 So we'll be hearing from Jens and Nick and Vincent and Sylvia will give an introduction to this session. So we have a panel on assembly followed by a panel on pedagogy and then finally a round table to close out the day and remarks. So hopefully we'll be on time and can open up the floor for some questions during this session, okay? So I appreciate everybody keeping on time. Thanks Sylvia, on to you. Thank you Craig and welcome everyone to the afternoon session of our symposium today. My name is Sylvia Prandelli, I'm a teacher at GSAP, I teach enclosures. I'm also an enclosure specialist in the industry. So today we had the pleasure of listening to our previous two panels, the first one going into the integration and now integration can push boundaries to achieve goals in a faster and more efficient manner. Then we moved on to the computation side of things where we look at how computation can help on different design scales to move towards achievement of new skills and goals. And now we are talking about assembly. Assembly in fashion of digital fabrication embedded in the design process and listening to speakers from different parts of the industry. Our speakers today will touch upon their experience and their research to create tools and design objects via a more meaningful fabrication process. The first speaker of the day today is coming from the design industry and is the co-founder and head of the R&D of a design lab in Norway. Jens Divek is going to discuss with us the connection to local consumers and now the assembly can work in a faster and more efficient manner. Thanks to that. Then we will move on. We were supposed to have Billy with us this afternoon but you heard a talk earlier today. She basically described how to locate sources in the agency and described what is happening in the architecture world. So we will move on to our second speaker, Nick Gelfi, the design principal and founder of Gelfi projects. Nick is also a system professor of architecture at Florida International University in Miami and he's going to discuss with us three projects to explain how available technology can be of support in advancing the use of familiar materials. And finally, last but not least, we will hear Vincent Louvière from Airbus. He will describe us, I mean, how we can elevate our understanding of assembly in his industry and what topics he's touching upon with his team at Airbus to look at the industry from a different perspective, from a broader perspective. Now for me, it's time to leave you to our speakers and please have some interesting thoughts for our Q&A session later because I'm sure you will see beautiful things from now on. Thank you. What is the stuff that surrounds you mean to you? The clothes you're wearing, the gadgets that you have on you, where does it come from, what do you know about it? I believe that one of the best ways to help us have more meaningful stuff surrounding us, the buildings and objects that we consume and live with is to enable a much larger part of our population to fabricate stuff themselves. We do this in Oslo in Norway at Fellesverkstede, which is an independent non-profit organization we founded, where we give people on demand access to tools and knowledge to make stuff. Just in time, they get to know how to use stuff and which materials to use and so on, but they do all the things themselves. We enable anybody to make pretty much anything. We are neither a university nor a private company, but an open living room for anybody or library in a way for machines where anybody can come in and use stuff. So here you see some of my co-founders and collaboration partners and what's quite special is as an independent non-profit, we managed to buy this 100-year-old building in one of the most expensive real estate markets in Oslo and right now it looks terrifyingly enough like this. This is our future location that we have bought. We have a temporary location where we are now, but it's going to look like this. So it's going to be about 10,000 square feet of open production facilities where anybody can come and make stuff, no matter background or prior knowledge. It's a beautiful old foundry that was built in 1915, but it's not so fun to talk about what we're going to do. It's much better to tell you about what we've done and what we have learned. So in the past five years we've been in this location, you can see a little video walkthrough from now where we built up a facility giving people access to digital fabrication equipment like laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC milling machines and so on. And here you can see here some projects going on. We also developed new interfaces like a projection on the machine to know where the machine is going to cut. But sometimes it doesn't make sense to use a robot to cut a plank in two. So we also have analog workshops as well. So full-fledged wood workshop to process your materials, to have more control of the materials you work with, but also to support that analog way of working. You have a screen printing facility and a metalworking facility. And then we also been repurposing old industrial tools like this welding robot from the industry. And it's actually a veteran because it's 20 this year and we got an offer we couldn't refuse. But then working with new types of software and open tool change, we're actually teaching this old robot new trick. So here you see a 3D printing head that we put on the industrial robot and we're also researching a mix of additive and subtractive manufacturing. So what's so special about an organization like ours, FABLAB, is that people meet on a flat floor to produce. So they step out of that hierarchy you normally operate as a person. You're no longer the boss of a company, or an employee, or a professor, but you come to produce and you meet in a different way and of course different professions learn from each other. And it's also about just in time instead of just in case. So we call it just in case learning. That's, you know, that's, you know, traditional education. You fill your head with knowledge for 18 years in case you just in case needed one day. Next to that is great to have also the opportunity to have just in time learning. So when you specifically you need to work with a process or material, no matter how far you progress in, you know, the journey of life, no matter your age, you can come in and learn that just in time and get busy immediately because we do provide luxury one-on-one training. And people do stuff because they want to, not because somebody told them to. So there's amazing stuff happening. So for instance, we teach people how to laser cut. So this was, this was an oil engineer that had this idea of a pancake printing robot. So he laser cut the parts to put together a prototype for a robot that digitally print pancakes for his daughters. And we had another oil engineer actually who built a floating sauna. So he built the modules in our lab and he assembled it on sea and then he kept building and expanding on this floating sauna later. And then also on the simpler side, we had a neighbor who just came in to repair his favorite guitar, you know, he just taught him how to work with wood, glue and clamps. But sometimes you also have very complicated projects. This is one of my favorites. I think it's nice also to present here at the Graduate School of Architecture because these two girls, they wanted to do their graduate projects in one-to-one. So instead of doing a render or a scale model, they wanted to do it in one-to-one. And also the School of Architecture, they don't have large format milling machines and the students don't get to touch the machines. They commit their files. In our lab, it's opposite. You have to use the machine. We are not allowed to use the machine for you. So we train them in using this machine themselves. And they plowed through 100 panels of plywood in seven days and assembled it. And this is based on the Wikihouse standard. If you're familiar with that very interesting development, open standards struck for way of digitally manufacturing joints and