 My name is Andres Hake, and I'm the dean at Columbia G-SUB, and for me, it's so unique this moment. It's a moment that we can celebrate and discuss and know more about the work of Mark Suramaki. And Mark has been teaching here since 2004, and it's inseparable. The history of G-SUB is inseparable from the work that Mark has been doing in the last decades. I think that when we look back to what is the evolution of design and the way it's understood, not only here but also in Princeton, in MIT, in the GSD, it could not be explained without the work that Mark Suramaki has been doing in the last decades. I have the feeling that we very well know what the section of a building can do through the work of Mark, together with his partners as LTL architects. And I think the manual of the section allowed and was a milestone in understanding that architecture operates on the social as the social and that the materiality of architecture was a site where politics would be enacted, or through us, politics would be enacted. And that's something that Mark contributed to represent, to provide documents that could fix that information and in a comparative way to produce a huge repertoire, I would say, or a compendium of knowledge on that through the revision of the most known, the most important cases of architectural design that had circulated in architectural media. Very recently, last year, there was a new addition to this, I mean, that was not the first book that Mark did, but that was actually the one that was inevitably making all of us go through his work and their work. And last year, the manual of biogenic house sections was following the same success and equal impact in the field of architecture. And I must say that the capacity to bring architectural design to a discussion where the societal and the ecological was basically the purpose or the main effect on which architecture could be measured and could be understood is something that was very uniquely done at a large scale in the work that Mark, together with his partners, did. But that's not the only thing that Mark has done. That came in parallel and I would say totally in connection with the work that you've been doing, both in your practice with relevant buildings that, for me, for instance, the Children's Enrichment Center in Arkansas, it's an amazing project that was developing collaboration also with this cave, right, and that was making it possible to imagine architecture that could change in relationship with plants, with land, with the earth. And that was actually something that I would say created a milestone that could unavoidably open a discussion that could not be avoided by anyone else that could basically would have to refer to a building like this. Here, right here in the Pulitzer Center, it's the Institute for Media Innovation that I encourage everyone to visit that was actually the amount of awards that it accumulated was actually a little bit offensive, I would say, but still people love Mark and colleagues love the work. So that means a lot, that says a lot. And the Absent Hall in Cornell University is also something that we all remember and something that makes people go to Cornell instead of staying here in Columbia for visiting only, of course. So that says a lot because we feel so comfortable here that we never want to go to other places. It's something that I want to underline the capacity of each of these buildings to establish what I would say a milestone that makes things that are discussed, experimented, a new standard that is then applied by everyone. And I think that capacity to normalize innovation and to make it a new standard that everyone goes through in the context of New York, in the context of the East Coast, in the context of the U.S. architecture, in the context of architecture at large, I think it's something that your firm has been doing for many years now and we have to celebrate now. That, of course, has not escaped anyone's attention and just to mention one important achievement. In 2007, Mark, together with his partners, got the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which as you know is a huge thing in the U.S. It's basically the most important national recognition that any architect can get. And it was very much, it was not only that it was very celebrated, but it was very much agreed by everyone at the time that that happened. And just to mention a couple of more things, I think that the first time I basically talked to students here, I remember one of the first days at GISAB, I asked some students, what is the class that you would recommend me to pay attention to? And they all said, Mark, you're mucky. You have to go to that class. It's amazing. It's really doing things. It's opening a discussion about how design is happening in relationship with the social and with the ecological that you cannot miss. I want to say that also Mark is a very important person in the context of New York. And Mark is the president of the storefront architecture and the arts and arts. And I think this is something that speaks of Mark also dedication to nurture a collective environment around architecture and nurture the profession as a space where discussions, fun, connections with art and with culture can be celebrated and highlighted. And I think this is very unique in a context that is incredibly competitive, that everyone's trying to maximize their capacity to the business that affirmed like in a person like Mark dedicates efforts to better the context in which we operate and to understand how the profession is also a space for relevant discussions and connections with other fields that are normally seen as not necessarily connected business, I think is something that we have to celebrate. All this is to say how important it is at this point to discuss your work Mark, to celebrate it, to understand in detail how the technical dimension that you've been dedicating time to, it's connected to discussions about what are the social relationships that we want to promote, what are the ecological constructions that we can enact through architecture and in collaboration with other entities. I think it's crucial. And for us to have this opportunity as a school also to reflect on how the work that you do here is connected to what you do both through your practice and through your writing and through your citizenship, let's say activism is so important. So please join me in welcoming Mark Ramaki here to speak in his home. So wow, that was a lot. Thank you, Andres, for that amazing introduction. I'm very generous and for inviting me here tonight to speak at the open house. So as Andres alluded to, I'm going to be speaking tonight about the work of my practice LTL architects and the work I do with my partners, Paul and David Lewis, as well as our kind of amazing group of collaborators at LTL. That work involves not only the more expected client-driven commission-built work, but it also involves self-generated speculative design propositions as well as research-based publications. And again, Dean Hakke was alluding to a couple of these publications. These frequently take the form of what we've come to call manuals. We like this notion of the manual because it alludes to an idea of clarity and utility, and we really like the idea that these are useful documents that can actually be put out into the world and actually serve as guides and references and touchpoints for a broader discourse to develop. Oops, sorry, clearly I'm not master of this yet. So the first of these publications was Manual of Section from 2016. The book arose out of our own kind of obsession and fascination with section both as a representational modality that allowed for the simultaneous apprehension of form, performance, material and tectonic conditions and embodied kind of social and spatial perception within any given structure and also section as a kind of site of resistance and invention for architects throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in the face of the kind of ruthless efficiencies of industrialized construction methodologies. The book's been kind of widely disseminated, reprinted, translated into five or six languages. We think there's a Turkish edition where we're told there is. If anyone's seen it, we'd love to see that as well. But we also have been grappling over the course of the intervening years since, like all of you with the increasing existential urgency of climate change, with the legacies of extractivism and the natural, the material exploitation of landscapes and the devastating impacts of these systems on humans, on non-humans and on the planet at large. So we actually think that this publication, Manual of Biogenic House Sections, which we released last year, really this year, actually earlier this year, is in many ways the more important document. And it aligns with a moment within our own practice in which we're kind of shifting our attention to these questions of embodied carbon, to questions of why we build, how we build and most specifically what we build with. And the notion here is to sort of fundamentally rethink the material basis of our architectures in the light of the crisis of climate, in a sense imagining a new paradigm for architecture and the Anthropocene. So the book is arranged according to nine material-based chapters and a chapter on reuse. So I'm going to start, in a sense, from the end and talk a little bit about reuse, which has been kind of critical component of our practice over the years and kind of undergirds a lot of the work that we do. Reuse is a really vital way to address these questions of embodied carbon. We all know this kind of cliche that the most sustainable building is the building that already exists. But moreover, we really feel that reuse, thinking reuse, really allows for a kind of a shifting in the perception of how we approach an architectural project, right? Recognizing that buildings are permanent, but they're continually in flux. They're shedding parts of themselves. They're acquiring new layers and new capacities, decaying and being repaired continuously. So thinking reuse really shifts the logic of the architectural project from questions of duration to questions of transformation and the kind of design work kind of builds upon this continuously kind of emergent quality of the project at hand. So the first of these I'm going to talk about is Steeple Chase Pier in Coney Island. This is a project that in many ways came in the wake of a project that we had conducted in 2010 as part of the exhibition Rising Currents at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Barry Bergdahl. As many of you may know, this was one of the first projects to look at the implications of sea level rise and climate change on cities. And about two years almost exactly to the day after the closing of that show, Sandy hit New York City. This is Steeple Chase Pier. During Sandy, this is Steeple Chase Pier after, in which basically the surface of the pier was unmoored from its kind of structural underpinnings. We were the architects for the renovation of the pier, and we worked obviously in close collaboration with engineers to develop a more resilient structure system that would resist kind of future storm events by actually not resisting them and allowing certain portions of the structure to be actually carried away more readily in a storm. And this project on one hand is still the longest project certainly that we have ever done in the office. It's about a thousand feet long. But on the other hand, actually the work that we did here was very much about reinforcing the idea of the pier as a social space, as a space of collectivity, of kind of mutual engagement. And our actual design interventions involved a very small scale, almost kind of urban furniture elements that actually repurposed the wood from the demolished pier into a series of elements, these sort of double-sided benches that would allow for simultaneous like ocean gazing and people watching, a collective lounge that would allow for sort of kind of collective sunbathing, a canopy that through its articulated shading would inscribe the name of Coney Island in shadow onto the surface of the pier and elevated or inclined ramp at the terminus of the pier that allowed for the negotiation between the fishermen who actually are the primary constituents. They kind of heavily used the end of the pier and strollers, kind of moving out towards views of the eastern horizon and the Atlantic