 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Welcome. This is an exciting experiment for us. Normally, I'm not at the front of the podium, but I'm GCEP's event director. This is, to my knowledge, our first ever 100% virtual event. All of the presenters who have won a prize from the GCEP incubator or for the GCEP incubator are going to be presenting remotely. David Benjamin, who will be introducing the program in just a moment, is also presenting remotely. And he'll talk a little bit more about that. But I just wanted to welcome you all. And thank you for participating in this experiment with us. At GCEP, we've been thinking a lot about, especially, what we can do to change our own carbon footprint as a school. There's a lot of things that we can improve on. And one of them is events. We purchase a lot of flights. We'll continue, for now, to purchase a lot of flights. But also, we want to figure out, how does the technology work? This seems to me to be the future of gatherings, intellectual and otherwise. So I'm really excited about this. And I hope that you'll stick with us. At the end of the presentations, there's going to be a discussion. And so you'll have an opportunity to come up here and look into the camera at what everyone else is seeing. And you'll see it throughout the day as we're doing this presentation here. So I'm going to turn it over now to David Benjamin to introduce the program. Thanks for that introduction, Lila. And welcome, everyone, to the GCEP Incubator Prize discussion. Just building on what Lila's already said, as Dean Amal Andreas has stated, at GCEP, climate change is ground zero for a shared discussion about architecture's engagement with the world. But of course, climate change is complex, and it's intertwined with things like materials, technologies, economics, politics, society, and culture. Although buildings account for a third of global waste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions, there's no easy single architectural fix to climate change. Action on one register often triggers changes on other registers, sometimes in unintended ways with negative consequences. For example, just a year or two ago, a recent carbon tax in France triggered massive yellow vest protests and an environmental policy without social equity ultimately backfired. So this is just to say that climate change is certainly the territory of science and numbers, but it's also a territory of culture and society. And from this perspective, it's important to look at the whole and at the part at the same time to understand the impact and the magnitude of specific changes and design moves. So while we might think about redesigning buildings and redesigning our approach to materials, we might also think about redesigning ways of life. And just bringing it around to this event, one could say that this kind of multidimensional, multi-scale approach, this design approach, this basis in addressing a complex problem through design is really the strength of the school. And this brings us to the GSAP incubator prize and another strength of the school, which is the school's students and alumni. So the GSAP incubator prize is dedicated this year at least to the topic of climate change at the building scale. And the prize offers direct financial support to projects created by GSAP alumni that advance environmental concerns in architecture and its related fields. And I think you'll see today how it's fitting that the different prize winners from this year are addressing this topic in a variety of ways and in a really kind of rich discussion and exploration of these issues. So today we're very excited to welcome the recipients of the prize back to the school in this kind of video conference format to present their work in progress this afternoon and to engage with the Avery community with you in the room in Avery in a kind of back and forth discussion. So as Lila already said, the format of the event is part of the school's experiment in using video conference more for certain discussions at the school. And with that I'd like to ask for your patience if there are any technical issues. So we're kind of trying this out as Lila said it's the first time we've done an all video event at the school. So the format will be that each recipient will give a brief presentation about their work in progress and then we will move to a kind of discussion including with everyone in the room at Avery. So I will just make these are basically the end of my remarks. I will just make very brief introductions to each presenter right before they present and we'll move on from there. So the first presentation will actually be a recorded presentation by Dan Luo. Dan is based between China and Australia. Her internet connection is not reliable enough to present live today. So she will not be joining us for the discussion but she's prepared this video for us to watch. Dan investigates issues caused by massive migration of rural populations to urban areas in China. And her project is designed to engage the regrowth of nature in abandoned rural villages. She received her MRC from GSAP in 2014 and she is a doctoral candidate in engineering with a focus on digital architectural design and fabrication at Tsinghua University, Beijing. And I think with that, we will be able to launch the video presentation. Hi, great thing everyone and hello all the alumnus, GSAP and all the guests here. Thank you all for being here today. Hello Professor David Benjamin, thank you for hosting the event. My name is Dan Luo. I graduated from MR program in GSAP in 2014. I just started as a lecturer in University of Queensland, Australia last year. I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to the GSAP Incubator Prize and all the dedicated committee members. Thank you everyone for making all the wonderful project happens. I'm one of the recipient of the 2019 to 2020 GSAP Incubator Prize. It is my honor today to give everyone an update on the current progress of the project. Thank you. So the project is titled Lady for Nature that's a current title right now. The intent of the project is to develop a fast and easily deployable large-scale spatial framework to creatively engage with the growth of nature in abandoned or informal green spaces in villages and sub-urban sites. Such process are not viewed as a retreat from the big space but rather as a dynamic interplay between creative agency and the natural world. Using the large-scale woven structure, we will create a framework to facilitate the growth of plants and convert the abandoned place to place of vibrance in the life. So the project is inspired by the current trend where villages and sub-urban towns are being at the front line of being impacted by the social economical changes, rapid developments, as well as the migration of population. With the rise in the fall of the local industries in social populations, patches of abandoned or underdeveloped lands emerges here and there in those kind of sub-urban or village areas. Typically these areas are viewed as the scars or being negated part of the city so that the local people and the government often feel compelled to redevelop the site in the rush, hide it behind the walls, or even just pave it with hardened concrete for easier maintenance. However, though some of spaces like over-bendment through evolution of nature along can be viewed as an interim of development between urban or rural sites. Those unattended areas, compared to the territory sent me to the control and the exploration by men, those left over land were actually privileged areas for natural and biodiversity purposes. In fact, those unattended neighborhood spaces provides a higher diversity of spaces even comparing to the cultivated land and the managed forests. So collectively the project has started with an investigation into the technique of traditional weaving method. With a few material experiments, the logic of weaving is translated into a digital workflow that enables the design and assembly of large-scale free-form weaving structure. With the large-scale spatial weaving as a method of intervention, we also put together an assortation of plantations to grow within the framework for a few typical sites in China and Australia. With the project, we intended to change the public perception of those areas from abandoned land to a site of potential creativities that engages human in nature. So this is the algorithm we have developed that allows the calculation of systematic spatial weaving method for any free-form geometries, allowing the potential freedom for creative artistic expressions that could be realized with a uniform method of spatial weaving. So all I need to provide is the assembly manual for pre-calculated geometries and everyone can do it in their backyard or in their own villages. So small-scale studies are the first step to systematically develop free-form spatial weaving method that allow for the rapid deployment of a spatial framework. Here are a few examples of smaller prototypes that we have developed using the weaving method and algorithm. However, translating into a large-scale still remains a challenge. At this point, we started to investigate into bending-active decomposable natural materials that are accessible at a low cost, which would be made available to most of the villages or suburban areas that we're investigating into. A few studies and simulations has been conducted to expand the system into large-scale. So naturally, we looked into bamboo as an option, as it is traditionally used in smaller-scale weaving of different artifacts. As well, it has been a common material that is used to build large temporal structures in rural sites. So last December, we conducted our first large-scale spatial weaving experiment with bamboo with the help of bamboo weaving experts. Starting from harvesting raw bamboo, we used traditional bamboo splitting and processing method to prepare the linear bending-active material strip for our further experiment. Though a more uniform, synthetic material, such as polycarbonate pipes, is more commonly used as a weaving structure, which is far more easier to calculate. However, treatment, calculation, and connection of bamboo is a lot more difficult, owing to its uneven natural properties. Thus, we looked into traditional bamboo processing and the weaving techniques, as well as the modern bamboo installations, to develop a method so that the structure could be quickly assembled in a rapid and low-cost manner. We tested our findings with the weaving of a three-meter-high partial sphere, proving the feasibilities and the structural validities of the entire design-built system. So here is the time-lapse movie that shows the process of the weaving of our latest bamboo weaving experiment. The entire hemisphere is assembled and waved in five hours. The next experiment and the next step is to further expand this system and explore how it would perform with larger and more free-form weaving in response to design intentions and the local conditions on the site. So parallel to the technical development of wood and the material experiments for weaving and assembly system, for the most of the first half of 2020, we're planning on looking to the plantation and the vegetation of those abandoned area in suburb and village sites. Though we first started with the investigation into the climate and the vegetation condition of a few typical areas in China that suffers the most from losing and immigration of this population, which was the original intention of this project. However, as everyone probably have heard about the unprecedented bushfire which was currently ongoing in Australia near where I live and I work, we're planning on adding a few sites in Australia as well, which we feel could also benefit from our integration as the enhanced on recovering from post-disaster like bushfire and adding the biodiversity of nature. So the intent of this part of research is to propose an association of vegetation for