 My name is Andres Hake. I'm the director of the AAD program, the Advanced Architectural Design Program here in GESAP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. David Benjamin, Siad Hamadalidin and myself have been organizing this series of summits on climate change at the building scale. This is something that is becoming something very important for the world. It's very important for the planet. It's very important for GESAP. Therefore, we've been, all the different programs have been looking at the way architecture and architectural practices are climate. And today we're discussing the way climate change can be addressed, is affecting, is being addressed through the building scale. This is something, of course, that is reshaping not only architecture, but the planet itself. And it's something that poses questions that somehow also question the way we plan, we practice architecture. In the last years, the discussion of climate change has been putting architectural design in the center in many different ways. And that's something that questions some of the traditions that we've inherited. And that are also posing urgent questions to the way we can react to realities that are creating vectims, changing our environments and affecting the way we live. Not only is climate change something that has to do with its origins, but also with the direct implications of it, the way water, the amount of fresh water and drinkable water in the world is shrinking the reduction of the habitats and the diversity of habitats that is immediately having an effect on the reduction of biodiversity. The way SPCs are migrating and the economical and geopolitical questions that this is also opening. This is, for instance, the displacement of mackerel from Northern Europe to Greenland and directly producing a huge human migration that is creating vectims and which is producing inequality around the world. The question of climate change is a question about our material world, it's a question about technology, it's a question about our political institutions and all that it's re-articulated through design. The case, for instance, of farmers in Bangladesh and the way that they're seeing their environment disappear and that's directly prompted the migration of males to places like Dubai where the star architects buildings are being built by people that are directly affected by this reality is solely one case of the way architecture is being part of hugely of climate change in ways that are not directly that easy to characterize through a linear perspective. What we're seeing probably is the crisis of the modern times in which resources were seen as something with no limits and where nature was something that could be seen from outside from a human perspective. The way we perceive probably nature now is very different. There's no way to have a safe place from which nature can be seen from outside and that's something that is prompt in reaction in every single aspect of our society or in every single institution our society is made of. We have a direct responsibility of course with many of the policies and the ways they can be reinforced that are reacting to climate change globally but also this is a conceptual question for our practices. Design has been called to be situated not to think of the general issues at large but to really get to the details of how reality is produced. It's becoming inter-escalar. What happens at the tiny scale of a glass is having an impact in the world. It's transactional. There's no way to talk about climate change without talking of inequality and addressing it without addressing its complexity at all these layers. It's something that is so ineffective and critical and that's something that is changing fundamentally the way also we think of our societies in regards to nature. The idea of give or pinch on that nature is kind of our fridge. Something that we have to care of because it's a source of resources and that basically our relationship with humans relating to non-humans is through optimization as a good result. It's being challenged by new notions of inter-espicis relationships that are asking for humans to acknowledge the limits of our relationship with nature and that's something that is already changing the way the curriculum and the design is happening in this building in G-SAP and it's a discussion that we care for. This is the second of a series of two summits and we called them summits that this is an urgent discussion that is kind of constitution, refounding, relaunching our practices and it's a process of relaunching that has to be done collectively, putting together many different voices, many different approaches trying to avoid to exclude any potential source of reaction and that's something that is happening. It happened in the first summit that I totally encourage you for those that didn't follow to see it in G-SAP website in the recording that was done at that time. It was also an opportunity to test ways to reduce the carbon footprint of summits by having a number of people not traveling and that was a great effort for the whole team but it worked very successfully and today we have this second summit. G-SAP has a huge compromise with gender equality. In the last lectures and summits and symposiums that we've organized there was a great concern on a natural way of kind of including gender diversity in the overall programs, the presence of all genders including trans-gender intersexual people in the programs has been something very sensitive for the institution. Today we have a number of cancellations and you will see that it's not the case but it's very important for us to be very transparent on this. It's the result of a number of cancellations that happened in the last minute and that it's really not the way we work. However, we're going to have two sessions, two panels. The first panel dealing with the materiality of contemporary architectural practices in regards to climate change. The second one about the relational dimension of architectural practices and the way that they expand into scales and through inter-espaces relationships. David Benjamin is going to continue. Thank you very much. My name is David Benjamin. I'm the director of Advanced Studios at G-SAP and I'm very happy to be organizing and presenting this event with Andres and Ziad today. As Andres mentioned, this is the second in a series of events but I also want to emphasize that these events are both a required part of the advanced studio sequence in the architecture program and also a public forum for exploring critical issues that are relevant to the world more broadly. As Dean Amal Andreos has stated, at G-SAP we could consider climate change to be ground zero for a shared discussion about architecture's engagement with the world. But of course, climate change is complex and as Andres was mentioning, it's intertwined with materials, technologies, economics, society, politics, and culture. And although buildings account for a third of global waste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions, there is no easy architectural fix for climate change. Action on one register triggers changes on other registers, sometimes in unintended ways with negative consequences. For example, the recent carbon tax in France, as you probably all know, triggered the massive yellow vest protests and maybe we could say an environmental policy without social equity, ultimately backfired in this case. So climate change is a territory of science and numbers, but it's also a territory of culture and society. And from this perspective, I think it's important for us to look at the whole and the part at the same time, to look at multiple scales in order to understand the impact and the magnitude of specific changes and design moves. In terms of numbers, it continues to be startling to me that if all of the people in New York City became vegan, it would have a more positive environmental impact than if all the buildings in New York City were net zero. So this is not to say that architecture is irrelevant to the discussion, but it is to say that while we might think about redesigning buildings and redesigning our approach to materials, we also might think more broadly about redesigning ways of life. So to kick off the event, I wanted to offer two kind of provocations, two things that have been on my mind in relation to our topic here today of climate change at the building scale. And some of you may have heard me talk about these before. The first provocation is from Paola Antonelli, curator at the Museum of Modern Art and also the curator of the current Milan Triennial entitled Broken Nature. And as part of the exhibition overview, Paola writes, even to those who believe that the human species is inevitably going to become extinct in the future, design presents the means to plan a more elegant ending. And the second provocation is from political scientist Jody Dean in an essay called The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change. Jody Dean writes, just as class politics without ecology can support extractivism, so can ecology without class struggle continue the assault on working people. In other words, again, similar to what Andres was saying, it's just as urgent to address social equality as it is to address carbon emissions and environment. And really the two must be addressed together. So these two provocations are partly to say that climate change at the building scale involves design and climate change at the building scale is complex with interconnections across scales, materials, society, technologies, and culture. In our first event earlier this semester, again as Andres mentioned, we explored some themes including growing and reusing materials, timber and CLT as a carbon sequestering material, and a kind of global and relational scale of action and ecosystems. In this event, we will explore topics including stone, rammed earth, and local materials, as well as what we could call the human-made natural. This is meant to be a working session. It's meant to raise questions more than to provide answers, and ultimately it's meant to be part of a feedback loop with the school and with student projects that are currently at this very moment works in progress and open to influence. Our first panel will include three presentations, and the first presenter is Rayfer Wallace from AOO. He is an architect and the founder of both AOO architecture and Giga. With a research focus on health and sustainability, AOO created Giga in 2008, which is an independent third party that develops and administers both the reset standard for healthy buildings and the origin data hub. Working at the intersection of health, sustainability, buildings, and cloud technologies, Rayfer is behind many award-winning firsts including the first carbon neutral hotel in Asia, the first eco-regenerative retreat in China, and the largest modern rammed earth building in the world. He has co-authored books on modern rammed earth construction as well as alternative chemicals assessment, and I'm very pleased to welcome from far away Rayfer. Thank you. Although I don't look at Chinese, that's kind of half a joke, but not really. I'm originally French-Canadian, so just north of here, but I've been living in China for the past 17 years. And I've got 20 minutes, I'm timing myself. There's a saying, if you give an