Ocean. So here the idea was to really sort of think about these maybe micro-scale ways within a very kind of macro-scale kind of infrastructural element to kind of create a higher degree of social engagement among the various kind of constituents who use the pier. The second project that I'm going to be talking about actually operates more at a building scale. And this is a project that we did for an arts organization called the Contemporary in Austin, Texas. The project was interesting because we actually got to renovate it twice. So this is kind of a perfect example of a building that evolves over time, in this case relative to shifting organizational and institutional needs. The original organization melded with another entity within the city and therefore how they needed to exhibit and display art changed. And we really kind of approached the project as this accumulation of histories, right? We began by looking at the origins of the building at the turn of the century as a proscenium theater, its transformation in the 1950s into a department store, actually that involved the kind of layering of structural systems and material conditions. And then we conceived of our additions and interventions as a series of strategic insertions that would not overwrite that existing architecture, but actually augmented in very precise ways, allowing for new functionalities to emerge without, in a way, cancelling out the kind of rich properties of the extant building. So this involved a number of different strategies. One was to look at this very long south-facing wall and introduce a series of glass masonry units that could be inserted without structural augmentation to allow for daylight to permeate the interior, modifying this existing second-story window as a double-sided projection screen to actually allow for the transmission of content within the museum to project it out onto the sidewalk. And then this kind of transformation of the existing 1950s awning as a kind of entry point into a public lobby space that was then animated by a new timber stair that connected the kind of public territory of the sidewalk up to a second-level gallery. The stair was composed out of these 32-foot-long kind of timber elements that kind of wedged open, both in plan and section, reaching up to a second-story skylight and allowing access to these newly renovated galleries. In the gallery spaces, we had to augment the existing wooden steel trusses to support a new occupiable roof deck, and that allowed actually for the integration within those green I-beams for a series of wheel tracks that allowed us to have a large 60-foot-long wall which could actually track throughout the gallery to create different exhibition contexts. At the same time, that structure supports a new public event space at the roof deck and a canopy, a shade canopy that was actually part of the second-stage of the renovation that can be modified through urban-scale curtains, and this can become a kind of collective gathering space for events and sort of the activities of the gallery in the organization to occupy a roof deck overlooking the city. It also becomes a kind of a framing device for an artwork, a large-scale installation by the artist Robert Hodges called Liberty and Justice for All, and we love the way that the building acts as a kind of a backdrop for political activity for gathering along this very sort of active stretch of Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas that actually leads a few blocks away to the state capital building. So the third of these projects, and this is kind of a preamble, so I'm going through these relatively quickly, operates at the scale of an urban interior. This is a very recent project called Poster House. It's the first museum in the United States dedicated to poster arts, and this is the space on 23rd Street here in Manhattan that we began with. The space was really interesting in that it was this very unusual condition of a thrubock block site, so it connected from 23rd Street on the south to 24th Street on the north and created this kind of condition of a public thoroughfare, and we liked very much this idea of the space of the museum as a space of passage, of kind of public procession, and we were thinking about this idea of the poster as a public document that in fact the natural kind of environment for the poster, the habitat, if you will, is really the street, the sidewalk, so how could we maintain that? We knew at the same time that we actually had to integrate a museum quality climate controlled gallery for works on paper into this same space, which meant a high degree of humidity and kind of temperature control that had to be kind of certifiable for borrowing of exhibitions and kind of delicate artworks in the future. So what we did was to essentially split the space down the middle line of columns between a more enclosed climate controlled gallery space and then this open public passageway. We inflected the diagonal line of division between these spaces along an angle to increase the dimension of the lobby along 23rd Street and the capacity of the gallery closer to 24th, series of secondary modifications to articulate entrances to the gallery, and then maintaining this idea of one side of the project is really an open public passage where a visitor could move through from one side to the other and countering a series of collective programs which were articulated through a continuous kind of cabinetry element. So upon entry you're greeted by this 20 foot long cantilevered timber table that's linked to the structural steel of the original architecture. And then this division, which we almost thought of as the architectural equivalent of a split screen between a newly inserted architecture, this kind of new gallery space that's rendered in a clay-based plaster, and then on the other side really kind of as little modification as possible but revealing and preserving and restoring the barrel vaults, the cast iron columns, the party wall and the wood floor with kind of minimal intervention. So this was both a kind of spatial strategy but also an economic one. So we really only had to kind of intensively renovate one side of the space, creating this again museum quality gallery with all of the requisite levels of environmental control on the one side, and then this more open public passage along which kind of the collective events of the museum were articulated through essentially a 200 foot long millwork item that modulated and shifted to incorporate programs, book store, reception desk, entry lounge, cafe, et cetera, along the length of the space. We wanted to highlight even in the context of the new architecture, the existing historic architecture, so kind of illuminating these columns as they carve into the kind of new canopy that extends from the gallery and then at the kind of terminus of the gallery volume, this kind of interactive photo booth that's correlated to the scale of the window and the street connecting the space of the museum back onto the public space of the sidewalk. So a lot of these projects, and this is another renovation project that Dean Hawke alluded to Cornell University, although they were clearly involved in the recuperation of the embodied carbon that was represented by the existing architecture, were really focused in many ways on kind of operational energy like thinking about, let's say, more highly performing skins that in this case would create greater insulated benefits while diffusing daylight into a series of laboratories. And since then we've really been, again, kind of addressing this question of how we can begin to shift into questions of embodied carbon. And I'm going to go through this, this is probably familiar territory for some of you but it's maybe worth kind of going through this once just to sort of understand some of the preconditions. So this graph you've probably seen versions of this, this is not our data but it's our kind of graphic articulation of data from architecture 2030. The kind of dark squiggly line illustrates kind of where we've gotten to and then these two broad kind of gray swaths represent where we're headed with kind of current climate policies or no action at all. So this is what happens if we just keep going down the road that we're on but this is actually where we need to be, right? So we need to be at 65% reduction in global carbon emissions by 2030 and we need to get to net zero by 2050. This represents obviously a radical shift in the way that we operate and kind of looking very carefully at where this carbon accumulates, what it's associated with. So we probably also know these statistics. Buildings like what we do as architects represents about 39% of global carbon, 28% in operational, 11% in embodied carbon. That may not seem very much, 11% but if we actually look at the total carbon emissions associated with global new construction, in other words new buildings that are going to be created over the course of the next 30 years, it's about half the carbon. If we actually look at more highly performing buildings, greater energy efficiency, it's more than half and as we know what's critical about embodied carbon which is the carbon that goes into the processing materials and construction of our buildings as opposed to their ongoing maintenance energy and operation, heating and cooling, is that it's upfront carbon. That means that it's expended at the time of the construction of the building whereas operational carbon accrues over the lifespan of the building. So what does this mean? What can we do? What can we do as architects? Well, we can not build. That doesn't seem like the most terribly appealing option for architects. We can build less, we can build more efficiently and we can reuse. But it's unlikely that we're going to reuse our way out of this situation. The projections are currently that the world will be adding about 2.5 trillion square feet of new buildings over the course of the next 30 years. That's essentially doubling the global building stock in three decades. So what does this mean? It means we have to seriously reconsider how we build and what we build with. It means we need to reassess the legacies of modernism with its reliance on steel, concrete and glass which are not only three of the most carbon intensive materials but are also based on extractive processes that have had devastating impacts on ecosystems and landscapes and in equitably distributed effects on communities and human health. It also positions, modernism positions the architect as a kind of consumer as a specifier of products rather than an inventor of material systems. So we think the alternative or one of the important alternatives is to work with biogenic and geogenic materials which are either low carbon or as in the case of plant-based materials actually sequester carbon in their very cell structures. These materials are ubiquitous, they're widely distributed globally, they're generally inexpensive, they're frequently erased products of other agro-industrial processes, they require minimal processing and in many cases we already know a lot about how to build with them, right? So we know about how to build with these products because they've been around for a while, right? So we're talking about these as if they're new but in fact they're paradoxically among the oldest forms of matter used for human construction and there's a vast amount of indigenous knowledge and long-standing cultural practices associated with their capacity as building elements. So we need to learn from this knowledge absolutely and kind of benefit from it but we also need to engage in a contemporary way what the potentials of these materials are. So manual biogenic house sections kind of looks at this question through the lens of 55 houses called from around the world that represent not only biogenic and geogenic material assemblies but also innovative ways to think about dwelling in the 21st century. So why the house? This is an important question. It's one that we actually had a great deal of anxiety about when we were putting the book together because we know the houses are part of the problem, right? We build too many single-family houses, about a million a year in North America alone. Those houses are too big so they've increased in scale by about two and a half times between 1950 and 2020 and not only that but they're actually built with the exception of the wood frame largely out of toxic petrochemical