 Welcome everyone, it's really a great pleasure to have T plus E plus A plus M aka team with us this evening for the second lecture of this semester. I think it's fair to say that the practice led by Tom Moran, Ellie Abrams, Adam Fure and Meredith Miller is one of the most interesting and exciting architectural practice to emerge onto our collective architectural consciousness in the past few years. The Detroit reassembly plant which was featured at the 2015 US Pavilion in Venice was, for me, one of those moments where you recognize something new is cooking. Mixing a multitude of disciplinary ingredients from site to ambas to Peche and Artipuvara with contemporary concerns about the environment and an urgency to engage with the material realities we construct as ideas, as aesthetic experiences and as reinvention of everyday landscapes, urbanisms and architecture. Team's practice has taken Kulhas's junk space to the mat, refusing the leftovers of complacency and cynicism to design instead new potential for architecture to matter, a shared imaginary but also as newly shaped realities for the future. There are many ways in which team is blazing new territory for its generation and for architecture. First, their name, reminiscent of a rock band or more precisely as they have said of themselves, a post rock band, registers in a manifesto-like way the realities of architectural practice as a creative collaboration of four, beyond the married and or couple duo or the duo that started as such and thought it was cooler to add a third more youthful partner. Team is resolutely four in the solid tradition of collaboratives in art and in music, now again brought to architecture. Second, the refreshing statements that they make in their work as well as in how they speak about it. Their cab or Chicago architecture Biennale 27 project Ghost Box, a striking proposal that reinvents the American Big Box and turns its cheap brick and ugly plastic into a strange and compelling sensual and intellectual experience, not only breathe new life into the wasteland of suburban shopping malls but also into architecture's building. Third, there's a sense of a resolute engagement that is redefined for a new generation on its own terms. I quote, I do want to make once more point that criticality as the only mode of political engagement is something that we are working against. I don't like the work speculative, what we're doing is design rather than speculation or representation is design. It's designing for a new reality without shrinking away from that reality, recently noted Tom Moran. This engagement seamlessly weaves together disciplinary expertise, discursive playfulness and historical consciousness with a commitment to rethinking building construction in what it can enable as unexpected reuse and original assemblies or reassembly, as team has coined, to move beyond the appropriateness of adaptive reuse and its accepted discourses or the smooth aesthetics around green building to propose instead exciting new ideas about waste, piles, roughness, incompleteness, the formal and the formless, the muddy and the pop, fuzziness and crispness, the digital and the handmade amongst many other readings and experiences. Finally, teams investments in pushing the boundaries of architectural representation are certainly of this moment and yet theirs is a different investment where representation is not an end in itself, rather their commitment to engaging material realities and to rethinking architecture as building essential to the practice. This commitment rendered visible in the material thickness, realism and scaled qualities of their drawings, models and installations only make us wish one thing for them and for the future of architecture that their visions get built. Please welcome team. Well, thank you Amal. That was an amazing introduction. I think you nailed it. I'll just scroll through the images and just remember what Amal's already said. So I want to introduce, in case you guys don't know, I'm Tom. This is Ellie, Adam and Meredith, T-E-A-M. Everyone's clear on it now. So we want to thank you, especially Amal, for bringing all four of us here. This is kind of a rare opportunity to talk about the work together and we're super excited. So what we're going to do is not really go through it chronologically. We haven't really been practicing together that long anyway, but we're going to talk about it more thematically and so you're going to hear from each of us in turn about different issues that we're working on in the practice. And we're really excited. Amal covered it all already, but we're really excited to talk about how we're contributing to what we think are the most urgent issues of our generation of architects. Oops, got two track pads. Living Picture is a winning entry to the Ragdale Ring competition. Every year, the Ragdale Foundation invites architects to propose a temporary reinterpretation of the original 1912 ring, an outdoor theater primarily from music, poetry and pageantry. In studying the historical imagery of the ring, we were reminded of the contemporaneous phenomenon of the tableau vivant or the living picture. And so we wondered if, like these scenes that a theater might not be limited to a stationary relationship between viewer and performance, but it might invite inspection from multiple vantages and engage in active moving body. So what we did is we took that historical imagery and we recreated the original ring as a very crude, intentionally crude 3D model. You can see some of the stills here. Then we designed a collection of objects, very large objects, and we took the renderings from different vantages and we projected those images over the objects. And so you can see here on the left, we're making the image, and then on the right, pushing that image out over all of the objects. So here in the overhead view, you can see that we did it from multiple angles and you get some of the stretching and artifacting of where the image, the image shadow, let's say, or these objects would receive the image and then get obscured and you'd see the shadows of those images on some of the objects. So the fragmented, this fragmented any single image of the historical ring and the multiple always in complete views. It's kind of a presence of the ghost of the original, but one that you have to kind of move around to truly experience. And so we are really trying to ask the subject for an active engagement in this kind of spatially dispersed and never quite complete experience of the original ring. It's always kind of flickering out of view. And so for us, this is a very contemporary urgent issue, which is how do you get away from that idea of bodily engagement as re-centering us in the body that might come from modernist sculpture, but rather the opposite of kind of disengaging the body in visceral experience. And so Frederick Jameson in his book on postmodernism, now several decades ago, he said that human beings might need to grow new sense organs in order to actually viscerally experience the postmodern reality of space. We obviously have not grown new sense organs yet. We're hoping that living picture and projects like it, that kind of architecture can meet us halfway and give us some visceral sense of what we know to be a kind of fractured experience on screens through digital imagery, but also in our bodies in space. And so while our aims were to produce a sense of fragmented digital experience, we still had to make seating a stage and cover from the rain and sun. In other words, we had to build it. So lucky for us, this challenge of putting images in space already has a well known solution, which is awnings. So we designed the entire project to be made out of awnings. It's cheap, you can print vinyl, you wrap them around these frames, and you could just bring them onto the site and assemble them there. And they're also designed to be weatherproof and last forever. Of course, it wasn't so straightforward. It took a lot of effort in figuring things out. But in the end, it was super satisfying to go from something that started as a digital rendering of digital renderings, those fragments mapped back on to a digital object and then being able to see it physically realized and experience it. So developing the imagery for the printed vinyl begins with the texture map that's provided by the software. And this image shows the collection of unrolled images from the digital model that we used to produce the competition materials. Each of these maps to a surface on one of the three dimensional objects in the project. And because we're interested in images as a material system, the constituent parts of the image become very important. So things like resolution, hue, saturation, contrast and so forth. And our desire to design the encounter, rather than simply build the rendering in a more reductive sense, means that something like resolution becomes a critical characteristic of the physical environment. In other words, what registers in human experience. And the resolution of the original files was too low to register the content at full scale. So in order to achieve a higher resolution, we recreated all of the