 Good morning. I'm Adam Frampton. I have the pleasure of introducing and responding to our second panel, which will examine the contemporary conditions of small-scale housing as it relates to domestic living and the consequence of multiplying that small scale to something larger to the kind of urban. The panelists will present case studies and histories from Mexico City to show how housing is designed in constructing within this rapidly growing region. The sequence differs a little bit from this. The first up will be Luis Caranza, a professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, and also teaching here at GSAP. Luis holds a PhD in architectural history and theory from Harvard University. His research focuses on primarily modern art and architecture in Latin America with an emphasis on Mexico. He's published a number of books forthcoming in March 2019, will be experiments in radical functionalism focusing on the work of Juan O'Gorman and others by Columbia University Press. And he's been actually an invaluable resource to have him share his knowledge and his research with our housing students in the housing studio here. Second will be Fernanda Canales, who is an architect who studied in Barcelona, Mexico City in Madrid, the latter where she received her PhD from ETSOM. She founded her firm in 2002. She received the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League in 2018 among numerous other awards, recognitions and exhibitions. Her work has a particular focus on the kind of spaces between the public and the private or the domestic. And she's also stated her concern for the kind of interrelationship between thinking and practice. So she's also, aside from a portfolio of very impressive built works that she'll show, she's a scholar who's published several books on Mexican architectural history. And finally Jorge Ambrosi and Gabriela Echegaray will share their work, their office based in Mexico City, founded in 2011. Jorge holds a degree in architecture from UNAM in Mexico City, the National University. Gabriela holds three degrees from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and one from the CCCP program here at GSAP. Both partners have taught in Catalonia now here at Columbia University. Gabriela is currently teaching in the housing studio. Their practice has also been recognized in numerous exhibitions and awards, including the Design Vanguard in 2017 and Emerging Voices in 2015. Their practice works across many different types of buildings, but housing has been a kind of constant subject to study. And again, I think like the other panelists, their practice extends into territories beyond building. They're currently the curators of the Mexican Pavilion in the Venice Biennale. So I'll give it over to Luis Caronza first. So this will be a little bit probably the most different presentation of the whole event, I think probably because I'm just going to be focusing on some of the historical examples in Mexico City. So the exponential growth of Mexico City in the first half of the 20th century from about 345,000 to 3.1 million people and the generally poor living conditions of 40% of the city led to a vigorous and inventive searches to address the problem of housing. The three cases that I want to talk about today show how various experiments were developed and how they still influence in our models to how people think about housing in Mexico. They are small proposals or prototypes whose reproduction seems to, seeks to address large scale needs. By solving the problem of the unit in functionalist and economic terms, the architect Juan Legaretta defined how this worker housing prototype could be developed in aggregate. For his architecture degree thesis, he built this double house which responded to the problem of housing by analyzing the functions, the costs, the use of the house in very scientific terms. He also sought to remove anything that was inessential such as ornament and kind of making the house direct. And also by using inexpensive materials such as reinforced concrete which was not only cheap but was actually kind of an aid to provide work for the working class. And he also reorganized the social relations that occurred within the unit. He eliminated, for example, privacy in favor of flexibility by adding curtains, for example, as the dividers of the rooms themselves so that you could in essence have one kind of larger space. He also placed the woman of the house at the center and the threshold of the house giving her central position but also one of protection and of nurturing. She's the one that in essence is the guardian to the house and has kind of views into the kind of the little backyard. Excuse me. And he, of course, advocated for the use of traditional furniture. So this is not furniture that kind of would be brought by the working class but it was actually kind of spec for the house. The same thing a good woman would do. And he was proposing this type of furniture so that the house didn't seem as alienating as it could be because of its radically radical new forms. The 1932-100 unit communities that he designed in La Baquita or La Balbuena follow these ideas and these prototypes except he developed units for work or for retail as you see here with this kind of gates that could open up for production or selling of commodities. And then he also developed the units that had this kind of double height interior space. And he began to kind of avoid the oppressive sense of environment from these very small and tight contained units. Now with its standardized unit which is repeated into a slab and the slab that then becomes determinant of the city the second case that I want to address is the C. Lungan model which was most effectively introduced into Mexico by the emigre architect and ex-director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer. The Mexicans and this is a proposal for a large workers housing project that was never built but the Mexican architects who worked with him in the department of working class housing would basically transform this model of the traditional C. Lung bar into something different kind of the component of a new type of kind of model for housing which was