 Hello everyone. My name is Zia Jamaluddin. I'm an assistant professor of architecture at Columbia, GESAP. I would like to start by reading GESAP Lenape Land Acknowledgement. Today we gather in Lenapehoking the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations and acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. GESAP has committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally and in the Western tradition of architecture education specifically. With this, GESAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring Indigenous knowledge in its curricula. I'm proud to introduce today's dean's lecture series speakers, Elias and Yusuf Anastas from AAU Anastas Studio. Elias and Yusuf were born into a family of architects. Both of them graduated from Paris with masters in architecture where they worked for a few years. After winning competition for a music conservatory, Elias returned to the Palestinian time of Bethlehem. At the same time Yusuf continues education in Paris and graduated with a second master's degree in structural engineering. Elias and Yusuf also founded local industries in 2012, a community of artisans and designers dedicated to industrial furniture making. They founded Scales in 2016, a research department that is constantly enhanced by linking and working scale that are across the spectrum. Their studio's work brings together architecture practice, furniture making, material research projects, and cultural initiatives. Their most recent celebrated works include All Purpose and Installation for the Seventeen Venice Architecture at the Anali, Radio Alhara, a community-based online radio, The Heap Run Courthouse Project, and Stone Matters experimentation-based research on to the possibilities of the use of stone and contemporary architecture while formulating a critique of historical colonial interventions all building material. Elias and Yusuf are also about to launch a cultural endeavor to create an art production platform bringing together artists and artists in Bethlehem, which they call the wonder cabinet. Within the disciplinary conversations today, the architecture in the Arab world where AAU Anastas's practice is based is either under described, positioned to belong to an idealized distant past, or looked at as in the case with the nation state through the lens of post-colonialism. Missing from this conversation is the possibility or impossibility for architecture production under the continuous state of colonialism of a land and its resources. Here, AAU Anastas with the iterative working process and tireless experimentation with stone brings us a clear-eyed vision on how to circumvent local constraints and operate within the very specific and difficult landscape of contemporary Palestine. Their cumulative and prolific body of work more generally from civic buildings design to chairs designs also insist on contributing to the global conversation and knowledge production on architecture typology, structural innovation, material economy, technology, labor force and craftsmanship in the making of the built environment. Looking forward to this presentation today and learning firsthand more about your work. Please help me welcome Elias and Yusuf. The floor is yours. So you just muted if you could unmute. We're still having issues being able to hear you. It might be a mic setting. Is it good now? Yes. Again, thank you Ziad. It's a huge pleasure to give this talk, although it would have been so nice to see you in New York, so I hope this would happen soon. So actually we thought that, you know, every time we're invited to put together a talk we kind of like to think about to reflect upon the different projects that we've been engaged in since, you know, a couple of years. And we try to formulate or to structure this talk around a series of notes that are basically nourishing our work and basically putting trying to create a kind of synergy in between the different structures that are constantly opposing the different ways we work. So we will start by, by segmenting this talk through a series of notes that might bring different projects together or oppose them in one specific note, and that would kind of elaborate on the state of the way we perceive architecture, the production of architecture in our context, but as well more on a more global scale how architecture production is shaped in our contemporary times. So the first note that we thought of is global versus local. Global knowledge are usually opposed as two separate systems of integration within particular contexts. This, this image basically shows the church in France, a little bit of a show that has been that has been built several years after the building of the Santan church in Jerusalem. They share very similar construction techniques, but it's very probable that the crusaders techniques that they had learned in Jerusalem had an influence on this second iteration of the project. It basically questions the unilateral transmission of know house and knowledge versus the kind of constant exchange of know house. It also questions how the local and global exchange of techniques and traces unseen analogies between architectural forms and across borders. Through time, certain architectural attributes originally found locally returned to Palestine as imported architectural elements. In an attempt to blur the limits between local and global architecture stone matters put forwards the relevance of its current content beyond space and time. It's called count and Arabic count means a lintel is is is as part of a series of experiments on stone architectural elements. It's basically inspired by system of stereotomic stereotomic lentils found in the, in the old cities of Jerusalem, Nablus and Bethlehem. Basically it was conceived to serve as a functional element. It's a bench, but as well as a kind of illustrative approach on architectural fundamental elements. This is an image that shows a very detailed kind of lintel in the old city of Bethlehem that when you look at how stones are assembled or the stereotomy different pieces of stone. We, we basically have very little idea or little knowledge to understand how what's the actually depth of the stone and what's the kind of geometry that allows this lintel to stand by itself. So this comp this lintel round lintel is a two meter has a diameter of two meters. And every piece of this continuous kind of lintel has a very specific interface that would allow this entire round shaped lintel to be totally It's produced out of limestone from the city of Jerusalem. And it's basically combining machine very precise machine cuts with with local craftsmanship for for all kinds of finishing. The second project is called the Takane, which is a very particular typology of a vault that was found in the region ever since the 11th century and continuously used by different civilization and very commonly widespread during the Ottoman period here in Palestine. And what is special about this vault typology is that it holds on four walls. It holds on four walls and it has a very shallow kind of vaulting system. And it's a typology that is very interesting because it's a very common typology it's very widespread in the common architecture of domestic architecture. So this project was a sort