derivative materials that have kind of negative effects on human health from asthma to cancer both in terms of the material processing, extraction and manufacture which often ends up actually nearby disenfranchised communities but also relative to the occupancy of these houses, right? That we're kind of living in these sort of toxic environments. The materials are predicated on a take-make-trash linear cycle meaning that they're very difficult to reprocess and most of them end up in landfill, right? But the house has historically been a kind of site of experimentation, right? So throughout modernism, for example, new forms of kind of tectonic and spatial assembly were played out in the context of the house. We know this history and because of the very ubiquity and scale of the house it becomes a potent vehicle for thinking about new material ecologies. So let's, if we take a kind of closer look at the wall section of the house we can see, in a way, part of a problem which is the way we build houses now is actually through a multiplicity of very lightweight, thin, monofunctional and kind of hygienic layers that are based on a strict division between inside and outside. These are kind of single-use, they're kind of monofunctional. They're very, very difficult to pull apart and reprocess for reuse and they often operate across purposes to each other. By contrast, biogenic and geogenic systems tend towards thickness. They tend toward limited material components and they often integrate multiple functions within a single monolithic mass becoming simultaneously structure, skin, insulation and envelope, a kind of symbiotic assembly in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So again, we looked at a series of these assemblies. All of the houses were selected from different climatic and cultural contexts. They're all relatively small houses around a thousand square feet so we weren't interested in exorbitant, luxurious houses but really kind of more minimal constructions and they all elevate the use of these materials from an architectural standpoint. In other words, the encounter with materials is kind of responded to in the design of the house in very particular and inventive ways. So I'm going to go very quickly through these kind of nine different material systems talking probably very fast but in each of these instances we look at the carbon sequestering potential of the material. We map each material's life cycle from field to form and back again repositioning the building not as a static moment or an isolated artifact but rather as a kind of temporary accumulation of matter and energy as an origin and an afterlife, a kind of moment in a regenerative cycle of material flows bound to the natural world. We look at the processing of the material, how it goes from the plant to the building component. This is really important in terms of questions of embodied carbon. Then we demonstrate through a series of houses in each category how this kind of translates into an architectural response. We do this through detailed axonometric drawings, photographs and of course sectional perspectives that look at this relationship between material assembly, spatial form and kind of operations of dwelling. So after about four years of working on the book we obviously are now folding back some of this thinking and work into our own project so I'm going to be talking simultaneously about some of the projects in the manual biogenic house sections along with a series of five experimental aspect of houses that we've been developing actually operate through different combinations of biogenic materials working usually in a kind of hybridized format to take advantage of different properties within the materials. So to start with mass timber, this is probably the most well-known of biogenic materials, CLT, it's the most kind of broadly adopted, the most kind of fully integrated into building codes and constructional processes and it obviously has a fantastic potential to reduce embodied carbon relative to structural materials like steel and concrete. But there are certain limits when we're talking about mass timber, the first of which is that trees take a long time to grow right, a tree takes 30 to 100 years to get to a state where it can be used as construction material. If it's left alive it continues to sequester that carbon and even with carefully managed for stewardship that cultivating or rather the felling of trees creates kind of the release of carbon into the atmosphere, the destruction of soils and ecosystems. And third only about 50% of any given tree is ever used right, so about 50% of the material is returned as carbon into the atmosphere. So this isn't a kind of pure net wind, there are kind of complications involving the kind of use of mass timber. But all of that said it's a potentially kind of transformative system and it's frequently used as a substitute for a conventional structural systems, slabs, beams and columns. In the book we're really interested in finding houses that actually operated with the specific capacities of mass timber, of CLT as this kind of penalized logic. So a house by Jennifer Bonner, model architects that uses the capacity to carefully and intricately tool these panels into complex geometries to create this kind of folded gabled roof which actually becomes the spatial interior kind of landscape for the house. Project by Atelier Subtama in Finland for the meteorite house which nests a series of rectilinear boxes within a more irregular enigmatic shell creating this kind of thick interstitial zone which acts as an insulative air cavity. There are issues here with convection that I'm sure you might kind of wonder about, but apparently the house performs quite well with this kind of double skin. It reduces the use of other surfaces. It's only finished with an exterior stain for waterproofing reasons and it eliminates insulation interior surfaces and other forms of excessive surfaces. In our own project in contrast to the sort of complex tooling that's possible with prefabricated CLT panels we're really interested in the capacity of the unmilled the kind of minimally processed CLT blank which typically comes in this sort of 10 by 50 foot scale. So really thinking about this is a very very large building component tilting up five pairs of panels that kind of go from vertical in the rear of the project incrementally moving toward one another to meet in the form of this attenuated triangle at the front of the project. The panels are interconnected by a continuous CLT stair that kind of links from top to bottom leading to a roof level kind of crow's nest with views into the surrounding treetops and then within the house that stairway extends into a series of platforms and sleeping lofts would take advantage of this very very tall sort of stretched triangulated space kind of derivative of the scale of the CLT panel itself to create this kind of new form of a sort of a simple a-frame construction. So bamboo actually takes us from the realm of the tree into the realm of grasses. Bamboo is not a tree, it's an arborescent grass with woody stems and the primary advantage of bamboo is that it grows very very fast. This is one of the world's fastest growing plants so rather than 100 years, 3 to 7 years to reach a point of kind of constructional utility. Moreover because bamboo is actually a kind of rhizomatic system, the culling of individual combs from the plant doesn't kill the plant, right? So the tree or rather the grass the bamboo plant survives. This process which is often accomplished through kind of minimal means kind of hand culling rather than kind of mechanical felling of trees there are a number of different ways of processing bamboo kind of most commonly. It's pressed, crushed and laminated into sheet good materials like wall panels and flooring but the full comb can also be utilized, bundled together and aggregated in different ways to create surfaces and structural elements. This very interesting house in Ecuador uses clusters of large indigenous combs to create a structural frame that creates the kind of diagonal bracing in the house such that the entire section of the house is defined by a series of inclining surfaces or ramps punctuated by a series of multi-story voids. Anna Herringer's work with experimental housing prototypes here using this kind of weaving of bamboo that's actually based on local traditions in this part of China, kind of a basket weaving tradition to generate this kind of complex outer shell or veil which surrounds an earth and core off of which you're supported a series of sleeping platforms creating this kind of interstitial protected zone. So earth is the next category and I'm going to go through this very quickly in deference to the fact that we have our own resident expert here at GSAP in Lola Benelan who's kind of specializes in geogenic systems but earth is obviously has both structural and insulated capacity it's ubiquitous, inexpensive, it's inherently local you can draw it from the site and it's everywhere. The most typical ways of processing earth are either through compressed earth blocks through rammed earth construction but also in a more contemporary event through 3D printing. So again the utilization of earth can range from very basic low tech techniques This is a project called Von Haus Flurry by Space Shop Architects in Switzerland which involves the use of cob walls that are manually constructed. Cob is a combination of clay and straw creating these very long kind of beautiful walls that become a kind of interior feature but also the kind of structural and insulated component in the house with these long overhanging roofs insulated by straw which provide kind of the erosion control for the house in detail, kind of blow up of that section. And then the other end of the spectrum company called WASP operating outside of Bologna, Italy which operates through the 3D printing of clay here working with the architect Mario Cuccinella to produce this kind of dome like or beehive like construction of multiple layers of structural layers creating a 30 inch thick wall that's filled with rice husks for their insulated capacity and kind of capping the entire thing with a series of skylights to create these almost cave like but daylight interior environments. So in our project for the Lamella Earth House we were kind of interested in this kind of necessity to kind of protect the kind of earthen walls which are kind of subject to erosion utilizing the kind of efficiency and strength of bamboo. So the project actually consists of an extruded Lamella arch, a kind of a long Lamella vault that works with the kind of limited eight foot lengths of bamboo repetitive joints to create an efficient long spanning structure within that structure which is clad partially with bioplastic to allow for solar gain to create a kind of greenhouse like environments and clad on the north side by reed based thatch that protects it from wind and rain. Within that kind of interstitial environment we lodge an earthen based set of living quarters that are excavated from and built from the soil of the site and are housed within this passively climatized buffer zone that acts as productive garden as an extension of the public collective spaces of the house and shields the earthen dwelling from the deleterious effects of wind and rain. So the next three things I'm going to talk about the last three things I promise are all insulation so I know you guys are getting excited about hearing about insulation. If you're coming to a lecture at GSAP you're probably thinking I really want to hear about insulation. So insulation is obviously not the sexiest aspect of architecture and for many years I admit we was also something we didn't put a lot of thought to right it's hidden within the walls invisible but not only does it perform you know it's incredibly important obviously in the thermal operation of our buildings but what we use for insulation conventionally in buildings is often as I was alluding to earlier very toxic EPS XPS spray foam fiberglass bat insulation these are all pretty nasty characters right so one of the great things about biogenic materials is that there are many forms that are actually really effective as insulation and I'm going to talk about hemp only briefly here but hemp which was actually illegal to grow for many years in this country from the 1970s to about 2018 because of its association with marijuana it's not the same plant