assembling structures. And for them to build on that standard, enable them to get further with their graduation projects, adapting the connection system to their design. And what I like about a slide like this is normally you see a grad student project as a render, a computer visualization or a beautiful photography of a scale model. But by giving people access to tools and knowledge when they need it, all of a sudden, you get to see their vision in one to one. And on the other side of scale, we also have this tiny stuff. So this is a local fashion label that work with only local materials, Norwegian wool, Norwegian wood. And they just came in to learn how to use the scene milling machine to make three-dimensional buttons in case you wondered, yes, we do have hipsters in Norway as well. But we're not alone in doing this. So we are part of the global FabLab network, fabrication laboratories. And now there's more than 1,000 of them around the world. They're all different in how they're funded and operate. But what we all have in common is that we are a global network of people who collaborate and share knowledge. And we give people locally access to tools to realize their own ideas. It's very tricky to explain in words what the FabLab is. I normally tell people like, it's not even enough to visit one. You have to come, and you have to physically make something yourself in this space to really understand what it means. Closest we get today is this overview of video walkthroughs from different labs across the world. So you can see here on the top left is FabLab started by a media collective in Jakarta, Indonesia. Top right is FabLab in central Amsterdam. And then on the bottom right is FabLab in Marjiva in Kenya, which is situated in the rural community, which is very interesting. It's also the same with this lab of North in Lingen in Norway, which was one of the first in the world when it opened in 2002. It's also situated in remote areas. So both city labs and remote labs have a very important functions. Because there's a huge problem with Braindrain in the world. You're probably familiar with that here at Columbia. Why should one smart individual have to leave their community to come all the way to New York in order to learn stuff? But if you give access to tools where people are and still connect them to this global intelligence, then they can still stay a resource for their community while advancing their field or whatever they're working on. And you see standardized tools. So bottom left you see a laser cutter in Norway. And bottom right you see the same laser cutter in Kenya, in this village near Marjiva. So that makes it really easy to collaborate. And that's the real potential of this FabLab, not just helping people locally, but connecting them globally. So I got dragged into this world of FabLabs because in 2011, instead of going to grad school in design, I made my own research projects through my own design companies. So I formulated a research around how can we build sustainable business models for open design and how can we do local personal manufacturing instead of centralized manufacturing. So from 2011 to 2013, I was like a nomad going from lab to lab around the world researching these questions. And on a side note of trivia, for those who saw Kevin's presentations about gut balance, actually, this destroyed my gut balance, these two years of consecutive traveling. But yeah, it's much too long to talk about everything. I'm just going to show one favorite project from the research and experiments. So when I was in Kenya, they asked me if I could help them develop leather products. And I said, actually, in the FabLab in Kamakura, they have a really nice leather product already. So they taught traditional leather craftsmen how to laser cut. And he made this beautiful design for laser cut slippers. So we asked them if they wanted to share the designs with us, which they did. So those bits and bytes behind that design traveled from Japan to Kenya. We got local material put in the laser cutter and then we had tele-transported that Japanese slipper design to Kenya. So they were going to sell to local tourists these leather products. So next was to customize. If you took the African mud-crab pattern and engraved it on, and you could tell the tourists that if they buy these slippers, you're forever walking on African ground. And they also used this for teaching. How would you go about this from scratch? It became a teaching tool in the lab. And they said, you know, Sara Obama, Barack Obama's grandmother, she's living close to the lab. Would you like to go and talk to her? And I said, we are makers, not talkers. We need to make her something. So we got some fish leather from Lake Victoria. We downloaded an image of her grandson and graved it onto the leather. And now we had grandchild slippers for Mama Obama. And of course, we told her about how we collaborate globally and produce locally and help people make personal stuff. And she was very happy and asked to come back with 10 more pairs. A few years later, back in Norway, in our lab, this guy, Miguel Vancella, who made a pancake printing robot, he got invited to show this at the 2014 White House Make Affair. So we put an image, still image, from my movie, got some stitching help from my mother. And now we had Meta Obama's slipper with engraved an image of Mama Obama receiving slippers with a picture of Barack Obama. And we sent those with Miguel. So here he is in the White House with his family cooking pancakes. He hooked up with Professor Neil Gersonfeld from MIT. He was one of the main figures behind the fab lab. And there they were in this exhibition. And we got an email later that day from the professor that the president was pleasantly surprised. And they officially logged it as a present. So what is really interesting here is that Kaluska himself, who designed original, he ended up quitting his boring day job to start his own business around this. But he's not selling the products. He's selling the service. So his main source of revenue is not selling the slippers, but workshops and events where people learn how to make this themselves. So back to our lab in Norway, because actually I made a documentary from this research. Because it was my own research project, not true in institutions. I didn't have to write the thesis. So in the best DIY style, I made a documentary. And we don't have time to watch that today, but you can find this documentary on YouTube. So I ended up falling in love with this sort of comments-based workshop so much that my own design practice is now sleeping for a while while I'm working full-time with this in Norway. And we're starting also to see interesting consequences of doing this in our community. So here, this floating sound now is now an Airbnb. Hannah's already paid back the initial investment to build it, which was not the intention, but the nice coincidence of the creator. We have people making, we have one guy make drone kits that he sells and teach people how to do. We have people doing lacing-graved wallets that they produce in our lab and sell. And the pancake bot went on Kickstarter for quite a significant, successful crowdfunding campaign. And I think you can buy it all over the world. So last, I talked about how people make stuff and how we help them make business with the stuff they make. But something they get me very excited is, well, I'm making the stuff that makes the stuff you want to make. So how do we actually give people agency to create stuff themselves and the machines that make stuff they want to have? Because then we can really scale. Then not everybody needs to come to us. So the real challenge is linear motion. For the tech geeky people among you, if you think about DIY machines, people building your own 3D printers and laser cutters and so on, usually the core vitamins that provides accurate motion, they actually don't buy it, they source it. And that gives lots of limitations. So the bi-linear guide rods and belts and screws and rack-and-pinion systems. So we've been researching the hell out of with the existing