of as part of a series that is called analogies that kind of creates analogies between different architectural elements found in the region across time. And so this, this project is about re thinking about this typology of the technique in a contemporary contemporary context, also in order to desacralize the use of stone because in in in Palestine unlike countries like Lebanon or Syria the use of stone is not only reserved to noble constructions and palaces and religious constructions but is also widespread in the common architecture. And this typology in particular is is a sort of a means to desacralize the use of stone, the use of structural stones so this structure is made out of these components that are that are that rely on each other's to structurally and that have interfaces that are ruled surfaces that are congruent to each other. And they're on a limit that is rectangle, which makes its use in terms of programmatic needs more, more contemporary let's say this other project that is currently working on is a is a project in the city of Matera and in Italy in it's the project ties links between the landscape, the architecture and the meditative historical address of Matera. Matera is built out of cavernous spaces in the rock, while in comparison with the way Jerusalem is built out of stone. It's built on a kind of very precise and steratomic, steratomic process. Architecture the opposition cannot be greater, yet the resemblance is really striking in between the morphology of these two cities. So the landscape found in Matera blends techniques from Jerusalem and ships from Matera. This space that we are developing as a kind of meditation space for one person, and it's, it formalizes the idea of carving space or architectural space within a mass, but the assembly or the technique of construction is basically relying on very precise cutting structures that basically creates this kind of stability of structure. So there's an imposition as well with the become the kind of outer skin of that object that is a very rigid boxed shape and with the very rich carving within the NTS spaces. So there are research drawings that focus on the kind of sinusoidal stereotomy that has been developed for the project. These projects all speak about global and local and no house in terms of stone techniques and stone architectural forms. And one of the first projects we had to do for a real client in terms of stone projects is in the monastery in a village next to Jerusalem called Abourosh, and it's considered as one of the most valuable witness of Crusaders architecture. I mean the architecture of this, the crypt of the monastery offers a complete example of what was the architecture of the Crusaders in Palestine, which is a combination of different architectural elements that they brought from abroad and local elements that they found in situ. The new project is an extension of the shop of the monastery and is architecturally it's a very simple juxtaposed volume addition. But the strategy of integration of in the site does not really rely on the formal aspect of the project but rather on the construction techniques. The new shop is thought as a stone structure, just like most of the architecture of the monastery, including the crypt, the soundness of the structure relies on a delicate work of stereotomy. So the entire structure of the shop is made out of this flat-volt ceiling that is made out of 169 stone elements that kind of weaved a process of construction that weaves stones into each other and create this structure that dialogues with the site in terms of techniques rather than in terms of forms and shapes. So the second note that will bring, will be illustrated by a specific project that we were invited to work on. It's a project that we were commissioned in 2017 and it was a project that we were basically invited to submit a design for a gifted students school in Ramallah. The site we were working on was beautiful, quite steep and overlooking a beautiful view. Our project is inspired by a herpin road system that climbs up the topographies following the contour lines. While avoiding to spoil the landscape by digging the land, we have worked on a herpin-turn-shaped building that creates interstitial spaces, planted interstitial spaces, while the single-story building snakes through the entire site with a smooth ramp. The project was immediately and instantly rejected for the simple reason that the investor of the operation wouldn't be able to fund rates for a project that has no distinctive separate buildings on which donation plates could be installed. We realized then that basically funds shape architecture, that the economic system that ships, the economic system ships buildings, and the city is no longer planned by architects but by investors. The city belongs to real estate investors, and this is the kind of result that we are constantly having in Palestine. This is a city that is currently under construction called Rawabi. That used to be a huge forest, and it's basically a city that is currently completed, but that has only 20% occupied, and it's basically a city that is now characterized by the amount of shadowed spaces and shadowed interstitial spaces. Note number three is about rules and opportunities. You can see here, actually in Palestine, buildings built before 1917 are protected by law. However, all the modern architecture heritage is being disregarded as an architectural legacy and replaced by economically motivated commercial investments. So, I mean, whether this trend is good or bad is not really the question for us today, but maybe in Palestine the absence of framework in architecture is both an opportunity and massive disorder creator. As architects we can experiment and build more easily than in many other places in the world, thanks to this absence of framework, but these are the exact same reasons why an investor is able to destroy a heritage fluid building and replace it with a commercial center. In 2019, we worked on Hamoud, Hamoud means column in Arabic, and it's a stone column made out of salvaged stone architectural elements from various illegally demolished stone buildings. So the different stone elements come from different periods, illustrate different techniques of construction, and a project itself addresses the question of the possibilities of reusing stone as a structural material as well as the finite resource that it embodies and its consequent effect on the natural landscape. On a more global note, the approach seeks to integrate salvaged building components into contemporary architecture. So the stone elements were scanned, element by element, and then they were we worked on a sort of a process of rethinking each geometry of each stone in order to create this column that is an architectural element. So the idea of this whole stone research project is also to create this series of fundamental architectural elements, the stone, the lintel, the vault, the column, the different elements that compose architecture and try to create a sort of vocabulary or lexicon of stone architecture in the now contemporary times. So the stone column was made out of these salvaged components and some other new components that you can see here that are smoother in surface that that create that