 I think we'll start here, and Holly we want to thank you, there's chairs, happy here to talk to you, here today, and Matisse, Luda and Daniel. I believe they're here today to talk about three projects. Before that, a brief introduction to their offices, their offices in Zurich and Berlin. And first of all, they have completed projects for this Swiss film archive, as well as the IEM or other pilot history. They're both listening professors at the EPFL and ETH. This semester they have been spending some of their time here in Istanbul at the European University, to get a bit of European teaching. So, we'll back to Pat on the way with the work to you, Matisse. And moving forward to you, Daniel. Thanks. Thanks a lot. It's wonderful to be here again. I think I will do this in English. I will speak English, or also probably would speak German, but I think English is the language best suited for everybody. We will speak about, well, recent projects, but we will filter them. Together with Medine, we proposed a studio here at Binky when we were speaking about transformations. Why transformations? We believe transformations is actually a topic which is completely underrated, underestimating architecture. Modern architecture actually started with a very different plan. Our heroes, which we were taught at school, they were mostly concerned with bringing to the world a new reality. This is Le Corbusier's hand, a godlike hand over the city. And the project proposing in Paris is actually pairing part of the city, really demolishing everything. This kind of mindset of modernism, this kind of DGA-0 started from new, actually found a turning point then, in the famous Julio apartments, which was then kind of a funnel for the end of modernism. At least it was defined as such by critics. This is the kind of Utopia, which is supposed to be everybody equal distribution of light and so on. Purely scientific principles, you know the story, but of course demolishing was kind of admitting that Utopia actually failed. Ever since, we believe architects have been looking for a new kind of grand story to tell, or for a new kind of outlook, for a new kind of perspective on how to think architecture. We believe that we don't have to look so far. And Le Corbusier introduced into the architectural debate the image of the palimpsest, the image of the overwriting of old skins, overwriting of old documents, creating layer over layer of meaning, and we believe that architecture actually for centuries, for thousands of years has also functioned like that. So, if we want to talk about examples that fascinated us, we often, for example, take the Palace of Ecclesiom. So when the Roman Emperor retired from Rome when he went back home to his own place where he was coming from, from Split, he built himself a magnificent kind of palace, which was of course modeled on the Roman image of the city, probably Cumanus, important buildings and so on. And when you go there today, of course, you'll notice you'll notice you find this fascinating kind of a melange of old and new. And it's interesting to see how the general idea is still readable, the general concept of the city is very strongly still, can be related to the idea of the Palace of the Roman City. But when you go closer, when you look and observe all the layers, you can see how it's also lost a lot of its kind of egalitarian, and it's actually kind of evolved into this crazy melange of elements from all types. And even the most modern layer, even today's layer, we believe actually works beautifully. It's not a problem, but it actually adds just another layer. We believe that architects should much more try to think in this kind of framework and really kind of try to just add the next layer, if possible. Because when you look at something like that, it actually carries a lot of meaning, and I think that's something we really sorely lack in today's cities. This kind of richness of meaning is when we start from scratch. Of course, this architectural theory has been used long ago. One of the heroes we constantly refer to is Joseph Exchini, who did this wonderful little church in Boca Gina. We've never been to it, but we studied the plans carefully. What you see is an original church, a small chapel, where he was asked to make it bigger to build a new church. And soon after he visited the building site, he actually came back with the idea of really starting from the old and then doing something new. So what you see in the dark part is actually original. The new parts, yellow is demolition, the new parts are red. And what you see is a complete reversal of the idea of the church. The direction changes and the old church actually becomes the entrance space for the new church. And all kinds of crazy things happen. For example, the way that this tower is deserted, or the way that roofs intersect, the way that things have turned around. Or for example here, when you look at the big space, you notice the old facade, how it's cut open. And actually you have these hanging elements here, which are completely reinterpreted in their carrying boat. And the old outdoor space where the monks were wandering around, is then actually the basis for the new church space. So this is a space which is very complex and which carries a lot of meanings into each other. And actually we love that very much that you can read one element in more than one way. So when we were asked to do a publication on our work for ETH, we actually put together a lot of the references we worked with and we discovered that most of the references that we pinned up on the walls of our office were actually renovations. That made us aware of the fact that we are probably renovation architects. Could be that this is one of our strong points. So for that reason, because of our love for this kind of complex kind of operations, I will show you now a series of old and new projects which exclusively be renovated. So the first project takes us to the periphery of Zurich. It's a kind of modernist planning, very low bumble of type of prefabricated housing. And our client was living here. And he was a lawyer. And the interesting thing was that the table was actually this big and if he wanted to do any extension to his house he would have to talk to all of his neighbors, which lawyers don't like to do. So we went to look at the building law and he discovered this. He can be free of any worries. He can actually send his house underground. So we went to this guy and he said, why don't we build you something which, for example, this lovely building from Northern Africa has been done for centuries. It's very foreign to see the Swiss context but it's actually very interesting, very specific pathology. And it's actually something which only the absurdity of Swiss law can generate in Switzerland. So what we did was we added this kind of new organism to the old organism of the house. This is the basement stair going down. We cut it off, built a new stair