 material, cities, and ethics. And please join me in welcoming Ronald Raell, who's a design activist, architectural researcher, author, and thought leader within the topics of border wall studies, earthen architecture, additive manufacturing, and emerging digital fabrication technologies. Ronald Raell is the Eva Lee Memorial Chair in architecture, and he's also the director of the master's of architecture program with a joint appointment in the department of architecture, college of environmental design, and the department of art practice at the University of California in Berkeley, where he also directs the primed farm laboratory. He is the author of many research articles and seminal books, such as Border Wall as architecture, a manifesto for the US-Mexico boundary, and earth architecture that I have here. I wanted to show it while I say that, but I forgot, nevermind. As an entrepreneur, Ronald Raell has co-founded Emerging Objects, an independent, creatively driven 3D printing make tank that specializes in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments, and products. He was also the co-founder of the startup food technology company, Forrest, for design and manufacturing of innovative interiors of 3D printed wood. As a practitioner, Ronald Raell is the co-founder of Raell San Fertelo Design Studio that was named a 2014 Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, one of the most prestigious awards in North American architecture. His work has been published and exhibited extensively. And just to list a few, his work is in the permanent collection at the MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Frax Center, and these are just, again, to least a few. And most recently, Raell San Fertelo's teeter-totter wall that I guess that I anticipate that Ronald will speak about today. It's about three pink sea saws on the US-Mexico border was named 2020 Design of the Year. You can read and watch more about Ronald Raell's work and published articles at the New York Times, Wired, Mark, Domus, Metropolitan Magazine, Public Art Review, and there are also several documentary films produced on Ronald Raell's work by the MoMA, by QDEC, which is an Emmy-winning documentary film by the New Yorker and for his humanitarian initiatives with the International Aid Organization Allite. Most importantly, we are proud to tell you that Ronald Raell is a GSEP alumni where he earned his Master of Architecture degree here at Columbia University and has contributed to a legacy of critical design thinkers. So join me in welcoming Ronald. We are so pleased to have you with us here today. Ronald, thank you so much. Thank you, Lola. I appreciate that very generous introduction. We'll see, I'm going to share my screen first and yeah, I have a lot of good memories of being at Columbia. And so it's really nice to be back, at least virtually, and I hope that all of you are doing well and get to not be virtual sometime soon because being in Avery, especially the library and the studios was one of my favorite things to do there during my time as a student. So Lola introduced a lot of the things that I do from being a designer to working with for humanitarian causes and also being an entrepreneur. And I'm going to try to stitch all of those bodies of work together and recognizing the topic of this particular course, try to weave in ideas of technology as well and see if I can pull that off in the talk. But I'm going to cite this origin of this talk in a very specific place, which is the borderlands. And for me, it's an expanded view of the borderlands. I'm not in Berkeley, California right now. I've been on an isolated ranch where I grew up since March. And it's a very special place to me, not only because my family's lived here for thousands of years, but because this place defines the borderlands in many different ways. One, it's surrounded by 14 and 13,000 foot mountains that makes it bordered from the rest of the world in many ways. And it crosses the border between the state of Colorado and the state of New Mexico. But until 1846 or 1848, I guess, the end of the Mexican-American War, it was the northernmost territory of Mexico. And so the history of this landscape is that of a bordered land. And the evidence of the borderlands still exists today in the architecture and the language and the food and the customs and the names of the town. It's also the headwaters of the Rio Grande River, which of course today divides the United States from Mexico and defines the contemporary border from El Paso and close to the Gulf of Mexico. But I mentioned that architectural legacy remains and it's an architectural legacy constructed of clay, constructed of Adobe. And just especially since March, we've been opening up these projects, working on actively restoring about nine Adobe buildings in this landscape, including my own house. And this is my great-grandfather sister's home where I live today and it's entirely constructed of mud and mud from the site. And I use this house as a place to teach traditional and indigenous building technologies and crafts, like Adobe plaster, but also indigenous and traditional foodways and the construction of ordinals. And this construction of ordinals, which is a recent project for me, has grown quite quickly in that I'm working with the humanitarian aid organization, Alight, which was formerly called the American Refugee Committee that Lola mentioned, which we are now constructing ordinals in borders all across, sorry, in refugee shelters and migrant shelters all across the US-Mexico border. And then it's an interesting project for me because it is a project where we are migrating a technology from New Mexico and Colorado to the border, but in fact, most migrants have a connection to cooking in these kinds of ovens made of mud. And so it has become a hearth or a centerpiece around which migrants from many different countries and in this particular shelter here, there are migrants from Russia, from Cuba, from Brazil, from Mexico, from Guatemala, and they all have some connection to this cooking technology. And so it's a common object or common technology that everyone can gather around and share food and share recipes and share the differences and similarities that they have with each other, making a community in these shelters. And so we plan to build many more of these ordinals and it's a topic of a documentary film, but I will just say one thing beautiful about that film is the nun who runs this particular shelter is interviewed and asked, what are you building here? And they want her to talk about the ordinals, but she pivots and she says, what are we building here? We are rebuilding people and we're rebuilding humanity. And so that's what excites me most about this particular project is it's a project that helps us think about how to create community and rebuild humanity along the US Mexico border. And borderlands are places where things from different cultures and belief systems come together. And this is evident also here in Colorado. You can see many of these US military forts built along the historical US Mexico border. And they are forts made out of mud and logs that emulate the building traditions that have existed in this region for thousands of years like Taos Pueblo, which is just on the other side of the border and just about 60 miles south of here where I'm giving you this lecture from today. But again, it's these tensions and frictions and the way that differences rub up against each other and in beautiful and sometimes ridiculous and sometimes violent ways that interest me in terms of thinking about technology and architecture, how bringing things together can make something actually new, make a hybrid condition. And I mentioned how this memory of the borderland persists in these landscapes. And so even in 1936, the governor of the state of Colorado declared martial law so that residents of the state of New Mexico who were indigenous or Hispanic could not enter the state of Colorado. And they set up border stops along the Colorado of New Mexico border to prevent that from happening and to return people back to their country. And even we saw last year when the leader of the previous regime boasted that he was actively building walls in Colorado. And I'm not sure where he was building those but imagine this is the kind of map that he had in his head of where the wall was to exist. And so New Mexico has always been this other to kind of condition and this hybrid condition. And that's evident in the architecture as well where we see a church San Lorenzo and Picuris Pueblo that was constructed in the 1700s entirely out of logs and mud. And we fast forward to the 1930s. We see how the introduction of technology of sawmill of lime plaster of the train of the importation of rolled metal transformed that building. And we can see how culture transforms the building even today where there's this romantic notion of what this building was. The pitched roof was removed locking it in a moment in history back to a flat roof but this flat roof is no longer a dirt roof. It's a built up tar roof. The ladder doesn't access the roof to maintain the earth. It's more of a symbol. We can see the facade is plastered in cement to preserve it. And we see how Home Depot comes into the picture now with this strange little entrance of columns and the flashing that's flat and has a roll roofing on top. So these kind of