 Hello, everyone. I just like to do a quick welcome to the Columbia GSAP Advanced Studio Six Faculty Projects Talks session. So this is a type of session that's part of our series of studio-wide events and it's meant to explore connections between professors' work in their offices and the studio topics in that professor's exact studio and studio-wide topics. More specifically in recent semesters we've been exploring the themes of architecture and environment on the one hand and maybe more in a more focused way climate change at the building scale and in this particular talk I think we're going to see some great examples of that kind of work and that kind of thinking from some people who you know well. So Stephen Hall of Stephen Hall Architects and Matthias Schuler of TransSolar need no introduction in this school, in this context and I'm very happy to welcome them to generously give us their time for this lecture entitled Ecologics at Stephen Hall Architects 1992 to 2020. So welcome Stephen and Matthias. Thank you. We have a small video. Matthias is coming from Stuttgart and it's what time is it there in Stuttgart? It's 11.30 in the evening. So he's going to the well for us and I have a four-minute video which shows you where this is coming from and then we can start the talk. Let's start with that four-minute video if we can play that showing you. I made this video for the Italians in a couple of architecture schools wondering what we're doing at this moment. This is my watercolor hut right at the edge of Round Lake looking at a 29 acre spring-fed lake in the woods. This is the little Tesseract addition of this house from 1952 was made in 2001 and that's my studio in the center. That big window that looks out and here in the foreground is the podium for tea space poets readings. This is a design studio for my painting and my architecture and we're busy on a project right now in Korea for a school and this is the site plan. It's a competition. It's a school for underprivileged teenagers in Korea competition. It's due in about four weeks so I'm in the middle of doing drawings for this. Some of the earlier drawings here you can see in watercolors and the way I work is I draw on these five by seven watercolor pads and then we I take a picture of them and send them to my team in Beijing and my team in New York and we're very happy to be working on this competition. We also have a project that went back on site in Shanghai. This is a health center and a cultural center in Shanghai. People are back on site on the construction site. So it's very exciting project going on and we're doing a prison initiative pavilion for Bard. Right over here you can see some models. These are some of the study models and I just presented this virtually last week to Leon Botstein the president and the trustees at Bard. This is a little prison initiative pavilion that will also have an exhibition space and a public event space at Montgomery Place near Rimec. So one of the great things about working up here is I do everything. You can see the wonderful view from my table. Here's my table. I'm going to get up early in the morning and work on five by seven water power pads. There's the Korea project and I work on these and then we send them to the team and then they send back three dimensional views. You can see the projects that are going on in our office. The Franklin and Marshall fine arts building that site has been delayed because of the virus. The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton that site is on delay because of the virus Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. I Carbon X and Chen Zhen is back on site and under construction. That's our archive building here which has just been finished. Taiwan Necropolis is back under construction. This is the building I showed you earlier that health center and cultural center in Shanghai is back under construction. These are competitions that we recently lost. This is building that is on hold right now. We're also working on the Dublin Creative Design Center in Dublin, Ireland and a concert hall that we won in Ostrava Czech Republic. Those projects are going on because they have schedules and everything is being done online. So the people are working in teams working very well with Zoom and we have weekly meetings. So all of our deadlines have not been postponed because of the crisis. So those things are going on. So we're very fortunate to have a global operation where some things are in Asia and are coming back on and other things are in Europe and they're in certain let's say categories. But I think it's also a time of reading and I've been reading for example the poems of Paul Salon or rather dark figure. But I think the poetry is appropriate or even the homage to Robert Frost by Joseph Bronski or Rilke. Rilke is always great at a time of rethinking things. And I think that's the kind of time we're in. So Matthias, we're so glad that you're joining us. And what I was hoping is that like on many of these, there's a lot of technical, we're going to do quite a number of projects quite rapidly. I think it should be taking 30 minutes. So I just wanted to read something that I wrote this morning. Ecologic is invented to bracket on environmental architectural work since 1998. And we have pushed these projects ecologically resisting all fossil fuels. In our current crisis, we must not forget the fight for our global climate. Perhaps we are inside the moment of a revolution like action. If the French Revolution, according to Hegel, for the first time, man dared to turn himself upside down to stand on his head and on thought and to build reality according to it. Now, it's nature. It's a natural history we need to wake up to. And Hannah Arendt wrote, modern philosophy, studying with Hegel has succumbed to the strange illusion that man in distinction