each of the selected site that would both work as the artistic interplay with our framework as well as enhance the recovering ability and the biodiversity of the local natural systems. Ideally, in the short future, we are making an assembly and plantation manual for each of those sites as well as the future forecast of how the system will develop with nature grounds in one to three year time so that the local or local communities could easily refer to the manual and deploy the system of spatial waving and plantation selections to the abandoned or post-disaster sites in their own neighborhood, transforming it with an artistic or creative engagement while enhancing the local ecosystem and the biodiversity. In last December, we have already conducted a full-scale experiment of spatial waving for just the part of three year forms. So in addition to the research manual that we're producing the short future, toward mid-2020, we have selected and have agreed with a few sites that we're planning to build our full-scale deployment with plantation as a sample project to demonstrate the potential of the system and observe how it will facilitate with the growth of the nature while provoking positively so that positive social attention to those left over areas that they used to be ignored. Lastly, this project wouldn't happen without this wonderful team of experts from field of digital design, spatial waving by book crafting and landscape together. This is a diverse team that brings together talents across different countries to discuss how do we contribute to prevent climate change and enhance biodiversity with a new touch on traditional craftsmen and the new perspective of digital design combining the architecture and the landscapes. This is the report of the current progress of the project. Thank you all, the friend of GSEP for supporting the project and thank you Alumina Prize for making it all happen. I apologize that I couldn't make it here live today but feel free to contact me if you are interested in this project in any way. Thank you and see you around. So we're going to keep going through the presentations and the next presentation will be by the next GSEP Incubator Prize winner, Greta Hansen. Greta has been exploring the potential of hempcrete as an ecological alternative to concrete at an urban scale. She's working to understand the manufacturing processes and also the municipal and building restrictions and she is eventually aiming to create a prototype building with hempcrete. Greta received her MRC from GSEP in 2009 and was an incubator member in 2018-19. Greta. Hi, thank you so much, David. I'm Greta Hansen and I'm sitting here with McNean. We're incredibly honored to have the opportunity from Columbia University to look at a new material that could change the way we build our cities and I'm going to just switch to a shared screen. Okay, is that working? I hope. So as David said, I graduated from Columbia in 2009 and started a design field firm with my partner, Sean Roe, a few years back. Nick, next to me, has been working with us for the last year on various architecture and interiors projects. One of our projects is the medical marijuana dispensary with a new facade. Our clients wanted the image of the building to speak to their products. So we proposed a facade made of hemp. We also proposed a hempcrete interior and we quickly realized that hempcrete is far too new a product in urban municipality to be approved easily by building departments. So we started to wonder what does it actually take to bring a new and environmental material to standard building practice? Hempcrete isn't a material in our standard architectural toolkit. And because of that, we're going to go on a bit of walkthrough history in order to get to our proposal, which ultimately questions what materials have been left out of the architectural imagination that could radically transform our approach to building? Has modernism's billification of vernacular craft in general blindsided us to essential carbon negative building traditions? And how do we take plant-based building materials and scale them up for urban production? Hempcrete is possibly the most viable carbon negative building material and we want to investigate how we can bring it to cities. So first hemp the plant, it is cannabis. It's a strain that has a lower THC than marijuana. It's a plant that grows in almost every climate on earth and grows so fast that it can be harvested twice per year in some areas. It needs less irrigation than most crops that requires no chemical pesticides. It's nationally pest resistant and produces a huge amount of biomass. So that's why it's carbon negative. Industrial hemp's biomass sequester is more CO2 than any other forest or commercial crop for acre 15 tons of CO2 per year. If it were planted on every square kilometer of arable land just for livestock feed production alone it's carbon sequestration would roughly negate our total global annual CO2 emissions. So perhaps carbon offsetting companies should consider grant weed. Compare that to the construction industry which contributes 39% of global CO2 emissions. That statistic is 70% in New York City and third of which comes from the embodied energy of construction materials and concrete is the most consumed single substance on earth and makes up 8% of global CO2 emissions. Hempcrete could be a partial substitute. It's made from the dried stock of the industrial fiber hemp plant as a bio aggregate and a lime based binder. Hempcrete like the hemp plant has a number of positive attributes in addition to being carbon negative, it's lightweight, it's biodegradable, it's naturally pest resistant, water resistant, higher resistant, it is structurally self supporting. It's hygroscopic which means that it breathes, it's reusable, you can literally break it down, mix it with new lime and reform it and it's an excellent insulator. So in some form it's been around for thousands of years since the Aurora Buddhist caves in India where hemp and lime was used as a plaster 1500 years ago on the right. And it was also used to cock the bottom of ancient Chinese junk shifts as well as these ancient French bridge supports on the left. So hemp can be grouped with other bio based building siblings. The hemp and hempcrete is one of many bio aggregates of plant based aggregates for construction and can be grouped along earth and plant based materials like cob, which is a mud reinforced with fibers, straw, hail, a tabby, which is oyster shells in lime as well as experiments with mycelium, louva or sun flower. Whether historical or new, we see these materials as proto architectural. These materials were standards in building before industrial revolution, which not coincidentally appears in history just as the formal profession of architecture is being formed. The A.A.A. was officially founded in 1857 just as steel and concrete were replacing a lot of these other construction methods and the ideology behind architectural deep telling was born out of the inventions of the industrial revolution. So what was left behind and what the emerging professional architecture separated from were builder traditions including building with plant based materials. There's some caveats like wood framing but by and large plant based building traditions were abandoned by architects. So it is no surprise that hempcrete was discovered or kind of rediscovered not by an architect or an engineer, but by a restore in France named Charles Rossetti, who was working on a plant based building from the 16th century made of waddle and dog construction. Most plant based buildings are very hygrosophic. That means in essence that they're breathable even if they're airtight because water vapor passes through the wall assembly and back out. So restorations experts were increasingly noting in the 20th century that newer gypsum and Portland cement based materials were trapping moisture on the inside of historic wall constructions and damaging sometimes the wood structure within. So while Rossetti was working on this building in the Sondelet Turk, he worked to avoid this by mixing a hemp based infill material to apply it to the existing walls. And this is actually where cannabis legality comes in. France is the only Western European country never to have outlawed industrial hemp production in the 20th century. So the fact that there was a thriving hemp industry made it a valid material to experiment and in fact there was a hemp farmers cooperative in the region of this building and that cooperative in turn turned into a company which began to patent formations of hemp creep blocks as restores around France took after Rossetti's example. From these restorations variations on hemp creep were patented in France and spread to the UK influencing builders. Most hemp creep has been within residential applications by green developers, green construction companies and self builders. Also a handful of architects. There are hemp creep homes throughout Europe on in Israel there's roughly 50 in the United States now. There are very few examples of commercial hemp creep buildings. Our search has been so exhaustive that it has led us to a storage facility in suburban Canada and a Marks and Spencer store in the UK. We've found fewer examples of hemp creep in cities but there are a few examples in Paris of low rise hemp creep residences. You may not have seen hemp creep in the US but if you've been walking in any US city in the last year you have likely seen bees and they popped up incredibly quickly. While industrial hemp was being legalized in many European countries in the 90s it took the United States until the very end of 2018 to legalize it federally with the Farm Bill. And so because of that industrial hemp has federally only had one legal growing season in the United States since 1937. The CBD example illustrates what kind of economic and policy mobilization is possible when there is enough to perceive demand for a product. It's clear from what's going on in residences starting in the US that it is possible to grow your own home and we think that the experimentation that's happened so far with hemp creep brings us much closer to growing our own cities and in this case New York. There are certainly obstacles including the fact that New York city building codes don't account for many plant-based materials. And we think that the interest of architects is really essential to advocating for plant-based cities. And we want to compare briefly a typical wall versus a typical exterior wall versus a typical hemp creep wall. A typical wall achieves its performance through a variety of materials obviously separately holding itself up, insulating thermally, shedding water, providing fire resistance. Hemp creep does this with one material and you see here that with an eight inch thickness it insulates with some proportion to a typical wall. However, to achieve passive house standards a hemp creep wall would need to be about 16 inches in order to insulate properly. And that also is the thickness at which a hemp creep wall would need to be to achieve a two hour fire rating. You can add to this with additional lime as a plaster or other plotting materials. But New York city comes with a zoning ordinance which makes a thicker wall feasible in terms of real estate allowing up to eight inches worth of deductions from calculations of floor area in fact. Our estimates by the way on fire ratings come not from US standards but from testing done on hemp blocks in France and the UK. A next step in the US is to work towards nationalized US materials testing beginning to test hemp creep. That's something that hemp creep suppliers are quite wary to do because of liability. We've just begun to reach out to some engineers who may be willing to work with us on initial flame test material. So these are some hemp creep blocks. We actually ordered a samples from a company in Canada where industrial hemp has been legal since 1998. This is a quick test we made