hybrids persist in New Mexico. The low rider is nothing more than an eviscerated church when people started leaving villages and moving out into the landscape. And when people started moving to this landscape from the East Coast demanding like the romantic notion of an adobe house adobe factories were constructed where vehicles were designed to consume the landscape leaving in their wake tens of thousands of adobe bricks. And this is the largest adobe factory in the world in Alcalde, New Mexico which produces almost 30,000 adobe bricks per day. So these hybrids persist. We can see them again at Casas Grandes, Arizona. The act of preservation and the introduction of a technology to preserve it. And then this is really an inspiring moment for me to think about the way I shape my practice in a hybrid landscape is how in the 1928 a architecture competition was held to preserve this structure built by the Hohokum in the 1400s. And the winner of this competition was Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. who's the son of the designer of Central Park. And he wanted to design a structure that preserved the structure, the historic structure but stood far apart enough from it that it wouldn't compete with it. And of course it was not made out of earth it was made out of modern materials glass and metal and concrete. But what's beautiful for me about this building is that it doesn't stand apart. It is synthetic in the way that it is a high a new kind of hybrid architecture bringing together the traditions of the past and the technologies of the present at that time to make one complete expression of architecture. I've documented many of my thoughts about building an earth on a website called eartharchitecture.org which you could visit and which has led to a book called earth architecture which I'll talk about in a bit but I've also thought about how one practices building an earth in a contemporary culture. And this was a house that we designed for a client after Hurricane Katrina and he wanted to build the house himself and this was sited in Martha, Texas. We designed the house to be entirely constructed in Adobe. It's plastered with Adobe on the inside and the outside so it's entirely mud through the entire section but weaving into the Adobe is concrete which helps reinforce that very long wall which otherwise would need some buttressing but the buttressing is kind of embedded in the wall. So we're weaving tradition and newer technologies together in a way that has a kind of friction to the architecture and the same with even the we think about this in the archeology of the house and this is how this might be revealed in the future. The bricks below were made in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They are stronger, they're more expensive and they have to be shipped some distance to the site. The bricks above are lighter, less expensive not as durable but they were manufactured in Ojinalga, Mexico just off 60 miles south of Martha, Texas. And so when one in the future dismantles this ruin trying to understand the culture of the time we will see within it a kind of understanding of the geology of place also in the economy of place and the performance of this material these various materials and how they relate to each other. The interior of the project also is just it's called the box box house and so it's enormous mud box and inside a box of technology the technology that heats the radiant floors that lights the building that provides the plumbing everything is packed into this little tiny box in the center. While we were working on that project we were asked by two artists from Berlin to assist with the project called Prada Marfa and while we had been thinking about how architecture can communicate much more complex issues like geology and archeology and perhaps anthropology and thinking about the culture of building related to the technology of building this project introduced to me the way that architecture might express even more complex issues, political issues and Prada Marfa is a project that I think blurs the border between art and architecture. And it also is a project that I would say speaks to the dichotomies and juxtapositions between wealth and poverty between United States and Mexico between a Mexican and an Anglo in this landscape you probably all know Prada as a clothier from Milan that sells shoes and upwards of $1,500 per pair and to construct this sculpture if we want to call it a sculpture in a landscape where the traditional shoe is constructed of Yucca fiber but it's also a landscape today where people walk hundreds of miles on a journey until their own shoes wear out and must stuff Yucca fiber into their shoes so they can go just a little bit further. So there are all these dichotomies present within this building and all these tensions present in this building but it's also a sculpture and the facade itself is based upon this very famous photograph by the photographer Andres Gertzky called Prada but it is a photograph of a facade of a Prada in Milan without any merchandise in it yet. And this is the final outcome, it's not a store you cannot go into it, it's sealed, it houses as an artifact the 2004 line of purses and shoes from Prada but it's also a project that speaks to the idea of what it means to manufacture a cultural object in the world. Again, we referred and thinking about the archeology of the project laying each adobe brick in a cementitious mortar. This is the way that military forts were constructed after the Mexican-American war somehow giving trust to the adobe brick but not to the adobe mortar and we can see in the walls of these buildings within Marfa how the adobe brick sitting on this impervious layer of cementitious mortar erodes much more quickly because it's setting in a pool of water after it rains and so what's becoming of these walls is we're left with this diaphanous screen made only of mortar which is beautiful and tragic and violent all at the same time but also ridiculous in that this was thought of as one of the first Instagrammable works of art where people would go to it and take a picture in front of it and it was ignited by Beyonce's jumping in front of Prada Marfa and then everybody followed in suit jumping in front of Prada Marfa in the same way and it's become this mecca destination but it's also become a cultural object a cultural object that's referred to in popular media we can see that in the Simpsons recent journey across the US on a road trip where they stopped not so much to see Prada Marfa but because Homer had to use the restroom out in the middle of the desert and went behind Prada Marfa to do so so while we were finishing Prada Marfa we were also witnessing the beginning of the largest construction project in the United States in the 21st century which is the construction of over 700 miles of border wall at a cost of over $4 million per mile mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and we began to document the stories stories about that related to the budget of these walls of how they were made and what the consequences were for constructing this wall in some of the most pristine landscapes in the United States so $3.4 billion have been spent since 2006 $49 billion will be needed to finish and maintain this wall for the next 49 years sorry for the next 25 years and so what does that mean in the context of architecture? And this is not the wall that was announced by the previous regime which was to construct a wall that cost $70 billion of which only about 15 miles were constructed during the last four years but let's put that $49 billion into an architectural context what else could $49 billion buy? 300 Seattle public libraries or 204 Disney concert halls or 500 miles of the High Line so imagine this kind of investment in the borderlands in cultural projects or social projects to improve some of the fastest growing landscapes and cities in fact, both countries. One of the questions that I pondered about back then was is this wall architecture and it certainly had designed structure it was designed by a organization called Fenslab which was a partnership between the National Laboratory and Texas A&M University and one way they tested the impermeability of the wall was to ram a 50 ton vehicle driving 40 miles an hour into the wall itself and this amounted to hundreds of thousand dollars of research to test the ability for this wall to keep people apart in a way but on the other side there was other technology emerging other research happening like the invention of these portable draw bridges that one could simply drive up to the border wall and drive over the wall itself. This is some really early cell phone footage of one of these events before there was even iPhones where you can see the vehicle driving over sometimes with success and like all research projects sometimes with failure but again, it's these frictions and dichotomies and ridiculous ways things happen but also violent ways as I mentioned and since 1994, more than 6,000 people have died trying to cross this border because it pushes people to further extremes in the desert and that Secure Fence Act of 2006 is kind of the highest law in the land and over 30 laws were waived for the construction of the wall Environmental Protection Acts Native American Heritage Acts, Willingness Acts they're all superseded by the construction of the wall it cannot be