also composed of a slab but it would be a very different slab and this slab would try to account for different family types and income types and you can begin to see this in particular in the way that the section begins to kind of work out. And it also in trying to transform this model they were also trying to kind of avoid the monotony that could be characteristic of the C. Lung model not only in the domestic scale that of the apartment but also ultimately of the whole urban planning as well. So Mario Pani, most famously in his multifamiliares as we know basically took from this model plan as it was called a series of examples and I just want to point out that Pani was in fact one of the architects that worked on this project. So specifically what we see and these are various examples of the units we see a mixture of units that in some cases actually spanned multiple floors so the unit you enter into one space and you go up or down which meant that there was a skip-stop elevator system which is what we see in the centro de Cupa, Miguel Aleman. There was also different relationships that occurred between the interior of the unit to some types of exterior spaces or exterior courtyards both that happened in plan and in section obviously that allowed for this porosity of the surface that would create different types of balconies as well as most importantly some gathering zones where people could meet and be together which is something again that we saw happening in the Miguel Aleman housing project. Now what these two previous cases lacked was an integration with the landscape and an acknowledgement of vernacular and cultural traditions. Architects like Juan Orman who started off being a functionalist in the late 1920s, early 1930s began exploring the cave, the cave house as a dwelling. The cave house is a place to explore art and muralism in particular to create this total work of art. So Orman is most well known for the mosaics for the National Library of the National University which he did following this experiment. So the cave house for Orman of 1949 was really a type of personal manifesto something that seemed unique and irreproducible. Now interested in creating an architecture that quote was not based on forms antithetical to humans the architect Carlos Lasso also explored the morphology of the cave and here you see some of his kind of early study drawings from the late 1940s or early 1950s kind of thinking about the way that the cave morphology could create a new type of architectural space which was a type of telluric architecture, an architecture that seemed to grow out of the ground, out of the place. What Lasso wanted and he would eventually become the minister of communications and public works what Lasso wanted was an economic efficient and hygienic architecture. Now this third case addresses the transformation from what I would call a quote unquote landscape unit to what we'll see be a landscape housing. So the experiment, the early experiments of Lasso ended up being this house called the Sierra Leona house which basically was characterized by an exploration of new forms and this meant that there was a combination of caves, courtyards which is a typical kind of Latin typology as well as a roof garden all integrated into the same building. He also was exploring new materials basically some chemical additives that would allow the soil to kind of become hardened to prevent from water infiltration but also they would strengthen the soils. I'm not sure that he knew how toxic those things could possibly be. And then of course he was very interested in new forms of construction instead of creating an additive construction he started thinking about a subtractive construction which was not only cheaper to make but also would create an economic living environment because the earth itself provided for its insulation. So the idea of the single cave house became the idea as I said of a landscape housing. This is something that he actually built as the director of the communications and public works in this area in the outskirts of Mexico City called Belenda Las Flores. It was a housing project of what he called civilized caves. So in Belenda Las Flores what Lasso did was to create this very large community that seemed to solve or wanted to solve the problem of inhabitation in Mexico. So the community was this very large community on the side of the hill that could possibly become a model for different places throughout Mexico and he has maybe about 30 different prototypes in his archives that he was experimenting with. And this Lasso is standing right there just to give you a sense. So now this community would have the integration of traditionally designed modern furniture that was actually built by a subsidiary of the Ministry of Education and Public Works. The units were all completely different and had the most kind of modern of services. And as I said you know the unit was not only kind of housing but also had a condition of being a roof garden as well. Now these cave houses were incredibly inexpensive. They cost less than $5 a month to rent and that was fully furnished. And if you wanted to buy one they cost $800 to buy in 1953 which I think amounts more or less to about like $5,000 now. So these three cases that I wanted to kind of show today and to kind of think about represent manifestos I think for how housing could be altered and rethought to respond to specific needs of the Mexican people. The needs for housing and hygienic shelters but also to think about their culture. How do we kind of create housing that integrates the things that workers are comfortable with or in environments that they're comfortable with for instance the courtyard house and that perhaps maybe start to kind of generate traditions or rely on older traditions like for example the tradition of at some point I suspect we lived in caves but you know this is the idea of lasso trying to create warms that were not right angled but something more comfortable for the human beings. And so people, traditions and culture were all integrated into these ideas of housing experiments for Mexico. Thank you very much. Thank you. My name is Fernanda Canales. I'd like to