FabLab tools, how can we help people do that themselves? And we came to this geometry, which is actually a derivative of a bike chain geometry that makes CNC-friendly rack-and-pinion, because you always get a round corner when you mill. So that is where it all starts. So we can connect this to a motor. And we can then, all of a sudden, ourselves precisely fabricate the linear motion system. And then using same tools as you saw do advanced buildings earlier today, we make parametric machines. So you can configure the specifications, how big, how small, and so on. And then not only do we do that, but we generate a code for the robot to cut this in the same environment. So no more file, export, import, set the things. But the moment you set the parameters, you can start running the machine to cut this out, making it much more accessible. So here you see a milling of linear guides and a milling of the rack-and-pinion with a tiny two-millimeter system. And this actually has given very exciting results. So this is one of our latest test machines. You can see it's here using this linear motion system to cut five-millimeter aluminium. That's almost a quarter of an inch of aluminium cut on this machine. And we also do circuits, electronic circuits. These are one of the highest precision requirements you can have. And also very interesting teaching people how to do electronic circuits, because that's really normally quite a black box. What the hell is inside that gadget you use all the time? How can I make it myself? But then what gets really cool is when it self-replicates. So here you see, we actually see in C-Mill, a new axis with the machine itself. So the machine has made itself a new spare part. And again, with adequate precision that this can actually be a useful tool, which is also the challenge, not just the proof principle. And what's so exciting with digital, it scales. So you can go from micron precision to if you don't need really micron precision, you can make a building size concrete printer, for instance. And you can do that yourself. So for people, young individuals with a lot of enthusiasm, passion, and time, but not a lot of capital, all of a sudden they can take part in this technological discussion in a very different way by giving them access to these tools. But the most important thing is we don't do it alone. We do it together. And we don't do it because somebody told us to. There's no senior manager or no professor telling us to do this, but we want to do it ourselves. And we do it for ourselves, and we do it together. And you get this sort of mix of how we work, live, and play. So if we sum up then with fabrication, literacy, and universal democratic access to making, we have open knowledge and storytelling by collaborating across the globe. We have the agency to create the own tools that you use to create, not only passively consuming and using the tools that are provided for you. And you have the fact that it's not about do it yourself. DIY, it's about DIT, do it together. And I would say we live in a pretty interesting age. And I think it's an age of more abundance than more people think. All our sources are available online, if you would like to collaborate or contribute, you are more than welcome. And it was very interesting, very enjoyable. And now it's time for Nika to run for his presentation. Please. Thank you, Sylvia. I want to begin by saying thank you to Craig and to the Dean for including me. In this, I'm a Columbia alumni, and it's nice to be back. Yeah, as mentioned, I would like to present three recent projects, which I feel are examples of how what are becoming more familiar technologies are perhaps expanding the reach of the traditional design process. Because this is a GSAP and it deals with technology, I thought it would be a good opportunity to use this article I found long ago. It comes from an issue of A plus U from 1991 titled facsimiles, and it's an exchange of faxes between Toyo Ito, Rham Kulhas and Stephen Hall. When Toyo Ito was actually teaching a studio here at Columbia, and it deals a little bit with pedagogy as well. This was the time when Stephen Hall and Ram were building their Nexus project in Fukuoka. And I'll just run through a few highlights from it, and then get into the projects. I think this is interesting. In some ways, the talk, I was thinking about my work and in how new technologies potentially don't invent anything new, but just embed new qualities into the nature of what it is we do. So I thought this is an interesting intro from Toyo Ito, who says to Rham Kulhas, it might be modern and somehow interesting for us as architects to have a three-way communication via facsimile. It's not as formal as conventional letter writing, but less casual than telephone chatter and more cool and objective than face-to-face conversation. And you'll see a variety of these things. From Toyo Ito to Stephen Hall, he said, I finished the studio, and now I'm leaving for Boston. It was a pity you could not come to the final review. The studio ended successfully with a good showing about the students. Your comments presented at the interview were helpful. But then he says, to be frank, I was perplexed when the studio started. The studio procedure and the students attitude were much different from Japan. I was surprised to see so many students shepherding forms blindly through the conceptual process without apparent consideration for function. I was told this was the system at Columbia. Is that true? And from Stephen Hall to Toyo Ito, thank you for the first facts. May 6, I enjoyed your remarks about the experience of teaching at Columbia. I understand your concern regarding the rejection of question of program and function. It is a particular style of the teaching. Students in schools go through many phases, and this will pass in a few years. And then Rham Kulhas says to Stephen, hi, Stephen, I've seen the letters between you and Ito. I find your answer about Columbia and possibly Glib. So we are neighbors now in Japan. I saw our buildings two weeks ago in torrential rain. They looked wet and beautiful, almost cheerful. And there's more. There's a lot of interesting things about the nature of them collaborating with the trades in Japan that have had some resonance in their work since then. And I think this is really interesting. Rham says back to Toyo Ito, I'm writing this on a plane back from another visit to Japan. This letter is just another sign of deepening involvement with your country. Some of its architects, you, Isizaki, Shinohara, I see more often than colleagues around the corner in Europe. I'll tell you later why I find that fascinating. And so I'm happy to share that with you. And if anyone would like it, please email me and I'll send it to you. The first project I wanted to talk about is a pavilion that I constructed at MIT for their 150th anniversary. And I have to publicly thank Mijin Yoon, who actually commissioned me to do this when I was a junior faculty member there. And it emerged out of my work with the MIDI lab as well, in fact with Neil Gershwin felt in some of these classes. And it began with an exhibition of work I did when I taught at Ohio State. And this was a kind of type of sketching with materials. They were kind of unmotivated prototypes. I called them mockups. But they were basically an idea about trying to invent a pattern system that was more responsive to issues of physics and not purely optical. And so we invented this simple idea of bending or flexing a piece of material. And we tried to scale it up to a series of generic prototypes. This one, a typical wall that flexed. And then when it flexed, it became more transparent. This one where the structure is inherently unstable, but the skin props it back up kind of like a buttress system would work. And so you can see a few more examples of that. And then last, a kind of floating prototype where in fact the frame is actually no longer supporting the skin, like the typical curtain wall configuration. It's a kind of inversion of that where the skin is now supporting the frame, which is somewhat