imagery. To do this, we rendered elements as individual layers that could be recombined into new images, which become compilations of flat elements rather than perspectival views into a cohesive scene. So here on the top left, you can see an example of an image that wraps a tall cylinder that's been unrolled or flattened. And then the individual elements which are used to recreate the imagery. So the stone column from the original site and vegetation, things like tree trunks, leaves and bushes. And then this is the print file that's used to produce the vinyl wrapper, so the final compilation and composition of elements. And then here, the image of the installation which shows the way in which that image wraps the cylindrical object and the relationship between the imagery on the cylinder and the adjacent objects. These are unrolled images for one of the cones, the original render file on the left and the recreated imagery on the right. In addition to compiling the physical elements like the low stone wall and the plants, we worked to translate the glitches and distortions that are native to the digital process. So when we projected the rendering of the historical recreation, it of course produced idiosyncrasies as the image jumped across surfaces and space. And here you can see irregular edges, stretched pixels and scalar distortions that result from that process. And then an image of that same cone in the final installation. So working on the imagery in this way produced a particular relationship between the two dimensional unrolled surface and the three dimensional objects. One aspect is that the edges is that edges emerge on rounded objects like cones and cylinders. So once those objects are positioned on the site and the projection of the image skims across their surfaces, crisp edges show up on forms that typically would have none. Another aspect is that perspectival recession combines with flat elements like blue sky and the two tone green grid. So this grid, which is familiar to us as Photoshop's transparency grid is part of the digital nature of the image, its materiality and reveals the environment of digital production. Our interest in the materiality of images means that we initially approach the characteristics of the image quite literally. The grid is no longer an indicator of transparency as it was in Photoshop, but is now an integral part of the image. And we're interested in the way that the grid as a characteristic that signifies digitalness can be realigned. So in this project, using the grid as part of the imagery and physical space begins to integrate human and digital experience. And here are a couple more examples of the two dimensional image files and installation photos that show those images on three dimensional objects. So this big one is a photograph of the object on the stage. And then this is the two dimensional print file overlaid. So there's another level of detail in the imagery and the project, which is what we were calling stickers. These are Easter eggs. So things tucked between shapes are sprinkled on objects waiting to be discovered. There's signs of life and activity that we imagine taking place on and around the project. Picnic baskets, blankets, coolers, cheap plastic outdoor chairs, coffee cups, etc. And this type of imagery is different than the background imagery, because it's oriented to the physical site, which means we think of those objects as either sitting on the ground or sitting on top of other surfaces. So that's rather than the large scale sonography. So here you can see the placement of a chair sticker on the two dimensional image and the flat depiction of the chair and elevation contrasts with the perspectival space of the projected image. So that's the print file. And then here you can see that chair wrapping a cube on the site. So our interest in materializing images and the relationship between images and forms continues in projects that use photogrammetry. In particular, photogrammetry is useful because it separates these two things, image and form. It uses images of a physical object to create a digital version. And the process produces an image file or what's called a texture map and a three dimensional mesh model. Photogrammetry of a rock, for example, produces a texture map that looks like this. The texture map flattens a 3D surface into a series of 2D images using a UV coordinate system. So U and V refer to axes oriented to the object, as opposed to X and Y, which are globally oriented to the world. And this series of UV texture objects could be stitched back together in a digital model to reproduce the original rock. But considered on their own, the images can be recomposed into new rocks that bear resemblance to an association with their origin, but have a different logic. These aren't attempts to recompose the original, but to explore alternative figures and compositions. The edges of the texture map images aren't related to the rock form at all. They don't align with edges of the rock's geometry, but are determined by logics of the digital process. Here, a rendered image of a digital rock is used to produce a new three dimensional rock. This new object is constructed from image planes. The rendered image is sliced into rows of pixels and stretched or smeared across each layer to produce another more optically blurry version of the rock surface, now reduced to swatches and stripes of color. In this project, Arrange Life, a proposal for a house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, this approach to working on the materiality of images continues. The image of the mountains near the site, its rockiness and its rugged surface are used in multiple ways. The house is bound by two perimeter walls that echo the flat graphic quality of the Hollywood sign beyond and create a visual play between the scenographic and the physical mountain ranges. The project imagines a provisional domesticity where the typical hard divisions between rooms and functions gets replaced by episodic spaces that afford more fluid and temporary forms of occupation. Clusters of elements loosely delineate domestic functions. These clusters sometimes correspond to an underlying rectilinear grid, and other times are organized more casually. This top view shows the accumulation of objects that form the architecture of the house and the loose relationship between inside and out. And as I mentioned, rockiness as a quality and an image is taken up in two-dimensional profile in three-dimensional shape in surface textures and in colors. Seen again from above, but in full color with textures and images, rocks appear as thick, slumping, overlapping surfaces that pile up to produce a roof covering, crisp silhouettes that define the edges of surfaces, pixelated images and material finishes. In plan, a perimeter wall marks the house's south and east boundaries, and the house occupies the valley between the actual mountain range and this graphic one. The interior takes cues from Los Angeles's history of experimentation with single family homes, such as Craig Elwood's low-slung enclaves or Frank Gehry's early residential construction to propose a creative and resourceful mode of everyday life. And perspective views show how the lightweight metal framing and geometric primitives loosely interact to differentiate spaces within the house and to collect tools and belongings. The sections reveal how the house is conceived as an accumulation of objects that builds up in the space between the hillside and the perimeter wall. So these drawings, they're about depicting the building, of course, but they're also a means of exploring how digital and physical traits come together in hybrid representational formats. So here we're interested in the form of the building resonating with the surrounding mountains, but also with the printed imagery on the building resonating with the textures of the physical ground and the images of physical ground blending with digital representation of the ground in the image itself. A lot of this started in our Detroit reassembly plant, a rendering of which you see here. So this particular image is made by compositing photographs of material studies with high-resolution bump maps generated by those photographs, which is a means of producing digital texture through interpolations of a photograph, combined with rendered photogrammetry scans of the studies that are all post-processed to have additional texture taken from the photos. This kind of process takes materials as a starting point, then layers multiple translations of those materials in sequence to produce an end result that can't be parsed in terms of its inputs. Conventional notions of representation break down when materials are freely mixed with their copies over and over again. This process collapses digital and physical into one expanded form of materiality that includes characteristics of both. So in addition to representation as a means of visualizing physical proposals, which is the conventional notion of representation and architecture as it pertains to drawings and renderings, we're also interested in how cultural content is represented through contemporary forms of media. In