that adapt to the geometry of the old components these these old components are actually facade components of old buildings, some of them of massive stone buildings and some other buildings that were hybrid systems in between concrete and stone, but stone being structural part of the massive walls. And this is an image of the project that is a constant research project is, it's one of the first project that led us to be engaged with with massive stone construction principles. We're doing this in collaboration with an artist residency project that is going to be implemented in the city of Jericho. And the idea here is to have a certain number of voted structures that would kind of develop with time. And these votes would would have the capacity to host the different functions of the of the art artist residency, and the city of Jericho has a very harsh kind of climatic condition so there's only a few months during the year where the space can be inhabited. So the idea of the project as well to think about how we can involve a kind of public dimension within a kind of private project. So six months during the year the project is occupied by artists and is used as an artist residency space and the remaining half of the year becomes the entire space becomes a kind of sheltered public space. So it was completed in 2017, the first prototype of one of the votes that is the idea here was here was to basically focus on a very simple geometric cut that would minimize the, the waste in the material itself. And that would be a very systematic kind of procedure for the for the cutting of the elements. The story is called artisan heroes. We're always impressed how crafted elements of architecture combined at the building scale can have an impact on the built environment. Artisans have a role to play in the architectural landscape. But unfortunately, today, most of the designers are interested in the illusion of saving the crafts, and then a sort of nostalgia nostalgic vision of artisan works. But interestingly enough, those designers aiming at saving artisans tend to work in countries of the global south. However, the artisanship disregard is not only true in the global south and the imperialist nostalgia that is used to pretend that saving crafts is more of a selfish useless approach to design. No artisans are to be saved and even less by designers. However, celebrating artisanship is a whole different perspective celebrating crafts makes use of contemporary skins of artisans for the production of design and architecture in a contemporary modern context. Crafting the city with artisans is such an enrichment of our knowledge of the city and its materials. In 2016 we have worked with the olive wood artisans to create in Bethlehem olive wood artisans are widespread and it's a it's a one of the main activities of artisanship in Bethlehem is there is linked to olive wood and all they all they fabricate today are small figurines like you can see on this image sold to pilgrims tourists, mainly. And the idea of this project was to work with artisans to create an architectural object that was made out of olive wood, taking into consideration all the constraints of the materials so for example, not if trees very difficult to to sustain so we never approved an olive tree, because it takes so much time to to grow. So, an olive trees, we only take the branches, and as a result, the sections of the pieces that you get from an olive tree are very small. Only the branches, you take the wood only for the branches so the idea was to create a sort of a structure that was made out of small elements, compared to the to the global shape and work on with the work for this project with a sort of machine that is from the 70s, that is called a copy machine a copy machine, in which the artisans, the artisan is in the center of the machine using a sort of a tool that scans center center master piece and this movement is replicated on the machine, 12 times because this machine had 12 heads, but can be 2432 64 heads, etc. So you so you obtain a certain number of elements that are all completely identical. But when you reiterate this process, the other batch of pieces are slightly different. So this project was called mass imperfections. And the idea was to create a sort of a structure that has imperfections in it that are dealt with with thanks to this kind of geometry that creates a sort of reciprocal structure so each element plays a similar structural role in the global structure, holding three of its neighbors and being held by three others. And note number five, folk or shit. When anthropologist James Ferguson met Mr. LaBona, a village from Minnesota, he was astonished by his choice of building his house according to European standards. The anthropologist would have rather seen him build something vernacular environmentally sustainable and using local materials traditional methods following aesthetics linked to the landscape. Mr. LaHona explained his choice of building something that would transform his quality of life that he had also the right of to modernity, not to simply mimic all traditional architecture that were pleasant, pleasant to the eyes of the western culture. What the anthropologist realized is that he was exercising with what we are not what Renato Resaldo would call imperialist nostalgia. A morning for what one has destroyed. The idea competition is a fake brief for a kind of fake tourism. In 2018 we have been invited to participate in a competition for the building of a touristic village in the surroundings of Bethlehem. The brief basically stated that it's no longer needed to for the pilgrims to visit Bethlehem, but try to visit the village where Bethlehem's authentic atmosphere is replicated. And he kind of attempt to escape escaping from this romantic folkloric brief of the competition we lost. Our project extracts peculiar characteristics of identified Palestinian urban space typologies to magnify them as transcendental elements in a kind of abstract environment. The project brief is what Renato Resaldo would call imperialist nostalgia. With the small difference that the briefs writers are those same persons who have been colonized. Heritage and in particular architectural heritage has become Western contemporary appreciation of local cultures. It freezes in a state of musified objects of illusion and qualities and de facto gives it a folkloric value. What have we associated Arab architecture, as if all Arab architecture, architectures are identical with musherabias and domes. Note number six is called cultural carbon footprint. In the Victorian Albert Museum in London. There's a room that's called the cast room, and it's made out of one to one replicas of Italian Renaissance sculptures. That's the boom. Where traveling was very costly. This room used to give access to wider audience to contemporary art. So it kind of relates to what today we have in terms of international expo events. Which originally were set to share advances in different trends of countries in the world. But in a world where technology allowed the high level of far distance communications. What are these types of events made for note number seven is basically international aid in Palestine. I mean, we're very much interested in one of the main areas