into two courtyards. In Switzerland, when you want to build, of course you have to kind of show where the building is. We built little wooden skeletons to indicate that. And the neighbors were quite shocked when they discovered the big hole which we made in the garden. But then, after we finished building, they returned to normal and there was just this kind of disturbing railway in the city of the garden showing that there is something underneath. Now there's a surprising thing about the new houses that the new houses much more fun in the old house because down under the ground there are not so many rules. Your neighbors, they don't look at the old apartment. You can run around naked if you want because they're not seeing into it. So we were able to do big glass surfaces. We were able to introduce a little bit of fun. This rubber mat here was then only introduced afterwards when kids were actually picking up their knees bloody on that wooden down there. So even our design was also redesigned. And you see how the new house is much more than the old one, than the above house. So sometimes students, something absurd, to go to a certain degree of freedom and do new things which normally you would not do. Also we were an experiment of fellas down in the bathrooms. And really go crazy down there. Even in the end they arrested from us an underground room in the other which we then added again. So after that little adventure, the North African adventure which was generated by the building law and Donny and I also tried to be speculators. We believe that the role of the architect is a role which should be imperative. It's frowned upon in Europe, but especially in Germany for example, it's strictly forbidden that Switzerland architect is not a profession which is protected. So anybody can be architect and also architects can be speculators. And we said why don't we start earning money, really money. And not just a fee but really money by buying a building and turning that building into something else. So we bought this wonderful supermarket here which was an old, small supermarket which was not really, you know, the big mean, you know, 3M was next to it. So it was out of work. And it was actually a banal building. No one wanted it. No one was seeing the potential of it. But we actually were fascinated by the whole four and a half liter tall space. The other thing that was interesting is if you did a renovation of this building you would be able to build much more square meters than if you took it away because the building all had changed in the meantime. So this was the concept. Very kind of bourgeois concept, even five houses on five sides of the building. And the trick now here was to actually leave this tall space and then do something in sections. You see, we actually introduced two floors here and we were able also to introduce one more floor here. So we were able to keep part of the building with that tall space here and then of course the trick is to kind of bring that new relationship with each other. The floor plans are also something that probably you would not do if you were building a new house. So this is what we enjoyed in renovations. Things happened that we probably would not do. So in this house we then tried to interior facades. I know you guys actually a wonderful house and I believe you guys are exactly there. So the idea actually to have an exterior facade and an interior facade and even to bring in the light from the top to do all these crazy windows to open up all these kind of side relations and so we enjoyed that very much and we don't think that we would have done that in a new building only in a renovation probably something like this is possible. So for us renovating is actually like making more interesting projects possible sometimes because it actually allows us to think things which we would probably not think we were building new. This is an interesting apartment. One of the families wanted to do something with color. If you want to colorize your apartment we know a nice color artist so they came up with this really crazy color scheme and they even renovated our own design. So they took our white plant design and added their color levels which then again very nice. When you do something and then someone else takes it and does something else. This is very interesting. I know a few architects who probably freak out about something like this but they actually enjoy a lot. They bring it there on the next layer from the outside. This is probably very Swiss but it's also a little bit out of this nowadays. From the outside we try to be high picking. We try not to scream, we try to be good citizens. So the thing is quite long to script only you get a little bit of an idea here because you see these windows kind of telling a strange story. So you kind of wonder what's going on in there and of course we hope that you get curious and they actually inquire about the inside of this. But we like to really not scream around probably. We like to kind of lay it down. Okay. Renovations have also helped us a lot when dealing with difficult places. This is the state archive of a small canton of Baselman. They keep their records there. They keep the books and public records. It's a small building and it needed to be about double the size. This is the place where this is happening. It's a very traditional city. You see here the city core. You see the station, the public buildings and so on. The government buildings and then there is a train line cutting the valley into two. And the probable state archive was that together with the humidity it was on the wrong side of the tracks. So it did not have an address. So when we did the competition our thesis was actually to keep existing buildings as much as possible for cost free. It didn't make sense to pull it down. But to completely change it to change those volumes which were actually one next to the other one add some new ones and then give it a new address on top. So that the new building would communicate and the other building would cross the river. And then this strange thing here is a kind of a mediating device. So we were trying actually to tie together a few parts under a common skin which is wonderful sketched by something simply of course which architects like to use a lot. It's wonderful. It kind of conceals something underneath. It conceals a growing situation in the old parts. And it goes straight on to here. So the situation now has completely changed. In this residential neighborhood all of a sudden there's a different kind of building. It's a different kind of scale of course and going up to the second floor it actually starts communicating to the other side. Of course the visualization also works. We were trying to give it kind of the lure of a public building with a glass of salt. At the same time we were trying not to be a bad neighbor in this neighborhood. This is why we chose this green facade which now is completely