 Off these seats in the front that have the reserve sign, so a fundraiser already Speak the same language and I think that also means that anyone who wants to sit closer. There is actually a Please come forward Front row see there's like at least seven But maybe that's it and then you can fill their seats. So you're all move clothes. I don't need to see that Except that one that one's taken Fantastic now we can see more faces. Oh good Not a shy crowd terrific One more over here if anyone One more over here very corner You're than touching distance great Good evening everyone. Hello. I'm Karen McCarty. I'm the curatorial director of Cooper Hewitt And I want to welcome you and thank you all for coming this evening. I want to welcome those of you who are here also those of you who are listening online And also our special guests yark angles and our tonight's game changer Game changers is Cooper Hewitt's program of conversations with influential and innovative practitioners thinkers and industry leaders across all industries of design a Special thanks and call out to Tim Brown CEO of IDO whose generosity makes these series possible Our next game changer conversation will be with Jeff Hahn. So subscribe to our newsletter Cooper Hewitt org to be notified of that date and time All of our game changer events have been sold out, which is great. So be sure to keep tracking that date Yark angles yark angles is founder of big in 2005 in Copenhagen Hope and big in New York City in 2011 and he is one of the most innovative and sought-after architects today And in fact, it was five years ago I first encountered yark angles when he was competing for a project and At the end of the competition. He was jetting off to Venice, but he handed me his card and he said I'm going to be moving to New York and We were just talking about that and it is staggering to think of all that he has done in Just the last five years. He's 41 years old and I think any one of his Projects would be the envy of any architect. So He is among his prominent prominent commissions to date our two World Trade Center the final building on the site dry line in Lower Manhattan. He's a partner with Hedewick's studio for design of Google's new headquarters and Smithsonian Institution South Mall campus Yark is a self-described pragmatic utopian He is author of the book. Yes is more a manifesto of architecture told in comic book form Earlier this year Tosh and published bigs hot to cold and an odyssey of architectural adaptation which Accompanied an exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington He cites Nietzsche and Charles Darwin as important influences on his architecture thinking From arc daily I quote to be arc angles conflicts of society are the main ingredients in the analytical work of creating architecture Instead of looking at the conflicts of a given project as limitations Angles presents the architects task as finding a way to incorporate and integrate differences not through compromise or by choosing sides But by tying and conflicting by by tying conflicting interests into a Gordian knot of new ideas We often he says we often give clients something they hadn't imagined but is still what they want His numerous awards include Wall Street Journal innovator of the year award in 2011 The Golden Lion at Venice Biennale in 2004 and the Urban Land Institute Award for elect for excellence More than 1.8 million views have been for his 2009 Ted talk And without further ado, I'd like to welcome the arc. Thank you As a sort of introduction to the to the conversation we're gonna be having Right after I just wanted to see if I could sort of touch on a On a sort of rapid fire handful of some of the ideas that have been governing our work the last ten years And and some of it is quite nicely summed up by this diagram we did for Our exhibition at the 2004 Venice Biennale Where we try to sort of portray the idea of cities and buildings as man-made ecosystems You know channeling not only the the flow of people but also the flow of resources to our cities and and our buildings and To sort of expand upon this notion I'd like to just to talk a little bit of how we work at our company Our office is called big we are located in New York and in Copenhagen. This is our office in Copenhagen It's located inside a former Carlsberg factory Where they used to make the least interesting part of the beer the bottle cap And apparently you need you need the 40-foot ceilings to make such a small thing We also do haircuts The way we work is that we in the beginning of every project we we try to spend some time educating ourselves in what are the key criteria for this project like what is the expertise What is the information we need to access in order to be able to make informed design decisions In a way we try to sort of prioritize through the different aspects of the project. What is the greatest potential? What is the biggest problem we need to solve? And then we try to use this as the driving force. So in a way, it's a it's almost Empowering ourselves with certainty that this is what is important This is what this project is all about and not just ourselves within the team But also our collaborators our clients various decision makers various consultants that everybody gets access to this initial sort of instant education Just to give you a few examples of what what kind of conditions can shape a design you can say like You can also refer to it as practical poetry this idea of turning all of the practicalities of everyday life Into something poetical Which I think is also very true for for all aspects of design that you take all of these like You sort of analyze deeply into the practical concerns of a of a product or or a building and and turn turn this into something poetic We did a Project for a sports hall in my old high school In Copenhagen and there was only two two places where we could put it Either on the football fields, but football is the natural sport of Denmark So it would be a complete political suicide to to put it there So we decided to put it in the schoolyard, but that's the main social space for the students So we didn't want to like invade on them So we tried to dig at the sports hall down, but digging and digging deep can be expensive So we had to minimize the excavation and finally it's a handball hall Which is the other national sport of Denmark and the rules say you need 15 feet clear on the perimeter and 30 feet in the middle Also because we got the commission from my old math teacher We decided to sort of base the geometry of the sports hall on the mathematical formula for ballistic arch So essentially when you see the graceful curvature of the glulam beams in the roof They're actually shaped by the throwing of a handball So we did draw these lines They're sort of the product of of what would we be the minimum geometry to dodge Handball thrown from one end of the fields to the next as a result It creates this molehill an imprint of the game into the into the courgette It becomes this sort of weird soft inviting piece of furniture The the janitor of the school believes that he can prove scientifically that we have tripled the use of the courgette since it opened Because he had to put up three times as many waste bins simply because they they just The more they they're there the more they they litter But essentially this of a notion of trying to sort of have this sort of almost like a It's like send like stands of where we allow the the sport to To dictate the architecture and as a result it creates this like enigmatic element in the in the courtyard Another example is we we got invited to design the Danish maritime museum That used to be inside this castle. It's the Hamlet's castle Cornball north of Copenhagen it became UNESCO World Heritage and as a result they had to put the museum somewhere else So they suggested why don't we put it in this dry dock where they used to build ships? And there was an inherent dilemma because on one hand UNESCO said that we couldn't stick as much as a foot out of the ground to To not block the view of the castle But the the museum wanted some kind of an architectural masterpiece to attract visitors So so we got this idea of turning the dock inside out Basically using the museum to preserve the dock leaving the dock as a big public space sunken into the The city of Eleusinor all we had to do was design three bridges one that stops the water from coming in one that connects to the Castle and then one that gradually descends down into the museum to stop cars from actually driving into the hole We put these granite benches that are designed like the elements you tie ships to We put them up in morse code, so there is actually an easter egg if any of you can read morse We built all of the bridges in a shipyard and then we could sail them into the site and lift them into place exactly the way you You make ships The ramp also shows the fact we couldn't even have an elevator house coming up So the ramp is an ADA accessible way for people to enter into into the museum you you sort of gradually descend And then you go through this sort of series of spaces of different dimensions some of them very intimate some of them like vast like cargo base and The architecture is in general this like encounter