 We're incredibly happy. This is a very unique session. We're welcoming back to Frida Escobedo, who's been teaching here and has been very close to the school for many years already and personally also very close to me. I remember when we met in Lisbon and she did this amazing, I would say, device that was making visible the interest and opinions of people by re-balancing. It was so incredible, so beautiful in the street as a political device that was actually contained in a very simple architectural shape. So we're incredibly happy to have Frida here back and the session will be introduced by Benedict Lluet, who is teaching and is professor at arguments, of course, and it's a fundamental part of the school involving many things. And Frida will be responded by Benedict, but also Benedict will be joined by Dan Wood and Carla Rothstein, who are teaching advanced studios, professors that are teaching advanced studios this summer in the Advanced Architectural Design Program. And they will be assisted by Daniel Cobb and Jesse Kanan that are around here and that are also teaching arguments. Today we gather in Lenape land, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations, their knowledge and sensitivities, their structures so societal, ecological, and in acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erosers of indigenous peoples. G-SAP and the AED program are committed to addressing the deep history of erosers of indigenous knowledge in architecture and in the western tradition of architectural education specifically. With these G-SAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring indigenous knowledge in its curricula. With these I would like to pass it to Benedict. Thank you, Andres. What can I tell you about Frida Escobedo? In trying to speak to her practice, which spans the design of housing, cultural institutions, installations, exhibitions, and furniture, it is both frustrating and enviable how powerfully her work resists being picked apart or broken down into a single theme or even a series of key terms that could summarize her way of working. While many architects and artists find success in the fields of transnational cultural production by elaborating a single dominant topos or preoccupation that aids the legibility of their individual works and lends an impression of coherence to their corpus, each of Escobedo's projects intertwines many divergent concerns, possibilities, and preconditions that have shaped it into a singular expression that defies attempts to find a single point of entry for would-be interpreters. Like the textile studies of Ani Albers that informed Escobedo's design for ASOP in Park Slope, which I encourage you to visit in Brooklyn, Escobedo's work creates tightly woven and intricate surfaces in which the ideas, materials, forms, and pressures that have shaped the project become inextricably interlaced, the threads of the work so thoroughly entwined as to give the appearance of having emerged whole cloth. Given the difficulty of distilling her production into a neat set of themes, it's tempting to say that she is simply a devastatingly good architect, which she is, and yet that characterization should not be construed as negating the intense intellectual force and creative labour that are brought to bear on her work, the care and attention to the forms of sociality in life in common that her projects engender, the material experimentation that draws centuries of craft knowledge into new configurations, and the considered interplay of temporalities and shifting durational effects of occupancy and use that the buildings in installation support. Escobedo's work resists attempts to mark where a material investigation yields to a formal impulse, or to divide a social or political commitment from the aesthetic or sensorial experimentation, as though the various threads that make a project have been carefully taken up all at once and persistently carried through to its resolution. Her projects prompt reconsiderations of these familiar categories, like what is concrete after the lace-like lattices of La Tierra Secueros or the Serpentine Pavilion, what colour is green, now my favourite colour, after the darkly radiant emerald-tiled walls of the Nest Cafe in Mexico City. So what else can I tell you about Frida Escobedo? Born in Mexico City to a surgeon father and a sociologist mother, she first studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and later at the Harvard GSD's program in art design in the public domain. In between, she opened her studio in Mexico City in 2006. After completing many projects in Mexico, including the Casa Negra, Hotel Boca Chica, El Eco Pavilion, and the aforementioned La Tierra Secueros, she received the commission for the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion, at that time the youngest architect to earn that prestigious award. In March 2022, she was announced as the architect of the future Oscar L. Tang and H. M. Agnes Su Tang, wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That monumental project, along with an ongoing project for a residential tower and new performance venue for the National Black Theater of Harlem on 125th Street, perhaps represents a new scale of construction in her studio, but seen differently is an extension of the sophisticated approaches to cultural production and history that her work has always manifested. In parallel with her practice, she is taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Harvard GSD, Rice University, and the Architectural Association, and most recently Yale, as well as here at Columbia in 2015. She is a recipient of the Architectural League Prize, and later the League's Emerging Voices Award, and the Iberoamerican Biennial Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, the BIAU Prize, and has also been named a Riba International Fellow. So what more can I say? Will such complex and subtle work can hardly be said to speak for itself? Fortunately, she is here with us today to join in conversation around her projects and practice, so please join me in welcoming Rita Escobedo. Thank you. I don't know if I should turn the microphone. Can you hear me? Yes, is it okay? Okay, great. Thank you for the beautiful introduction and humbled by your words, and thank you, Andres, for the invitation. It's really great to be back at Columbia after, I think, seven years now. It was one of the first opportunities I had to join the Academia, so I have like a very nice memory of this space. And the projects I'm going to show you today are definitely not typical architecture. There are more projects that have triggered some ideas or become seeds for different projects of different scales. This is why the idea of unfolding presented as a title for the lecture, because it's about unpacking or unfolding ideas through a specific set of very simple actions. So the first project that I'm going to talk about is Ai Weiwei's Orders 100 Project that happened in 2007. Some of the architects that are here today, like Dan, participated also in this project. And today, Ordos Inner Mongolia in North China is a ghost town, a term often described to define cities that are built on a whim and with no whim to occupy them. The project was proposed in 2008 as part of China's pledge to build 400 new cities in 20 years. The project was erected by the renowned artist, documentarian, and activist Ai Weiwei and created by Herzogand Moron. 100 architects were selected from 27 countries to decide a 1000 square meter villa to be built on 100 days. Over the course of one year, Ai Weiwei and his architectural firm called Fake Design documented a total of three side visits to Ordos Inner Mongolia. The construction of the Ordos 100 Project remains unrealized, but nevertheless I wanted to share some valuable insight. I gathered from it and how it was informed by the way I think of domestic architecture. The project brief, as I mentioned, requested this 1000 square meter villa and include amongst other spaces, three bedrooms, a library, a swimming pool, living and dining areas, and two kitchens. Initially, out of ignorance, I thought that this was a mistake, but the two kitchens had very different descriptions. This is the first time that I learned about dry kitchens and wet kitchens. I had assumed that the heart is the center of the home, which to me meant that there was actually two homes in one house. So for this proposal, I thought about designing two houses that coexisted programmatically, but were distinguished formally. The Domestic Workers' House, here in dark gray, and the owner's house, one nested inside the other, almost like a Russian doll. The main house had an open-plant configuration of the public areas of the ground floor and a more intimate configuration on the top floor with a porous brickwork lattice on the upper level in a column impediment configuration. The Domestic Workers' House is nested within it with a separate entrance and a layout that allows for some autonomy on the main house. You can see it here. This is the Domestic Workers' House embedded in the larger house, and this is the second floor with this volume here being the Domestic Workers' House. And as you can see, all of the spaces replicate themselves so they can have full autonomy. The connection between the two homes is the two kitchens, which are located right here and connected by this patio. The dry kitchen has an open configuration and is mostly used for entertaining. Labor, therefore, takes place on the wet kitchen where greasy cooking and strong smells need to be contained. Efficiency and community are two fundamental aspects of the Domestic Kitchen. In 1926, the forerunner of modern fitted kitchens, the Frankfurt kitchen, was designed by Austrian architect Margaret Schutt, lead host for Ernst May's social housing project, New Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany. Some 10,000 units were built in the late 20s. The streamlining of the environment of the domestic labor and the special dimensions of the kitchens actually began in America. In 1843, Catherine Beecher wrote a book called A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the use of young ladies at home and at school, which laid out kitchen plans based on something resembling ergonomics. Windows for light, work spaces at the same height, consistent shelving, clearly deliated storage spaces for the most commonly used items. The Frankfurt kitchen, now known as the Swedish kitchen, has developed further in the U.S., Sweden, and Switzerland, with adaptations continually made according to the advance of the technological developments. Throughout the 60s, the most important work and design criteria were effective use, ergonomic improvements, and demands on terms of hygiene. And it was only towards the end of the 60s that design criteria, based on aesthetic considerations, and a more attentive view to social interaction, were incorporated into kitchen planning. Warm colors and faux decoration, combined with breakfast bars and table areas and shelves, were incorporated, breaking up closed kitchen units and heralding the tentative beginnings of a kitchen oriented storage greater livability or communication. In the 60s, the continuation and culmination of this trend happened. Simply, rustic wooden, rustic wooden kitchens