from all other things has created himself. And I like what Arvo Park, the composer, said to a Spanish newspaper, I think it was yesterday, the coronavirus has shown us that humanity is a single organism. And he said, in a way, it has sent us all back to the first grade. Anyway, I would go now chronologic and reverse chronology. The projects get bigger and bigger. Of course, this is just according to chronology. This is just finished. And it's our architectural archive and research library. We built based on an idea of bracketing, which means it threads through the trees. And we had to build this super economically. So I acted as the engineer, the architect. And I'm sorry to say, Matthias, I was the HVAC engineer. You know, I decided on a single well, 500 feet deep, which was a closed loop, a new, where a bundle of fingers takes the temperature. And it's working. But I took all the lessons we learned in the X of N house, the radiant concrete floors, six inches on center with the correct installation. I'm very proud to say that this building is performing brilliantly on a single well. It was about 10 degrees outside, and it was like 72 degrees inside. The walls are super insulated. There's a minimum number of windows. The VLUX skylights were donated by the VLUX Corporation. But you see that concrete radiant floor is riding on an insulation slab. And once that building heats up, the geothermal well maintains the heat. So here in Rindback, also in Princeton, we're doing the Rubenstein commons for the advanced study. This is a place where Einstein served his last 10 years. It's a very important building that David Rubenstein donated. And it was based on the concept of space curves, the notion of space that is made up of two intersecting curves. So the whole pavilion, then, is geothermal heated and cooled with 20 wells. Right, Matthias, 20 wells? Yes, 20 wells. Yes. And Matthias led this one all the way through. And it's been a little bit delayed right now due to our problem with the class, but it's going to be opening probably in about six months. There you see the inside from a couple of weeks ago. And this is a very prominent position. It's on Einstein Drive. So in a way, it's merging with the landscape, and it'll redefine that entrance to the Institute for Advanced Studies. I'm very honored to have won this in a competition against some very important other architects. There you can see a diagram of Matthias' work. Do you want to say anything to that diagram, Matthias? Yeah, it certainly shows the connection on one side. We see the closed loop of the geothermal system, and we connect to improve the efficiency of the heat pump. It was radiant system, so we have radiant floors for heating and cooling because with the lowest heating temperature and the highest cooling temperature, we can serve the rooms by this radiant system. And I think that's quite important that you always connect the source to the related system. Well, there's a little drone view from a few weeks ago. This is the Kennedy Center. In fact, if you go on Instagram today, you'll see we just posted a new film of this. I think it's about, how long is that for? About 10 minutes. Anyway, this was a really exciting competition to win against, I won't name the names, and our concept was to, instead of adding on to the 1972 building against it, to go underground and link everything in the design process. We couldn't float the pavilion from our competition entry that we proposed to float in the Potomac River, and I made this sketch. I made this sketch, and I had to show this. You can see now that at the bottom of the river pavilion is up on ground, but we got a bridge connecting over the highway. So we got our river side connection. And I made this sketch. And Deborah, the director of the museum said, you have to speak to the main donor, David Rubenstein. And I said, okay. And he came at 9.31 morning and I showed him the sketches that I had to move this up on the grade. But it's going to be served below. But another good thing is all three of these buildings going to work better environmentally. And then David said, all right, we'll do it. What else do you need anything else? I said, well, if you want the great details that I like to do, I need another $12 million. And he said, okay, and he left. And it's a great client, by the way. And this is, these are, these are, you want to say something about this, Matthias? Yeah, I think in this case, what is quite interesting, we do a geothermal system, but we are as well connecting it to the river, which is as well at the moment, serving the existing museum. So it's kind of the river was always the source of the energy for the existing museum. And that's why we have connected it to the ground to serve now the extension. And as I said, you can see a much more thorough. Film just released about the whole concept of the building. These are the glissando curves that indicate the building is connected down below. And that's the structural concrete. I'm a student of Kenneth Frampton. I believe that structure ought to have an expression in the architecture. And this one is certainly all the structures expressed. And the interior, we developed a new kind of concrete. These are the bearing walls for the holding up the landscape above. But we developed this acoustic crinkle concrete. And Derek Ambrose was doing experiments. We made these rubber forms. But the depth of the concrete allows for that kind of amazing acoustic vibration in that auditorium. And it's the largest green roof, I think, in Washington, D.C. And you see the position here in the diagram of the geothermal wells. Recycling water in the pools. Yeah. And I think as well, the big advantage putting most of the program below ground is as well, you are kind of buffering between the warmer inside and the outside because you don't lose energy in