architect a mic, it's the worst thing in the world to do, they never shut up. So I'm going to try to not adhere to that rule today. And in order to contextualize this, whenever I have the honor to be in a situation like this speaking to students, it's encouraging people to first and foremost, if there's one thing to take away is to focus, make sure you zero in on what your own personal goal is, and make sure you realize that there's absolutely no right or wrong way to get there. And I've jumped across many topics, you're going to get a glimpse of that today. And I'm going to do my best to try to synthesize it. But I put this up here as a starting point, my favorite movie in the world, probably that has had the biggest influence in my life. I don't know, raise your hand if anyone is able to recognize this. Yes, usually somebody Asian in the crowd. So this is Miyazaki Hayao, my favorite film directors, Japanese. The film is called Nalsika, Valley of the Wind. I saw it when I was seven years old, and it was the first movie to be picked up by the United Nations as a must-see film. And it blew me away as a child, and for, I can bore you later on why, but it was pulled from the U.S. and North American market, and I never saw it again, until I was about 25 after having moved to China and rediscovered the movie. It's a story of a young woman living in a depleted world, her future, and her plight to regenerate the world that we live in. This is her in her lab, and this set my definition of what an architecture studio should look like. So that was the dream for what our future studio would look like. But this set the mission for what I wanted to do later on, basically here to leave the world in a better state than when we found it. This is really no point in having been here at all. And setting this as a personal mission. Scalable solutions to environmental regeneration. Now, that meant I started my time on construction sites, working as a blacksmith, a timber framer, bricklayer, all of that fun stuff, and it's still honestly where I have the most fun. And then I went into sciences, chemistry, biology, physics. It was kind of okay. Ended up with Governor General Meadow from Canada for highest achievements, but it was phenomenally dull. And then finally made my way to architecture. Finally getting a chance to pull these pieces together. And in 2001, grabbed the one-way ticket and moved to Shanghai as the busiest place in the world, just to get my hands dirty. And we were building homes like this, zeroed in on very, very unapologetically people with a lot of money because it allowed me to do research. And then when you do research, it trickles down. You need rich people to pay for research in order to make it available to the masses. And that allowed us to do things like was mentioned, this is the first carbon neutral hotel in Asia. And I'm not going to go through these projects in great detail. I don't have enough time. But one of the biggest challenges we hit was the problem of building materials. We're in Asia very proud of our designs as anybody with an ego would be. But the building materials that we found were all garbage. So we're building designs that look good in the pictures but are actually built with garbage. You don't need to be able to read Chinese here. Right there, there's PVC on the list. In 2004, when this was taken, PVC on a green building material list, you've got to be kidding. That's got to be quantifiable. It wasn't. So we started, I went back to my chemistry roots and started looking at the chemical makeup of products. So this is looking at something as boring as varnish, wood varnish, and the way it affects brain development, reproduction, so on and so forth. And then we couldn't find any good materials. So this is in the early 2000s we had to start developing a style which everybody, I mean this is super common today, that had no finished materials because we couldn't find any good finished materials. And we were working, remember, our clients were hyper-wealthy because they allowed us to do this research and would trickle down. So we had to propose this is luxury to our clients. Eventually started looking at rammed earth. So this is, I don't know, can't remember when, but you'll recognize the Hakka housing in China. So we were looking at this as a solution for many reasons. And this is the traditional methodology of building these things here. And a lot of people know these pictures. A lot of people have researched rammed earth before. This is the romantic view of rammed earth. But what you're seeing here is not a building. This is a cake. It's made out of brown sugar. It's made out of rice. It's made out of straw. There's more organic material in that building than in your average cookie. It's a slight exaggeration, but just to dramatize it, right? It's a beautiful structure, but it's a highly organic structure. And the type of finish that we were getting there was not acceptable for the type of projects that we were after. So it was a nice romantic idea, but how do we actually make this scalable and get to an impact? And this was really interesting because in terms of local materials, we were looking at a lot of other local materials, such as building with straw, which in my book is an incredibly bad idea. Why? Because I'll steal this story from one of my mentors, a person I highly admire who got this amazing perfect client, trying to keep this story short, perfect client, perfect project, wanting to build the most eco-straw-bale house out there, went to see his local organic farmer and said, I've got the most mind-blowing place. This is the one in a lifetime we're going to build this amazing house out of organic straw. We're going to use your straw. And he was expecting the farmer to be super excited about this, and the farmer goes, what the hell is it with architects and this obsession at putting organic material into buildings? If I sell you my straw for your house, what the hell am I going to use to re-fertilize my fields for next year? Can you please stop putting food in your buildings? And it really opened up this idea of, okay, what's the life cycle of the projects we're working on? If you are building a local house out of straw, make sure that it does not last longer than a year, because that is the life cycle of straw. It should be a temporary house. If you're building with wood, that building has to last no longer than 70 to 300 years. That's the life cycle of the tree. That's how much time you take that tree out of the ecosystem and lock up the nutrients in something as dumb as a building. So if we're building for the long term, this is where you need to be looking at the materials that have the same sort of life scale as your building. And this took us back to Ramd Earth, which obviously, if we're building a building for a long time, then from an earth perspective, we had several hundred years, several hundred of years to play with. But here's a picture of a Ramd Earth wall, which is a bit of a Frankenstein material. It's Ramd Earth mixed with straw. The organic material fails first, bugs go in to eat it. And again, we were starting to realize there was a big difference between idea and reality, especially when working with local materials, and that we needed to achieve basic things like comforts and so on and so forth. And when I'm jumping around all over the place, but when we were looking at Ramd Earth way back then, we're realizing, okay, the thickness of a Ramd Earth wall has nothing to do with the structure and the load it needs to carry. The thickness of the wall has everything to do with the amount of energy that wall needs to absorb in order to re-release at night. So if you have high temperature swings, really hot in the day and really cold at night, you need a wall of just the right thickness to absorb the heat during the day and then re-release it at night. It's perfectly cool in the morning, ready to store more energy and really warm at night. So the thickness of those traditional walls had nothing to do with the structure they were holding, but with the energy they were holding. And when we were looking at the Chinese structures, we were realizing these bloody walls are 1.5 meters thick because they need to last a couple months through the winter, right? I can't build a house in China these days with walls that are 1.5 meter thick. So we were looking at how do we reduce the cross-section of the wall. To do that, I need to start adding a blanket, in this case, insulation. And then we needed to transform to really take this to scale, not be a romantic idea. We needed to take what was an art and make it science. As an engineer, as a science-based person, I needed the results to be predictable, meaning I can calculate exactly how my rammed earth wall is going to perform, and I need to be replicable. Otherwise, how do I get it through code? How do I get to actually build this without creating liabilities and getting through the reality of everyday practice? Back then, there were some really cool Australian architects who were doing three-story structures with a pretty good finish, but it was uninsulated. So this was good for a country like Australia. It was not good for what we were trying to do in China at the time. And the idea came up with... The idea was really just how could we leverage the benefits of rammed earth and reduce the cross-section of the wall with a plane of insulation in the middle. And fortunately, I was lucky enough to stumble across these guys in Canada. The most advanced group in the world doing modern rammed earth construction. They saved me 15 years of work. So if there's anyone you can copy, find them and zoom in on them. This became my mentor, world's best teacher, and it was doing exactly the type of work that we wanted to be doing, turning art into science. This is the Ink Meep Museum, in the only desert in Canada. And what the numbers that rolled out of that, again from an engineering and code perspective, in order to be able to do this at scale, you're seeing here the Great Wall of China, one megapascal in strength, the first modern rammed earth walls, three megapascals, and what we're hitting today. We're hitting with rammed earth greater strengths than you hit with concrete, with half the amount of cement, to a quarter the amount of cement, as you know the climate impact, the carbon footprint is in the cement, so reduction of that is absolutely critical, able to hit those strengths while reducing the carbon footprint in half. And now as we continue to evolve the science on this, the goal is to be able to get this to such a level that we remove the cement, change it for other binders, such as you look at termite saliva, which has the ability to bind sand. Now people starting to synthesize the termite saliva and use it as a replacement for cement, geopolymers and so on and so forth. So it's still very much a work in progress. A little bit about the difference between art and science, traditional rammed earth versus modern rammed earth. Here we're not, what I was showing in China, uses topsoil, a lot of organic material, great for the bugs, and then adds, as mentioned, brown sugar and other things that are sticky to hold it all together. In modern rammed earth, you aim for everything but the organic material. You're aiming for the inorganic material down below, food in a building is bad. So we're in