were offered alongside colorful kitchen units. Contradictorily, many of these improvements to either professionalize the domestic kitchen or to open it up to not, did not ease the burden of domestic labor. As hygiene standards became higher, most of these kitchens either demanded more labor or were simply used for serving delivery food. One of my students this semester at Yale described the kitchen as deep space of the house and ghost kitchens, delivery apps, as the new deep space. The lessons learned at Ordos 100 revealed to me that the architecture plays an important role in concealing certain spaces of domestic labor. Selective concealment is a typical thought, though often acknowledged, is a function of architecture. Mouldings, for example, hide the effects of construction and imperfect edges between walls and ceilings, drop ceilings, conceal pipes and dot work. The Ordos 100 project brief thereby suggested that the architects should render one household invisible. I began to focus on the systematic global tendency of architecture to conceal spaces of domestic labor and the people, mostly women, who work in them. In 2018, I was invited to do an essay for Instituto de Investigaciones Independientes and Gato Negro Ediciones, and I decided to work on a detailed study of five modern domestic buildings in Mexico. The intention was to offer a counter history of modern architecture that would question the duality among the visible and visible, those who count and those who not. We used five case studies, which included the work of some iconic Mexican architects like Luis Barragan, right here, the Barragan studio house, and Mario Pani, with the second example here, to show that the forces that bind together the owners of the houses and their domestic laborers also serve to keep them apart in spatially distinct domains. Just as a dynamic tension causes a celestial body and its satellites always to circle each other, therefore the title domestic orbits. In Casa Estudio Luis Barragan, Space for Domestic Labor becomes embedded in the house, nesting a hidden household within the other, very similar to Ordos 100. This is the only house by Barragan that I've never seen published, and I've always wondered if it has the same aesthetic quality as the main house. It also signals some technological tools that further erase the relationships of the owner of the house and the domestic worker, such as hidden doorbells under the dining table, that further erase even the sound of a bell to call one of the domestic workers. The book also suggests that architectural representation of these projects, particularly published drawings, would avail between owners and workers, because they almost invariably failed to show the servant's quarters. This is the case of the Mario Pani building. Apartment units are often depicted in the architecture books, but domestic workers' units are never shown, and they are right here. We had to map them out. Those are raising them as inhabitants of the building, sometimes for even longer periods than their actual owners. In other cases, housing for domestic, well, and also something important to mention is, for example, in this unit, you can see three different apartments, one large unit here and two smaller units here. There are two service elevators here. One is a service elevator, the other one is the main elevator, and the only way to access the domestic quarters is to go all the way down to the basement, cross the elevators, go through the staircase to find these spaces, which are the domestic workers' quarters. So this is another part of Mario Pani that never gets published. In other cases, housing for domestic workers spin off into other domestic realms within the city, and I think this is a really interesting example, as in wealthy Mexico's city neighborhood of Polanco, where an obscure ancillary building contains parking domestic spaces and workers' housing. This is the main building here on the corner, and the housing for the domestic workers is almost one block away, which creates a very interesting urban condition because it's separated, but at the same time it's concealed. You can see here how this almost looks like a building that does not belong to the neighborhood. It is very closed. It seems more like a parking lot, but this is actually housing, and it's part of this building. So it creates this tension. There's a positive relationship with the use of the street, but still separate structures. And other examples where domestic quarters are tucked in so deep into the building as to be part of the infrastructural and structural core. As you can see here, the service quarters are almost part of the central core. So domestic orbits highlights how architecture selective concealment of domestic space makes it complicit with great social inequalities associated with gender, class, and race in Mexico. Like for example, this announcement of Bosque Real, which says in Spanish, I live in Bosque Real. Where do you live? And the intention is to show an idyllic part of the city where you see that all the view that you have is basically nature, but the reality of this neighborhood is quite different. This is Bosque Real right here at the center, and as you can see, it's embedded within a very deeply packed environment. This is the main entrance of Bosque Real, and this is the condition that you have. No, this is sometimes seen as a Photoshop, but this is the actual condition and contrast between the golf course and the main space. And actually there's a very interesting point because there's the second entrance right here, a service entrance for the neighborhood towards the building. Now this has changed. The fence has gone up, so you don't even have a relationship between these two areas by the view, and this extends to some other strategies of the city. So this is not just about analyzing how housing can conceal these spaces, but also how this translates into larger urban interventions. For example, the intention of painting different houses into a single landscape, so they can be beautified and also seen from a distance as a single entity, like a single tapestry. And all of these lessons maybe come out of a curiosity of show or start unpacking different relationships and behaviors that maybe could seem to be invisible. And the first project that did that for me was Pabellón el Eco. El Eco Museum was designed in 1953 by sculptor Matías Gerit, a Mexican artist of German origin who worked closely with Mexican architect Luis Barragan. It was conceived as an inhabitable sculpture. The competition organized in 2010 as per a pavilion in the museum's courtyard that could house several events during the summer months. The courtyard was originally occupied by two elements, a yellow still right here and a black serpent. The latter eventually disappeared from the museum. While thinking about the proposal, I came across an interview of Mexican writer Brenda Lozano. She said her work was very similar to that of a bricklayer, putting one word next to the other until you will a text. So if literature was very similar to the work of a bricklayer, then I thought I could draw a parallel between architecture and concrete poetry. So following Ferrer Agullar, the concrete poem or ideogram becomes a relational field of functions and one could try to find maximum expression through a minimum of words. And that single word became a cinder block. Growing up in Mexico City, I had seen how many of the simple modular industrially produced material gives way to a multitude of expressions from balconies and screens to staircases and lattices. Repeating a single gesture can actually make visible certain differences, just like this Agnes Martin drawing. The perfect read reveals certain nuances, the moment when the pencil starts to get a bit blunt, the texture of the paper, the trace of the hand as it becomes a bit tired. The proposal was simply to stack in regular patterns several layers of cinder block. These would be configured in several settings for the museum, a forum, a seating space, a labyrinth and a bar. People were encouraged to move around the pieces to their own desire, those changing the syntaxes of the space. Here you can see Duke Gerspleng in the courtyard moving around the pieces to create their own imaginary landscapes on top of these very strict grid. So you can see that the spontaneous layer and the program layer coexist in a single space informing and transforming each other. Some artists were invited also to intervene in the space, like Pia Camille and her group El Resplandor. They did a series of concerts and performances and they assembled their own set. And another part of the proposal would be that it would disappear without leaving trace. People were encouraged to take the blocks with them. You could take one as a souvenir, tend to build a bookshelf, 200 to finish an extension of your house and so on. And at the end it was a developer who took them off for an apartment building, which didn't come as a surprise. But anyway, the blocks came back to the city. And then another project, the Civic Stage, where I met Andrés, that allowed me to unfold layers of interaction. This was commissioned in 2013 by José Esparza to design the stage for the new public's program, which he was creating for the Lisbon Triennial. And the stage had to fulfill all of these concepts right here. But most importantly, it would have to put in question the relationship between speaker and audience. Typically, a stage provides a minilateral direction where the speaker is standing in a podium like I am doing now. And I believe the voice of the speaker is only as loud as the people who reaches, who it reaches. So I proposed a circular 15-meter diameter stage with a faceted bottom that could act as a seesaw, literally raising the voice of the speaker as people gathered and listened. And also, of course, it allowed for more playful speculations. Lisbon is filled with beautiful plazas, so selecting the place where the stage would be installed was also a difficult task. Most of the plazas have a strong symmetrical axis and have a relationship with either a public building or a religious building. In one of our final discussions, after looking at all of these plazas, we were considering Plaza Rocio, one of the main plazas in the city, and we came up with Plaza de Figueira, which is this smaller plaza right here. It was a former market that turned into a transportation hub with an underground parking space. The equestrian statue of King John I was not placed at the center of the square, but aligned to the street with its back to the square, almost as to give him a nice view of the tegus of the river, rather than a relationship with the plaza. The fabrication of the piece was entirely done in Mexico, which becomes relevant to me because it illustrated the disparity between economies across continents. Because even though Lisbon is one of the cheapest manufacturing countries in Europe, it was significantly less costly to produce a structure in Mexico and to ship it to Lisbon. This is the structure being installed in the biennial and then being activated. We had to lock it in place, of course, for safety reasons, but here it is in action on the opening day, a lifetime ago, and then it also became the platform to host