 to see you back for what happens to be our 189th episode of think-taker-wise human-human architect here. In our continued search to check on more tensegrity for our tropics, we're broadcasting live from both ends of the world, one me and where Mr. Pensegrity Fry Otto had one of its most prominent projects, the Olympics in 72, and to Tucson, Arizona, where his collaborator and friend Larry Medlin is. Hi, Larry. Good to have you back. It's nice to be back. Let's jump right in where we ended last time with this first slide here because very emotionally we ended when we last saw each other in 2014. You had moved on and were able to see Fry one last time before he passed away then the year after and got the Pritzker Prize well deserved. But before we leave Stuttgart, his place where he was heading the Institute for Lightweight Structures and had his firm nearby, we want to show here how his work is lasting in its impact. We're looking at Stuttgart 21, which is currently under construction and our previous guest, Ulf Meyer, who we had on the show way back and we want to have him back to talk about his expertise of architectural criticism and the importance of that. Ulf had been working from Christoph Ingenhofen who is the architect and right now the executive engineer is who I had the chance to have in school as my structural professor and handover for a year who is one of Stowback, but the initiating engineer and architect was in fact Fry Otto and we see him at the very bottom left there pointing out the initial sort of pencil project here and it reminds you a lot Larry of your guys pioneering days right and explain more in detail why. Well right after I left Germany I was invited as the guest at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale where Buckminster Fuller was and there I was exploring with soap films explaining some of the principles with the students and then I was showing them how to make soap films and how to do it and then I turned it over to one student and I said you know play around with it for a little bit and one of them said well well what if I lift one side up and pull the other side down I said well let's try it and he did it and made a very interesting form so that was done literally in 19 time it was 1960 late 1967 and then at Washington University of St. Louis later I had a chance to build an experimental membrane structure which you see in the top row with the pictures of the design model and then on the left hand slide there you see a photo of that actual structure there and that was sort of an idea that was developed further from that point in Fry Otto's development of the project you were just talking about which will serve as the new train station in downtown Stuttgart. Exactly and I was just watching a video from the client where Ingenhofen gave a talk and we it's actually been executed in concrete which is a little surprising and again Fry as we kept talking not afraid of constructive discourses basically was also a little bit critical of the project after the fact but I think it also shows that you know how much bigger this idea is and that it can inspire indeed you know structures in different embodiments and different materializations just as well and again him his you know his legacy living on even or particularly in in his city of Stuttgart but let's move on and go to the next slide because as he as we're showing here his work has not just stayed in his home country in Germany right what are we looking at which other parts of the world Larry? That's the temple in the middle of the garden in Mecca there those were made out of one foot by one foot stained and painted glass tiles. Yeah so that's in Saudi Arabia and in Riyadh and already at the conference that you were attending he had someone from that region sitting next to him which we cropped out and put at the very top left and we're looking at another continent at the very bottom right? Yeah that's a conceptual design he did of the one of the first actual sort of use of the space net concept as a structural element and that was a proposal for a pavilion for the country of India and the idea was that it would be taken from town to town and set up and re-elected in different places it would be a place to display cultural artifacts and historical artifacts and stuff so it was a way of inside of India to introducing all the sections of the country to the interesting variety and the variations and the dimensions to its own culture. Absolutely but the other main continent in the world the United States of America and let's go the next slide he basically continued to leave to guess to whom to you Larry he already started that as we were talking about when he was invited for the MoMA for an exhibit and he basically said well you Larry do it because it's your country it's your culture and so to be continued so one of the first projects when you went back we see at the bottom right explain what we're looking at but we're looking at actually three different images of projects right there on that slide the one at MoMA which was manufactured by Peter Strohmeier and then afterwards I had to find a way to get a manufactured and done in the United States so the large picture is the Crown Center Plaza and that's actually the same conceptual form as the high-low model that we talked about earlier that that was a basis for the conceptual ideas for the German Pavilion and this is in Kansas City, Missouri and it's two pieces to the pavilion it's two 75 foot by 75 foot squares to make a in this case they're put together to make a 150 foot square and the interesting thing that these also show is those were a vinyl coated polyester materials there and they were intended to be portable so that they kept them up for nine months of the year but they could also put one of the pavilions on the upper plaza one of the lower plaza so it gave them a chance to plan on many different ways for different cultural events and then the upper right is a slide of the adaptive recreation center in Tucson, Arizona which is 30 years later the the the the previous slide was made by Walter Byrd but I had to go and talk to him in Buffalo, New York he was famous for his doing his radar domes and he knew how to use fabric and had great vocabulary and awareness in many samples of fabric materials so that was made of vinyl coated polyester and then the range in the 30 year period or 40 almost 40 year period to the one in the adaptive recreation center and that's a Teflon coated fiberglass material so that the vinyl coated polyesters will last depending upon where it is and what the climate 10 to 12 years and then theoretically the Teflon's supposed to last 30 to 40 years. All right and let's look at some more of your applied research as Larry and go to the next slide which first gets us at the very top left to the place you continue to stay where you are broadcasting from from your Tucson, Arizona and that was around the time when you started there in the mid 70s right? Oh no in the mid 70s I was at Washington University in St. Louis. Oh you still were okay when did you start in Tucson again then? In 1973. Okay all right okay. The