between the Ancient history and the heaviness of the dock and the lightness and transparency of the glass and the steel You have an auditorium where there's sort of let's say the seats for the grown-ups extend under the stage and become a small auditorium for kids Similar to the way a ship you have like all these weird spaces and nooks that you sort of try to sort of occupy and Suddenly like the dock has actually become like a really popular part of the cultural space of Elsinore because of the heart reverberation of the walls and the open ceiling. It's actually it has an amazing acoustics So it like a series of performances are occurring down in the in the dock And and you can see the sort of coexistence in way like above the horizon the heritage of the castle below the horizon this new contemporary world This is this sort of the inverse titanic moment so basically the whole idea of like they say in the sports hall it's the Minimizing the impact on the courtyard while sort of accommodating the sport for the The maritime museum. It's the coexistence of the history of the UNESCO World Heritage and this new world That become the driving forces, but like once you've established what the critical criteria is that you don't necessarily have the answers yet You need to make a lot of you know Proposals you need to make a lot of tests you need to build a lot of models to be able to see If something is working just to give you an image of what this looks like as a process We are designing a museum in this beautiful valley valley to shoe in Switzerland. It's the cradle of of Swiss watchmaking. This is our site It's gonna be a museum for watchmaking Funded by Audemars Piquet the watchmakers One of the few watchmaker companies in Switzerland that are still on family hands And the site is basically the workshop where they 150 years ago started their Watchmaking in the attic and you also have their current headquarters and our first thought was like let's try to sort of blend in between the existing buildings sort of almost as a stealth like exercise we sort of Almost like connect the dots of the two existing buildings but the more we looked at it the more it felt like more like an an annoying alien that sort of butts in between two two friends that have been sitting there always so we thought sort of Maybe we should stay into the stay low and be part of the landscape at the back One idea was to connect the galleries of the space program into this sort of village of connected galleries Also, like there's like a linear Chronology of the exhibition so we thought maybe you can walk from gallery to gallery and end up in the in the attic And we started like making different variations of this idea And it just turned out to be maybe more invasive than than what we'd expect so then we thought like okay Let's just stay down completely Do something that doesn't speak the language of the surroundings at all And then you can see sort of gradually the the process takes on sort of a life on its own so So basically What we ended up doing is we took the space program of the individual Exhibitions turned it into this sort of linear trajectory that we then coil up so that actually fits onto the site We place this this coil on to to the landscape You have this sort trajectory where you go Into like the bigger galleries in the middle and then you sort of continue your journey up to the The workshop But you can also do shortcuts at any point if you wish to skip a few chapters Then we sort of follow the the slope of the landscape to allow sort of daylight and views to enter deep into the continuous floor plate and Basically the journey to the museum you enter into the existing headquarters The first thing you see is like the view opens up to the surrounding valley You have spaces with more controlled conditions. You have spaces where you pass through The watchmakers workshops where they sit with north-facing light and a view of the valley as they've done for like a century and a half And then basically you'll notice that them as you walk around like something is missing. They're actually there are no columns and the basic thinking is that glass is actually Stronger than steel when it comes to compression it can't do tension very well and And and also when there's a seismic event it buckles and breaks But because of the curvature of the glass the curve lends rigidity to the to the geometry and it can actually Sustain an earthquake and still carry the roof So almost like like in watchmaking where part of the disciplines is to get a maximum impact with a minimum of material In a similar way this like super light pavilion is carried on on its own windows And then from here you you are sent into the into the workshop But sort of when when presented like this as a sort of linear set of like rather Logical practical decisions it feels almost inevitable that that this is what the museum wants to look like But you are just forgetting that you had to kiss like 50 frogs before you found something that that worked so like all of these sort of Equations or sort of mid-term calculations are essential in order to be able to arrive at something that seems Simple and and clear one one thing that we often work with is Also as Karen mentioned this this is like bringing together of what seems to be mutually exclusive elements or typologies a few examples we're doing a Museum in a sculpture park full of like that is an ish kapoor. There's like an old folia son and We could place the museum where we want it in the park and you have sculptures on either side of this beautiful river and we thought Why don't we actually turn the museum into a bridge so you can really make it part of a continuous loop through the sculpture park? the paths of the park extend into the Into the museum you have on one side a stack of three galleries the top one being a sculpture gallery with skylights and Then these the skylights of tilt 90 degrees And become a panoramic window of of the neighboring mill and then you sort of continue through the rest of the sculpture park So in a way you can almost see it as you know a Museum that is also a bridge that is also a sculpture in a way in its own right as you walk through the sculpture park It might just be the biggest sculpture from certain angles. You might not even notice that it's a That it's a building and and this sort of Idea of hybrid characters is also something we've experimented with here in in New York on the on the west side this This sort of striking new silhouette of the of the skyline of the city That is essentially an attempt to combine the density of a Manhattan skyscraper with the communal space of a Copenhagen courtyard Or since she that's why we call it a court scraper It creates this like rather striking silhouette that has a height of a handrail in one corner and the height of a high rise in the other It creates this sort of oasis in the middle of the city This is what it looked like a month ago And actually two weeks ago A friend of ours took this photo from the airplane to New York, and I promise there's no there's no photoshop It makes the heart architect really happy to see something like this Another part of the of the skyline of the city that we are working with right now is Lower Manhattan at the World Trade Center. We're doing the the the final silhouette of the World Trade Center the tower to and One thing that has happened Like this area is really the encounter between the financial district or what used to be the financial district somehow after 9 11 and then after the Meltdown in 2008 a lot of the financial institutions have moved elsewhere, but you have like these Sort of tall tall skyscrapers of the financial district But then it's also butting up straight up against the Tribeca with these are more varied city blocks And we asked ourselves if we could imagine a building that could be sort of equally at home in both neighborhoods Also, there's this change of the of the kind of companies that move to downtown. We just moved down there In April and this building is going to contain like TV studios and film studios. It's going to contain like big newsrooms It's going to have like more sort of classic Executive floor plates and our basic idea is to just take these different buildings each tailor to their specific programs and combine them Vertically so that towards the memorial Where you're definitely inside the World Trade Center? It has the same sort of straight-laced character as the other towers except it's actually expanding towards the top But from Tribeca it becomes this more sort of Abstract bundle of individual buildings within the building with these huge hanging gardens Giant terraces where the life inside the building can sort of extend To the outside and and some of the content that is being manufactured inside the tower Comes out of the ground And then as the tower starts expanding the the down-facing undersides the overhangs become part of what projects the The character of the building to to the outside and I think sort of an interesting point is that when you make a building or like when you make any any kind of public art and Architecture is always public because it's sitting outside in our cities No matter what you intended when you designed it once you put it out there