stopped in fact. And the wall is a U.S. project so it must be constructed on U.S. soil and therefore all of the wall is constructed in the United States and sometimes well into the United States there's about 44,000 acres to my count on the Mexican side of the wall that is the United States. If we zoom in though, we see that despite the intention of the wall to keep people apart and away has brought people together in some really amazing ways in forms of resistance and resilience to this separation to celebrate the bi-national identities of people in the borderlands like this picture of the bi-national yoga classes that used to take place at Friendship Park and this photograph from early 1900s National Geographic photograph sums it up for me in many ways. It describes both the horrors and the humor present at the border and this photograph by the way is entirely set up it's not a real photograph, it was staged but the horror of the wall itself is the horror of xenophobia and racism and poverty that is exacerbated by the construction of the wall and humor is a way that's constantly used to overcome those hardships. And as we documented the events that were happening on the wall we created a series of illustrations of the biography of this wall stories that are illustrated about what was simply happening in that landscape at the time and illustrated through the form of what we call recuerdos or souvenirs to remember the time that we constructed a wall and what a ridiculous idea that was and so in the form of postcards and snow globes keychains, maps, a border game, get it, and farm and that told these stories stories like this, like a Border Patrol agent working out in the sun, getting thirsty, wants a paleta there's a guy just a few feet away from him who's selling it and so money and food is exchanged to the wall which is entirely a federal offense made illegal only by those couple of centimeters of steel and this is the snow globe that we call burrito wall that remembered the time when food and conversation ideas were shared to the wall the notion that if the wall is a barrier to north-south, south-north movement perhaps it could that enormous steel armature could serve to facilitate east-west movement within the respective sister cities on both sides so we call this the pedestrian wall when we envision this by National Library we're imagining ways that we might dismantle the meaning of this wall in an effort to dismantle the actual wall where the wall itself is actually nothing more than a bookshelf through which ideas and information and knowledge could be exchanged and if in fact the border wall is nothing but political theater perhaps we should invite audiences to that theater so they can participate and see the atrocities of the construction of the wall with stages and seating on both sides this is an example of what we call the swing wall where people can enter from both sides and swing over to the other country until gravity deports them back to their own respective country and the wall has very different means and perceptions on both sides on one side someone's mowing their lawn in their backyard that's defined by the wall and on the other side the wall is the literal fourth wall of someone's house and we produced a series of blueprints thinking about these disparities between wealth and poverty and how on the right you see the average size of a house in El Paso, Texas and on the left the average size of a house in Juarez, Mexico and you see the different kinds of construction technologies employed but in this particular drawing you see that the wall divides the bed in the bedroom because this wall not only divides countries from each other but they divide cities, neighborhoods and divide families and so these are the kinds of stories that are packed into this compendium called border wall as architecture which is not, they are not proposals for the wall but they illustrate what is happening in the borderlands right now because one thing that I think about is this quote by Hassan Fati who I hope you're familiar with his work an Egyptian architect from the early 20th century who said architects do not design walls but the spaces between them and so it's those spaces that I think we as designers have to be cognizant of and have to think about how we might repair those spaces that are endangered by the construction of that wall. While we were beginning that research in the borderlands we're finishing a book called Earth Architecture which documented earth as a contemporary building material. So it is a material that civilization has used for 10,000 years but in fact in the modern era architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Loos, Schindler and many contemporary architects who define modernity built in earth not abandoning those 10,000 years of tradition but actually hybridizing this moment when modernity was born and new materials were being used and thinking about and continuing the vast traditions that have existed but in the last chapter of this book I wonder what the future of earth architecture is and I imagine back in 2007 that perhaps it is 3D printing because that was the thing that seemed cool in 2007 and it was interesting to think about how we might accomplish this and so my studio embarked on a project called Emerging Objects and the goal of Emerging Objects then was to think about how we can take man's oldest building material which was clay man's oldest additive manufacturing material and think about it in the 21st century and around the same time there was a magazine who on its I don't remember if it's a 100th anniversary or 150th anniversary announced the 40 things you need to know about the next 40 years and the number one thing on their list was the sophisticated buildings will be made of mud and that was a Smithsonian magazine and I thought that was really cool and interesting because I thought that the number one thing you need to know about the last 10,000 years was that sophisticated buildings were in fact made out of mud because civilization has showed us that it's the material that we have been working on the longest so how could we think about this in the 21st century, this beautiful material that I think in my opinion we have evolved to manipulate to think about how we might take a 30,000 year old endeavor and transform it through a fairly recent technology a 35 year old technology so back in 2010 we embarked on developing formulations for 3D printing in clay and these are some of these very early examples from then which led us into ceramics and 3D printing ceramics and wondering what's the place in the world for 3D printing ceramics we're making things like this but also wondering could it be a brick that holds a plant or an object that is full of air and so it's insulative to a certain extent or could we begin to hybridize technologies that were based on traditional technologies like traditional passive cooling systems this is in modern times we'd call this a swamp cooler but this continues to be used throughout India, North Africa, Southern Europe where you place a very porous ceramic vessel in a window fill it with water and as warm air washes over it that evaporates the water humidifying the air and cooling the space within and so could that be produced in a single module these 3D printed bricks happen to be able to be very porous and absorb water like a sponge but we could have a matrix of porosity to allow warm dry air to move through them thus producing cool moist air for an interior condition in the desert-arid environment so we call this the cool brick and it's kind of just a masonry water sponge that also serves to attach and bond with cement mortar in a very strong way giving you some tensile string to that wall connection and so we've just embarked on a series of experiments like this but not only the making of a form or performative form but thinking about how we can deposit the material through its deposition and so six years ago we sort of stumbled upon a process that brought us into the world of ceramics and kind of invented a way of putting down ceramics that is today really highly replicated and experimented with but it was just the making, taking a robot on a little dance on a curve and exploring the materiality and the plasticity and the glitches that could happen when extruding clay through a tube and so until then, most of the goal of 3D printing was to produce the exact object that was in computer and produce that in the real world and we took it in a different direction which was to make a series of glitches not knowing what these were good for but discovering new kinds of textures and patterns and possibilities for something and I think there's pushing these experiments to the limit walked somewhere between science and art and I think while we received lots of attention in the art and craft world because of these objects each of these objects was simultaneously a vessel that related to that craft and art world of ceramics but it was really a sample it was really a very specific experiment that looked like a vase but it was really just testing textures and movement and materiality and we saved every one of them but we were also speculating on what is this good for and of course the possibilities of waterproof durable architectural skins was something that we were thinking about and how 3D printing could be the total kind of way of thinking about