especially thank Hillary and all of you here present. I will briefly present five of my most recent housing projects in Mexico that are in different ways based on an attempt to deal with contradictions, contradictions that are synthesized in this image of the myth of housing. You shouldn't change your family, you just have to change home. And contradictions dealing specifically in Mexico with the social contrasts and economic various situations but also with the contradictions underlying housing projects, different desires between individual needs and collective needs and also between desires and possibilities on the specific case in Mexico between rural and urban conditions. The four of the first projects are commissioned by the CEDS, the Centro Investigación of Enfornabit, the Research Center, promoted by Carlos Edillo and led also by Julia that we'll speak later today. The projects will range from very small scale to larger and from rural to urban, also from specific to more generic interventions. The first one, Eva House, a house built for a family that was left with no house after the earthquakes 2017. It's the same model that Derek presented for a community in Ocuelan, a two-hour drive from Mexico City, a house that has to cost around 8,000 US dollars and has to be built in two months. We're just about to finish it. The idea here was to provide Eva House with three bedrooms. She used to live as many of the people in the same area. The whole family lived in a single room house where they could slept, even have different partners or children of different sexes from different parents. So the idea was first to provide individual bedrooms, the prototype A with three bedrooms and double height area to provide this space for also communal space for cooking, living and dining area with different solutions to reply the same structure, the same frame with one bedroom working space or even a terrace or an open patio. This is the solution that's being built with the water deposit just above the bathroom. Very economic, simple solution. But also thinking of how the same prototype can be replied and multiplied become a community built with self-built production. We're building the earth bricks and we're almost finished. This second project deals with the same idea of how a very single unit can grow, how it grows with the family needs. The first prototype A, just a single bedroom and then the living and cooking area separate from the house in order to play with the separation of the two units and providing a patio or different ways to grow the rooftops. This is the ground level where you have the very basic unit and also providing two or three bedrooms for the grandmother or a newly wed daughter or whatever different family needs and also providing working space or storage for the crops. And then how you can shift volumes and provide back deals because most of the families are used to cooking outside and they're also used to having the bathroom outside. So it's different typologies, the same structure. And it's also thought to be a self-built with different materials. And this third project, the Casa Productiva, depends on the very basic unit, 25 square meters and how you can provide a growing house. Also changing the typology of different solutions for one bedroom, two bedrooms and working space. You can have a tapanko which is a double height and this double height solution has to do with reusing rainwater and having the bathroom and the kitchen just directly below the water deposit. Also thought to be built with different materials ranging from adobe to block or even hay. And forming a community also. This project is being built now two prototypes in a band. It's the same project that Derek also showed. We're almost finishing the houses. And this is the fourth project with the same concepts of the third projects before but with the logic of identification, taking abandoned housing and providing the same idea of houses that can grow even within a vertical solution. So you have minimum housing with the possibility of growing, of extending new room or even copying the house, mirroring the apartment building. So you can use the vertical and services, the stairs to provide a more economic situation. And this fifth project, Portales Housing, this is in an urban condition in Mexico City. It's a building for 12 apartments. They range from 50 square meters up to 70 square meters. And they all have different possibilities of extending the dwelling to the outside either with a patio, a small balcony or a double height apartment in the upper floor with the terraces on top. And in this apartment, the hallways and the corridors are all open spaces. They take advantage of the climate in Mexico City. So they extend to small patios, to balconies or to terraces, providing also communal areas and small spaces to extend the living areas. This project is Montelban Housing. We're about to finish it this spring. It's 24 apartments and also with commercial space extending out the street. It's a very long volume, but it opens up with different patios, different balconies. And the idea here is to provide different typologies ranging from 50 square meters through bedrooms up to solutions just with one bedroom or working spaces. So you have the diversity, in a way I think all of these projects connect with the same idea of providing diversity within a unitary structure. So you have one bedroom, you have commerce and you have always patios or balconies to extend the dwellings. This is the solution. You also have the rooftops and double height duplex housing in the upper floors. This is the seventh project. It's an utopian proposal. It deals with the problem in Mexico that we have more than 5 million abandoned houses. Mexico for one part is one of the countries with more scarcity of housing, but it is also one of the places with more abandoned housing. They're mostly new housing built in the peripheries, built three or four hours away from working areas or from schools with no links to public transport, no services. So the idea of this project is to take the abandoned houses and build structures just on top of them to provide all of the lacking services. So you take the