counterintuitive. And then for this pavilion for MIT, I kind of, you know, those just existed. And I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. And this was a great opportunity. So the two elevations of the pavilion, one side, there was a shift. And then you could see how the skin kind of responds to that shift. And then the other elevation, the wall actually lifts from the ground and the skin supports it as in the final. And so these are three sections from the pavilion. You can see the kind of stress and strain on the skin that would be needed to support that. And then here's a, so you know, scaling up. Like here's one of the more difficult pieces to assemble. And we experimented with a variety of species of wood to see which could actually respond to the geometry that was required. And also which were rigid enough to actually support this thing. We did get a building permit from the city of Cambridge. And so these are some of the different species of wood that we looked at. And actually this was the key module that really picked up to a table height. And so once we could demonstrate that when we knew we could, we were good to go in a sense. So here it is the section where you can see the piece that picks all the way up off the ground and the eaves where it transitions at the roof peak as well. Those become activated and light comes through there like the flexwell we had been experimenting with. This is, and we made this completely from scratch. I was also involved in the Fab Lab. So the base structure was a simple frame which we CNC milled. And we also waterjet cut our own gusset plates. We had access to a lot of this equipment. A lot of the things that you would never actually see. And then to assemble it, it was a simple process of assembling these things flat on the ground and tipping them up like a good old fashioned barn raising. And so here you can see it was a pretty low tech process but you know, low tech is still tech. And here you can see it going up. And ultimately, I apologize for the image but each section is slightly offset and has a lot of detail that we put a lot of attention into. So here you can see four of the final five and it was also embedded with lights. And so at night it was kind of nice where it picked up off of the ground. Here you can see that key moment. It also kind of flooded the ground with light. We had an issue where the engineer, you can see this 20 inch max, the engineer kind of wanted us to revise the design saying you know, this was the longest flap. It was five feet and he said you could really only have 20 inches clear. So we came up with a stiffening splint that we put inside of it which allowed the last 20 inches to remain clear and thin. And we fabricated a few details to fasten it to the slab. This is a, these are pieces of steel, the same thickness as the wood that we folded. And then just a few more of the details from the frame which connected with slots for the skin. You can see those arrayed across the elevation. And again at night, it became this kind of beacon there on campus. And so just one final image showing how the lights also eliminated the ground around it. And then the next project I wanted to talk about is one where I was asked as a, well first this is an artist named Marcus Lindenbrink who does this thing like, he tends to paint objects. He deals a lot with the materiality of paint. He also does things like this where he'll take a found space and sort of do these striped mural paintings on the interior of spaces and create these immersive paintings that you would have it. And they're very large scale. I had constructed this barn a few years prior that we called the balloon barn. It's a pole barn that actually gains a structural stability from its skin. And so the owner of a gallery space in Detroit who launched a new art center two years ago, he knew us both and he asked us to collaborate. So he wanted the artist to paint something but he didn't really want him to paint his building. So he asked us to design like a folly or a space for him to paint ultimately. So this was our plan and this is the form that we came up with. And what's interesting is you can see in the model, this is a laser cut model that we engraved but we began by experimenting with forms. Ultimately we were looking at a primitive house shape and we unfolded it and actually mailed it to him. He lives in Bushwick here. So we mailed him an origami model and he did this marker painting of what he thought the mural might look like at full scale and sent it back to us and we traced it back into the computer and scaled it up in a kind of strange act. And then ultimately we projected it. I mean we were able to fold it back up into place and see it spatially in section and we constructed models of it where we actually printed out his photos of his sketches. And we kind of went back and forth developing it in this way. And I think what is interesting, you can see the variety of models that we use to kind of communicate this and coordinate it, is that in a way CNC technology is so familiar to us and I was thinking about it in relation to the first panel about integration. In a sense it's almost unconsciously embedded in our process now. And the owner of the gallery was very concerned that he said don't worry too much about lining up your engraved lines on the outside with his painted lines on the inside. Like that's gonna be very challenging and ultimately expensive to do. And I said it's not challenging and it won't be terribly expensive. So we went about that and we experienced a few setbacks along the way as a result of a lack of familiarity with the technology. But here you can see this is once constructed standing inside of the painting. And each half, so you could see here what was interesting is it's symmetrical but from the two oblique views, so you have twin sets of views depending on the side of the pavilion you stood on but the arrangement of lines that were engraved provided a kind of unique experience. And so you can see here the kind of same view but with a different overlapping set of lines. And then we also constructed it on a steel chassis on industrial casters. This is Detroit and steel was fairly inexpensive actually. So we constructed it and it was intended to be cracked open and programmed in a variety of ways. So it could be opened up to the gallery. You could look at it as a kind of painterly object and then they also used it for performances. And then it could also be pushed back together and used as a kind of quiet contemplation space. You'll also see there are these small portholes that align with the pattern. And so there's this dual interior exterior on the inside. You basically have one view of the painting but it's immersive and on the outside you could explore and peek in and basically gain a variety of perspectives. These are the simple, I wanted to show this because it's very low tech in a sense. We built these all with two by fours from Home Depot and we just laid them out and it was about cutting them to length. The really only thing that was more specialty was we had these gusset plates laser cut in Detroit. And then also because art handler has constructed this they also were really concerned that when the 90 large panels came in the mail they for some reason they were convinced that they were all the wrong size. So actually dimensioned every single one of them and sent that to them so they could verify and they were all 100% accurate. But we had to kind of prove that. And then so just a few construction picks you can see us framing it up, laying out the skins on the ground and then putting it together. And so the process of painting actually went pretty quickly. What does it say? Oh, okay, I'm good. So this is one half of it and this is what it generally looked like. And then one last project I wanna show is a house that I just completed in Miami where I live. I forgot to mention I'm an assistant professor at Florida International University in Miami. And this actually began with a funded research grant that I had through the university. And the story of