 Today, from members of the Yale Nomus Chapter, which tries to foster greater inclusion, unity, and representation of the Yale School of Architecture. Also, each of these discussions is a collaboration with a different guest university. Today, we are partnering with Columbia's University Latin GESAP. It is an interdisciplinary student organization dedicated to the promotion, discussion, and reflection of contemporary issues and ideas in Latin America. Today marks the first of our three-part series of events, and we will focus on the topic of agency and architecture. The discussion will explore the expanding agency of the architect from the interface between architecture and other fields, such as political science, sociology, and environmental science, to the relationship and difference between agency in practice and pedagogy. Our panelists today include Elisa Turbe. She's a critic at the Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches design studios and seminars dedicated to studying the spatial expression of our dominant energy paradigm in both urban and architectural form. She also coordinates the dual degree program between YSOA and the Yale School of Environment. Recently, she gets edited log 47, titled Overcoming Carbon Form, and co-wrote a book with Peter Eisenman titled Lateness. In addition, she's an assistant professor at the Per Union and is the co-founder of the firm Outside Development. Elisa was born in Mexico City and grew up in San Diego along the US-Mexico border. We also have joining us today Enrique Walker. He's an architect and lecturer at Columbia GESAP, where he directed the Master of Science program in advanced architectural design from 2008 to 2018. In addition, he has taught at the MIT Princeton University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Universidad de Chile. His publications include The Ordinario Recordings, The Victionary of Received Ideas on Their Constraints, The Ordinario, and Schumann Architecture Conversations with Enrique Walker. We're also joined by Adriana Chavez. She's an adjunct and assistant professor at Columbia GESAP. She holds a master's degree from Harvard's GSB and a bachelor's degree from Universidad de la Americana in Mexico City. She is the co-founder of PORU, Office for Urban Resilience, a design think tank that focuses on implementing innovative solutions for cities through urban design and landscape infrastructure with a water-sensitive approach. Finally, moderating the discussion, we have students from both schools. I'm one of them. I am Guillermo Cusana Barrepe, originally from Mexico City. And I am in my final year of the MRT program at Yale. I was recently an architect in residence at the Max Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. And I'm the current co-editor of the forthcoming 56th issue of Perspective. Alice Pan is originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil. She's in her last year in the master's of architecture program at Columbia GESAP, where she is currently the co-director of Latin GESAP, as well as part of the editorial team for Patio, a newly launched publication. She most recently worked at Modu in Brooklyn. And finally, we have Gabriel Gutiérrez Huerta. He's originally from Tijuana, Mexico, and is in his final year of the post-professional MRT program at Yale. He has practiced in both New York and Baja California, Mexico, and is currently co-editor of the forthcoming 56th issue of Perspective. With that, we'll start with an initial 10-minute remarks from each of our panelists, followed by an open discussion. Just a reminder to everyone joining us that you can engage in the conversation by leaving your questions in the chat. And throughout the event, our student moderators will work them into the conversation. But there will be also some time for Q&A to be towards the end. So let's turn it over to Elisa. Elisa, you should be able to share your screen. Great. Thank you. Got everything in order. Hi, everybody. Good evening. And thank you so much for this invitation. I'm very happy to be here and very excited to be talking about this question of agency, which is very pervasive in architecture today. I feel like we're talking about it a lot. And that makes sense because in the face of the climate crisis, in the face of worsening inequality, in the face of this pervasive neoliberal attitude from our governments that even still, despite these things, there is no alternative. So in that context, how can architecture have agency? And architecture, in any case, is fully embedded into this monstrous real estate machine. And that machine prioritizes commodification of space above everything. And that seems to render architecture perhaps useless or, at the very least, certainly powerless. And so we are resigned. And so we feel helpless. And so we ask, does architecture have agency? However, I think that an attitude of resignation would imply that the current conditions of architectural practice are the defining boundaries of architecture itself. And that I'm not so convinced by. And so I wonder whether architecture's relationship to the dominant economic order, which is undeniable, is not an ending point from which to declare architecture powerless, but a starting point to investigate the nature of its power. So today I'm going to suggest a few things. First, that architecture is powerful. Second, that architecture's power is not always for the best. And that perhaps there's a difference between agency and power. So in my mind, there's no question that architecture has power. And throughout history, architecture has had a very close relationship to power. Vitruvius dedicated the 10 books to Caesar Augustus. Le Corbusier was a little bit less specific, but still very clear on his position. And he dedicated the Vilhadius to authority. And so we have these architectural treatises that are dedicated to empires and to authority itself. My area of research is the spatial paradigm that arises from the onset of fossil fuels or because of the onset of fossil fuels. And that's something that I like to call carbon form. And early carbon form was very chaotic. This is an etching of Victorian London. And in this time, you had demographic shifts that are associated with the enclosure movement and with the rise of factory labor. And these things transformed the city almost overnight. And at this time, architectural typologies were emerging. But these changes were haphazard. They lacked intention. And the city seemed kind of out of control. It was growing and changing as capitalists and factory owners were pushing this new economic regime with all the power that was unleashed by fossil fuels. But eventually, carbon form becomes an architectural project because modernism was reacting directly to this condition of the 19th century city. So often, we talk about modernism as though they were interested in this blanket rejection of the past. But if you read these treatises closely, that's not actually true. These modern treatises on the city were full of references to ancient cities and classical architecture. So the modernists, I would argue, are largely concerned not with history necessarily, but specifically with the 19th century city. So that leads Ludwig Hilversheimer and the new city to look at a congested street and to look at the skyline of New York and to call this disorder and chaos. And then we have Le Corbusier, who writes that in the last 100 years, a sudden chaotic and sweeping invasion unforeseen and overwhelming has descended upon the great city. And we've been caught up in this with all its battling consequences, with the result that we have stood alone and done nothing. He goes on, the resulting chaos has brought it about that the great city, which should be a phenomenon of power and energy, is today a menacing disaster since it is no longer governed by the principles of geometry. So this to me is extremely telling. The problem here is not necessarily industry. What's lacking is geometry. What's lacking is order, contention, and structure. So even as they were declaring a break with history, their problem was not with history as a whole. The problem was that the cities of the 19th century were continuing the formal logic of the medieval city. And so that's how you get the opening chapter of the city of tomorrow with the contrast between the Pactanke's way and the man's way. And you get statements such as this one, where the Corbusier writes, a modern city lives by a straight line. Inevitably, the circulation of traffic demands a straight line. It's the proper thing for the heart of the city. The curve is ruinous, difficult, and dangerous. It's paralyzing. OK, so this is not just a treatise for straight streets. What I read here is a plea for a new urban form that can accommodate a new kind of mobility. It's essentially a plea to make space for a new world order. So there's another passage from the city of tomorrow that's really remarkable. And I'm not going to read it all. But essentially, what you have here is that you have Corb. He's walking along. He's narrating a fall afternoon where he's just strolling along in the Champs-Élysées. And the traffic has just started up again after a lazy summer. And he's contemplating this. He's thinking about how the streets used to be a place for singing. The road belonged to us then, he writes. He's hanging out in the streets with his friends. But now they're full of motors in all directions, going at all speeds. I was overwhelmed, he writes, and enthusiastic. Rapture filled me. Not the rapture of the shiny coachwork under the gleaming lights, but the rapture of power. The simple and ingenious pleasure of being in the center of so much power, so much speed. We are a part of it. We are a part of that race whose dawn is just awakening. We have confidence in this new society, which will in the end arrive at a magnificent expression of its power. We believe in it. And he goes on, it gets even more dramatic. No, the power is like a torrent swollen by storms of destructive fury. The city is crumbling, so it's very dramatic. It's very dramatic and very extreme. But what's so interesting about it is that in the congestion, he's standing in the middle of a traffic jam. And in this congestion, what he sees is potential. What he sees is