these quarries, and then, I'm not going to bore you with the details of this, but a lot of soil analysis, so geoengineering for particle size. To really, basically what happens is, we'll drop into geography, and I'll ask people, take me on a tour of the quarries in the area, then we'll take samples of the quarries, do a cross section of the soil, and engineer the most perfect rammed earth wall in that area. So I need a quarter of material from that quarry, another quarter from over here, based on these analyses. I work in Shanghai, well, in China, and I work in Sri Lanka also, so this is one of our sites in Sri Lanka, that kind of just shows the process. I'm going to walk you through very, very quickly. We don't use big wood bats anymore, we use pneumatic tampers called butterfly tampers. This is one of our clients in China who decided to take part in the ramming. You see the insulation plane in the middle. And then when we're done, and we're here in Canada, we core out a piece of the wall and take it to a test lab in order to test the strength. This was our first project when I took this technology back to China and started training a local crew. You'll laugh in a moment, they were a brilliant local crew. So this is building scaffolding for the rammed earth wall, and then as they strip it, the contractor is a massive fan of Korbu, and so he surprised us by carving the modular into the formwork, and then as you're carving the earth into the formwork and you remove the formwork, it stayed behind. So this was a great little gift and surprise on his part. The whole pavilion was designed on Korbu's modular proportions. Details here I don't have time for today. That was a little... And then he turned it into a great contractor, best contractor in the world. Here you see the plane of insulation in the middle, and maybe here I'll pause because I am jumping around. What we were looking for in modern rammed earth was the ability to remove all finished materials. At the time I mentioned we couldn't find the right type of materials that were non-toxic. And so what we loved about this rammed earth is this modern rammed earth approach is that paints, plaster, all that stuff, indoors, gone. The finishes that you'd put on the outdoor of a building, gone. So we immediately eliminated 20 materials from a normal construction project. We end up with a really significant amount of thermal mass inside, so if you properly design the building to be passive solar, it sucks in the energy during the day, stores it in the walls, at night. We have a lot of case studies asked me about that later on, but we were looking at one, the carbon footprint and of course climate impact of construction by removing cement at large scale from these buildings, and then of course the operational impact of running buildings at a fraction of the energy cost due to the thermal capacity of these buildings. Again, coming into China we had to do a lot of practice, so we built a bunch of fun projects. This is a winery and the other advantage of rammed earth is the ability to mitigate humidity. So it sucks in humidity and re-releases it. Perfect for wine, if you're a wine fan. Weaving it into whatever project we could, this was the Dalsa Soon Academy and we didn't give them a choice. We said you have to build a rammed earth wall. They said okay. We didn't design this. We just asked to build it. This was the first three-story insulated building in the world. Very difficult project. Crazy. This was a little sample pavilion that we were testing a bunch of new ideas on. And then playing with things like circular walls that are also retaining walls to build these amazing little villas, or not villas, it's a resort. And then this is some of our Sri Lankan projects. These are built, they look traditional because they're built on a UNESCO protected site, so we have some requirements that we need to adhere to. Again, the rammed earth there. And this is a rendering, I'm cheating. This is the actual building. So this was designed by a friend that we helped build, the largest rammed earth structure in the world built in China. This is on the boards. And the closest rammed earth builder in your geography is in Quebec. So this is getting some really nice finishes here. So again, I'm just pointing this out because this isn't a climate that goes down to minus 40 in the winter. Okay. Now here's looking a little bit, just in the last couple minutes, looking at the performance. I'm a bit of a data geek. So looking at some real-time data on performance of buildings has become an obsession over the years, as well as the ingredients and chemical makeup of materials. So here was just comparing typical wood assemblies with what we were doing with rammed earth. Of course benefits of chopping out a lot of materials. And I just want to wrap up with what it is I do today. Thank you. Long and short of it, I've gone from starting as a blacksmith and a brick layer and a timber framer to science, to going into architecture, still having that practice. It still operates to, I forget, construction and now I run a software company. What I realized is one of the problems we decided to tackle, the biggest problem we were up against was building materials for everything. Data on building materials was crippling us from health and liability point of view. Chemicals in products that create a 10 to 150,000 year legacy. When we make a choice on a material and it's a toxic material, the amount of time it takes to take down and how many people it's going to impact over its lifetime. And then information on things like carbon footprinting, life cycle impact of products from water and biodiversity and so on and so forth. And so we were finding all this information in a whole bunch of databases around the world, which is for anybody who practices knows this as an absolute nightmare. As an architect you need to find information on products that split in a ton of places. So we came up with the idea that you know what we really need is sort of a UN of data that just aggregates all data on building products and makes it universally accessible where we have no pay wall let's make this data free let's use it to promote transparency let's make sure that the data is up to date and let's make sure it's neutral and so this was the big this was the big vision it led to what is today the world's largest hub of data, what I spend all of my time on these days and I'm missing a slide here, but in it if you go and have a look it's all publicly open look at mindful materials we can talk about that later information on, we strip out the information on embodied impact of materials and then finally the reset standard which is currently the world's only standard that tracks the performance of building in real time. We do this via sensors, collect all the data into the cloud and assess the health impact of buildings on a daily basis I put these in because we're in New York a very famous New York developer that we do a lot of work with another very famous New York based and institution this is Tsinghua University in Beijing and so that's it I put a few social media handles up there if you're interested in learning more so that was time is up but that was a little all over the place trying to take essentially 20 years and wrap it up in 20 minutes on some of the touch points and some of the things we've worked on over the years and you see a circuitous course in order to try to get to reach the goal that we started off at the beginning thank you very much. Our next speaker on this panel is Francisco Adeo de Fonseca from SCRE SCRE is an independent firm of architects, engineers artists and technical specialists offering a broad range of professional services for the built environment. SCRE started their practice by conducting a survey on the qualities of Portuguese raw materials in 2009, 10 years ago by experimenting with clay and construction instruments they managed to develop new materials and began to participate in the administration of building sites. They became the architects of experimental constructions where building techniques and craftsmanship were combined with refined engineering skills for sophisticated clients. Their architectural practice is based on establishing close links between design and construction an approach that shows how materials can incorporate knowledge and how such knowledge can be instrumental in recreating architectural practice. It's a pleasure to welcome you Francisco. Thank you for the invitation to the opportunity to share SCRE's work with you. As David said, we started 10 years ago right after the crisis I mean when the crisis started the 2008 crisis and there was no architecture market I mean all architects in Portugal were immigrating and going somewhere else and me and my partner Pedro Gervel we for some reason, which I can't quite tell now, we started going traveling throughout our region and collecting Portuguese soils and we collected hundreds of these samples we wanted to that's what I, that's my reading now we wanted to get sort of embedded into the territory so from collecting soils we started to also test them to see how we could relate to those, what they could give us in terms of materiality not so much in terms of building construction and so we went through this one year, two years course of understanding what the logics of the north of Portugal is in the whole region and we got a few commissions, not as architects, but as subcontractors this is one of our first jobs together where we applied raw earth as a plaster in a bathroom that was there was an interesting job we also go on collecting local bricks and construction materials from which we now, you know this is a small construction not a big one, this is a model what you usually would see as a model and started to get into the course of compacting earth for the purpose of building construction this is a rammed earth floor basically that we started and we were checking the traditional recipe books in Portugal we were collecting these recipes and seeing how could we sort of adapt them to the contemporary use and usually it's not really a technological question, it's a question that goes a lot about labor and the perception, the market perception about clay or earth people would ask like does it have worms and do plants grow in it and so it's a cultural process then we you know, we started pressing this rammed earth flooring solutions into tiles so we could use them more extensively and making our own machines for it, usually pretty low tech machines but we always come across this question it's like who's how can we do it it's such a simple thing but apparently there's not much offer in terms of specific machinery for this kind of work so we made our hydraulic presses and finally after few years of struggling we got our first building entirely refurbished out of earth so the project the building started with the 14 big bags of earth and we used it for flooring for walls, for ceilings for bathrooms for everything I mean we as you can see here I mean this is a kind of another rammed earth technique where you basically compress the earth into a mold and you make bricks we call it CEB bricks it's a very common solution but in Portugal we seismic region, we highly seismic so we have to revise how to build with these materials against a seismic regulation basically so that's a big challenge