winter against the very cold outside or in summer, gain energy from the hot outside because you're buffered in between by the town. Okay, this is the Institute for Contemporary Art at Richmond, Virginia. There was a competition we won. And this was a very conservative town. We know Richmond. So we were very surprised how well they supported our project. They were great clients. And it's at the biggest intersection in Richmond, the most beautiful city in the world. And I think it's a great place to be. At the biggest intersection in Richmond, the most busy intersection. So we wanted the sort of intersection front of the building to express that torsion and that movement of the intersection. And then we thought about its program, which is a contemporary art. And we decided to make forking galleries. And I said that they're today, instead of art being a kind of grand narrative, like it was during abstract expressionism, or like it was during conceptual art, even there is no brand narrative in art today. It's a kind of forking time where someone working in sculpture, like Richard Sarah, or someone working in video, like David Atkin or someone painting like, like. Bryce Martin or anyone. I mean, the idea is that forking time is where we are. So that the building kind of folds on the plane of the present. But this was also a big stretch because they've never done geothermal wells and in Richmond, Virginia. Matias, did you want to say something about this? Okay, we were not on this, but I think it's, it's clear that in this more, let's call it conservative parts, it's a battle in a circuitry. And I think Stephen, in this case, you are quite a convincing supporter for us engineers. If the, if the architect is convinced this and Stephen, in one project we'll see later even Stephen even put it, put it in his money to convince a client. Right. No, we, we had a very great client. There were a lot of resistance people on the various, you know, various client groups, but the main client of doctors, they're working perfectly, by the way, the system of 40 wells is working perfectly. Everyone wants to come and see the basement and see how this system works. There's just some views. There's the galleries, the forking time galleries. There's the diagram wells going off. And so they're not under the building. They can be accessed in the garden and the green roofs. And it, and it receives lead platinum, the highest leads. And it's like a water, the water garden at the cafe. This is the, this is the university side. The building has two fronts, like a Janus figure. This is the main entrance from the university. At the Lewis Center for Arts in Princeton, a competition we won. I think in 2007, it took 10 years to build this because the moving of the Dinky train and a lot of other things happening in their local town and the fighting of the university in the other town. But finally, due to a great client, a great president, we, and a great, a great donor. Peter Lewis, we, we've got this through. So, Matthias, you were, who were involved on this one, right? No, we were, we were watching it from outside. Okay. So basically it's a, it's a forum below water garden that connects the three buildings, the dance pavilion. where each one has their own idea, a thing within a thing, the dance pavilion, embedded for the poetry and literature, and suspended. The individual practice room is suspended over the collective of the orchestral practice hall. And it's a lead silver building. It has 140 wells, recycled water pool, green roofs, high performance on the low. And it was a great client. Noyati ran this one, and it was a long process, but now everybody's very happy with the project. And as it started to unfold, they invited us to do all the interior furnishings. So we did carpet designs, and there's the wells diagram. So in this case, we had a very constricted site, and a lot of the wells are practically they're under parts of the building. Which is fine, yeah, which is fine because to me you don't need to access this well. You don't, right, you don't need, I mean, that's a common misunderstanding that you really don't need any maintenance on these things. The maintenance is only on the water furnace, right? From the teeth. Right, you may exchange the heat pump after 20 years, but the two of them are well, can easily run for 50, 1800 years. Right. And there you see the suspended practice rooms, suspended on steel rods, intention over the orcasal practice room. And this is a house, which I convinced this client who has too much money to make it totally a green building. So it has all green roofs. We call it planar villa. It's kind of, it has a kind of texture that's a structural concrete on the outside. And Matias, you weren't involved in this one either, right? No, no. So it went on for a long, a long time, about 10 years in fact, it starts in 07. It has 44 geothermal wells, a green roof by performance, clear and translucent, and below thermal mass construction releases energy. And again, the client allowed us to do the furniture, the cabinet trees, all the details, which I love to do in architecture. I think that the light and the space, and then also the detail. There you see the diagram of the 44 geothermal wells. And that's the landscape. We also work with, we did the main landscape working with Ed Holander. And it's a beautiful condition on the edge of the Hudson River. This is our guest house at Teespace. It's a 915 square foot house with a single geothermal well. This one is open loop. And there's also a video about this that you can see if you're interested in the concept. But it's a recycled glass facade, a solar flex panel roof, a natural unfinished locally sourced wood, a diaphragm construction, and 3D cord starch-based light fixtures. And there you can see all natural wood on the inside and the corn starch printed