dwellings and build on top everything that they're missing from working spaces, recreational areas and links to public transport. In the past 30 years, the population in Mexico City has grown 40%, but the territorial expansion has been more than 260%. So, you know, we're growing just to sell more, extend more, buy more, but not actually related to the needs, not even to population growth. So we have this million of abandoned houses with this proposal what to do with those areas instead of just continue to grow, extend horizontally. So the idea is to provide with the existing structures something else. And this last project thinking in a way it relates with Luis Carranza's idea of the more organic house or landscape housing. It's a single family dwelling, but the idea of the client was to invite it's for a weekend house in two hours from Mexico City. The idea of the client was to always have guests, always invite, so it's a house for more than two or three families at the time, that they could have a private space but also shared common areas. So in a way, I think it relates, even though it's a completely different budget and size, in a way it relates to the first projects in the sense of you have a single dwelling that can be multiplied and have then a communal space in the center. So you have nine different volumes comprising different areas. It's like either large bedrooms or small houses just put together around the central courtyard. And you have a house that in a way deals with this different gradients between the public, semi-public, private, or completely private. And they open up to different views depending as well as the first project on climate issues and on orientation. So you have the different volumes and how can you sum up the different private needs or actually thinking about the consequences of private needs in a collective territory or in a common land. So thank you very much. Hello. Thank you, Hilary, for organizing the symposium and Adam for the presentation. As an architectural film based in Mexico City when we think about housing, we think in urban environments. We don't understand housing something to be in rural areas. We are used to understand housing in these urban environments. And Mexico has a great heritage about housing. We have great examples from the 20th century that were projects guided by architects and institutions in a kind of collaboration that works really well for a lot of years. After that we have some more serious projects that were not guided by architects for more of a political decisions and economic interest. So I don't want to talk about this in a specific way because what we want to address here is that to understand that housing as a typology is one of the richest representation of the history of a cultural evolution in a city. So understanding that we want to share with you not some specific projects but more the questions that we have to address or that we have to confront every time that we are trying to design a project in this kind of environment. So when we're thinking of these urban environments the first thing that we're dealing with is the idea of substitution because when we are arriving to a new housing project to do is what is that we are going to replace and something awkward is that normally when we're talking about housing what we are replacing in small-scale projects like in Mexico City is we are replacing houses. So here what we want to really focus on is to understand what is what is being lost what is that in this replacement action it's been erased from the city and what can we do as architects to start keeping that form disappear because at the end all these projects are based in this pre-existence some of them have historical heritage some of them are just regular buildings that could be just like demolished but at the end with the thing that we are dealing is that all these houses are representations of manners of inhabiting that have been created on the city for maybe quite a lot of years and that thing is something that could not be just replaced by a new housing project the new housing project has to address and need to have the possibility to the offered opportunity to understand this domesticity and to multiply and to reply that and try to allocate these manners of inhabiting so when we thought about this domesticity and these manners of inhabiting that exist on the city it can be represented in very different ways and in the history and tradition of housing in Mexico there are a lot of examples of these different kinds of domesticity so maybe just the scale of proportion of the space could address this idea of domesticity but maybe some other issues like in Mexico City because of the mild weather the relation with exterior spaces and how in the house we are relating with exterior it's something that has a lot to do with the manner of living the ways that people are used to live in their houses and it's something that could not be changed so easily because this way that the houses related with exterior has not just to do with the relation interior exterior it has also to do with the perception of the space for example if it's a courtyard where the house uses to get the light all the perception of the space is about this pouring of light through a patio so it's something that it could be kept somehow and we want to explore in this exercise of projects of the office these ideas of how people are used to live on those kind of spaces another way that domesticity could be expressed is how did an apartment building or how did a house it's addressing the problem of privacy and how this privacy is related with the city and not just talking about privacy in terms of the private space or the private property but also privacy in terms of the public space a public privacy that could be taken off in public spaces that you feel privacy and you feel contained spaces that allow you and give you the opportunity to have spaces for silence that it's also something about manners of inhabiting or maybe domesticity could be also a way to understand rituals rituals as simple as to be standing up in a portico watching toward the streets and there's a lot of typologies in Mexico that has