to be immersed in or whether we should be viewing things more from a distance totally changing how we think about parks. So that question required me to step back and examine the various methods of the park itinerary and really how we move through the park or how we could move through the park of the future. Whether people move through the park on their own kind of path of isolation determined by how many people they're with in their own isolation group or looking at the park as kind of a bubble landform of these destinations that people go to in the park almost like these little park islands or is it something more like a combination of the two where we have these clusters of surfaces that allow the park to remain a sort of community and still we can circulate around nature and see each other and interact with each other but just in totally new ways. So like I said this project is still under development but as it progresses I'll be considering it under slightly different terms and through the lens of climate asking some of the questions that I'm posing here. Like what effect does decreasing densities of bodies have on the environment when we start to socially distance ourselves that totally changes how we think about density in the urban environment and how does reframing our experience of nature and our relationship to it change how we think about climate? Will it be something that we view from a distance that we're trying harder to protect or will we be so removed from it that we consider it in different ways? And following the current health crisis which aspects of daily life are still necessary? Can we kind of cut out some things that were damaging the environment before if we're going to totally rethink not just park design but the design of the whole urban infrastructure what actually is necessary and how do those things impact climate and how does what we remove as unnecessary start to impact climate? And that's what I have. Thank you so much, Jamie. Up next we have Zanshi from UPenn. Today I'm not going to talk about a project I'm going to talk about a totally theoretical thing about the life cycle assessment which is a very important concept in the environmental building design. And my topic is a methodology in solving uncertainty in LCA and its impact. And I will introduce the quantitative method inside of this area. And here I will list three core issues inside the life cycle assessment. The first one is the life cycle impact assessment on global scale which aims to cover the complete cause-effect pathway from pressure to impact in separate steps by monitoring fate exposure and the effect of environmental pressure to arrive at impacts on humans and ecosystems. And the second one is what I'm going to talk about today is uncertainty and availability inside the LCA. And it is the hardest part to measure for us. And the third one is the life cycle assessment of new technologies which will include some environmental technologies that can help us to save energy, save carbon and other stuff. And also it includes some sustainability resources and resources in investigation. And here is a life cycle diagram. And we can say the uncertainty may happen in every step of the life cycle from the raw materials to the end of life of the environmental building design. And a certain things happens in every phase of the LCA making the life cycle assessment process hard to inflate precisely. So when the problem of a certainty assessment is significant process in the development of LCA. And here I'm going to separately introduce this question into a quantitative method and a qualitative method. First is the quantitative method and we will use mathematical ways to solve these questions. And nowadays there are lots of life cycle assessment software that can help us to calculate the input and output inside the life of building design. And there are always some, there's always has its own black box inside the software. First in the black box, it will give a category about the uncertainty and will identify which type of the uncertainty should belong to. And then it will move on to the list to give an order according to the importance about the aspect of this of the uncertainty and will apply the mathematical model to different category of the uncertainty. And finally, it will use this kind of a probabilistic model to give estimation about this kind of amount of the input and output. And finally, it will have the result. And the other method is the qualitative method which has not been developed very completely nowadays. And I think it should include the ethical and the philosophical ways instead of this method. And which we can also think is in this four ways and exact rule. The first is the location of the material maybe. And the second is the role material production plans control input and output. And the start architecture should have the awareness about the environmental protection. And the fourth are related disciplines may pay attention to the environmental protection. This not the quantitative but quality team. But I think it can kind of comprehensively solve this question. But we still need to think about whether it is practical. So I just want to allow this kind of discussion to us. So I will give a summary. We should combine the quality team and the quality team method in the whole process of LCA. And we should use quantity team method in experience professional field. And we should combine the quantity team and the quality team method in uncertainty part. And finally, build a decision-making system to make people aware of making the most environmental friendly decision in every step of LCA. So that's all the things I want to introduce. Great, thank you so much. Next up, we have Viad and Yumana from GSAP, the AD program and the CCCP program. Unfortunately, Yumana couldn't be with us today. Cedar Accidents Climate Refugees searching for Humbaba is a research, sorry. Is a research focused on non-human climate refugees that face similar dire situation as human refugees. In particular, it looks at the Cedar Tree as a case study to approach the climate urgency. With the climate warming up in Lebanon, the trees have to migrate to higher altitudes to follow the colder winters in order to survive. To counter capitalism's abstraction of geography and ecologies, the research documents and visualizes the Cedar journey as an asylum-seeker searching for a protector. The first documentation