it Belongs to everybody and their interpretation is going to be as good as yours So when we presented this we were quite anxious not least because of the heritage and the significance of the site and The two days after announcing it we I received a letter from a man who was the brother of one of the Firefighters one of the first responders in 9-11 who gave his life at 9-11 and and he just wrote that He liked the design very much because to him it was a giant staircase to heaven And commemorating the heroic stair climber of the first responders and maybe sort of an ascension to to heaven of the innocent souls that the died in 9-11 and And he just wanted to say that he thought it was a beautiful thought that not just the memorial and the fountains and the park commemorate The heroism and sacrifice of 9-11 but also that the skyline of the city could also be a monument To those people And I had to tell them that we had absolutely not thought about this But but now it's it's almost hard to to see the building at least when you see it here from from uptown without also seeing that that potential symbolism That brings me to the last sort of a Category of projects that I'd like to talk about like three examples Basically what we call social infrastructure And and the basic thinking is that we all know that infrastructure can have a negative impact on The environment like this is where Grandville Bridge touches downtown Vancouver It splits up in a in a triforce slicing up the site into these like useless triangles and we were asked to sort of take a stab at seeing if we could turn this into a neighborhood there's some contrast missing but You're gonna have to imagine But essentially we started like sort of a mapping down the different constraints the The setbacks from the streets then there's setbacks from the bridges Then there's like a hundred foot setback from all of the bridges because the city wants to ensure that nobody looks straight into the Traffic of the bridge then there's a park over here where we can't cast any shadows And we're left with 6,000 square feet of almost useless floor plates So then we're thinking if the minimum distance of a hundred feet has to do with With the setback of a hundred feet has to do with the minimum distance from the home to the car Once we get a hundred feet up in the air. We could actually grow the tower back Imagine sort of as you drive over Grandville Bridge. It's as if someone is pulling a curtain aside sort of Welcome to Vancouver It has this feeling of a genie coming out of a bottle and sort of expanding almost like a wheat Growing out of the cracks in the asphalt and then blossoming as it gets daylight in air It's it's quite similar in the way that it's shaped by its surroundings to the flat iron for instance Where you have the intersection of the diagonal of Broadway and the sort of straight laced grid of Manhattan And at some point the rise in real estate value combined with steel structure and elevators Made it now the namesake and landmark of a whole neighborhood in Manhattan So we sort of taking that idea, but maybe taking it one step further Somehow the the name the fat iron hasn't caught on yet but but essentially this sort of This idea of trying to turn this sort of the constraints And the impact of the bridge into an asset also we can put shops and offices and restaurants Between the bridges they can be closer than the than the homes And there we are trying to sort of see if we can turn the underside of the bridge into an asset like a an Urban canopy we're working with Rodney Graham and a series of Canadian artists To turn the underside of the bridge into what you could call the Sistine's Chapel of Street art a Gallery turned upside down just like in Grand Central Station here when you look up you see like beautiful decorations sort of Star configurations and here you'll see contemporary Canadian art But also It's quite clear like in a project like the one in Vancouver Concerns for public public life and public space is a major part of the the project even though our client is you know Is it primarily interested in selling condos? To make it successful even for him and especially for the city it needs to be a nice neighborhood In one case we actually sort of Took this idea of the public interest one step further by almost like outsourcing the design To to the public You probably all remember three years ago when Sandy came and and wiped out most of lower Manhattan According to a cartoonist that gave rise to a new neighborhood in Manhattan South power south of power and and basically the The science is simple the rising temperatures have expanded the Atlantic hurricane zone North and suddenly a series of states that didn't used to be hit frequently by heart storms It's now seeing more and more activity and because of the geometry of New York bite the funnel shape It actually concentrates storm surge and puts the most densely populated part of the east coast of United States at risk and we were asked to see if we can look at making the necessary Waterfront protection in such a way that it wouldn't become a sea wall that segregates the life of the city from the water around it And and we thought what if we could learn from the High Line? The High Line is this beautiful Super popular new promenade on the west side and it's essentially a piece of Decommissioned rail yard that has been granted Sort of environmental and social programs We thought like what if we don't have to wait until the infrastructure shuts down? What if we can design the resiliency infrastructure of lower Manhattan in such a way that it comes with? You know pre-intended positive social and environmental side effects And if you look at the sort of urban development of New York It has been very much shaped by the clash of these two giants on one hand Robert Moses The power broker the sort of public servant who did a lot of like the very big public works of New York Often very necessary, but also often with a devastating impact on the neighborhoods highways and public housing projects at some point he wanted to run the trans Manhattan Highway through Greenwich Village and he encountered resistance from Jane Jacobs She rallied the local community and in a sort of David Goliath moment. She defeated the plans and saved the village So what we thought was what if the dry line as we call this project? Could be conceived as a love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs Because essentially what you need on one hand you need 12 miles of contiguous waterfront protection To resist an incoming flood but to make it socially successful It needs to happen in a close dialogue with the needs and the requirements and the concerns of the individual Communities, so we actually reached out to all of the communities all of the NGOs all of the foundations inhabiting the waterfront neighborhoods and together with them we've designed this idea of a Of the dry line as a chameleon where the necessary flood protection is take shape To actually become positive for the environment In the form of a million of parks, so we've made a short film where you can see the people we worked with from the different Community groups here their experience of sandy their concerns for their future neighborhood and what it might turn into Floating And it's totally covered in water for two days, so we lost everything Everything we're really concerned about another storm and the flooding as possible, and we think that the next time It's going to come even further. I'd like to see some time By the The plans the Burma the sense of how it can become into the natural landscape itself how we want to program that is I don't mean to end up in a sense of a big use. It's important that the entire waterfront So Decided upon and we're working on the first portion the East River Park the schedules break ground in 2017 as the last example of this Something that is actually already being built that I think really sort of Manifest this idea of social infrastructure is what could be the new landmark of Copenhagen, and it's not a cultural palace or Royal Palace. It's a power plant that turns household trash into electricity and district heating It's basically Something that operates on an economy of scale So they're like thought like how can we design this so it doesn't become a big Ugly box that cast shadows on in neighbors and blocks the view it's going to be the tallest and biggest building in Copenhagen, it's going to be right next to Copenhagen Marina and Right where the locals go water skiing So we thought like how can we turn this into a positive asset for this neighborhood? And speaking of skiing Danes love to ski we have snow, but we have absolutely no mountains But we apparently have mountains of trash We have to go six hours by car to South of Sweden and we can actually do two-thirds of Isabel Because of the size of the power plant we know how big the different machines have to be so we can just design the envelope so it becomes like this of continuous descent complete with You know landscaping pine trees hiking paths I Think to everybody surprised. We actually won the competition based on this idea Suddenly we had to figure it out and This to give you a sense of scale. It's twice the length of an Olympic half pipe. So