but because of the war on drugs you couldn't grow it here until relatively recently hemp is an incredibly robust and useful plant it grows into graded soil it requires minimal fertilizer and water and it generates a lot of really useful effects both a kind of fibrous stock but then internal to that stock what's called the herd the herd is the part of the plant that's combined frequently with lime to form what's called hemp crete which sometimes is erroneously called well it's correctly called hemp lime but it's often erroneously called hemp crete it's not a substitute for concrete it doesn't actually have structural capacity to speak of but it is a fantastic insulator it can be sprayed or compacted into walls it can be fabricated as pre-manufactured blocks assembled into larger panels another fantastic insulating material is cork and cork really is truly multi-purpose it is fungally resistant it's water resistant it's thermally insulated and even has structural capacity compressive strength the difficulty with cork is that it only grows in very limited parts of the world right so most of the cork in the world is grown in the Iberian peninsula Africa and it's part of a very complex agroforestry ecosystem that actually requires the kind of hand cultivation of the bark of the cork oak that's what cork is that happens in a periodic basis so once the trees reach maturity they can be essentially sheared like sheep without killing the tree and the cork grows back on cycles of about nine to twelve years these trees are protected but most of that cork goes into the wine stopper industry believe it or not which is a huge industry so almost all of the material that we use in building products is really the waste product of the cork stopper so what's left over from that is granulated it's adhered to itself either through adhesives or preferably through an autoclaving process which actually activates the naturally occurring binders in the cork so it's kind of self-adhering if treated thermally and it's most commonly deployed in the form of sheet goods wall panels, flooring surfaces but this is a really fantastic house in England called cork house obviously enough which really kind of uses almost exclusively cork as a mono material to create structure, insulation exterior envelope, waterproofing and interior finish so all of these kinds of qualities of cork in this case translated into 1286 CNC custom milled blocks which are interlocked to create this kind of corbled or beehive vault shape that then articulates a series of rooms below these sort of skylit kind of pyramidal roofscapes and with the exception of the spiral foundations, CLT platform and a series of timber ring beams the entire house is really one material it's all cork so kind of fantastic capacity really for these biogenic materials to become almost a form of vegetal masonry if you will that actually performs at kind of multiple scales in multiple ways so the final material I'm going to talk about tonight is straw and straw is ubiquitous around the world basically straw is distinct from hay which is a feedstock straw is essentially what's left over from the processing of cereal grain crops wheat, rice, oats, barley, whatever, what have you so anywhere in the world that people eat grain which is everywhere in the world you have straw and straw has fantastic insulating capacity but it's generally because of its status as a waste product frequently left to decay and degrade in the field so straw on the other hand because of the predominance of grain crops has the potential to sequester enormous amounts of carbon according to one calculation the amount of carbon that's represented by one year of straw in the world is equivalent to all of the carbon generated by concrete construction within that same year right so if we can recapture this carbon and kind of utilize it sequester it, it's a kind of huge potential advantage rather than kind of returning it back into the atmosphere which is typically what happens now so straw of course is frequently bound into bales and in fact as early as the 1800s in Nebraska this Nebraska load bearing system essentially just utilized the ready-made agricultural artifact of the bale as essentially a building block to create structures many of those structures 120 years later actually still exist so this idea about durability and how long these structures can be maintained is a really interesting question but certainly it's possible straw needs to be protected by in most cases a layer of lime or clay based plaster that prevents the infiltration of mold and vermin and other kinds of critters from the interior surface but it has both thermal capacity and also can act as structure it's also frequently used as an infill for structural insulated panels and we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment this is a kind of fascinating project by Atelier Schmitt Werner Schmitt who's doing a lot of really interesting work with straw this kind of corbelled pavilion which as you can see it kind of exhibits this kind of massively thick straw wall using here jumbo bales which are very large bales they weigh about 600 pounds each creating this kind of internal domestic space under this super thick insulating structural blanket that happens to kind of contain about 75 metric tons of agricultural waste in which sequester is about 83,000 kilograms of CO2 so we really became fascinated by this capacity of straw to be both thick and efficient right and so we developed a series of houses that look at this kind of question of mass in relationship to a series of dwelling projects so the first is called straw bale spiral house the house works through a combination of two contrasting materials CLTs and straw with the space of the CLT units carving voids into the mass of the straw so essentially the straw bales these jumbo straw bales are stacked up into a hollow cube and combined with a series of prefabricated CLT mass timber modules each of which corresponds to one of the programmatic rooms of the house the bales support the CLT modules and the CLT modules stabilize the bales kind of creating this sort of reciprocal exchange the entire assembly is capped by a stress skin roof with a central skylight which can be shaded in which extends into a series of cantilevered eaves to protect the lime clay plaster on the exterior of the house and the rooms of the house essentially form a continuous spiral from front door roof terrace interconnected by a stair open at both ends to create this interior condition which is simultaneously thick and porous highly kind of introverted but extroverted at the same time so with mass straw house we were really interested in this idea that we could make a house that's actually more mass than space and kind of capitalized on this kind of logic of the straw bale so here the house is really formed by two different ways of stacking straw bales one a kind of corbelled wall and the other a kind of terrace stack those two elements are connected by a series of timber box beams which are actually insulated by additional straw capped by a hemp fiber membrane and then an additional sacrificial layer of unprotected straw is added on top in the form of a decomposing green roof so we like very much the idea that the house will begin to decay back into the site over time kind of engaging in a productive way in tropic processes the main space of the house is essentially contained between these two systems and exists as a kind of terrace interior landscape with private spaces carved into the thickness of the straw itself creating this condition again where there's kind of as much stuff as there is occupiable space and we were kind of fascinated by this possibility that thickness which is usually conceived in negative terms indicative of a lack of material optimization is here kind of exploited both for its kind of idiosyncratic spatial characteristics but also for its thermal structural and carbon sequestering benefits in other words if the material is cheap it's plentiful and the more of it we use the better the house performs then paradoxically the excessive becomes efficient so two very very kind of last things these are kind of ongoing work in the office and things we're kind of pursuing now one is a set of material experiments and with the caveat that we're not material scientists but really just kind of fascinated in about the possibilities of these materials and as I was alluding to earlier there are a whole series of interesting products that are hitting the market in the last several years from Iqaqaqan to AlphaWall to Croft a company that actually works out of Rockland, Maine these are essentially structural insulated panels in other words their stick frame or timber structural panels that are filled with compressed straw utilizing it for its insulated capacity these are great systems they're potentially really useful they have all kinds of interesting efficiencies and architectural implications but they don't take advantage of what we think is the most fascinating condition of straw which is that it's both insulative and structural so we really are really curious about this idea of how can we think about combining those capacities so this summer we built a compression table so we could conduct some of these experiments ourselves that allowed us to kind of compress the straw to a much higher degree of compression than the standard straw bale but once it's compressed it has to stay in that form or we lose it's kind of these new capacities so we are experimenting with a series of binders this is mycelium but working with a variety of elements from earth to lime to various adhesives even cement just to sort of see how this kind of evolves working with the idea of a kind of a stress skin panel with these more highly compressed straw interiors to kind of take advantage of this dual capacity of structure and thermal regulation we cut these elements down to test them within the kind of in strong compression machine we get this very very strange effect where there's almost no lateral deformation by the way this is sped up about 15 times and then sort of bounce back so rather than conventional materials which basically are rigid up to a point and then fail catastrophically straw just keeps kind of compressing at a certain level so it behaves very very differently from kind of conventional logics of even timber as a structural material so the question becomes how do you kind of maximize the resistant capacity of the straw from a structural standpoint without actually compromising its thermal capacity because the denser the straw becomes you actually risk kind of losing some of its insulated property which is based on the entrained air within the straw units themselves anyway so all of us to say we're kind of working with this we're now testing the thermal capacity of these elements and you can see here very preliminary inconclusive and needs to be further tested but the standard foam is by far the worst in terms of its insulated capacity relative to these other kind of conglomerates that we've been operating with so the final project experiment with straw is kind of based on this kind of ubiquitous feature of the American landscape you probably kind of see this when you drive across the middle of the country right these very very large round straw bales which are actually more compressed by virtue of their size they're closer to 40 kilograms per cubic meter in terms of their density which is denser than the normal straw bale they're very large they're inexpensive they can be moved around by a single piece of equipment and we became really interested in how this very strange element might actually become a building component we began sort of kind of experimenting with this idea of an overscaled column that's a thick wall that can be carved reposition that can kind of create both figure and field that can become more or less kind of organized or more or less randomized that can be stacked up to create new kind of spatial characteristics and then we began to think about it relative to a project that Dean Hakke mentioned earlier which is the Helen Walton Children's Enrichment Center so this is a project for an early childhood education center that we developed a couple of years ago the premise of the project was that and this is basically a center for very young children about the age of four and the ethos of the center was that all of the children would have kind of immediate