green all the way to the top which kind of mediates to the neighbors and also picks up that green element of the railroad down. So this kind of building is also a strategy of not really telling what's inside. We kind of go in up there and we invented this kind of space which probably in a new building they would never let you build because it's completely absurd. It's empty space and there's a strange stair coming down and there's this concrete this layered concrete which kind of symbolizes the activity of storage and then you go to the middle floor and when you go up you emerge into this open floor kind of modern, kind of spacious and also it signifies control because the kind of documents that people would hand it out there which they would get they kind of have to be kept under control so it's all glass on the supervision people can sit there it's a small life and also a kind of long life. So we like to work with these kind of opposites concealing from the outside and then kind of surprising people kind of grow on the inside. If we now go from buildings to urbanism also we believe that transformations can be very interesting. Of course we have here in Istanbul a lot but also in Switzerland we have these industrial areas which are very important kind of key areas for the transformation of the city. The question is always how do you deal with a character or something like this? How do you on one hand preserve the character that it offers, the identity how do you protect the character and at the same time develop it into the future? We were very lucky to win the competition for this place which is a textile factory and broken here you would say. And the strategy which we adopted was actually really to kind of respect these huge conglomerates of buildings and to really not erase anything which is kind of for a gradual kind of transformation. The strategy came from our fascination with the place as it existed. This is almost a little bit city so when you walk and you see this, you see an industrial area which is actually very urban. You see a street space which is not quite a street space so there is no sidewalks really it's kind of just an open service but you have this lovely kind of transitional spaces going into the houses and you have this very very carefully done facades which are kind of like an alphabet over the time of industrial pathology. So we were fascinated by lovely care which the architects had used when they were placing the buildings together and we decided to just really kind of keep this strategy here and just kind of show how one building after another one could be replaced new kind of courtyards could be inserted but walking through these spaces you would still have the same character preserved. We tried to show this in models because in models you can show very easily by bringing in and taking out when you present a project also for people and also we like models because they kind of carry a message which is not so precise as rendering so you're not forced to do this super realism but you can just kind of let people's imagination grow a little bit so we worked very heavily with these kind of models to convince people to keep the character in place. We won the competition and again we were very lucky because the club tour wanted to place a part of the school of art school to this to this area concentrated there and we were faced with this building which we should transform now this kind of building is a strictly functional building the fascinating thing about this one is that since they were actually testing production processes it was kind of a lab it was almost kind of kind of a research facility and they had built it with a completely free span of I think it was 22 years ago so we actually analyzed that structure and built the model of it just showing that structure and completely fell in love with it and I think at that point we decided that the best thing to do with the building was actually just really kind of take it like a shelf in which you could fill anything so of course we had to redo the facade which is a difficult thing without spoiling the whole atmosphere and we had to do a kind of a new floor plan for the building but other than that actually it was very very useful if you have this kind of a shelf it's very easy to stack functions even very different functions and also it's fascinating that it's also in a very long term probably flexible so this kind of a building kind of allows you really to think in very abstract terms which is kind of a big architecture like a kind of a like your partner who put the books to the shelves and then you can rearrange the books so you see here the walls which we broke down only the yellow walls we were trying to use as many walls which were existing as possible also because the cost had to be kept down you can see how the facade was doubled with thermal insulation but other than that architecture really changed the most decisive change was on that side where they had a kind of a stacking kind of device like a silo for puts with a robot in it going around and the storage facility we broke that way giving the facade so when you go up you see how the plans are very deep those 22 meters and there is a very natural way of filling them you just take the spaces which don't need as much light and you bring them to the inside and you arrange the other ones on the other side you try to keep the circulation as little as possible in the spaces as big as possible for the students so this is now the new image of the area these are still untouched buildings they will be converted later we were able to do a new public park on that side and the building is reacting to this new facade where we took off that storage facility it was interesting to take the fire escape issue and come up with a solution we did an outdoor kind of stair attached to the building also we tried we were very happy with the way that this kind of element without spending much money is actually giving a new image to the building showing that there is a new use for it there are very minimal things done to the building you use some color you use the number it does build houses where you use the number as any new identity tool for the new facade you see how the transformation strategy is already showing itself this is the place where another building will be built by Harley Cooper, a friend of ours he used to work for Ed's terminal now he has his own office so here we just kept the place for the other building so you can kind of see how change is gradually one after the other it's sometimes very nice to use these kind of fire escape things to create nice spaces like the building it's an excuse if you would tell the client I want the building in front of my school you would say you will pay for it and the students can hang out on it and other than that we have a very minimalistic strategy because we believe that that is actually the character on the inside we kept