where we when we are interested in producing architecture is in the public sphere. And we're kind of lucky in Palestine, because there's still competitions that are running for public buildings. But most of them basically are financed by international aid. As much as the system benefits the society in terms of a kind of economic growth, it's a never, it's nevertheless postponing a kind of independence. A study on exponential economic and population growth from 1972, called the limits of growth shows that every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits of that growth. It's basically demonstrates that deliberately limiting graph is not only a possible solution but the only one to achieve a kind of global equilibrium. Basically, we were basically fortunate to work on two public courthouses in Palestine, one in the city of Hebron, and the second one in Tulkada. Both of them were funded by international aid and implemented by United Nations. These images that we're sharing now are, we're sharing them for the first time. They are the images of the Hebron courthouse that has been just completed a couple of weeks ago. And we kind of wanted to photograph the building in a kind of dramatic way because unfortunately, we had to quit the project right at the beginning of the start of the construction, because there was a drastic shift in the way the project has been implemented where architecture became secondary and the main focus was driven by more kind of economical and systems that would create kind of order in Palestine. But what the way we designed this project since the beginning was putting an emphasis on how we can imagine a building of such a scale in a city where a building of 15, 16,000 square meters is not kind of frequent, is how to create a kind of building method that would allow any construction company or any contractor to have access to compete basically to be one of the potential candidates to build that project. And basically we kind of tried to reduce the scope to what could be the easiest way to build a building of such a scale. So it's basically mastery and a certain number of openings and the rhythm of these openings would depend on different factors, whether it's neighboring the street, whether it's in continuity with a kind of planted space, etc. And actually we're kind of now shooting the building and seeing that many things changed during the course of the construction process. This idea of trying to retain the kind of common way of building kind of saved the project while we kind of were not involved in the construction procedure. So the idea was to try to develop this kind of skin that would this picture is quite kind of illustrates quite well the idea of the project where within this kind of massive scale in the city there's still a link that has been created within the streets and the human scale around it. There's a second courthouse that we completed a couple of years ago in the city of Tulcadam and I think we can, we will share a small video of it and how it's currently being used. So basically the Tulcadam courthouse, we shot this video a year after we delivered the building. Tulcadam is a very small city in the north of Palestine and the courthouse was, the program of the courthouse was really, in terms of size was really disproportionate compared to the city. But it was really architecturally and maybe urban-wise sort of a challenge to try to understand the place of such building in a city as small as Tulcadam. I mean, for the small story, the electrical capacity of the entire city wasn't enough for the building to function properly. So the entire electrical capacity of the city was updated in order for the building to function in a correct way. The courthouse in Hebron was, I mean, this setup of international aid and public projects in Palestine is a bit ambiguous because it creates a sort of situation where actually without this international aid no public projects would be feasible, but at the same time it's kind of postponing the society's independence. The building's architecture in Hebron, we have not been able to supervise the works of this project, but the project setup showed its limits and contradictions when it comes to choosing between architecture and financial agendas. So for us the limit was reached once architecture and qualities started being sacrificed. And the Buckminister Fuller in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth says, in respect to our planet's life sustaining atmosphere, we find that yes we do have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes. And after this we say but it costs too much. There are also ways of desalinating sea water and we say but it costs too much. This too narrow treatment of the problem never faces the inexorably evolving and solution insistent problem of what it will cost when we don't have the air and water with which to survive. It takes months to starve to death, weeks to thirst to death, but only minutes to suffocate. Note eight space time. This image is an image of Herodion, or in Arabic for days, mountain of the little paradise. It's named after Herod the great. It's an artificial cone shaped mountain in which a complete fortress has been carved, built in 25 BCE is now part of the natural landscape around Bethlehem. Although artificial it has blended with the landscape and in our contemporary times rules and regulations places buildings, lifestyle 50 years in terms of structural and terminal performances. What if we think of buildings for time scales that would be long enough for them to be integral part of their surroundings and were nature and where the landscapes become part become one with the architecture. This is a site of a project that we're working on. It's an art foundation in the city of Amman. And the foundation has conglomerate a certain number of buildings on its site that you can see here on in the center of this image. Currently the foundation is expanding and the they're looking to add a couple of buildings on their site to create an art school. So I think that we've been trying to develop focuses on the idea of an infrastructure in the city and infrastructure that has the ability in on a long term to provide a very strong link with the city and the way the city is inhabited. The structure has is being developed with with a stone stereotypy principle where the different spaces aligned horizontally in the building with with those two different spaces. On the lower floor floor it would be production spaces on the first floor artist studios and multipurpose spaces on the upper floors. So kind of trying to create systems of assembly of stones that would allow us to have large spans spans that would cover areas of would actually spans of approximately 14 meters. These are models of the primary study that. So the building is basically acting as an infrastructure open to the city. It's, it has this ability to adapt transform to different spatial configurations. And it's basically dialogues with an infrastructure parking lot that that is basically opposing the lot or the parcel. Approaching the building from what once you get closer to the building you start understanding the very delicate work on the the stereotypical kind of approach. This project is is also in terms