and continuous access to exterior space right these landscapes designed by Scape in collaboration with Scape to here on the left and even within inclement weather all year round the students would have these kind of porch like terrace like elements and kind of the activity of play was seen as kind of absolutely integral to the educational property however this project although we work very hard to eliminate toxic materials actually there's no plastics no VOCs the toys are wooden and the paint is mineral based and that was really kind of critical to us but the structural systems are conventional right so we were using here a steel joist steel studs sheetrock and so we began to think about is there a way based on these experiences in Arkansas to think about a need for similar facilities throughout underserved communities in the rural south where there's simultaneously a surplus of agricultural waste in the form of these very large jumbo round straw bales we developed a prototypical system a kind of wall system that uses a kind of a chaining together of these round bales kind of double stacked to form these kind of columnar walls that could then act as insulation at their kind of thinnest point it's about these things are like they're in terms of their mass capped by a CLT plate in a series of reciprocal beams so these straw bales are again arranged in a circular formation they're capped by a series of reciprocal LVL beams that create a kind of oculus at the center of each room creating these very sort of thick insulative environments which are simultaneously open to exterior yards so the thick walls become compatible and the bales extend into a series of exterior playscapes creating the kind of required kind of secure enclosure out in the landscape and the entire kind of assemblage operates through the pairing of classrooms with similarly scaled classroom around shared service core and extended kind of extension of those straw bales into the landscape to create both a shared space age appropriate play space for the children but also we really like this idea that those same straw bales that form the structure of the building could extend into the adjacent kind of agricultural territory degrade and decay into the landscape to become a substrate for a series of vegetable gardens that feed the children who live in the school so I'm going to stop there and just maybe as a kind of brief summary these are all kind of experiments and process these are all things that were kind of working on continuously and each of these instances were really interested in how an encounter with the specific characteristics of these material systems can become a kind of catalyst for rethinking architectural form performance and inhabitation and how this really kind of shifts the meaning and relevance of a whole series of terms like optimization and standardization maintenance and repair efficiency and excess durability and entropy and we're like super optimistic about the capacity of engaging regenerative materials and their capacity to foster response that's actually more powerful enduring than that of modernism's instrumentalization of extractive processes and materials reengaging architects with regenerative cycles and creating the potential for new imaginative ways of buildings that are tied to a more convivial relationship to natural systems to other beings and to the earth. So thank you. Amazing. We've seen everything we've seen basically from machines that are compressing hand-bend stall and to books and to examples of architecture from all around that we've seen and I have a question because normally this kind of broad spectrum of registers it's not something that we're used to see in a lecture like this. Normally we see architects present in their portfolio with very nice photographs a few plans and a few anecdotes but I have the feeling that there's an expansion of the material that is presented here and somehow I have the feeling that normally architects try to hide that. There's a lot of research and let's say work that is done at the offices that kept secret and I remember when I graduated from the School of Architecture one of my first jobs was interviewing people for El Croquis magazine so the first thing that everyone would bring is an NDA. You're going to see many things you're not allowed to publish them, you're not allowed to talk about them we will tell you what you have but somehow there's an effort here of showing much more, sharing much more and actually I have the feeling that we see a change and you see the profession. Somehow research and experimentation I would say, let's say the outcome of your work, processes that are kind of allowing you to analyze other examples or cases of architecture and even the way different sites like the harvest site as the construction site and the construction as interconnected are part of a larger let's say laboratory where architecture is sort of emerging. So I want to ask you specifically to start this conversation about that. What is the way that you see the interaction between this experimentation, the profession and also sort of something that I don't know how to call which is sort of influence, diffusion or even activism within the material realm of how we operate. But definitely there's a change in the way these different realms are articulated in your practice and I'd like to know more about how basically you came to this. Yeah, thanks for the question. Hopefully it's not indicative of the fact that I overshared but I think it hits on a number of really important points. One is that I think we've given that lecture that you're describing many, many times, right? Here's our work, this is the project, these are the highly composed photographs and I wanted to give a little bit of that tonight but I think we're at a place of transition in our own practice where I think some of the things we're most interested at the moment don't actually materialize in that format yet. So there are things that I didn't show, there are things that we're working on now and there's a couple of client-driven projects that I can't speak to but which hopefully will be available to share in the near future that actually are taking some of these ideas and then kind of deploying them relative to in one instance an educational institutional project and in the other case a kind of large scale kind of rehabilitation of an existing building. But we really do see this really as an exchange, right? The manuals for us and the process of constructing them of making them are first of all in exchange with the architects that we're featuring because a lot of this is by and large not our work, we're kind of learning from and engaging with architects from around the world. So we're also in the context of that building a kind of network and a kind of community as it were and then we're kind of working in collaboration with a whole series obviously that I didn't specifically denote here but a whole series of collaborators at different scales, right? Clients, engineers like all architects are doing and with the kind of fantastic people kind of within our office. But part of it's kind of emblematic of the fact that I think we're trying to find a new way of operating, right? And so a lot of the more kind of conventional ways of talking about work or of lecturing about work seem inadequate, right? To kind of talk about the things that are most concerning to us. And frankly there is a moment of kind of uncertainty, right? Where sort of these are things in development, these things are in a kind of initial kind of nascent stage and we're kind of struggling through kind of capacities and possibilities and kind of research, right? So it's a kind of a research that's in progress and I, you know, there's maybe a naïve about kind of disseminating that and kind of opening it up. I mean we you know, we did this project at the beginning of the pandemic called Manual of Physical Distancing which was essentially a kind of documentation that deployed the techniques of architectural representation to visualize the best available science at the time about transmission, proximity, spatialization of the virus and we made it available online as a kind of free accessible resource which may not have been the wisest thing to do from a kind of legal kind of self-protective perspective but we really wanted to contribute in a productive and direct way to a kind of ongoing kind of moment of crisis, right? And to use the tools that we had at our disposal to do that, right? And so maybe there's a kind of moment in the practice now where we're questioning a lot of the underpinnings of what we've done in the past and the kind of basis of the way that we've sort of conducted work. I mean it does involve client conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable. Certainly in all transparency it's probably meant that a few projects that we would have had access to we didn't and we had to kind of step back from certain amount of work because of these questions that we think are so vital to the kind of future of the discipline. But we think that's important, right? And if there's a certain amount of kind of kind of exposure related to that maybe that's all for the, that's a positive thing as well and it kind of hopefully fosters a kind of exchange rather than this kind of sort of passive reception of things where we're sort of delivering information that this is all kind of it's evolving, it's emerging, it's kind of a state in a state of change. I love the fact that you started with the project in Coney Island because in a way I think that there's two directions of your work. One is when you were accounting for Coney Island there was all these emergencies I would say like basically Sandy came and then there was all these different types of wood that would be basically differentiated by Sandy those that were destroyed, those that were recyclable and there's other things that you found like the fisherman would go there the other people would do that, other things and would happen you know it's there's a certain kind of messiness in the way that you account for projects that have that trajectory in which all these presences are manifesting in let's say unpredictable ways in the way that you connect other sides through the analysis that you're presenting of existing projects there seems to be a predetermination of what are the parts that you're going to look at for instance you're going to look at where the material is sourced from what is the way that it works thermally and structurally but maybe there's always surprises like for instance I love the fact that there's the rabbits there in the mass of the house but somehow there's a sense of control on what is that that you're going to be paying attention to I wonder why these two directions are so different whereas one seems to be unpredictably finding alliances and associations and the other seems to be much more prescriptive in the way that and I wonder why that happens and what is your take on that yeah it's interesting I mean I guess the my initial take on it is that in relationship to the content of the book where we were working within the let's say the language of you know in a way it kind of comes back to this notion of the manual and the necessity that we which was true in the first book as well which was developing a kind of consistent set of graphic representational conventions that would allow in that case the kind of cross-comparative analysis of these different works of architecture so that you could understand them in relationship to each other but in the context of the new book you know it's thinking similarly about these material systems in a way that is systematized in its representation to allow for a certain amount of kind of immediate accessibility to that information right if that makes sense so part of it has to do with format part of it has to do with how do we make a kind of complex information readily accessible right to the reader to the viewer to the observer and the you know the intent you know we recognize absolutely that there are you know there are books that get into incredibly intricate detail right about every nuance of bamboo right every potential kind of you know functional usage artistic tradition kind of cultural implication you know structural joint and in the kind of survey quality of the book which was about consolidating that information into a kind of compendium right where this information could be