the case of Detroit, there's arguably no topic more relevant to this discussion than so-called Ruin Porn, which are the highly aestheticized images of abandoned buildings in post-industrial cities that have gained global appeal through print and online media in recent years. The site of our project, the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant, which you see here, is one of the icons of Ruin Porn, and as such was necessary for us to contend with the aesthetics of Ruin Porn as part of our proposal, which is something that I'll return to shortly. The project itself was commissioned for the architectural imagination, the exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, curated by Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon. The curators chose four sites into Detroit and asked teams of architects to reimagine what might become of them in the future. So we were assigned the Packard Automotive Plant, which was a prolific automotive factory for a half century starting around 1900, but has been abandoned for decades. So we approached the site with a few basic assumptions. One, we wanted to acknowledge what was already there, like in terms of physical and materially, what is existing on site at this moment. We tried to avoid seeing it in abstract terms or as just potential for something entirely new. Instead, we wanted to approach it as a material reality that we would work with. So these are photographs from an initial site visit where we're both cataloging the state of the plant as it is, but then also taking notice of quite a bit of materials that are just laying about, some of which are perfectly fine condition. So the first thing we did was actually gather materials directly from the site. So copper pipes, bricks, concrete blocks, and then we began crushing up these materials, mixing them in heated molds to produce material samples. So here's a mixture of plastics and crushed up brick. We treated this as both a technical process and an aesthetic one. So we worked to perfect the details of the process, so the shape of the mold, the optimal distribution of heat, the right size of aggregate, but also explored the visual and textural combinations that the process would yield. So here's some of the studies showing the different aggregates, sizing, ingredients of the aggregates, but also just thinking about the patterns, visual patterns, textural patterns that you could produce by arranging them in certain ways. At the same time, we started to look at the Packard plant itself in terms of how it was built, what are the materials, what state is it currently in. We found that a substantial amount of the plant is in good structural condition. This is due largely to the fact that it was built, it was designed to be bigger than it is. So underneath this, these floating images is a ledger from the architect Albert Kahn, and you can see in the top left that it says designed for six stories, but built for two. So there was an idea that a lot of these structures would be bigger than they currently are. What this means is that a building of two stories could have the column sizing and the reinforcement that's proportional to a six-story building, which makes a lot of it cost prohibitive to tear down, which is one of the reasons, further reasons we wanted to work with what was existing on site. So these are original drawings. And then we began to think about how our proposal for reusing discarded building materials could combine with the existing structure to create a new building system, how we can make the materials modular, stack up to produce larger structures, etc. The proposed buildings are massive because when you're using a material that has little to no economic value, you can use a lot of it. This turns a liability, i.e. blight that requires demolition and discarding, and into an abundant material resource. Ultimately, we proposed four building types, which each had their own pet name. So this was the mountain. So this takes over the largest existing structure on site. It demolishes the slabs, but keeps the columns and reinforces them to compensate for the missing shear support from the slabs. And then around the columns we stack large monolithic chunks to produce a massive shell with a hypostyle hull like interior. This is the elephant, which is a thin translucent shell, which is cast in place around a portion of the existing columns and slabs. This we call the wire frame and chunk, where we're inserting large objects into the space of the existing factory to partition the continuous horizontal spaces into smaller zones of inhabitation. And of course the cone, which we proposed fabricating as freestanding shelters that could be shipped to different locations. In terms of the site and the program, which is up to the architects to develop in conversation with the curators, we proposed a plant dedicated to the process of reassembly. So materials gathered from local abandoned buildings and other regional sources would be sorted, processed, and utilized in experimental modes of construction. The first act would be the dismantling and rebuilding of the plant itself as a test case for the system, which for us harkens back to the beginning of the plant, which through our research we found to be constantly evolving through experimental modes of construction. So the architects brother Julius was an engineer and the two of them and their teams prototyped and patented many novel building systems that were exported across the world. Moving forward, our plant would service the region, taking in various material streams, sorting them, then fabricating building components that would be taken and used elsewhere. So on the far end of the site, on the south side of the site, we have an area where materials are trucked in. Next to that they're sorted. There's a space for fabricating and staging prototypes, exhibition spaces where visitors can learn about the process, and in the far end, which you see here, an institute dedicated to experimental construction. The model itself reflects our commitment to the physical nature of the proposal. So wherever possible we tried to build the model as we would propose building the building itself. Again, to eliminate abstraction and try to get the kind of material reality of the proposal like in the model itself. We also conceived of it as scenographic, which meant we saw it less as an object and more as a device to produce various scenes of inhabitation. So returning to notions of cultural representation. As I mentioned earlier, the inevitable context for this project is ruin porn. The aestheticized images of vacant decrepit buildings that in many ways produce the identity of buildings like the Packard plant. As it stands, these images signify narratives of urban decay and post-industrial decline. And these narratives are communicated in part through the materiality of the physical structure. The overgrowth of the vegetation, the patina grime of materials, the crumbling structures. Reusing materials maintains many of the qualities of abandoned buildings. But the new forms of the structures and the aesthetic manipulations we make to those materials evoke alternative narratives, not of urban decline. So in our work, we're not only interested in the physical immediacy of materials, but also materials mediation, which we see as an inevitability in today's digital milieu. We're not recuperating the authenticity of the original plant, but rather mobilizing its materiality towards different ends. Our colleague at Michigan, McLean Clutter, wrote an essay called Notes on Ruin Porn, published in your own esteemed Avery Review, and put it this way. In manipulating the aesthetics of urban decay, Team knowingly produces a project native to the very same media culture that has afforded Ruin Porn its recent prominence. In this sense, we might read into the project a trajectory toward the redemption of Ruin Porn, an attempt to co-opt the form and redirect it away from its conventional narrative of decline and toward narratives of urban resurgence, in which Detroit's ostensible depravity is traded for rich aesthetic abundance. Our proposal for the Packard Plant was speculative. The design was grounded in material research and prototyping. As Amal kindly noted in her introduction, representation for us is not the end product, but a means for developing an approach to building. So making prototypes and building the exhibition model helped us test different composites and casting methods that could scale up to a building assembly. This might be a non-conventional and a very massive building assembly, but one that could translate the vast amount of material that's currently distributed across the Packard Plant. These material strategies that we were speculating on in the Detroit Reassembly Plant have greater implication when we start to consider the staggering amount of material put into global circulation by construction and demolition activities. After waste, concrete is the most consumed substance on earth. And then in the United States alone, over 500 million tons of construction and demolition debris are produced each year. That's about double the amount of