of the way the buildings adapt through time in terms of what we call today sustainability that is for us very a bit ridiculous that sustainability is also linked to some rules and regulations that set the lifespan of a building to 50 years, sometimes a bit more a bit less but more or less 50 years. Whereas you have buildings like this one in the old city of Bethlehem that actually the spaces in the building are all typological spaces so there are spaces that correspond to way of living away of living in the in the old city and as you can see here in these two pictures from the outside the facade is really quite quite simple with the openings towards the street balconies nothing very exuberant and from the inside on your left hand side you can see voting systems and the much richer environment that that corresponds actually to a way of living of representing typological spaces so we have different typologies that compose the old city of Bethlehem. None of them are really iconic. So there is no building that is iconic but there are a set of typological spaces that have the ability to adapt and transform in time. And these typological spaces are very sustainable. In terms of their capacity to be flexible on not on tens of years but on centuries and we this project we started this project a year ago. It's an old it's an old house several houses, a building made out of several houses that communicate through a sort of a central patio that is a topology called the hush, and it's going to be transformed into a sort of a cultural center, socio cultural center. And the entire focus of the project was on this shift between the residential aspect of it and the public and the public aspect that would be introduced with the new project. And so the entire idea was to try to think how to reveal the inside of the project, as it goes from a domestic to a public scale, try to reveal the interior aspect of the project from from the street. So the idea is that you have all these vaulting systems inside the building. And the last, last floor of the building wasn't ever completed so it's an unfinished floor where we are adding a sort of a vault that will reveal from the street in a very subtle way. The extreme richness of the interior spaces so that the project has two main components this this bolt and in the circulation the new staircase that would go along the project so the staircase travels along this internal passio but without limiting limiting itself in plan to the limits of the passio so the stair crosses the passio and several points. So it creates sort of unrevealed point of views on the existing structures, because at certain points on the stair you are very close to the vaults you're at distances that you have never experienced before of the same building so the idea is that you have this circulation that goes across the building travels across the building and offers new perspective on the, on the old building with with with a with a sort of intentionally detached architectural language that clearly puts in value the old structure. So a project that is still under construction probably summer or end of this year would be the completion of this project. So basically night note number nine is concerning curves, we have been very much interested in the idea of the curve in architecture and specifically how the curve in the different forms of architecture that we've encountered in since 60 years is very much linked was very much linked to the idea of the curve and the curve was basically a way of creating the strong connection between architecture and nature and the elements of how the elements of the contours or the contour lines would basically create this kind of transversality in between the built space and the end topography. This is this is an image of the global heat map. A global heat map in an area around Ramallah. It would be funny to look at on this images. If you look on the spots where you have where the basically the heat map shows basically trajectories that are encircling a certain topography. These correspond to settlements Israeli settlements, and where you have an account of expanded background, it's basically the Palestinian city. This this global heat map shows also the, I mean this this heat map has no labels has no titles, no, no information about the localities about the locations, but the global heat map. So the kind of on the lower left hand side and on the right hand side, you can see two settlements, and you can recognize those settlements because that the global heat map shows some introverted sort of system of movement that corresponds actually to the urban infrastructure of a settlement and on the center on the top center side you can see a Palestinian city where the global heat map is in a more organic organically shaped path. And I mean, beyond the idea of recognizing the urban morphologies through the global heat map. It also shows the sort of relation between bodies and nature, or between basically architecture and nature. This is an image of a valley. It's called the Kremizan Valley it's in. It's on the periphery of Bethlehem. And it's an area it's one of the largest natural reserves around the city that is currently, or has been during the last 10 years threatened to be expropriated. And we were commissioned in 2018 to work on a to continue the research with stone on for a commission at the Victorian Albert Museum in London. And we were very much interested in trying to explore this idea of the curve and this idea on the link in between architecture and nature in Palestine, how the link has been historical and the way cities were formed in Palestine and how the current political conditions are erasing this kind of very strong link. And the way we, the way the Palestinian city protected or created a very strong link in between architecture and nature was a very dense city centers and the way of preserving nature was to keep them totally free of construction. In the last 30, 40 years, there's, there's a kind of, there's a tendency to go towards a form of conquest of territory, where from the moment we built on on lands and we built on territories we kind of protect them from being expropriated so there's this tendency of consuming lands. And this is an image of what they call the Friday gathering, which happens actually on a weekly basis in this valley that is threatened to be expropriated and they started by being religious ceremonies, where the different members of the community would come and pray or protest the passage of the world. And from, from the moment these gatherings started they grew very fast and they started to conglomerate different parts of the community so here we only see priests and obviously people from the Christian community that are you know joining this kind of celebration, and gradually they started bringing in different part, attracting different parts of the community so they started being more and more kind of meditative exercises in the valley. And the, the, for us it was very interesting to think about, oh, what's the link in between these gatherings and the land and the territory. The project for the V&A was a kind of tower that is inspired by, by what we call in Palestine Muntar, which is a structure that is basically a towering structure that