light fixtures from our office. And Mathias worked on this one, right, Mathias? Right, yes, yes, I think. And you know what, I decided, this is just about a thousand feet away from the archive building. And I decided to do one closed loop deeper well. And I think that was a better decision than what we did here. Yeah, it's certainly, you learn, you learn, you improve. And depending on the site, either an open or closed loop is better. We had 850 pounds per minute or something like that on the underwater once we did, anyway. We knew, we learned about this, but this is working fine. But we had to replace the main water furnace. I tried to economize, we didn't have much money. And I opted for a $3,000 unit and I went back last year and put in a $6,000 water furnace that cools and heats and that works perfectly now. So that makes it a much better house. This is in Chengdu, 2012. The largest project I think we've ever done approaches four million square feet, offices, apartments. The main idea is the client was always building a tower and an office tower and a condominium tower on a big base, which was a shopping center closed with closed surfaces. And our idea was to turn that around completely and make an integral urban space, a big shaped public space. Matias, did you work on this? Yeah, we worked on it. And I think it was quite a back road to convince the client to do this 455 welds. And luckily in this case, because this was in the times that is time during the world crisis in 2008, I think the decision to do the welds was made already before the crisis came. So they had already dig the welds and so the system survived even the economical crisis. Right. And this also contains the only built work of labious woods, my good friend, the late labious woods, the trillion of light, which I saved from a difficult client. They wanted to take this out. And I said, wait a minute, you can't take this out. This is the light fixture that lights the public Plaza. So they had to build it. There you see the diagram, Matias, this is your diagram, right? Right. That's our diagram showing as well that building, Stephen, as you did it, building around the edge of the site, this gives us as well more access to daylight for all the program in the tower. So I think that's as well a main important point and even keeping a big natural little Plaza in the middle of the site. Now you see a diagram of the geothermal wells. There are three sub basements. So you can see this below the construction site when they're doing these wells. This is the decision you had to make because they were moving fast in the construction. And then that sub basement on top of a sub basement goes on. So every geothermal well is under the building in this case. There you see how deep the three sub basements, the shopping centers are also down low. Matias, you wanna talk to this one? No, no, I think it's only that this, I think this success that we could convince as well the client that we had a quite good reference project from linked hybrid. So we could refer them to a client which was totally convinced about such a geothermal system. But moving from, from Beijing down to Chengdu was quite a, because the climate is quite different, because still could convince the clients. I think this was a great development. Right. There you see the water pond with the skylight that lights the shopping center below, a glass in the bottom of each one of those water ponds that are part of our landscape that brings natural light to the shopping center. And there's structural frame is exposed. That's the earthquake bracing on a concrete frame. This is a gallery and house in Seoul, Korea. Opened in 2012, a great client, the Diane shipping company, Mr. Two. And it's a project which was very ideal like a little utopia. So there's a water garden that's at the heart of it, a house and a guest house. And it has geothermal heating and cooling, green and recycled water pools and natural light to all spaces, even all the spaces below. You see the entrance pavilion, when you come in the entrance pavilion or standing with that guy standing, you can see that main house on the right, on his right and the guest house on his left. So you're inside, but you're looking at an outside that's looking at two other insides. We also did many of the pieces of furniture and selected the furniture. So it was a wonderful client. And there you see the context in Seoul, Korea. And here's the project that Matias was talking about, the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art project that we won in a competition in 2006. So it went on very rapidly. There you see to the left, a shirt factory turned into a museum, once was a shirt factory in the shape of a collar. So we had the idea because they had the largest collection of Tiero Manzini, Manzoni. We had the idea of shirt sleeves draped over two boxes as the main concept that would bring light on their curves. And at this point, Holger Ringberg, who picked us in the competition, he was a wonderful client, but at this point we were nearing the breaking ground of the site and we had just a few months to go in the drawings and he was resisting and resisting the geothermal well system. And I said, listen, Holger, I believe in this. It works, this is the future. No more fossil fuels. Let's do geothermal. I believe in this so much, I'm gonna give $25,000 out of my fee towards these wells. And I was surprised, but he took it. But Steven named it in the opening of the museum. So this was kind. Right. When he opened the museum, he was so proud that this is the first geothermally heated and cooled museum in Denmark. He was the first proud. Yeah, and Denmark is so privileged in respect of geothermal because they have such a high groundwater level. So you easily tap down and take it from the ground and reject it. So with their two