making but this pushed us into other materials that exist in the landscape and how we might incorporate those if we were inspired by Adobe which is a material that exists in landscaping to make a building out of it what about other materials like salt which is prevalent in the San Francisco Bay area and there's these enormous crystallization ponds in the South Bay where they produce hundreds of thousands of tons of salt per year and they cost very little and we developed this 3D printable material made almost entirely out of salt and because it was so inexpensive we imagined the making of panels or buildings out of this material and took it to the extent to think about how we might make buildings from the landscape inspired by the inured igloo we developed a project called the salty glue because it was made out of salt glue of course I don't know if you got that joke but that's a joke but all of our experiments are experiments in a certain process and this was how fast could we print an enclosure out of this material and so in this case there are 300 and some salt tiles that make what I would call a lightweight salt tent held in tension by lightweight aluminum rods this is the salty glue being put together in our studio and you can see the lightweight rods but that opened up a whole set of possibilities for different kinds of materials that were powder based this is a technology that doesn't even they don't even make these powdered printers anymore but we thought it was the best printer in the world and one of the materials was wood and sawdust and thinking about how the 7 million tons of wood waste a year can be turned from a subtractive industry back into an additive industry always thinking about the component and thinking about how we might make facades partitions skins a new way of manufacturing building materials essentially out of the ground up of an industry and in October of last year we started this startup company called Forest thinking about how we can improve the ecology of our forests especially in Northern California by using small diameter timber wood waste from those forests and you can find more information at Forest IO but these academic experiments and these art experiments and I think that's something I want to pass on to you in terms of your own research is to think about how they are also intellectual property we've developed intellectual property patents and we've created several startups around this that have been a new way to think about how we might practice architecture via or through the lens of technology and technological development this cement process I do have a patent for which uses a very small amount of water to produce parts that are stronger than concrete and very lightweight and a kind of an eco cement polymer and this is one of the largest objects we explored using that process but always remembering and maybe being inspired by the processes that came before us and thinking about how those might we might have one step foot in the past and one foot in the future as we advance and thinking about how we might transform the present most of 3D printing is plastic and we've done a lot of experiments with plastic this was an experiment in how you make a doubly curved enclosure using the least amount of building components in a concept around a building farm where we're having multiple printers we did this back with MakerBot I don't know about six or seven years ago where we simply designed the single component and the instructions for the assembly were based on color and so one could look at a picture and know where red goes or blue goes and I thought it was interesting to think about the political implications of this at the time there were of course and this continues unfortunately thinking about this relationship between some people said, oh, that looks like American quilt and some people said that looks like the dome of a Muslim mosque and to think about how those tensions are embedded within the making of an object whether they are intentional or not and what those readings could possibly be and so in some ways nothing that one makes is really can escape the political dimension that one might read into the architecture the, you probably can't hear this the volume is very loud for me so I'm a little bit, okay, there we go one thing about this experiment is that the people who fabricated had never built anything in their lives they just were a printing company and they made all these blocks they put it together but it was a study in prefabrication how we might prefabricate panels and have them assembled and shipped to a site and then reassembled very quickly because of the larger aggregation and your classmate Reem helped us on this project so remember that Reem? so some other projects around that are thinking about how plastic could be a an armature for clay because we're starting to think about how we might push some of these technologies together and so in this case we produced a I don't know if you're familiar with this this building technology called Waddle and Dobb which basically make a woven mesh of an organic material like branches or sticks and then you cover it with mud in this case we use that same kind of G-code clay pattern at a micro scale to create an armature around which we could onto which we could apply local clay so we shipped these panels to France in this case and we're using a local French clay to provide the Dobb that reinforces and stiffens this structure and this is sort of what it looks like and see the textures and the patterns in the surface so these experiments on that were simply a way to rethink the way we might make an object in the world and wiggle around clay and take things for a walk that you saw in the clay and you saw in the Waddle begin to have more purpose of course the anchorage for anchoring for clay we're thinking about building facades but because of our ability to print any material that came in a powdered form we're visited by the California Academy of Sciences who wanted us to see if we could 3D print scanned coral out of calcium carbonate which is what coral secreted not because that is good for the restoration of coral reefs it's not but in fact to use the teaching tool at the Academy of Sciences to show that how higher acidity levels in the ocean due to climate change are one major factor of what's depleting coral reefs and so we produce these calcium carbonate objects so that they could show visitors how acidity breaks down these corals but when they visited our lab they saw that array of experimentation and they had been working on thinking about how ceramic is the ideal substrate for coral larvae to attach to and can flourish and grow and so we worked with them in an organization called SICOR for several months developing these seed pods where at least one coral larvae during a coral larvae bloom can attach to and thrive and ceramic works very well because algae is a competitor to coral and algae doesn't stick very well to smooth ceramic and so we produced extruded versions and powder ceramic versions and produced over 4,000 that are now being tested all over the world in Baja California and Curacao in Australia and Guam with a lot of success and so there is hope to print over a million of these in fact we were able to be competitive and outbid traditional ceramic manufacture processes making these particular forms that are optimized for not only coral larvae habitat but for shipping for dumping out of the boat and for scuba divers to dive to the bottom and anchor them physically to the bottom of the ocean so the other ways that we're thinking about this technology is not only sea life habitat but also human habitat and there is a housing emergency in the Bay Area which has lifted zoning regulations and you can now build up to 1200 square feet as an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard without going before the city planning commission or using an architect and so we decided that we would use that opportunity to bring together many of our technologies and make a kind of micro house we 3d printed over 4000 of these ceramic cladding system tiles each of which is exactly the same but in the way we're printing them they make it very different so it feels like it has this natural handmade kind of character attached to a 3d printed backing the front facade of the building is made out of recycled sawdust some of our experiments in cement but also recycled Chardonnay grape skins from wine country in northern California which is a waste product that's produced by the wineries there that all hold succulents and airplanes that thrive in the northern California climate so it also becomes this ecology and the interior of this micro 3d printed house is biobased PLA plastic which you're probably all familiar with but we use that translucency of that to make the house like a lantern the cabin like a lantern changing the moods within the house and thinking about different daylight and nighttime kind of phenomenal in qualities the furniture is 3d printed much of it you can see coffee cups made out of recycled coffee and a coffee pot made out of recycled coffee so thinking about a very strong chair because we're weaving and correlating the the plastic filament and this is the house at night with the kind of daylight setting in the backlit LEDs and the kind of mood and tone that transforms the houses one goes from day to night so