historically was built on lands in order to mark properties. We didn't have any kind of land registries and in order to have to present who mark properties and know who are the different owners on different lands, they used to build these stone structures. And basically the one we built is in the Kremizan Valley in an area that is beyond the zone C and you know in Palestine we have different kind of zoning of territories. And the zone C is basically a zone that is under, it's a Palestinian area but under Israeli jurisdiction so any, it's under Israeli security control under Israeli civic control. So any form of construction is not allowed. And the idea here was to kind of mark the property with a kind of exploration of architecture that has a strong link with nature. And the whole process was focusing on the idea of the contours and the idea of the curves and architecture and the curve here has been used as an element of stereotomy. And it's basically the whole system of the whole structural system of the building relies on on the curve. There was as well a part of the project that was trying to question the idea of an object that is musified. Basically this project is born at the V&A at the museum and then goes back to the city and is released in the nature and this inverted path of musified objects is something that we were very much interested in. There's a small mess in the arrangement of the PDF so just need to scroll back. This was during the Venice Biennale. So we presented during the Venice Biennale All Purpose, which is a project that suggests a new form of habitat whose structure reflects a way of living. So the roof shape include two domes that might be understood as two main spaces and an interstitial common in between space. The typology is inspired by local forms of architecture found in Palestine in which shared spaces are essential but is also adaptable to a more generic habitat typology. The title of the installation is All Purpose and it refers to the way stone has been used in Palestine to serve multi-layered agendas in terms of political agendas, cultural agendas, territorial agendas in 1918 for instance the British mandate imposed a bylaw that would force everyone in Jerusalem to build out of stone and officially it was to create a sort of urban continuity or an urban continuity of the built landscape. But the fact of the slow has created new limits to Jerusalem so everything that wasn't built out of stone would be excluded from Jerusalem and everything built out of stone would be in Jerusalem. The slow was used through time also by the first big operations of housing around Jerusalem that were built out of stone in order to include them in the imaginary of what Jerusalem includes and doesn't include. And this slow was since then widespread to practically all the Palestinian cities. So today, stone is being used in all Palestinian cities as a law so today the law is inscribed in every municipality and 70% of the covering of each building has to be built out of stone. The problem today is that this slow is still applied and it created a sort of systematic approach to construction to building so every building is built with the exact same way. There's only one construction technique and in that creates a sort of a boring city city that is made out of the same building so the idea was to use in this project stone. The idea about a new way of living with a structure made out of stone, not only on a local context but also to inscribe the use of stone on a more global context on an approach that is more that has more to do with contemporary architecture and the way we invest a habitat and use the platform of the Venice Biennale as a sort of a place to experiment new typologies of architecture directly related to space to here in the Venice Biennale it was exhibited as an abstract space. So, but it could be understood as if the two domes are principle spaces in the house, and the interstitial spaces as a sort of communicating shared space inside the household. So I think we're running out of time so we'll just go very quickly on this last, these last few slides. In March 2020 so at the beginning of the pandemic we started the couple of friends radio radio horror, which, which became actually an extension of her practice and at the beginning the radio started as a way of, you know, keeping in touch with and keeping certain connection with, with the outer world. And basically, it created this community of people coming together from different parts of the world. And it created a very strong idea of transversal knowledge and transversal cultural exchange through sonic content. So we give it as a way of exploring the city and how the city can have kind of a break into another city and how we can form different forms of solidarity or how different forms of solidarity can emanate through sonic content. So one of the big projects of the radio is the film mish-mish campaign, which is, which was an online protest that took place in July 2020, when Israel decided to unilaterally annex territories that are in the West Bank. And basically we had to react and our idea was to invite a certain number of artists and DJs to come together, form a continuous lineup of 85 or 84 hours, protesting the passage of the world. And it was a very, very rich moment because it was a moment of solidarity where different artists were talking about different struggles in other parts of the world that are kind of mirrored with what we're basically living in in Palestine. And this idea of solidarity creates as well a form of transmission of knowledge and an idea on how we can be more responsive on how we can preserve cultures and the planet in general. In the exact same process, our research stone matters is fed by analogies of architectural forms and techniques found in different locations and at different periods. And the radio has been sort of replicating the system of creating analogies between different protests and different struggles all around the world. So what was really interesting about the content, the sonic content that we've been listening on the radio is that it creates a sort of blend between the listener and the producer. And create a sort of a global solidarity movement that is, that shares very, that shares very common understandings of struggles, while being completely specific to each, to each personal condition and situation. So it kind of relates to the work of stone analogies in between different architectural forms that are found in different spaces, different locations across time. These are images of local industries, which is our industrial design arm that is a constant network of makers, artisans and designers trying to explore what are the different know-hows that can be investigated in the city. And just to conclude, this is our upcoming project this year. It's a space that will open during the summer. It's called the wonder cabinet and it's basically a kind of, it's a space that would encapsulate the different elements of our practice. So it would be a space that it's a cultural space focusing on production production in a very broad sense. So it's a space where we'll be able to open the space to artists and designers to come work with researchers and artisans and makers. But as well, it will