power. So he walks away from this experience, ready to destroy the old city, and ready to give form to something new. Because he saw in this moment, he's immersed in the speed and the congestion of early carbon form. What he understood is that the true potential of carbon form had not been realized. So harnessing that power would from then on become his project. And that's how you get an architect that's willing to take the existing form of the city and tear it open in order to give it a new form. So at this point, I want to be very clear that I'm not romanticizing the modern. It's a basic premise of my work that when architecture takes on carbon form as a project, it strengthens this spatial paradigm irreversibly. And that's why we are today at the verge of extinction. It's a legacy that we have not shaken. But I think also we have to revisit this moment and to understand that the modern period showed that architecture can have extraordinary power, but that power is not always for the best, especially because the promise of that power, this power that Nicolusia saw when having his moment of ecstasy on the Champs Elysees is now paired with the promise of extinction. So what I would ask or what I would suggest is that the question today is maybe not whether we have power. I think architecture embodies power all too easily. It's not just in the modern moment. The first great works of architecture were first and foremost projects of power. In this moment, you had the labor of vast populations that had to be harnessed, not just for the construction of these buildings or these temples, but you had to basically devise a whole new social structure where architectural productivity could create a surplus. And that surplus is ultimately what allowed for the conditions of architectural production to emerge. So architecture and power have always existed side by side. So in my mind, the question is not whether we have power. In my mind, the question is whether we can dedicate our work to a different civilization building project or simply a different project entirely. So to return to the question of agency, maybe there's a difference between agency and power and maybe agency can be found in refusing power. And if architecture has the power already to give form to our current socio-political and economic structure, surely it has the power to give form to something else. And maybe agency and architecture is found in the ability to locate that difference. Maybe agency and architecture is found in the moments when we ask whether our work is serving power or not. So one of the reasons I like to look at the modern, which I know is very unpopular to think about modernist, but one of the reasons why I like looking at them is that there is a similar moment that has arisen today. So there's a similar danger because the modernists looked around them and they said, the city is not working. And the same has happened again. Our cities are not working. The suburbs are not working. Real estate development and global development are not working. And right now the production of the built environment is essentially built on a faulty premise. The premise that we have infinite resources, the premise that the economy can keep growing, the premise that we can continue to commodify architecture in the way that we have and that that wealth of that produces is somehow a positive thing. So I think our work now is to not hope for the right commission and to try to find agency within the way that commissions are structured today, but our agency perhaps can be found in reconsidering the city itself. I think that agency might emerge through our knowledge of the city because today things have to be arranged and rearranged in space to soothe the climate crisis and to adjust to it. We're going to have mass migrations, sinking cities, shrinking cities. We have all these new and difficult conditions that are emerging both before and after disaster. So we have this other moment, again similar to the modern moment where we can look around and say, the city is not working. So there's no question in my mind that architects will have to play unimportant role, but I think it's going to be necessary to refuse the current conditions of architectural work and to build more than buildings. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. That was great. Can we pass it on to Enrique? Can you see it, Guillermo? Yes, we can see it. Thank you. Okay, first of all, thank you very much for the invitation. I really appreciate taking part in this conversation. I will address the question obliquely through my teaching, or let's say the way in which I think I've intersected obliquely the topic in recent teaching. For the past three years, I've been teaching a studio at Columbia University called Openwork. It's a series that focus on buildings that about 50 years ago were designed to change and to grow. In other words, a period in which buildings were designed to systems rather than buildings, open-ended and finished and incomplete systems. So what the studio does is basically I select a number of case studies and the studio examines these buildings, their arguments, their design techniques, the genealogies within which they could potentially be situated and the architecture and the cities they may imagine. The cases I've actually worked in the past have been primarily from the 60s and 70s in Japan, namely coming out of the debate around metabolism, such as work by Kensotange, Kiyonore Kikutake, Arata Isosaki, Masato Otaka, Fumihiko Maki, Kishogurokawa, Kensotange, Sachi Otani and Masato Otaka again. So the point of the studio is actually to it has a very precise brief, which is that students are asked to join a team, they work always collectively and they're assigned a building and they're asked simply to double the surface of the building. That's all they're asked to do, which in a way sets up a number of problems and difficulties, which is the actual setup of the studio, which is that you basically must one way or another engage a conversation with the building. In other words, define or take a position on a building and its arguments in order to design. In fact, the first question is, do you endorse the openness of the building? And if so, with what protocols? Since the building is 50 years old, the protocols may be completely outmoded. On the other, do you simply counter openness? And if so, with what architecture? Since the questions of open use, open authorship and open meaning still linger, even though the product is not treated as open. This studio I've taught for a number of episodes, as I usually do. Yet last semester, I taught a slightly different case study which introduced a question that intersects the issue at stake in this seminar, which is exactly what I'm presenting and through which I basically tried to engage the question obliquely. So for a number of reasons that would belong to explain, I basically taught a studio where the cases were now driven from South American debate and I chose basically two buildings from the late 60s and early 70s, Lina Bobardi's Maspi in Sao Paolo and the Un Tat 3 building in Santiago, Chile, built by a group of five different architects. Those images under construction and then the products as built. The common denominator is of course, not only the fact that they're sitting on the sort of a main boulevard of the city and that they building span the full site either on the long side or on the short side, but they were both buildings that were designed under democracy as social condensers of sorts just before the countries, the respective countries fell into dictatorship. And the question of the studio was in addition to how you position yourself as a building that was there before you and that you had to expand, it was how do you also position yourself vis-a-vis a building whose fate and meaning had completely changed and in fact, whose political content had changed regardless of the wish and the will of the architect. Of the two cases, of course, the one I thought was more decisive is the one of the Un Tat 3, which you probably don't know as well as the one by Lina Bobardi, which to some extent was the centerpiece of the studio, but I could not admit it until probably now. And the reason being that basically this building, which is the one I'm going to present is implied a sort of very difficult problem that allowed for me to, in addition to the briefs of the studio, set up the question of how does architect operate? In fact, the question of here today of agency and how an architect operates within conditions and circumstances often adults with the architect's position, position in architecture, position in life, position vis-a-vis a society, but also the way in which architect can operate politically to sort of advance a project that may be in fact undermining, destabilizing or subverting the very system for which the architect works. And the Un Tat was an extraordinary example. In brief, this was a product that was built in 1971. It was a project commissioned by the government of Salvador Allende, socialist government in Chile. As I said in 1971, Chile got the possibility of basically organizing a UN conference called the Un Tat 3, but there was no adequate auditorium for the main session as a result of which again, they commissioned a project. The project was basically done under incredible pressure of time. It was designed and built in 275 days under a year and it was located on the main thoroughfare of Santiago on the Alameda on as a basically very large building that will operate as a canopy over the site adjacent to a tower of a sort of a late Corbusian team tennis housing product that was already being built on the site. So the product was basically a superstructure spanning the full site under which there would be basically the auditorium and other programs adjacent to a tower. The problem being that basically the main driving force being how to build it fast in order to basically meet the expectations of the conference. So the product was proposed not unlike a sort of sort of fun palace of sorts although the references were coming from elsewhere in a very wide range of references as a sort of large umbrella as I said that would cover the site instantly on spans of 40 meters