you know we're often asked if we if we mix these materials together and we're thinking about how the research could be borderless also and this this is kind of a connection between an architecture that is inspired and emerges by the ideas and hybridity of the borderlands and to think about how we might begin to combine systems combine materials combine technologies and and combine and you know reflect upon the horror and humor of the borderlands as well when I was in El Paso the the regime leader announced there were bad hombres at the borderlands and we laughed and we thought hey we're bad hombres but he didn't he actually didn't say we're they're bad hombres he said they're bad hombres and said oh bad hombres that's interesting he didn't say hombres he said hombres and so this to me is a bad hombres on the left hand side of the screen maybe the right hand side is a good hombre I don't know but it's this gradient between light and dark that makes an hombre and I thought how sophisticated that the regime leader recognizes these differences that we have and these gradients between culture and language and food so we decided to produce a series of objects called bad hombres that used clay from a republican state and clay from a democratic state and weave them together in a way that we could see the differences and we could see the singularities but we could also recognize how it's one singular object itself at both the scale of the object but it's the scale of the detail as well so these are what we called the bad hombres but it opened up a conversation to think about how a better version of that project would be taking clay from Mexico and taking clay from the United States and doing the same thing and so we traveled to El Paso and Juarez we gathered together 25 ceramic artists a professor of ceramics from University of Texas El Paso and a professor from a geology professor there and we sought clay deposits throughout the borderlands on both sides of the border and we gathered this amazing array of complexions of clays from whites to reds to browns to tans and even some greens that I think is in a photograph that was really special that you can only find in Japan but you can find them also now in Juarez and we asked every ceramic artist to make a pot using a 3D printer but of course they don't know how to 3D model they have their own craft with their experts and so we developed this little app where you could move around sliders and you could make the kinds of weird things that we were making is fundamentally a grasshopper script that allowed a very easy on-ramp into 3D printing and exported the G-code file that you could print and we asked them to make a pot or two each and they ended up making around 250 of these beautiful amazing vessels out of the landscape of the borderlands using clay harvested from both sides with ceramic artists from both sides but the goal beginning 10 years ago was could we make architecture using this technology and we're still imagining like maybe this is the goal this is what we want to aspire to and so what do we need to do that we need a machine and we envisioned a machine that could print an object larger than itself a kind of polar 3D printer and we began to work with the company that was making a ceramic 3D printer and we simply asked them would they like to help us and they said yes and so we produced this SCARA robot it was very simple and inexpensive relatively to like a cuckoo robot but actually uses cuckoo robot parts it could print many objects but to print one big object but also so we had the machine we had the software and now we need to figure out how to produce or to push massive amounts of clay through a hose and so we continued to experiment experiments themselves were fruitful inventions and finally we became accurate and confident enough that we were producing scalable hardware software and materials and so we took this technology back to the borderlands in a project that we call Mud Frontiers and for the first time in 10,000 years of making mud on this planet we're printing with mud in the borderlands celebrating the traditions that have existed there for thousands of years both at the architectural scale and the scale of ceramics we made a kiln to harvest clay from the site and fire it and we also produced these these study models I would call them that were studies in well they were based around three themes one is lightness that we could produce a very thin earthen wall if we corrugated and so that provided strength whereas earth technologies are usually massive and thick this is only about three inches in thickness but it is woven and corrugated so it provides strength but this idea of lightness was also related to building these objects in the middle of the desert and how we might illuminate them and what technologies might we use to illuminate them the solar powered LEDs for example this was a study model to think about how we could make circulation a beacon a stairs that you would climb and what what are the code implications of making something like that the kiln of course allowed us to fire pottery using those same kind of algorithms but making functional pottery in traditions that emerge from that same Pueblo of Picuris but in a new way in the 21st century using a new technology but using the same materials as it's been used for thousands of years and structural experimentations where we're not so corrugated and we have a double wall system and we use these juniper sticks which don't rot to tie the inner and outer wife together and thinking about how we might print a program in make a hearth 3D print furniture a place for gathering and our final experiment was to think about how we could move much more quickly instead of printing and letting it dry and printing and letting it dry we developed this fourth axis rail very inexpensive just made out of plywood and wood where we could print and because the printer is so portable we could print it and move it print it and move it and that allowed us to make a multi cellular structure in about the same time as it took to make a single cell one of the single structures and so here's here's what it looks like here's what it seems like squeezing out here's the printer had its height limitation so we realized we could just put the printer on a pedestal and keep on printing and we're driving this printer with just our cell phone and we're out in the middle of nowhere and we're excavating the dirt from the site and we're doing this all during the time of COVID and so we decided to call this structure Casa Covita not because Covita means COVID Covita means cohabitation it's a house for two people but it's built during the time of COVID and this is what it looks like if each room has a program and a function one room is a place for sleeping and looking out into the landscape and peering out to the sky the textiles you see were woven with friends of ours traditional weavers in New Mexico out of Churro wool this is the place for sleeping from above the the center room is a hearth where we can stay warm it has two benches that surround the fireplace but we can also cook on this fireplace in that functional cookware pottery that's Micaceous clay from New Mexico Micah prevents the heat shock from occurring so you can actually cook for very long periods of time in on direct fire in that ceramic and that's what the hearth looks like and then the third place is a space for bathing oh and oh so the hardware is made out of aluminum cans that we found alongside the road and we 3D printed the door handles and we melted that 3D printer out 3D print out of a adobe block that we casted in and then we simply poured in molten aluminum into the door handle itself it was a really fast way to make metal objects and the third space is a space for bathing filled with water from the enormous aquifer that exists below us in this valley and you can peer up into the sky while you're bathing in the warm water um and thinking about a roof for the structure we imagine a much more ephemeral roof it only rains nine inches a year and we begin to use pneumatics to create the roof itself they could be temporary we could open up to the sky but it also imparts this beautiful color into the interiors of the structure and it's sort of like a blooming cactus in the desert or a cherry on top of this chocolate sundae i don't know what it looks like while we were doing all these experiments the leader of the regime kept separating children from their families and so on one weekend when our friends were going to protest we simply wanted to design a protest sign because we were out here and they were up there and so we designed this protest sign that built upon the genius of this work of graphic design that comes from the borderlands designed by a graphic designer named John Hood who is was a his Navajo graphic designer working for the California Department of Transportation to warn motorists of migrants who may be dropped off alongside the highway and might attempt to run across the highway so that motorists wouldn't hit them and John Hood saw the plight of the immigrant today very similarly to that of the Navajo during the long walk when they were forced to migrate from their homelands to now places in New Mexico and Arizona where they are today and this is in my opinion a brilliant piece of design activism he put a little girl with ponytails because he thought that's