archiving of the Cedar and their exodus was the tale of Gilgamesh that narrates the defeat of the Mesopotamian demigod, Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest. This defeat marked the first victories of consumerism over conservatism, paving the way to exploit the Cedar Wood as an architecture and capital commodity. The Cedars since then have been used by the Phoenicians for building boats and sailing and have been used by the Pharisees for modifications where they used the oil of the Cedar Wood. In modern day Lebanon, the Cedar is a main integral part of the Lebanese identity where you can see it everywhere on the flag, passport, ID, medals and even universities, army and the currency. Other than the identity narrative, the Cedar Tree plays an integral role in the ruler economies and is essential for the sustainable preservation of local crafts. Like there's a lot of ecotourisms happening around the Cedar trees and this ecotourism activates a lot of ruler areas and the economy is over there where they start designing like woodcraft, honey, Cedar honey and Cedar soaps. Since 2018, the Cedar crisis have reached mainstream media in the West and they've been focusing on the climate change and how it's impacting the Cedar Tree. It even goes as absurd as like the Lebanese claiming climate change is devouring our Cedars which shows a bit of possession and how they relate to the Cedars and how they see them. This is a map showing the Cedar territory. It exists in Southern Turkey and in Mount Lebanon. It has a different shape. It's specific to that area. It's called an ecotype. On the left, we have like three studies showing the, showing the Cedar potential new territories where they can survive in green and magenta as the old ones. And you see a huge decrease in it. This one is the least optimistic that shows if we don't abide by the Paris Agreement. These two they show if we abide by it but one by 2050 and the other one is by 2070. Again, this study doesn't take into consideration. It only takes environmental factors and it doesn't take into consideration the human landscape, the human architectural landscape and the intervention on the territories of the land use. Today, because the Cedars exist in a climate where isn't optimal for the reproduction. Most reproduction and germinations happen in labs where NGOs and labs go collect the Cedar cones which we see over here. They have to freeze them until they crack and then they put them in refrigerators to germinate. And this is like the architecture of germination for the Cedar trees currently. After it stays in the fridge for a couple of months, it moved into a controlled environment in a greenhouse where it stays there for a couple of years until it grows a certain height. Where then it is relocated in the land and you have like always, you have this kind of architecture devices that are protecting the trees because those areas are in control by the government and there's a lot of cattle herding and wild animals eating them. So people need to protect them with these kind of like incases for a couple of years and to keep them protected. Other than that, the problem is that there is no areas today for the Cedars to migrate. Like from all of this mountain, you only get this small plot that is publicly owned where you can relocate the Cedars to but the rest it is mainly used for architecture of leisure. So the Cedars face a limitation in finding host soils due to the lack of governmental policies and privately owned profits. The displaced Cedars face socio-political conflicts with the existing landscape of human activities, extractive architecture, and it's industrial capitalism echoing the many struggles of asylum seekers. These are some of the examples of the architecture of leisure in the Sherry Cedar Forest. They actually removed one of the hills to turn it into a festival site. The other one is ski resorts. They take most of the mountain tops and they hinder the migration of the Cedar trees. You can see Lebanese, they love to ski a lot. Other problems are private chalets and developments where mainly they are sold for Arab businessmen or Lebanese who live abroad. And again, they're eating up the potential territories where the trees can migrate to and it's creating this kind of conflict between the trees and the architecture. The other, this one is like the highest resort in the Levant. It's on 3000 meters high. It's on the highest peak as well in Lebanon and it's turned into a residential development. With the Cedars as well, as they migrate upwards to seek asylum, they are faced with another problem which is an anatomical change in order to cope with the new ecological zones and climate change. As the Cedars migrate upward, the shape of the tree changes drastically where it starts to become shorter and flattened and it kind of abstracts the tree that most of the Lebanese relate to. And this would somehow impact the identity narrative. So I want just to end up with, due to the lack of flows regulations and locked their presentation plans, the displaced Cedars are pinched between climate pressure pushing them upward and the dissemination of Mount Lebanon by development that is obstructing the Cedars migration. The displaced trees can't claim territory rights like refugees, the trees are pressured and blocked. And how can we look when we are designing and working as architects, how we can ensure the rights of non-humans the same way as we work on ensuring the rights of humans. Thank you. Thank you so much, Yad. Next up, we have Azul Kliks from the GSAP AAD program. Hi, everyone. Okay, so good afternoon and thank you for including me in today's panel. Today I would like to make a brief statement on the importance of a materials performance which I believe is essential to our human trace as well as our climate trace. This topic is actually one that I am developing with my partner using our personal projects as case studies. But today I will share with you a project that I worked on at GSAP that has allowed us to think a bit further about our collective trace. I would like to introduce a series of columns that I was looking at while learning to work with clay. Throughout the years, columns have become the ultimate expression of architecture. These images of Pianese's drawings show the image of Rome in crisis, portrayed through the crumbling environment, portrayed through its crumbling environment. These representations