which were then unthinkable for a place like Santiago under which the rest of the building could be basically built separately. The product was basically built as I said on record time as an extraordinary large structure and with very little technology. It was the first cordon steel building in Santiago and it was basically addressed as a sort of a political act by Yende not only by placing it on the main thoroughfare but also by engaging a question of authorship where the five architects were coming from five different teams. They made a new super office that had never worked together and would never work together again and they were paid in accordance to what workers were paid and they were given credits just on a large list of people where the architects were sitting next to the workers and everyone else that basically joined a large team. That was also sort of enshrined in the large sort of a luncheon that was given when the building was topping its structure and the building basically became an emblematic piece of Salvador Yende's government, not only because it was going to be a cultural center that would become the whole for this assembly and then be a cultural center thereafter but also because of the sort of epic of building it on record time with very little technology and sort of pressure from countries outside, namely the U.S. for the Chilean economy not to be so successful to put it mildly. Yende basically celebrated the moment and the assembly was performed yet in 1972, well, 1972 the probably became a cultural center. In 1973, there was the coup and the story radically changed. In fact, the UNTAT, which was that basically opened in time and as I said, became a cultural center soon after with the possibility of becoming in fact a social condenser source including the sort of the large scale restaurant that would bring people of different interest and kind within one single space and the contribution of artists decisively to activate the project. It positioned basically the building importantly on the city of Santiago as a sort of cultural gem within the sort of a debate of a forward-looking society. But then the coup came, the government pass was bombarded, the dictatorship basically took over and Pinochet and the Junta took the building as the headquarters of the government itself. So the building suddenly, the main hall became populated by the military. The building now became the sort of an infrastructure of the military, the government palace and it was therefore completely changed in its meaning by simply encircling the building with a fence and a wall. And from that moment onwards, the building became for half the population a left wing building for the other half a right wing building. The building was also the place where the government had to concede defeat after the 1988 plebiscite and thereafter was abandoned during the sort of return of democracy until under the sort of a center left government. It was then burned after a fire, which became the start of a competition that ultimately led to the current state of a cultural center, which is called GAM, the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center and that led to a new project that here basically implied both the sort of difficulty of its legacy understood as a project in the right or in the left and suddenly became a sort of project from the sort of, I mean, at best a sort of third way left of the sort of early 2007 cutified the mega structure in order basically to both bring together the sort of right and left to a sort of slightly more tragic outcome as I think to the product was approved by Michel Bachelet happened and it was then launched and it's basically in current state of extension yet it was yet again taken by the events of barely a year ago where basically Chilean society is being shaken by a number of questions regarding what its future is and the building has been actually taken again over 50 years of representing a sort of fractured history in the Chilean imaginary. So the question of that studio was in fact can the architect operate politically but by using basically a case study that would act as a reminder not of the optimism with which we address the question but rather by reminding ourselves of the difficulties with which architects act in terms of a certain shortage of tools but the possibility of architecture not to basically define fate as a buildingness and its effect thereafter. I think I'm at the level limit of my time yet more so I will basically leave it there and if there's anything that I could wrap up I will add during the conversation. Great, thank you. Finally we can pass it on to Adriana. So I will share my screen, you see? Yeah, we can see. Okay, you see a poster, right? Yes. Okay, so thank you for inviting me to this lecture. I think the topic is very relevant and in this presentation I will lay out two questions that came to my mind when I was invited to this event and after that I will also show one project developed by Oru to inspire a conversation. Also I want to make a disclaimer I have many questions and not too many answers about the concept of agency. On a side note, I believe that the topic of agency is very relevant as I just said yet the word agency does not exist in Spanish. I don't think that the word agency will translate as poder or power in that sense it would be fruitful to think about what would be our own definition of agency especially in the Latin American context. The world is not on track. We face simultaneous crisis, a climate crisis and economic crisis, a pandemic, social inequality, and racial injustices. However, as much as we want to think architecture can change those, design fields are complicit in the social, ecological, and economic crisis. These demands are where immediate attention as we need to stop replicating and expanding them. The future will only bring more of these crisis especially under the context of climate change. For example, what happened in Texas last week. So the first question to reflect upon is what is the agency of design in the 21st century? In other words, how do we as designers respond to the simultaneous crisis that we are living? The second reflection is inspired by Enri Lefebvre's quote who says that at the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to change our intellectual approaches and tools which leads to the second question. What tools do designers need to expand on to avoid being complicit in the world's most significant problems? I believe we need to deliver design alternatives with the required urgency, but at the same time, we need to all learn and yet to expand our approaches. This entails blurring divisions, opening up to other fields of knowledge, expanding our scope. Only then will designers address today's pressing challenges. And I want to bring one lens that we have used at Oru of Fisperurban Resilience a collaborative practice where we believe design must operate and be a bridge across scales, ecosystems, social, political and economic contexts, especially in Latin America, the context in which we have mainly worked, but also context where one constantly needs to adapt. First is an introduction to our practice. My partners and myself have spent the first three years working within the government with the idea of fulfilling multiple public policy objectives. I believe this was crucial for understanding the complexities of the built environment. At Oru, during the last years, we have developed multiple projects ranging in applied research, urban design, city scale strategies, public infrastructure, landscape projects and academia. Our work is grounded as research methodology from an experimental, proactive and collective approach. Also, due to the nature of our practice, we are more familiar with public projects collaborating with governments, NGO or development banks. And depending on the scope, we regularly team up with the specialists from other teams. The project that we'll be presenting today, it's called Medium Scale Heighted Districts, a framework for testing alternative models of decentralized water management in Mexico City. This is an applied research project funded by the Mexico Innovation Fund from the Harvard-David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. It has been developed in collaboration with Anita Berizvedia, professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard GSE. And I selected this project for various reasons. First, the project emerged as a response to Mexico's Titanic water crisis, a language economic infrastructure of social and environmental challenges. Second, due to the project's research nature, there is no client. Third, to this research, we explored the notion of collaboration as design methodology. And finally, the result is a design framework as a tool for possible interventions in a complexity where no single solution will tackle the water crisis problem. This research relates to the current water management model that fundamentally needs to change, as it is based on the extraction and over-exploitation of water resources. The city relies on a massive centralized drainage system, as you can see in the left picture, while at the same time, piecemeal, uncoordinated green infrastructure efforts demonstrate no impact on the overall system. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the inequalities of a large-scale infrastructural system, rending visible that the city needs a paradigm shift from centralized water management model to a more circular, decentralized and collaborative effort to ensure a universal right, which is water access. We have used a historic area located within the central area of Mexico City as a pilot site to test ideas. It's called La Cuballa. And this diagram presents public, private, institution, and academic communities, NGOs, that are simultaneously working on this site, but without a coordinated vision. Therefore, the hybrid district responds to the lack of collective vision among scales and sectors, as interest collides between the government, developers, community members, and experts. While the centralized water system has flaws, the government-extended needs to provide water only creates space for immediate but short-range solutions. As a result, the most visible solutions ready to implement are those tested before, replicating and expanding the macro-gray infrastructure, without rethinking the system comprehensively. The short term immediately dismisses a collective loan pressure, becoming an obstacle for urban and social transformation. In sum, the hybrid district integrates green and gray infrastructures for an alternative decentralized urban water management to design strategies of reuse, treatment, retention, and infiltration of water on the scheme of core responsibility and shared governments. And how do we arrive to this? We tested our ideas using collaboration as methodology. These pictures from the workshop at Dunham in 2020, right before the pandemics. We developed the interdisciplinary workshop to lure the boundaries between government officials, designers, academia, experts, developers, and community members. We spent two days worshiping ideas together, and then we also invited everyone to the presentation to spark a conversation. We also developed interviews and an online survey. All of these to create a framework of multi-sectoral cooperation to begin to experiment with new city models. These might seem easy, but in reality, finding a common ground among the different interests is the most difficult task. With this information, instead of immediately translating into design proposals, we created the hybrid district framework, a tool to expand the conventional notion of water resources. The central premise is that the urban waters, rain, gray, and black water are a valuable resource and not waste waters, which is shown in blue. We also looked into revealing the site's hybrid history and opening up permeable green spaces. The conceptual framework translates into a set of proposals that link urban and environmental development with a water-sensitive perspective. Above on the right, you can see Takubaya today, and below, you can see Takubaya as a sponge. The design framework will be presented in our upcoming hybrid districts to vacation that will be disseminated across the city stakeholders to stay tuned for more information. Finally, I would like to propose that the transformative projects resolve from a collective effort that requires links between advocates, designers, policymakers, communities, and politicians. As designers, we need to envision experimentation processes and tools where design is a fundamental component of a long-term vision with a more integrated approach. For doing this interdisciplinary collaboration is not an option, it's the only way. Thank you. Thank you everyone for the fantastic presentations. I think that they make for a great discussion. And I'd just like to remind everyone to please join the conversation and add questions to the chat, and we will do our best to incorporate them in discussion or in the Q&A section at the end. And so to start things off, the presentations reminded me of the idea from Marilyn Strather and of that it matters what ideas we used to think other ideas with. And these different ways of looking at architecture and agency, I think really pick that question. And you've touched on this in your presentations, but I would like to just start things off with a broad question of asking you to expand on some of the ways that you would like to expand the notion of agency and architecture or the role of the architect in describing modes of practice that attend to issues such as energy, resources, community building or policy, as well as labor and material production, whether they're in discourse or practice and also if it's something that you have references that you work with as you think about these topics. Is this question for someone specific or it's an open question? It's an open question, but if you don't mind me putting you on the spot, maybe we can start with you. Okay, I think I'm on the spot. So you mentioned many things, but I think that I like a lot what Lisa mentioned about the legacies that have not been taken. I think that we are carrying a lot of legacies in the architecture field. We saw the example from the modernist times and I think that there are so many practices and knowledge that we need to learn in order to rebuild our tools and look into it future because we are now in a completely different panorama where we are facing different traits especially in the future with climate change. So how are we going to cope because everything in the world needs to systemically change? So how are we going to shake these legacies and rethink our future? Yeah, if I can just add to that. I think one of the questions that comes up for me sometimes in my courses where I'm trying to deal directly with this question of the spatial paradigm that we continue to replicate over and over again is some of my students will sometimes ask why in a course about climate change I wanna look backwards and I wanna look at some of these architects that everyone's saying don't look at them, right? They're part of the problem and we have to sort of expand our view of architecture beyond the movie players but I think that what happened in that time is that they put in place a very specific legacy and a very specific way that is like certain conceptions of space that because of what happened internally to architectural discourse throughout the 20th century and the way that the conversation around the death of modernism occurred, it kind of obscured some of the basic assumptions that then have continued to carry through all the way to today and that different permutations of architectural discourse have not ultimately disturbed them. And so I think that the moment of carbon modernity doesn't begin with the modernists. It really begins when you have the beginning of industry and the beginning of cities starting to change based on the growth of economies that were based on extraction and in that case, we have to think about the legacy of colonialism and how slavery was a form of harnessing energy that created a model of economic growth that is the foundation for our fossil fuel economy of today. So in my mind, I think we cannot necessarily find very much agency unless we really understand the roots of the problem, otherwise we're going to continue to replicate it. And so that's why one of the reasons why I tend to look backwards instead of forwards in a conversation often around environmental issues is because I think that one of the basic problems in architecture is that we're replicating the same model. And I think we have to, if we don't understand that model then we have very little chance of breaking through it. If I can add very briefly, Gabriel, in my case, basically I present that rather than deal with contemporary issues which are changing the nature of the problem, I think my take was rather one of trying to define a brief for teaching that would allow me to establish a conversation between the questions today and the questions the last time we addressed it as a field 50 years ago in the early 70s in a post-68 moment where there was probably the last moment of discussion of architecture and politics and whether instead of starting from scratch, again, as we often do as architects, we could really build up from the knowledge of the field that was basically produced then. So rather than deal with specific circumstances today, I was simply trying to engage a question as it was left off in the past. And therefore, rather than start with a sort of optimistic approach that architecture has the ability to do many things, to start from the rather skeptical moment where the debate was left off after 68 when many architects, in fact, either defined, to say, went away from the professional commission and defined alternative practices, like, I mean, the famous super studio Arquisum that defined counter design as a mode of finding compatibility between the trade that were trained to perform and their political ideals, or, I mean, from Arquisum as opposed to the sort of server on the wave into the 80s, or basically those who decided to sort of abandon architecture altogether because there was no way of recuperating it from the power it basically served. It was deemed that architect was slow and expensive in implied concentrations of power and capital. Therefore, it would have enormous difficulties in offering an alternative to what the status quo was offering. In fact, Lefebvre was the one who mentioned that architect was a projection on space of the status quo. So how could architecture be anything but the projection on space of the status quo? So of course, my tick was not deliberately pessimistic but simply trying to build up from the moment of skepticism and cashing in on the fact that I'm older than my students and my students should be more optimistic than I am. And therefore, my game was to try to be proven wrong, which I think I was. Although I cannot tell for sure because the building was not built, that's half of the job. I think if I could just add one thing to that because it makes me want to ask a question about where agency is located during the process of architecture is coming into being because I think Enrique, a big premise of your presentation is that once the building is in place, there's no telling what will happen to it. And so there is a way in which a building once built has no agency. So that's part of the argument, I assume. And so I'm just wondering if going to also what Adriana was saying in terms of a process versus an object if there's a difference in locating agency there in the moment that an architectural concept is formulated, the potential to resist something maybe emerges there and instead of maybe once architecture is built but I wonder what you think about this and whether there's a possibility for a building to have agency after it's built once it's in place. Shall I go or Adriana? I think. I mean, you sort of set us up for Enrique because you set us a problem where the building gets taken over by Pinochet, so. Right, in fact, yeah, I mean, it's a tragic outcome. It's even more tragic right after, I mean, what basically happened, the way in which the new left digested and hid the old left or it was a shame by it was, this was before the financial crisis were basically all the techniques of a cutification were applied to a mega structure in order to hide it from the