wells, it's not a closed-loop system. It's an open-loop system. We take the water out and reject it further away. And we are again using similar what we saw in the U.S. projects. We are using it to condition the floor. So it's mainly floor heating and cooling system in combination with a displacement ventilation where the air comes out of the ground, out of the floor, was grilled along the walls to condition the space very carefully where the light comes from the top. And there you see natural water ponds that reflect in the landscape. We also did the landscape here. I worked for four years as a landscape architect at Lawrence Helps in San Francisco. And I always feel that landscape and architecture are integral. You need to think about them right from the beginning. This is our linked hybrid project in 2009. This is a project that I think was the first one that Matthias and I did together. Is that right, Matthias? Right, right, yeah. So I remember it. This is like a very ideal project because the client, you know, this was on the way to the Olympics, the 2008 Olympics and they wanted to show off the greenest possible building they could build. And so they went a full distance on anything. And then we really had to call Matthias to the table and take some risks here because nothing like this had ever been done anywhere in China. You wanna talk about it, Matthias? No, no, no, I think this was quite as well. And Steven, that's as well my compliment for you that you were open, we hadn't worked before together that you took the risk. And it's like me to go with such a radical solution. On the other side, I think, especially this nice combination of the geothermal system to the water pond in the center to the combination of the external shades. So in a certain way, it's all end the slab, the integrated slab heating and cooling. So it was also integrated that for the client at the end, it was impossible to take one element out because the whole system would have collapsed. And there you see the recycle of water ponds. And I was nervous about that because I thought they might smell because that's all the gray water from the apartments. But there's an ultraviolet zapping tank that takes away all the bacteria from the apartment water before it hits the pond. And then there's natural plants, water lilies and all. So it doesn't smell at all. This water, this whole pond system runs all year round. So they ice skate on it in the wintertime. There you see the diagram, 660 geothermal wells, 100 meters deep, no system like that had ever been done in China. This was a huge risk. And what is very interesting on this, that the client, which at the end, we totally convinced with this concept from there on in all his project. Right. Now doing geothermal all over in China. So kind of, and I think this is like we should spread the news so we should spread kind of the concept that we convince the client that the client takes us and he builds this project without Steven and without us. But he learned that geothermal connecting to the plants absolutely makes sense. There's a diagram of the gray water system, the toilet flushing and the pond water, the gray water treatment system. And this is your diagram, right? Exactly. So we calculated, we showed this are like three year cycle because the question was, could we in a certain way make sure we get all the heat, we dump during summertime into the ground out for the heating in winter. So you have to balance the system and therefore the finally the connection to the pond in the center that the pond in springtime we are using the pond to reset our geothermal system to make sure we are starting every year with the same temperature and it doesn't get warmer and warmer because you get a bit more cooling in teaching than eating. So even in such kind of systems, you have to think on a balance that you are not getting it out of the balance that you take enough heat out the same amount you're dumping in during summertime. There you see the typical installation of the radiant floors, tubes floating over installation very close together. And that's your diagram as well. Right, and you see it's not a floor system, it's a slab system so it works downwards so it's in the exposed concrete ceiling and then we have a kind of minimum rise floor where we bring as well the basic fresh air into the apartments with a kind of a central system. So even the basic ventilation is mechanically but they have operable windows and I think what you see as well here then there's an external roller shade and that was a tricky stuff because you see in one of the pictures Steven has this colored window sills and Steven insisted that you should even see the color when the shade is down, which finally made us possible to install a quite more expensive system from Europe which is stainless steel roller shade but it could take the curve to make the sill, the colored sill even visible when the shades are down. Yeah, and it works great. They made so much money on this project, it's unbelievable, you know, well we won't talk about the economics, but... Yeah, the client, I think this is a small thing but Steven, I think it's still interesting to see that the value of these apartments when they were finished then to today rise by what about 500% Yeah, amazing, it's amazing. In a certain way, it was recognized as the greenest residential development in Beijing and this pushed this for all the price, so... Right, right. And here's a project we won right after that project was opened in... in Shenzhen for the Vanki Center and it was a competition and there's just to give you a diagram of how things work in China. There's our model from July and there's the construction site one year later, I think. So, I mean, it's unbelievable. It was a horizontal skyscraper freeing up the ground, giving the landscape to the public, the