who drivers might empathize with the most and he is the head of the civil rights leader Cesar Chavez as the the silhouette head for the father so he embedded kind of smuggled in this design into his everyday job and what we did was we just simply turned the family to face each other and we made this open source and available for everybody to download we announced it on social media say hey if you want to use this people started downloading them using them protests putting them on their signs in their their lawn and then we were able to do something that I never had imagined which was all the last signs of this kind were being taken down from the highways in Southern California we were able to return this sign to the highway in the form of an enormous billboard through the Four Freedoms campaign which is the largest public art campaign in the world and this was seen by hundreds of thousands of motorists but the open source nature of this project that we disseminated through social media allowed us to smuggle it into other places maybe you've seen this at 110th and Amsterdam which is on the walls of Cathedral of St. John the Divine I have not seen it in fact but it's it's there I think I think it's been tagged a few times I saw some recent photos but it's kind of dented but it's been there for a while now and other activists are downloading it and installing them on signs throughout Los Angeles and it was interesting to think about how this idea of smuggling allowed us to smuggle an agenda into the context that one doesn't normally have these kinds of conversations or or or or political expressions when it became the facade of the Johnson Museum at Cornell it became very controversial and some people wanted it down and also it was going to be part of a public bus campaign in the city and that that was nixed by the university but this idea of smuggling this idea of design is activism this idea of understanding a technology and thinking about its ramifications to people and to an ecology all folds together in a project that Lola mentioned which is called the teeter-totter wall and it was one of the recuedoes it was one of the souvenirs where we illustrated the border as a kind of metaphorical fulcrum between U.S. and Mexico relations between trade relations and labor relations between migration and we made this illustration imagining that and we call the teeter-totter wall we also made a snow globe to describe this but I think in the confusion of these as proposals and not illustrations several art organizations asked us if we would consider making this and we would work with cities on both sides with a lot of support always actually unanimous support but always a big no by the department of homeland security and border patrol and so in many cities and over the course of many years you can see this in 2017 it failed to be allowed in some of the binational fiestas that take place along the border so we decided that we wanted the the teeter-totter wall just to exist in the world as a thing just to carry it through even though we couldn't do it and so we designed it for a very particular place we thought about how it might slip through the wall that's dimension how seats and handlebars might be installed and how it might connect to the wall itself we traveled to the wall and we would carry objects on both sides to see how quickly border patrol would arrive and there's different times if you arrive with an object to the wall from the Mexican side border patrol will come much more quickly than they will from the US side but we also thought about how you know we thought about how it worked we worked with a with an organization called Colectivo Chopeque in Juarez that makes houses for very poor people in Juarez and the colonias that are outside of the city and we also worked with this welding shop that makes really fine hat racks and doors and gates and things and they're really excited to work on this project with us and we thought about how it might simply attach the wall and we might smuggle design to the border so there's the wall what that that obelisk you see is actually the border between the United States and Mexico half of that obelisk is in Mexico and the other half is in the United States and so you can see the wall is about a meter into the United States so when you're standing those footprints you're standing in the United States but on the Mexican side of the wall you zoom in closer there's the literal fulcrum between US-Mexico relations we designed it with bicycle seats and horns and all kinds of fun things but and and what is considered a fun color but for us that color actually is used to remember the women who were killed during the Femicides during the times of violence in Juarez because it was important to us that while we were embarking on a project that was using play as a form of activism we wanted to remember that the border wall is in fact a site of violence and the wall itself is an architecture of violence and with the continued conversation of continued wall construction and child separation at the border and because this object existed in the world we simply decided one day to wake up and go there and place it on the wall itself and this is how it happened that day I don't think you can hear the sound so I'll just kind of narrate what's happening here we're installing the teeter daughter on the wall and like the moment that thing locked in there was a kid jumping on it and you know it was a very small event we didn't invite press to come it was mostly mothers and children and within minutes border patrol did arrive and they asked what we were doing and we said have an event with children and they parked off to the side you might see their vehicle through the fence there and then later the army the Mexican National Guard arrived heavily armed and asked what we're doing and said have an event with children and and they too smiled and stood back and took pictures and what happened was that we realized that that our theories about claiming space were coming true that in fact a sanctuary was made by the ownership of that space that belonged to mothers and children and it was impenetrable that sanctuary that was created and the connections that were made through that wall made that wall dissolve and I think in retrospect you know while we had no idea that this project would be seen by so many people all around the world we were excited by the or excited the word we were we appreciated the opportunity to tell a different narrative of the borderlands because I think the narrative that is often defined is that of bad hombres bad men doing bad things in a place where no one lives when in fact this is a place where mothers and children and grandmothers live every day and experience joy despite the violence and oppression of the wall and we were happy to be able to share that reality with the world and show that the actions that take place on one side of the wall have a direct consequence on the other so thank you very much Rona thank you yeah so much I want to invite people to turn their camera on and one moment to reflect because this was so amazing and just open this to to questions and discussion and it's a really unique opportunity to converse and to interact and to raise your thoughts and questions for Ronald yeah so I'm happy to answer any questions you might have don't don't be shy there was a time when I was just in a rehaul staying up all night every night thinking about projects and that wasn't I didn't seem very long ago I think Josh I am can I can I pull rank and ask one first um yeah that Ronald thank you um that it was amazing work is amazing all right so I I sort of introduced myself earlier I run the shops it is yeah I just sure hi um first we would love to steal you to about Potter bot for about a week if you just have that to spare but short of short of short of that maybe my question the question I would want to put to you and to maybe to others here to talk about is you know in the the shop represents a certain call it dimension of the school and maybe of architecture education as a whole where maybe on the face of it we so we focus on problem solving or representation or it's kind of in a matter of speaking it's like where the rubber meets the road and this the the architecture studio sometimes is thought of as the location for the activism and the sort of sitting down and thinking through social and political problems and proposing the sort of long view to them so it's not always easy to match the sort of like mundane and sometimes frustrating realities of 3d printing with the kind of the sort of grander meaning and purpose of activism architecture which is what I would call a lot of what you're doing so I feel like you in your practice like you are the you are the guy that we knew as the 3d the clay 3d printing guy when everybody was sort of you know really starting to pay attention to that five or six years ago but you've drawn such a complete line from like the stuff that we do in the shop the technology to the sort of social project of architecture and I feel like that's the the the shop aspect of it and the like getting out there and making an impact aspect of it is not something that you always see in an architecture practice so I guess like for you you know and it's it's kind of what you presented today but how would you describe how that line is drawn from technology to activism in