Andrés Gáquez's play Superpowers of Ten, which I highly recommend that you should all see. And for that purpose, we proposed a circular curtain that could be attached to the platform. The idea was to invert the condition of the stage by setting the platform as a seating space and the city as a theater. The city would become them the backdrop and the audience would be able to experience it in a different way just by reframing it. On the night of the play's premiere, all the architects participating in the biennials sat on the stage behind the curtain, and people started coming out of their balconies and windows to see what was going on, wondering if perhaps this was some sort of performance. We were the performers, and as the play started, there was an interesting situation happening because there was a double layer of interaction. We were looking at the play, the people were looking at us, and they were also performing in this double layer. This is Andrés and his team during the presentation. And another project that had helped me to unfold different dynamics that had to do more with the political and the idea of representation is Estaciones. This was first presented at the Orleans Biennial of Architecture in France, and Estación in Spanish means station, but also season. So the work could be interpreted as something traditional or as something static. These are stills from the movie Los Olvidados by Luis Buñuel, and in it he impeccably portrays post-revolutionary Mexico, in my opinion. At the time, Mexico was a country in the making, and we had to come up with an identity that was not clearly defined at that point. The conflict was that on one hand we wanted to project an image of development and sophistication, whilst simultaneously showing a Mexico that had overcome social injustice, and the hegemony of the landholders and foreigners had had over the country's economy for centuries. It was under this context that modernity was interpreted or reinterpreted to reconcile the progress and tradition and to work as an effective tool for the country's transformation. But we need to consider a very important political factor into this equation. The revolutionary movement of 1910 was composed of many different fractions that had very different political agendas, and the triumph of the revolution in 1917 didn't guarantee a peaceful transition into democracy. The following period consisted of a series of anarchic revolts that most of the times culminated with the death of the elected candidate in turn. The systematic elimination of the head of state and the presidential candidates led to a regime that was neither democratic nor self-destructive. In order to guarantee its own survival, the group in power established two measures that broke the cycle of violence and death, the non-re-election and the creation of Partido Nacional Revolucionario, which later became Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI. For the next 72 years, the fear of the president and the party became indivisible. The party was dedicated to preserve the political control, not necessarily through physical repression, but by deploying solo mechanisms of manipulation. While the party remained loyal to the president in turn, it was known that it was only going to be for a very specific short period of time. At the end of the day, the control laid in the hands of the party. In other words, it was prized mission to guarantee the stability that was necessary for progress to flourish and therefore to establish the general vision of the nation. This is a very interesting piece by the artistic collective Tercerum Quinto depicting the idea of the renewal of mural painting. It was inspired by these interventions or these propaganda that is sometimes painted on top of facades in small towns in Mexico City. As you can see, it's done with very thin layers of paint and it's creating this kind of transparency allowing to see the continuity of the political party and the discontinuity of the political candidates. I think it's a very interesting piece. For the purpose of establishing the general vision of the nation, no one was better than, in my opinion, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez. Pedro Ramirez Vazquez defined himself as an architect who had an undefined style, which very conveniently suited the party's interests. In my opinion, his work was not about style, but it was more about strategy. Nevertheless, things were not as happy as they seemed in 68 in Mexico, by the tango de asorbas that came to power. The vision of modernity and progress endorsed by the state was tarnished by a social and political crisis that was impossible to deny. Potention produced by the sharp contrast culminated in October the 2nd 1968 with the infamous Tlatelolco massacre, where thousands of students died and many disappeared. The Olympic Games were inaugurated only a week after this dreadful event, without interruptions in the official program. Pedro Ramirez Vazquez had been designated as the general director of the Olympic Games. No other architect has assumed that position in the Olympic Games. Pedro Ramirez Vazquez had a vision of recovering the regional spirit of the Olympic Games, which celebrated the human spirit in all of its dimensions, both physical and spiritual. And for that purpose, he organized the Cultural Olympics, a series of events that would happen parallel to the main games. And one of the projects of the Cultural Olympics was Ruta de la Mistad, a public sculpture project that was installed along the newly inaugurated perifetico. There were 19 stations, each one dedicated to a different country, and the core traversy behind the Ruta de la Mistad was the conflict behind abstraction and figuration. On one hand, in the following years after the revolution, the muralist movement had successfully transmitted the social and political messages for reunification. In contrast, after the Cold War, non-figurative language became the preferred form of representation for Pré. The colorful and monumental sculptures conveniently portrayed us as a cosmopolitan and modern nation, without having to appeal to either an explicit nationalism or a provincial aesthetic. Illustrated here in the steels, you can see the relationship with perifetico and how this was the periphery in almost rural land. And while we were doing some research about Ruta de la Mistad in 1968, when it was the 50th anniversary for the Olympic Games, we discovered a series of photographs that were taking at the moment of the construction of Ruta de la Mistad, including this one where you can see Matias Geritz, Alexander Calder and Pedro Ramírez Vasquez here. Growing up in Mexico City, in the south of the city, and visiting it many times, I thought that these sculptures were as solid, as monumental as they looked, but to my surprise finding these images revealed the true and contradictory nature of the cultural project of that area. Scaffolds and structures became indistinguishable, revealing that the apparent monumentality actually depended on the precarious. And this to me is one of my favorite images where you can really see how the scaffolds and the structure merge. So the proposal for Estacion 16 or Estacion 16 came to reveal this dual and scenographic nature by varying the monumental sculptures. The whole of sculptures expose the constructive process of their built process, but also point out their intrinsic incompleteness, their ruins in reverse. The use of scraps of metal from other buildings from the Olympic compound to the structure, as well as the use of our own provides scaffolding, suggest and rotating and unfinished construction, which reminds me of a Spetlana's poem description of the monument to the Third International. According to Bohem, this monument materialized many of the implicit and explicit meanings of the word revolution, which literally means rotation or repetition. Let's remember that it was only until the 17th century when the word was associated with an opposite meaning, an achievement, a break, and a repeatable event. So the project presents the sculpture as an open skeleton and as a provocation of the re-appropriation and repurpose of it. It also materializes the conflicts and contradictions of the historical moment in which a mask of apparent progress and harmony were concealed by turbulence and social turmoil. The very structure symbolizes the tipping point in which not only the project, but also the utopic discourse of modernity began to collapse. Since the piece was going to be first presented at the Orleans Biennial, we selected Desistation 16 by French sculptor Olivier Segan. And for a long time, we tried to find in Pedro Ramirez Vasquez archives of the plans for the structures without any success. And we discovered that what happened was that the sculptures would shape scale models of the sculptures and they would be translated in Pedro Ramirez Vasquez's office, which was a very interesting metaphor construction. And then using scraps of metal, they will build these structures and then just wrap them in concrete. So the process of doing the reverse engineering of these sculptures was using photographs and working with metal workers to define each one of the pieces and basically reconstructing them through photography. This is the first part of the installation the frags center in Orleans. And then finally how it was set up in Orleans Botanical Garden. And finally, another project that explained to me different kinds of relationship. This happened a few years earlier than the Stacionas project while I was doing my master's degree. And I discovered with this project that through aesthetics, we can find new ways to understand our history. Architecture is very old nature to me is that it simultaneously becomes a precise snapshot of a particular historical moment. And at the same time, it's always in continuous flocks and transformation. So the project that I was working on for my thesis under the guidance of Erika Naginsti and Shisto Bodisco focused on a specific building that is located in Colonia Juarez. Now it's under renovation, so it's mostly gone, very close to where I grew up in Mexico City. And this is one of the many modernist buildings in downtown Mexico that are almost anonymous. No, there's no particular architect. It might be designed by an engineer or just by a contractor. It seems to me that it possesses nothing in particular, but yet I always stopped and stare since I was a kid because it kind of evoked some excitement that I found in the contemplative nostalgia of ruins, even though it was not a ruin, it was occupied. And as opposed to the process of erosion that a ruin may undergo, this building seems to slowly accumulate the signs of time. Its materiality makes it hard to define the limit between the interior and the facade. Although the glass curtain wall remains practically untouched, the facade appears to be more like a shoreline that grows on recedes, suspended somewhere between construction and decay. The fact that the building's facade has remained intact when concurrently changing might be the reason that I'm drawn to the building and why I continue to think that it might have something to reveal. Behind the glass facade, one can read half-hidden narrative that the inhabitants have decided to do with