our municipal solid waste, so from our homes and commercial buildings and institutions. So this project classic order is really a first step toward realizing the strategy of reassembly at the scale of building. Commissioned for the designing for material innovation exhibition at the CCA in San Francisco last year, the project is an experiment in monolithically casting and monolithically thermocasting columns out of a combination of industrial waste and aggregates, which are composed of construction and demolition debris. So you can see in the surface there's concrete chunks and brick fragments and there's also a glass collet and this is combined with plastic that comes from industrial processes. So whereas the previous project was specific to Packard plants deteriorating and very iconic material pallet, here we're interested in how each composite would, how each composite could kind of register variations in local waste streams. So where we live, manufacturing and agriculture are two major sources of plastic waste. So these are some of the sources that we were combining and testing in these prototypes. Plastic order builds on an ongoing research project that Tom and I initiated in 2015 called Post Rock. And Post Rock is a material and a process which we modeled after a recently discovered type of stone which is called plastic glomerate. This is formed as plastic waste plastics in marine environments spontaneously fused with sand, rocks, seashells and other inorganic objects. Plastic glomerates are then a post-natural product of both human and ecological activity. So we can think of them as kind of tangible indicators of global environmental change. And given the inherent properties of plastics and stone they're likely to last for a very long time. So the premise of our research has been to determine how to make use of this emerging material as a resource for building by fabricating our own version, which we call Post Rock. So to us one of the very important qualities that we're trying to reproduce is each rock's distinct visual impact where different inputs whether it's a nylon rope or a seashell or a bottle cap remain somewhat distinct and legible in the surface. So if these post-natural rocks visually communicate the cultural and ecological territory of their formation could we author Post Rock to do the same? Different geographies of waste production might yield different palates of coloration, texture, and partial figures in the rock's surface. So whether that's kind of an urban beach ecology or a kind of Midwestern agricultural ecology. And again we're experimenting with fabrication methods for realizing these ideas at an architectural scale because it's important to us again to get beyond a purely representational practice. So we don't want to just call attention to these global matters of concern or kind of illustrate them through speculative architecture. We really want to produce experiences and building strategies that can take on our changing environmental conditions as material realities on the one hand and as mediations on the other. So for us plastic order was an exciting step toward making buildings out of garbage. Since the melting point of polymers that we're using are relatively low we could devise alternative methods to applying heat to the molds. So we designed a process that's similar to slip forming concrete which is used for like elevator cores and green silos. We're both the form work but of course in this case the heat source since it's thermocasting has to move up to allow for a continuous sequence of filling the mold and melting the plastic. And this is a way of kind of unifying the structure. So one of the methods that we tested placed the source of heat on the inside where the plastic material in the mold almost acted as an insulator. So the heat doesn't travel all the way out to the surface. So that's why you get a kind of rough chunky textured surface. And then the second method that we tested placed the heated panels on the outside which yields a very smooth kind of marble like finish on the visible surfaces of the column. So the finish and the aesthetic impact of each column is very different. And I'll just end by saying with this project that the name classic order is sort of capturing the classical orders of architecture which established mathematical rules of proportions, spacing and a kind of sequence of parts. But here a classic order is suggesting an approach to design based on material behavior under heat and gravity. And in geology a classed as an intrusion of a foreign stone or object into a different type of stone. So an architecture of a classic order then would combine but not necessarily assimilate. So if we understand materiality is a tangible link to larger ecologies and histories, then designed by reassembly places various material inputs into new contexts and affiliations. Ghost Box, our project for the Chicago architecture biennial this past fall, was a chance to further articulate many of these ideas. The project stages a vacant big box retail store as a kind of found condition. Within its partially disassembled shell a dense domestic landscape is constructed on mounds of redistributed material from demolition but also the kind of contents of the store. The exhibition curators Sharon Johnson and Mark Lee prompted us to consider architecture's relationship to precedent and history and we designed this project as a conscious dialogue with certain architects work. But I would say that we applied an almost literal interpretation of those precedents. We encounter them as images but also as constructed artifacts with entropic qualities. With the representation we tried to highlight this literal sensibility. The model is quite large. We scaled it to be big enough so that we could convincingly convey big box construction and details from four decades ago. So the model is scenographic in the way that in the space of the gallery people can kind of walk around it and gain these different views into the different program spaces. So here you see one of the dwelling units with the kind of shared public space in front of it. This is a sort of punch through the facade into a zone of shared programs. So a communal kitchen, bathrooms and so on. And this is the large civic space that occupies the kind of open corner where it's kind of excavated down to allow for a more monumental space. But the model is also scenographic in terms of the architecture itself operating as a kind of sonography. So we have large scale printed images that act as an additional material system in the building. Quasi landforms were generated by photographing kind of crumpled textured blankets that are also a part of the project. They hang from from the structure and these layer and flatten into profiled walls that act as kind of party walls between the dwelling units. Some examples of this. There's also a series of large banners along one edge of the interior with an image of blue sky meeting a textured ground. This provides a backdrop and a kind of horizon line that visually extends the interior and it also kind of recontextualizes these familiar building components. The feedback between physical materials and digital imagery is an integral to our idea of reassembly as architects to engage the contemporary spatial conditions that result from environmental and economic trauma. We have to look squarely at their material composition and their aesthetics. So to return to precedent for just a minute. It is probably evident by now that the ghost of sight the practice founded by Allison Sky and James Wines in 1970 looms very large in this project and other team work like a few other American design practices in the 70s sites work represents an unresolved relationship between postmodernism and environmentalism and projects like the best inside outbuilding site was working on the familiar media imagery of our typical spaces like big box stores as well parking lots. But they also challenge these images through the materiality and construction logics that were specific to these typologies often highlighting their entropic nature. However different from other postmodern postmodern architects for whom the image was self-referential to architectures history sites built images addressed environmental issues of the day. And they were building in a context that seemingly runs counter to an environmental agenda. So then the kind of discount retailer in a gleaming new suburbia similar to site we are committed to engaging reality as it is now an obsolete retail format in the crumbling first string suburbs or the accumulation of plastic waste or digital mediation artifacts and so on. And so for us reassembly is not nostalgic. It is about confronting the present with its characteristic instability between image and meaning as well as its entropic material dimensions from the scale of objects to planetary systems. We do this with optimism for architecture and for the alternate civic and environmental imaginaries it can produce. Thanks. Okay, I'm going to introduce another A in the team and discombobulate the old system. Okay, first of all, thank you guys for a great talk. Really nice to see all of