but again it's not truly a technological challenge it's maybe a reading challenge so we started we made the first CEB building in Portugal, in the north of Portugal in the north where you have no clay basically it's just granite which is a difficult sand to work with these blocks are really nice to build with because they have no they have no render mortar in between the bricks so the mortar goes inside like a Lego it's really nice I just added this kind of slide so you can see that our modeling I mean the models we make are focused on construction so we anticipate the construction process with models we extensively model with bricks we produce our bricks we produce the roof tiles and that really gives a sense we usually have architects to direct the building site and not engineers I mean we try to push architects to lead the building site and models are very these kind of models are really important to achieve that because then you get the sense of how much material you have to handle you know you have the sense of the logistics and all of that that is completely out of our traditional disciplinary approach to model making and architecture we try to bring it in this is an anticipation of a test for a catenary arch made with the CEB blocks and this is how how we work I mean again it's not a technological question it's a question of of doing and getting the process started it's mostly about that and then in the way you're going to solve the tech problems that come to you like like Raffer just showed and so we made a prototype let me get like this so I can also look at the slides um this is my partner Pedro he always take the dangerous roles we're loading an arch just to see oops how it works we did with this a couple of times to get a sense of how this bricks would perform in terms of of arches we've built a one one prototypes and this came at a time that we got a commission from a big winemakers we work for winemakers a lot for making a hotel in the middle of nowhere and where we plan to make CEB arches and so we also made you know produced models with several arches and that's really really pedagogical for ourselves to go through this kind of small scale building work this is just a picture fitting because it's interesting to see how models can also work for you to map the um um the earth and the territory and how it's made up this is a model for the hotel with different parts with the with the sun arch and the lunar arch and by working with when you work with big teams and everybody needs to get a sense and to give an input in a short period of time this models really are very very helpful um but we ended up not doing the hotel we did another building which is this winery it's um it's a winery that where Ramdur's for instance is placed in between these concrete pillars it's um literally at the moment very difficult to go through the seismic regulation in Portugal when it comes to building Ramdur's 100% Ramdur's buildings and and so we got this uh building made by using pillars which I don't have a picture to show to you which has a butterfly shape so it's it's like this you know that's the section of the pillar so basically the Ramdur's is clicking into the pillar and when the building shakes you know the pillars are holding the horizontal forces but they keeping the wall in place otherwise the concrete would just burst the Ramdur's building when you mix Ramdur's with other materials it's very critical because it has its own seismic wave when those when the wave goes through it it has its own behavior and when you fit other things in it it becomes kind of kind of critical so um we made this so what you see there is a number of detached walls basically um this is the the winery this inside of it you know it's eight meters Ramdur's walls but you know the greatest achievement in this was that the subcontractor who made the the building he's now one of the greatest builders in Portugal in Ramdur's building but that time we had no one who could price this building properly so we made a working session with local men, local people so they would you know they built like a two meters long wall themselves and then the building price dropped by half and this was their first you know significant job in Ramdur's and then the markets for them started to to open up to Ramdur's solutions and they're like doing really really well not right now so when you look at this I mean don't look at Ramdur's itself I mean look at all the invisible reverberation it has across the economy across the local economy the labor, the environment and that's for me I mean for Scraze the most important thing in architecture is precisely what you don't see so when you think of getting the grains together in Ramdur's it's exactly the same as stone construction you have to grind it you have to transport it and you have to place it together it's the same logic just the grains a little bigger and so you could also you know eventually see this as a Ramdur's wall I mean and start to start to to understand that the grinding I mean the sourcing in nature and then the transformation and then the way you sort of settle things put everything together again it's a natural process it's something that is happening everywhere throughout throughout nature and throughout architecture and perhaps we should we should start to look closer at this loop let's say of sourcing transforming and putting it back this is Pedro we made some vats in the ground so wine makers could produce their own wine into these big pits so we were my partner he was just diving in one of these huge vats and that really reminds us the process of bees you know the way you know they come to terms with the pollinizing the whole the whole forests it's such an inspiring animal the way we can learn so much from it and so we at SCRE we have our own beehives so we can also source ourselves from bee wax and propolis propolis is a kind of bee wax that is so incredible that it's been all sold to the pharmaceutical industry it's super expensive but when you have your own beehives you get propolis for free and honey and all of these a lot of sense to start making our own oils for wood and varnishes out of these components and then okay I mean the easy path is to get your own beehives and starting source yourself directly from there and so we extensively use bee wax because that's what our bee friends supply us we use it for making stained glass and also to use it in plasters with incredible results it's really nice to see how such a simple material when you add it to plasters it will make them so resistant so antifungical it's really nice this is a restaurant made with a plaster out of bee wax and the horse manure and the clay plaster but there's another material which is really fascinating for us it's perhaps the one that will you know it's one that can break out of thin air it makes sugar out of nothing apparently nothing using just light as an instrument it makes you kind of crystallized sugar and that material is wood wood is let's say crystallized sugar made from nature which fascinates because it's a material that is always giving you back you know it's solving so many questions on the side and it's giving you so many so many capacities this is wood we use from old wine vets so we recycle this wood something years old wood we've traveled to France to visit these forests and to meet the people who actually take care of the forest and who make the wine vets and I mean it's so respectful it's so breathtaking whether you see those huge trees I mean a nook tree like this takes you 180 years to grow and so the wine vets they're just disposed like there was nothing at the end of the process so we started to reinsert them into specific jobs we made this is a winery again and having our own trees I mean we now very happy to have our own trees and we usually go for the invasive species because we have a tree called australia there and it's really taking the whole it's everywhere now it's plague we don't know how to handle it anymore and so people just keep on chopping these trees they grow really fast and what we tell people is like no just leave it we're going to use it we're going to use it for our own building works and then we replace as we use them we offset them with native trees it's a it's a process which I don't see why it's not embedded everywhere it's so simple that you can just offset wood it's simple it's really joyful I mean it's great to go and plant trees we our relation with wood goes all the way from reusing wine barrels to having our own trees for construction and and the passion goes it's not really about wood it's about cellulose it's about cellulose it's about also the way that you can use certain plants to rejuvenate the territory we're desertifying Portugal has no national sourced trees anymore we don't have I mean the trees we have are pine trees that are like it's kind of almost a petafile relation with trees it's crazy it means being all taken by eucalyptus for paper making and the construction sector is so huge it's so huge and impacting it it has the possibility to reverse this just by starting to starting to think beforehand before you take the design pen just think which industry which craftsman are you going to give a hand to that's the power of architects I mean that's part of it but it's a significant part of the power we have so we decided to introduce hemp lime construction in Portugal being a model before we start working with it we were like how are we going to handle it what does it mean in a building site one-to-one prototypes we also prototype in our own office with this kind of mockups just try to see how it works and the clients are really sort of you know what's coming out it's very not easy to handle and then we started making our own bricks making the mix the machines you need to pass them and we started off our own production of hemp grid blocks which is this kind is quite pioneering in Portugal especially because we try to normalize the materials also to go through the process of making it available to others and so we're in the way of getting the first such building in Portugal made in different sort of trials we get materials to work in different ways hemp grid which is basically the only building material I know which complies with the major regulations which is thermal regulation, fire regulation and acoustics in one material so that's quite sophisticated when you mix hemp hemp stalks like small I don't know how to call holes whatever and then with lime it becomes quite a high tech solution which you can apply across your projects well I'm heading towards the end of my presentation this is the slide I placed for me to to warn me that we're heading towards the end and the passion for cellulose and vegetable fibers goes way beyond what plants can give to us animals there are animals who also produce cellulose and we're starting to tap into it most of you probably kombucha this simple drink you get kind of a tea and you have bacteria and funguses who actually work together in very complex ways and gives you and give you this which then you turn into this and you turn into this which is basically kind of a bio leather people call it but we think you can go really far with this kind of solutions we're starting to be able to make it waterproof and we think in a future that we'll be able to replace asphalt asphalt how do