the material customizations. Every curtain, drywall addition or add tape to the window compounds the facade split nature, one divided across identity and representation. So if architecture is the discipline that thinks the relationship between society and form, then the architecture of this building as the main of cultural representation resided on this capacity to act as a register tool. For me having lost the structural function at first, the facade lost its symbolic power and then the narrative power. Now the facade seems to be losing the ability to act as a signifier of what happens inside or what could be considered the more intimate realm. In common thought modernism was largely held responsible for this act of erasure. Typically the modernist architectural object was staged as a scene of the object's standardized production aiming toward neutrality. Juliana Bruno pointed out some time ago that if the facade is the face then the problem of modernism is the skin. Modernism architecture was after all an architecture of the surface. How it is then that a rigid modernist structure can provide the conditions of agency and expression? Curtain walls carry within themselves two opposing possibilities, a gaze from the outside and a gaze from the inside as this piece is called public space to audiences by Donald Jodd illustrates. These surfaces are open to exchange they simultaneously accept the inscription and uphold the wall. These quality signals the fact that architectural objects are ultimately non-coincident with themselves rather and they're perpetually changing. What the building in Colonia Juarez reminded me of is that facades materialize character whether they try to do it or not and perform their function the same way we perform our social face. In the case of Mexican character Octavio Paz, one of our most prominent poets and writers pointed out that we perform it simultaneously on one hand as a shield, a wall and on the other one as a symbol covered surface, a hieroglyph. The facade has an etymological origin on facha that points out its instrumentality as a public face of the building while at the same time it shares an etymological read with facade to do to make that suggests the mechanism of the construction of an identity is simultaneous to a projection and an appropriation. The facade arguably works then as a collective mirror stage, a representation of the relationship of individuals and the real conditions of collective existence. It works simultaneously as a face and a mask. In Mexico modernism a notion that is tied to progress and development became a rehearsal of a future that actually never arrived. But it is precisely because of this failure of it in completeness and lack that modernism allowed for a recapitalization of the Mexican character. Octavio Paz constantly pondered how this could be tied to a cultural critique of modernity, an issue that was profoundly provocative because it appeared precisely at the moment when Mexico was leaving the dream or illusion of progress. In the early 50s Mexico had committed to attaining a future that was by definition unreachable. Modernity had established that the notion of future was anonymous with progress and this entailed the division of the world into two parts, the modern and the ancient. The latter composed of all the cultures that did not share the same ideas, principles, systems of organizations or even institutions. At the time when universal types were ruled, Paz was proposing that the personal and collective identity were central issues that needed to be addressed. At that time to further define our own sense of existence and identity it was necessary to consider the other. Paz pointed out that the history of Mexico has been a long struggle to negate, conceal and mask otherness. His reading of otherness holds two meanings. The first corresponds to the country's social reality dividing it into two parts, the developed and then the redeveloped. The second reading eludes the notions of poverty and wealth, development and backwardness and simply acts as a compass of unconscious attitudes and structures. This notion refers to ideology and social psyche and how historically there are certain behaviors in Mexican character that prevent us from manifesting ourselves. When the mask attempts to hide this otherness which is every day in practice in our intimate selves, it's also in a way of synthesis and stratification. So in a race towards development, otherness became this ballast that stood between us and the progress and we conveniently decided to sweep it up on the carpet of a hegemonic historical discourse, flattening it into a single official national identity that was very much aligned with modernism. So for me, like the rings on the tree, this building bears the marks of duration, life and weathering. These marks reveal how the other Mexico, the submersion repressed, reappears in the modern Mexico. The underlying stratum of the social psyche, the intangible reality formed by beliefs, fragments of beliefs and concepts, were manifested under the transparent mask. The visual unfolding that happens in the surface of this building is similar to the simple beauty of some natural genomorphic materials where the register of change and growth provide the richness and value such as marble or wood. These facades manifest as spontaneous accretions, subtractions and reorganizations of the continuous flow of the temporal rhythms of life. So for the first part of the project that has been ongoing for 10 years, it was crucial to recognize that the curtain wall of the facade was a liminal zone of exchange. The transparent surface parallelized the threshold between a face and a mask, between hovers and oneness. During this production, the first step was to photograph and to trace each one of the windows to identify the repetitions and the differences. These images were then decoded in a stratigraphic approach. Isolating each one of the elements allowed the recognition for the hidden coast that composed the facade. So removed from their context of origin, these displaced and stripped down fragments do not aim to restore an authentic story of the building, but to generate a projected narrative. Some years later I received an invitation from Troy Conrad and Manuel Cirauki. The proposal was to participate in architectural effects. I joined the initiative of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition presented an innovative look at the correspondences and connections between art and architecture at the height of the digital era. In the curator's words, the exhibition's origins is a museum building itself, inaugurated in 1997 as the first and seminal example of architecture carried out and made possible by means of computer technology, a paradigm in the communicative and economic effects that will redefine the success of the discipline over the following decades. On the text build score, performance score, Manuel Cirauki explained how and I'm quoting, in fact it is by means of the idea of performance that architecture transcends any tectonic, structural or building oriented definition. Discussing the question of performative architecture one decade ago, Branko Kolarevic stated in performative architecture the emphasis shifts from buildings appearances to processes of formation grounded in imagined performances in the termination of patterns and dynamics of use and poetics of spatial and temporal change. It was clear to me that the piece that we wanted to present was this building of a split subject. Manuel and I discussed how it could be presented as a series of drawings and blogs of the photographs that I had done seven years ago at the time but oddly enough the building was on sale at that point. So I immediately contacted the owner, came to visit it, the structure is heavily damaged and the building was vacated but all the traces of previous life were somehow still present and you can see like more clearly in some moments here. It was a mix of storage spaces, a few adaptations to make tiny housing units and to my surprise there was even a fly simulator inside of one of the rooms. So I acquired these are photographs from like a very small room. So I acquired some of the windows and replaced them with clear glass. I was able to do the transaction arguing that I was doing an academic research and honestly the owner was just looking to change the appearance of the building so he could sell it faster. So we got a hold of some of the windows and it was presented in architecture effects in 2018 along with several dear colleagues like most architects, Idia Faustino, Leoneau, Yena Sutela and many others. And to me some of the photographs of the exhibition and of the piece are like beautiful imprints and like they almost can resemble abstract paintings you know they have like these conditions of being aesthetic compositions without any intention but to me what they showed is that the idea of architecture is in a state of constant relocation. It's almost like a physical register on a violin record waiting to be decoded and to become special temporal when it is played. So by breaking down the layers of contents it was a split subject that materialized the complex history of the building and to me it is through this project that I've been able to draw out the social legacy hidden at plain view. So those are the projects that I wanted to present to you and maybe we can jump into the conversation. Thank you. The ways that the concerns of your practice have developed through you know now I guess since 2006 or even earlier with the Casa Negra I guess is even earlier. Thinking about the last project, the split subject project, one of the images that I think for me is what sticks with me about your work. The concrete screens of La Tayera, Siqueiros or also similarly of the Serpentine Pavilion. And you know part of that is the way in which it works with a material that is you know maybe like the most sort of paradigmatic material of mass and solidity and structure and density and opacity and weight and renders that as this lace like lattice like semi-transparent but still sort of conditioning views screen. And so I wonder how you consider the way in which you work with what I'm calling a screen, something a screen like those in relationship to the aesthetics of the modernist curtain wall that you're presenting in the split subject project. How do you think of those together? Because it seems like a continuing preoccupation in your work, the way that you can transform the aesthetics of that through a different approach to material. Well lately we have been discussing in the office, the ideas of transparency and porosity and how they're different from each other. At the beginning when I was working on split subject, I was thinking very much about the transparency and the reflection. How surface can become completely permeable or completely opaque just because of that reflection that is happening in the glass. So it was almost like the building never changed from the reflection outwards and from the transparency inwards it was completely changing. But then I'm thinking more about it in terms of the porosity that it has. This idea of how it changes from being something that is open-ended or being closed just because it preserved its shape throughout