shame of the ideals that it represented earlier. But anyway, I think your point is very important that once a building is built, it's beyond the architect's ability to sort of inscribe a new world. So basically it implies in almost imitation that architecture ultimately means not in terms of what the architect inscribed as a building that hence the open work or it's not used as the architect expected or inscribed in the building but everything is in the end open ended. So architecture has a sort of shortage of tools but of course the setup is not to claim that architecture is not the right field to perform politically but to simply tune up our expectations. And therefore sort of scrutinize in depth what the architect can do. And I think it's not only the agency of architect the agency of the architect, what the architect can do. It's a really, it's a difficult problem but I think as my goal as a teacher therefore was to set up a difficult problem that would remind the student of the outcome every time you were basically addressing it. You were there, you had the, you were dealing, you were expanding the building that was reminding you of how stale a building could be. Erika is a follow up maybe also wanting to add the question or the word authorship that you touch a little bit in your presentation. So I wonder if the panelists could talk a little bit about just today's phenomenon of the architect with the capital letter A that claims authorship and recognition versus this idea maybe of relinquishing this authorship. You start touching a little bit maybe in the octet that start happening a little bit because the collective work. So maybe my question is does giving away authorship provide a lensing to power to the collective or public or community or are we in this pitfall that we don't know what's gonna happen after? Right, should I go again or I feel I'm sort of skipping. I mean, I think it's a very good point, Alice but the basic it's we have to question notions of authorship also authorship as delivering meaning as was basic question in the sixties but still lingers. But authorship as I think let's say the legacy of that project is on the one hand yeah the building and its story and by the fact that we can actually refer to some of the knowledge that we derive from it in terms of how the building was created, how the in fact the authorship was granted what we learn from the building as not only as a sort of finished object but the process of making it and the ideas that went into it and were debated and open up our field to some extent. So I think probably that also is another way of returning to Elisa's question which one way of addressing the question not always seeing as the building as a final object to which every procedural move is conducive. In other words, the authorship of the building on the one hand, the authorship is completely distorted by the outcome what happened to the building. That's basically another form of authorship but on the other hand, it was an extraordinary effort that we still know about and we can still discuss and that basically shed light on the way in which we can operate as architects. I think another question about this is also just how we use our knowledge of built form and how we think not just about architecture but also about building practices and the figure of the architect as we know it today is a modern construct. It's a recent, I should say modern with a lower case M and recent. And so there for long periods of time were civilizations with no architects as we think of them today but we're still engaging in architecture in some way whether it would have been like some of the great works of architecture that we now understand through archeological records or simply through the simple structures of shelter that would develop their own techniques of construction that were responsive to an environment or that were responsive to local ecologies. So architecture has existed for longer than the architect as we understand the figure. And so I think that the question of authorship is also one that's new and that we have to understand in relation to all of the constructs around the architectural object as authored which is paired especially now with the idea of the architectural architect is modified but I think that there's a way in which the knowledge that we have of the built environment and of building systems can still be useful. And I think that we can not simply erase the figure of the architect but think of the architect as someone that engages in the production of knowledge about the form. And we might ask different questions about how that knowledge is shared or we might create sort of like open access building systems and things like that that then get replicated in a community and that sort of take a life of their own. And so there are things that we can also teach. We don't have to build everything ourselves and design everything ourselves for architecture still to happen. And I think architects can still embed themselves into building practices, practices plural and in that way think about alternative modes of practice. Yeah, I totally agree with that because I believe that the concept of authorship it's even if it's new I think it's rearchike meaning that we are the architect that will arrive as a savior and we'll get these magnificent building that will change everything. I think that in the current society, if you have that, I mean, you are very privileged. I think that the norm is that we need to understand how to operate in a completely different setting and to understand, okay, what is what interests is the project serving by doing that with our design however we are complicit in replicating certain practices that have created many problems in the first wave for example, erasure of communities or social injustices, ecological damage just for the sake of constructing a piece of art. So I think that we need to be more thoughtful and thinking about the process not the process of design but the whole process of how do you get to the project? How do you decide who's making the project? How do you decide what type of project you want? So I mean, you need to see it in a more larger span of time. Also in the buildings for example, you have appropriation you have the construction but then at certain point you need to think about maintenance and I mean these infrastructures especially if they are public they have a larger lifespan that the ones we have and the building will live more than the time that we are working. So how do we create a process when you can create a longer term visions and engage with topics as ecology and climate change? I think it's very relevant at this point especially for students that are coming right now and starting right now I think we need to engage with these topics but the question is how we do it? I think that that's what I'm not completely sure. We have a question from Abraham, if you want to jump in. Thank you, Elisa, Andrika and Adriana for those wonderful presentations and thank you, you all know us for putting this event together. So I'm Abraham, I'm a second year here at the Yale School of Architecture and my question is a step away from but I think tangentially related to what you're the topic of agency and I'm curious to hear each of your takes on the concept of latinidad and how that shows up in each of or it doesn't show up in your work specifically and I'm wondering is there room in architecture for latinidad? Well, I think that maybe finding a common ground on what latinidad is maybe you can explain a little bit more what do you understand by that? Yeah, and I'm glad you asked that because I think the issue with putting panels like this together is that oftentimes people think that communities are monolithic and based on all your presentations it's clear that you each have a very different approach to architecture and built form. So for me, I'm really just curious on what latinidad means to each of you because I understand that everyone has their own definition of latinidad but I'm also curious to see how identity shows up in your work specifically in relation to the Latin American diaspora. It sounds like you're asking can I interpret your question to me what is our relationship to a Latin American heritage in our work? Or how does it show up in your work or doesn't show up? Yeah, I mean, I can speak to that. I mean, I think so in the past few years I've been lucky enough to work with a community on the border, the community is called San Ysidro and it's right up against the US-Mexico border very close to where I grew up. So it's been a really amazing opportunity to work in this place that is one that was very formative for me. I grew up on the border and very much was always dealing with the Mexican side and American side, always crossing one side to the other, not just crossing the physical border but even in my own identity. And so it's been a real pleasure to be able to work there because it's a site that has been very formative for me and the border is something that I think has very much shaped my own concepts of territory, the arbitrariness of that line and just having to deal with its extreme spatial ramifications while confronting its pure arbitrariness and the pure abstraction of it. And so that I think the border itself is certainly something that from an early age was formative in terms of trying to think through the relationships between space and politics and form. But then also in working with these communities with this nonprofit in particular, we're in conversations with them about helping them with the community land trust. And so there for me, one of the questions that we've really engaged with them there is to ask how building occurs in the community. They want to have an anti gentrification strategy. They want to build. And so a lot of what we've been asking is how do you build without development? What's development without developers look like and what does density without displacement look like? And so in those conversations, we very much started to talk about the mobilization of social labor and have worked with many presidents from Latin America. And one that has been central to us is the president of the MINGA, which is a workers cooperative from the Quechua people. And so thinking about these questions of cooperatives and sort of alternative modes of organizing economies for us, Latin America provides many alternatives. And so I think the question of how society is organized and understanding it in a Latin American context is a way in which we've been able to really think about that in practice. I also wanted to touch a little bit while Adriana started talking about the savior mentality and the archaic mentality of that. Last summer, Jisab had a lot of discussions about our housing studio and how approaching the Bronx community, for example, where the site was located. So in my year, the approach maybe didn't render a super sensitive approach, I believe that they make efforts to improve this top down view as the idea of the savior to a more collaborative approach to work within the territory. So maybe a first part question of that is how do we identify the client and who's the builder in a broader sense? When I was in Erica's studio, we spent a lot of the time questioning who is the client in our project and Adriana talked, the project that doesn't have a client. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit. Sometimes in the community, the client, the community becomes a client and sometimes it's also the builder. So I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. So I think that we, I think we need to be innovative about our practices because conventional practices will have conventional clients and I understand there's obviously a value for that and it's the way we work. But also if we consider the community our client, I don't think the community is a client. I think we need to build that relationship with the place that we are working and the context that we are working. And so that we engage because at the end, these places have links to social patterns. They have linked to ecological patterns also as, for example, if you're building on a ground that valuable thought or thinking about climate change and these things. Also if you're looking into economics, maybe you would be building a project that will regenerate the economy by building the project, you generate jobs. So I think that we must expand what's the impact of the project and connecting the dots. I see more the role of the architect or family here or connecting the dots between different agencies, different persons, stakeholders, however you wanna call it in the ground because I think we have the ability to visualize. So I think it's also the power of visualization and the narratives that we bring into the project are very important as well. I'd like to follow up with one idea. I think that relates to, will we just discuss Abraham's question as well, which is I think an idea of regulation within the Latin American context. I think it's clear to people who have practiced in Latin America that there is a different kind of regulation and much more relaxed regulation. And I just wanted to know like, what do you think about the value of that in thinking about expanded boundaries and practice and discourse? Versus, for example, working within the United States. I mean, that I being from Tijuana as well can recognize a distinct difference between working on one side or the border and another. Well, I can respond. Look, I don't wanna take the stage, but no one was speaking. So I'll take the term. But I think that this idea that Latin America has the rules, I think it's not true. I think there are norms and I think we need to operate them. There might be more relaxed, but I think there's a system in place. And the concept that might be useful was one that I mentioned at the beginning. It's, I think that this context of crisis, obviously I have this in mind because we are living this precise time in the pandemic and we have been already for a year, almost in few days, maybe we have been in our houses. But I think that in Latin America, we had experienced different crisis before even the pandemic in Mexico heated 10 years ago or so. We had economic crisis. We have disasters as we live in Mexico. We have to coast. So every year we have hurricanes. We have heard about social inequality. So I think it's how to deal with these very relevant topics that are in place in our communities, how to engage with the government in order to bring out ideas. I think that also the architecture and politics, it's very present. Enriquez portrays one vision of it, of how politics really influence even the use of the space. And I think that as architects, we need to engage more and be more politically active, sometimes not in the role of designers, sometimes in the role of activists. I think I would also be wary of associating a lack of regulation with more freedom. I would be wary of that for a couple of reasons. And I think the larger question is, what kind of sort of social contracts are we working with in general? And I think Texas right now is the perfect example of a discourse around deregulation, allowing things, but it really depends on how that then plays out, right? And it really depends on who grabs power in that deregulated environment. And often there isn't really deregulation. They're simply regulation in favor of a certain party. So I think the question is, how do we think more expansive we around the terms of engagement? And I think in architecture, we can ask that. And I think bringing in, for example, questions around the environment is central to that. We have to change the terms of engagement. So we're not simply measuring the value of architecture according to its economic potential, but we also have to measure it against all of these other things. We have to think about the well-being of people. And we have to think about the relationship between different social groups that exist within the building, right? So I mean, there are just all these questions that I think the question is not like, do we control more or less? I think the question is more, how do we think about the terms of engagement and what kind of rules do we produce that can maximize at least some sort of equal footing when there's tension in the built environment? Because there is no such thing as consensus and there is no such thing as sort of an easy sort of contestation of space, right? It's always, there's always a kind of agonism. And so I think the question is, what are the institutions that we build that can maximize democratic discussion around what the built environment should be and democratic practices around the production of the built environment? Not to say that exists more here than in Latin America, but just in general, I think the question of rules is an important one. Well, that kind of leads into another question that we were thinking about, which is the idea of a relationship between agency and mandate. So, you know, often in practice, the issue of agency is circumscribed by a client-centric economic mandate. So I'd like to hear what you think about how one practices within an economic paradigm that is a constant and intractable threat to, for example, ecological stability. That's the question. I just want to note the round table. That's, in fact, it is, I think the core of the issue is the professional agreement. That's, yeah, the mandate. That's where the basically, the architect has the ability to say, no, I don't do it, or yes, I do it. And if you do it, to find the way in which you can actually operate to be more or less in tune with your own principles and operate sort of, yeah, we operate within constraints. And then you might be able to move through them in such a way that you find the outcome is compatible with your position on the world. I think that was at least what I was trying to aim at. And so some of the examples in the 60s, let's say the whole Italian debate or the so French debate after the 60s, many thought that it was impossible to sort of work professionally without giving up your goals that it was, and therefore many decided not to do it. So I think the question has to do with your own position on the world. That's, to me, the question of agency is one of the persons standing in the world. These are her vision and principles. And how do you operate, whether you decide to do it or not? And if you do, how? And it's... Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. Well, I was just gonna agree with you. And really just say that I think that this question of refusal is a really important one, but also I think one of the reasons why it's very difficult in architecture to engage in refusal is this feeling that the machine will continue without us and that construction will happen without us and or someone else will simply take the job. And so another thing that I feel like we have to add is the importance also for architects to organize and really work together because that's where the act of refusal begins to have power. And so I've been saying for a long time that I really wanna organize a luxury condo strike. Nobody built any more luxury condos. And I say it sort of ingest, but also I'm very serious. I think that these are the kinds of things that we have to really consider because these are the things that we continue to replicate, right? We have these, not only the particular mode of production involved in building that kind of typology but also the typology itself, right? And the economy that it's embedded into. So there's so many aspects of it that are replicating the paradigm even if you put solar panels on it, even if you insulate it so that it's more energy efficient. And so to me, that's at the heart of this problem is really reconsidering what the construction of architecture entails and what our role is in that. And seeing that these things will kind of happen almost on their own whether we participate or not I think is one of the reasons why there's an enormous feeling of lack of agency but I think that the more we bring that to the conscious level and the more as a discipline and as a profession we grapple with it directly, the more I think we can engage in these acts of refusal which I think are extremely important. Right, if I could add something I think the act of refusal has two conditions. One, it's how you stand in the world vis-a-vis your own principles regardless of the effect it may have because in fact, it was as Elisa