with finishing one of those samples out of the plaster intel. And these are some of our first small block tests which we made while we were waiting for a larger order of hemp shift to arrive. Because industrial hemp cultivation is so new to the United States it's still very difficult to source locally. So here's a picture of about 50 pounds of hemp shift and about 65 pounds of hemp line binder which will be the source of our continued block experiments. The opportunity to create hemp creep blocks for the purpose of an exhibit allows us to test the possibilities of material and question what the future of a New York City exterior wall can be. Working within some of the given parameters to have construction such as the 16 inch deep block we're kind of looking now to mine the properties of hemp creep for the intersections between its performance and aesthetics. Whether that's in its adaptability to reuse mold forms in its ability to breathe and paint the air or even in its texture and potential to create the new urban palette. So these are a few sketches of an exhibition proposal at GISA. And today we're really open to hearing thoughts and questions about how our first kind of construction can help us get to the root of our initial question which is what does it actually take to grow your own city? Thank you. Thank you. Great, thanks a lot. So our next presenter is Eugenia Mowaylin. She is working on a project called Inter Institute which reimagines a historic building located in the rural Catskills region of New York where she and her colleagues are using community engaged architectural design processes. Eugenia received her masters of urban planning from GSAP in 2011. Welcome Eugenia. This is my background is in planning. I'm a planning practitioner and an artist in choreography and theater. So for me this digital, I'm leaning into it but it is a little wacky to be so disembodied but I'm gonna do my best. So thank you so much for hosting this event and it's been such an honor and pleasure to hear about other people's projects. And I think to see some really obvious connections between them, like, you know, I work, I live in the Sullivan County Catskills and I'm working just drafted a sustainable construction policy for our land bank that includes hempcrete as one of the materials as one of our preferred materials. So it's really nice and exciting to see it pop up here as well and not surprising I suppose. I wanna acknowledge my collaborators who are not here with me today. Talbeary and Dany to sell on both artists and architects whom I'm working closely with on this project and I'll say that the concept behind this project is in part about what happens when you bring together people from disparate practices and disparate fields in the same program and in the same space. You know, what are the benefits of that sort of cultural practice? And I think this prize is a good example of that as well. So I wanna say a few things about resilience. I have taught a few courses at G-sub since I've graduated, I believe all of which were actually focused on resilience and resilience is, you know, a powerful and necessary lens through which to look at architecture and planning and I think we are living in this sort of anxiety provoking period of economic and social and ecological uncertainty and, you know, we're faced with this, I think we're called upon to sort of reorient our relationship with natural resources and with one another. I think this effort is in my hope sort of coming to define our generation and it's in that spirit that I'll be talking about inter-institute and what it is. So it is conceived of as a multidisciplinary center for art and ecology located in the rural and wild Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. It offers indoor and outdoor contemporary art exhibitions, educational programs for people of all ages, intensive workshops for adults, frequent public events and it is about two hours from New York City and about two hours from Albany. It is sited in the Delaware River watershed, which comprises, you know, a significant portion of your water that you're drinking today and part of the largest unfiltered drinking water system in the world and the site that we are currently looking at is a 400 acre campus. Campus, the building is a former ski chalet sort of as reimagined as an inclusive and experimental haven for artists, scientists, architects, educators in the local community to come together and chart out and unearth paths towards what we like to call futures worth living. So among our guiding principles is the importance of rural than wild landscapes and I know this is G7 and I know I graduated with a degree in urban planning, but I'm currently most interested in rural and wild landscapes, it accounts for depending on who you ask and where you look upwards of 97% of the land in the United States and because our rural communities are so often tasked, disproportionately tasked with stewardship of our most vital natural resources, I think it's so important to invest in their cultural and ecological and economic well-being. And a little bit about Sullivan County, it is the only rural county in downstate New York with about 75,000 year-round residents and there are portions of Sullivan County that are owned by New York City and protected by the DEC as part of the Catskill Delaware Watershed. It is a wonderful county. It is incredibly ethnically and linguistically diverse. It also suffers from a half a century of disinvestment and according to County Health Rankings report, it has the second poorest health outcomes among all New York counties followed only by the Bronx and it's also a county that's experiencing the fastest percent cumulative population growth in the region. I think I'm gonna assume that we all more or less know and agree on the realities and impacts and future impacts of climate change. And so I'll gloss over that. But since 1950, spring in New York State has come a week earlier, average temperatures have risen by about two and a half degrees and obviously this has had large effects already and will continue to have effects. So in light of this, climate change at the building scale is sort of exactly the framework within which inter-institute is imagined and situated. We see the educational workshops, the public exhibitions and the building on site and the site itself as unified within a single cohesive model such that the institutional and physical structures operate in harmony with the organizational mission and programming, which is just kind of a wordy way of saying that the institutional structure reflects the ethics and the programming of the organization. And so that land-based art interventions and prefigurative works that address ecological challenges would be and frankly always ought to be housed in the building and on a site within an institution that reflects the values of resiliency and sustainability and interdependence. I guess just the opposite of greenwashing essentially. And so to sort of reinforce those ethics of resilience and sustainability and interdependence, it seems like there's no sort of better institutions suited to the task than a cultural institution. For instance, national public opinion polling consistently shows that Americans overwhelmingly appreciate and recognize the value of cultural institutions, although there is as you may have noticed nationally a decline in trust in public institutions in the United States, but sort of across the board, young, old, conservative, liberal, Americans seem to trust their cultural institutions. And according to the American Alliance for Museums, there are about 850 million visits each year to American museums, which is more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined. So I think museums have a, sorry, I should have been there, have an incredibly significant role to play and nevertheless, despite the fact that museums are these powerful and trusted institutions, public funding for the arts has, as you also may have noticed, been diminishing in recent years and arts organizations struggle to find private funding. And I think this also speaks to one of the crises of where you reach for funding. So are you as a museum taking money from pharmaceutical companies and oil companies that have problematic practices that go against your mission? If you don't have an alternative, then your hands are a bit tied. So I think these funding dynamics are really worrisome and ultimately an over-reliance on short-term contributions from private philanthropists can undermine the long-term resilience of a project. So we have programmatically and institutionally sort of conceived of this hybrid funding model that can draw on financial support for social service programs, such as after-school programs, programs for the aging, nutrition and public health programs, which tend to be much larger sums given out over much longer periods of time, more predictable and creating an institute that uses those funds alongside more conventional funding sources for arts organizations. And where are we? Yep. And I think this cohesion between the principles of the principles program and the built environment has had a really significant impact on our site selection when we applied for this grant. We applied with a site in Mountaindale with the owner who was demonstrating kind of tremendous support for the project and had invested in the town. And there was a lot to love about the space. And as we sort of moved forward with our feasibility studies and community engagement process, we came to understand that this site would be great for our programming. But the owner was more interested in the aesthetics of arts and ecology rather than the development of an institution whose democratic and ecological values were deeply reflected. And I think that as with all of these projects and all of this work, I think there is a danger of just playing to like the aesthetics of sustainability rather than sustainability itself. And I think we came to learn that this landline was a great supporter of fracking and we felt like our institution was just being instrumentalized for a certain gentrification-based stream of economic development. So we were both disappointed and grateful that our community-engaged design process equipped us with the understanding that this site wouldn't work and in ending our relationship with one site, we began, we were approached by an owner of another site in the hamlet of Nerosburg who owns a mountain, essentially, half a mile from the Delaware River. And it was to be started kind of developing this partnership. We were so much better equipped with the right questions from the get-go and at this stage it does appear that this particular owner is mission aligned, understands what we're trying to accomplish and is open to kind of a different development model. We're also excited at the opportunity to work in Nerosburg, which is already home to a number of important like local arts institutions and to work on a site that is much more ecologically significant next to an incredibly ecologically significant site, probably one of the most in the Northeast, which is the Delaware River. We've had a few kind of architectural inspirations that continue to guide our community-engaged design process. We're looking at renovation, adaptation and reuse. This is the SCSC Pompeia in Sao Paulo, which is the sort of where it is like a deeply intergenerational space, which was very much part of its design. We think about the landscape as a stakeholder rather than just a site or context for the work. And this is Lacketown and Vassel's house in Cape Ferret in France. And also, if you don't know anything's book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, you should read it, it is wonderful. And in considering human and non-human architectures, where when you do your stakeholder analysis, you look at non-human stakeholders as well. So to wrap up kind of what have we learned so far, kind of halfway through this process, I think we learned a lot about how to articulate our core principles and the elements of construction and design and programming that are essential to the success and integrity of our project. And we've experienced what I would say are the benefits of an open-ended community-engaged architectural design process that doesn't always lead you to the answers that you're hoping for. And I think when we're being honest and we're not just trying to back up into, I think we haven't made our decisions and just trying to back up into them, that we are kind of genuinely open that I think that there's a lot of value in that, even though it's a tough lessons to learn. And our next steps as we move forward are continuing with our community-engaged design process with the ultimate goal at the end this particular grant cycle to have a draft integrated architectural and programmatic design with the aim of connecting with multiple partners and essentially moving from people's programmatic desires and needs in spatializing, yes, essentially spatializing the needs and the needs of the local and regional community. Great, thank you. Our next presenter is Adam Marcus. Adam is an associate professor of architecture at the Columbia College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he is co-director of the Architectural Ecologies Lab. The lab studies ecologically productive floating structures as a form of sea level rise adaptation. Adam received his MRC from GSAP in 2005. Welcome, Adam. Thanks, David. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can. Good. It's great to be here. Thanks for the introduction and thanks to the school for supporting this project and all these projects. It's amazing to be to share this event with such kind of inspiring and impactful projects. I'm gonna share my screen real fast. Hopefully you can all see that. Yeah. So, as David mentioned, I teach at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and I direct a research group called the Architectural Ecologies Lab, along with two colleagues, Margaret Iqueta and Evan Jones, who are kind of full partners in the project I'm gonna show today. The lab serves as a platform for collaborative research between designers, scientists and manufacturers. And specifically we're interested in exploring the intersection of architecture, material innovation and ecological performance. Thinking of ways we can leverage interdisciplinary expertise and meaningful collaborations with scientists specifically to develop compelling architectural strategies to address ecological challenges like sea level rise, habitat restoration and climate change. I'm today I'm gonna talk about the focus of this grant and one of our primary initiatives, which is a project, an ongoing project called Point Ecologies and specifically our latest prototype, which we call the Float Lab. It's a pilot project for an ecologically productive floating architecture. And I'm gonna start with some background on the project which was started 2014, 2015. So it's been going on for a while. And then I'm gonna conclude with some recent images and talk about the work we've been doing this year. Central to the project is the notion of material performance at an ecosystemic scale. When we think about resilience, we often think about oftentimes architects and planners think of kind of large scale infrastructural changes at the kind of macro scale that can increase adaptability and resilience. Our work tries to kind of invert that. And instead think about how material strategies at the micro scale can have broader and transformative impact at scale of an entire ecosystem. And related to this, many of our work seeks to leverage computational design, digital fabrication, to try to develop new material strategies that can have these effects. The project, the Boeing Ecologies project is a collaborative research endeavor that synthesizes not just architectural design, but also marine ecology, material innovation, as well as community engagement and regulatory advocacy to develop new approaches to constructing resilient waterfront structures. And these are the kind of primary partners, our group at CCA, the architectural ecologies lab, as well as a team of marine ecologists at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, which is a big research facility in Honorary Bay. Chrysler and Associates, which is a global kind of leader in composites manufacturing at the architectural scale. And also the port of Oakland, who's been a critical partner in providing the deployment site, as well as logistical support for putting things in the water. The ecological premise of the project challenges conventional notions of what's called fouling, or bio fouling, which is the unwanted accumulation of marine life on the underside of floating structures. Traditionally, species that attach to themselves to the holes of floating structures are called fouling communities because they create resistance in the water when boats move. And this is often seen as a nuisance. And if you're a boat owner, you know that you have to kind of regularly scrape off these barnacles and other animals every year. This project seeks to turn bio fouling into an asset. And so instead proposing that controlled upside down growth of these animals can actually become an ecological resource. And really the way the project has developed are focused on kind of two benefits. One is that instead of flat surfaces that create kind of homogeneous habitats that are dominated by whatever the most invasive species is, the thought is that by creating contoured surfaces, you can increase the range of species and therefore the biodiversity of the environment. But as the project developed and the prototypes started to perform quite well, we also realized that these dense masses of invertebrates of animals can absorb wave energy. And that led us into this kind of realm of thinking about breakwaters and wave attenuation, which of course is critical for mitigating erosion control along shorelines and an important part of thinking about resilience at a larger scale. But so essentially the project tries to align the interests of kind of marine invertebrates of non-human people with a kind of human impulse for defensive adaptation to climate change and sea level, trying to align those two things. The project has developed over the past five years in a speculative way through a number of studios that my colleagues and I have taught at CCA and see some of that work here. This work has been very important to kind of push the kind of speculative limits on the part of our ecologist partners to think about the underside of the structures as a kind of additional facade for a building. And the material focus has been fiber reinforced polymer composites, only known as fiberglass, working with Chrysler who have capabilities to mill robotic molds and easily customize this material. It's commonly used for boats and marine structures. It's corrosion resistant and very durable, very strong, especially when curved. So we've developed a series of workflow of kind of prototyping these small surface samples, trying to quantify parameters of slope and dimension, things like that, fabricating them. And here you see a selection of some of the early prototypes. These are about 60 centimeter square that are these strange geometries that are designed kind of coordinated or designed, let's say, by our ecologists and then translating their sketches into forms that they initially, through intuition, I think would have different effects for different types of species. These have been installed underwater and monitored over the past few years in successive rounds. And here you see some documentation of that through diving underwater. And over a few rounds of this, we kind of reached a kind of proof of concept point where we were able to understand that gradation of geometry can create gradated habitats. And so you see this here in the kind of before and after of the same plate where the different colors on the right are actually different species of invertebrates. These are all animals. A lot of people ask if plants, if any of these are plants, but plants can't grow upside down because there's no light, no sunlight. So you can see that there are different animals at the peaks and the valleys. So that was very exciting to start to understand that there's a correlation between geometry and habitat. More recent prototypes have looked at these kind of vertically extended tubes, thinking about how to develop the wave attenuation capacity that I mentioned before. And so this is also before and after. And you see on the right, this kind of huge densities of what we call wave attenuating sponges start to emerge. And this is in Oakland, Oakland Harbor. So all of this kind of led into the construction of the most recent prototype, which we call the Float Lab. Here you can see a picture of it completed before it was deployed in the water. And as always, we looked to many precedents, including also referenced earlier, the escape work in New York Harbor, which is an important touchdown for this work. In terms of kind of aligning non-human interests and human interests, but also Bugminster Fuller, who patented in the 70s, two ideas for floating breakwaters that were never tested. Although we suspect they would be compromised by biofouling. And the Float Lab itself essentially is being shaped. It's about the size of a car. It's kind of like a clamshell made of two identical parts that are adhered together. And it's designed as a singular object, but as you can see on the right, it's also embedded within it is this idea that there could be multiples and that they could string together to create a chain of breakwaters and habitats. Not gonna spend too much time on the fabrication process of this, but it was designed with a reusable mold, thinking about a form of economy of scale so that we could make multiples for different sites, et cetera. And here are some shots of the fabrication process. This was about two years ago. The cross-section, you can see there's, it's basically a small sailboat without a mast has bilge pumps, solar panel, a small irrigation system for the top side. And again, here are some pictures. Here's of the completed prototype and the detail of the surface. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this aspect of the project. It's kind of a whole separate sub-project, but in many ways these documents are maybe the most important part of current accomplishments so far. It's actually illegal to deploy floating buildings or floating structures in San Francisco Bay. And through a year and a half long process, we were able to get permits from both the state, governing agency, and also the Federal Army Corps of Engineers, and to our knowledge, this is the first project of this kind to be approved for deployment in San Francisco Bay. The site is located within the Port of Oakland on the east side of the bay, but pretty close to the Bay Bridge. And we worked with the Port for about a year to kind of figure out all the logistics and location, et cetera. And last, this past fall, we deployed Float Lab, which was an exciting day for us. It was very easy for the Port. They're used to dealing with large ships. So it went very smoothly. It was towed into place out in the middle of the harbor, where it has a great view of the city and the bridge and the bay. And you can see some shots here. Let's look through. This was a video taken right after we attached it to the moorings and X-Well came in, excited to see how it kind of took the waves without any problems at all. And so the Float Lab's been deployed now for about four months, three or four months. And these are some photos from last week when we visited via boat. You can see that the top side is loved by the birds as a perch for feeding, which is exciting for us. And this kind of title habitat is developing on the top side, which is something we hadn't tested before. On the right is an underwater image of the underside, which we're really excited to see is completely covered with animals, any different types of animals, which was the hope. And now, with the support of this grant, we're moving on to the next phase, which is really, now that the project is deployed, we can use it to keep developing experiments into the material research, which is the key part of the project. So we've developed this system, which we call ecological habitat columns, which are basically like underwater chandeliers of modular system that can be switched in and out to test these columns made out of different materials. And we're continuing the polymer research, but we're also very interested in testing other materials, especially more ecologically friendly materials such as this 3D-printed calcium carbonate, which you see some examples of that on the right. So these columns were actually put together in the past month and deployed last week underneath the float lab. These are some shots of that. And they're out there now for about, we'll probably leave them out there for about four to six months, where they'll be monitored by our divers. And parallel to this, we're also working on kind of computational simulations that start to imagine not only how the singular float lab or floating breakwater would perform, but how multiples could perform. And so this is gonna be a big part of the research moving forward, looking at, again, returning to this idea of material performance at a singular scale, thinking about a cluster, but then also imagining and simulating what the chain of ecologically productive floating breakwaters, how that might enhance or prevent, help mitigate coastal erosion along the shoreline. And of course, we're always thinking architecturally of what could a larger version of this look like, and potentially even at a kind of urban or community scale of these floating communities that align human interests with broader ecological interests. So with that, this is our kind of large team of students and collaborators. And again, feel free to reach out with any questions. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Our next presenter is Steven Mueller. His irradiated shade project endeavors to develop and calibrate a means of uncovering, representing and designing for the unseen dangers of irradiated shade, which is where the body is exposed to harmful ambient or scattered UVB radiation, even in what is apparent shade. The research is located at the El Paso, Ciudad Juarez Metroplex, where the effects of solar radiation are an index of social inequality at the border zone. He received his degree from the AAD program from GSAP in 2006. Welcome, Steven. Thank you. Everybody can hear me? We can hear you. Yeah, great. Okay, well, thank you, David, for the introduction and thank you to GSAP for the prize. I'm really happy to meet everybody virtually, meet my co-conspirators, share some ideas. Okay, as David mentioned, so the project is located in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. It's a bi-national Metroplex, sort of bisected by the international boundary between US and Mexico, but really one city and one desert city. And it's a city that is uniquely subjected to environmental pressures that routinely kind of ridged this international divide. So pressures from migration, which we've seen in the past few months, including climate migration of populations moving north into the US, but also desertification and urbanization. And it's a metropolis that's really underserved by shade and public shade. And it's under-prepared to protect against the dangers of UVB, ultraviolet B radiation. A lot of my work and my work with my partner in practice, Ursula Kripa, and my research and teaching at Texas State University seeks to kind of reconceive of the borderland in ways that I guess question the jurisdictional boundary, especially the national boundary, and to reconceive it in relationship to forces of climate change and climate migration. So understanding the atmospheric shifts that actually impact bodies and the cities, the desert cities throughout the borderland. The UV index, which we visualize here, I think is really indicative of one of these sort of vectors that crosses the boundary. The UV index, as we know, sort of changes seasonally. This is basically the degree to which UV is irradiating different parts of the world throughout the seasons, but also with climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer, there's actually a wider band of UV exposure north and south of the equator at different times of the year. So the kind of UV border is something that's migrating across our international border as well. This is in tandem with some pretty significant demographic shifts we've seen in the last few years that populations have been migrating domestically within the U.S., primarily to western and southern states. And these are really collapsing on a few counties that are located sort of towards the southern extremity of the U.S., counties that hold major cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami. And we're interested in this because as populations from northern attitudes sort of migrate south, they put themselves at different and often increased risk for the kind of damaging effects of UV irradiation. Populations of aren't necessarily used to this exposure right now in environments that increase the exposure. And El Paso in particular, where I've lived and worked the last five years, we see a kind of typical distribution of where the population is coming from. So the kind of orange counties here, the sources that are moving in, and it's quite spatially diverse. We get a little east-west movement, but we also see a large number of people moving in from northern latitudes, from the northeast and the west, et cetera. So the project really focuses on understanding how UV irradiation in cities and UVB irradiation the wavelength of UVB in particular contributes to poor health effects, including sunburn, skin damage, eye damage, and immune system in addition across a kind of range of demographics that are newly exposed, both those migrating north and migrating south. These photographs from the researcher sort of show one of the major cruxes of the issue that the UV spectrum of light is invisible to the naked eye and UV sort of migrates across shadow conditions in ways that aren't necessarily perceptible or sensible. So the traditional photograph on the left and the UV photograph on the right shows this kind of condition. Atmospheric scattering of UV wavelengths also accelerates their kind of diffusion through environments, including in desert environments like the ones that we live in, rendering bodies and shade increasingly susceptible to damage. The borderland that surrounds El Paso and Ciudad Juarez is highly susceptible to this kind of scattering. There's a high degree of airborne particulate in the atmosphere, both from anthropogenic sources like wood burning in Mexico and elsewhere, but also from windblown dust, from dry lake beds and other kind of geologic features throughout the Chihuahuan Desert. It's an enormous binational desert that we live in that surrounds us. And it creates these really diffused conditions of sunlight and radiation throughout the landscape in our cities. You can see the kind of difference between the kind of visible spectrum and the infrared spectrum here where the infrared has kind of eliminated the effects of scatter. So you can imagine how much scattering there is. There are a number of emerging techniques in order to capture the effects of radiation on populations. I just show this as an example of an artist, Kara Phillips, who's capturing the effects of invisible skin damage using a technique you might find at your dermatologist's office, using UV photography to kind of reveal this underlying hidden condition of kind of radiation as it's impacted the skin and left the skin susceptible to damage. But we're exploring similar techniques to kind of image and also to imagine UV radiation at a number of different scales from the scale of the territory to the scale of the city and the architectural scale as the prize sort of mandates. We're developing visualization and design tools to engage conditions of irradiated shade within the borderline. The national divide and other jurisdictional divides were also by the way between three different states, the state of New Mexico, Texas, and Chihuahua. Limit the amount of corresponding and correlating data that is available in order to reach a kind of image of radiation within the city. So we're using as kind of a workaround, we're using remote sensing in order to bridge the state of divide at the largest scale. But here we rely on available data that usually comes with pretty rough and coarse geospatial scales. So here we've developed a land use classification index in order to understand the location of urbanized development and emission sources that are contributing to the kind of atmospheric scatter that's contributing to the irradiation of bodies in this environment. We've also generated this false color image in order to highlight natural shade. The vegetation, as you may know, is shown in red in this kind of image and the urbanization is sort of shown in the cyan. And we also have our first measure of the impact of irradiation on the landscape. So here we extrapolated the satellite sensor data in order to produce a land surface temperature map. You can see the cool mountain peaks in blue, sort of bisecting the top of the image and elsewhere. But also the kind of bright spots indicate the intense heat of the urban heat island in which populations are often seeking shade. Zooming into the international border, so you see El Paso, sort of to the north of the Curved River and see the flottas to the south. The international border especially suffers from what we're calling a shade deficit. And this is even more apparent at the international crossings like these two pedestrian bridges that connect the city, where a kind of reduction in urban density low building heights and a scarce amount of street trees contribute to low measure of shade. Despite the pretty incredibly high volume of pedestrian traffic of folks that are crossing the bridges and traveling through the international port of entry each day. One of the major findings that we have so far from this scale is through closer inspection of our land surface temperature map, we can reveal a number of different hotspots that give us clues to locations where the kind of inequality index of shade is the most extreme. So we see throughout the map that sort of lower income neighborhoods are more poorly served by public shade. But here we also see intense heat around the pedestrian approaches to the international bridges as well as neighborhoods and then around the border which includes one of the poorest zip codes in the country. So we're moving all of this from sensing into also a design environment where we begin to explore the applicability of different software workflows to pull data into design software. So here we're working in Rhino with some already developed plugins like Grasshopper and Elk to integrate satellite data. This workflow we've noticed sort of depends on a lot of factors. So it depends on things that are beyond our control. And we have to manage to find data that's available on a clear sky day. The processing is a bit cumbersome. It demands a high level of processing power and it's often that leaves these sorts of images that are informative but they're kind of like low course spatial scale resulting in a planar, graphic and atomized outfit. So we're also developing a comprehensive building model of the borderland in order to more accurately physically compute three dimensional qualities of shade in the borderland. Here again, using a kind of standard plugin with Ladybug and butterfly shade analysis tools to identify areas with shade surpluses and shade deficits. So here we have a look just