the years. And in the case of the celosia, I think it started just as a curiosity, just growing up in Mexico. Like everywhere you see these celosias because it allows for air and sun to come in, to allow also for privacy, the idea of being concealed, of not being looked at, but being able to see, which is very much related to the idea again of transparency and reflection. So that started as that experiment and also because it allowed to do more with less material. It was a means of economy. So you would see many, even of the public structures hold that celosia as a way to create this institutional veil that creates this monolithic view without having to use like the heaviness of the material. So that was the reason why we started using it in the tallera. But then we started learning that it was also a way of showing the past and making it go into the future as it was aging nicely because it could absorb the passage of time. It would register like the dust or even interventions. Now in the facade of the tallera, there are some artists that start using the little hollows to do interventions or even people leave notes, like romantic notes to the girlfriend and we find like little notes wrapped into the corner. So it becomes almost like an active surface. And in the case of the serpentine pavilion, that porosity also helped us to frame different views, but more than views experiences. So you could have the visitor come into the space and by using these diagonal lines, you could create an opaqueness in the wall or more transparency. So you could see the garden or you could see the wall. So it was almost like focusing on being inside the space or focusing being part of a larger space. That's what it has allowed to me. Yeah, I'd love to build on the issue of the walls and also on Benedict's initial comment about the difficulty in pinning down your work, which I've really enjoyed getting to know in preparation of speaking with you today and what you shared. I do think though that there is an incredible body that is so clearly exploring the spectrum from the veil and how it can both how it can reveal and the mask and how it can conceal and really across the buildings that you've built, which you didn't share with us, but are just exquisite tectonic expressions of the organization of material in space and subtlety and a kind of immersive creation of an immersive environment that frames one's understanding of context to your research where I love the use of the word sluice, which is not a word I generally have heard used in architecture. And in your case, when you're looking at the domestic spaces, the labor of domesticity is hidden within an apartment. The sluice is the valve or the mechanism of almost sinister concealment. So I see this actually very rigorous range of exploration from the material to the political, also in the way you described the propaganda on the facades in Mexico that is also this kind of subtle coexistence between the domestic and the position of the politics, but it also sort of dissipating and fading and the liminal traces on the modernist facade in Mexico City. So congratulations on a beautiful body of work that has explored really rigorously this concept, both historically in terms of the origins of the perforated walls and their translation into modern time into your current project, your past projects and your research. And I'm really interested if you would share with us, given the title of unfolding, kind of how this is unfolding in your current work, in the projects either in Mexico or obviously in New York since that's where we are. And I'm sure that you intentionally chose what you shared today, but it would be really lovely to hear you describe how this project is continuing to unfold in the present projects. Well, there's some concern about how we use the material and what the material say about specific time and locality, regardless of its porosity or not. The material itself is talking about the specific set of conditions, the production, the way that the material was extracted, how it will age and so forth. We all know that this is like the discourse of all the architecture schools. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to try to work with those questions as you move through skills. And as Hispanic was saying, this is this moment of transition for an office like mine when you start working in different contexts and you want to keep talking about how the material can tell the story and then it's not telling necessarily the story that you want. But then you find out that it's an additional more interesting story because it's the story of why that material becomes the chosen one for developers, for the city, for the clients and so forth. So even though if you find some deviations on the road of exploring a material, you find another interesting solution. So for example, in the case of the National Black Theatre, we were thinking about using brick because it's something that is related to the neighborhood. Like Harlan has a history of the townhouses that use that brick and we were thinking about creating this relationship with that. But then later, there was no you need to use commercial brick. Like it needs to cost, I don't know, 12 dollars of food and maybe it was five. I can't remember. And then it was an expression of what can we do with this material because, for example, for that building, the symbolism of the place and the spirit of that place is very important to the client. Both Shade and Michael who are the sons and daughter of Dr. Barbara Antier, the symbolism was fundamental for the theatre. So we had to experiment with different types of brick to find the perfect color that would resonate to the original temple that was the inspiration of their mother to set up this space. So the color, the materiality, the idea that this comes from the earth could be traced and then reused into something that was contemporary. It could also work for the developer. But this was like extra layers of work for the architect. At some points they were just like really annoyed at all since like just pick one brick. And we have like these long tables of samples we could build a little house or another eco pavilion in our studio just with different colors. And yeah, I think it's how the material can express certain things. For example, in the serpentine pavilion it was not Mexican lattices that were used. It was roof tiles that were used for the pavilion. So it was also about locality and how to use something that was modular. So sometimes it is about the material and the way that it is telling a story. The other one is more about like this binary combination, almost like a computational thing that allows you to create different patterns and different porosities and different weaves. It's almost like infinite possibilities of the loom. Because you mentioned the serpentine. So the history is that the installation happens for the summer and then it has another life somewhere. And in your case you oriented it in its original position. Do you, where is it? Did it get relocated? Not yet. It's in the storage space but yes. So how do you know what the process when that will happen or do they consult you at all? Yes, there's a clause in the contract that they need to consult us and we need to make sure that it's properly aligned. Yes. Good. Do you have a site? You're long for it? Unfortunately, don't open space large enough. Yeah, I just have one question. It's like a simple question. But I think, thank you. That was great. Really so good. And you learned so much in this new view, like history of the PRI. It's really fascinating. I think it's a great lecture as part of a course called Arguments because it is a series of extremely well-crafted, well-researched, well-illustrated arguments. And I think that's great for students to see. I think what I'm interested in is that the argument is so clear but it is an argument in many ways against what the outside world thinks of architecture, that it is static, that what is seen is what it is really. And you are more like, no, what you see is not really what it is. There's this hidden life inside the structure, like with those sculptures or a hidden life of what happens to a building over time. And I think it's a critique of the view of architecture as a static monument lasting throughout time built for a client's ego or whatever. And I think further it's like a criticism of many aspects of architecture, domestic workers, the political reality of power and how power gets manifest through infrastructure and architecture. So I'm just wondering, like it's a communication question. What is the relationship between these arguments and how you operate in the world, I guess? Like how do the clients know? I don't know. But it's such an important part of your process, right? And I would say like, what's interesting, you presented 80% process, 85 maybe, and 15% result. So it's obviously, yeah, it's so important. How do you, it's a mask, I guess. Yes, it's something that happens as you are designing it. You're finding these things that you uncover and sometimes they're very surprising and very unsettling. Because you think architecture is a profession that works for the greater good. This is what we're taught in architecture schools. We are here to solve problems. We're here to create better living conditions. The truth is we're working for the financial system and for capitalism. That is the reality of architecture. It couldn't happen without it. So to me, it's like, I know that I have to work for that system, but at least I can ask these questions. Your commission to do a pavilion, well, maybe when you're reading the brief and you see like, okay, so this is going to be installed here for three months and then it's going to move out. So what is the question here? Architecture is not site-specific, as I was taught in school. And it is not permanent, as I was taught in school. So then that evolves into creating a pavilion that could be positioned anywhere else. Or you are asked to do a theater here in New York and you see the relationship with the material, the ideas of the client, but also the heavy past that lies in the brick, because we were proposing bricks and it's like, no, it looks like the projects. It's like it has a deep symbolism that we didn't, we were not aware of and we needed to learn. So it always reveals some sort of hidden history. We should take some questions. Domestic labor, could you wait for the mic for change in the design practice, because I've been observing, at least in the last decade, as a Mexican designer from the International Powerhouse, or powerhouses or power forces in design. These officers are attracting a lot of international students who want to practice in there, but at the same time, I'm observing that students who graduate from Unam, Iber-American are having a really hard time competing because they don't have the brand name to go with the portfolio. Even though the portfolio is at the same level, sometimes it's better. So I'm just wondering what your office split is in regards to national talent, domestic talent and talent that you bring, especially from Colombia. And if you think about these things in terms of how to create some kind of design sustainability and design practices within Mexico