it's actually a pretty significant Piece of hillside You might have noticed that Denmark won zero medals in Sochi We hope to actually change that because now we can start practicing at home Also It's of course for skiers, but also if you just want to go for a walk It's a hiking path. You can picnic. You can enjoy the views of the otherwise horizontal city of Copenhagen You have the world's tallest climbing wall 300 feet of extreme danger and basically, it's It's coming so close to completing this sort of idea of cities as as Ecosystems because not only do we harvest locally resources daylight air flows Water flows but also together with the city and the city sense of Copenhagen it creates a metabolism that turns waste into Electricity and and heating the reason we could win the competition with this like rather wacky idea was That what's amazing about this power plant and the technology is that it's going to be the cleanest waste to energy power plant in the world The smoke that comes out of the chimney is going to be completely non-toxic. It will contain a little bit of co2 a little bit of steam But this is something that would be completely invisible And normally you would want to be as far away as possible from a power plant to not breathe all the smoke But here you literally have clean mountain air on the roof of the power plant and by turning it into a public park That becomes blatantly visible and that's why this is the CEO of the company She liked it and chose this project to take this idea of them completely changing people's minds of what is a power plant? What is a factory? What is a piece of public utility? in a clean technology kind of world where we worked with realities United and Copenhagen University to design the chimney in such a way that it accumulates steam And then at regular intervals it puffs a gigantic steam ring or like a smoke ring So essentially what used to be the symbol of a problem pollution the chimney now becomes something playful That puffs gigantic rings of steam and the idea is that we sort of celebrate Every time that we have saved the emission of one ton of CO2 by converting to the technology We celebrate it by releasing a smoke ring So of course again, like when you put these things out there and you win the competition you suddenly have to deliver and When you look up in the yellow pages There are no giant smoke ring emitting contractors so we've been working with a sort of a Vortex expert from Copenhagen University and a guy called rocket mason that essentially builds do yourself space rockets from something that looks like a bicycle repair shop and Just to finish off. We we've made a series of tests last summer. There was something interesting happened so So what I like about the this idea of the smoke ring is that them It's like even though it seems silly. I think it's a kind of an important sort of a and very real symbol of this sort of idea that at the core architecture is sort of the the art and science of of turning fiction into fact That you sit in the studio and you like brainstorm these ideas and you come up with something that is a pure figment Of your imagination It's just something you made up and then you spend the next like five to ten years like Solving all the problems like getting all the permits doing all the tech documentation sort of securing the funds and And and then finally, you know, it becomes a concrete part of our everyday reality So in that sense it has this sort of world-changing aspect And I like this idea that in 2017 when the ski slope is open and you know, let's say a person from from China travels to Europe for like a few months Then they can come back and then they can say You know, like Europe is very interesting, you know, like in Venice They have paved the street with water and you sail through them in gondolas And in Copenhagen they ski on their power plants that turn household trash into electricity and heat and and where the chimneys puff gigantic rings of steam and that's just how it is in Denmark So so I think this sort of world-changing aspect also means that the as a reminder that every time we sort of invited To intervene in a situation in a neighborhood or create a building that not only do we have the possibility But we actually have the responsibility to make the world we live in a little bit more like like our dreams And on that note Thank you very much Bianca for that amazing presentation and also giving us insight into Your work and your inspiration and your goals And I'd like to spend just the next few minutes exploring a few of your themes and why we Selected you as a game changer and then I'd like to throw this out open to questions from from the audience Which I'm sure you have a lot of But I I read that Developers like to choose you because you weave the practical with the fantastical and I think we've just seen that throughout your presentation and Just wondering why that may have come from in your training I mean I had I had a professor at At the Royal Danish Art Academy I called you Thomas Arnfeld this sort of Like real hippie kind of 60s Dude and and he said a few like they have a company called Van Kunsten They've done a lot of social housing and they had one funny motto, which was like it doesn't matter what it costs as long as it looks cheap And He actually said on day one when I started in his department It was it was organized back then as an art school So you would choose a department with a professor and they would sort of create the whole curriculum. It was very liberal so he said like you know There's all kinds of curriculums. I actually don't care if you read any of the books So if you learn any of the hard skills For that matter that's sort of up to yourselves But like one thing you have to promise me is that when you leave The school in you know five six seven years You have to leave the school with something at heart Because it doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know what to do with it and I think in that sense I Think this of that gave me this idea that maybe more importantly in anything else For you and also for your team and collaborators is that you make it very clear in the beginning. Why is this of relevance? What are we trying to achieve here? How does this? How does this tie into how we otherwise see our lives so in that sense we don't we don't just solve X amount of real estate at At X amount of marketability for the developer. We also try to make this into a meaningful neighborhood We try to sort of realize Ways of living that might might otherwise not be possible so in that sense But we also it's so in the way we try to sort of hack the You know we always base it on the needs So it is a bit like you know like that like a whole idea of social infrastructure You have a certain piece of necessary utility that needs to stop a flood from coming in or a power plant that needs to Provide electricity for a city But then once you're doing all that once you're moving all that soil and stacking all those elements What can you also do with it? I think One of the things that comes and became apparent to me when I look at your Work and listen to you talk is that experience is really important experience of the user and I Think about the times during the 1980s and early 90s when I would go to presentations by a lot of architects whose Buildings were being very influenced the footprint was being very influenced by the zoning laws at that time And that's what really gave them basically their shape except what was happening at the very top and I Am You know for a long time that actually was okay New York being divided on the grid and these sort of monolithic structures But now but I have that's of course all changing and I have read that you've described That way of designing and in fact it was very positive for a lot of people and I think many people think that that gives a nice clean sort of orderly Layout to the city, but I have read that you described that almost a disdain for that and describing it that type of architecture almost as boring and Not really having creating a lot of fun and for experiences and when I think about your skyscraper for two world trade center. It really definitely transforms the sort of vertical Building much more into an interactive experience Yeah, I think the Again like It's very true like for some skyscrapers typically like it's quite funny like our office is now the penthouse of Of 61 Broadway, which is building from 1916. So it's like a pre zoning law Extrusion of a chateau with an awning at the top and you can just see that it's like it's like a typical sort of Parisian whatever chateau of like Five six floors that has been extruded to 33 floors And then of course that there was Then there was a hundred and twenty Broadway, which was an even bigger version of this that caused so much Contempt that it created the setback zoning law in 1916 that created this sort of a cigarette silhouettes of Certain pre-modern skyscrapers then came modernism C gram, you know US steel chase all these like perfect Sort of Logistical masterpieces with an optimized core and a sort of ideal leasing depth and like a brilliant elegant single idea for the curtain wall That I like quite beautiful in their own right and quite often The early