the old floor just kind of fixed it in some place and the new elements which we introduced like this bar we tried to keep it down as much as possible it's a design school so we don't want to kill everything by over designing we actually want to open a kind of field of possibilities this is already one intervention it was a student competition Daniel was in the jury they decided that none of the entries were good enough but they did it so that's also very nice it's like kids you know you make kids and then try to educate them and then they do everything the other way it's lovely it's actually very nice also in architecture sometimes funny way to do this control these kind of wonderful spaces it's still the same staircase and they came up with this balcony here they had to kind of go around twice because the spaces are so nice they have a wonderful staircase with a balcony we didn't do anything here and now you can observe our students and staff on the first day they're coming in they're bringing their things they're installing their things they're adding like a new layer so that's very nice also when you go back to your project after you've delivered you actually see what people do with it sometimes it's quite surprising for example we never thought they would install swings swings so it's a kind of architectural position that tries as little as possible to kind of create a free space for people so when we speak about the city this is the city of Zurich of course the airport the lake and the central city the industrial areas have been very important these red spaces are actually the only spaces where the city is really free to evolve and free to kind of develop in this part of the city here we have our office here this is the industrial part close to the city center you can see how much change has been going on all these buildings and it's still going on have been renewed or changed and it just shows you how quickly that process is going and the question of course is always how do you kind of steer such a process without the city losing its identity it's always kind of kind of a walk on the edge between protecting and killing things and so on you can see also that new scale which was introduced here and the city model it's a one thousand scale and whenever a new project is done they place it in and you can see these kind of things this is the project for the football stadium which eventually was not realized this new scale which is coming to the city they debate and you can also see in this picture maybe how really the new is kind of flashing sometimes in a good way sometimes not in such a good way in the city so I will show you now a few of the projects in which we were involved which play this part of the city one is an adaptation you mentioned an adaptation of an infrastructure and the infrastructures are very very important in cities you notice of course for instance in the cities kind of traces that people bring in they stay forever for example this railroad buy looked here was done a hundred years ago and it was done very carefully you can see this contemporary artist the piece of art and you can see how people were fascinated by the fact that the traffic was brought to the second level that there were views framed into the city and so on so they were at the time disruptive things but they carried a high degree of fascination with them of course what also helped the city digest this piece was helping to identify the worst care in which it was done you would realize here that the city at the time when this was built was not yet developed and the engineer who did this by adult decided to use stone here in these places where there later would be the houses and they used very nice light steel bridges here bridge the streets in order to enable kind of permeability so if you do an infrastructure in this degree with this degree of care and with this degree of kind of love for the city and if you think it together with the city it can be first of all more sympathetic in place and then you can start actually enjoying a life of its own which we witness this is actually the part of the by adult which is going down the lake and this is going today out to the airport to the other part this is still in operation until today but this was then abandoned and at the time when this was abandoned they had the competition and they asked us to rethink that by adult what it had been actually it had been kind of a place where there were storage facilities and so on within the city and they wanted to clear out all these things down there which had grown over the years they wanted to renovate the stone and they wanted to make a new walkway out here and they asked us to imagine that kind of renovation down there so when we tried to find a position to this task we went to look to the infrastructure buildings over time you can find a lot of bridges which are in fact inhabited like this one here from us so you can see how this infrastructure elements in history were not just thought as pure infrastructures but always they were hygrids they were kind of oscillating between usable structures houses and parts of infrastructure and they were always really thought as part of the city you can also observe the opposite when the Roman Empire collapsed and the population went down in the ages after Rome because of the war and disinvention of population so on the cities retreated to their course so here this is in our I believe this is the Roman theater and the city actually retreated into this theater and actually merged together with the theater it became a kind of an infrastructure or monument in city hygrids and what's nice about it is that it's not really possible to say where one starts and the other one stops it's kind of a hybrid also in an architectural sense it's not it's often when you deal with old structures people try to bring something striking new which opposes the old but in these examples you see that kind of architecture coexistence finally when we did the project we said Viaduct is actually such a great place that we want to still have it in the foreground we want to keep it as the main player and our human dimension should just be very very slight and it should not be so we often here to fill out all these wonderful arches the other competitors most of them put them in houses underneath the arches tiny houses a little architecture we said no no no we don't want to do this we just want to fill it up we want this to be still the protagonist and then up here where the two infrastructures were parking where there's a special geometry we kind of tried from this here from that kind of geometry to develop a special place so what also was very interesting is that the city at the start they were actually formulating the need for this pedestrian connection on the first floor which later then would go on to the other side of the city and we were actually asked to incorporate it so this is the result today you