the house begins with this tree. This is called the Melaleuca tree. It's a native species to Australia. And in the 20th, I forget exactly, I think the 40s, the Army Corps of Engineers scattered it across the Everglades to aid in drying up and facilitating drainage of what's known as the River of Grass. And it's become a number one priority nuisance species in South Florida. And so these are different photographs of over time, how the density really strangles all of the native flora and fauna. In fact, very large winged birds live in the Everglades and these grow so closely together they can't fly between these trees. So it is a big problem. You can see it really grows like a dense thicket and really strangles the landscape. So we began chipping these trees and casting them into concrete using them as an aggregate replacement. And this is a compression cylinder that we made. And you can see we started experimenting with the mix of water and other ingredients and replacing some of the typical ingredients with this mineralized wood aggregate. And we started using some very low-tech means testing them for compression strength and we tested over 300 different recipes. And ultimately found a kind of optimal mix. It's not as strong as concrete but it's strong enough in some ways. And we started experimenting with mix and geometry. These are some material studies that we produced. And then I had the opportunity, this is actually my house. So I had the opportunity to purchase an old house built in 1960 and we needed to expand it a little bit and my wife seemed okay to let me try some things. So we also experimented a little bit but it was my budget that also was a limitation. And so this is the plan. We actually lengthened what was an L-shaped house into a U-shaped house. And then we used pavers that kind of solidified from the street to the front door. It's kind of medieval architecture. Like you have to walk up this very long courtyard to get into the house. And so you can see it here after construction where the roof jog is in this image. Everything beyond that is new construction. But we didn't want there to be a clear difference between the old and the new. So we clad the entire south facade. This material I should mention also is 70% lighter than concrete, has a much higher R value and absorbs sound. So it makes like a very nice, like a tropical down jacket ultimately. These are some of the elevations. I see I have a minute left. So I'll flip quickly through the remainder of these. Again, some of the studies that we used and these are the wall sections we produced. We actually fabricated the molds ourselves and we did prototype several of the panels for a few mock-ups. Ultimately we delivered these master molds to a pre-caster who produced them for us. And this is the installation sequence. The waterproofing is behind these panels. Generally the typology and the construction standard in Miami is that everything is concrete block construction for hurricane reasons. And then we actually hung every one of these on the facade and we have four unique panels that produce these different shadows at different times of the day. And just the last point, we actually align these things. This is through the new addition. So we have one that's low. We align the windows with the grid of tiles on the outside of the house. So from the inside, we have like a corner window, a high window and a low window. On the outside they align and we call them interior misalignments. And the last detail I wanna show, we didn't want it just to be a kind of exterior or decorative cladding, although in many ways it is. But we wanted to bring it inside and allow the logics of it to affect the interior. So each room has a kind of soft shaped built-in desk that pulls in through the window. So the first was the addition room. This is another bedroom. And then last is this desk. And in the kitchen, we actually pulled out the windowsill to make a built-in with a soft shaped breakfast table. And here's the courtyard in the last image. Oh, that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. It was another very helpful presentation that we had today. This is the time for Vincent to come and evolve us on his experience with Protospice at Airbus. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Vincent. I work for Airbus. And we do airplanes and flying stuff. In the company, my job is, one part of my job is to be an observer. An observer of the world, of what is happening in terms of trends, technologies and what kind of revolution and disruption it could bring to airspace. So in this presentation, I'm gonna urge everyone of us to elevate. And it's only my perspective, which is a bit personal and also affects my industry, but we could dwell into larger perspective later on. But here are a few points. So the story starts in the 60s with JFK, who told us we chose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And so those words created a huge wave, a technology revolution, the golden age of aerospace, pushing the boundaries, going to the sky and then going to the moon, being faster than the sound, bringing ultra lightweight materials, revolutionizing systems, sensors, the way we control things, and computers, pushing the boundaries of what we can simulate and test. So all that came from the 60s through the 80s from aerospace, but suddenly it kind of stopped or we plateaued. We were not the king of the world anymore. It was taken over by, for example, automotive. Automotive was the thing in the 90s. They brought the robot in the factory. They were super efficient. They were delivering more cars than ever and cheaper than ever. And then they brought in the bin management, reducing cost, managing your flow, your resources, and so on. And they slowed down. And then a new wave came, the wave of IT, internet revolution, the creation of smartphones, better communication, application, and the platform model, where your smartphone is a link between the developers and the users to create new ways of generating revenues. But this is gone. This is almost over. The technology is not really the driving factor and this is not what will bring revolutions. What we see happening is collision. It's not anymore waves that go forward. It's wave by clashing and creating collisions. Those collisions are when the car become a robot, when your car has an operating system, where your car is loaded with applications, where your car is a platform. This is completely unexpected. This is not a car manufacturer. This is somebody who comes from Silicon Valley and it's bringing huge disruption in all the fields. So the question we asked ourselves in our bus is, okay, we see what's happening with the car. What's gonna happen to us? And so we think that it's not anymore linear evolution and plateau. You have to step up and go to the next level with elevation. And you need to be able to elevate your technologies. You need to be able to elevate your perspective of what's happening around you and you need to go beyond silo industry. So I'm gonna go through those three points in my presentation and we'll start with elevation of technology. So the way we bring technology to an aircraft is the process we use usually in our bus is a legacy of the 60s, a legacy of the time where we were shooting for the moon. It's called TRL, Technology Readiness Level. It was created by NASA and System Engineers and basically it takes the technology at level one which is you know it theoretically, you know it from the research center and you take it through the steps of maturation up until nine or 10. And the way we've done it, this legacy has become our burden. What we do is we do a TRL level every year. And so it leads us to bring technology on an aircraft in 10 years. But today it's not applicable. We cannot do like that forever. If we want to be able to compete and to be integrated and to be compatible with the way of living of everybody, we cannot take 10 years to bring something on the aircraft. So what we've done is we created another process which enables us to absorb technologies and absorb competencies from