you around this table and the round table and the multiple computers and the scrolling of images. Lots of great stuff. I have to start by saying that I hate the response. I'm not a big fan of the response. I actually really love when there can be a sort of urgency to the students response and the public response. I was very hesitant when I was asked to respond to you but by the same token I thought that there's not a lot of us that are so much in love with the Tritus and waste and therefore I felt compelled to come in and say my thing. So I want to talk a little bit more about waste or have you talked a little bit more about waste? In particular I was interested looking at your work even before hearing your work today at the relationship between waste and materiality and making obviously but also between waste and aesthetics and practice. And maybe starting from the first I want to start from the last model you showed the ghost box which I just saw recently in Chicago I was there in December. And so arriving at the biennial and seeing the model was super interesting. The model is big it has a big presence. For a moment I felt like I wasn't looking just at a model because on one end it's your observation on a real instance. So there is this issue. Ghost box is about retail, big box retail and everything so you're looking at it. But at the same time there is a lot of your intervention from the get go the way you crop the site, the way you crop the box. It immediately shows a lot of your creative mind and eyes and knowledge. And I felt I was like wow this is almost not a model it's a sculpture. And then I looked even closer and I thought I looked at what happens on the inside, I looked at the base. Of course the base is like the piece that has a stance, right? It's the fantastic moment. And in particular the exciting thing about this piece of rock that touches the ground only at the very bottom and then there is that pipe that comes out. That pipe is literally like the cherry on the cake, right? And it's a copper pipe, right? Is it? Sealed but you know it's suggestive also of water of course which is another big, big issue. So there's so much intelligence in there. At the same time when I looked at you know more closely at the especially what happens on the inside, I was really puzzled by what you call scenographic. And I kept thinking about can this be looked as a model? Can it be looked as a sculpture? Can it be looked as a prop or a set, right? So in an interesting way I came to a very close place where I thought of it almost as a theater piece in a way. And I just kept thinking also about the way you use the material in this idea of the redistribution which you put forth also in some of your theories. So the idea of taking materials from somewhere and then relocating them even within the same structure but allowing them to do something else. So I am really curious in looking at especially looking at ways there, I see that there is a component that is also aestheticized, right? And I want to put out a word that is kind of a non-word in architecture which is decorative. So when I looked at the piles of asphalt and bricks and the piles in general, in particular the piles, that sort of stayed with me. So on one end there is the compositional and the idea that these things are in motion but on the other end there is the decorative. And because your production is also very much focused on image making, I want to put out to here how much it is a value that you embrace, how much it is a value that you consider, how much it is a placeholder for actual strategies of understanding which partially you are also showing in the opportunity to actually test some of these ideas. Well I would say I wouldn't call it decoration. I don't think it's decorative, I think it's communicative. I mean James Wines in writing about his own work talks about using archetypes or using things that communicate beyond any kind of specific or specialist language and so that's why the big box or even the brick, the cinder block, even the bar joist ductwork, all that stuff communicates I think. And I'm not sure if I quite understand the question but you're saying do we mean to pile that stuff up and we would pile stuff up if we were given a commission or is it just in the model? We would definitely pile stuff up like that. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Although the pile stays a pile, right? So it talks as a pile but it also stays a pile. While instead there are moments in other projects like in the other Detroit project, the mountain, you call the building the mountain. The mountain is already suggesting a way in which the pile becomes possibly a building. Or at least that's how I see it, you know, where it gets thicker and it starts performing and it does something and especially if I think about the classic corridor tests on the material, you know, it makes me think about that so it goes beyond. Instead in those blocks, they really just sit there. There's many piles that just sit there. So I was just... These mics on. I think so. We can share. No, you've given me a lot to think about. I mean, one thing I would want to point out is just I think you're probably like our ideal like viewer of Ghostbugs being like a self-described lover of waste that maybe your reaction to the piles being kind of aestheticized or decorative wouldn't be another one's reaction where I think we got a lot of responses that found it quite like they were put off by it. And so that would be one thing to point out. But what your thoughts make me think about is the sort of the different processes of allowing the pile to become something else. So in the model, it's a kind of giant monolithic chunks in classic order. We're doing that in a more one-to-one scale where the material is literally piled up in the mold, but through the heating process, it becomes solidified and takes its own and takes a more, let's say like geometrically controlled form, the kind of the extruded square of the column. So it's interesting, I think what you're describing that the piles in Ghostbox haven't in that project, we didn't sort of apply a process to push the pile into something that might be more architectural or traditionally speaking architectural. Yeah, this ties to the second kind of question. You know, there are more provocations a question, obviously, but which is more about aesthetics and in particular the aesthetics of your images, which you talk about as also material. So it's an interesting thing. So in reality, the two things are not as disjointed. But so there are, there is the power of the fragment, which is, you know, the loose parts, the fact that you talk about pieces being independent and they're just deployed or juxtaposed or episodic, also quoting your words. And then there is the power of the mound, which I think is the big power here that I want to highlight and that I think it's an important thing to think about because it is also about potential energy, right? So that mound, when you when you see it, talks a lot about what it can become. And it's a super interesting and very, very original, I think, way to think about materials and waste. And then I want to as a little bit of a provocation, I want to bring instead the thought on the images themselves, because I think that the images, a lot of the originality that is in the work and is in the physicality of the models and the way you think about things, the images for me are somehow belong more to the realm of academic production right now. And I want to put this out also because I think it's connected to the way you run your practice, the fact that you are all academic and all academics and then you do this. And you also do it individually, but then you come together to do it within practice. I think it's a very unconventional way of running practice. At the same time, I wish that the imagery that are out of the work could carry on more of a voice that is not just the academic voice of right now. So my provocation was to ask you if original was a value for you, if it was something of relevance, and then I simplified saying, are you satisfied with the color pink, which is just a generic place older to say that there is a lot of the, from the tones, the colors, the composition of what you're doing that belongs to this post-post, post-modern, post-Dekirico, post-Sotzthas, post, you know, we can post a lot of things, post-rocks. But I would like for you to, you know, to respond to that. Do you see it? Is it something that you see? Do you see that you belong to something that is larger? How much do you feel that you're, it's exciting to be part of that? How much you feel you want to lead? And I say that in particular because I think that because of your place of origin as a practice, Detroit, you are dealing with something that is so much raw and so much stronger that in a way the expectation I feel can be very high. I maybe won't speak for every, all of us, I'll speak for myself, but I think I like to see us poised at the pivot between the two. So I think it's true that we are historically a more academic practice and that the work that we do is exhibition and installation