mentioned a sort of old cliche was okay if I say no someone else will do it but that didn't imply that you would be sort of sleeping well at night if you said yes I will do it because otherwise someone else will do it. So one is the way in which you stand vis-a-vis the world. The other one is whether that will have an effect on the world. I think it's more likely to sort of achieve the first the former than the latter. The latter is a difficult one. Although Elisa is right. Yeah, if you can actually get to such an act of refusal a coordinated one which is more thinkable today than it was 10 years ago it definitely would have an effect. Now of course, that effect has to do with the agency of architecture but not the agency of the building. But again, that's so it's still and it would qualify as sort of alternative practice as well that architects have basically since the cornerstone of the problem is the professional practice and the fact that architecture that the Arctic serve someone in power that represents capital and that is quite unlikely that through his or her work would basically undermine or subvert the power that that represents. Arctic have actually expanded the field to operate in different ways. I mean, counter-design was precisely that super studio or Argyzum said no stop cities basically a product which uses drawing which is cheap and fast as a way of showing the ways in which society's unfolding the contradictions of our society by virtue of architectural knowledge and drawing. So it's architectural and part of the field but it operates in a different way than if you were engaging building which is slow and in fact, slow enough for the political realm to completely change over the course of the eight years that a building takes. But in addition to that it implies concentration of power and capital. So I think Gabriel that's, I think look the question let's take here, I would say. But what about the idea, for example how hard is that line? Is there a space for the idea as well that within the active refusal there's also an idea of using current systems or subverting current systems. The kind of the idea that in expanding practice there's also the idea of strategy and the idea of the architectural trick appropriating common forms of production in order to then instill different agendas. True, I agree. And in fact, I think part of the conversation has to do precisely with what you're pointing to which is that the Arctic's ability to really read finding the conditions under which he or she works. In other words, the set of constraints under which you work to see whether there are spaces of operation space of freedom with space of subversion or spaces of undermining systems. But often these are rhetorical and as such they're sort of bound to the same outcomes buildings where basically meaning is changed instantly. So, but I agree. Yeah, at the level of strategies where this finds its potential. And really reading, yeah it's basically ultimately agencies about finding the when which you operate within a series of circumstances and conditions that are specific, which I would also claim that in that respect it would be also important to going back to the previous two questions to understand that the South America is not cohesive. So the conversation is really about reading finally circumstances that change enormously from one condition to another. I believe that the inverting way sometimes we are obsessed with building and getting done all the projects that we get. But on the other hand, I think would be very brave to not only to refuse the project but also to think about what are the consequences of the designs that we are doing. For example, I've seen projects that are built in natural areas that are conservation areas that you shouldn't be building there. And there are some luxury buildings placed there for the sake of connecting with nature which I don't think you are connecting with nature you're destroying nature. Or for example, we have to admit that concrete is one of the materials that pollute the most. And we are using concrete for our buildings. Buildings use energy. And the energy it's also one of the causes that we are now in the midst of the climate change crisis. So we are relating to these classes and how are we going to not replicate them but maybe a concept of not building anything new in cities. Maybe that it's very radical but maybe it's something that we can think how to work with it's already in place why we need to continue expanding cities and metropolitan areas horizontally. Maybe we can start to fill out the voids inside the cities. I don't know. I think that in thinking where the project comes from and what is the impact in the long term not only with the society but with the planet I think that is very important. Yes, if I may follow up on that thinking of agencies and act of expanding possibilities was also an act of refusal. In the convention of some point in his lecture how can we position ourselves this of the building which function or purpose has changed but it also brings the question how can we position ourselves in relationship to a curriculum that hasn't changed because to get to the point of being the architect we need to go through architectural education. So I was just wondering if you can elaborate on what different kind of mechanisms can we put in place to reach that to bridge the gap between how architects are educated versus how we practice. I think this is a central question for all schools as we think about how we're going to engage in the climate crisis and everything that's happening but I also think that sometimes it's tempting to think that architecture itself is the problem and I think that the relationship between architecture and its larger context has become problematic but that doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to make a building. And I think that there's a question in my mind which is how does knowledge of how to make a building empower you in this context to have agency because if you have knowledge of how something happens you also have a better opportunity to understand how it might be different. And I think that's very important and I also think that power plays out in space and so we as architects part of our education is to learn to see space in a particular way that's different from other disciplines that work in the built environment. So we're different from engineers in that way and we're different from contractors in that way and we're different from craftspeople in that way in that a very central element is to see space and to see form. And if the more we educate ourselves also about these other dynamics around economy and power and inequality, I think the more we are able to correlate that to how it plays out in space and have a very unique point of view in terms of what needs to change. So I think, for example, in the discourse around transforming built environments relative to the climate crisis, one of the paradigmatic and most problematic examples of carbon form is the suburb. But a lot of the proposals by environmentalists around the transformations of suburbs often lack this sort of spatial aspect, right? And so I think as a result, a lot of the environmental proposals for suburbs end up being or at least operating not at the deeper level, right? It might be around energy efficiency of the home or it might be around solar panels or it might be around walkability of streets or bikeability to a certain extent. But the question of how you fully transform the suburbs so that it becomes something else is something that an architect through their knowledge of the built world can contribute to in a unique way. So as important as it is for architects to educate themselves as widely as possible to understand the context in which we operate as comprehensively as possible, I think it's also very important to know our own feel very well. Otherwise, I think we accidentally replicate the things that are problematic with architecture. Or that are problematic about architecture, I should say. I would second, I would second, at least I'm both in her corner but also in celebrating your question that I think it's as decisive as the previous one. I also believe that basically, yeah, you learn, you learn your education somehow is doomed to being a bit slow in relation to where you apply it. And I think that's part, it's sort of definitional that we sort of learn the sort of series of debates and conversations within our field, we know it well enough to basically have the ability to raise questions and to understand the way in which emerging conditions in the world redefine what we do but also the way in which we can actually rethink the way in which architecture engages the world. So in other words, we have the ability to raise questions precisely because we have a knowledge of the field but that implies often that what we teach is out of touch slightly with the contemporary. In other words, we teach to raise questions and in order to do that, we must teach things that are a bit slow in relation to engaging. That's the nature of teaching. And then basically, yeah, somebody who sort of, you teach the ability to raise questions and in order to do that, you basically have to instill a sort of knowledge of the field as that Elisa was emphasizing. But do you think that the teaching is slow or somehow the execution of architecture is slow? Because I think one thing that we do constantly in architecture school is that we behave in school as though architects do have agency. We ask students to write their own briefs. We ask them to select the constituency of the housing that they're designing. We ask them to set the terms for the architecture coming into being. That's not something that happens. And so I think that that is an essential pedagogical tool for understanding architecture's power but I'm not sure how that gets taken up afterwards. And so in many ways, I think that school, it can be slow in some ways in that perhaps it's sort of our own history is heavy on our shoulders in an academic setting. But at the same time, I think that there's a potential in an academic setting that doesn't exist. And what I see, I think more often with my students is a kind of impatience because in school we're