all around the world way faster. So instead of taking 10 years to bring something on the aircraft, we do it in one year. We use the resources we have in our bus. We use the flight test aircraft. We tie links with startups, companies and universities which are completely outside of our perimeter and we enable them to rapidly bring their value on the aircraft. And so year one is on the test aircraft. You evaluate where you are in terms of maturity, you plan and you go for the second year. The second year you apply on the customer craft in prototype mode. And this way you are able to rapidly absorb new technologies, new idea, new competencies and bring this value to aerospace. That's what we call technology elevation. And that's a process we've been applying this year. I'm gonna tell you the story of Electro-Luminescent. So we came up, we met this company which is based in Ohio. It's Darksite Scientific. They are a small company, five guys who do crazy paint for motorbikes and cars. They are full of tattoos, they have big beards, nothing to do with aerospace engineer. And so we brought them in our bus to create some cultural description and we learned from them. So we illustrated what they can do in their shop to our head of program, the head of A350, a big guy with a lot of stars in the shoulder. And we told him, okay, give us a challenge and we will do it in one year. And so he told us, this is my aircraft and I want you to do the logo. Sorry, I don't know if you see it. Yeah, I want you to do this logo. You have one year. The logo is seven meter long, one meter high. And there's absolutely no electrical connection available on the outside of an aircraft. Okay, let's go. So we experimented, tried to find solution to apply the paint. We tested it. So the paint systems we apply on the aircraft go from minus 50 to 60 degrees Celsius in a matter of 10 minutes. When you take off from Dubai, you go from the external temperature of plus 60 of the aircraft and you are up in the sky at 10,000 feet at minus 50. Everything that is on the aircraft see speeds which are close to Mach 0.9. So that's, it's complicated. So we tested everything. We demonstrated what we could do. We have been doing all the architecture and finding the way to connect and bring the electricity to this technology. And we started to produce. We started to produce a seven meter long adhesive coated with electrolytic instant paint. And then we failed. The first prototype delivered in December, we tested it like two days before applying on the aircraft and it failed. We brainstorm, we try to find solution and finally we adapt and succeed. And two days later, we are on the aircraft with a startup applying the logo and then flying it. So you might think, yeah, that's a tiny, shitty stuff. It's bright and nice. It's ultra complex to bring this kind of stuff on an aircraft. And it's probably the largest flexible electronics ever produced in the world. Seven meter long, one meter high and flying on an aircraft. So the first commercial flight with this technology was yesterday night. So yesterday night in Toulouse, we had the first successful flight and you'll see it in the following days. So what I'm trying to show with this example is that Airbus is adapting to be able to work with more people to acquire new technology and to do it in a easier and faster way than ever. Okay, so now you can, and so the way we do it is technology elevation through Protospace. This is the entity I created in Airbus and that we are driving and we enable everybody to come in and to work with us to bring a disruptive challenge. So now you have your technology, you are able to work with a lot of people. You need to elevate your perspective. So airplane is one thing and the air network is one thing but there's also shipping routes, roads, cities and we are not alone in the world. We need to be able to interconnect with all those networks. So it cannot be anymore that the airport is so complicated to reach. It cannot be anymore that it's so complicated to get into an aircraft. It cannot be disconnected from the world when you fly. So that's one observation. We belong not just to the sky but we're also part of the world. And we have also to realize what's happening. Flying sucks, really. And we all know it. It's a pain for your body, it's a pain for your brain and everybody's aware of it. So we need to do something about it. And there are also more and more alternatives. So it's not gonna be in the future, it's not gonna be anymore about flying big jets. It might be about flying small autonomous taxis which are flying around San Francisco and LA. It will be also virtual reality which is taking you instantly from air to somewhere other place. It could be also autonomous car driving you overnight. You don't need to worry. You can sleep and the next day you are somewhere else and modularity. So all of that we need to take into account. And best of the best architects working on connectivity of transport means and working with other companies like Hyperloop defining of what will be the future of transportation. And I'm not sure how to read this video or what he was trying to say. But it's interesting. It's really fascinating and it's opening a lot of perspectives. And so once again we see this understanding that everything is about network and connectivity and compatibility. So what do we do about that? We understand that we are aware of this context which changes, changing. It's not anymore transportation. It's all about mobility. Passengers have the choice now and we need to be providing an experience which is connected, flexible and integrated. So this is a work which is done by our Silicon Valley office called AQ and they are thinking differently the cabin. Instead of having a set cabin in the aircraft the airline can use modules and define each module differently depending on the experience. It wants to bring to the passengers on a given route. The change of cabin can be operated in. And it's also about opening to different kind of business, different kind of models. You go out of this spiral of cramming people in the aircraft by providing other avenues to the airline when they can offer the space they have as a place for other companies to make business. And so doing this work is involving a lot of capabilities which are not aerospace engineering. It's about understanding how the people feel in a cabin. It's understanding how the people move and live in a living space like an aircraft and it's completely redefining the way we design the aircraft. So now from the two previous examples you have the technologies, you have the people you can bring them in rapidly in aerospace where you are also aware of your context which is global connected and you can adapt that and you can change your product, you dare to do that. But we think we should go also a bit further. We think the concept of industry and go away from the silos we have today. I'll use this sentence from Renzo Piano. Architects spent an entire life with the in reasonable idea that you can fight against gravity. So when you think about it, that's exactly what we do as aerospace engineers. So in the end I'm driven into the thinking that what you do and what we do is exactly the same and we should work together. Designing an aircraft, it's exactly designing a building or a city. The aircraft is a living space. You have people living there for 6, 10, 12 hours. You have bacteria, you have sewage, you have many things that you have to design into a building and making it is also exactly the same. You have infrastructures and you have complex things to manage. Those two industries are a bit different and I think it's complementarity. We are really good at 3D CAD precision and managing our supply chain from hand to delivery through this CAD model. This is something we master and this is something we could bring to your industry. Opposite, you are really good at doing almost anything anywhere in any condition and we are struggling with that and it takes 10 years for us to do one factory. So we think there's complementarity and I think also that we