you call that I forgot the word with this asphalt filters you call that important thing here at the end just to wrap it up really fast it's not really a question of sourcing it's a question of a synergetic working you don't give anything you don't source anything you have to give in order to get back it's about this sort of loop and this is very visible with this kind of animal cellulose that you just make a soup and the bacteria over and it will produce this bio leather for you so it's nothing to do with sourcing that's an old thinking you have to think you have to give something it'll get something back and this by fitting this loop you'll be able to perhaps see the huge impact architecture and building construction has in the environment this is our arts division we've been involved with some workshop teaching and this is this is our environmental action group which basically you know I would see this as a kind of one of those pools of animal cellulose very complex pools where you just have to make sure that the environment is set so that bacteria can start to work the same holds for us we need to get the right environment the right setting for us to take off and start to to take action and yeah okay that's what I had to show to you thank you great thank you I just I can't help mentioning that that that last material is compatible with some research here at the school in fact a student project from about a year ago made with bacterial cellulose won this school's well the Buell Center's inaugural Paris prize which aims to award architecture by students at the school that is kind of living up to the ideals of the Paris Accord although I should note that there were several complaints from other students in the studio about the smell of that material so smell is the topic of another symposium our next speaker is Elias Anastas from AAU Anastas Elias studied architecture in Paris and set up an office there before winning a competition to build a music conservatory in Bethlehem he returned to Palestine in 2010 and has since expanded into furniture design and research projects that celebrate local artisanal skills he is a partner at AAU Anastas and also co-founder of local industries a community of artisans and designers dedicated to industrial furniture making his most recent work includes while we wait an installation commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London it is part of the AAU Anastas research project called Stone Matters which combines traditional building craftsmanship and materials with innovative construction techniques to produce architecture that is inscribed with both local heritage and natural surroundings please welcome Elias thank you for having me it's great to be here I'll just start very quickly by introducing our studio our studio is actually sequenced into three different entities a classical architecture studio where we do public buildings this is a courtyard that we did in the north of Palestine we have the network of production with local makers and artisans around the city local industries and a research department that deals with questions that spans from material to territory so before starting talking specifically about these projects about stone we started a survey a month ago putting together a list of notes on architecture in the Middle East and elsewhere through them, read them quickly so this is a project that we did for a small educational campus in Ramallah the concept was linked to the topography of the site and the essential space of campus that we designated as the common spaces the very steep land combined with the will of focusing on common spaces led us to work on a hairpin shaped building the single unique building is accessible with a common space that snakes through the entire site with a smooth ramp all interstitial spaces are planted and created in between islands of freshness when presented to the client the project was immediately rejected because it was not a fundraising friendly project the client could not raise funds for a project because philanthropists would ask for the name of for having their name on each one of the specific buildings that would be allocated to their funds we realized here that actually funds are shaping architecture that the economic system shapes the building and the city is no longer planned by architects but by investors the city belongs to real estate investors in Palestine buildings that were built before 1917 are protected however all modern architecture heritage is being disregarded as an architectural heritage and replaced by economically motivated commercial investments as an architect in Palestine we can experiment more easily than any than any other part of the world thanks to the absence of framework but these are the exact same reasons why an investor is able to destroy a heritage fuel building and replace it with a commercial center we play by the same rules yet we take the absence of framework as a tool in the process of making architecture this testifies the bitterness of architecture and pinpoints that there are no ideal projects the city is a violent environment yet at the a sense of cultural enrichment perhaps bitterness creates a framework in which architecture is challenged we were 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 unfortunately today most of the designers are interested in the illusion of saving the crafts and in a sort of nostalgic vision of artisanal works interestingly enough most of the designers aiming at saving artisans tend to work in countries of the global south one could think that this makes sense since artisans are being disregarded in those regions which is true however it's not only true in the global south and the imperialist nostalgia that is used to pretend that craft 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 make use of contemporary skills and 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 Alavidia competition is a fake brief with a fake for a fake touristic project in fact the project's brief is what Ronaldo Rosaldo would call imperialist nostalgia with the small difference that the brief's writers are those same persons who have been colonized heritage in particular architectural heritage has become western contemporary appreciation of local cultures it freezes architecture in a state of objects of illusion and the fact of gives a folkloric value how many times have we associated Arab architecture as if all Arab architecture are identical with musha rabbias and domes global and local knowledge are usually opposed as two separate systems of integration with particular contexts this church in France has been built after Santan church in Jerusalem yet Santan was built by the crusaders using local techniques of construction those two churches share very similar construction techniques with that in mind we can ask ourselves if the church in France has been built with techniques that crusaders exported from Jerusalem the architecture of Palestine combines disparate architectural elements brought by different civilizations from abroad with local elements found in situ through time certain architectural attributes originally found locally written to Palestine as imported architectural elements in an attempt to blur the limits between local and global architecture stone matters put forward the relevance of research beyond space and time at the V&M museum in London the cast room is made of one-to-one replicas of Italian Renaissance sculptures they were at the time were traveling was very costly used to give access to a wider audience of contemporary art the international expo events were set to share advances in different realms of countries in the world in a world where technology allowed a high level of far-distance communications what are these types of events made for so stone matters is our project that we started four years ago on the use of stone in contemporary architecture in Palestine we have a context where we have to use stone up to 70% of envelopes of building it was historically used as a structural thermal component and gradually with time during the last 50 years its use has been disrupted and we will use it more and more as a cladding of concrete structures this small construction this small shelter made out of stone is found throughout the landscapes of Palestine historically we didn't have any land registries and in order to mark properties we used to use stone to have these kind of structures punctuate the landscape and generate markers of property so in that context we started producing this research on the use of stone as a structural component in architecture and that was the first experimentation that was produced and conceived on a public space and the idea that the whole research was an open source project and all the algorithms, all the details and the mechanisms of construction were given away on the public space the project was as well inscribed in a logic where referring actually to these first kind of stone castles that we used to find throughout the landscape and in our contemporary history we are trying to use them as markers of property but in a context where there are different elements of the nature in Palestine that are being spoiled because we have historically a very important heritage of landscape and due to the political very heavy context there's a tendency to go towards the conquest of territory so the balance between the city centers and the landscape is being disrupted so the structure after its exhibition on the public space was moved to an area C in Palestine is an area that is under Israeli military control and no construction are allowed so part of the process of the project was to think of how we could reposition these elements of architecture in the landscape in order to mark property in a politically charged context so the structure was displaced on a Friday night during the Shabbat because this area is not allowed we are not actually allowed to do any constructions or modification of the public space this second project the format of the project is particular because it's a collaboration that we're doing with an artist residency that's allowing us actually to actually build a research project and the the whole format of the project is that they're having a program to have this project implemented in the city of Jericho and we wanted to have the possibility to implement a specific research project usually when you have a research project you end up having it you know based on documentation and it won't have the possibility to be built so the whole idea was to create this format of project that would allow us to have our research built into a long term architectural project so the first the whole project is based on the principles of stereotomy this is one of the door lintes that you can find in the city of Bethlehem and that show actually the complexity of the cuts of the stones and how the cuts generate the stability and create self standing structures so the first prototype for this artist residency was a vault that spans over a distance of 12 meters and the different pieces of stones were cut in a way to generate this autonomous piece of vault one of the complexities was to think about the formwork and how we can find a way to have formwork that would be as precise as possible and that would allow to have the interfaces of the different stones to take the