can see that building in the front it's a market hall well the Swiss version of a market hall all over the world there's more lively and market halls than this unfortunately you can see here the pedestrian walk on the first floor which is actually a great thing because you get to experience the city from another level and it kind of gives you a new connection which I have never thought like this in the city for even the view so going back to that contemporary picture from 100 years ago really now making that possible bringing that to the people connecting the lower floor bringing in light but light in the sense that we're not lighting our new intervention but we're kind of lighting the spaces that resist between ours and the existing and then of course that infinite mode to fill in people who did their own thing which then adds a second layer of life to the intervention which our intervention which is kind of very discreet in the very times time together so the strategy was actually very simple but difficult to do because here of course it was able to do a roof and to insulate this but the thing up there was still an operation there are still trains going and that stone violet has no water proofing so we were forced to tell our clients that actually some rain water also in switzerland still some trains and toilets which actually tracks so some other water also might actually come down here it might actually exit inside the spaces so imagine that the swiss control frames they are difficult and we tell them maybe so what we did we just did kind of a water gutter here you can catch up the water there are still a lot of problems with this building we are now making a concert to renovate our own roofs because some things aren't the way they are supposed to do we still have water coming but it's living and it's actually working this is one unit we did the bare minimum we just hung in that kind of floor this is a toilet and the infrastructural unit and here the front hall that market hall which on the other end we left open one space as a sitting space for the restaurant and then we were very interested in with our new intervention kind of take up the materiality of the stones to honor the stones but to come with a new material so this is kind of a rubber insulation thing there is a soft insulation underneath it we screwed it down with these pins and it kind of enters with that dialogue and then here is the space for the market hall with the restaurant on the inside with this kind of geometry which is developed from the geometry of the two infrastructures parking alright I'll come to a project which has actually been in our office I would say the main project or one of the main projects for nine years so it actually kind of grew with us and also kind of almost killed us at times and changed us also the way we look at architecture the way we do projects so we now we're going out here Tome is actually the place where about one third of the Swiss milk production was turned into cheese and yogurt and ice cream and all kinds of wonderful things but as you know also this is not a very successful economy so it's heavily subsidized Swiss milk is much too expensive no one buys this cheese so this cooperative went bankrupt I think 17 years after this this dairy so it was most modern dairy factory of Europe and later I think it went bankrupt so the main bank financing this was the state bank of Arbantone not a very nice thing to have this kind of industrial room on your hands a room which is actually a pure image of the production process so what they were doing was they were bringing the milk they were storing it here vertically in these taps then you can see these kind of flows in powder and they were kind of bringing it to the spaces for production ice cream production and so on and then they were kind of storing it and then holding it out on that side so here this is a vertically storage thing this is a kind of big shelf 6 meters, 7 meters light between the flows and then this big ramp for the trucks to come to the building so when the bank side is on the books the lucky coincidence was that at the same time the city of Arb the school of art was looking for a new place and they were emerging with the school of music and with drama and so on so the idea was to make these huge cannons when we first were invited to the competition we were actually kind of exhilarated and also shocked at the state bank and exhilarated by these spaces I mean this is like a here an easy painting but you actually walk through this is the space where they had the tanks they took them out and sold them to everywhere from Turkey to Ukraine to China these tanks that are standing and producing again and this is the vertical part and this is the horizontal part that end to this kind of just the field of possibilities so we were exhilarated by these spaces but we were daunted or shocked by the stale of it this is the existing school of the arts this is ETH where we studied the main building by Semper and in red you always see the size of the side this is the tank model by head of the map of course the addition has been done over on the other side and this is the pumping it's kind of hanging out of that section so we said oh my god what's this kind of a young but kind of a small architecture office in with this kind of a huge task how are we going to do this and what of course was that all these schools they were housed in little houses all over the city and they loved their little houses because also they had the little kingdoms every teacher was kind of in his little cute house and he was keeping his old house and all these places would then be merged into this huge kind of campus and of course that scares people scares people socially but also in terms of organization but also kind of in terms of machine numbers people are scared especially in Switzerland of these big things and then we were terrified also by the program when we in the office when we get a new competition always we ask the competition team all the spaces and we ask them to color code the ones that need light the ones that have acoustic requirements the ones that are important to size and they were drawing them all and placing them next to each other and those with the kind of that most don't need the light and so on and it became more and more and more and it just never stopped and he said oh my god how are we ever going to organize this with that principle for us we don't know anything about all these spaces we're not specialists for a list of that and so we just filled it into the building and it looked like a little city and at that point we understood that we were actually building a little city and maybe we were not building architecture but we were actually building an urbanistic project we're dealing with an urbanistic problem building an urbanistic project of huge density so the question of how to make such a huge density tolerable is also a big question