tropical landscape and it was a great client, because Wong Shu, but I mean, I couldn't believe that we got the building permit in 10 days, you know, I mean, it was an amazing process and this was all materials designed. Do you want to talk about the materials? Yeah, in this case as well and certainly on one side connecting to the ground, but then as well developing this external for this kind of solar exposed facade this kind of perforated lube system where Stephen kind of in the combination in this collaboration between us and Stephen kind of developing what kind of lube is how they should look like, how perforated they are what is their tilt to ensure that we are minimizing the external loads. And that was a competition diagram. There was a height limit of 35 meters and I simply said, let's just shift the building and put it all up at 35 meters. So everybody has a view of the sea by the way, if we ever get a tsunami wave it'll go right under the building but then we give the whole landscape to the public, a tropical landscape and there you see is a Feng Shui building. You can see it's facing south and the mountains are on the north and the views to the sea they're all maximized by this design. It floats over a tropical landscape that was a concept model but this is the key part and I think this helped us win the competition. We had a 60,000 meter site but when we raised the whole building over the green we keep 60,000 square meters and we have a green roof adding 15,000 square meters so now we end up with 75,000 square meters of green. So this is a really the most green you could make. This could only be done in a tropical landscape. It's 20 meters off the ground so the sun shines just enough to keep all the plants going. Nothing is in the shadow that won't let it and then the coolness of the shade of the building is something positive when walking around in this landscape inspired by Carlo Burley-Marx and there's just a diagram of some of the sea breezes coming through. I think this is as well you get the shade by the building and you feel the breeze from the sea which makes you much more comfortable standing in the shadow but being still in the landscape. And that's open to the public so they can use that landscape as they wish and the banking company is very generous that way. This is your diagram too, right? Exactly. This was about identifying what facades are getting the biggest load where we need to develop this external shading system to ensure that not only by a high performance glass but by this system and we choose this kind of fixed or kind of tiltable louvers we see in one of the next slides as the protection from the outside load. Those are the louvers, the special louvers that we design. Studying palm leaves palm trunks the exact width of the palm trunks and then reversing it punching it into a aluminum that gives a special feeling of the light and how the shading works. And it still keeps a high transparency of the building because if you look at like from the sun from above it's quite shaded. That's another advantage we see with the solar system that with this reverse skyscrapers Steven was deciding we get the biggest possible energy collection move because there is no self-shading in between towers because it's all a horizontal big move. It's all on roof on the top. And all of the interior were done in bamboo natural without any additive or finishes so that let's say ecological aspect of the materials we use to finish the building. This is wall shoes office and there you see a diagram Right and you see kind of preparing exactly the louvers on the facade to minimize the external loads and it was the first lead platinum kind of certified building office building in China. Yeah, first leads platinum building in China. They engrave the doors and we go in to the building the front doors with that award that they spelled platinum wrong. That's all right. And these are the cores that hold the building up the concrete cores so I use those as light fixtures as well and the glass is suspended off the concrete so all the plumbing chases the services that serve the apartments and offices above come down between the core of the concrete core and that glass shade skin therefore they can be serviced and this is this is the first geothermal project that we did the Lake Whitney water purification facility in Park and it was in Hampton, Connecticut and it began in 1998 this is a water purification plan and that was my drawing from 1998 and that's what happens in the water purification treatment plant, rapid mix walkiation, dissolved flotation, clear well, ozone these different aspects then I said should come out into the landscape and become micro to macro expression in the landscape and what happened here was this is very early in the geothermal knowledge for us it's our first geothermal project and by the way that's 22 years ago but it's because the client manager was an enlightened engineer and he had done a geothermal well in his own house and it worked so well he convinced this bureaucracy of the water treatment people to do this I mean that was like unbelievable you know and he convinced them of course we were behind it and we were trying to build everything as green as possible so it's the largest green roof in the state of Connecticut it's got a gravity driven water treatment process that eliminates pumping and skylight natural skylights to all the plant spaces and there you see Michael van Walkenberg's planting and the building itself is a kind of upside down tear drop and you see it's sitting really grown up it's been a long time this has been open there you see the pathway between the offices and the treatment plant itself and there's an overview of the incredible largest green roof in the state of Connecticut but I was up there a number of years ago and you know when they did