kind of at a very kind of level absorbed that wasn't kind of possible for us right so that meant a certain amount of standardization in relationship to the representational kind of techniques and maybe that's what I'm kind of getting out of your question in terms of how we kind of assess the viability it's also maybe responding to the fact that if you're making an argument for these material systems which are not kind of readily acceptable that have a whole series of kind of complicated issues in terms of how they get incorporated into everything from code to kind of constructional logistics to liability questions right that there's a certain kind of necessity to kind of represent and document right the information at hand in that way right so that this is you know it's a kind of toolkit in a sense right and by virtue of being a toolkit maybe some of those kind of accidents that some of those kind of idiosyncratic elements end up being smoothed out hopefully they're more visible in the projects themselves I think because each of those sort of plays it out in kind of disparate ways and kind of looks at different qualities of these materials right something that is fascinating like normally we would see you know in lectures like this we would see people that could bring amazing houses that they built and then draw in some big buildings that they would like to do right here is the opposite basically we see huge buildings that are built and then we see tiny houses that are the word your experimentation goes right and I'm surprised by that because in a way it's indicating something of a shift in the way you're working and then it comes like the last project that you saw the children's building that I love you were frustrated maybe or not frustration but basically we didn't manage to do the structure it's very conventional in a way as opposed to the ambition that you have in the or the kind of the work that you're making the structure of your houses your own houses do so I think that I have a question about scale and what is the relationship of scale with experimentation what is the way that you see things that happen at one scale moving to other scales and what is that that takes to do that because in a way your manual is showing a little bit of a happy description of how this happens it's not showing the reservations or the difficulties of making the timber come or basically doing a house with timber or doing thick walls that are but I have the feeling that in the way you're presenting it and you're allocating let's say the most ambitious part of your material experimentation in these houses and then accepting more of a negotiation in the larger buildings there's a lot to learn about how things move from the scale of what you can control to to bring other actors in and making that something that is broader participated it's exactly right what you're noting is absolutely true maybe perverse way in which at this kind of relatively advanced stage in our careers we're actually designing smaller projects that create a space of speculation about these materials it correlates in some way to the identification of the house as the site of experimentation in the manual in general and that was a kind of recognition that in fact when you look at a lot of these materials where they're being kind of deployed or kind of using them in construction is in a sense out of necessity in smaller scale constructions like houses where it's more difficult to imagine because of all of the other impediments that the profession brings with it large scale implementation comes with another set of challenges that are often circumvented in the context of the dwelling and that was a point of anxiety and for us of insecurity because that whole question of the house is an incredibly complex one and problematic one but the other kind of realities was that the drawing of a relatively smaller scale building like a house allowed for a magnified scrutiny of the kind of material constituency of the building so in manual of section the very very large buildings you could convey aspects of their spatial organization, their kind of social condition but it was very difficult to convey kind of in a detailed way questions about tectonics, material assembly, etc and we realized that the smaller scale buildings which were there were a few houses a number of houses in the original publication allowed for that kind of level of attention right into the specificity of that and to draw it out to make it visible to kind of render it meaningful and legible in a way and so the scale is on the one hand relating to that right condition and so that when we kind of started to kind of deploy some of these materials in our own kind of speculative kind of design work that became a kind of a natural kind of outgrowth of that the question of scalability is absolutely a really kind of critical one and we're now kind of looking at what that means moving beyond the kind of realm of the house and looking at larger scale configurations and implementations of this and that's happening but it is the earlier projects, most of the projects I showed were before the last few years we now have a kind of a new range of projects obviously that are in production but really in a sense came before a lot of these realizations for us right that they were working in a realm or maybe those questions hadn't come in as forceful way to the foreground and so obviously we've always you know materiality is something that's always obsessed us from the earliest kind of projects that we did very very small scale projects in many cases but kind of very materially intensive but not necessarily in the same way and not necessarily using the same metrics right so absolutely we don't necessarily see the house as a scalar limit but we do recognize that moving kind of beyond that scale into kind of larger and larger projects requires a different set of operations and transformations and engagements on the other hand you know I think maybe we're also at a point where building the biggest building is no longer the most right necessarily something right it isn't necessarily about building more right building kind of more kind of grandiose buildings more and more kind of grandiose structures that's got us into trouble right at some level that's part of the problematic so I think the modesty in a way of the scale is something that we're at least kind of initially sort of embracing right and trying to move beyond the notion right of you know the scale of the building being a virtue in and of itself and maybe the dissemination also because your books are probably the most I mean I'm always amazed that they're among the best sellers in architecture right in Amazon so that dissemination probably will but maybe we can open it to two questions from the audience and there's one there and then Mario let's start there with that yeah. Hello Mark first of all thank you so much for a wonderful super informative and exciting presentation it's actually so fitting to what I'm gonna talk about in my elective tomorrow morning I was hoping that maybe when I see only one person from my elective present there's two more there. Oh sorry more, thank you so much you have a good grade already so I'm already wondering if the video on YouTube is gonna be uploaded by tomorrow morning at 9am we'll see about that Mark I really appreciate the manuals they are incredibly important in the canon when teaching architecture not only for incredibly strong graphics but also all the information and innovation over there but what I appreciate most is the pushing the materials out of boundaries and actually not only taking what is out there on the market but trying to create new pieces new structural systems which is a very big inspiration not only for us your colleagues but also most of all the students and here this is leading me to the question because I do have a question bear with me I wanted to ask you about those nine chapters in the last manual and I have kind of a egg chicken kind of question I really like I know how difficult it is to write a book and select the right case studies that would be drawn or discussed but I find it fascinating that you always can show your own examples from LTL and I'm wondering what comes first do you say straw okay we're gonna write about straw let's make a project about straw that we can put into the book or was it the other way around yeah it's a really interesting question it is a chicken and egg although I will say that the projects those projects that I showed are not in the book they're in a kind of a second publication that has a more limited release projects in the initial manual of section included our own work in that and in some level the question that you're asking is exactly the point the reason that we generate these manuals I mean yes on the one hand we hope they become kind of useful documents for students of architecture for architects in general for the discipline and initiate a kind of discourse and a conversation around these topics and I guess we've come to recognize that our particular skill set whatever that is maybe kind of has allowed us to do that in a certain way but they're also really documents for us right that they're generated out of the things that were obsessed and fascinated by at the time so you know we always we historically kind of deployed sectional perspectives in our own work actually they're very different from the drawings in the book in many ways and the ways that we develop them were very different they kind of contributed to this notion right of okay how do we think about this also as teachers working with students all the time we also were faced with this kind of you know this kind of maybe void within architectural education that we were trying to mitigate and thinking about how section had you know become a kind of retroactive document that was generated as a kind of secondary effect of a digital model rather than seen as a kind of generative and instrumental for developing the project and so we thought you know that was something that we could we could kind of contribute to the kind of conversation of course having gone through that exercise and gone through the kind of let's say in that case the typological classification of the buildings and the emergence of the set of structural operational kind of logics that you know absolutely kind of folds back into the way that we think about our own work and in the context of the manual biogenic house sections book it was absolutely came out of an interest in these materials again you know some of our earliest projects when I think about them were working with things like felt and bamboo and cardboard right these very sort of normative generic and expensive materials natural materials and maybe we had felt a bit as you allude to in the HWCC project as much as we like many aspects of the project that the materiality had started to kind of reach a stage of kind of neutralization in a way right it was less impactful right in the conceptualization of the work right and the and also this kind of inherent frustration right that as architects were continuously dealing with like what's available what can I specify what can I put into the document right that meets all of the requirements and so I think that in the case of the straw projects they're working on now they kind of emerged sort of simultaneous with the work on the book and as we were kind of you know for us it's an amazing it's always at this sort of instructive process right because we're working closely with these architects in many cases you know one of the fantastic things that came out of manual section is we have like full drawing sets of Buckminster Fuller and you know Frank Lloyd Wright projects and this you know same with the houses kind of smaller scale of documentation less well known projects by you know it was our intention actually was to select kind of less known projects smaller projects from around the world but yeah it's a kind of continuously sort of revolving feedback loop between the research which drives the speculative work speculative work kind of folding into the built work and the built work then kind of raising questions that then kind of generates kind of the next set of research possibilities for us right and that that kind of cycle which I think is part of you know parcel of you know TSEP and the way we kind of operate here in this kind of continually kind of this way of continually asking