your practice or maybe where other places you see that or you know what do you think we can do in the academy to support that sort of connection because you know as the as the evangelist of the shop like I I think that's super important as well. Yeah so you're not a student just if I remember you're you're no I only look like one on two okay I used to work in the shop when I was I went for three years I worked in the shop and under Mark Taylor who I think is still there he is very much still there yeah and I mean work working in the shop and when you're the when you are a shop guys they used to call us we we would stay up all night in the shop and I think the shop in many ways became the studio I don't know if that's allowed anymore but that's why you know I just stay in there instead of upstairs because when I was getting paid but also people would come down even though they were supposed to and we'd say yeah let's you want to cut that tire let's figure out to cut the tire you're giving people ideas but yeah yeah so um I think I think not making those distinctions between like Rhino and a pencil and a potter bod and a and a bandsaw like for me they're they're all tools to communicate ideas and also express ideas and to test ideas and maybe maybe the idea that I was suggesting that research could be borderless could be brought to the fore there that you could actually imagine that that um that there's no distinction between those spaces that that the space this I I think this is happening in in many schools of architecture where the the facilities like a shop or the laser cutter lab or the 3d printer lab are becoming service um service providers and it's more like hey I have a model print this uh and so you get the model back and it's a representation tool right it's and but the question might be to say well how does that act of making become a way of making changes in the world and making substantial changes whether it's an whether it's an object and I would argue that like the object of the object of the snow globes which are now SF MoMA they're telling a story but those are just made in the shop they're made of in my shop and the but I'm but I'm thinking of those as having their own agency and so in the forms of representation that you do as students whether you're making a model or you're making a drawing those those should not simply serve to represent an idea that has not yet been made yet or realized yet but those objects the drawing or the model or whatever it be have their ability to be transformative as well and that's what I like to think about that I see beautiful drawings coming out of schools all the time and they can be beautiful to this extent of being fetishized but how can that object that you make and maybe this is where I cross the border between architecture and art as well that that thing that you make is its own thing in the world and it has its own power in the world and it's not subservient to an idea that doesn't exist yet but it exists in your hand at that moment that was a long answer I don't know that was a good that was I was gonna say that's I love it I mean I think that's a really good point about service versus you know an extension of the studio and in our space the way it's partitioned is a call it a wood shop still mostly nominally and then a digital shop which is just based on how the machines are separated and plugged in but sometimes it's hard to keep the makerspace side of a 3d printer side laser cutter from becoming a service bureau and so we're kind of always looking for ways to um and I sort of mash the spirit of the two sides into each other but I mean I think it was a really great point in your presentation about like purposely misusing the tool like sort of the procedural glitches of the of clay 3d printing becoming a like a project on its own um I guess that's the thing that I would like you know encourage students to take away of of elegantly misusing tools and finding their their their true their true calling or something like that yeah and it sounds like you know the the philosophy of those spaces can be sometimes you don't want to misuse them so they're dangerous and so you stay away from that but the question is how do you turn these tools on their head and you know hammer can be used for an infinite number of things not just hammering a nail um so how can you think about these other tools as exploratory tools thanks Joshua yeah thank you Sabah or Xiang do you have any questions I actually do have one question thanks Ronald this was amazing um I really enjoy that um I'm really interested in starting to use earth in our studio in my studio project as a material as like one of the substantial material but I just don't know how to approach it or I don't know what are my limits basically um so I was just wondering what is the best way to approach like a building through earth I don't know if that's like a kind of a stupid question no it's not a stupid question I was wondering if you were thinking about like there's a number of ways think about it like does does clay become a representational tool like you can make a model out of clay and I don't know what your instructors think of that but um uh in a sense I have one colleague who says that you should never use a material that you used in kindergarten and and I completely disagree with that I think why not use crayons and clay and Elmer's glue to make models but so it's representational and does that allow you there's the there's always been this beautiful relationship between ceramics and architecture and they both have the same goals I think a ceramicist is making space uh they're making vessels to contain water or to contain uh food or uh and architects make space for you know for for a different at a different scale so there there is that there's the raw material itself is it representational or is it real can inspire new ways of thinking about making form there's thinking about ceramics in that entire endeavor which is about the material and about space and then there's just understanding building technologies that can make buildings like adobe like rammed earth like waddle and dawg like the the hundreds of different kinds of technologies that have evolved all over the planet to make buildings and not buildings for the poor in rural environments but these are airports and embassies and museums and cultural centers and and uh so I I think you know and then maybe the last part of my answer is just understanding that relationship of the technology to the place and for me that's really meaningful to think about because because you can imagine or think about where that material comes from who uh is engaging with that material and how and what is its expression as it's read in the landscape um you know there there's a really interesting podcast on 99 invisible I don't know if you guys are familiar with that about adobe and all the problematics of adobe how it's gentrified and and becomes a tourist a material of tourists and how you can represent adobe without even using adobe and what does that mean and so there's a politic behind it that's really complex and interesting embedded in in history and identity so I don't know if that answered your question but I think you should go for it and and test you know test what the outcome would be I will say that when I was a student in Colombia I had bought an adobe house that one that I showed that I had lived in the presentation I I had bought that from a cousin in uh 1996 and my classmates made fun of me they were like why are you buying adobe house a mudhouse and and then there was a class being taught by Dominique Malacue I don't know if she still teaches there or not but it was an architecture of sub-saharan Africa and it was the most amazing class just looking at sub-saharan architecture from from Mali from Senegal and halfway through the class he said uh I don't think you guys are going to really understand this unless we go to Africa and so we all went to Africa and I stayed there throughout the summer and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and my William Kinney grant that I got when I graduated Columbia was to study earth architecture in France so I've been working on this question of earth for a long time I'm happy to answer questions offline for you too Saba but I think if you if you want to do this you should just go for it and see the reaction and see what you learn and earth is a is a political material and it's material of resistance and you have to deal with that too thank you for that question thank you thank you Rana and it lands itself so easily right it's it's so like when I work with with clay with students or with research assistants it's not like with concrete I don't I hardly need to explain anything um well you know why I think why is because this is this is my theory but I think that we evolved as humans and we look the way we do and we have these things and we have the musculates where we is because we evolved with earth itself we evolved to actually manipulate the earth and we've been separated it from it for about 200 years in history after millennium of being very intimately associated with it so whenever you have the opportunity to live in a building with earth or to touch the clay you actually are coming home you're returning back to a human state I mean that sounds a little crazy but I think that I think you know you can actually