behaving as though architects have agency. And then there's this knowledge that when we go out there, we don't. Right. I think it's a difficult question but I would say that architecture is a slow field. I mean, if let's say, if we acknowledge that buildings play an important role within our field and buildings take six, eight years to be built. In other words, the architectural knowledge is developed at a sort of slow base. We tend, let's say academia, funny enough is faster than the field. I would say that we have to come to terms with a number of definitional things such as the fact that architecture is slow as field. That gives us enormous advantage as well. We can actually be extremely thoughtful about how our field engages the world and also digest the questions that are emerging as they have it with a different speed. I think part of my presentation had to do with the fact that for instance, the question on architectural politics that has been discussed intensely over the past few years has never engaged the last moment at which that discussion was taken by the field. So we started from scratch. It's always like that. We always start from scratch. We forget and then we engage and then five years later, we get bored and we change. That's the nature of our academic setting. We are very, very, we try to be a bit too fast but also we tend to be very not too patient with the topics. Of course, what I'm saying is not terribly popular or exciting, but I do believe that slowness is a sort of a condition of architecture and probably an important attribute to sort of a nourish in academia. Actually, I think that this concept of slowness, it could be good to have it in practice because the reality at least my personal experience is that when you get a project, you need to really fast. You don't have time to think. Reality, you need to respond. If you're working with a department, okay, you need to decide in two months ready for construction. So I think that this idea of the immediacy and that everything will get built very fast whereas the slowness of we have time to think about it and reflect them. I think that's something that could happen in academia and I see also the academia as a place of experimentation. In my mind, I feel completely that we need to have all the skills rather than just learn to draw an autocad about this in my experience. We need to be able to have a discussion about economy, about politics, about the environment, to have other terms of knowledge that we are not learning. I think that maybe learning more multidisciplinary doesn't mean that we are now gonna be scientists and understand everything or economists because I don't think that's our role but maybe finding these common grounds in which we can start to be part of the decision-making processes at least in the maybe political realms, also in the financial realms. Sometimes we are just expecting to get the project as a commission, but if we could transform the project from a larger perspective when the break was thought or decided to be done, I think that we could have some influence because I think we do have an agency or a say in these projects but if we cannot engage with the conversations with the other, if we're working in silos, I don't think we will get farther enough. I don't think there's also a problem from architecture. I think that the other disciplines are also working in their silos and that we need to blur that especially right now. Well, it also becomes difficult to engage the problems that our work might cause in these other areas if we're not familiar with the other areas. So I think that's one of the most important reasons to have a really comprehensive understanding of the ecological crisis and of ecological dynamics because architecture acts upon ecosystems very actively. And so without a working knowledge of that sort of thing, we cannot help but create this kind of damage. So I think that in that sense, knowledge is agency because you are able to not only make a choice if you design it one way or another, but even in the first place, see the problem. And you can't have agency if you don't in the first place see the problem. I think that will be a really nice way of wrapping up at least sort of a Foucault sort of paraphrase that knowledge is agency and in fact, because it also reaffirms what you claimed before about education. I do believe it's a really extraordinary line to sort of emphasize the interesting enough the fact that as a conversation, I feel that it has actually worked quite a bit. We address different topics. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm a guest and it looks as if I was wrapping up and it's not my role. But I... I was about to, so that's perfect. But I must say that I feel extraordinarily rewarded by seeing that we address very different questions in our presentation that suddenly through the questions and the conversation, a number of topics are really overlapping quite fast actually because I tend to think it happens over time. These are difficult questions and they deserve, in fact, the time to build up the knowledge. Yes. Yes. That was a great wrap up. But I would like to ask if the panelists and the guests could stay a little bit more because we're a little over time where we wanted to touch in some questions that appeared in the chat if that's okay. Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, I think, I don't know if Brian is there if he wants to ask or I can also read. As Peggy Dramas suggests, should we drop the title architect to open up potential for other forms of agency as shift societal roles? Retraining the public to understand that we don't just design buildings for a conception is more difficult than we positioning ourselves entirely around other forms of spatial intelligence. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that there is an important question as to what architectural work is thought to be versus what it is. And one example I will give of that that I think is really important is simply the development around environmental legislation right now and the conversation around the Green New Deal. A lot of it centers around the built environment but I don't know of any legislator that has reached out to architects to really help shape some of this conversation. And so I think that there are many examples like that where the perception of what architectural labor is or what architectural expertise is from the public is limited. And as a result, I don't think we're necessarily thought of as people who can really help in this moment of transition and it's in a conversation around policy. We could still, I think without being policy makers have a lot of knowledge that is worth sharing. If I could add something, I would, I'm skeptical of changing terms rather than the thing. So in other words, the rhetorical act of changing dropping the name architect rather than addressing the way in which we operate as architects. In that respect, very much I'm the follower basically what Lampedusa said, that basically everything must change so that nothing changes and extraordinarily skeptical of the symbolic change that it allows for everything to go on as it was. So I'd rather scrutinize the architect rather than the word. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think in the end, it's more a question of asking what architectural expertise is and what it is that we can share rather than sort of dissolving the idea of the architect. I think that's actually we share a lot of things with other disciplines that are not precisely called architecture but for example, with landscape architecture with urban design, with urban planning. I think that most of them are, that's why I like to say more about maybe the design field maybe that's more big but it doesn't encapsulate your landscape architect and your parks, your planner and your zoning and your architect and your building because I think the architect or the designer has the ability to go across your scales. So work at a larger scale and be part of a Green New Deal proposal for example, or working on a specific design. I think that it's also a matter of what are the interests of which practice or how can we build new modes of practice that we'll engage not with the traditional field but with a more expanded notion of what design is and what is the relationship to the world. When I add another question from, we have a question from Andrew that says, do you think architecture has a lot to learn from the discipline of landscape architecture which often prioritizes process over objects? Yeah, I think that if in this design field we start to blur the boundaries, I think we can learn more from the landscape architects in the process, in ecology, we can learn more for public policy in planning. I think that for me, I think that actually that's a way that we have worked within Auto. I don't think we fit into the traditional architecture field and I think that it's, we feel comfortable with that actually. We have another question by Luis Miguel on the subject of language specifically to Adriana's point about the complicated translation of agency into the Spanish language. I'm wondering what the panelists thoughts are on implications of agency and authorship of unarchitecture writing. I'm not sure I understand the question. Is the question to say, are the questions of agency and authorship different when one is writing about architecture as opposed to designing? Yeah, it's about writing architecture. Architecture seems the word agency doesn't translate into Spanish or Portuguese. I think we can, that's an interesting exercise to come up with our word and because it's not agencia, poder, so I don't know if we'll get to that word today but I think it would be interesting you having in mind. I mean, I think on that note, I think we can wrap up and that's actually a very good exercise for each of us to take home. I just wanted to thank our three panelists and our student moderators Alice and Dave on behalf of the El Noma. Thank you for providing your time and I think it was a very fruitful conversation. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. If you could ask the panelists to stay for a tiny bit. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Thank you.