questions and then finding kind of ways you know direct ways indirect ways speculative ways to think about them I don't know if I answered the question but yes they emerge together they kind of and they inform one another on an ongoing basis so I think you know again the books in a way there is much for us in a sense as they are right for the kind of larger audience that we hope that they find Thanks Mark really fantastic talk and thanks for the generosity of sharing all of this work I mean I want to go back to the question of representation of architectural representation and you answer this partially and the dean has kind of alluded to this but it seems to me that there is perhaps something a bit sneaky and subversive about the architectural representations not only in terms of the manual and sort of clarity and clarity in terms of being able to compare the drawings but I was struck that I could not help thinking of for those of us of a certain generation or went to certain schools of Francis D. K. Chang's sort of books you know form space and order architectural graphics construction manual and it seems to me that the you know these materials that we've been alienated from you know due to modernity or modernism are now sort of being drawn in a kind of very familiar way in a kind of sense so that which from unfamiliar to us right is now being represented as being familiar and being comfortable and you know widely understood and widely disseminated I'll have to go check to see how many books you've sold on Amazon you know in five or six different languages so there also seems to be a kind of subversive propagandistic sort of thing that's going on in terms of the way that these manuals communicate sort of to others and maybe kind of reintroduces us to these materials and I wonder if you can sort of talk about that because I was thinking about as I saw the goats like well what does this smell like you know what does this earth smell like what does the hay smells like what does the hemp smells like so I wonder if you could talk about that if you could let us in on what's really going on here with these drawings. Yeah thanks Mark for the question it's a good one and a hard one to answer adequately because I think you're hitting on something that we really struggled with right but that architectural modes of drawing are about inducing a level of clarity right in material systems and their articulation and kind of construction right about this kind of supposed transparency of the medium right which we all know as a kind of illusory condition and so this really interesting question of how do you draw this stuff that kind of eludes that precision right that you know this it's messy it's erosive it's entropic right it doesn't kind of behave in the ways that normative architectural right materials with their hard edges and defined surfaces operate and I don't you know I think that's an ongoing question for us and I think I'm really interested in you know how the representational strategies have to evolve in order to kind of engage some of those questions one way is that these projects that the kind of we kind of the drawing of the assembly and constructional systems the kind of full life cycle of the project even though it's kind of drawing off of the more iconographic language of the book which kind of develops a sort of consistent graphic technique is trying to engage this idea of the building not as a fixed artifact but it's something that kind of emerges but also kind of you know eventually kind of you know decays back into natural cycles but you know this kind of really interesting question came up all the time of like well what what do we how do we draw the line right of the straw bale or of the kind of hemp wall or of the tree because architectural techniques are not kind of adequate to it right they don't they don't have that mechanism so you're right there's this there is a strange way in which the supposed precision of these more kind of it's some level conventional modes of architectural representation which hopefully we're using in interesting ways but they imply a kind of cut and dried quality to things that isn't doesn't necessarily in here in the materials themselves right and so there's a kind of inadequacy of the representational technique on the one hand and then there's maybe the deployment of a number of different representational strategies beyond the pure kind of section to try to engage with some of those other qualities and I don't think we're there yet to be honest like I think with that it's going to require more experimentation more thinking and more drawing way to draw out those aspects of it and you know I think it's a it's a super interesting question for us and I think you you're you're hitting it on the head in many ways but there's a kind of maybe there's that sort of subversion that you're talking about which just has to do with re-representing as you say materials that have not been understood in this way in a format that makes them more legible and accessible presents them as kind of in a way rationalized but but that's also you know there's a problematic there right that you're also kind of pointing to that I think we also need to kind of move beyond and invent new strategies for. I wonder if there's something that you you decided to remove from a house you know like something that was because as you get to that and following on Maris's question in a way what as you basically introduce other material culture or into the definition of a house there's moments that things start to be challenging assumptions or ways of for instance there's things that are really stinky right your question about so I wonder if there's something that you decided to remove you know something that oh this is going too far you know or something like that that probably tells what is the limits of what can be tolerated to a certain or by a certain audience or yeah no so I wish I had a really interesting response to that because it's a really interesting question but and you're absolutely you know right which is you know I think it raises questions about like all of the assumptions that we have right so on the one hand we can say yeah there are these problematic conditions that would emerge in engagement with these materials by the other hand I would say well maybe we need to question some of our assumptions about comfort or what we consider kind of repulsive or acceptable in the context of our architectures right and we've all become kind of used to these kind of you know homogenous sanitized right always clean perpetually new environments right but that hasn't always been the case right and so you know if one just sort of takes into consideration the notion of the aging of materials for example which of course is inevitable and present in all kind of materiality right like you know we think these walls are pristine but we see right the patching and the water damage right and the repainting that kind of imperfectly covers right the tape joints and screw marks right so you know it's you know maybe what I would like maybe to invert the question a little bit is not what would you remove from the house but how would you have to live differently right maybe to kind of encounter some of these conditions and how might that kind of change the condition of the house itself in a kind of fundamental and potentially kind of productive way Hello my name is Tom Jead I really appreciate the lecture I've been a big fan of your work and LTL as a whole my question relates to kind of the transition between your work and the manual section where the poche is almost indifferent to the interstitial of the wall compared to your current work where the poche is almost the driving force of the architecture itself and kind of how you reach that process Yeah well first of all I would hope to say that the poche is an indifferent manual section so so if you look at those drawings we did pay a lot of attention to kind of the articulation of the different material systems within the walls and componentry and closure systems on the lobes of those projects but I think they also represent a different you know those are projects that by and large are based on industrialized material right conditions concrete steel and glass other kinds of highly processed materialities right and so by their very nature their assemblies of kind of elemental components that are kind of aggregated in different ways that concrete is maybe an exception to that but it you know it also in the sense that it's a homogenous right arguably kind of monolithic material but I think part so part of it's I think in the nature of the change in the materials themselves right and part of it's a kind of intentionality about in a way shifting the focus from although these are all building sections they're also much more focused on kind of the quote unquote the wall section right and looking at the material assembly of the wall itself and the kind of constituent components but also the fact that in a lot of these instances the thickness of the wall itself was kind of either a singular material or assemblies of other material systems working together in kind of unexpected ways that are very different from the way kind of conventional kind of modern industrialized architectures operate by and large right through their kind of multiple laminations of different membranes and layers which have specific functionalities and uses right so the although I wouldn't say the manual section that the wall the pochet quote unquote was neutral but certainly in the manual of section we're interested in maybe questioning the notion of pochet in as much as pochet as it was historically deployed kind of cancels out the materiality of the wall as well as the kind of labor that goes into the constituency of the wall Michael Young writes about this actually so kind of revealing right what the constituent matter right the kind of invisible thickness of the wall itself and what it's comprised of was absolutely the kind of focus of the most recent publication for sure maybe one more the final question yeah let's do the three together like yours and then CRC thank you very much Mark and Andreas for this incredible presentation we have been discussing in these studios with Rosanna and Thomas about collections and the significance and major major meaning when we analyze a network of elements rather than them individually and this is one of the most interesting aspect of your work that rather than going deeper in one material or one typology we are seeing an extended collection of many of them and I can imagine that behind this compressed information on your book there is many thought behind and it's also almost a curatorial practice of selecting those contents and projects and I would like to ask about how was this curatorial process if I can call like this and what were maybe the challenges faced including that you are talking about so many locations scales materials etc and how it changed across many of those scales maybe we can take the three of them and then there's four let's take two and two and you'll try the question right hi thank you sir for the lecture I'm Vincent I'm Mark's student the construction methods you listed and detailed to me are obviously more costly than the conventional ones to achieve the same comfort and energy efficiency and I don't really see how you can in the future to make reduce costs and spread the use given how much chemical treatment and layers of things to make them make them work so can you share like your plan and how you plan to promote these methods encourage people to pay to do this okay so maybe we can take these two and then the others and we conclude with yeah and I know this is going on a while so I'll try to be relatively brief I guess we would make the argument that these material systems aren't necessarily more expensive right that the kind of complex layering of chemically comprised ingredients that kind of building products that I was talking about earlier in the lecture actually kind of are costly they contribute to cost there as well as having all of the kind of negative environmental and health impacts that I described right but if you think about a material like straw or earth right these are inexpensive ubiquitous materials they're everywhere so you can deploy them relatively easily right the soil for a project can come from the soil and the site doesn't require transportation you know Lola Benelan