different charges and reactions so the formwork was produced using polystream blocks that were carved and the whole the whole idea as well was how we can couple the very rich know-how of artisans and makers with novel techniques and advanced techniques of fabrication this is the result it's a vault that spans over a distance of 12 meters with a 4 meters height in the middle and it has 45 different topologies of stones and they totally stand through the stereotomy principles that were developed for the project currently working on the second prototype of that project that's coming up soon so while we wait is a project that was commissioned by the Victor and Albert Museum in London and it was a project about the cultural claim over nature in Palestine historically the Palestinian city is built around a duality a duality between the very dense nucleus that you have in the historic centres and the landscapes the most important element of heritage in Palestine for us was the landscape and today due to the fragmentation of the territory there's a tendency to go towards the conquest of territory we try to consume lands because from the moment where you consume lands expropriation becomes harder so we are losing actually this very important duality urban duality that you had historically so the project actually deals with this with this urban form that we had historically so this is an area that's called the Kremizan Valley where historically it's one of the most important natural areas around the region of Bethlehem and this is the city centre where we can notice a very important density that is totally adapted to a specific topography and that actually generates a form of architecture that is suitable for specific climates so the project was inscribed as well in a context where this whole area of the Kremizan valley is beyond the area C so it's under military control, Israeli military control and it's currently threatened to be totally cut from the city so this is the separation wall that is made out of concrete and that creates a road that connects Jerusalem to the settlements that are around Bethlehem and the local community around from this specific valley and the monks from the monastery that is located in the valley created a very interesting form of protest where they would gather in the valley every Friday and they would protest the passage of the wall and gradually within time it became a meditation exercise that gathered different parts of the community so the project of when we wait was as well a kind of we wanted to memorialize these gatherings through a physical space that would be positioned at a very specific spot where these gatherings are happening so this is one of the first principles that we try to put together in order to generate a structure that is totally self-standing through the geometry of the stones and how the stacking and the way that the lacing of the stones can be economical in terms of use of material and at the same time can go towards spaces and heights and volumes that are quite quite big so the whole carving and the geometry is as well a reflection on the smoothness and the organic shapes that are found throughout the valley and it refers as well to these kinds of stone shelters that we localize as markers of property so this is the structure that was developed it has a height of 5 meters a footprint of 8 square meters we have 500 pieces of stones and they only stand through this particular shape that was generated that is based on the very specific stereotomy principle that's part of the show at the Dalit Gallery in London and the project actually one of the components as well of the project was to think about a project that gets into a museum so it was an inverted path of an object that gets musified so the project is born at the museum and then travels to the exhibition and then finally gets back to the valley and it's today serving the community as a meditation space another project that we completed last year is a flat vault and it's part of it's located in a monastery in Jerusalem it serves as an extension of the gift shop of the monastery and it's a vault that is entirely made out of pieces of stone boussoirs that are assembled in a way to generate a self-standing totally flat slab of 8 meters by 8 meters and the principle is that the stones are woven together so we align the first line and then we put in steel P-bars and gradually we insert the other pieces so the structure is the ceiling actually holds on a certain number of columns that are massive stone elements and the ceiling is made out of 350 pieces of stone and that particular context it was as well this church actually was built during the Crusaders period and the crypt of the church was as well conceived in a very similar process where the stones are generating different kinds of geometries of spaces this project was part of the Jerusalem show and it was as well a reflection on a typology of a vault that is based on a rectangular plan and it's part of a new collection that we are trying to develop that's called Analogy the aim of Analogy is to generate a certain number of architectural elements that are all made out of stone and that could regenerate the whole vocabulary of architecture coming back to crafted elements that have an impact on the urban morphology so going from the scale of an element of architecture and how we can have a result a new result on the scale of the city so these are the interfaces that are actually holding the entire structure oops and this is a project that we are developing currently it got acquired by the Victor and Albert Museum and it's a circular a circular lintel that spans over a distance of 2 meters by 2 meters and the cuts of the stones it actually sits on 3 points on the floor and in between these 3 positions on the floor the different geometries of the interfaces have very specific curved elements that hold the entire structure together this is one of the first prototype elements that have been developed thank you thank you very much, it's been really inspiring and amazing presentations it's really hard to really talk about all the material that you have showed us such a prolific expanse of kind of experimentation fields of experimentation with concrete architectural outcomes but maybe I would like to start with a few remarks and maybe we turn it into a conversation or a question the first thing that strikes me I think from those 3 presentations is really maybe from an architectural history point of view is that how far we have gone from the idea of looking at material in a fetishized manner where the aesthetics and the light the movement of the light across the surface the texture was kind of celebrated into perhaps definitely a more radical way of understanding material that has to do with process has to do with the there's always an environmental awareness but also there is a consciousness towards who's building the material coming from how does it contribute to the economy how does it contribute to the craftsmanship but also how far we went from the idea of looking at material that is really tied to a locality and to a vernacular and instead while keeping that history and knowledge in mind like really pushing forward and experimenting with where this material can go right so the stone is a flat vault not a vault anymore it's a flat vault so I think that's becoming or the dimension of the round earth removing the organic out of it questioning its width become kind of almost like a bringing in science obviously knowledge bringing in technological tools fabrication tools pure design innovations of kind of manipulating the material and discovering the material along the way become also ways and means of additional material that is usually typically locally tied into perhaps posteriorly grounded right so I think in the case of Ilyas for instance what's really interesting is that the impossibility of building an area sea yet you are using the stone of area sea right all of that geography so it's built outside that territory and then it's brought back in right or the idea of somehow finding a balance between China and or common ground between China and Canada right because earth is everywhere right so round earth although it is different in terms of clay composition it needs to be rethought in every context yet there is kind of universality to it that you're able to capitalize on or maybe in your case Francisco when you went to France assuming the way you describe it and then that invasive wood which is typically had been looked at as a problematic tree type right that kind of takes over and somewhat has a lot of environment that kind of accepting that as a material that could be subverted and used because it has this short life cycle right so I think these are some of the I think characteristic that I see across those project the other one would be the scale the question of scale and maybe this is where maybe we can open up the conversation further is that all the project have like really careful understanding of proportion and size I think yes you always describe your project in metrics eight meters span five meters tall its square foot you describe your project in terms of thickness of that it's the wall is the thickness of the wall right it's the wall section detail that becomes your kind of space of research and innovation and I think in a way Francisco in your work when you go to the scale of the B all the way to the scale of the tree right I mean there's kind of spectrum of scales that you are very much aware of when you produce those spaces the other thing that is also coming among I think at least both of you guys is that you were both worked as contractors first or you accepted contracting as part of your of your mandate let's say before becoming architect all while becoming architect right so having said that I was wondering if you can reflect on this idea of so we are beyond this locality and globality because you're all operating locally but somehow it's post-territorial and if this becomes the way of kind of pushing back against the project of modernity that only propagated universalism and technology that could travel across cultures and geographies and climate and be implanted right and it performs the same because of its air condition or because it has the scientific qualities that kind of protects it from the weather as opposed to being integrated with the environment so I was wondering if this is perhaps if you see this is the future of architecture where there are these innovation on the local level yet they could be applicable elsewhere which could become important for us as we face the climate crisis that the multiplying effect of the solution to be effective on the larger scale it needs to perhaps to do that yeah maybe I'll take your first crack so the question of scale that you touch upon has been has been the center part of at least our work and especially you know I'm Canadian I grew up in an environment where there were no people and then I moved to China and it's an environment of people there's people absolutely everywhere and some of the ideas I had for who I would be building for some of the sort of more type pavilion work that we were working on and then you come into China and it's like okay I've got problems to solve for a few billion people that's not quite the scale I was originally thinking about right