to do with this idea so this idea of domesticity is also a tradition and it's something again that could not be just erased it's something that has to be preserved or at least give the opportunity to have a continuity or a transformation during the process of time so to work with these possibilities to create different kinds of domesticity we think that the alternative exploration of different typologies in architecture it's very important for us because through them we can find or search for different ways to give opportunity to the new housings to express these different kinds of domesticity and that exploration of typology give us the opportunity to rethink or to redefine the concepts as simple as how to solve an apartment building in a corner of two main streets but also it gives us the chance to maybe explore the idea of the patio house and how could it be transformed into an apartment building or maybe also how to reinterpret this idea of the classical tenement housing building that is very popular in some neighborhoods in Mexico City and how could that also become a new housing building trying to preserve this idea of the tenement housing and also explore for example ideas on how could a grid could use offers different possibilities of inhabiting these specific grids with complete different kind of size of apartments configuration of apartments but always trying to explore this idea of the grid also like a typology and also the idea of the portico again like a typology the house with a portico that is very common in some rural areas in Mexico City and how could that portico become a building like itself a building with porticos so apart from that from these explorations of typology the other concept or concern that we normally are focusing on in the development of this project is this idea of integrity and when we talk about integrity we normally talk about structural simplicity and economy of means because it starts approaching to the topic of ethics in our case because what we think is that when we are trying to build something in Mexico City the most complicated thing that Derek's already explained the things and the problem that we have with earthquakes is that any construction in Mexico City already have an over cost because all the effort that we need to do in structures to resist the earthquake so normally structures had to be simple just because of that because the structure by itself is expensive to be affordable in houses so we cannot explore and we cannot start to invent things in structural meanings because what we want to do is to maintain the cost of the structure the lower as possible so what we believe in this thing of integrity is how could this structure became part of the facade and how did every element that you put on your building it work in a structural way it's not a way of designing facades but it's everything working so in this case for example the grid of columns it's combined with all the shearing walls that are working and are taking the efforts for the earthquake so all the building, all the elements in this kind of assay is working precisely to resist earthquakes and to support the building or maybe also talking about integrity understanding the boy that conforms not just the patio on these patio houses but also the boy that is inside the house and how these two boys are relating so the integrity of the building became both the interior and the exterior space like one complete space that just flows from inside to outside or maybe in this idea of the grid the grid expressed to the city like this way also again like an integrity structure that is just what it looks like inside the grid and inside the same grid is expressed in all the apartments just to be coherent and to try to make the less elements possible towards the streets and towards the facade and in some different cases maybe the corridors is the element that in this tenement housing it's trying to create this integrity through all the project and how this corridor is expressed also in interior space of the project or maybe again in this project about the porticos also how those porticos became the building and the structure it's everything that you see and there's no second elements that are not working in the structural way for the project and maybe the last thing that we are starting to be concerned of as some of our other colleagues already mentioned is that Mexico has addressed this idea of collectivity in the last years because the 20 previous years maybe there was no thinking in architecture in this kind of ways and if onabit is one of the institutions that have created this kind of opportunity to rethink again the idea of collectivity and maybe in a kind of way to critique our own work it's what we were presenting here has to do more with the specification of a city creating from a house maybe a multiple house or a size of multiplication but it's not yet problem of collectiveness it's just about reconciliation. Thank you very much. Presentation is really amazing kind of impressive work one thing that kind of strikes me about the many projects that have been shown from the kind of early examples of kind of modernist experimentation is this idea that I think Luis brought up in the Juan Lagerata's projects that the forsaking kind of privacy for flexibility and maybe in a way how that kind of in a lot of Fernandez projects this idea of the sort of invention, the territory for invention is kind of within these kind of communal spaces the hallways spaces between the threshold between the kind of the private space and the sort of city on the balconies and the growth, the kind of indeterminate growth of the kind of projects and I think in maybe less so Gabriela and Jorge in your projects but there is also this kind of expression of within these kind of frames the sort of infill, the infill of windows I know that it's not growth per se but perhaps the kind of expression of this kind of informality or indeterminacy and so I feel like that's somehow perhaps a kind of theme or connection maybe not between all these kind of projects and I wonder how much of that comes from the idea of the rapidly expanding kind of city and the growth of population