this they were nervous so they put a conservative 88 wells 11 pumps and one pump for eight wells and we were up there on a 92 degree day and there were only five or six pumps running so it's completely over designed but anyway that was our first before we even started to work with Mitya Shuler but then he convinced me even after that I mean we had a great client in this case but I think now we would in fact I've turned down projects that won't go green as we want them I think life is too short to be building anything run by fossil fuels I think Mityas you have anything you want to say we can take some questions yeah I think let's take some questions well great I just want to so this is David again I'll just ask the first question and then I'm sure we have some coming in in the chat so if for the audience if you have any questions you can type them into the chat and Lila will help field those questions but I wanted to thank you very much Steven and Mityas for giving this presentation and for me it was a really fascinating context in which to see all of this work together and I really love the way that you know just as you describe the site and the program and the year of the building you're indicating the number of geothermal wells and the depth of the geothermal wells so essentially like elevating geothermal energy to the highest level of a project description that's amazing I wanted to just ask a quick question though what are some of the challenges and limitations and trade-offs in the use of these kind of geothermal systems because you guys are the experts now are the challenges in terms of cost or climate or soil is there a trade-off between operational energy and embodied energy and I guess related to that I'm thinking what would it take to get to a critical mass in the adoption of geothermal systems to move the needle on global carbon emissions or like you're saying Steven to just like squeeze out fossil fuels forever well I think just one thing for sure it's a no-brainer when you're in a climate like New York or Beijing because of the swing you can harvest the cool in the summer and it swings back and you get the warm in the winter so you know I think people are foolish in these climates the question of it becomes difficult when you get to the southern and tropical climates right Matias? It gets a bit it gets a bit more difficult but I think what is interesting as well that okay a geothermal system relates to the ground our buildings are built on so it's kind of the base of the building as well base of the energy system and what is clear if we want to get rid of fossil fuels we need to use the sun now if we use the sun depending on the time of the year the intensity is different so we need storage and geothermal systems work as a perfect buffer as Steven described that surplus heat in winter we are dumping down improving the efficiency and reducing the urban heat island because we are not dumping the heat into our neighbourhood we are dumping it into the ground and we take it out with the delay later to heat our buildings right so the main the main challenge is just convincing not very intelligent clients that that's what they should do one of the biggest problems we have in humanity are very small mines in high places right now in many ways and it's about cost and it's clear that compared to a gas boiler the investment costs are much higher but if you account over the lifetime of the building then this is the system to go for yeah that makes sense and so do you bring those arguments Steven in addition to your act of persuasion and insistence and contributing your own money that's brilliant but do you bring that the kind of life cycle cost you say that you know investment in a certain number of years is kind of you know pay for itself it's not even a certain number of years you know I mean for example the the first project I showed you has a single well that cost $14,000 we had to go through stone it's 500 feet deep but it heats and cools a 3,000 square foot building right next to it is a little house from 1945 it's running on an oil furnace you don't have to do anything with it in the month of January the oil bill was $1,000 February $900 you know the archive the electric bill was $40 so that's the difference it's immediately experienced the drastic the difference in cost a monthly cost so you don't even have to argue it on like payback that's evidence yeah that makes that makes so much sense so I see I want to invite again if people are listening you can find the chat button at the bottom of the zoom window and type in a question if you have a question I think Lila will be fielding those so just looking here pulling up the chat myself um I wonder um this is probably beyond the scope of this presentation and lecture but I wonder if you either of you want to speculate about this moment taking advantage of this moment in terms of you know kind of like what you were saying Steven you know small imaginations in high places I forget how exactly you put it but is there a way we can take advantage of this moment to help people realize that a little bit more long term planning and thinking in terms of our architecture and our whole society everything that we're doing as a society the example of Korea of South Korea the example of Taiwan evident both have healthy you know huge healthcare systems and hospital systems and enormously lower death rate and virus rate by a factor of a huge a factor I mean somebody did the calculation if we had the same system going on as Taiwan with just 24 million people the amount of deaths in America would be 83 that's how different it is we just need smart people to go out and you know and get on the on the fence and push this stupid out get the right people in that we can get the right systems going I mean we have the knowledge to completely be all fossil fuels