so this blow your brain out to what you studied and then what you're going to be applying it to and multiply it by 20,000 really challenges everything you've ever learned about scale how you're going to build what technologies you choose especially when we were looking at Ramdirth you know of course we're asking ourselves for example in our case this is cute but can I build a 30 story building of people out of Ramdirth the same way people are looking now at wooden CLT and building towers this way too so I'm just taking a step back to kind of stretch the definition of scale from the scale of the materiality but the scale of the impact and the people that we're trying to build for today and I think part of it is more than anything it's and I'm jumping around a little bit but always some kind of clarity on what's being pursued as mentioned right and not being afraid to change course in order to to to solve a core issue that that people are after and becoming really good at something like understanding something really really well and I think that's something that's blown me away from the presentations today right trying to figure out how to heck you carve the stone in that particular way and all the materiality work you've done because without question the way we're going to be building you know I spent a lot of time in tech in data right now and artificial intelligence and machine learning and so on and I'm looking of course at how we're going to be building with 3D printers in the future and how we're going to be using artificial intelligence to build the algorithms that are going to be building a lot more organic shapes that are responsive to climate responsive to different types of stresses and with tools that don't yet exist but you're all going to be building with and designing with in the next 10 years and the pattern at which we do that or the design process that remains right and so I'm jumping around a little bit so to try to answer your question because it's a broad one but also trying to put it in the context of the own things that we prioritize which is scale impact at scale and the scale of what we're doing for example is so completely different but at the same time so similar it's about in my mind developing an expertise in making sure you understand what you do incredibly well and then figuring out how you can take it to scale thereafter and scale might not be a bigness of I'm not going to build a 30 story tower out of let's say blocks but I might use that to impact as you're so well describing an economy and doing more than so measuring the scale is important so a bit of a ramble there but I'm just trying to answer a very open question recently I came across David Harvey he's a professor at the London School of Economics and he was describing so well that the greatest crisis of our times they were all solved by the building sector from Roosevelt's 1929 all crisis in the 80s post war and even the crisis now in 2008 it was if you could point one thing that was the building sector it was when China decided to make the high speed connection between Beijing and Hong Kong that was like the beginning of the end of the crisis so as David was saying at the opening of this series the impact of the building sector in the environment biodiversity landfill is just huge it's colossal so we're the elites and I say it without any arrogance architecture is perhaps the only discipline that is able to connect technology and cultural awareness in such a significant way as we are now to tackle the crisis we have at hand you know who else could connect water security to food supply to the whole material production manufacturing sector from extraction and all the footprint of buildings who can else articulate all of these except architects so yes the materials and the building materials you use for making buildings is very very significant is very very significant so anything you do in terms of offsetting or creating loops of positive feedbacks into your local environment if you do it with architecture it's always at a grand scale remember some buildings they take up whole forests 80,000, 100,000 trees in one single building these are numbers we should really reflect upon and not worry so much of the sheer scale of your building that's not as relevant as for instance supporting a company a building company that once you work with them they will be able to replicate the technique into some other dozens and dozens of buildings I mean this is architecture it's a lot more than what you see I mean what you see is important in the terms of how it connects what you don't see but that's all because the impact is invisible I think referring to the question of scale and what you notice I mean concerning my presentation that I always mentioned the proportions, the height, the span etc is to emphasize the fact that even the evolution of the material of stone during the last 50 years has pushed stone to become only of decorative cladding materials used to hide concrete structures and the idea is to say that basically looking at the new technologies that are open today how we can push further on the static possibilities of the material to push it at its limits and how going from a micro scale how the impact of the technique could have an influence on the city and how basically the techniques of construction would impact urban setups and as well the scale would reflect the idea of being global and local and trying to hinge and connect different elements of architecture that could be inspired by different areas and how they can come into correlation we just noticed that the entire the Middle East in general the historic Middle East in general is constructed and they resulted into morphologies that are quite adapted to the climate to the different ways of using space while today it's more an architecture of objects and an architecture of investors so basically this is what we are trying to achieve I think I will pass it I just want to say I think your answer is really resonate with your presentation obviously and what I had in mind when I asked the question is that I think what you describe as making the invisible visible in this case material is not about fetishizing the objectness of it but actually what it could communicate to us in terms of processes of making either kind of political history that you just talked about or the economy and the craftsmanship that you guys were talking about and I think we want to open it up for a couple of questions before we take a break and move on to the next panel so if any of you in the audience have a question get it ready but I will just build off of that a little bit by asking one question before I go to you thanks for raising your hand I think it's fitting that we're addressing the scale in terms of like the multiple scales but magnitude of impact and how each of you in your own way is engaging that but at the same time I want to really note that the work that you presented was striking and raw and powerful with a compelling aesthetic and so my question is I mean something that I am wondering about myself increasingly and working with my students on and some of them in this room is how do you advocate for things like beauty and quality of space and aesthetics as well as for things like fair labor practices and social equality in the context of climate change in the context of what we almost didn't state yet today I think Andres covered it a little bit in the introduction but according to all intelligent measures we have 11 years to radically transform everything about our lives and certainly about our carbon emissions or we will trigger this irreversible catastrophic change so in other words like although it's cliche I think at a certain point we cannot care if it's cliche that there may be this crisis and call to action that we've never before had in potentially human history so can we still advocate for design or what is the role of design that's partly why I put the provocation originally of Paul Antonelli saying like we are doomed but we can design a dignified path to our doomed fate but I wonder in your own work how do you the work in other words the work comes across as beautiful as design but do you advocate for that can we how do you balance that with the other stakes at hand? When people ask what's beauty then I tend to ask who's asking you because design and beauty it's something so beauty is one thing design is other thing and sometimes we maybe confuse both as I was about to do but what I try to design is invisible networks and relations between nature and people and local craftsmen and CO2 footprints etc and that's basically the design work we do 90% of our energies is setting relations and getting people in place and all that and then something will come across something will happen and at least I have the conviction myself that this something that happens is a reflection of a good work so somehow I tend to think that beauty is an expression of goodness so somehow I mean if there's an effort to do something that is that is honest work and that you work hard for something that is not for your own self but somehow for the common good that somehow that will carry some beauty in it you don't need to design beauty basically it's something that emerges out of your service to otherness and I have a really good friend who's a chemist not a really good friend he's a good acquaintance and he says the only person the only type of people he ever wants to work with are architects because they're the only optimists left on the planet and I thought that was kind of very true and if you take the path of the provocation which is a valid argument there's no question that we're going to hit a wall the question is at what speed we're going to hit the wall and what gets planned in consequence and there's a certain percentage of the population out there who have an act for inspiring others and whenever there's sort of a disaster at hand it's the first set of people that step up and start to inspire what gets built thereafter that's our role that's what that's what we're trained for so if I know today that I am going to hit a wall then I'm going to design an airbag that's just my job right and because my job is to inspire others I'm going to make that airbag really damn beautiful because in architecture school one of the things that happened when I was going through architecture school was that there was too much thinking and that drove me nuts I did not like architecture school there would without I had to step back out and do construction and be in the design office I needed to sort of have a balance between the theoretical and the practical just to have a chance to put things back into physicality and sort of practice the art of of making things beautiful in order to inspire but I really think that that ultimately will be and is our fundamental role as a profession and the type of people it attracts is to always be looking at the solutions because there will always be one it's just a question again repeating myself on taking the provocation if we are going to hit the wall at what speed and what do we design in consequence but sorry I lost my thought there because I'm jet lagged and very very tired but the one piece I wanted to say was that there's a lot of rational thinking that happens in school which is great and there's a lot of process but we need to