generation of them came with a lot of generosity like the floating lever house with the sculpture courtyard and sort of But then at some point that sort of degenerated the first into just like generic extrusions and then With increasingly in elegant Facades and then it was so boring that it triggered post modernism where to sort of Compensate for the for the lack of intentions in the architecture You started putting like weird Roman symbols at the top and columns at the bottom And then came I don't know some contemporary version where I think architecture has been shaped a little bit like a certain Insecurity or lack of confidence that in a way anything that looks too bold Has been sort of seen with suspicion and as a result you get all these little sort of Like mildly inexplicable moves that means that at at least you can't say the architect was being arrogant because it wasn't just like One one blatant idea. It's a lot of like insecure moves. So I think and That's where we are now. So like I think for the world to it's enough We really tried Actually the the zoning has been speaking a lot, but it was it was literally the fact that Unusually we actually had the client the tenant because typically these office towers Just for business generic business. So therefore you draw like one nice floor plan that somehow fits with the core and with the envelope And then you repeat it 80 times until you run out of density And I think in this case we actually had like a super specific program for half the building That would be impossible to accommodate in In the sameness of a traditional skyscraper and in that sense we actually had something to work with Also, I live in Tribeca For like another two weeks that I moved to Dumbo but I could walk basically from My my house on on Franklin Street down West Broadway Until I hit The two World Trade Center site, so I will be walking in Tribeca until suddenly I'm in financial district and and and we really had this idea the address of the building is going to be 250 Greenwich so So it is a building that is actually standing in Tribeca on one side and therefore has a completely different Setting and then when you go to the other side, it's the huge memorial and it's like this Colornate of brand-new skyscrapers, so there was also like a demand or like a desire to make a building That would somehow be at home in these two radically different conditions I Would love to ask you a little bit you're thinking about the the public involvement in Architecture today because your two World Trade Center power center was originally as we know Slated to be a Norman Foster Building and then your building came along and it gave death to the Sir Norman Foster's Building and we know that that was initially a very active public process after the tragedies of 9-11 there were a lot of there were competitions there were exhibitions for the public to voice their opinions etc and And what do you think about the public process in general? I Mean I think increasingly and of course like the the bigger a project is the more impact it has on on its surroundings And in certain cases Like things like with the with the dry line we could use it if you ignore Public concerns, and I don't think we should turn architecture into a democracy. I don't think we should sort of vote about it But also it shouldn't be like a dictatorship Where it's you know, it's just gonna be like this. It should be somehow a meritocracy Where the idea or the proposition that marriage the most is Put forward and I think Public process has to do with harvesting specific knowledge from the neighborhood just like you If you're doing something that has to do with the waterfall position you speak with Coastal engineers you speak with environmental engineers that can give you good estimates about how what kind of Water level rises should you design for and and then you should speak to the people in the neighborhood that are gonna be living next to It sort of how do they use their neighborhood and if you're gonna like move some dirt around is there a few wishes? We could fulfill while doing so and what are their greatest concerns about having a project like this What are the things that they have now that they like that they're afraid of losing or one of the things that they like now that they Would like more of so in that sense you should consult The public as experts because I mean experts in their own concerns and and desires And then you should accommodate that but I think at the end of the day. It's important that Because the clothes will be like this or a populistic Idea that you know Everybody should like and then you get like designed by committee and then you know You can imagine like 500 people trying to hold the crayon at the same time and like what kind of a drawing that's gonna look like so I think at the end of the day, it's important that The role of the architect is is to be the one that has the expertise in translating all of these sometimes contradicting demands into something that seems to fulfill All of the concerns ideally that has been stated But you can't make these big projects without getting a lot of Positive as well as negative feedback By the way, how do you how do you keep abreast of all these Latest thinking and research and cutting-edge Thinking about climate change and you know, it seems like every project you You have to involve a lot of new expertise Yeah, I actually think that I normally sort of compare because I think it's Is it it's back it's good One of the professions that is very much like architecture, I think is journalism Especially in the beginning like if a journalist has to write up an article about something he or she needs to call a lot of experts to Get an understanding needs to speak with a lot of people that have been involved in this case So on this story to get around the story and access it from a lot of different angles and then once The journalist has become more familiar with the material or the subject then the journalist has to find an angle that makes this relevant to the readers an Angle that might reveal a different take on this story because the story might have been told many times before So how can you tell it again? That's gonna like shed new light on on this issue and like For an architect it's about like trying to again like acts access a Problem that might have been answered many times but in different situations and maybe try to find a new take On this that would unleash new energy and make it relevant to its users So I think in that sense as Architects we shouldn't be necessarily experts in anything just like a journalist necessarily doesn't have to be experts in anything But we have to be expert experts in Instantly accessing the expertise we need and then to translate that into a consequence in the form of architecture Sounds like a curator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah in that realm, too. I Wanted to ask you since you're living in New York here now and the one of the Desires of our current mayors to have a lot more affordable housing and as we know In a city with a lot of wealth that's when there starts to be a lot more disparity between the the wealthy and the Less wealth to do and I'm wondering have you ever thought about social housing affordable housing and Yeah, like I Mean, there's different ways of getting around it, but I mean one One way is the city pays for it, right? and I think the of Course Like there's also been like this tendency and then we know Some of our first projects. I didn't show them here, but like the VM VM houses the mountain the eight house and Copenhagen They're actually all private condo projects, but in the lowest income zip code in in Copenhagen And the eight house came with a 20% affordable Just like distributed throughout the the project And I think that's the ideal way of doing it but what I wanted to say that that it seems to be an architecture that it's almost like embarrassing to talk about the You know cost and And there's no doubt that the more money you spend on something if you spend the money wisely the more amazing you can make it and I Think the review of the your show here at the Cooper Hue It also talks about the the price tag that comes with Thomas Hetherwig's amazing things and it's like if you're not gonna spend Like the millions then you're not gonna get such amazing things And the same is true for social housing that of course you can try to do something that is like They're cheap and it is kind of possible like we're working on a project in Copenhagen right now for student housing at a very low fixed rate and The trick we're doing is that we are having these hexagon hexagonal barges made in a Polish shipyard And then we're stacking containers With this sort of NASA developed the insulation that's so thin that we don't lose the inhabitable space inside the container And it's a extra height container. So you actually have good like good ceiling heights inside And then these students they move and they move into like a relatively Small footprint, but it's it's like an it's a charming little studio But it has a water view And they have instant access to the sea in the sort of Let's say four months of the year when you can swim in the port So they get beachfront property at a very low