slide that we're looking at on the left that also shows the the duration for which you can use materials those are just simply polyester stretch fabric material and that's used to stretch out and cover an alley a north south alley with the high buildings on each side so those shade structures not only provide shade for the area there but they also keep the sun from being absorbed by the masonry mass of the adjacent buildings and the asphalt on the pavement so that it was possible in midday in Tucson, Arizona to have a summer micado underneath there and sell things and that's that's a temporary structure like that and then over on the right the blue structure that that was a project done for the National Endowment of the Arts sponsored that for new performing environments for symphonic music it was at a time when positions were going from you know part-time employment to full-time employment and the arts foundations were interested in finding ways for them to do things outside the venue so this is one of several concepts that we did this is a St. Louis County governmental plaza that's again a polyester stretch fabric it's a deck and the county plaza that's up with the parking garage below and so the day before that show windows were open and cables were tied outside of the building over sandbags and down tied underneath to the deck below and then from that that blue thing was suspended and that was put up in literally there for a day or two so it's a portable structure that could be used literally as a part of our cultural facility in any place and you said the conductor liked it because it's swinging and swinging and the wind was just in line with his choreography right that's right and then he asked me did you intend that and my answer was yes maestro the thing that works very nicely there is there's an arcade behind that so that's an acoustical resonating chamber so sound is protected out there so it works very well with a natural acoustic yeah and you also didn't shy away from you know having your expertise applied to commercial structures like malls and let's zoom on to the very bottom left the bottom left is an interesting firm that's the Yuma Palm Stopping Center in Yuma Arizona and it's right on the border between Arizona and California and this is a mall that runs literally from sort of southeast to northwest and it's at an angle but you can see it's got shade structures all the way along that with intermittent cool towers that provide cool air and spaces so you always have the choice when you're walking in that mall walking in the shade or walking on the more shaded side of the more sunny side and the middle row of pictures gets us back to Tucson right yeah that's that's the northwest community center and the flowing wells area and what we're looking at there is a courtyard with landscaping in with a lot of vegetation and then the shade structures that are oriented so we're in the bottom picture what you see is how what the high over said sun's sun's summer sun sees it shades most of the air and the upper one is how some of the sunlight gets through it and the openings in between in the winter when the sun is lower but the advantage of that structure it made it possible for all of the the activities that surround that courtyard to be glass facades because again it's shaded not only from direct sunlight at the time but it keeps the area shaded so they could open and close sliding doors to let activities and all of the things on the four sides move in and out of that plaza indeed and as we also see in all of them you're bringing color to it right as one of the new things you've been adding to there've been monochromatic a lot before that and you're bringing color to them also which is to the one that that's left at the very bottom right which is this sort of you know reusable kind of adaptive structure right that that's the erosional spirit that was an exhibit designed for the university of areas centennial in 1985 and there you see it that's when it was I think in and a pine top one of the rural areas it traveled to every county fair the state fair shopping centers in Tucson and Phoenix it was on the u of a mall exhibited twice and what that was a travel company linus a band and that band was provided as a sport structure and so when we got to a place that provided a place to put vertical posts and then we just unfurled from that the in that case a stretch fabric a shade structure and then it was nailed down a post around the perimeter and that had different modes of areas around it it had exhibits about items at the university had a performance stage it had you could go inside and then electronic contact with the university on one side it had an exhibit about the history of university so it was meant to be able to communicate to the citizens of Arizona what the University of Arizona was doing and what it was doing with both its teaching research and service and so we're going to see in one of the next slides of that same structure was reused yeah let's let's go there and again just make sure what we've been talking about the previous projects you've been doing with fry they were in tempered canada and montreal and equally tempered munich germany here we're talking hot arid right and you told me that here on the ground without your interventions it would have been or was 140 degrees fahrenheit right that's like what 45 degrees celcius for so that 1987 on the phoenix civic plaza called the solar oasis the slide it's the same infrastructure the same but this time it's a permit vital coated polyester tent that's used there it's oriented to the south so a little bit of low winter sunlight would get through and then warm air rises up and vents out the top so you always get a nice breeze through it and the downward or restraining curvature direction follows the arc of a high overhead summer sun so that were the two cool towers which are the devices with a adaptive cooling pad that draws in natural air and drops cool air and floods the space with cool air two zones and that allowed people to use that in the middle of the summer when it was all 110 15 degrees use it in the middle of the summer even to go there and eat lunch and view activities in the summer by reducing temperature that way the bottom two slides show an aerial view of the overall of that and one of the elements on the right yeah absolutely and the cooling towers by the way you also always used to do with the students as one of the first projects they ever did as to you know get them sensitized about their very specific climatic conditions you always had them you guys always had to build a cooling tower but you just didn't you know leave it with you know designing for for human beings but also for animals and not that far away a little further west on the on the continent of the United States you've been building an LA for birds and let's go to the next slide and let's look at the the top project first the top row is the Children's Zoo in Los Angeles and we designed a series of different enclosures and what you see here is the model of an enclosure on the left and the actual mesh material on the right