have the capacity to transform a topographical landscape into an expressive power, as well as allowing for imagination to play an important role within the images. In my GSAP project, A Garden of Columns, I worked on the integration and combination between clay and concrete. In this process, I learned to manage and work with unpredictability. During the molding, I was able to control the stacking technique, height, thickness and overall composition. But in a way, I could not control the end result. There always seems to be an alteration due to the material compressing, drying and reacting when in contact with another material such as concrete. I found that the unwanted or unused space between the bricks can have a purpose and allow for new possibilities, as the clay bricks shrink, decay, or in some cases, are even removed from the column, new spaces are created. And here is where insects, birds, animals and plants can start appropriating it. The column and its representation created a language of change within our realm. That is why I believe that the column is a way for us to think about a new integration and a new commitment to architecture. Columns enable different situations to happen around them. They can be seen as objects that organize the movement of people, compress and open up spaces and allow for elements to be placed on top of them. Humans have always had the capacity to create environments, building with available materials and with acquired knowledge. Since the construction of clay huts to protect us from extreme weather conditions, to bubbles that simply protect us from contaminated air, and today with homemade materials, we are using plastic and textile to protect us from each other. And materials performance to holds a history, a technological evolution and an acquired knowledge of use. For instance, clay acts as a modeling agent that absorbs, adopts and changes into any given role. This is why its performative transformation allows for diverse uses and appropriations to be incorporated. Therefore, the appearance, use and influence will change over time. I would like to use the column presented as a metaphor to allow us to speculate on a materials future transformation from its original state and anticipating the materials trace. With time and new landscape will be created, decay is introduced and accepted, welcoming the appropriation of biodiversity. I believe that a materials trace is important and necessary to accommodate for climate transformation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Azul. Next, we have Marilyn, I'm talking. Hi. Hi, so this is a work in progress of the Lebanese ongoing Lebanese revolution through the eyes of an expat. October 15th, 2019, more than 100 wildfires erupted simultaneously on the 10,452 square kilometers that formed the Lebanese territory. As a result of unprecedented wind and temperature increases driven by climate change, the three firefighters' helicopters owned by the government and donated by the French, laid inactive and without maintenance, unable to cope. So the fires were eventually brought down with the help of neighboring countries and the relief funds were coming in through crowd-funded campaigns and donations from the diaspora. Overlaying failed governmental action, obsolete policies and inadequate response protocols, this resonated with the past 30 years of political incompetence coming from the same political class, which pushed the Lebanese two days later to go down to the streets in a movement of uprise, one of the first of its kind. A revolution happening on the ground, although made possible with the support of a digital and technical realm through which alerts were given, tear gas bombs identified, oppressive actions denounced, unjustified detainees tracked and governmental security apparatus investigated. On a larger organization scale, a human chain linking the most northern point of the country to the south's point of the coast was realized. The chain where the bodies become a statement tool conquering the extent of the territory. The chain mutates to a human shield, the concentration of bodies acquire resistance quality, road blocking the access to the parliament to halt the coming session. The cell phone becomes an important component of the fight in this necessary prosthetic of the human body for organization, self-defense, documentation and resistance against the oppressive forces. The indispensability of that element has activated the stationing of mobile charging stations amidst the crowds with electricity sponsored by protest backed businesses. They act as a type of life support to the revolution. However, the cell phone cannot be seen in those instances and independent tool. It gains added value only when connected to the internet which activates its ability to share information. With the threat of having it shut down, the internet becomes a political tool, simultaneously a catalyst of the revolution and a threat to the protests. Leaderless and running away from politician led media channels, alternative media platforms multiplied where the communication landscapes are participatory aggregated through rally accounts that organize and summarize the input. Transcending national borders and the legal outreach of national sovereignty reaching remote areas in far away localities, the data centers become crucial links in the revolution equation as relay and archiving points of the information. These alternative media are all internet-based and collective. They rely on the support of the already established infrastructures of data exchange and communication spread across the multiple data centers among which the ones of Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services and Apple. Each of the new media platforms activates this remote landscape in a unique way depending on its presence online, reconfiguring and mutating it with different hybrid usages. Megaphone news, Akbar Saha, the directory of the revolution and the diaspora group that can be found on Instagram and Facebook in that instance. Triggering and stimulating diaspora solidarity protests in cities scattered all around the world, reconfiguring the geography of the revolution. From the screenshots to forwarding, the forward button takes on a different connotation and indispensable catalyst in the data propagation within the population. Although images are weighted and depending on which platform it will be forwarded