but also kind of footprints that Fernanda mentioned how much of that I mean I think it was really interesting that Jorge you mentioned like how in a way because structure the area for invention can't really be within kind of structure and material I know that Fernanda also a lot of your work is in concrete basically even though you showed other materials so I'm curious like how or where you see and so it's a kind of question maybe for for any or all of you how much you see your projects as through the kind of lens of growth maybe for me completely because it has to do with resources with limited resources always and for example if you have just the money to build 50 square meters you have this is 50 square meters so if you take 25 and 25 instead of doing a house that's just this if you do a house it's this then you have another area that is also part of your house and this space can extend to this courtyard and this one can do that as well so you have a house that can measure up to 100 square meters 120 depending I mean land in rural areas is really cheap they don't even have to buy it so they just occupy it so then you can extend the house and maybe just put a temporary covering or whatever really simple and having the possibility of extending the house through time so that's the case for rural areas which is really different from urban areas where land is really expensive so you have the opposite so in the same space so that's why I think Jorge explained that very simple you just have the money to spend structure I mean you just have to cover an area and then everything has to be to happen inside and exploring that with double heights or spaces that can occur and can change within the same frame you know something that I kind of as a theme that I thought your question kind of insights is that in contrast to the last group which was kind of thinking from the outside master plan to the eventually to the unit it seems like I mean at least what I was trying to make a case and I think that in your presentations as well that the concern is like well how do people live and what is the relationship between the user and the house and the furniture or the user and their sense of space and then you know you start to kind of create the wall and the environment you know to kind of and then you know then it kind of then it multiplies and then you figure out what the master plan for it is which I don't know that's the best thing but you know so there's a kind of an aggregate where you actually start with the with the traditions with the use I mean because everything of that has to do with some kind of relationship with the outside that seems to be kind of like kind of thought Yeah I agree with what you're saying and I was like even linking to the previous panel when they were asking about whether the territorio de gigantes could turn into sort of like a set of rules or not I think by doing these exercises like questioning like the typology of housing what we do it's like we're really experimenting on how to from like from a certain territory from a certain culture from certain traditions we relate to different ways of inhabiting different ways of producing or providing ways of living and I think what we're sort of like questioning at the end of the presentation is how this collectivity could leave behind the idea of possession and start thinking about the sharing of spaces and like the approach to a wider idea of like to a broader idea of how to relate to public space but also to the to the conditions that a private space could form or could integrate in terms of community of neighborhood of city of like from the smaller state growing into the bigger scale and then it goes back again that the richness of the typology of housing that how from the understanding or from this experimentation of questioning how to how to live we end up like also constructing or experimenting in the scale of the city and the evolution of culture and history and I mean I think that I really actually enjoyed the introduction of the idea of like private space and the kind of solitude of private space it's of course so central to housing and at this moment when you know we're all talking about of course the importance of sharing and the importance of collective space it's like interesting to kind of return to that and having you know having visited your office and some of your projects earlier this fall like I can say that they in a way they have the use of the patio or the kind of courtyard they're very inward they're also very inward and very focused and in some cases very cut off actually from the city and so that's I think it's it's interesting you bring that in and then I guess I'm wondering like you know you both your work is both of your practices are of course not just housing right there's your work and other types and how much of the I'm curious like in the experiment in the experimentation with housing how much of it would you say is like from typologically driven versus the idea of like other types thinking and ideas from other types coming into kind of housing maybe that's maybe a question also for Fernanda. I think for in my case it's really based in housing itself every time when I research more and more and more on Mexican typologies from the last 100 years I find more and more examples that deal with housing in different ways in incorporating workspace or productive even the productive notion of le goretas example that Luis mentioned earlier with retail space and it's the natural condition of how people live especially in the case for women that are usually the ones in charge of the whole family economy in Mexico they take they're in charge of the kids but they also have to work so it's a natural condition so I think the universe is so vast of examples that historically have done that in better ways that architects usually plan for that I think the flexibility issue is so strong that there's no there's no better analysis or examples than the every day the vernacular or the informal solutions for me those are the best examples because in the case for Eva housing the first project I showed after the earthquake the program the first time I visited and knew the owner