based, but I think that isn't where we would like to remain. I think we have a lot of desire to build. We're very appreciative that Amal referenced that at the end of the introduction. We hope that that's true as well. And I think the first project that we showed, Living Picture, which is a built project, or maybe a question for you would be, do you think that the imagery of that project could be characterized differently? Or do you see it still in the same genre as the other images say? No, I actually, you know, it's interesting that you ask because my next point was more also in the future of the practice, which is super exciting, I think for all of us, right? Like you have so much and you're so young and so much to move forward. And I was also very curious looking at the making. Of course, the awning is a fantastic thing. So it's again a sign of your intelligence and ingenuity in approaching both the material and the thought and the intellectual, but also like, OK, here is this thing that is there, is readily available and we can make something big and quick and light. At the same time, there are the exploration on testing the material, the material with the plastic and with the idea of the cast. And they seem to be very different. So I wanted to ask you in growing and thinking about growing in scale and in ambition and possibly also towards architecture, how much you saw yourself moving towards something light, like the sticks and the skin that some of the project shows, including a show, including some of the cast project, because even in the packer plant, the dome, you call it the elephant, the elephant for me belongs to the same realm of living picture. So it's a frame that has a skin on top, no matter what the shape of the skin is, whether it's more organic or more geometric or instead, how much you think that you will move towards weight. And when I look at classic order and I look about the mountain in the packer plant project, I think that there is something really interesting in this idea of mass. So I just wanted to put it out. Light or mass. This is what we wake up screaming. What are we going to do? Yeah, maybe a response to a couple of other questions. I think that the question about our context and let's say the focus on imagery maybe seeming like it belongs to the realm of the academy and circulates amongst academic architects and graduate students. And it belongs in that world and therefore is influenced by the aesthetics of that world. I think that that's true. I think what was interesting for us and exciting for us about the packer plant one was engaging thinking about like ruin porn as another form of other cultural phenomenon that exists and is disseminated through imagery. And so I think that that is a that's a moment when let's say the image culture of architecture or this kind of rarefied architecture that we practice and a larger cultural circulation and communication of images which are tied to other like sociopolitical economic regional context can kind of come together and maybe a community like a conversation can be developed that's internal to our proposal. So I think that's a kind of bridge. And I think in order I think that's something we want to continue to think about because I think image culture is not a disciplinary. It's happening in architecture but it's happening everywhere as well. And so it's it's like it needs to we need to contend with it. I think in terms of yeah I mean living picture the first project the theater is exciting for us because it was I think we were maybe intuitively working through a lot of these issues in the drawings of the Detroit reassembly plant. And that's when a lot of this like confusing but intentional merging of material physical qualities and digital representations and digital copies started to emerge. I think we're living picture we kept asking and I think there's always like a vector towards like literalizing all of this. Right. So we want to again with the Detroit reassembly model we want to build it the way that we would propose building the building when you're trying to literalize images that's a different problem. And so we're this is why we're going to kind of great lengths to sort of maintain the characteristics of the projection of the digital images in the digital model and and reproducing that in the final thing. So I think that like images moving out of the realm of just this dissemination and Instagram and like into the physical world and engaging human subjects like a perceiving subject is definitely a part of the future of the work. I think maybe Ghostbox there was both there was banners there were sticks and there were screens and there were images hanging but then there was also piles and maybe I think your point which I agree with Meredith I'll continue to think about after tonight this idea that the pile then is maybe rendered less. It's almost like it's brought into the kind of discursive realm of the imagery and maybe closer to decoration and becomes less let's say performative or making something new. So maybe that's territory that we didn't anticipate coming out of the piles next to the pictures of the piles. But I think Ghostbox maybe has both and I think until we figure it out we'll probably continue to keep both. Well you definitely open a really really interesting world and I think that again the Detroit base of it I think is allowing you to see these instances that are not at all just of that world. That's what is interesting. You know it's about obsolescence of buildings and infrastructure and it's about landfill materials and construction being number one on that. So I think you're digging into something that is super super interesting. So bravo and producing beautiful stuff. So nothing better than waste becoming beautiful. We all need to learn. So I think with this I would love to open it after we put this filter and see if you guys want to jump in. Hi. How are you doing? Welcome to New York. I had a question. I mean I find the robustness of the work you do extremely impressive like the range of techniques and the coherence with which they're pursued and it leads me to wonder to what extent and this I think relates to something Adam you were just saying to what extent both the formation of the practice itself and the work that you do was more of an intuitive occurrence that came out of the context you were working in in Michigan and your preexisting relationships to one another or a more say strategic decision to combine certain talents that you each had towards something that could occupy a kind of niche within the contemporary landscape and related to that to what extent the aesthetics the practice and the or just say broadly the interests of the practice are contested amongst yourselves and sort of debated and arrived at through maybe a kind of rational process of understanding what you could contribute versus a more intuitive feeling out of what you all have in common if that makes sense. We get a version of this question a lot and I think it's because there are four of us. I think if there are one or two of us up here probably wouldn't be as interesting to ask about the internal processes. I mean a lot of it is this. It's just four laptops around a table and it's not any more complicated or glamorous than that. But we have we have known each other for a while and actually when we all met it would be kind of hard to imagine us working together on the same set of issues. But I think the four of us are all committed to what we see as the most urgent issues facing architects today and those just seem to become clearer and clearer. And so as our individual practices progressed and began to focus maybe outside of our own academic training things that are happening outside of the academy and in practicing in the world more broadly just made more and more sense that our practices began to overlap. I don't know if you guys have anything else to say. I would just say it was intuitive and not strategic. I don't I think it's actually bad strategy probably to have a four percent practice in that we're much less efficient I think because we do debate and discuss and kind of truly collaborate on the work. And so I think those conversations and those meetings with all of our laptops take up a lot of time. But I think we're obviously committed to that collaboration because we believe that the work it produces is better than what we would do by ourselves. Yeah. And I think that this touches on what Tom is saying. But I think working on individual ideas seemed more and more. Yeah. The issues became more and more alike and more and more tied to the outside world. So I think those issues for us are like ubiquitous digitality and computation algorithms like influencing every aspect of our life and like the environment. And so I think a lot of what we talk about like comes down to those issues and how do you work on them through design as architects through materials. And like that doesn't seem like a idiosyncratic individual project that's just like what we all need to be thinking about. So doing it together seemed to be natural intuitive. But also just open up a lot of possibility that we weren't