south of the international crossing. You can see the approach to the international bridge as the kind of vertical channel towards the middle of the image. Here we have just north of the border in El Paso. Similarly kind of pedestrian plazas that are underserved. And then we've identified an area actually near to the College of Architecture at Texas Tech El Paso that is sort of on the edge of downtown where we're working with community partners to develop a prototype shade structure in a particularly extreme kind of shade desert. So this is a spot that hosts a weekend market and captures a lot of different populations and we're working to sort of gain the approvals and work through the design to deploy something there. We also decided in addition to just kind of analyzing the city with some known tools, we quickly determined that we had to kind of develop our own and turn the approach to understanding the city sort of inside out in order to see the environment from the perspective of the radiation itself. So we were sort of inspired by these like spherical projections that we're able to capture an image of sky exposure. These are researchers working with kind of big data in Google Street View to do this. And we found in the research that actually the exposure within shade to particularly UVB radiation is directly correlated to the amount of sky that you can see from under a shaded canopy. And so it was really important for us to develop a tool where we could understand, compute and draw the kind of the sky volume that is visually accessible from any point in the city. So we developed this kind of spherical projection algorithm that takes any point in the city. It scans the surrounding cityscape and then masks the obstructions onto a sky dome that then give us not only a kind of graphic representation of the areas of potential vulnerability, but also a computable surface where we can understand not only like the percentage of sky cover in a different area, but also the relationship of very particular orientation vectors. We unrolled this projection in a kind of panorama style drawing in order to better understand how the surrounding city already offers protection against UV exposure. And we can work in this environment, sort of in real time with design proposals to see how interventions that we're proposing might additionally mask the sky dome as we work. The procedural algorithm continues to develop. I mean, we're always debugging and streamlining and testing it within different urban contexts, but we have sort of future plans to develop it as a standalone plugin for other designers to use. And we're interested in some of the results of the studies, including these kind of catalogs of these masks, sky domes, which is at once a kind of representation of the visibility index from any point, but it's also a representation of what could be an optimized form for protecting against UVB in a shaded condition. So we're planning to use this form as we develop prototype shade structures that will serve a kind of didactic role in order to educate the public on the hidden dangers of shade. We're also experimenting with the technique as a different way to index the changing sky exposure and the radiation exposure values within the larger border flex context. Here, we've deployed the algorithm at major intersections throughout the metro flex or pedestrians who are often traveling or kind of waiting for rides or waiting for public transit. With this small sample, you can see that the borderlands is not only subject in general to shade deficit, but it collects along the international boundary at kind of the middle of the image with darker orange indicating a higher percentage of exposed sky and therefore a larger surface area required for any protective structure. And we can also sort of break this down to more tighter intervals so that we can see a progression of exposure as you would walk down the street or on the sidewalk. So here's a test to know passive moving toward the international boundary at the lower left of the image where you can see that the exposure steadily increases in anticipation of crossing the border. So now we have this kind of borderlands sky exposure catalog, we're calling this kind of broken egg shell drawing, maybe that's fitting for an incubator prize, I don't know, but this captures the various exposures and simultaneously signals the kind of desire for protection from any one of the infinite number of points within the borderland. From this catalog, we can now also begin to assess the impact of orientation and engage the science of UV wavelength travel exposure and scatter. So on the left, you see a kind of, maybe a more typical understanding of how the angle of incidence impacts UVA wavelength exposure, but we're developing sort of more nuanced understanding of how UVB works because it travels through scatter, it doesn't necessarily follow the North-South logic. It also occurs at different times of the day. So while UVA radiation from morning at the top to afternoon at night is rather predictable, UVB actually is primarily diffused, but it also peaks just before and just after solar noon. So we're trying to identify the kind of design space of the projects within these kind of time frames and work on exposures that might come about. We also use our tools to analyze the district surrounding the proposed project site and have reached out to various stakeholders and community partners to begin the design of the prototype structure. We're exploring ways to document the site from the perspective of radiation and increasingly high resolutions. Here, by creating a photographic grid using an infrared camera to capture the heat of the surfaces around the site at midday, we'll soon begin to use UVA and UVB sensors and microprocessors like Arvino's to provide feedback into our design environment so better understand that UVB radiation is scattering throughout the site, which depends on a lot of things, but among other things on the reflectivity of neighboring surfaces and other factors that the modeling doesn't capture yet. And we begin to explore possible forms for a structure which will need to simultaneously cover a large area while selectively masking the sky exposure. And we see this just as the beginning of developing an ability to address the complicated biopolitics that are enmeshed in UV exposure and the provision of shade in the borderland. It's here that we increasingly see vulnerable populations exposed to high levels of UV radiation and an inability to adequately protect them from its damaging effects. We're discussing with project partners now how the shade structure might bring attention to some of these issues while also being replicable beyond the prototype stage. Thank you. This is also what I mentioned, this isn't just my work, this is with a team including my partner, Ursula Kippa and its team of research assistants. So thank you very much. Great, thank you. Our final presentation of the afternoon is from Anaheed Simitian and Bruno Nakagumagondo. They are studying changing agricultural uses of the fertile crescent and are developing a community-based seed inventory and experimental kitchen in the Baka Valley of Lebanon. They each received their AAD degree in 2015 and founded their office, Oficina Paberta, which is based in Sao Paulo and Beirut. Welcome, Anaheed and Bruno. Thank you, David. It's very good to be back in GSAP even if it's just virtual. It's been very inspiring to see everyone's projects. So we want to thank GSAP for the opportunity to carry out our research. Our project Food Security in the Fertile Crescent aims to highlight the intersection between climate change, food insecurity and conflict. The project addresses this year's theme, climate change at the building scale by first looking at a region where the challenges of climate change are publicly felt, yet overlooked due to geopolitical and economic turmoil. And second, by focusing on vulnerable communities in rural Lebanon and proposing social and programmatic approaches to mitigate the future imminent challenges of climate anomalies. 10,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, the first seeds of urban civilization were established in this region. Modern day Baldad is the site of Mesopotamian civilization that first produced surplus food and consequently built and sustained cities. This perversely prompted a vicious cycle of conflicts, a vicious cycle of conflicts for the acquisition and control of fertile lands caused by climate anomalies and food insecurity. A recent study reveals that the fall of the Akhidin Empire 4,000 years ago was an outcome of conflicts triggered from rapid erudification, which led to famine. Similarly, the civil war in Syria that began in 2011 has been linked to droughts caused by climate change. The fertile crescent is a geographical region that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the western borders of Iran, encompassing countries with freshwater resources and forming a green crescent that hugs the Syrian desert. Countries within the fertile crescent include parts of Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. With climate change, this region witnessed a severe drought between 2006 and 2009, recorded as the worst drought in the last 900 years. This drove 1.5 million, sorry, 1.5 million Syrians to migrate from rural to urban territories. So this satellite image, which dates back to April 2008, highlights the effects of the drought on the vegetation. 2008 was also a pivotal year for global food insecurity, as it was the first time since the OPEC 1973 crisis that the sudden increase in oil prices triggered a global food crisis. As climate variability becomes more and more unpredictable and concerns for food security grow, the region is witnessing more regional civil conflict and wars on natural resources. So although this map highlights the drought and the fertile crescent, it also highlights green areas and parts of Turkey and Iran. This recent disparity of access to water resources is largely due to dams built at the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by Turkey, which has limited the flow of water to Syria and Iraq. In addition, Iran has diverted 42 rivers that previously flowed into Iraq. More than 50% of the region's water is sourced outside the region's territories, and 80% of the total water resources are used to irrigate agricultural lands. This has prompted disagreements between key regional states. These aerial photos of the Ataturk Dam in Turkey show how it was before its construction in 1983 and after it was built in 2002, showing how water is collected within a state's border, limiting the natural resources to surrounding countries. This is called the Sierra Reservoir in Iraq in 2006. Climate change and mismanagement of water resources has led to the loss of 144 cubic kilometers of fresh water between 2003 and 2009, and that's roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea. Conflicts in their turn target the environment and its resources for food security. Here we can see ISIS burning crops in Iraq's Karashal Mountains in May of last year. 2019 was marked by heavy rainfalls, the highest levels of precipitation since 1988. This caused floods putting almost 330,000 people at risk, but it also provided significant yields in crops with the highest wheat production rate since 1998, which were then targeted by militants. 