Eva she had just two kids and a certain economy whatever and then on a future visit two older kids appeared then another visit she had a car that she didn't have before so the families are so complex then the sister was supposed to live with her then there weren't any grandparents and suddenly a grandparent appeared so family wise it's so complex that flexibility is not in a couple of years it's even in the process of designing and even every day conditions change even you could say regarding budgets but also regarding the neighborhood so the views I mean you're not controlling anything so I think that what you mentioned projects sometimes shut off the context have to do with that at least in my case the only thing that you can control is what happens inside the same frame so that's what you have to work with I would say that and also probably from other what we get influenced by is the idea of how we address the territory and by territory not only in terms of the landscape but probably what Luis was presented with the last case of Carlos Lasso and these projects that question the morphology of the cave but also the project is not only questioning that it's also questioning the idea of like a rooftop a liveable and yeah a liveable rooftop and also the relationship with the courtyard which is something that we also have and very embedded in our culture or tradition so I guess like how other projects end up influencing in housing is with the relationship towards the landscape but the landscape beyond its condition of the beauty that could provide or the contemplation of the space of how we relate to the morphology of the construction of different terrains or different territories yeah absolutely I mean I think that's I see that also this kind of connection through very small scale projects this connection to the kind of bigger scale I know that's also something that Tatiana has talked about a lot in her work this kind of relationship between landscape and bigger systems and I think it's very present and I love they were talking about the kind of architecture of 50 square meters yet the kind of this kind of larger impact in the sort of city should we perhaps open it up for some questions from the audience in the future thinking about the question beyond design but also at an institutional level like how do you redefine the conditions within which things are built here in such a way that Adam for instance would have the opportunity to build as much as quickly and to experiment through building because in a way I think design is one question and something to discuss and to learn from but I think ultimately the value in looking at these other contexts would be in thinking how can we reshape the kind of political and institutional circumstances within which we're working such that the students or the faculty here would have equal opportunities in the United States to execute work in housing in the field of housing at the same scale as you might see in other countries and Mexico seems to be a particularly salient example today let's say so I was wondering from the experience of perhaps working in Mexico teaching the United States or working in the United States and teaching here and with the international body of students how we start to have a kind of discussion about the political and institutional conditions within which we're building in such a way that some of these very salient questions for instance of developing new housing paradigms or addressing kind of family structures and the demographics for which we're building are able to be dealt with through the actual kind of material active of building things here so I don't know if that's a fair question but if there's a possibility of reflecting in a way on how circumstances in Mexico have enabled you to build and how we might rethink the circumstances here in which we aren't able to build in the same way Can I just adjust that historical answer? Since I don't have a practice I wish I had a practice like these guys I think that one of the things that I mean as I was already mentioned the article for the Mexican Constitution which is a constitution from 1917 in the middle of the Mexican Revolution which was trying to correct this disenfranchisement of a huge part of the population that didn't have housing and they were basically living in terrible conditions and had this really bad political situation I think that this is the beginning of the kind of questioning and people like Juan Legarretta the first guy that I talked about that was his thesis project which he built he was maybe 19 or 20 years old and then shortly thereafter he started building for the state and this was because there was this need that was associated with the revolution this radical kind of opening and I think that still I mean this kind of in the background the Mexican revolution is still this kind of oddly perhaps maybe subconscious force that people keep bringing up in political discourse that are I mean people are trying to get away from it but it's still this thing about the equality of the people and the need for housing and you know like in Juan Aguirre in a sense is kind of set up within this paradigm of thinking I don't know I think that's one of the reasons why there's so much and there's so much opportunity just because there's this need that is you know regulated by the government of the constitution I agree but I would say it's a need a worldwide need I mean we cannot base it on the United States or Mexico I think I mean even Mexico a hundred years after that constitutional I mean after the revolution and the big achievement to put it in the constitution still 70% of houses in Mexico are built informally are legally made and they're not provided by the government so we're still not even close to that achievement and if you think of it worldwide we're still I mean we're not being useful to society so the possibilities of doing projects are every day they're needed obviously we have to do it with the same velocity and the same budget as the clients I mean the people needed but actually that's I think our big still what we still have to do I'm also amazed that the kind of quantity of work that you've been able