to, it is downsized differently and releases CO2 accordingly. A two megabyte photo equals 14 grams of CO2 emissions. A picture uploaded in my locality though doesn't have the same impact as one uploaded in another because country have different levels of electricity efficiency in terms of CO2 emissions. Creating relationships of inequality between the country posting and the country storing. In the case of Lebanon, electricity efficiency is still to this day one of the main points brought up in the revolution, leading $1.5 billion in the state funds yearly. Profoundly shaping disrupted forces of political participation, the revolution is supported by an already established infrastructure of data exchange whose users have been reconfigured and mutated leaving behind heat and energy exchanges and a trace of carbon footprints. This is a time to rethink entanglements of new currencies, conversions between energy data and the repurposing of the byproducts with new systems of interactions, transformation and regulations at a local and a global scale that transcends national boundaries, makes visible and activates relationships with the back house. Through the data center's mechanical facade system, the building envelope becomes the key political actor. Thank you. Thank you, Marilyn, so much. Next up we have Federico, Roberto Castillo-Convales from the AAD program. So I'd like to talk a little bit about a project on architecture role within the climate crisis. I think in face of this urgent nature of climate crisis architecture has scrambled to position itself within this discussion. And I believe we have reached a moment where the field has acknowledged that we need to position ourselves as actors rather than having a reactionary voice. This is obviously not a new idea by any means and we have great examples of this posture which I would like to exemplify. For example, rotors work in Belgium and investigating material organization and the broader build environment affirm that we think demolition and the circulation of materials. Projects that use community-driven processes such as Aleph Zettos and Rosenbaum's project of a children's village in Brazil in order to reimagine vernacular architecture, local materials sourcing and sexability. And also forensic architecture based in London which has a work that utilizes tools within the architecture realm to advance space and media investigation into cases of human rights violations from various angles which they refer to as the production and the presentation of architectural evidences. Last semester in a studio that's led by Andres Hake which called for design-based interventions responding to and departing from trans-territorial implications of architecture. I had the opportunity to think about and reflect on where do we as architects fit inside this complex world of building in order to respond to climate crisis which architecture has stated a lot of times being capable of presenting a quote and quote solution. One of the projects developed in the studio by Yining He and Xinyi Hua was an amazing project called Mining the City that positioned architects as the designers of a system which would create solutions for the recirculation of materials inside of New York City. This in order to allow for a non-extractive strategy within the realm of construction. Utilizing camera recognition, just in time method and construction details, the project reimagined the processes and the aesthetics of material sourcing and construction. Another project in the studio was developed by Christopher Speedakos, Frank Mendel and myself called Toxic Entanglements and I would like to briefly present this project focusing on what Andres did the role of architecture was. So the project analyzed the broad scale of waste management within the city of New York which has a massive territorial implication and it is intrinsically tied to an equality constructed social organization, circulation of economy and a massive infrastructure built to make what we call trash invisible. In the intersection of all of these items, we understood that Hudson Yards, the development on the margins of the Hudson River exemplified the built structure that perpetuates this unsustainable system which not only mobilizes billions of dollars but has started to crack as clearly visible in recent years when foreign nations stopped buying the waste produced in the U.S. In order to propose any change in the system, we understood that our relationship to what we consider waste and therefore toxic has to be rebuilt. To do so, the project organizes existing systems inside political economical frameworks into a building that creates an assemblage of many actors that include human beings, organic matter, microorganisms, animals and flora. Each system, there are 12 spread throughout the tower, utilizes what some of the actors consider to be waste as resource and produces their own waste which is considered resource by the next actor. Throughout this project, we as architect positioned ourselves as liaisons of various skills and spheres. We met and talked to people from a wide range of fields from scientists to organizations, political activists and venture capitalists in order to get a glimpse of how each partner stood and acted on the issue. What was evident for us was the lack of communication between these actors. Basically we had scientists with processes ready to act that couldn't get funding and people with funding who didn't know where to invest. It is important to state that in our project, none of the systems we included were created by us. They're all existing processes using various locations and scales around the world. We utilized the tower because we saw that it was ideal vessel that mobilizes all of these actors that we stated. The typology that has historically been capable of mobilizing people and capital as the case of Hudson Yards itself. From the project, we understood that above all, architecture arranges and organizes people around common issues. And rather than trying to simplify, we tried to embrace this complexity that emerges from this gathering. A complexity that is inevitable in order to react to climate crisis as the climate crisis itself is built around a complex structure and does not allow nor respond to any simplifications. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Federico. Up next, we have Tianxui and Bingyu Lin from the Historic Preservation Program. In the advanced studio of Historic Preservation Study, my partner Bingyu and I had proposed an augmented reality app that can be used as a powerful and non-contact forms of interpretive technology for possible historic preservation. In combination with original elements and the facsimilists, the app presents a virtual tour for San Gimiano's to San Giovanni Dimolta in Venice, Italy to show how AquaAuto affects the heritage and the preservation and how digital recording could be an active force and towards the goal of protection and transformation to future generations. AquaAuto is a routine flooding phenomenon that occur at Venice during particularly high tide due to the sea level rise and the climate change. The frequency of the AquaAuto has increased more than 10 times a year to more than 16 times a year in the last century. In November 2019, the AquaAuto has produced the worst flooding in Venice in more than half a century, causing serious damage to the city. St. Mark's Square is one of the lowest ports in Venice, which suffering flood frequently. The picture below is an approximate representation of the one meter of the floodwater around St. Mark's Square. Headlines and photos from medias and prize also show how severe the disaster was. Although the existing approaches to control AquaAuto mainly focus on infrastructure construction, such as walls, in this subject we stick a new way, digital recording for people in the world to assess, preserve and think about Venice with cultural heritage written by AquaAuto and climate change. We selected a small region of Venice for flood and building damages analysis. Representative sites are selected for case study. These sites influenced by AquaAuto are either important monuments such as St. Mark's Square and Passo di Morta or residential and commercial buildings that are damaged by sea water and turbulent waves and closely linked to the daily life of local people. So we propose an augmenting reality application which functions whether people are on site or off site. In the on site tour, relative to people's current position, they can watch the specific scenes of each site and through multimedia content to get these history and stories. When they are off site, the app functions as a virtual tour. People can use joystick to walk through the site. And by representing the flood scenes in St. Mark's Square, people can better understand what the AquaAuto looks like in Venice. Information such as how often AquaAuto happens and what damages it caused to Venice will also be presented. We believe it will be an interesting non-contact preservation practice and we hope to raise awareness and convince not only the local people but also a growing number of partners around the world that care about Venice culture to join in and protect Venice from the effects of climate change. Thank you. Thank you both. And for our last presentation, we have Marcos Morante and Peter Maxwell Martin from who are both alumni of the GSAP AAD program. We are presenting a work with it together with Marlene and Taki and the support of Xiaoxhi and Andres consisting of five live support architectures. Yeah, so these are the five live support architectures next that we designed for a territorial Jean Lafitte which is located at the Mississippi Delta and it is slowly being erased due to sea level rise. This is a territory of competing water flows between the Gulf and the Mississippi River which changed their flow direction on salinity levels in minutes. A territory which has been colonized by oil industries which have fostered social inequality by declining traditional economies and increasing erosion processes. A territory where material cycles have mutated due to these non-economic forces through estrogenous ibuprofen or naproxen powered by the Mississippi and a territory where underwater mating areas have been modified as a result of noise pollution coming from novel traffic of oil industries. All of this in a territory which has historically has historically been considered a wasteland, the Mississippi Delta and did not even find an accurate representation on official maps. In a desperate attempt to gain attention from policy makers, Timothy Garner, the major of the town, initiated an architectural operation that of dedicating the town's budget to building dozens of vacant facilities just for the sake of adding value and forcing the construction of a protection levee. This was however unsuccessful. Jean Lafitte has been left to tides. It cannot be even graphically represented. It has become a territory of blurriness in social and economic terms. The aim of blurritorialism was to construct a scenario of transition for this render the space. This is rather than thinking of the illusion of restoring this location to its former state, we were proposing urbanism of building time and transition meaning empowering the disenfranchised non-human and human actors of these render locations to take action against the processes that are leading to their natural and social erasure by making the best out of their available resources. The five low-tech architectures of transition become interspecies like supports. The same is to slow down the processes that force the non-human and human inhabitants of Jean Lafitte towards a dramatic and sudden disappearance with the small interventions implementing amplified effects. A transarchitecture of soil. This architecture deals with a contest in which lands popping up and disappearance depend on the sediments carried by the Mississippi. The aim of this transarchitecture is to mitigate the loss of land. And it consists of a series of inflatable structures that as they gain volume reduce the speed of waters and encourage the position of sediments. A transarchitecture of pollutants. This architecture deals with a context where territorialities are affected by the chemicals carried by the Mississippi. It consists of a series of floating linear structures which are able to move, expand and retract. Once they start working, the structure retracts creating a volume that becomes an obstacle for naval traffic. A transarchitecture of fresh water which is the next slide. This architecture deals with a contest where the presence of fresh water determines interstices movements. The desalination process takes place inside the balloons which move up and down depending on the heat generator inside creating a change in geography. As the fresh water is released the