talks about this right but dirt it's dirt cheap right and so straw is agricultural waste it's being thrown out and those jumble bales I've seen them like on the web you know they people sell them for like $11 right it's like these are very inexpensive materials comparatively speaking to more heavily embodied carbon material systems so I think the challenges are less about cost although there are obviously are costs involved in you know bringing these systems into a point where they can actually be deployed in a construction but part of the interest of these materials is that they can be used with kind of minimal processing right so the companies that I was describing like Ecococon and Croft are building projects at kind of competitive prices right using these same materials to achieve better thermal benefits than an ordinary wall without the kind of toxic and environmental impacts right so you know we could it's a longer question and it's a super important one because if we can't make an argument for economic viability then obviously these things will not come to scale and of course there are impediments and challenges to that for sure but I'm not saying this is easy there's lots of kind of technical kind of complex technical questions that have to be negotiated but inherently these aren't more expensive materials right inherently these are readily accessible they're out there and they're in many cases going to waste right the second question maybe the first question about curation you know I think we wanted to get a change of these material conditions in a way to understand the different let's say the different ways in which they were kind of catalytic to architectural responses in different formats and in different kind of climatic and cultural conditions so we very specifically chose projects from many different geographic regions from different climate contacts right from tropical to kind of northern climates of course there are places in the world like for example in northern Europe the deployment of a lot of these materials is more common so that probably ended up kind of biasing things in certain ways but we tried to select from a kind of a range of projects in many different places across multiple continents to get that range the houses were all relatively small like a lot of them were like a thousand square feet or less we were really trying to work with houses that were economical in their construction and not exorbitant in their usage of space like one of the impulses I think is to not only think about building with more intelligent less destructive materials but also to build in ways that are kind of more minimal and less consumptive in general so how much space do we need right we can kind of question that and then the other was to really look at projects that for us in one way or the other use the encounter with the material as a generator for the kind of spatial programmatic and tectonic response right so it's you know it's super useful that low carbon and embodied carbon or carbon sequestering materials can be there's a kind of ability to replace let's say worse systems with better ones with that with making the same exact building right like architecturally speaking right we can replace this insulation with better insulation we can replace the structure etc etc but it doesn't necessarily in all of those instances result in a shift in the nature of the architecture that results so we were really interested in all of these houses that for us they were houses that catalyzed these materials in ways that changed the architecture that you couldn't build these houses out of ordinary materials that there was a kind of intrinsic relationship between the two Rosanna house in the book by the way amazing house that draws on the kind of use of bamboo to create this kind of more open environment that allows for kind of kind of climatic engagement of airflow and ventilated cooling while creating a kind of complex set of spaces out of a simple set of parts right but each one right each of these systems require something different so responses in terms of mass bamboo is a kind of a linear element that can be clustered and combined and aggregated in different ways so you know all of these different characteristics were interested in to us and also how they would relate to one another right so how they would kind of interact in different ways and how one could take advantage of the individual qualities of each one in combinations we take the three of them and we conclude with this first of all thank you that was marvelous and coming to what you were just mentioning about the bamboo really caught my eye the fact that you let's say mentioned bamboo was a very important construction material but you didn't mention and perhaps it could be a suggestion not only to bundle it up as such but because it's even stronger than steel interaction I don't know if you guys explored into that possibility because it could be something very interesting a little bit more along the signs of less is more some way yeah I know that oh right we're doing more good evening so first thank you really appreciate your work and how accessible you made everything incredibly formative as a student and I think the way we practice generation so I think the work that you're proposing is a shift in the way we build and I wonder if it also requires a shift in the way we think about for example permanence stability wealth the death of buildings the death of our own change I feel like maybe this is something that is required to happen in parallel for this changes in the way we built to be meaningfully adapted and I wonder if this is maybe some of the struggles that you're finding in getting these things built this cultural shift that we need to make and I wonder what are the ways that you may be addressing this need in the shift we think maybe through your work as an educator the policy even and I also wonder if you see particular challenges in the US specifically in this need for this shift hi thank you for sharing all this work I think my question overall addresses this idea of metrics metrics and how it relates to maybe the values that they are built on I mean the selection of certain materials that we're looking at you know curatorially where the way that they're drawn or presented has this sort of idea of embodied value or embodied inherent value of capturing carbon and you know as you're sort of going through let's say in a way what world does that live in you know is it the present one is it one that doesn't yet exist is it one that we have already found problematic especially in this set of metrics and how it relates to worlds as they relate to labor and technology because you know as we all know 3D printing in clay is so much different from you know making a rammed earth wall or these bamboo laminate sheets are so much different from bundling them with different kinds of people different kinds of communities so it's this question about metrics and what are the values and what worlds do they imply and where are we or maybe where where's the project even I don't know if I can answer all those 3 questions together but I'll try to see so yeah I think the question of metrics is I mean you're asking a very specific question about metrics which I appreciate I think the question of metrics in general is a really interesting one and one we also struggled with in the production of the book you know we did these lifecycle assessments for selected projects in the book kind of cradle to gate carbon assessments and we all know that those are like it's a thing unto itself that whole process and it's full of all kinds of complications and pitfalls and complexities and in other words kind of you know how you draw the line where you get the data how it's evaluated how it's standardized in one region versus another makes it very difficult to come to any kind of sort of comprehensive blanket way of conducting those kinds of analyses right to apply a kind of a standard blanket metrics across the grain of all of these different projects if I'm carrying bamboo from a nearby grove to build locally the value carbon wise of that bamboo is very different from bamboo that's been shipped you know 20 miles even or a thousand miles to get to a new location etc etc right we all know this but I think you're asking a slightly maybe different question than that and maybe it relates back to the other question regarding the maybe requisite shifts in the kind of broader culture that might allow for right or might need to accompany some of these changes in the way that we think about architecture and building and I would I mean that is the subject of my current studio is actually asking some of these very same questions which is if we're thinking about biogenic materials which may not represent the same degree of permanence you know on the other hand permanence itself is a kind of kind of you know this assumption that's undergirded architecture for many centuries but in fact right has never been the case right our buildings have never been permanent really and in fact everything that we create is subject to time to impermanence to decay to entropy in kind of varying scales and is it possible to kind of reevaluate those phenomena not as a kind of a negative condition to be forestalled but actually as a productive one to be engaged right and maybe the kind of desire right with a kind of illusory kind of desire that permanence is possible is something we need to kind of question and rethink right and I think it goes to these questions of what is the world right that that maybe these kinds of projects suggest and I think it you know it does sort of I think lead to and that's what's interesting to us about these materials right just that they are you know in all of these more measurable and demonstrable quantifiable ways kind of important ways of thinking about building and how we and changing the ways we think about building but the more I think nuanced ways in which they shift our relationship to the architectural project and how they kind of require us to question certain assumptions right about things like durability, maintenance, repair, transformation, change and you know how we live in relationship to the things that we make and put into the world right and I don't have a road map for negotiating that unfortunately right but I think it's a for us and for me that's really exciting right and necessary I think right that you know it isn't necessarily a question of making these products fit into the standardized expectations that we've come to have for the last kind of hundred years that we apply to industrialized materials but we have to maybe shift the way we evaluate and value things right in a more fundamental way. Oh and there was a question about bamboo I want to say kind of quickly about that one of the really interesting things in relationship to this question is that when you're building with these kind of bamboo columns and there are many people obviously you know much more about this than I do but you know it does raise really interesting questions about for example the predictability of structural conditions right so as architects working in this country we're subject to all of these sort of legislated boundaries right that we have to be able to work in predictable ways with materials that behave right according to certain patterns and when we're working with something like a bamboo column which is an inherently variable natural element there's right a certain kind of notion of standardization that no longer applies right and the predictability of that element in combination with other elements right and it's tensile capacities for example are you know escape in a certain way the kind of calculable nature of kind of structural engineering logics right that and that's one of the challenges right how do we kind of incorporate some of these practices that maybe don't fit into the accepted patterns we can do it by actually working towards standardization right so that's happening already in the processing of bamboo into other structural elements and in essence that's what we do with trees right but maybe it also allows us to work in other ways a lot of the people that work with bamboo in various parts of the world are working really kind of through empirical experimentation through large-scale modeling through kind of on-site testing to arrive at their kind of structural forms and logics Fantastic Mark, thank you so much