to produce and I would encourage you to stick around for Julius talk from in front of you to actually understand the sort of context we have studio this afternoon okay but I mean one thing that's actually even more interesting I think Fernanda I discovered that you don't have a real like an office or employees actually and so the kind of eight to ten projects you've literally produced you know kind of on your own in a very direct way on kind of construction sites and I think that's even more remarkable so maybe then to kind of turn the question like how you know how do you structure your practices to kind of achieve this New York City and it's zoning the relationship of the Department of City Planning and people in New York City and all of the back and forth is there any what is that situation in Mexico City as to what who decides or makes the rules as to what can be built where I think in Mexico there are a lot of organizations that are organizations and institutions that are responsible of that decisions of zoning and in most of the cases they are consulted or concealed with neighbors of each part of the city not always it's like like in the way that we decided to be because sometimes there's a lot of interest that are pushing things behind maybe the co-ordination of these institutions and it could be make really create changes in those sonings but most of the cases and in the places where community it's very well organized it's very difficult now to really go behind them so they have to approve everything that it's happening in the zoning changes and maybe in Mexico City in my experience there was one specific moment that really starts changing the way the city started doing development and also how the city was understood and it's when the Mexican architects that was formerly the dean of UNAM when he went the secretary of urban development of the city that really changed a lot of things because it was a moment where an architect really starts designing decisions and showing the public that the architectural view of a city could really change and maybe the further governors of the city had really take that heritage and most of them are really close to architects when it's convenient for them when you're not convenient they just push you aside but somehow the city really felt that need of an architect Thank you so much for a very, very nice panel and set of projects I appreciate very much this panel in relationship to the one before I think the one before there were a couple of very provocative statements and I think in this second panel the idea of learning from a group of people a condition emerge and rather than teaching to learn or laying out a plan for others emerging a plan from the context and I think we are in a moment that learning from observing and learning rather than teaching and experimenting upon it's a really important way of thinking about housing and I also there are other ways in which we are moving away from what you were saying Adam moving away from this idea of kind of a fake idea of sharing or a kind of collectivity and people whether it's in Israel they are moving away from the kibbutz in Southern Italy they are moving away from sharing intergenerational housing and so there are ways in which collectivity emerges from a different standpoint from a point of introspection kind of thinking about certain things that are to be private and certain things that are to be shared and those things are not necessarily coming from an architectural textbook or from the legacy of European architecture they are coming from observing more millenary ways in which there are plenty of in Mexico millenary ways in which country and culture over millennia has learned to live from a land build from a land medical care from a land and not necessarily importing those things from the outside so my question to you is as people that are pivo team between the United States and Mexico how do you feel about the legacy of international architecture and international style and the molos of housing that so many times come from other places How much time do we have? I mean I think it's one of the huge paradoxes of like Mexican architecture that I think you know Juan Agorman who started off as this radical functionalist I mean you know Legarretta and Juan Agorman were actually collectively designing houses and Legarretta was working with historians and with poets when they were designing houses but I think that there's this kind of moment of crisis that Mexico kind of arrives at in terms of how to deal with like modernism and you know the cave things are really kind of a response to that legacy although you know I think one of the things that I was thinking after hearing their presentations is how much faith I have now in Mexican modern housing because in a sense what these young people are doing because they're young is that they're actually they're actually thinking about kind of very consciously about the way that people are living but then they're also kind of responding to the things from modernism that didn't work like for example you know the Miguel Aleman had the nursery and the pools and things like this and you know Legarretta's had the same thing which are just really kind of like variants of Siedlongan and they're kind of figuring out how to actually integrate it into the everyday and just like radically kind of transforming you know like those relationships between housing and like these other needs that are so necessary for a living you know there really isn't a prototype it's more a problem than ownership they don't own a unit they own it and that's why I need to know who they own it in my case there are cases where they rent them and others where they own it there's not a big difference as to the results and neither as to the demands because actually they change as well even if they own them yes I think I think we agree on that and maybe most in Mexico it's very common to own the apartments the business of rent is not so profitable than the way of selling houses so normally the new developments always have to do with selling apartments so renting becomes like a secondary business maybe not the main thank you very much to our panel