fabric becomes a nesting area for species affected by the loss of land. A transarchitecture of salt. This architecture deals with a context where salinity levels of water determine the flow of species. This transarchitecture works on the possibility of building a system that as the fresh water is able to aggregate, accumulate and release portions of salt. This is done by a series of towers which are able to aggregate salt through capillarity during periods in which the levels are high releasing them when they become low. This architecture deals with a context where the presence of carbon dioxide and oxygen determines the suitability of occupation. The aim of this transarchitecture is to foster the material cycles in which the human inhabitants of this town are imbricated as a means to build a scenario of solsufficiency for the transition. It is done by a series of digesters which are attached to the existing urban fabric and operate within the humanist part carbon cycles. This is a scenario that empowers the human and human inhabitants and provides time to manage the future condition from resisting to relocating. The aim was not to freeze the actors but to think of a transitional collective scenario which could life support diversity and slow down the processes of ratio. Thank you. Thank you, Marcos. Okay, well that concludes the presentation portion of the summit. So right now we can move on into the discussion portion. Well, thank you very much. This has been an amazing map of the way architecture is dealing with climate now, from different perspectives and from different methodologies but also different ideas, different concepts and different strategies. We are going to make it possible now, right Laila, to unmute anyone. Also, so basically anyone could unmute her, him or whatever it's called. And we at this point have the opportunity to have a quite informal probably conversation. But I would like to start with going back to two of the things that started this conversation. Jorge Otero was asked, Pilos was asking, what is the way architecture buildings could become elements of monitoring and also actors in the making of climate and making space for also the kind of unblocked boxing of the processes by which humans relate to climate and not only humans. And in particular, he was posing this question with regards to pollution. And Daniel Barber was claiming architecture as a mediator in the way humans would negotiate the way they would deal with climate. These will construct and be climate. And I think that these are two questions that are kind of crossing all the presentation somehow. And I wanted to start with maybe Jorge and Daniel can respond a little bit of these two notions, buildings as monitoring devices and actors in the making of climate and also in the way it becomes unblocked boxing and also this capacity for architecture to mediate and to assume this role of mediation. And maybe if you can expand on this, we can then follow with all the different contributors also explaining how they react to these two ideas. Yeah, thank you, Andrés. Here, let me turn on my video. Yeah, I thought the presentations were terrific. I really enjoyed all of them. And yeah, I think what I was trying to point to was the aesthetics of it, like our modes of representation, how we present architecture. There is a kind of inner language of architecture that is comprehensible to architects that involves plans, sections and so on. And that surprisingly to most architects is actually not understandable to most other people. You show a plan to most people, they really have a hard time. So we sometimes forget how much we know and how coded our own modes of communications are. So I'm very interested and concerned with the way that architecture appears on the street and to the public. And I think that architects are great communicators in the world. What I liked is a lot of the projects that we saw today, were trying to make a claim on the larger discourse of climate change. And they were looking, I mean, I was very taken and by the project on clouds. And I was very taken by the project on social media and the way it's been used on protests in Lebanon and its relationship to energy use. I think that what I would call for is a way in which the buildings themselves as we experience them could make visible all this knowledge that is accumulated in the research and not buried in the research, right? So maybe a challenge is a form, maybe it doesn't. But also that I would want to push for a architecture that actually deals with the materials of pollution. So maybe this is a bit of an American perspective, but James Terrell, the light artist, he would talk always about impressionist artists in France, painting with oil to try to represent light with oil. And he would say, well, I just want to deal with light, not the representation of light. So he makes light art. In the same way I would say, oftentimes in architecture, we deal with the representation of pollution rather than with pollution. And so I think that we have so many buildings. If we can get all buildings to in a way begin to deal with pollution, then I think we can make an impact, but it's not just about energy. I think culture is very important. I often think, for example, of how do we stop smoking? There was so much data since the 1950s about how bad it was for our health to start to smoke. But everybody smoked, but it took policy, Bloomberg's policies to stop smoking in bars. It took a concerted cultural effort to make it uncool, right, to smoke. And then we stopped. So it was policy and culture. And I think we can do both as architects. But climate change, I think, has this deep telescoping historical dimension. That's what makes it kind of unstoppable. That we feel like, wow, it's been going on for so long. We can't stop this huge wheel going. It's the same with smoking. But one of the great things today is that we've stopped polluting for the last month. The world is the cleanest it's been. And so we could build on that if we could use architecture to be a cultural aesthetic that everyone can understand. So I don't think, for example, well, green roofs, right? Green roofs are one of those things that everyone can understand. They look green. But what about black facades, for example? Could we make black facades? Could we make buildings that accumulate pollution? And so everyone can see that, oh, that's a great building because it is