maybe feeling individually. Hi. So something I noticed both in the introduction and your own individual presentations was you were kind of shying away from trying to be boxed into just being critical or speculative. And something that Meredith also said was that you're interested in responding to economic trauma. So like I understand that the rubble from the Detroit factory in particular is very cheap but that the processes of photogrammetry and the labor required to do projection mapping and melting plastics and keeping the fumes from polluting the area maybe isn't as cheap. So do you see part of your practice as having to like potentially persuade Detroit citizens that this version of their factory is like desirable and that the capital required to make this new version of the factory desirable through kind of like these really beautiful renderings and images. Thanks for that question. I think it's a good one. I guess I'll answer it by describing a little bit more some of the research that we've been doing on combining plastics and construction debris together and that yeah right now it's probably not a very economic process but in terms of material availability I mean it's just everywhere right. And if we can find a way to reuse it and to make new structures I think that would be really fantastic. And we currently are working on we have a patent on the way and the idea of working with a department at University of Michigan the idea is to license it for free. And so that it's not just our sort of intellectual work and research that would make this that would kind of improve it over time but that there are others that could kind of contribute to the process of developing that technology and the techniques for this like monolithic thermocasting of that mixture. So kind of I guess in addition to the work that we all do we're also researchers at a research institution and so we have these opportunities to actually like see this get out into the world through different channels and so that's one channel that there's the potential for that. I think I think to respond directly to your question about Detroit and would we propose building that in Detroit and convince people through the images. I think that that is a response to the context of the exhibition. It is responding to the context of Detroit and the site that we were asked to think about. I think the way to let's say mobilize the ideas of that project are probably not through a giant building of that scale. I think it will have to be more at the level of like systems and material ecology. So I think the way that we start to think and talk about it now are more like how do like considering how materials move about the world like to think of buildings not as a static object but as like materials in motion that come from a mine or a factory are you know solidified in a structure for a moment in time of various durations and then eventually demolished and discarded and moved elsewhere. And how could you maybe think about that and engage that process to maybe move materials into new locations and for new uses. So I don't think the way of like let's say cashing in on some of those ideas or you know trying to yeah put those out into the world is through that exact proposal. I think it's a different conversation but it's the ideas are scalable and have you know purchase on that context. Yeah I also just wanted to say that we don't live in Detroit we live in Ann Arbor which is a world away in some in some respects and earn many respects and so I don't think we ever saw our role as going into the city and trying to convince anybody of anything. I think what we were happy and grateful for the opportunity to do was to produce ideas and kind of images and imaginations let's say of alternative ways to think about this material. So to kind of offer that as a something which might provoke new conceptions of what that materiality could be as opposed to a kind of literal like you know trying to come in there and build this thing on that site but we are interested in that material system so as Meredith said it is a kind of strand of research and a classic order you know was our first attempt to kind of work full scale with that material system. So I just want to be clear we don't live in Detroit. This is a lot of answers to one question but I do know I think it's important like we mean all this stuff but obviously we still work through representation and it moves and it communicates and so our colleague Lyda Geeray she's the woman behind the Instagram project stock that you guys may know and she's talked about her own work is making images of really banal materials and she's like you know if she photographs a center block it doesn't make you want the center block any more than you did before it makes you want the image the image of the center block is what's at stake and so I think like we make images of stuff and we actually want the we want you to want the image but also the content of the image so it's like yes these images circulate and they are rhetorical but I think that ultimately the proposals in the images are what we want one to project into so I think that I mean just to go back to McLean Clutter's quote it's like using you know taking the kind of attention and energy around ruin porn and redirecting it to get people's attention and to get to get to people get people to just reimagine the possibilities I think is I think that's a lot of work to already get done even if we can't get it realized yeah thank you for sharing as one of four I'm sure you're good at sharing and thank you for the presentation tonight I think it's sort of a historic occasion that this is probably the first night since 1988 that the word hippostyle hall is has been used in a lecture at the wood auditorium at G-SAP and I would not have expected you guys to be the ones to use such a classical neoclassical phrase so I got excited and it made me start to think of you as neoclassical architects and of course classic or whatever that word is a classic classic classic plastic it's very close somehow so I like thinking of you as neoclassical architects and I wonder if you would welcome that and in what way that would be useful to your practice in terms of systematicity and what is the difference between a semi-circle and an arch or between a cylinder and a column and and is that is that territory useful to you as post post post modernists and then the other thing I got excited about is to hear this word artifacting Tom which happened in the middle of the sentence about the various digital visual translations in the scenographic work and you know I sort of understand that word to mean what happens when you get a sort of interference between two different software environments and the result is these kind of traces this artifacting in the image these anomalous interruptions and and disturbances but then I thought is there a is there an artifacting in your material practice like archaeologists you collect the artifact from the site you reposition it you confound future archaeologists so is there an artifacting in your material practice that's analogous to the digital practice so yeah those are both great questions I think the first one like I always joke about this but I don't know if I would I don't know if it would call us neo post neoclassicism that there are a lot of posts and neos in there but I think like I would feel like I've achieved something as an architect if we invent a new arch because I like the arch is the best it's the it's the most amazing architectural invention because it performs like materially and structurally and it also just like looks like something icon like the Romans invented like the thing I think and so if we could we're just that's what we're trying to do like the new arch it's like both a visual system and it's a material system and it does a lot of good or I guess bad work in the world depending on what the Romans were up to that century but the verdict is mixed what's that it's a mixed verdict yeah yeah yeah so I mean I don't know like you guys probably have a lot to say about this we we definitely are not modernists I mean so much of our work just has to do with reference you know it's not obviously there's a lot of material there but it's never about the authentic experience of the material it's not always about mediating it so I don't know I mean neoclassicism no but we're not like afraid of any historical reference and we're not afraid of any kind of contemporary or media reference like it all just kind of gets flattened for us because I think what we're ultimately interested in with a lot of this is just communicating to the broadest audience possible with the work the artifacting one I don't know that's tougher I mean certainly I think that's where that word comes from when talking about like glitches and you know other issues digital imagery and digital display but I'm not sure I'm gonna have to look it up because certainly yeah we're we're like collectors of stuff but it's never any one thing that's precious like we don't you know like it's a pile of rubble or it's like a bunch of bricks and maybe a brick shows up in the surface but it's