are facing similar problems. It's really labour intensive to make an aircraft a building. The infrastructure and the tooling are costly and difficult and the future will be about robotics, robotics assembly. And trying to take the robots of the car industry onto our industry is just unrealistic. It doesn't scale up. We need to go to a next level of thinking and to have collaborative swarm robotics working around and putting together the bricks that makes an aircraft an building. So let's collide. Let's disrupt together. I'm going to give you a quick crash course on Aerospace 101 and my time is up but I will finish that. So this is the architecture of the wing. This architecture has been driving all the complexity of Aerospace. How we transport, what is the logistics, how we assemble and the final result of what an airplane looks like. All that is driven by the architecture. So let's change the way we architect our aircraft and I'm going to talk rapidly about digital material. It's all about starting from a small cell, a small element, assemble automatically by a robot to make cells and those robots come together and put the cells together, start to build a wing and so you have those Lego bricks that assemble into a wing and for the last part, the aerodynamic where you need high precision, you can finish it with 3D printing and 3D printing technologies to do the ultra-optimized way. So you have 80% of standard parts, 20% of ultra-optimized structures. And at the end, you have your wing which is not set forever. It's reversible. You can repair it easily, send the robot, change the elements and repair it. But best of all, you can upgrade it. Your structure now is an operating system. You can improve it as you go. You can change it, modify it, add it to the root or the function it is you want to have. So it's a potential revolution and we call that digital material, discrete and standardized elements automatically and reversibly assembled into a volume lattice. We are working on the design of the material. We are working on the design solution, the simulation. We are working also on how we assemble it with robots and dream about this production where you have those robots coming together and printing from the ground up this structure that will make an airplane. So I will end my presentation on this, maybe this dream that we could share together and work on it together. Could we distribute the industrial silos with those Lego bricks? Try to define a universal brick that will enable humanity to build anything, anywhere and anytime. Thank you. So thank you, Vincent, as well, for your presentation. It's interesting to see, I think, from these three presentations when we talk about assembly, we also go a bit beyond the industries. I mean, we talk with people from different industries and different perspectives. One of the things that I was thinking while looking at your presentations is that it's very interesting that you're trying to connect the existing facilities and your knowledge to what is going to take us to get to the future. So understanding, for example, how sharing knowledge might enable us to do so, how we can use similar materials that we know very well and do something different, or how we can look at different customers in different sections of the industry to find something that can be fruitful for the airspace industry. So my question to... I mean, I will start with one question and then we can start from there, but my question to you is, how do you see this new... How do you teach your industry to get to the future? What's the advantage of what you see in your industry and where we can go next? Which industry? In airspace, what we try to do is not to try to teach people, but to demonstrate. You try to do concrete stuff to show them meaningfully and people, they buy in or they don't. And if they don't buy in, then you go to the next thing. What you do with the Fab Labs is exactly that. Demonstrate the results and... So it's a process of exclusion basically of what's interesting to the people out there that you work with. A bit of Darwinism. It's a self-nomination as well. Let's give people the possibility to self-decide that it's interesting. It doesn't help to preach. You should be doing like that. It always creates like a defensive mechanism. So then what we try to do is then provide an infrastructure that is open both for those who wants to replace the old giants by doing something new themselves and to also equally support those traditional giants in also thinking in a different way and being a place for these forces to meet. Because they have a lot to benefit from each other and these power couples of new and traditional. Nik, what about the architectural world? How do you see we are progressing in our industry? I actually think we're progressing just fine. I think... I heard Greg Pascarale give a lecture recently about how when they were doing the porterhouse they had to train general contractors to use CNC machines. They didn't even know what they were. Now they all know what they are and we have an easier time. In ways I think architecture has always historically collaborated with industry. So to echo both points I would say yes I agree. I think innovation occurs at a smaller scale. I mean this is exactly Neal Gerschenfeld's pedagogy is that we shouldn't rely on these large scale corporations to give us products. We should be able to invent our own products from the bottom up and idea of personal fabrication. And so I think each of us are able to advance our own interests ultimately with the goal to influence the larger industrial factors. And I think architects do that. I think the most interesting work actually takes on some of the impossible and through mock-ups and through applied research begin to realize things which are not so easy. I think it's interesting with CNC milling specifically because it's so much older than people realize. It was invented, developed in the late 40s and implemented for aerospace industry in the 1950s. And it's taking us so long for that to become a toolset that for instance architects and designers mastered themselves. That's only happened in the recent years. That's actually common for partitioners to self-understand how this technology works and use it themselves. So it would be nice if that lag wouldn't be quite as big. Same with 3D printing. It took forever from the 80s until now that it was mass accessible. And with materials like you're working with this assembly and lattice structures and stuff it's super interesting stuff. And there we're probably going to see a similar thing where it's going to be quite a lag but it's going to be a very interesting moment when we find ways to make it basically cheaper so we can make it more affordable so much more people can play and work. But I think we can have strategies to accelerate that because there has been traditional mechanisms to delay it. But you know with this sort of protectionist way of working that you don't want things to change. So I think also thinking about this talk about pedagogy agency and willingness to adapt and stuff I think could be very positive if we try to disseminate this great stuff as fast as possible instead of trying to keep it within one niche. There are questions from the audience to continue this discussion. I'm interested in convincing that we have the sort of big hairy gorilla of industry to the sort of idea of completely fundamentally decentralized fabrication. Do you see those two things do you see those two processes as competitive or do you see them as feeding off of one another right now? Because of course one could destroy the other if they want to. I think actually it's more of one might become the other and it does that more often than you think because there was these guys in a shack over in the US who invented an airplane and that became a huge business and there's people quitting their jobs at Airbus and that's something all the time as well. It's already changing but these things feed off of each other so much more than you think and often it's a bit too much romanticize this maker