sucking up all of this pollution around the world. That's I think what I was trying to aim at. And that as a provocation, you know, that we could begin to deal with, I love some of the proposals dealt with materials, for example. I think that would be really interesting to develop new materials that could absorb pollution. There have been some tiles that have been designed with titanium oxide that are catalytic of pollution. So those could be, you know, pref, you know, used by people. I don't know if this kind of gets to what you're talking about, but I thought Daniel's presentation was very interesting in that he was making us think about the aggregate, the aggregate figure of all of this architecture, right? And so I think that's very interesting when you start to look at architecture and begin to see that it is part of a bigger system because it looks like the same, right? So, you know, a style can be that. You can look at a building that is an art deco building in India and you can be like, oh, that's an art deco building in New York. And it kind of links together an aesthetic and a moment and a time and a concern with different things. So a kind of new aesthetic that would be able to link together consciousness and culture towards a kind of common ethic. Is it a guess what I'm asking us to think about? Maybe I'll just jump in with some similar reflections and again, yeah, really an amazing suite of projects. Great work everybody and to the organizers for sort of bringing this all together. You know, I think following on what Jorge was just saying, I think, you know, two things. I mean, one is the importance of communicating beyond our field, right? And as somebody who spends a lot of time even in just sort of history of science or history of environment or kind of Anthropocene discussions in various forms and coming from an Ivy League architecture institution and the kind of assumption is, oh, I'm sure, you know, I get a question a lot of sort of, well, what does architecture doing to sort of encounter a climate change, right? How has your school has been mobilized to help transform the world according to these carbon demands? And, you know, it's often hard to describe, right? And it's often hard to describe in part because we have a self-selected group here that's quite focused, but it's hard because in some ways the field is falling behind, right? To sort of not necessarily the avant-garde in terms of rethinking climate and culture more effectively, of course, many, many, many exceptions, many that some of them represented here. So I think in part it's a question not only at communicating differently, right, but at really reframing the discipline in so far as we can begin to see it as the built sort of mediating device between social practices and the geophysical world that they impact, right? So if we start to kind of imagine, you know, in some ways the kind of interior, planetary interior notion is in part to emphasize that we have our interior spaces, we have our exterior spaces and the building is the mechanism that sort of separates and filters and engages both of us. You know, in some ways it's, the second point I would just make is that in some ways it's over some, you know, it's a very familiar notion to think about architecture as media, but I think even if I can get a little sort of theory wonky for a second, right, to think about in particular relative to some of the German media theory of the past few decades, the emergence of this notion of cultural techniques, right? Which is a certain type of media theory that proposes in particular that media operates through both symbolic and material formations, right? So that we, I mean, again, this is not a, this is not some landmark idea so much as just kind of a framework for thinking, right? And to say that if we begin to consider architecture both and it's symbolic, or if I may kind of Jorge's aesthetic, right, and I'm, it's a bit too easy again, but in that general direction. On the one hand, yeah, the sort of symbolic or even sort of visual aspects and then also the material aspects, right? That every building is both, right? And always both. And to really keep those two in the suspension and recognize that as we continually try to refine our approach to the climate crisis that we want to operate across that device, right? That as media or as a cultural technique, architecture both provides a means to articulate a new perspective, symbolically, aesthetically, formally, and also a means to sort of operate on that new perspective in terms of performance and energy efficiency and other sort of material concerns, if you will. You know, the other important thing about addressing architecture as media is to recognize that climate is also a mediatic concept, right? We can experience the weather, but we can't understand climate without media, without visual tools, graphs, charts, maps, et cetera, et cetera. So I like to kind of put architecture and climate kind of together as sort of cultural, you know, kind of confounding questions for our contemporary world as we try to sort of resolve and discover new ways of living. And I think that that in the end becomes the kind of nut, right? The kind of important point is that what we look for in architecture is not what we look for in engineering, right? We're not aspiring towards technological fixes. And I think I say this in the kind of nuance with which many of these presentations were made, I think playing it out on these terms, that the promise of the field in my mind is not so much to sort of, you know, provide a solution in the sense of a kind of building that performs so well that it, you know, does everything you can imagine relative to the climate context. So we're not so much, we're not interested exclusively in solutions, that is exclusively in sort of technological fixes, but also in exploring new ways of living, right? I mean, a recognition that, you know, we're never going to provide the same amount of fuel through renewables as we can get from petroleum, not gonna happen, right? So what we need to think about is both upping the amount of renewable energy, right? But also reducing our needs, right? And a lot of that reduction of need has to do with habits in interiors, has to do with turning down thermostats, has to do with putting on sweaters like I just did a second ago when I got cold, has to do with, you know, re-imagining our ways of life to accommodate not