and what we started up with actually was saying we like the building we like the building although it's completely arbitrary it's just the image of that production process but what's cool about it is it has a high part and has a low part and it has a kind of a very nice industrial look to it it's been a landmark in Zurich in that part so we decided to not obliterate it but actually to exaggerate it so we said let's make the high part higher let's make the low part kind of let's renovate that put some things on top and especially make that roof really excited and very kind of in a cursory way we said ok apartments maybe out here is there away from the traffic noise kind of also in Zurich we didn't have at that time so many apartments and towers so they enjoy a view and schools one school would be here the other one there and that's about it so we kind of did a very rough kind of estimate where things would go and now of course we're realistic we've spoken about our fascination with the landmark building which was sitting there I'll make a jump now to what it's today so you almost kind of recognize it you almost kind of recognize in terms of material but certainly in terms of silhouette and there is this kind of head standing up at the big intersection and that's marking the spot in the city it's also kind of answering of course to the huge empty space in the railroad tracks and anchoring the buildings and as such as a huge building which is anchored in the city it's also becoming part of the growing number of buildings like these ones or industrial areas which also assert themselves in the cities in which you can actually find small impacts within the city but then the city the question of course was how to anchor this huge beast in the city how to prevent the danger of that thing becoming completely autonomous and completely also forbidding to the outside and analyze the footpath network around there of foot traffic and bicycle traffic is very important not so much public transport also and we said what we should do actually we should take these kind of take up these footpath and what we should try to do we should connect them through the building here you've seen these ramps these delivery ramps which are very very kind of strong element which have been also added to the image we were saying okay we could leave them we could use them as footpaths we could use them as streets and we could connect them also through the building so in a first kind of act we were actually doing a urbanistic operation within the building so we were saying okay we have a big building we know roughly where is what and now we're going to create streets so we are creating a huge hall connecting through the building we are building big ramps leading up into the building we are kind of rethinking these ramps as kind of a boulevard like an urbanistic piece and then all we have to do is connect these elements within the building and we will create a system of circulation which then will enable us to place the functions according to where we want them in terms of they are in the public or not public in terms of their needs in terms of life and so on so this is how we arrived at the plan this is the big hall you see here this is the big ramp it's an old plan this changed later because we don't have this theory in the United Arabian Museum this is the other side leading down to the street and this is the start of the ramps you can already see here on the rampside also can access this actually two sides this side and that side and then connecting in the middle when we had achieved this it was actually much easier to speak about the place when the functions speak because then we had criteria we said ok I mean if we want for example a cafe the place in a cafe with a cafe should probably be on the main square so the main square is the big hall down there so we placed the cafe right next to it there's not a discussion about this people found it very logical and very understandable so this helped us a lot in the discussion of the uses because in this nine year process of planning and building of course everything changed like I mentioned the use of this changed this big hall down here should have been kind of the hall for happenings and so on that changed later on in just the workshops and this connecting figure then we tried to really keep it not touch it and it actually was never touched and even we were extended into the power part into the high part and we were even able to preserve some of that here in asian kind of spatial property so the operation is actually quite simple now when you talk about building we take the existing look like this clean it out so this immense just kind of feel of possibilities you see you know see the hangers doing the jobs very good and now it's all gone this is also beautiful though we start here well this is our wrong side of the university finding out why do I know why do I know directly this is my working this is no but I love this I love I love I love I love love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love the club and bathroom not going out and what for me I like And then, we were in a Turkish place, we were staying in a small passion, a megalomene You know, very nice people, they speak German, and I went everywhere and I saw these sites, I said, what's the Saqlilik? He said, no, Saqlilik means to sell, and I said, oh, it's amazing, everything is for sale here. He said, can you learn me the price? So, he learned the price and his room got very expensive, but my dream started then to have a piece of land on the sea. So then, we started discovering and we ended up in a small village, Mazikeh. It's really on the side, and there's no one there. There, in the kind of delirium, we bought a big piece of land. And ever since, we have been in the system. Which village? Mazikeh. Do you know Mazikeh? No, but it's perfect. Very nice. We know the monks. You know them. You say, monks, you learn them. You learn them. You look at the sky with your eyes, with your head. There's a big, tiny temple there. There's Mazikeh on the road. You call it Mazikeh? Asha Mazikeh. It's Asha Mazikeh. You can call it Mazikeh there. Tamamen deni. Deishi insandam. Okay. They're about me. They're very normal. It's like in Switzerland. One guy says the other one is crazy, but they're all crazy. So, what we did was we were actually just perforating like model building, cutting that building. You can see here the tool, that big saw, cutting through the concrete. Opening up spaces for light. And then, because it was so high, we were able to insert these new floors and steel. Like you see here. And then up. Very basic. So, we'll go through now. I'll spare you all a little further details. So, you see the inner circulation figure, inner urbanism. You see the light wells. You see the pores which we need to circulate. And, of course, then the system of pass like a small sort of factor. And here, then that ramp. That