act as well as a label of sound production label. It will have as well an artist based an artist residency restaurant and different other components. Thank you. That's great. Thank you so much, Yusuf and yes. We are short on time, but I will do my best and maybe commenting quickly, asking one quick question and because I know some students are about to leave to their classes. I want to start by, in fact, reading one comment by Mario Gooden who has, I don't know if he's still there or he has just left his studio and he just says for you who is the current director of the architecture program he says thank you for the inspiring lecture carefully and critically considered work. I think this carefully and critical work I think that's obviously, you know, careful in the precision and maybe in celebrating the imprecision is I think it echoes your work and maybe I'll come back to this in a second but I appreciate how you kind of wrapped it up the lecture as well maybe stopping at the radio Alhara where stone, which has been of course the subject of study throughout all the projects we've been looking at, with the exception of the olive wood trees. branches stone became in for you as much as a real physical material of a specific place that had to be kind of crafted and designed. It became also an analogy, right. in radio Alhara so you see it's very interesting to kind of hear that kind of analogy playing in your word because it makes us rethink the whole lecture right because suddenly you chose an immaterial subject. The sonic exchange as you describe it and you compare it to a very physical and static and fixed material, organic material that is stone. So this is more of a comment I really appreciate the way kind of you wrap it up like this which makes me think that to go back to the question of particular and crafted well crafted work is that obviously your work. operates on multi level levels. This idea I will jump straight to the second question I'll go back to the first one if we still have more time, which is a little bit more of a personal question maybe, but the idea of the precision and imprecision right because you've introduced to us. Stereotomy and then very exact machine production, but you also brought at certain point talked about a machine from the 1970s right as an old tool that we appropriated and there you celebrated mass imperfection. One can assume that next to this imprecision precision there's in the imprecision of the craftsman or maybe the labor with their expertise whether historical or new whether it's still up to date or whether it has been degraded with time. But one can also assume that that labor probably has a higher precision, perhaps at certain point in the making of things. So what I think what this has produced in your work is that exactly that a very static material that is, and you don't hesitate from using the word curve curve linear and organic right it's a very kind of dynamic. And organic forms right that has imperfection and they're very permissive yet they depend on this precision and imprecision kind of balance. So I'm wondering if you can expand a little bit on this and talk to us. How you work right with those craftsman. And how do you manipulate those precise tool to produce the architecture that you're doing because at the end of the day it's a very formal new formal language as you're producing but it's not coming out of formal obsession right of creating complex shape it's coming exactly as I read it as a combination of these two opposing qualities. I think, I think there are maybe different layers of answers to that question but maybe the first kind of first direct answer would be, you know, as much as as far as we, you know, we have more and more access to machinery that are developed and high tech digital kind of cutting devices. The, the level of craftsmanship stays the most important element in the fabrication of these elements because by the end of the day stone is an element that is kind of heavy it has very different properties from one stone to another etc so the level of understanding itself and how it can get assembled disassembled juxtaposed. You know the level of porosity etc creates a very strong and intimate link in between, you know the human working the piece and how the machine delivers it kind of automated response. I think that if you look at the very quickly to the lintel in the old city of Bethlehem the one that yes showed. Where was it. Yeah, this, this lintel here. This lintel is in the old city of Bethlehem and it has interfaces that are very complex interfaces so if you try to imagine the interior geometry of these interfaces. If you look at all of them, it won't be that evident to understand how they're, how they're, how the geometry is built and how, how, how at that time they could assemble and carve such stones, which, which actually, the right here. Now you can see it. Yeah, so they're very sophisticated stone elements that were actually built without any kind of technology that we have today and this is on one level and on another level this kind of approach of trying to understand the traces of the architectural forms and techniques is also a way to enrich our own, our own knowledge of the, of the material and of the way it has been, has been used so I guess that precision and the imprecision is not only linked to the way we work with the material, but also the way we gather the knowledge about the material and the way the know how is created through the practice of the material. I think, I mean, I mean all these devices that are, you know, all the machines that are, you know, getting updated in a kind of nonstop way. We perceive them as a tool, so we perceive them as a hammer and as a, you know, they're just an extension of a new tool that would allow to have a more precise kind of response and that would just enable us to maybe have less waste, for example, but they're just a new tool, they're not producing a new form of architecture. Yeah, that's a very interesting way of framing it. Most of you thank you for this answer. It's almost yours. I think you're also trying to say the tool is not fetishized. I mean, the machines are not fetishized. At the end of the day they are as secondary as they use as the hammer used to be. And the craftsman or the maker is still on top, kind of in terms of that hierarchy, which that person not only has the know how but also carries with him or with her that knowledge, right, that kind of historical knowledge moving into today. There's a question that came up, but just to build on that very quickly, because I know some students might be heading also out to their classes. What I appreciate also about your way of describing the work is that this idea of transfer of knowledge that I think you've just brought it up again. And especially when you're dealing with the stone right again it's a static it's heavy it's local right it's kind of Syria Lebanon Jordan some degree in Palestine so you talk about that geography. That has this very specific material that the shaping your work, but yet you never defined it you never use geography as to determine your work you're always talking about the crusades right like even that form of violent is actually a form of encounter and exchange you talk about the