price tag and as a result it has an industrial charm So like there are ways of hacking the system and this is one of them but But also for like a I saw somebody had tweeted that you could get a Studio at our West 57 building for $536 because it has 20% affordable and and I do think that that's a mechanism that I find more charming is That basically grant developers additional density Against affordability because then you won't get the East River Like basically the Lower East side of Manhattan, which is like this Sort of what you call a potato print like this of a rubber stamp of identical extruded towers and a very very sort of Homogeneous demographic When you when you focus more on just having a completely consistent the 80-20 Attitude then you get the right mix and you don't and you make the homes affordable not by making them They're cheap they're cheap because you actually almost have to deliver them at the same quality as as the non affordable ones just certain certain people that have the The need will also get the privilege of inhabiting one of these these apartments. Yeah, and I think I'm also just to maybe sometimes commission inventive designers like yourself to to come up with solutions for Projects might be of some more interesting solutions as well. So I was actually on the jury for this micro housing Yeah, where? Where the idea was again to look at the allowing for smaller units to be built because like with I think it was like two million singles Working on Manhattan and like most of them kind of fought to To live here. So actually they had they had like made the micro units Forbidden to sort of stop develop a greed But suddenly it just meant that it was very very hard to come by these units and people would have to like split up bigger Apartments and like really ridiculous setups Eliminating privacy and all kinds of things. So like suddenly the micro unit actually became a good idea again I think I think it's an excellent idea excellent Thank you for mentioning Thomas Heatherwick we do have a Exhibition on the third floor here on Thomas Heatherwick. It's up through January 4th I wanted to give that plug if people hadn't seen it yet, but You didn't mention the Google Plex. Can we go there a little bit for a moment? Yeah, sure. Okay, great because I'm sure that's on everyone's mind and of course I'm Interested to hear a little bit about your Collaboration with Thomas what Heatherwick because that's always fascinating Here is part of the design process. So maybe you could say a few words about that and then we could talk a little bit about the Google Plex Yes, I mean the reason I didn't show it is actually because The the images that have been sort of approved for public sharing Not like super current although they're the design is still within the spirit, but I think it got infinitely better and quite different so That's why so they're a little like one thing that I that I definitely learned after moving to America is the the meaning and the Omni presence of NDA's I had to ask what it meant the first time I was presented one But we have done nothing but signing NDA since arriving to America Yeah, sure sure, but I Literally never signed an NDA before coming to America. Would you believe that? It's pretty amazing. I haven't done anything But signing them since but but we went through the selection process and And somehow they narrowed it down to That they thought it could be interesting to work with Thomas and other way again. They thought it could be interesting to work with us and and then Then we had a chat and said like why don't we why don't we try to do the master plan together? See see how it flies and We had a great time looking at this like huge 2050 year projection of What what could Google look like if they're growing tenfold in In Mountain View and and surroundings including like researching quite seriously into radically alternative ways of moving around in the city not just driverless cars, but sort of other more sort of Jetsons-esque things And then once we got to the stage of building We had already like also through the conversations With Google and some of the visions that Larry Page had been putting forward We'd already sort of jumped the gun on some of the building designs and we thought like why don't we just keep keep going as a team And it's been going on for for like a year and a half And it's it's been a very sort of refreshing experiment. I think for both offices Like actually at day one we sort of decided on a certain uniformity in our material So that it would be impossible to distinguish in a way Which team member from which office had created which which piece of material so In that sense it has been this sort of excursion a bit like you know when when we did the project In Copenhagen that we call super keen where we outsourced all the designs that 120 people from the neighborhood have suggested 120 different objects that are not designed by us and somehow we had to take Responsibility for bringing it all together in a way that that didn't Look like the dog's dinner an expression that I've learned from Thomas Heatherwick. I've learned all of these like Yeah, exactly like when you take all this crap and put it together it might look like the dogs dinner and and in the same way in In the in the collaboration with Google and actually in that sense, I think because Google has been such an active Client it has almost been a A threesome if you can say that in a non-offensive way in a cultural institution rather than a Duo it's definitely been a tripart collaboration where Google has put as many Things proactively forward as has Thomas or I but actually from my experience on Working with on projects the building that the adage that the art the building is as good as a client is really true so But one of the things that I was struck by and that the renderings the early renderings that were released is It was really this almost ethereal landscape and there was an emphasis on including the public Not just not in the process, but in the final Design is that true? Yeah, I think one of the things we found is that the When you take like the the main streets of downtown Mountain View and the surrounding blocks and you compare it to the Googleplex and the Buildings where Google has staff sitting now They're equally in size and and Google is only growing and and when you look at all of the cities of Silicon Valley It's true for every single town. There's a an equivalent tech campus of similar size So it's like old notion of a corporate campus or headquarter building That sort of is just for itself and shuts itself off from the surroundings Won't really work when companies grows to this scale and they have to become a neighborhood. They have to become a community also Google has been very actively seeking That in the zoning it could be opened up for like having Residences So that so housing and like work in restaurants and shops would sort of blend together be more 24-7 active And some of that is being granted. So part of our project is that we're actually looking at at making some residential developments tied into the the whole project but But then you get this sort of interesting thing once you talk about sustainability and Different interests might not agree on what is environmentally friendly. So even though in the big picture This is the best way to make You know as a sustainable both environmentally and socially sustainable neighborhood is to Mix the functions so you don't have, you know, all the all the people working here And then they drive to where they sleep and then they drive to where they shop you want to blend these things You minimize traffic you maximize usage. You also make a more safe environment like there's like this place He no reason you wouldn't do it But in this case there's like certain environmental activists that are afraid that any Any people living there as their residents might have cats that might eat some of the birds that also live there and then you get this like Contrast between the big picture and the little picture and how do you reconcile that? What I find fascinating also about the project is that it's that that openness and that engagement the community is so counter to The attitude at Apple's headquarters, which is in the neighboring municipality that the you know, that Sir Norman Foster's Don't it shape Which is really I understand it's going to be very close to the public as well as to Frank Gary's New complex for Facebook, so I thought that was really quite interesting having it open The other project that I'm going to turn it up over into the audience I've got to ask you about because we are part of the Smithsonian is how is that going? Because I'm not sure if everyone is aware of that and of course I am eager to see Yes, it's actually going through the The the public process right now in terms of like the The public the different public entities that need to look into it explain even when we started at one of the board members of the one of the members of the steering committee said that Welcome to the Smithsonian the most heavily regulated piece of real estate on planet Earth And it's true because like not only is it there's like federal Sowing there's like the National Monument. There's like a whole series of