where young Mexican designers are not getting shut out. And I say this because I have friends who went to Unam and they come to New York not to practice architecture, but to wash dishes. I have friends who lived most of the lives in Mexico City, but now they've gone to Baja California, they've gone to Veracruz, because they can't get the design practice that they're seeking in the city, because again, now it's this like reverse process where here we get blame, Mexicans are stealing their jobs, but really that's now happening in Mexico City. Thank you. And I see the point, and it's very true. We see that as architecture offices grow, not in number necessarily, but in reputation, that starts happening. And I see many positive things about that. Like my office now is very mixed. We have people from Jordan, Colombia, France, where else, like Canada, the U.S., and also Mexico. And it's half and half. It's a very balanced moment. And the truth is, I also struggle with that because I never worked for an architecture office. So I had to build that trust that you're describing, like how do we build that trust so we can get hired because we have the same talent, but we don't have necessarily the name or the credential. So to me, it was taking opportunities as all of these small projects, like doing competitions, trying to do essays, things that would show that I had a particular interest. So I could start building trust. Like it didn't happen overnight, but I think it has to do also with how we present and how quickly we're seeing portfolios. Like sometimes we just see the CVE and we pay very little attention on doing interviews because even portfolios are tricky. Like most of this work happens in other offices or in collaboration with teams. So the one-to-one experience I think is going to be very necessary as we go back to the office space, which I think is not happening in the U.S. I see that it's still a hybrid mode. In Mexico it's mostly in-person now, but I have seen that many of the offices are in between and it's creating a very complicated relationship because then you don't engage with a person, you're engaging with a result of the person. And that's very problematic. Hi, here. This question goes more to your project of domestic orbits. Because I found that in Mexico there's kind of this contrast between what people see, that they talk about their domestic workers. They see like, oh, they're part of the family because they're always there in their events, their birthdays, their funerals, but they don't really treat them as family. Like and also like as the places are more high-end, they're looking to make them more invisible. So I was wondering how can we as architects kind of create how the value should not be in the invisibility, but instead of the coexistence. So it can be more coherent the way that we are telling that they are part of our culture and part of our family and treat them as actually part of our family. No, I agree. And we had a course, the GSD in 2019, right before the pandemic that was discussing that idea. And the students were developing case studies with existing buildings in Mexico City from, you know, like the idea of how kitchen changed over the last two centuries to what happens to these new rises, like the massive residential projects that are happening in Mexico City with over 2,000 units in one building. And what is the relationship between the domestic units and the quarters? Because the way that these spaces are configured assume that these are spaces for women, for young women who don't have children and who basically don't have a personal life. They become almost metabolized into the family as a child that will never grow, but that is working for them, which is very problematic. Even if they are in their reproductive years and they have kids, the kids are not part of that extended family that they're supposed to belong to. Or in very, very cases, the family is also incorporated into the housing dynamic. And on the other side, you have, well, there's no domestic quarters in the building or in the neighborhood, so you have to commute for four hours a day to get to your house and it creates a complicated situation. So what is the solution? I don't know, but it's worth discussing it. Hi. I hope you can hear me. This is a great presentation. Thank you so much. You were talking about in your text how you envision your architecture to be a snapshot of the present and also, but it's an ever-changing piece. So through your designs, have you or do you direct that change in a way? Or is it free to evolve in whatever way it will? How much of your work then surrounds directing that change? And I don't mean in an immediate future, but through ages, because sometimes most architectures are pretty permanent. And then as architects, for all of us, I would say, but how often do we then go back to our architecture to check what effect it's having or how it's evolved to be? Because we just place it and then we disappear from the picture. So how do you, as a practice, then work with that? It's a difficult one because we're always thinking about like, oh, let's make something that is flexible. And sometimes these flexible spaces can become really practical because they're nothing. Because we're thinking about that flexibility in a very short period of time. Oh, this can be like a room that could be occupied as an auditorium, but also as a dance floor, but also as a party room. And that's it. No, it's very limited. But when we're confronted to people changing our projects, we always panic and complain and we become very annoying people. Like we don't want people to touch our architectures. But I think it's more about letting go of that process because it's going to change and it's going to evolve. So maybe the idea of simplicity becomes really relevant because with that simplicity, you can absorb more of the things that are happening at the surroundings. It's like that Agnes Martin piece that I showed. If it's very simple and it's very strict, it might show what is happening around it. And it doesn't lose its essence in a way. Thank you very much for this discussion. So in your article, Domestic Orbits, you exposed the relationship between domestic work and some masterpieces of Mexican modernism. How does this research influence your design practice, especially your upcoming design to the Met Museum? How will the spaces for invisible labor be architecturally designed, either revealed or concealed? Well, I think it has informed all of the buildings that we're doing, not like from, let's say, the houses that we're designing, where we're constantly thinking about these spaces and what they should hide or protect. I like the idea more of protecting rather than hiding, to hospitality projects where you have very important parts of the building that are back of house. So it's almost understanding that buildings have always not a single occupant, but many. And these many need to be also respected and recognized. So in the case of a hotel, you need to consider the employees. That's part of the experience of the hotel that we never think about. We're designing the fancy rooms, but what happens to the back of house? And the same happens with museums or cultural institutions. What is the other half of this institution? What are the storage spaces? What are the employees' dining rooms? What are the circulation paths? I'm trying to remember the name of the photographer, but there's this series of very interesting photographs of Disneyland and the tunnels that happen underneath it. And it's very strange because this is the moment where the magic kind of falls apart, where the Mickey Mouse loses its head and it's just like this guy who's very tired and sad. Or all these hidden things that happen underneath. So I just think it's very interesting to see that other side. Hello. I'm wondering, what is your position on the contemporary practices for the facades of new developments and the relationship with the public space as this liminal moment for performing cultural, political, and social manifestations, and also the implications of the facade in different scales of the city? I didn't get the question, sorry. Yeah. I'm wondering about what is your position on the facades of the buildings regarding the public space, looking at the facade as this liminal space for political, social, and cultural manifestations, and also the implication of the facade in different scales? Well, I think it's just what they represent. But it can be at any scale, institutional or political, they always represent this idea behind it. The owner's ego or the values of a specific time, how materials become trendy or not. You can see sometimes you see a material that starts repeating itself and it becomes almost like the common language, even between cities. And it becomes political in a way. But to me, what's more interesting is how that starts shifting from something that is desire to something that is residue to something that becomes interesting again and alive. So it's these changing facets. And maybe that comes from growing up in Mexico City where that juxtaposition and layering is necessary. You never see a building that remains the same. It's constantly changing. Hi. Just, I guess, you talk about materiality of having this kind of life cycle to it and I just find it very fascinating, especially because it's kind of driven by the people allotting your projects. I was just kind of wondering how those two kind of play with each other and the way you pick the materials and the way I guess you build and design your buildings. And on top of that, I just kind of also wanted to know how involved you are when you actually get to build these buildings. Because one of the things I think modernism brought is that it separated the architects as the builders, I think. We just did the drawings and that was it. That's very true architects don't build buildings. So I was just wondering how that kind of placing your practice, especially kind of through materiality, which I just think it's really beautiful the way you describe it. I'm very interested in the materiality, but I'm very little interested in the detailing of the materiality. And I think that's the difference because, again, I come from a context where you cannot rely on the precise detailing. Like it cannot be the perfect corner or the polished surface or the custom-made window frame that makes the statement of what you want to say. It's more about like the big picture and how that big picture can remain through the years. So there's this moment where you can design and you can go and be as obsessive as you want, but you know that that is not going to happen, especially with public buildings or with social housing or even with private clients that just decide to do their own thing. And then you need to consider like what is this thing that I want to preserve, I want to protect, and the rest can be a little bit more open. I wonder, I'm here. I was rephrasing this question a lot, so I hope it's like okay. I wonder if you have a special agenda when you will design or you are designing the new wing of the Met, because I feel like there's a lot of political agendas around this whole new wing. And I wonder if you had any political agendas of yourself of this like kind of