do-it-yourself thing and you see it for instance as an alternative to a society of blindly consuming but you have all these people blindly consuming tools so instead of buying shitty stuff they buy shitty power tools and what is driving the price of that is of course grand scale fabrication in Central Asia specifically China and also electronics that runs your milling machines they are much more intertwined than you would think and I don't think there's as much of a frontier as some people would like to present as well. If you look at the production cycle of an aircraft and the production ecosystem of an Airbus it's worldwide we have components coming from every part of the globe from Korea to the US and it's slowly converged toward Europe and then to Toulouse as we build the aircraft but this is changing slightly already because A320 the final assembly line was in Toulouse initially and now it's in Toulouse in Tianjin in China it's in Mobile in Alabama it's in Hamburg in Germany so we have those assembly lines a bit everywhere and now we shift the distribution of parts towards those assembly lines all over the globe but it's still very costly to create an assembly line so I think we will converge I think the two models have to converge and it will be forced not only by the economical KPI but by the well-being and the common sense that we are living on a planet and we have only one planet I think you can see them converging already I mean with your two presentations one thing that is interesting to see is that both of you have a shorter world map on your presentation so to make clear that it's not just it's not anymore about the location where you are it's about the people that you find on your way how we get connected to these people to empower our businesses Any more questions? We can also maybe talk about what you mentioned about failing and adapting to gain success on a project I mean it's again in all our industries the process of failure is really related to success is it you presented also that time frame wise is changing so you don't have 10 years to fail and adapt how is that impacting your work knowing that there is failure on the way how do you project your work to get to the final point knowing that you have different steps Just before answering your question I will come back to something you said that strikes to me in the assembly world of Fabus we have a driver which is right first time and you said something similar during your presentation so right first time is what is driving all the manufacturing engineering but this is somehow wrong and misinterpreted because when you say right first time everybody says we cannot deliver something if it's not perfect and right at the very first time and what you really want is to be right on time but what you have on the assembly line on the D-Day is right but you should allow yourself to fail and repeatedly fail on the way to deliver it and so this is where the culture have to change and this is the kind of stuff we say in terms of managing failure in our process we took learnings from the software industry from the IT world and video games we use agile methodology and the first rule of agile methodology almost is no planning set your goal define the task and go for it and do it quick and try and fail and iterate and progress on the way and that's kind of the culture we bring to Airbus through the in our FabLab we joke a lot about half joke about that we spend a lot of energy repairing damage from the traditional education system because from young age we rate our children on a scale your quality as a human being on a numbered or lettered scale on the ability not to make mistakes and that gets hammered into for quite some years so we really actively try to put together an atmosphere and behave in a way that it's okay to make mistakes when they crash the milling machine they try not to yell but just as long as you learn to screw up in aerospace then the stakes are quite different of course there are also maybe different levels of failure allow yourself to fail up to a certain level there was one way humanity learned about material fatigue in aluminium and that was planes falling down sometimes it's inevitable in order to progress you need to make mistakes you need to learn and not repeat those mistakes exactly we have a very shy audience here I would say yes there is a microphone coming your way you talked about how long it took CNC milling to kind of become something that we're all we can all use much more readily clearly a lot of these new technologies new things that are coming out are going to come to us much faster and in some ways it seems like the fab lab model or the fabrication culture is laying the groundwork possibly for some of these other things to come along and I'm sure in its own way it will be disrupted by some of these things coming down the pipe as well but what are some of those things that you I mean I'm not asking you to predict the future but what are some of the things that you can see playing out with new things that are going to make qualitative changes I think usually when you're trying to improve society by having some form of organization to effort to put a lot of funds and resources into making a better setting one of the best things that can happen to you is that you become obsolete which is quite interesting so right now we're sort of trying to force an acceleration of democratized access to all these tools by somehow either privately or publicly put together funds in order to make reasonably expensive machines available to everybody so as this technology does get cheaper then that will become less important to have this maybe formal structure on it and we can focus even more on the people I really like it's all about the people and that's why I love this presentation from Billy about that that's the driving change and there's so much machine fetish that for me I see it more as props in a way that again on the stage it might be made out of foam with black shiny paint so it's not a gun but the audience perceive it as a gun and for the actors it's a gun and so we are mentally having some change together and fought because we perceive this object so it's not so important what object is and similar in the fab lab a lot of the machines we use and the stuff we make with it is really not that important the real product is what happens in your mind how it transforms how you think and how we connect with each other so hopefully that will grow stronger and in the way you know people are super excited about laser photocopiers in the late 80s right they were excited about fax machines and nobody is that anymore so it will grow similar with these technologies but hopefully then the soft values that I care a little about will hopefully then get a stronger focus I think ultimately many of the things we heard this morning from Kevin's presentation to Forrest I think ultimately all of those things will have an impact and I think consistently I think architects are we're catalysts, we're activists in a way and if technology can extend our reach to bring things in like I was looking at your diagram of the airplane and I think you said 85% standard 15% innovation or 3D printed piece on top I would be thrilled to have 15% of innovation in a project I think maybe I'm perfect to sit between these guys because we do rely on large corporations for products and then we also want to be able to bring our own experimentation to be activists for something ultimately I think permission is a huge delay in human development that you need permission for somebody are you allowed to enroll at Columbia are you allowed to do your master thesis in this are you allowed to investigate this on the behalf of your company are you allowed to use the robot arm to try out this technique so I'm personally very interested in this if you want to do it you just go and do it that's very interesting both from a personal well-being perspective and for advancing technology and things we do and meaningful buildings it's really quite interesting if we can take away these delays are we on time