like listed buildings a lot of like heritage the National Park Service the National Park Service and then beyond that there is actually this sort of series of Most of this is like a lot of Smithsonian has been like funded through various gifts and donations and these donations Comes with certificates That that restrict what you can do for perpetuity to all kinds of things So it's like a minefield of Things you can't do And then of course And actually in this in this case we were Granted the commission based on an interview round where we presented relevant references, but also like How we would go about it and I got to say it was a pretty radical selection committee because We were up against some some pretty significant household names and at that point when we got the the Commission We hadn't completed a museum yet We were still in construction with the maritime museum. So it's pretty ballsy that we got the job. I was quite the I Was quite happily surprised but Then we got access to All the different chief curators all the different directors of the different museums in the Southmore campus and we spent like three months Designing absolutely nothing just mapping out the constraints and mapping out the criteria mapping out the needs the concerns The utilitarian requirements the things that had to be done the things that would be good to get done while doing these things And together with the steering committee. We sort of established a set of criteria And then we started the like designing And it was kind of a dream process for an architect because We only had to submit the final conceptual master plan and the designs for the different buildings after like almost a year Which means that typically in a competition situation you have like limited You have like often because of anonymity you have zero access to the client Because like you know, what if they say something like you can ask some like predigested questions then you have some Client consultants that have been hired to try to distill the the needs into a brief but that brief To me to even like get to a program. It's full of so many assumptions and it's hard to see which of these assumptions are actually Hard hard requirements and which one of them are just something that they came up with so that they could start doing a brief And then you end up Making all kinds of guesses wild guesses and then you submit something and then you just wait And then maybe you win the Competition with the design that once you actually start having a direct dialogue with the client and the different You start really understanding the constraints. You realize that a lot of the stuff you put out there Doesn't really make so much sense anymore, but now that's the competition winning scheme So in a way you're almost like legally bound to do it. So so there's all that and in this case we We had like this is re iterative process where we would arrive at meetings with different designs and eventually The design with the sort of gently sagging in it helped garden that dips down and creates access to not just the The castle and all the visitor amenities, but also brings daylight and view down to the Sackler and the And the African Art Museum that are currently These huge collections underground, but with hardly anybody knowing At least any nobody passing by would ever go because it almost looks like It's like little pavilion. That's almost the scale of I've already had like bad Bad quotes in the press because I I said because we look through like some of the the reviews right when we started the job and and some of the surveys said that Two two-thirds of the people that go to the castle, which is the most iconic structure on the whole campus Went there to go to the toilet So I said it had almost degenerated to something like a glorified the public public restroom and And that became sort of my this like standalone quote, and I got so much shit from the communications director from from the Smithsonian. So now I've learned what not to say but but essentially It was really this sort of Exercise in trying to uncover all of the qualities that are already there and make them much more blatantly accessible and much more blatantly visible and enjoyable for the public so like almost like an an act of radical reinterpretation I Have to tell you a secret. I was delighted when I saw that you won the competition and I thought it was a Great breath of fresh air for the Smithsonian. So I really look forward to seeing what you Come up with I'm gonna turn it over to the audience at the moment I've got plenty more I can ask you but I'm sure their questions out here and a microphone is being passed around You want to raise your hand? Hi, I was just interested so you talked a lot about process The product design process between your projects as well as what they contribute in terms of like public involvement or Infrastructure like the ski slope thing so I was kind of curious in terms of aesthetics like where does beauty or like trying to Make something formally beautiful function into the process as well like is it more of just a result of all the other things you showed like the Public use and making terraces like that idea or do you ever make formal moves? Just to make something more aesthetically pleasing like is that do you think that's another way that you could that the buildings Contribute to their like other than contributing public utility. Do you think do you in the process? Do you also think about the contributions they make aesthetically or stylistically into the context? Yeah, I mean I think we We definitely spent As much time as anyone I guess trying to make things look good It's just a little bit harder to talk about and maybe also a little bit Less productive to talk about because I think what we're trying to do a bit like you know if without making any sort of Comparison otherwise than the than the sort of the analogy, you know like if Michelangelo was commissioned to do a Sculpture of something he would also like walk around in the quarry and try to find a nice block of marble that might be able to convey this This commission because I see like it back in the days artists weren't like Like today you have an artist that has You know they occupy a niche in the market and they can put things out proactively and then they find their buyers Back then it was like a king or a pope saying I need this there and it has to show this And then please make it nice So they were actually much more like architects like they had very specific commissions with a very specific functionality that then then Like try to breathe their soul into And I think what we try to do is To mobilize the forces of You know the program or the context or the logistics or the city or the building city code or like fire safety Handicap accessibility whatever like you have to work with and then Try to find ways of steering that to become something that is interesting or fresh or elegant or Beautiful but but in a way also to escape our own prejudice or pre Pre-programmed conceptions of what is beautiful. What is not so beautiful? We really use These are practical elements as the driving force for suddenly like suddenly we know that we know that this Is maybe the most optimal way of doing or the most interesting way of doing it? It looks a little weird, but maybe we can use that weirdness to create something That has more personality and I think even when you talk about one of the sort of most blatant definitions of beauty like good-looking people like the most popular and Celebrated fashion model today is perhaps care to leave any which is arguably not the most objectively beautiful of the women out there, but she is maybe the one that has the most Character and personality. She's pretty goddamn good-looking, but she's not the most beautiful model But uh, and I think it's the same way like I think that's also a way to create architecture that Has more character and more personality while still Having elegance or character or hello I was wondering if you believe that if if you believe in a transparency of scale and if you Approach projects of a different scales perhaps similar to mr. Heatherwick with a Similar process so whether it be large scale or small do you apply the same system of exploration and design I Do think that certain things like I think What we love about doing small projects We are sort of involved in a handful of provisions. We're doing some private homes is that there? It's a little easier to make the project like a blatant manifestation of a single idea Whereas the bigger the project becomes the more You know the more the more it almost becomes like The less it becomes an object and it more it becomes an environment and the more it becomes an urban environment The more it actually needs to sort of embody You know diversity surprise So I in that in that sense I think I think there's a similarity in the process in The way we ask the questions But I think the answers necessarily have to be quite different at those different scales and I think also like sort of Arne Jacobson Danish architect and designer He was like he was a fantastic product designer and you know He's still like, you know like the the egg The the swan the seven the ant But like down to his cutlery that from space