not about like this brick like it's never a cabinet of curiosities it's always kind of a palette of totally recognizable things and maybe even idiosyncratic sometimes but never I don't think there's ever a preciousness given to one specific object and I'll let you guys add to this yeah I was thinking maybe instead of archaeologists were just like material processors and so we're never I think searching you know for the for the precious thing but we are constantly I think reprocessing and reprocessing our own material both physical and digital so you know we things move pretty fluidly for us between physical modeling and prototyping and digital instantiations of those things and then back again into the physical world and I think that slides kind of across and between projects where we're just always processing that stuff whether it's digital or physical yeah so okay my first question is about sort of the literalness of the representation both in terms of drawings and models you seem to have sort of a value on on something that sort of looks built I'm just sort of wondering what that gets you why what where is the what why do you value things that are real and then and then the other thing is sort of an observation about the this or one major built project you showed at the beginning the theater that's the one of the few built projects but it's also one that appears for the most abstract right the platonic objects and the should dematerialized wrappings so sort of like what's with that sure thanks I would distinguish between literal and real and and this may be in terms of the R wave of using that word and I think we do talk about making things appear literal often times in terms of the kind of value we bring to our representation but I would distinguish it in terms of the way we use literal colloquially colloquially when you say something's you know we we say this in a way that means oftentimes a mistranslation so you can look at let's say if an image or photograph or representation of something if you take it literally it's often not correct but there's a reading into something a kind of let's say reading into it a kind of reality that's not necessarily our reality and so I think in the representations of Detroit reassembly plan and ghost box to produce something literally was more about having the viewer really sort of buy in at least momentarily to sort of read this as a kind of complete world even if it's not realistic yeah I would also say that like today the binary between like real and represented is different than it used to be I think that our conventional notion of representation is architecture as we you know we produce drawings of a more real thing to come or photograph is a less real copy of like a physical object out there in the world that if you really want to experience you have to go there and inhabit it and I think that today like images are real like they circulate and have power and communicate and are just things that we need to contend with that said I think that we don't like are it's important for us to get to understand that is like an unavoidable context of a static and creative production today but to not let it stay in the realm of the digital or to stay on the screen but to like get out into physical space so that those characteristics are made inhabitable they're made spatial and it does invite and anticipate a human subject there and so it becomes mixed and I think that those terms just need to evolve today and they're constantly evolving and I think they evolve like in every project that we do so thanks very much I have two brief questions first is to what extent the possible mediums project created a kind of precondition for your guys formation and to what extent do you think it influenced your work now and second one is why team and why not meet or meta or meet or meta yeah do you know that Adam is a co-possible mediums person okay so yeah for those of you guys who don't know that that's a possible mediums was a series of events soon to be a book it was a conference that I co-organized initially with Kelly bear Christie Ballet and Kyle Miller the four of us were all teaching in the Midwest and it was basically trying to bring together a lot of us in our generation who are working in different but similar ways and on similar problems and to try to produce a kind of conversation around the work that was happening I think that one principle why don't we've ever talked about possible mediums as a precursor to a team but I do think that there was a spirit of like influence and communication that's at the core of the possible mediums project that I think is about having ideas taken up by others sharing ideas sharing techniques and having it kind of produce this weird soup of creative potential that many people are pulling from kind of breaks down the individual author and there's some more collective strange creativity happening in terms of team versus meta I think I don't know that possible mediums is the preconditions team but I think there's something that preconditions both team and possible mediums which is that like almost 10 years ago now for whatever reason there was this real influx of young kind of academics into the Midwest and so Kentucky Ohio State Michigan UIC we all found ourselves with people that we had gone to graduate school with or knew when we were grad students and so I think that kind of preconditioned this like we all arrived at Michigan at the same time not together and impossible mediums both we found ourselves there but there were all those schools had new deans or administrators or chairs that I think valued young architects and valued speculative design and they hired a lot of young architects that were just hungry to do work and supported them in various ways and it created a culture of creativity that I think was different than the coasts which is where we were coming from in terms of our education or the offices that we worked at so I think there was a lot of foresight and in terms of the heads of those schools imagining kind of strange middle where things were happening I've given the signal for one more but it's already been engaged bunch. Yeah I guess I'll just follow up on that what the what does your what does does something about being in Michigan drive you maybe to deal with some of these this populist imagery such as big box stores or even just the internet which is like in a lot of ways the most populist thing out there because some someone mentioned earlier but that kind of being an academic realm to work in these like image references but I was kind of thinking that maybe it's not so academic anymore that maybe some of these things are actually extremely popular especially the language of the internet. So I enjoyed the James Wines reference I think that that's exactly I never thought of that in your work until Chicago and so yeah I guess is it about the midwest or is it about maybe finding references that are outside of our traditional discourse. Well one note about site and the internet is we got a lot of great feedback online about that project we've got a lot of what are they called again trolls yeah lots of trolls pointing out to us that there was a best store project that looked like what we had just done that we had ripped out clearly ripped off but I mean so I think that's actually it's still is I'm going to give the trolls some credit because there's a challenge there because on the one hand you could say like yeah we are engaging the world as it is and we're looking out yeah like exurban Michigan if I don't think it's like necessarily what totally drives our work but it's there and we look at it because it's a part of American urbanism at the same time we're making a very academic reference in an exhibition for sure the public but mostly architects and the design public so yeah like we can take that criticism like making a reference to a project that was dealing with the reality of you know suburban and exurban development like yeah that is where we sort of come down as being maybe more academic than we like to but we also see that is like it's just it's inspiration it's reference and yeah I don't know it's the trolls got us on some level they did got to give it to them yeah well it's kind of it's funny I mean the internet yeah internet populist maybe sure I mean I don't think we're interested in the populist nature of the internet I think we're interested in it more like yeah as like preconditioning our experience of the physical world and yeah as another way that architectural ideas circulate as images but I don't know if we're interested in it it's like a forum for you know people to communicate about their angry opinions about things I thought you were going to ask like what do people who don't use Photoshop think about the green grid is that they thought it was a picnic tablecloth so I mean it was really interesting to us we had never it had never even occurred to us and they thought it was really apropos and it was a beautiful like gingham pattern you know I think that's what's so interesting for us about the way images traffic in the world on accident way hey now okay I think that's it thank you