Jerusalem vault and dorm in Paris, you talk about the, you know, the VNA installation starting in England and then coming to the landscape to inhabit the landscape which supposedly came from right as a material. So I think this is a, it's very exciting because in where you're liberated and you're kind of operating in a very with this idea of movement, right, as an operating concept in spite or in a place where movement is limited if not always restricted right. So I think and that's what I appreciate it may be what I think that my interest that, in spite of all these constraints, yet the work is never fixed in one place and only responding to that it has the ability to kind of move. Right, you know there's a slight movement let's have a slight movement that's happening from a house into a cultural center right this kind of slight transformation of the vote system, etc. This is the beautiful thank you again. I had other questions but I'm going to take the students question I see them here. This way there's an opportunity for everyone to take part. So, Matthew Barton says incredible breadth and intensity you are etc form a regional network and reference point whose importance for cultural and political growth and resistant cannot be underestimated. That's more of a comment. Maybe I'll use that to go back to my question, which is, and it's appearance it sounds like a personal question but really about that knowledge that you kind of articulate throughout your work so there is this bit of work right there is this all these, you know, you local industries scales, they do have a and then wonder cabinet right. So you are running kind of a multi form discipline, yet you do come from a tradition, I guess a family tradition architecture tradition right that's kind of your both your parents are where are architect, I don't know if they are practicing I didn't talk much about that work. I know you cannot fit everything but they're there in our intro. So I'm wondering how much of that internal knowledge is part of your practice in terms of, you know, at least this continuation in the making the building practices and that time or at least learning from your parents or from that environment that you grew up in. It's the rejection of that I don't know. And, you know, I think stone matters is exactly that is this evolution knowledge learning and moving it into the contemporary because of this political technological landscape you're dealing with. But at the same time your office has so many initiatives like it's very hard to follow I always get texts from. It's like I'm doing this now send me a song to add or whatever. So I can and then you have the chairs right coming up and now the showroom and so this is very exciting in a way it's, it throws out of the window the traditional architecture practice which is, you sit waiting for a client to come in, or for the commission in fact you actually use the word we have a real client at certain point like this is that's the one real client everything else is imagine. I don't think if you can, giving that we have an audience who are going to become architects of the future, wondering if you can talk about this multi form of practice, and maybe even logistically or bureaucratically how do you manage both of you kind of to run all these ideas in part and what's the synergy that you talked about. Maybe I'll just give a few reflections on that. I think first concerning the kind of family atmosphere of architectural. I mean, we grew up in a really in the family of architects spending like our childhood on construction site etc. But basically my parents are, are, were, you know, studied completed their studies by the end of the 70s so they're very much functionalist, which kind of is not really our, our thing but there's, of course, there's a very strong link in. I mean, in general, Palestine, everyone has a strong link to construction. I think construction is embedded in the way people live in this, in this country because basically the construction is the way you safeguard your presence in this territory. Even the other day we were just discussing that with a friend where people from the moment people are doing some, you know, have some economies, the first thing that they would do they would just start building even if it's the first elements of foundations of a house or of construction. They feel that this is like the safest way of doing it, rather than having their money in a bank or etc. So basically construction is something that is basically in, in the blood of everyone here. And I think the one of the reasons that we decided to come back and work in person is the access to craftsmanship and the idea of, you know, be. Basically to crafts and be able to process things very quickly and to embed the idea of crafts in the form of architecture and how, how crafts can influence the way you think about space. And basically I think one of the reasons we're doing that is as well because, you know, it's becoming to be it's a bit maybe pessimistic but it's becoming more and more difficult to be an architect I think in person but as well in general because we mentioned this courthouse issue that we had but it's become it's becoming as well a tendency where there's really lots of architects that are facing complex situations with due to many layers of agendas that are linked to other politics or kind of context. So, having this possibility on developing autonomous kind of initiatives as well a way to maintain a kind of equilibrium and balance and in the practice. Yeah. This is a great comment of this idea of being tied to the land by building forms and by those through those practices is definitely probably what makes the place unique for you kind of and kind of start to explain I guess a lot of your work and contextualize it doing that. So it's not really a family tradition, it's really a local tradition architecture, the local tradition of making and kind of having your property kind of physically as a physical object not as an abstract land right. It can be a building. It builds I mean an even ancient kind of ideas of properties right where in Islamic laws if the building doesn't exist. You don't own anything right has to be a physical space that your nurse cannot be just an account that you have in the bank for instance in the bank system. It's very Mediterranean I think when you when you travel a bit around the Mediterranean area where you have always these kind of columns that are just waiting for you to be added a new slap to be cast and etc. So this from the moment you can invest into something you just add the space you are the floor you are the staircase etc. Yeah, yeah, there's always a provision or a kind of future that you imagine. No, I think this has been great I think we had the to the two o'clock mark is one more minute. Because I can see that student now has the running to their studios. But it's okay. Thank you so much also for making the time I know now it's late where you are and I hope again that we see you back in New York very soon. Thank you for the work it's very beautiful very inspiring for all of us and it's very nice to see both of you today. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you everyone. Thank you. Bye. See you later. Thank you so much.