Odyssey 2001 the astronauts are eating with Arne Jacobson cutlery It's like everything he did. It's like so like insanely good-looking and gorgeous and still today. It still seems fresh but His architecture was not like super interesting like he did the Hotel Royale in downtown Copenhagen, which is kind of a bad but elegantly designed And detailed copy of the lever house, but without the hovering A podium and without the courtyard in the middle and without all the cool things of the lever house But arguably with the more beautiful furniture inside So I think also psych sometimes I think it's very rare like John Utzon the other great Danish architect the designer of the Sydney opera is like cooler than any other I take like the best architect Denmark ever Fostered but His furniture designs are so insane and sort of overly quirky detailed Absurd So I think sometimes it's it's very different sensibilities that makes you Succeed at the different scales We've designed a few things in a collaboration we have a sofa that the brick sofa just stacked pillows as if they were Masonry So my question was a lot of architecture today is As you've seen oriented to a user's experience with like rams in the marathon like museum or looking up for the World Trade Center So I guess my question was how far do you see this going architecture responding to data and architecture being Instantly responsive to the user's experience My I think I think to a certain extent the Architecture is the art and science or at least practice of accommodation that the that we we build buildings to accommodate our lives and The greater care we put into exactly that accommodating the life we want to live the more enjoyable the buildings and the cities are gonna be as environments for For human life So in that sense, I think there's like almost no limit to because that's exactly what we have to draw our Inspiration from and like in that sense I normally say like sometimes you get a client that says like I don't want to bog you down with any Requirements or any practicalities you just like think blue ocean blue sky out of the box go bananas But it doesn't make any of the requirements go away, so then you come back and we said oh sure Go nuts, then we come back. I'm sure we did this there's an that's not that that's not gonna work because like you know We actually sort of so the restrictions and the requirements and limitations They don't go away by not knowing about them on the other hand You end up crashing into them as obstacles whereas if you have them from the beginning and the more of these Concerns you can You can tie in to the design process They suddenly become the driving force and they make your work stronger So it's almost like this sin-like idea of turning the force of your enemy into your own strength in martial arts That the more you can equip yourself with the power of all the problems to begin with the more you can actually do something very impactful afterwards I'm a student in Pratt, and I really really like you my mom my dad even my grandma My grandma thinks you're funny and smart you're you're definitely undoubtedly one of greatest art So my question is that so besides the aspect of our texture Do you think what other aspects that help you to achieve your goal to for example persuading our clients to agree with you I Mean I think I Mean I think definitely in our case it has been Very important for the way we work not not just because mean of course It's it's it's always gonna be easier to explain anyone what you're doing if you yourself know what you're doing And therefore I think we spend quite a lot of time in making it clear to ourselves What are we doing? Why is it relevant? What what makes it urgent? What makes it significant? What are the problems we need to solve like we really try to Internally in our team to spend a lot of time on like really understanding before we act because if if understanding precedes action then you You will act sort of informed And that means that you make Not just arbitrary design decisions, but you make very well informed design decisions and it also sort of Sometimes because you're gonna encounter so much obstacle in a not just in the design process and in the documentation process the permitting process the budget exercises the so-called value engineering but also in the actual execution on site like morse like Murphy's law rules More on a construction site than anywhere else like if anything can happen. It's bound to happen So and in those situations you're gonna have like a lot of hard choices and you're gonna have a lot of hard discussions and if you're like very Well aware of what it is you're doing and why you're doing it That's gonna that's gonna make you stronger in these situations where you have to argue your case That it's not just because it's pretty it's not because just because you say so It's because of this and this and this and we actually by the way all agreed about this when we started So I think That whole process it's not a sales pitch. It's actually a design methodology and Not only is it accessible to The lead architect in the team it's accessible to the entire team and Also all the other consultants engineers You know acousticians environmental consultants ADA accessibility people and But but also the clients and all the decision makers So I think that part of it to be very serious about What you're doing and and actually in that sense as we as we Develop the design we also developing the design narrative For our own sake so we constantly reiterate Okay, so yeah, okay, so this makes more sense because this is what we're doing and therefore This is how we choose in this particular case. So so in a way when the design process is over We don't have to create a design narrative It was was created in the design process So I think we have time for one more question Any burning questions it's burning Question was that how does material come into play in all of this because a lot of Projects that we saw they seem to have like a similar language materially Yeah So as a how does what come into play material? Yes I think again like I mean in certain projects, let me see which ones I showed I mean again, I said certain certain materials lend themselves to To certain things I mean in general if you take the two first projects the sports hall and And the dock the museum in the dock For the sports hall it's it's a basement and it's made with a rather modest budget so there we We had the idea that we actually have no material finishes Everything is what it is so the sports floor is a wooden floor that's That's that's the kind of floor that has the the bounciness That you that you want for the different sports the the concrete walls are the retaining walls We we made all the corners rounded so you don't have any dark corners We wanted to mitigate the fact that we're in a basement and then the ceiling it's it is the glulam structure That is the ceiling So You know and then along the perimeter we managed to put in a perimeter skylight that washes between the glulam beams down Along the the walls so the walls even though they are You know heavy and concrete they actually glow in the sports hall so I think they're There was some kind of a various sober attitude towards materials and also it's like these are young kids. They're like Potential vandals all of them so it's it's a very durable Building in the maritime museum. We wanted to preserve the materiality of the dock as much as possible so in that sense we didn't even you know Like even the repairs the necessary repairs we had to do because like we we cut some holes There we decided that because it had it had been an active dock for More than half a century That and then it had been dinged quite badly here and there and the way that they would repair those damages would be by by cutting like some kind of arbitrary rectangular shape and then Casting that in so that you could totally see the patch They didn't try to hide it in a way and we decided okay. That's where we have to make necessary pairs We're gonna use the same technique and that just means that now you can't really see what are the repairs We did and whether the prayers that someone else did and and then because the rest of the architecture is about It's about bridges It's we use steel and and the the surfaces you see are metal And then also because the bridges is the only way we get daylight into the dock The vertical facades of the bridges is as transparent as possible also somehow when the discipline is to span You want to show how sort of Lightly and elegantly you can actually span so I didn't go into the details, but there's quite a few tricks to make to make the three different bridges Light in in their own ways. So I think in each in each case we try to make the also the materiality a blatant manifestation of Of the idea we're working with for the bridge in Norway where we're starting the construction documentation right now Again, it's a bridge. So there where we're working with With a with a steel steel facade and we're trying to we're hoping to find a way that maybe we could Make it like a Richard Sarah so that the It could actually be thick plate steel That could be the load bearing rather than a big fat girder. All right. Thank you so much, Bianca