it was a mess material because this was for small birds and as they could fly into the mesh without becoming injured and we also did you know chain link materials and other things for different kinds of enclosures we even went to a one inch by one inch chain like so that we could provide safety in a more secure environment for animals that had claws or things like that to provide check protection mm-hmm and then there are the condors you designed for at the bottom right that that's right there was a California condors were almost extinct and they're a very important bird bird in the ecology of the desert and there were only 25 25 left in existence and half of them were put in this facility at the Los Angeles Los Angeles Zoo which is this which I'll explain in a minute and the other half in the zoo in the San Diego Zoo and the reason we got this project was that we realized that if you think of a chain link fence it's just a long literally stretched tensile band and so they wanted this facility to be first of all it was in a part of the zoo that was available was a back part and it was very steep hillside and that was a desirable circumstance because uh when the condors were in there they could fly and what was a series of six flight pins and and but when they weren't flying they could walk up and down the hill so they'd develop their pectoral muscles and be much stronger you know more athletic so they'd have a better chance of surviving and and the reason we got this job which was also the design project with TAK which is a design bill project with TAK which fabricates items all over the world and is excellent at doing things like that so we we prefabricated these components and the way we got this built was we took chain link fencing strips and draped them up in the air and then we uh cut channels down to the earth and then dropped chain link dividers in between that so we literally built this pavilion from the sky down and and the the logic of the way it works is up at the top is a series of blinds those are places where the scientists observed the contours the reason they're playing it painted black is so that the condors won't see their own shadow and get spooked and then there's a series of nest box down at the bottom of the hill now that program has been very successful uh they keep nature shows and things i just saw a program where there's over 500 healthy condors now and they showed a series of slides of how they're breeding naturally and remote areas and the various parts of the desert and all throughout the southwest thanks to you kudos to that and we we put in that little picture of uh of fry autos aviary in munich up there and again your your work is a continuation of that on your continent and that gets us to the next slide which is the beginning of a of a larger um research um publication that we want to talk about and to put this into perspective again we throw in the little two slides quotes from the past you know just reminding us how you both had been kicking off so amazingly having had the chance so early in your careers to build one of the most important typologies that you can think of um a world's fair pavilion but um again if we look at uh little picture to the right um we don't want to forget that you reminded us that fry very early in which we call his little bird berlin bow housey in box he was already investigating in in much bigger things and basically you know um in whole communities in whole neighborhoods and and this is what you then you know immediately after returning from having been so successful with with uh with design building a real thing and large scale and you know been shown to the world you went back together with your students and did studies how you how you can apply that to larger and habitation for the many people in need right and let's talk about that that a little bit tell us the context and then also tell us what we look at at this sort of suggestive illustration well with this these were done at washington university in st lilas they were done basically from 1967 to 73 and there was it was actually two studies one was a architecturally conceptual model of how you could build a space net system and the image is a suggestion of how it might look on a real site that we made it work into and test it and we'll see images more images of that later that's what this image shows but also to test that we built a physical test structure where we actually built a real space net and that was also built on the campus part of a university of washington university in st lilas and it uh it was for us it was an experimental structure but it was also a vehicle for an art fair and a festival and the exhibits of various items in and around and about it but it allowed us to actually physically build a space that experimental structure that was about uh 60 feet long by about 30 feet high so it was big enough to really test some of the principles and ideas at close to full scale and then this this this part was actually done after the experimental structure and so this was showing how you could take some of those ideas and develop them to a real permanent building and what the detailing might be and also architecturally studying about how you could you know solve all the architectural problems of various types of units and adaptability over time and those kinds of issues we're almost at the end of another exciting 28 minutes but let's go to the next slide really quick to phase out because this is a very methodologically uh manuscript and let's quickly touch on the basic principles on tensegrity here in in these diagrams there yeah you see that that's all those members pulling out of the cubes up above that that creates a square that's only stressed in penson taking advantage of there's no bending or buckling in tensile members and then on the right shows how you extend that to a network so the series of slides are sort of on the left you're seeing a series of how it's a linear structure like this golden gate bridge on the left and then a pre-stressed bridge where there's a counter cable so that's a pre-stress one dimensional tensile structure the dallas airport is a two-dimensional uh non-prestressed and then the german pavane was a pre-stressed tensile membrane and then the same in physical buildings there's a hanging or suspended building in canada on the left and then there's the space net concept that we developed and as shown on the right and then the series of right slides on the right are just showing some of the form possibilities for how you could use that to create different architectural volumes and shapes and so forth yeah and and how that can be applied to the these days even more urgent need of housing the little people we will see in in the next show and until then we want to thank you larry of course and our host rob paulis and his studio in which you're sitting in thanks for your generosity and having us and yeah until next week larry where we're looking forward to see you again um you guys all stay uh increasingly tropically tensile right hope theater zayn martin feels boss and swishin dankeschön larry bis nächste woche bye bye