political colonial background. I mean, I'm sure I have them because I'm Latin American and I'm a woman. But to me, this is a very big opportunity personally of course, but it's also an opportunity to reconsider what the museum represents and for whom. Because it's not just a museum for Fifth Avenue, for the Upper East Side. It's a museum that historically, and as I remember it as a kid, is a museum of every kind of tourist and people from the city. And New York is a very cosmopolitan city that is traditionally the city of immigrants. So I think this is the possibility of rethinking not just the people who visit them and how they're represented, but also what cultures are representing to them. So I think there's this very interesting moment where museums are rethinking their collections and not giving a single narrative. And to me, it was the most appealing thing about designing that wing, that it could open the conversation to see how it affected the rest of the collections, how you view the rest of the collections, to reflect yourself on them, but also to self identify. There's this saying like to self differentiate, we need to self identify. So what do you identify with when you see a collection in the museum? What is important to you? Is it a specific piece? Is it the narrative that the curator created? Is it the building itself because it makes you feel safe and represented? Or is it the location? Is it the possibility of bringing your family? Like what are the different readings behind it? And I mean, traditionally the encyclopedic museums are very European oriented or colonialists in their views. But I think now there's a possibility of rethinking through the modern collection, the relationship with the rest of the museum, which is very complex. It's a mini city in itself. Now it's more than 20 buildings into one, folded into one. So this is just the lens through which it can be seen as a whole. Hi. I just had a more of a practical question. Where and how do you draw the line between your own ideologies as an architect and what this capitalistic world and what the client brief demands of you? And also just as a secondary question, after this extensive study you've done on domestic orbits, is there some way you would change the design for orders 100? Do you think just revealing these spaces that are hidden is our role as architects? Is there some way we can just break this classist system and work more for this political agenda? I mean, I try to push as much as the client allows me, which is sometimes not too much. But, and I don't know, I wouldn't change too many things about that project. And we were thinking about doing, for example, new renderings for it or trying to represent it in a different way. But that project never got built. So it's not important. The building is not important. It's the ideas that happen because of that project that became relevant to me. And in that case, the project of orders 100 in my office is about not designing for a specific client that wasn't known because these were bills that were going to be sold. So you're basically designing for an imaginary family. So now the extension of the imaginary client extended because it included some other characters that were actually living in this space. So it was more about that realization that there are different occupants within domestic spaces and how that could affect also the neighborhood environment and the urban environment. Is there public transportation? How do they get there? Are they visible on the streets? Is that also affecting the city planning? Are they too far away because the prices of the neighborhoods change so much? So it starts scaling up and down. So thanks for your lecture. And my question is, you have many projects creating open and public space, which the interaction with people is essential. So I think you are trying to give the interaction to the public so you can create a moment for them. So how do those tools come into your design? And are there any people's behavior surprise you in these projects? So I'm having a very hard time listening to the question. So I think you are designing creating tools for the people to use it in the public open space. So I'm thinking about how these tools, for example, the civic stage, the platform you created and for the echo, the bricks you used that, I wonder how do you use these tools? How do they come up in your idea? And how the people's behavior are interacting with the infrastructures? Are there any behaviors that you haven't thought about that surprise you? Just a personal question. I think these pavilions or interventions have the possibility of being more experimental and allowing me to do larger questions. When you have more stakeholders to respond to, it becomes a little bit more constrained. So that's why we keep the practice very active in these interventions and in also thinking about academia so we can continue to ask these questions and to try to apply them to other spaces where it might not be possible, but at least the question is there. So yes, it's very important for me to continue to like these smaller, more elusive projects in the studio because it's difficult to implement those tools in other scales, I think. The students in my section we're talking earlier this morning about the Echo Pavilion and we got into a discussion about how the material qualities of that, I think it's concrete, the concrete block unit, how that would affect questions of the duration through which the project can be transformed. That if they were heavier or lighter or larger or smaller, that might imply different scales of adaptability within the project or different numbers of people who would be required to make a large transformation in that space or levels of coordination between groups of people that you would need. And I wonder how you think about that, like because your work has such a sort of rich experimentation in materials, how do you think about in a project like that, for example, how the selection of a material or a unit or a block like that engenders different kinds of social performances. Because on the one hand it seems like a kind of a project where there's total flexibility, there's a sort of neutrality or a loosening of authorship. On the other hand there's a very precise calibration of the selection of that block for what I, you know, what it might afford or what the possibilities that it might engender. I think it has to do with observation, because of course that material has already been designed to be handled by a single person, you know, like it needs to be moved very easily for construction workers to lay out the brick. That's why the phrase from Brenda Lozano resonated so much. It's just like doing these small efforts. Like if you try to bring a wall up as a single unit, it's a monumental effort, but the same way as designing architecture, you know, it's like the beginning is like I don't know what I'm going to do, but then you start like having like these little moments and you start constructing an idea. And that had to do with the metaphorical aspect of it, you know, like just doing it one by one, one piece by one piece, and physically because it's modulated so it's easy to carry both by hand but also in transportation, like it can be packed, it's modular, it can it can be almost like this neutral thing, but because of this neutrality, which is also the lesson of the split subject windows, it can express a lot of things, because any little thing that happens to that will reveal something. The relationships of two kids playing together and how they decide and they have to have a consensus to build this little city or artists that need to present this as an envelope for their structure. Do they want to present it whole or do they want to present it math? They're all of these decisions that become almost binary, you know, like void and mass, heaviness and lightness, and it's infinite. Here. Hi, thank you very much for your presentation. I would like to ask you a very similar question to her. Do you think that there are some barriers between architecture theory and architects' intentions related to social and political? Between really applying it to practice, I have my own firm in Brazil and this is something that always comes to my mind. How can I really produce a critical architecture between so many barriers and conditions in the markets and clients, et cetera? This is a question that some of my friends and colleagues and I are always discussing and we're always talking about architecture school. And at least in my generation, I was taught that design started when you received the architectural program. That was the exercise in school. You would receive an architectural program with these square meters, these rooms, this budget. And that was it. And then you would go to the drawing table and you would do something very beautiful. And that was it. But now I see more than the actual design starts way back. And I think we need to start thinking in schools that design is planning, it's developing, is making all of these decisions that are actually going to inform the final product. And especially here in the U.S., I find that it's very constrictive. In Mexico, we have more loose rules. So we can play a little bit more. I'm sure that in Brazil it's the same case. But here everything is defined. You try to come up with a size of a window and it's like, no, that's not the code. Okay. Well, let's do these stickers. No, that's not the code. This glass, no, bird glass. And then it's like, well, then everything looks the same. But it's like, who defined that this is the only way that a window could be done in New York City? Why? Who's discussing this? And why is this not a process of designing in academia? Who is making those decisions? And I think there are big opportunities on that aspect. Great. Thank you very much. I mean, we work in Kenya and something you mentioned to do with materials. And how difficult it is to get precision within a lot of global South continents is a reality we face. But what's really nice about your work is that you look at that in a really contemporary way. And in a way, I mean, using an analogy of skin, obviously, as being the largest organ in our body, and in a way, your practice seems to really be all about skin and the different layers of skin. And you also highlighted, you know, how modernism, you know, sort of, it failed skin deep, in a way, and looking at that territory as so critical within your practice. My question, in a long-winded way, relates to museums. And I think one of the students touched on that, referring back to your La Talera Museum and what you hope to do at the Met. And how you really, in a way, sort of looked at changing the institution from the inside out and how that seems to be, you know, your strategy, not expecting you to reveal what you intend to do, but it seems like that's really important to your work. And it'd be nice to see you or hear your response to that notion of architecture being all skin in a way, and what that means for the rest of it, if at all, it's important for you. I think that's a nice analogy of the skin, you know, and the idea of liminality and the threshold. And maybe in Mexico, it's a little bit more porous, again, you know, because you have different