right let's see as we did these diagrams before USA could completely run without fossil fuels but it's a corrupt government that's in bed with the oil companies you know this is the biggest problem we have is the political problem it's not an engineering problem we have the knowledge now so it's the same the same thing we're facing with the virus it's just ignorance and not listening to science but that's not part of our lecture David coming back to your question I think what we can learn is exactly on one side we should be better prepared and carbon emissions which are as well kind of endangering our health they are an additional argument we should keep in mind it's not only about today's operation cost it's about the health for the future right yeah yeah exactly so yeah Lila I think you can take over your fielding some questions I see them in there so go ahead Lila yeah so we have a question from James he asks if there are policy or building code challenges I mean obviously we're just speaking about sort of like the political will issue but in terms of maybe specifically building codes or specific policies that you would like to address that could be changed can you imagine incentives or specific policies that would encourage more widespread adoption of these types of technologies and practices Matias can you speak to that yeah I would see okay it's clear if incentives can always support a client especially clients which are kind of only looking on the moment investment cost to support it and often it's not the amount of money it's more than if you can argue that there is incentive which means there is a governmental or an institutional proof of this approach which then helps a client to argue even is in his own circles to convince his own people that this is the right way to go so I think incentives they are often an argument support it's less the amount of money you get by it but it's kind of supporting that we need to step another to take another path just to take that a step further not that you will necessarily know this but are you aware of the sort of percentage of the use of geothermal in the US versus Europe in terms of like overall adoption okay the northern part so like state of New York is pretty good in respect to geothermal further further south the systems are not so popular compared to let's compare it they are I think Scandinavia definitely are the countries with the biggest kind of application of geothermal systems and then central Europe, Denmark, Germany Switzerland big applications of this so there I would guess we are probably factors three times more systems related to the installed facilities than in the US so Lila I'm going to interpret a question that came in I'm not sure if this is what it means but it's basically a question about implications of using geothermal systems in the design of the buildings and I guess what I'm interpreting that to be maybe is Steven do you think are there cases where because of using geothermal you either had to sacrifice on another design feature you were interested in or it's somehow even enhanced design feature you were interested in well I've been interested in the environmental issues since 1970 I was part of the founding members of environmental works at the University of Washington so I had to take my own direction long time ago and I believe that thermal mass is part of this kind of strategy and so when you look back at the 60s and certain people like Buckminster Fuller when he says how much does my building weight and it's better if it's lighter that doesn't work right Matthias that doesn't work therefore even from the beginning I thought that architecture with a substantial mass is better it's more like a flywheel it's much better so kind of that I think that attitude is in the design work and it's about sustaining on a longer on a longer line not just being immediate gratification of a geometric tectonic and I think okay the integration often geothermal systems lead to water based systems so typically you try to activate the floors or the slabs which then is dramatically reducing the air duct system so the distribution system the suspended ceiling the hidden systems which are in the section taking out 20-30% of the height of the spaces are yes another way to argue this is if you have a radiant slab and you have the cost of the well and the water furnace but don't get the cost of the duct work that you've eliminated if you eliminate all that duct work that's hanging around in the ceilings we don't have any of that with the geothermal I've been able to articulate that basically it's a wash an oil furnace with duct work hanging all around is just as expensive as you know an integral concrete slab six inches on center the tubes floating on insulation and the geothermal well yeah that's a great argument I had one other question I wanted to ask about the cooling so does using the geothermal for running water and cooling does that is that a little less common does that present some unique challenges to do both of those normally we might think that you know cooling is from above but you know Dewey is are there new rules where it just makes sense to do both heating and cooling in the floors I would say this depends and it's clear we showed like the turning of museum or other museums longs in France that you can use in even in museums where the most load comes from people and lighting radiant floor for heating and cooling even when normally you'd say cooling should come from above and heating from below that we typically today in more let's say residential applications we're using the floor for heating and cooling but in offices where typically the internal gains are much higher we're truly using this lab because they're dominated dominated by cooling and not by heating so depending on the use you either choose the slab or the floor