5,100 hectares of agricultural lands in Iraq were burnt between the months of May and June 2019, which is during harvest season. Similarly, in Syria alone, 40,000 hectares of wheat and barley fields were subject to arson or were burnt. Because it is important to note that while ISIS claimed credit for the fires in their online newsletter, some have blamed unusually warm weather and the fast drying of crops, while others have pointed fingers to pro-regime airstrikes. So as the world becomes warmer and resources scarcer, the fertile present is but a reflection of the future global reality. So how can we break this vicious cycle of climate change, food insecurity and conflict in the region and prevent it from spreading? One proposed solution is the regeneration of crop wild relatives or CWR in the fertile crescent. These are crops prior to being domesticated, which, you know, they're crops, they're the wild relatives of the crop that we consume. And because they are wild, they are resilient to eridities, salinity, droughts, pests and extreme weather conditions. So they are the future of our food security. We were introduced to CWR through this paper titled Setting Conservation Priorities for Crop Wild Relatives in the Fertile Crescent. A research carried out by the Plant Genetics Department at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in Bright Areas. So the study finds a total of 21,000 native varieties and recognizes 835 varieties to have high socioeconomic value. It also recognizes this region for having the highest concentration of CWR per unit area with 84 global priority varieties for the future of food security in every 25 square kilometer. So one way to ensure that CWR adapts to the future climate is through institute conservation. So the planting of the species to adapt to the changing weather and soil conditions. The image here is of a wild relative of the pea or bean family that grows as wildflowers in the region. This was collected by Dr. Nigel Maxtit in Syria in 2002. Dr. Maxtit is one of the co-authors of the research paper who's also the chairperson of Plant Genetic Conservation at the University of Birmingham and an avid collector of CWR. We contacted Dr. Maxtit and he was very enthusiastic to find architects interested in his research and he put us in contact with Plant Geneticist Dr. Magda Harad and Juzul Lebanon and NGO in Lebanon that focuses on the forestation, agro-biodiversity and conservation of CWR. Their most recent projects focuses on our sale Lebanon. It's a village in agrarian town near the Syrian border that has high agro-biodiversity but is still recovering from the aftermath of conflict. So looking at a map of targeted agrarian communities in the fertile crescent, the region has witnessed a 40% decrease in agricultural production, preventing countries in conflict to attain food security. The damage to fields has had devastating effects on agricultural output, further impoverishing rural communities and contributing to rural to urban exodus. Highlighted in this map is the agrarian town of Arsail in Lebanon which fell victim to the regional conflicts and where our project will be located and developed in collaboration with Juzul Lebanon and the local farming co-op. So between 2014 and 2017, rogue militant groups including ISIS and Jeb Hatim Nusra terrorized Arsail before being forced to fully retreat back into Syria, leaving behind 2000 landmines and other DIY explosives on agricultural lands. So Arsail has an estimated population of 40,000 Lebanese locals and 100,000 Syrian refugees, so more than twice as many. 85% of the locals are landowners, having a total area of 465 square kilometers of land planted with approximately 2 million local fruit trees that are resilient to droughts such as cherries, apricots, apples, grapes and 500-year-old pear trees. So all these lands were destroyed or were inaccessible during the conflict. Arsail's farmers co-op have since reached out to Juzul Lebanon to help restore their agricultural lands, established new nurseries to expand their production and offer Syrian refugees employment opportunities as well as how workshops on sustainable farming. In January we met with the farming co-ops representatives Ahmad Freeti and Nimr, who walked us through the site. They were eager to inform us about the biodiversity of their village, such as the 200 varieties of wild almonds and recounting what ISIS had destroyed. They further explained how the militants burned a community facility to the ground. Highlighted here is one of the site options that was donated by Nimr, one of the local farmers we met. It has access to a main road, convenient to transportation and logistics. It has a relatively flat topography and is in close proximity to the refugee camps and the local community. The site did not show any traces of war, but when seen from above is surrounded by homes, refugee camps and agricultural lands. With their stories in mind, we strove to design a community center that brings the locals and refugees together through the growing of CWR. The rural community center comprises of the CWR nursery that includes a greenhouse for seedlings and a support facility, which includes a workshop space to learn about the collection and conservation of CWR, a kitchen to experiment with wild crops and a reception that also houses a store for local produce. All programs stand on a platform that can flexibly accommodate activities between locals and refugees. It addresses sustainability through its orientation that utilizes passive solar design. The greenhouses can sustainably recreate ideal weather conditions for seed germination and continuous production of high quality CWR seedlings throughout the year. This section perspective shows how the building uses geothermal weather control. The geothermal ground to air heat transfer keeps the space warm and winter and cool in summer, decreasing operation costs by 75 to 90%. This allows partners to focus on the seedlings rather than the building maintenance costs. In addition, it has fully insulated reflective galvanized steel northern wall that maximizes natural sunlight and protects seedlings from harsh northern winds. Its recyclable galvanized steel frame structure has a facade of 16 millimeter triple wall polycarbonate that is durable and has high light transmittance. The system allows the crop-wide relative nursery to be combined with cultivation methods such as epiponics to efficiently manage water and other resources. The building addresses climate change by bringing vulnerable farmers and the space communities together in a space dedicated to learning and growing local crop-wide relatives, crops with high socioeconomic value and the future of food security. It simultaneously addresses climate change through the building construction system that simulatively utilizes Earth while efficiency is what drove us to choose materials that can perform reliably, are durable and can be reassembled or recycled in the future. The building will be an experimental prototype that would allow us to learn from user experience and improve or change its construction methods for future expansions throughout the fertile crescent. On the whole, the project is an architectural intervention as a response to mitigate climate change by giving nature and crop-wide relatives a safe space to recover and providing neglected agrarian communities with a platform to reappropriate and revitalize their economic standing within the current regional landscape. Great. Thank you for that presentation and thank you to all of the GSAP Incubator Prize winners. I mean, this was really fascinating and inspiring work. I think it was fittingly serious for the topic at hand and also fittingly diverse. I mean, I think there were, you know, a wide range of approaches and topics and techniques that people used, you know, from... But actually, I'd like to just make a couple of quick observations about some overlaps, you know, not entire overlaps, but overlaps of, you know, theme or technique. So it was interesting to hear biodiversity come up, you know, with Dan and Adam. It was interesting to hear an emphasis on the rural with Dan and Eugenia. Hempcrete and materials and different other material approaches was common to Greta and Eugenia and Adam. Computational analysis was part of the work of Adam and Steven and Dan. Social equality was part of the work of Eugenia and Steven and Anaheim and Bruno. Community-based engagement and design was part of the work of Eugenia and Anaheim and Bruno. Anyway, there were a lot of ways of, you know, we could make some kind of crazy Venn diagram of the overlapping. And I think that's, you know, in part what we had in mind for this, you know, this loose association of projects, you know, that are all exploring, you know, one common theme, but in different ways. So I know we're going to run out of time soon. I want to ask one or two questions and then we'll see if we have time as well for any questions from the room in Avery. One of the things that's on my mind is the topic of climate commitments. And, you know, GSAP is hosting another event later this semester called Climate Commitments, which will bring together a range of architecture firms, but also institutions and, you know, cities, but also architectural institutions and also academic centers. And all of these different kinds of things, the firms, the institutions, the academics, have pledged to transform their work in the context of climate change generally in the next 10 years. I mean, think of this in the vein of the, you know, Paris Agreement. It's like what are different nations committing to by 2030? What are different firms committing to? Or, you know, cities or associations of architects committing to academics, what are they committing to? So I wanted to ask all of you as, you know, out there in the world doing these exciting things, you know, all over the globe, is this kind of pledging on your radar? And if so, given your work on these incubator prize projects, but also your broader practices, I wonder if there are any commitments that you might have challenged yourself to make or that you think you might challenge others to make as well, you know, in the context of the things you're exploring. Like we could almost do an exercise of just translating your, each of your theses into a pledge, right? A pledge for yourself and then a kind of call to action for others to do the same. But I wonder if you're thinking about that or if you even want to question that approach. So anyone who has a comment on that, I think you'd be excited to hear your response. I'm having a respond just because one of our most complicated and all of these institutions, like one of the most complicated issues is funding and where you get your funding and who you accept funding from. And I think over the course of our work, it's been really hard to find like clean money and what is ethical money? Like is that out there? I think it's kind of easy to identify what's not ethical. Like, you know, if you're, whatever, if you're involved in child labor weapons, you know, there's certain like big bad money makers that, but it's much more complicated when you think about public funding. And if you're going after public funding, where does our public funding come from? And we've been challenged basically on every category of funding that we've proposed. We've gotten pushback. So I'd love to hear what other people, I have no solutions, just kind of problematizing that. And that's always kind of the elephant in the room. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious to hear others, but just quickly, have you pledged not to take any money related to fossil fuels? I mean, I think you're kind of alluding to that earlier, but. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, so what we're doing is kind of making those determinations, like who do we not accept money from as we're doing that in our process. I think we're finding the list. The list can go on and on. You cannot, you know, the, and where you draw those lines is, has been really tricky for us. It's really easy to say we won't take money from fossil fuel companies directly, but there's for every one fossil fuel company, there's 10,000 that profit kind of directly from the fossil fuel industry. So drawing those lines has been really challenging. I just thought I'd say that I noticed a couple of months ago that the architecture firm pledged to stop. I think they pledged to only build carbon neutral buildings going forward. And they had an idea which was largely based in energy production actually through photovoltaics. And it's been something that I think we've seen architecture firms all over the world begin to do in different ways, commit to only build with heavy timber, for instance, commit to certain materials. And I think we've been incredibly inspired by the idea of saying no. It's particularly difficult for a small firm as you search out work to, but I think we're generating the idea that making a commitment to work on sustainable buildings, making a commitment to possibly only working on passive buildings can actually be one way to find more clients. And we're kind of working actually on now finding our own clients instead of responding to market demands. Yeah, that's interesting. I think actually the snow head of one might have been carbon negative buildings by a certain year, which is a great category for using hempcrete. It's a great alliance. Any other thoughts? I think I'll just add. I have a thought explicitly about this in my project, but I can see a number of metrics that could be developed in order to kind of leverage or advocate for something like UV equity or shade equity. And I think it'd be interesting across the range of projects. We have kind of inherited a system of metrics, including carbon neutral slash negative and energy efficiency and whatnot. And I think it's also on us to develop the meaningful metrics that we should measure what's important and not make important what we can measure. So while we're achieving, I think while we're building on making pledges of the kind of known system of sustainable resilience solutions, we also need to sort of contribute other ways to evaluate and other ways to sort of advocate for performance or equity, whatever we're after. Yeah, I think that's a really great way to frame it, to design the metrics. The metrics themselves could be an act of design. And I think you put it really articulately. I want to, if other people have reflections on that, they can jump in, but I want to throw one more question out there before we run out of time. And that is how do you draw our model climate? We've seen a lot of really compelling images and material from all of you today. And I just wonder if, do we need new types of drawings for this new context? Because I think these projects could make the case for that, but we're seeing something a little different than we typically see in an architectural project. Yeah, I just want to go back to the first question. Yeah, good. I think geography influences one's ability to commit because we're working in Brazil and Lebanon, both are developing countries, and so our clients really don't care about climate change because it's not something that they can grasp. Of course it's happening. Everyone agrees, but it's not an imminent threat as opposed to other imminent threats that they can... But how do you draw or scale climate change? We were looking at the whole region of the Fertile Crescent, but also we found a lot of interesting images which we didn't put because we were constrained at that time of seeds and how the seed itself changes with climate change and adapts to heat or gets resilient to... So it's this huge scale, and I don't know how as architects we can learn from that or have the tools to learn from biology itself and how it's adaptable and how the tools that we use, whether they're adaptable or not, just a thought. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think one of the things that we come across in our work a lot is this representational challenge of climate, especially since climate is so statistically based and it tends to manifest itself at a scale that's totally in conflict with what we anticipate, architectural resolution or material resolution might be. I don't know that our goal is to represent climate, but it's something about deciding on a representational strategy in which you can engage something like, for lack of a better term, microclimate or something like this, right? But by sort of turning climate into a kind of hyper-local condition and using sensing or using sort of point-by-point analysis instead of sort of territorial statistical analysis in order to get a handle on it, I think we find that we're able to sort of gain some sort of agency over it, but we might be turning a blind eye to climate with the big C by privileging the kind of micro. I think there's one really obvious thing that drawing or maybe computer modeling can do. We were looking a lot specifically at embodied energy and there is a lot of work being done right now to try and measure the embodied energy of different materials and buildings and perform calculated totals of buildings. And I can imagine that with the rabbit and the new softwares that we're using to develop these buildings that that could be integrated into our drawing and the architecture before construction. I would add this is less related to, let's say the kind of computational performance in aspect of our work, but one of the types of drawings that have been really effective in, let's say, galvanizing awareness or support for our project over the years has been these kind of speculative drawings drawn from the perspective of non-human animals, which with our students we call them the fish eye view, like kind of underwater view of these landscapes at a large scale. And we found that in meeting with community groups or the community education initiatives that we've run in Oakland or potential funders, oftentimes the people resonate more with the kind of interests of animals as a way to think about climate rather than the kind of human impacts, which is bizarre and fascinating. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it does, and I think that resonates a little bit with what Steven was saying, that there's this range of things from what Greta's describing that the metrics that are now available, compatible with our existing digital tools and that can maybe help us design a new ways to the things that are still important, that are not just the easy metrics or this typical metrics, that could include the features of imagination like you're describing Adam and helping people to see things in a new way, which architectural drawings have always strives to do. I actually did want to engage in each of the speakers in one question just sort of informing our thinking. David and I are working on this climate commitments conference as we discussed or as he mentioned already. One of the things that we're really considering with that in addition to what's going on in practice and what's going on with institutions that are supporting these efforts to climate change is to think about how our curriculum is changing and with the opportunity of having this group of distinguished alumni, all of you having graduated roughly within the past decade, but also being pretty far afield from your experiences at the schools and also some of you having taught, could you sort of give us a sense of maybe just one idea of something that you, a skill that you're using now that you think could lend itself well to a curricula towards a sort of climate urgent course and what that might be? I think that's something that feedback from people who have been here is something that is really critical to this conversation as it develops here at the school. Yeah, I think that's a great question and an important one. And I could talk a little bit about the kind of pedagogical based roots of the Boyn Ecologies project, which began as I mentioned in a kind of speculative setting in architecture school with architecture students thinking about what a floating architecture could look like. I would say the two things that have been critical to kind of feed the project. One has been the interdisciplinary aspect that from the beginning, we've been working with our partners at Moss Landing Labs since 2014. And it's hard to kind of forge a collaborative partnership in a meaningful way, especially since they're three hours away, but bringing them to the studio, bringing our students to their lab, making sure that there's kind of regular interactions has helped kind of produce this interesting feedback where the students inspire the ecologists to kind of think about their own discipline in a different way, largely through drawings. And the ecologists, of course, inspire the students to think about architecture in a different way. So I think that's been one super important aspect. The other one, which I think is kind of present in all these projects is to prototype and to make tests and experiments and to put them out in the world. And I think it's obvious, but without doing that, without kind of seeing what's possible, a lot of this work kind of remains in an academic realm. I would say briefly a focus on regionalism and bioregionalism and moving outside of just, I mean, I think that's a crisis in the field that we call it urban planning, and we continue to call it urban planning where cities don't exist in isolation at all in any way. And I think just like a deeper understanding of not just like your regional hinterlands, but all the ways in which global resources make New York, New York, and make a city a city. I wonder, too, if there are opportunities to reconsider what credentials are achieved with that sort of education. There's something about the certification processes and the licensing requirements for architects and planners and LEED certification and all of these things that filter through different professional or academic settings, but there's not really like a credentialing system that leverages a kind of like architectural education in tandem with a climate focus or with a sustainability focus. If there's no word for that, isn't a climate scientist and isn't an architect. And I wonder beyond the sort of step-by-step pedagogy of what other degrees or what other credentials we could imagine that would give somebody a seat at the table because what we're asking of people educated in this way is to be able to affect policy. And you would approach that differently if you're approaching that table. As an architect, it just happens to know everything about material science or climate science versus a credentialed professional or some other discipline. So I think there's a kind of climate design credential that needs to be considered. Yeah. And maybe with that, in a way that's a pretty radical call to action to reimagine the degree. I mean, maybe just to wrap up, I'll let you remote people know what maybe this has gotten to you in one way or another, but along those lines, Columbia as a university has started to investigate what it would mean to have a climate school, like there's a School of Architecture, School of Public Health, Climate School. And the new director of the Earth Institute, Alex Halladay, has been going around and talking to all the different schools, existing schools and departments about this. And there seems to be a certain momentum. And so I think while it's a kind of radical idea about a new degree, the idea of a seat around the table, the idea of like, do we need a radical transformation to address the context that's already radical is I think a really relevant question and maybe a good kind of provocation to leave us all mulling over. I definitely want to thank all of the presenters from my perspective. The event went very well, but we welcome anyone's feedback on this video conference format. And I think you guys who all presented in the initial round of recipients of the GSAP Incubator Prize have set the bar very high for future. So of prize winners and for the current students, you pointed out a range of different, you know, really exciting paths that could be explored. And thank you all for your great work. On behalf of everyone here in Avery, thank you guys all so much for being here with us for the time that you took to test for one of the smoothest calls I've ever been on in public, which was really amazing. So thank you everyone for your participation. We really appreciate it.