a culture of scarcity, right, but a completely different symbolic and material relationship between material worlds and exterior worlds. So to emphasize that cultural dynamic, I think is something, an opportunity for the field. But again, I'm trying to put this in the context of something that was quite elegantly explored of many of the projects we just saw. But also this allows to maybe go back to some of the other presentations and see how they, how do you, the ones that, those who presented, see your project with regards to these questions. And I'm thinking, for instance, of the last project that Max and Marcus presented, which in, of course, there's both a need to somehow create a different rhetoric of the way that the medium is produced in the Delta by extracting the salt is only something that could happen as a very rhetoric process that basically makes the salt very, very visible. And also it really implies this change, this kind of evolution in the lifestyles on the forms of life, the ways of living that Daniel is referring to. So maybe that would be, maybe we can go back to that project. Also, I think the project that Frederico presented, both the one of this recirculation of materials and the project of the way to deal with waste are referring very much to both the questions that Jorge is doing, like in a way to rethinking the role of buildings in making waste, circulate, transform, even transform the notion of waste, but also they totally require these processes of change the way we live or the re-articulation of social practices with field of formal and physical and biological spheres that Daniel is referring to. So maybe these questions that both Jorge and Daniel posed in these comments, maybe can be also something that would help go in a deeper reflection in these two projects and any other probably that wants to jump in. Yeah, well, one thing that I really picked up on Jorge's presentation is this idea of visualizing the climate change and seeing the physical effects. Sorry. And seeing these effects on the old buildings that you had presented seeing both how that they were interpreting new styles of what the pollution looked like onto new buildings to look like the old buildings. And this idea of visualizing climate because we can experience weather patterns but not the overall climate. And I think that that's an interesting point and something that we liked to explore with our project in creating devices that weren't solving anything or necessarily creating solutions, but we're visualizing and making visible a change so that it might affect the lifestyle of the people that are there. And by affecting the lifestyle of the people that are there very slowly, they become more implicated in their surroundings and the environment and more aware of the slow effects of what are happening due to climate change. I think I should be a little bit with this. I think what Daniel said about architecture itself and climate being constructed ideas is something that we try to explore within the project. And so understanding that waste was a construct, actually that toxicity was a constructed notion and to deal with in this climate crisis, we have to at least rethink or understand that they are constructed notions and how they were constructed so that we can start to kind of reframe and rethink how we live inside this framework, which I think has a lot to do with kind of our role within the climate crisis. As I stated, we talked to scientists and venture capitalists. And I think that from these talks, it was very clear how different we are from them. I don't think personally that it is kind of this technology base, because I talked to like the scientists that were developing the processes, like mushrooms, kind of eat plastics and they've been doing this for 20 years and they've been going, it's a process that takes a lot of time and they've reached a certain point. But I think architecture has more kind of task of rethinking how we deal with what they produce and how we implement that in our society and how we kind of start, arrange how we live around these kind of processes. Maybe Ibrahim, yes. Do you want to? I actually wanted to bounce back on what Federico was saying because I had kind of a similar experience. I found two things just to go back to the kind of what Jorge was saying of this extension to an inner language that we have and a communication in the world. The one that echoes back to what Federico was saying was, I met with the people at the NASA Godard Institute at Columbia. So there were people like very thinking very differently and this friction of just being with them and talking to them about these very absurd kind of situations that they didn't really understand created something and just keep on going to see this. I saw like a NASA researcher called Gregory and he just, he was very confused at first. And then the more we talked and the more he kind of played the game along and came up with the research that he wasn't really sure with and he told me, maybe you can use this and so I developed and I pushed on it and that's the second part that I wanted to talk about the power of speculation as an extension to this inner language and as an extension to architecture. I think speculation we learned a lot just from being around Marco was how much you can use speculation and situations that projects yourself in a different reality as really kind of exciting and new ways of thinking our own field. So creating kind of alliances with other trajectories like scientists and kind of using speculation as an extension. Excellent. We are running out of time. I mean, this went really, really fast and we're going to have more climate summits soon and we would like to keep having this conversation with everyone. I would like to thank all the speakers. It was an amazing panel of presentations really, really amazing in many different ways. I want to also be very grateful for our audience that was part of this experiment and an audience that is also, I want to insist in this amazing moment in which we can have a conversation across universities, schools and programs. And thank you again to everyone that made it possible. Laila and Siasi and I would like to, I don't know, find a way to switch on all the microphones and unmute everyone. And if we can have an approach, I think it would be a nice thing to do. Thank you. I'm meeting all of you. Okay, soon, tomorrow. Congratulations.