ramp became very important because we said if we have that wonderful ramp, we can really use it. For addressing, also for programming. And on the other side, of course, also ramps leading up into the building. All the ramps then. Outdoor spaces to connect with the city. Kind of welcoming spaces, which also can be used to, you know, because those are different happenings or also to smoke, very important. And then those big kind of spaces. This is the big hole. And in a very natural way, we have to have faith here. And we were actually trying to create facades like you would find in the city. We were using kind of furniture, which we've been using gardens or in the fares. So we were actually trying very little really to carry that image of the city to the building to create kind of an outdoor space. We had a very nice cooperation with some guys from Berlin. They are media artists. And we actually, first, the principal of the school, he said, I want some flashy things on the outside. He said, we want a multimedia. He said, ah, we're not so sure about it. What are you going to show? So we invited these two guys to help us convince this guy that we should do something different with the building. And they actually said what you have in the tool is the light. The light is a good problem in these kind of buildings. You have light everywhere. And it has to be at a certain level. But that makes them very tired. So they said, well, we can do. We can take the light which you have now and you can actually place them in some places and create more light in some places. When you sit here, you're always burning. And in the back, it's kind of dark. Like in the city also, when you go outside, it's dark in some places and light in some other places. And they were arguing also in an urbanistic way. reality is united in both. Our office is now also in their office. And they were actually just helping us rearrange things. These kind of things, we left them in the spaces. These are traces of use. And as you go up, you have a lot of questions about scale. How big to make a stair so that you can use it so that the spaces would be more than just kind of a circulation space and really kind of a seating space. I'll show you now some pictures of how this space is central space to be used. For example, at the big school happening which we're having for the opening. For example, when we're just all alone, the French President is coming to visit and we're using it as a stage for the dancers. Or when they feel like they just had a big party there and they were in the bands all day. So it's a kind of space, like a city space, like a city square in which you hold festivals and you kind of reprogram it according to your needs. There are many kind of these corners. These kind of informal places where people can meet. This is the place where the musicians are because they don't have their own table. They always run around with their instrument and so we thought it was important to have a faith in them. And then there was also this idea of making big kind of vertical connections. You can see how with the stairs we place the stairs in the staircase once here, once here, once here. So when you go up, you're not just going up, up, up, up, up. You're kind of doing this from an up. You're kind of always seeing things from a different angle, always turning around. We were trying also to invent some crazy things, like for example these little shortcuts. There's this stair here. It just takes you one floor. It's completely, well, I will not say use this, but it doesn't make sense at first. But because it doesn't make sense, it's nice. In a building where everything makes sense, it's cool to have something that doesn't make sense. It's just something you wouldn't get used to it and they use it and it's like a little shortcut for something. And at the place where the tall building and the flat building would come together, we were actually convinced them to leave the space open. It's going all the way up to the roof and it's actually kind of giving you an idea of the, like I said, the former kind of crazy spatiality which it had. You can see things like we were seeing in the small house before, this kind of inner perforation, the kind of stairs, the protests, the blue cross and so on. Then, in this project, finally we were allowed to do this fifth facade which everybody always is talking about and it's never happened. And a huge roof and the city of Zurich actually listed the one that they were calling for out of space. So up on that roof, we were doing this promenade here on the outside and on the inside a kind of a wild garden. It's made of granite plants because the roof gets very hot in summer, there's not so much water. And you have a completely different kind of an idea when you're in there, between those higher buildings, you feel like you're somewhere in the suburbs in a garden or something. So it carries you to a completely different space. Within the building, of course, the nicest thing was then to distribute the special places. Like I said, a field and so on. And it was also logical when you put them always on the big house. So for example, a library. That space would then be right next to that tall space which I first showed you before. Then the workshops remained on the bottom floor where they would be away and not disturb. This is a workshop for many stage props. Then special kind of studios for sound and film and the workplaces of the students and so on. They all found their place in this urbanism. It always was important to kind of open up the spaces. So you spend a lot of money on these fireproof glasses. Then the apartments, which I mentioned, they are up on top. They really have nice views. And then that special space, which I'll come back to now, that ran in the competition, we had actually said we would make a cultural boulevard. Like a vertical kind of thing. And we put there all those kind of special spaces like a movie theater. And this is what it looks like today. This is the other entrance. North entrance. It's actually a really, really monumental space which we didn't design, which is already there, but we're kind of using it. And at night, when the building comes alive, it actually creates a very nice scenery, kind of like a vertical urbanism. And they use it when they have parties. They actually use it as a second entrance. On the inside, then, we did things like this. This is the entrance hall, which doubles as a cinema, lobby, and which people use also for this form of play. So they are appropriately, and so on. One floor up, we have this small chamber music hall. All the way up, we have this crazy kind of organ playing place where they would catch organists or church. They are kind of freaking out because it's so flat that we don't know exactly where they are. And then, what you can now observe is a very nice thing that's happening. People are putting it in a second layer. So again, what's happening