trust our gut and our emotions a lot more because that is through practice which is why I was mentioning the need to get the hands dirty because we tend to think of ourselves as rational beings with the ability to have or rational beings with the ability to feel emotions that's a complete load of crap we are emotional beings with the ability to rationalize right and so again being able to leverage that skill to use it for design and make sure everything we do is beautiful taps into that fundamental truth that we are first and foremost emotional beings before we rationalize and so designing for beauty should actually be in many ways our number one priority because that is the first thing we respond to not the way it's been rationalized I just have to specifically towards that we are not supposed to the whole process of a project is not inscribed in a perspective where it has to respond to a certain aesthetic or a certain beauty but it's the whole chain or maybe the whole context in which we operate and how we put together these different aspects of a project for example obviously these projects that are based on stereotomy and how we can generate structures that are totally self-standing is inscribed in a very technical approach but the fact that we are trying to couple the know-how of local makers and local techniques and artisans with advanced mechanisms and advanced technology allows to generate a sort of capacity to bring together a certain aesthetic to create a very contextual inserted form of architecture Thank you so much for sharing your vision and your inspiring experience from your practice there's one question I want to ask specifically to Mr. Valais like when you made your decision to move from Canada to China was there like anything like any special quality within that market or that culture that sort of driven this problem or issue you saw there because I know more than half of the country is actually poor in the land of China every year and we feel desperate about it was like one of the issues that driven your decision Yeah, it was it's a good question, thanks for asking it is one liner, I'm from Quebec which is a place with no people and where problems you don't feel global problems you just really don't feel there compared, so when I graduated it was just what's the busiest place on earth where's the largest opportunity to have an impact the busiest place was Shanghai at the time, so I bought myself one way ticket and moved to Shanghai so if it had been, I always joke if it had been Brazil, I'd be in Brazil I happen to love Asia that helps fell in love even more once there so there's a lot of qualities there for sure, but it was really just the opportunity for impact and we don't live very long, you know most people are master architects by the time they're 50 or 55 I don't have that patience and they're master architects because by that time they've built 120 projects I wanted to build 120 projects by the time I was 30 and I did and so it was really just looking for the opportunity to get the hands dirty learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible because I'm not going to be alive very long and there's a lot of work to do Hi thank you, this is a question for any and all of you, but in response to something that Rafer said at the very beginning about needing to convince rich people that these materials were beautiful and I'm wondering if you flipped that question talking about the need to also convince people who aren't affluent, who are low income that these materials might be valuable and worth building with because I think there is still a very real stigma in a lot of parts of the world that rammed earth and mud brick and a lot of these natural building materials are no longer preferable and you see people also unlearning a lot of these traditional crafts and building techniques because of that and I'm wondering if you've experienced this type of stigma in any of the work that you've done around these materials? Yeah of course because it's I think we have in common that all these projects are based on more research based projects they're still under kind of trying to find ways actually to push the scale of these structures towards to have really an impact on the city for example in the context of what we do in terms of stone as I mentioned during my presentation stone has been used historically as a structural component and gradually it became only cover of concrete elements so today the cost of stone is in the context of how it's being used is very low because it's only thicknesses of two to three five centimeters and the fact that we are thinking of using stone as a massive material is that it's bigger chunks of stone but on a longer term basis we are thinking that these chunks of stone can be re-adapted and reconfigured in various ways while when you have only very light elements then the possibilities and the future expansion is very limited and this as well the fact that on a midterm or long term basis these constructions are more thought of as structures that are more responsive and that could have an impact on the long term use of the space my answer is not I don't know much but I try to respond to my environment and to the people around me so considerations on whether it's more to reach people everybody plays a role and doesn't have much to do with where they stand so I rather play with the people around me and the needs of those people and that's already complex enough if I go on like asking how do I globalize this or how do I answer the world's questions I mean I get really and that's something I try not to answer universal questions both in your both work there is almost a product that's been produced that has the possibility of being marketed and reproduced you do touch on you are at the kind of the threshold of where it could become exponentially the the key is we are an aspirational animal that's really the uniqueness of humanity is that we're born aspirational and unlike I don't know a frog maybe frog inspires to something but no one's ever asked but I'm not sure humans are born aspirational and so you want to take a material and make it noble so it's not just it has nothing to do in my mind with whether they're rich or poor the only conscious decision on our part to say we're going to work for wealthy clients was because we wanted to do research and we needed somebody to pay for it and the idea that and we were very blunt with our clients about that your project we're going to design this and you're going to be and what what I'm going to be a guinea pig for what you want to research in my project and say this and I'm going to have to pay for it yes and why would I do that because you're benefiting from all the guinea pigs that came before you in our other projects and okay and then we convince them is a controlled experiment we're going to do we're going to experiment with this very much same scale right convincing somebody to do an arch out of compressed brick that's never been done before it's that's what you're going to be a guinea pig for and we're going to build a prototype and it's going to be controlled experiment if it fails we'll do something else but that's that process of always having one experimental thing that that creates that aspiration in each project is the really fun part and guiding clients down that road and we just we just chose clients because they were able to accelerate the research that we wanted to do and then make it available to others there after but haven't expired to it there was one more question up here and then I think I'm just closing and transition all the remarks because we want to make sure we have enough time for this so I really like the aspirational animal reference that you just made but I also really agree with David's timeline of 11 years and I think that when we are sitting here trying to identify what the role of the architect is in the scope of this conversation I think it's also important to realize that there's a lot of value in the exploration of these materials but there's also a generalized focus on what the potentials of the materials are but we're not too sensitive about the way that we're doing it in terms of globalizing these materials for the sake of climate change I think is very powerful but also we are limiting the way that it's being done I feel like we are limiting the potential to truly globalize it in a sense that we are not going to be able to provide you know settlements in you know rural settlements in East Africa with a four-axis CNC machine because that's required to make this material globalize and I think that that's something that we have to tie into this timeline to a certain point we have to explore and understand the possibilities of these materials but also we have to turn around and look back to see how it is that we're going to start implementing them and I think that there's again generalized lack of discourse on that on how these materials are going to come back and do the role that we are designing them for and in terms of aesthetic I think that aesthetic right now is or could be or the potential of aesthetic could be to kind of I guess make the material more attractive therefore more marketable but again aesthetic isn't really answering the first question which is how do we throw it back into communities it's a it's a that's an awesome closing comment actually thanks for thanks for posing that I wanted to add to that if I can despite being over time the one of the things that we hit upon in Ramdurth a lot is we get a lot of inquiries from well-intentioned people who say I'm really interested in Ramdurth it's kind of like a DIY thing and then we step back and no no no this is not a DIY thing this is a human health and safety thing and a lot of the research being done now on those the basic materials that might provide shelter in the future or the now have a really hugely missing engineering component to them and you know so that we're not if we are trying to do this at scale that some of the the core design and engineering thinking goes back into them and that's in in in our own field the Ramdurth field we see a lot of very dangerous good intentions for people who are DIYing materials without having any understanding of the engineering and human health and safety implications behind it from seismic implications and weather wearing and so on so extracting that knowledge to take very local materials and do them in a properly engineered way that will actually help people as opposed to harm them are some of the sort of key simple lessons that can and should be pulled out of these experiments to be able to help solve some of these issues at large scale under his time to his own next panel I know I think I think we're out of time I really I also appreciate that comment and I agree with you it's there's a risk when you go and become the marketing part as it becomes desirable that material because it has the green qualification as it complies with we talked about a little bit before the lectures start is that the access this doesn't guarantee the availability of the material and performance doesn't guarantee its accessibility to places where you really want to be and also doesn't guarantee the equal distribution where that matter needs to be so there's kind of another conversation perhaps that needs to be taken on after thank you all very great