feel it when you live in the house of earth you know like this makes sense this feels right yeah I'm curious to hear about this more because you've experimented with so many kinds of materials right from plastics to concrete and ceramics is different from you know using raw earth from the construction site and chardonnay in your tiles salt right all these materials and I'm curious to hear from you about the perception and experience component of users of your architecture and installations how did different users and visitors and people who experienced your architecture um um how is their experience different depending on the material or how do you infer about the materiality and how it affects the experience of the user and well-being and that sense of is there a material that was especially you know mentioned by users to be extraordinary or to change you know sensations well I maybe I don't know if one stands out so much but I think the the root of the answer is that every material has its phenomenon or you have the ability as a designer to tease out certain phenomena from the material so whether the material is translucent and we can make plastic translucent we can make wood translucent or we made some concrete translucent using a 3d printer uh some materials smell and so you have the phenomenon that lingers of of the chardonnay or the coffee in that in that experience we we made a bunch of objects for the Cooper Hewitt a few years ago where I don't know if anyone saw this but we 3d printed these various objects out of out of different materials and we covered them with a glass cloche and the way to experience was to stick your nose in and smell the objects instead of touch them or didn't even matter that you looked at them really maybe um but there there are the senses like how does architecture engage the senses and we probably don't talk about that often enough how does something feel the kind of textures you can stick your finger in it you can stick your arm in it you can rub against it it can smell you can see through it or you can't see through it and it defines something really clearly the light falls on it in a certain way so there's all these beautiful phenomena that I think different materials can have and they can have a combination of those phenomena that make something really sensorial and sensual and spatial and I think that's that's kind of what I like about experimenting with materials because they all have their different properties and we we often revert to gentrified notions of landscapes that are clean and precise and white and and painted and but I think you know the the dirt and the grime and the dust and the smell and the decay and all that's part of an architectural sensation as well we love it when we walk into an old dusty attic or a gothic cathedral and we can smell this when we when we smell the fire and how it changes the smell of the material all those things are are exciting I think I agree I'm sorry if I asked something before you had a chance to to have don't mean to put you on the spot only if you wanted to ask who was that it don't be shy I have a question for you run I was wondering in those different types of kind of binder jetting experiments that you've done did you stumble upon any kind of healthier alternatives that are more biodegradable than epoxy well what we binder jet the materials with are mostly edible when they come out of the printer like you can actually eat them uh and like all what look at every single wood piece of furniture you have around you it's it's coated with an epoxy but we did we used um we used an epoxy that was invented by a graduate of Berkeley in the material science department that was made out of recycled wood in bamboo and so it was very low VOC and uh so it doesn't emit the volatile organic compounds but is also biodegradable and so there are questions there I think about materials and and when does the material need to be biodegradable or not and so for us now we're working with material science to think about how it can be much more durable because often we're using off-the-shelf things that because I'm not a material scientist so we're working with a material scientist who actually has the capacity to develop those materials um so that they are ecological natural their biodegradability relates to the terms of use uh in other words it's just going to be outside or inside is it going to be exposed to water or not is it going to uh is it going to be touched or not did you put in the dishwasher or not we can drink out of it so there's lots of questions about that that are really interesting and important to think about but I but I would say that I think a lot of our experimentations that led to think about how things can be more durable led us back to clay and ceramic and just that that is really fundamental to that was fundamental to our ethos from the beginning but I think it's unquestionable when you think about those materials and how they relate to our our bodies um and the environment right yeah thanks Reem there's a question in the chat by Francia um would you like to ask where I can read it out loud I can read it how do you envision your experiments being applied to larger building scales um well that's what we want to do and we're a very small team um and that kind of limits us but I think our next step is to think about how we can move in this into a more entrepreneurial phase and how we can scale up and it'd be crazy but I just I just got a call this morning from Saudi Arabia saying they wanted to uh they're looking for a consultant to help them make 150 million adobes and so I did the quick math and if you can produce as fast as the largest adobe factory in the world which is here that I showed it would take 16 years to make 150 million adobes and so it's an interesting problem and I did present to them I said you can you can skip the adobe making step by 3d printing it and so we're just going to keep talking and see where that goes but um there are ways I think and we're just moving along I I would like to think this is not it's not going to be how it sounds but I think when when Wright and Lois and Schindler and Mies and they're they're all moving from a landscape of stone and earth and wood into a culture of concrete and steel and glass and that must have been an amazing moment to be in because it was a moment where these it was it was a border moment where a hybrid was occurring and I think that's the beauty that's what gave birth to an amazing moment in time in architecture and I sort of feel like we're in that moment now there are new kinds of technologies and ways to think about materials that are emergent and it's just interesting to be a part of it and to and then we'll see where where it goes but well thank you I mean I like very much your answer to the first question by Joshua which was that that there was there was design in the making which is what I what I heard you said that the making was its own design it wasn't a representation of something else so I think that's a very uh wonderful thing in the architectural movement in which we are now which is that somehow making doesn't seem to be part of design in many ways in which architecture is made so I think it's very I think it's very interesting so thank you very much for your lecture it was very great thank you for your answer for your answer about the large-scale upskilling applicability Ronald have you have your lab previously tested so you used your own robotic arm in the experiments in Colorado have you used the WASP for instance the WASP large-scale robots that are used for clay that have been no you know why I can't it's hard because I presented the early version of that printer at a conference and the CEO of WASP came up to me and said that's how you do it and the next thing you knew they were on it like you know they have a factory of 30 employees and engineers and they I mean I will claim that WASP inspiration came from that work because the CEO told me directly and then invited me there to share uh and I like them but I I'm hoping that I'm hoping that I have like a little different agenda and direction that maybe could well I'll say this if if two people can do what we're doing and WASP project is not that much bigger if we pursue this trajectory and have 30 people and I think there's some possibility to take this in a different direction and Josh is adding that that's why you get patterns yeah you're right well yeah interesting right yeah well I appreciate it and it's nice to see all of you who I see on the camera or read your names and it's so inspiring to to see your work again Ronald this is incredible how you really converge how the vision of intersecting right the indigenous materials with emergent technologies and then you know that your borderline studies to really influence how you make shelters that are more accessible affordable ecological and um really um inspirational so thank you so much this is great thank you thank you Lola thank you Reem thank you everyone thanks for listening thanks Ron see you in person sometime soon next time yeah feel free to send me an email we'll have to come back and visit us at Columbia for you yeah that would be great or you'll have to you'll have to host a troop of us flying out last oh yeah yeah that would be if you guys want to come and dig I would welcome that everyone have a good evening bye have a good evening bye