types of interiors and different types of facades because it's so very open. But with different projects, I'm learning that that skin can become a little bit more strict, you know, in what it is representing and how much it can absorb in other localities. So maybe it's more about the porousness than the skin. But I like that metaphor. Hi. So there's a lot of mention about time and symbolism and reference to time in your pavilions and projects. I was wondering, what is your position on the human construct of time and the primarity and its socio-political and geopolitical influence of it? On the what, I'm sorry? Your position on time as a social construct and kind of the, because you're a certain pavilion, like the primary as a primary symbol, so like the geopolitical aspect of it. It's a very important aspect also of the conversation in the studio, because again, like we, or I always thought that time was one thing, you know, and it was linear, and it was measurable, and it was something that was sequential, but then you find out that there are different forms of time, you know, like the perceived time, the social time, geological time, and so on. So it's something that could be interpreted almost as experiential. So that's why we're interested in these proposals that are about the body and the relationship of the body to the environment that it's being surrounded by, or some others where social time is a little bit more important, you know, like the idea of what collectivity is teaching you, how people feel represented or not in a specific space, and then the interruption of that duration, you know, like these ideas of symbolism as monuments, you know, like what marks time and what is it marking, like whose time is it marking, what experience is it marking for everyone else, so that's why the relationship of representation and time is so important. Maybe as a segue to time, how you envision your office unfolding as your practice grows, that seems like the scale has been relatively intimate in that conversation among a changing group of people, but relatively small. Do you see collaboration or the office growing? What are you envisioning? It has been a very strange period for many of us, you know, like the pandemic, because we were starting to develop larger projects both in Mexico City, I mean Europe and some here in the US, and then the pandemic started, and we were 13 people at the studio. We had to go to our homes to work, and then we started getting more commissions, but we were doing everything on Zoom, so the group grew larger, but we didn't realize that until we came back to the studio. We don't fit into this office anymore, like we need to get additional space, so there are these periods for architects where we are in these black boxes, you know, we're just working in the studio. Nothing is out, you cannot publish anything, like it's like you've been doing nothing for two years, it's like you've been working hard. And then there's this question of do you want to continue to grow in scale as some of these opportunities emerge, and for me it's no, I just want to, you know, like get the opportunity to select better the projects and to be able to continue to ask these questions on larger scales, because I've been able to build that trust, you know, like we were talking about how you do these very experimental things with very little, because no one's willing to take a risk with larger ones, but maybe as they see that they evolve nicely or not, they will trust you to do some more of these experiments. And we actually have very interesting clients now, for example, we're working on for these mescaleria, and we're experimenting both with the material, you know, and the actual logics and the program of the building, this is the distillery that is owned by three women, which is unusual in Mexico, especially in Oaxaca, you know, this is a male owned business most of the time. And the employees are also mostly women, especially in the bottling facility, you know, like on the fields and harvesting and even like cooking the agave, it's very problematic because it's heavy and but with other parts of the industry that are more easy to women, they're trying to grow their circle, and they want to create these facilities that are not the typical visitor center, for example, you know, that this is something that happens a lot, you know, like you have a mescaleria, you have a visitor center, people come get the product and they leave, and they want to do this as an intersection between the need for representing their mescalera, but also to recognize that women actually have a double shift of work, you know, like they work in the facility, and then they go back home and they still have to cook, they have to raise the children, they have to take care of the sick people and so on. So the communal spaces of these, the space will be a collective kitchen that they can use and cook together so they can take the prepared meals back home, there's going to be a laundry, a childcare facility and so forth, so it's actually recognizing that domestic labor is part of the economy, and it's just not recognized as such because it's so cheap, and we as a society have made that possible in the disadvantage of many women and men, you know, in the globe, but this is something that we need to start changing because it's actually, if we were paying for it, it would be very costly, you know, and we saw this during the pandemic, when we wouldn't be, when we weren't able to cook our own food and it was just delivery, we started seeing like, well, this is becoming really expensive, and actually we understood that it always relies on someone who is more vulnerable than us, you know, so now we were not preparing the food in our kitchen, who was preparing it because we just received it from the delivery guy who is probably someone who was an immigrant with legal status that was difficult, so all of these things start like trickling down, you know? I think it's great that you're in a position where you can select your clients to some degree, and that you're pursuing the agency of architecture relative to these socio-political realities. I'm curious, there was a question about, you know, how much we can have an impact in the world and in the, in the Orbit's, Domestic Orbit's project, you were making visible something that, you know, hadn't been discussed, and in New York recently, relatively recently, this calendar year, domestic workers and other caregivers have been officially recognized as having been covered under the human rights statutes. I'm curious if there's anything analogous happening? Yeah, no, and that was one of the reasons why we chose to do the studio in 2019, because this was the same time that Mexico recognized domestic labor as former labor for the first time. So there was this moment where now all of these women could be incorporated into social security, and in Mexico, it's a different condition than here, you know? Like when you go to social security, you're able to ensure or secure your family, you have access to health, but also, and this is very interesting from the fifties, no? The big party did these institutions because they were thinking about the welfare as something more complex than just health and medicines. It was sports, it was culture, it was community. So there were like very interesting compounds designed for this purpose. And now I think that this is a new opportunity of rethinking what those spaces need to be like, because of course, these were thought for the workers, for the male workers and their families. But now that it's going to be for the female workers and their families, what are the needs for that? Do you need to have more childcare? Do you need to have proximity to transportation homes because you're not able to drop your kids and then go back and then work? So what are the implications also for the public sphere and for these public institutions? So important. I had a follow up question. It's just something I've been thinking about because, you know, in the U.S., no one has ever asked us to design for domestic workers. It's just not, in the culture, if we're working in Lebanon or Mexico, it's very much part of the, right, you have to find a space. And I just, it's interesting, it's always been interesting, this discrepancy. It's not that we don't rely on labor, as you mentioned, delivery workers and packers and Amazon workers and everything. But I just wonder, you know, from your research, what do you think that difference is? And do you think the fact that it's maybe much more explicit architecturally in this, in the third world, maybe makes it easier to solve or easier to create solutions for? I mean, here, I don't know what I would do, you know, as an architect, but in a way you have a little bit of architectural agency in Mexico. Even though the conditions I think are, I mean, if it's anything close to Lebanon, the conditions are crazy, like people live in closets, you know. But people live in closets here too. Yeah, I live in a closet. I did when I was younger. No, I'm just joking, but it's true, like it seems to be more visible because it's on a very intimate scale, I think. But if you start looking around, I mean, just walking in New York, you, there's like, they open the kitchen or a basement and all you hear is Spanish. So it's right there. It's like you see this radical difference between different jobs, you know, like who is directing and who's leading and who's following. And I think it's, I mean, this condition is interesting because one of my students had the same question. Like, well, this is very evident in Mexico, but here it's quite different. And then I asked this person like, well, who does the domestic work in your house? It's like, oh, we equally do it. My partner and I do it equally. It's like, okay, do you clean and wash? Yes. Who cooks the meals? No, we order. It's like, well, there you go. And there's always someone who will remain in this condition. And I think it's very visible. We just need to pay close attention. So maybe the question here is, like, what are we doing for immigrants? What are we doing to recognize that these are very necessary jobs? And actually, everyone benefits from that. Especially, I think now with aging populations, it's going to be an issue of the care, like who is going to be doing the heavy lifting of healthcare in the future. And that's why there's also this inverse migration on like older people are moving to countries where they actually get better healthcare and elderly care than their own countries. It's impossible to live in New York as an old person. I'm thinking about both the social commitments of your work and also what you were saying about the risks that clients take or are willing to take in relationship to architects. I think it speaks to the position that you're starting to occupy in the field through the work of the last decade that an institution like the Met that one imagines is probably not particularly able to take risks given just its scale and the relationship to public institutions and so forth, that they would invest this responsibility in you. And so it's been such a pleasure to see the way in which your career and your body of work has been built in the presentation today. And so thank you so much.