with all our projects, people are coming in there using it. This is very harmless. This is in front of the library. And this is in the big hall when they do exhibitions. They glue things on the floor, and this installation is not so good, so it's coming off from these traces. So the polymessage is happening there. There are a few little things like this. The bear is feeding the wheelchair driver and the lady and the man. But there are also very interesting things now happening with the artists. Some of them are kind of coming creative in the hallways, which we enjoy a lot, and some of them also going crazy a little bit, which then is a problem for the school. So in an urban piece like this, it's very interesting to see now how people are coming in and then changing it. And there is a whole process of social kind of stratification going on and orientation. What can we do with the building? How far can we go? Are we going too far? That's in between the art students and the principal, which is very nice. So I'll come to the last project, and now I'll show you why we believe that renovations can actually be a tool for new architecture. A client came to us. He's a furniture producer, and he had bought this lovely parking lot. It's on the main highway of Switzerland, so it's a very, very good site to bring his brand to the main highway. We did a little kind of model search. This is the highway here. Your program is not very big, so if you want to do this, you don't want to go flat like those supermarkets here on the side, but if you want to do it, you want to take the whole program and you want to bring it up here to make a tall building here and to actually kind of make a sign to the highway like an enduring sign. But then the question was how to rationalize that or how to organize it internally. And we were actually fascinated still by this space, which is the cascading space in the high power of Tony Armada. That was always in the back of our mind. And all of a sudden, I think, Daniel said, why don't we organize that furniture department exactly the way that we did this space? This space came out of Tony. It was actually suggested to us by the building. This is kind of stepping up space and we said, well, that's interesting. We can actually use that for the furniture department. We will have here the storage down here. We will have an entrance and then we will do a series of kind of terraces in which they show their furniture and underneath the terraces here they will have all their storage. So what they will do is they will show the furniture here, they will store it here and show it here and store it here and like this we will have a high volume at the same time. And we will have a kind of a spectacular effect on the inside which we know works on Tony Armada. So we did this building with a very minimal budget. We tried to put everything, all the money we had, we tried to put it into the space, not into the services because we knew that the furniture producer would then come in and he would show his furniture. And it's actually a building that was conceived in Tomi Ayal was just transferred to here. So I'm close with this and I hope I've shown you some of the fun we have with renovations and some of the strategies we'd like to use. And yeah, I hope I've inspired you and I hope also that your own renovations would be wonderful. Thank you Mr. Tito. It was very inspiring. I think it's 24 something. I think we used a beautiful presentation and beautiful projects. Maybe I'll just start if we'll open up to the floor just asking how the venturing out as a developer ended up, yeah, curious. Well, we didn't make much money on that first building because we spent all the money on those crazy windows and so on and my system lives there. We gave her a nice rebate also. So then we thought and we came down very professional and we bought a second building and we built it. Seven apartments built it bigger and we sold all of the apartments except for one and now we have a huge problem with our building. Technically. It's a concrete building with a carrying facade and the ceilings are hanging from that out of the facade and there is a huge noise problem. There are still connections so we may be going back right soon. Obviously. When I go back to Switzerland on Tuesday I will, in the evening, I will meet all these people and we will build it all. Be careful. It's another set of five villages when we do that. Definitely. So it's something to think about and I know why all these developers do such boring buildings because they don't want to risk anything. But I guess there could be some kind of partnership work out where you could minimize some of it. It would be wonderful if someone would carry the risk and we would carry it with fun. Okay. Thanks for filling the room. Who has questions? Do you always renovate buildings or do you actually build from scratch from zero? Of course we also do, but for the sake of the lecture I'm trying to condense it just to show you the renovations also because I still believe the meaning is about renovations. We like to build new. We do it a lot. But I have to say that in Switzerland probably half of our commissions are in our renovations. Just because there is so much standing around for various reasons people don't want to take it away or because if they take it down they don't want to build this much. So I think it's a growing reality and it's nice because when you think in Switzerland after the Second World War they build more than in the entire time before. Also pretty assured. So we have been for 3,000, 4,000 years we have been building our cities and now we have more than double them in the space of maybe 50, 60 years or 70 years. So now I think we need some time also to digest and to settle and to kind of make not just to go for quantity but also to go for quality and I think many people are not happy with the cities because there is no sense of history or layers so I think now is the time also to respect what's already there or at least to look at it and see if it has potential. I know in Turkey there is a big problem with the quality of the build of the metro. It's a huge problem. So it's probably not possible in the same degree but when I see some of the things that I've done now they probably have to take down an old part of Istanbul they build it new when you see what's happening and what the kind of city that is actually coming out of that because again it's so modern again it's so binary, zero modern, there is no added layer meaning it's just new again so always starting over and never setting new and never kind of feeling starting to feel at home and that's really important I think it's time to kind of start thinking out new stuff Would you like to have a suggestion for us, for architects or for people living here No, I've stopped suggesting this is very difficult No, also I think there is a problem it's not transparent so we are speaking when we go to France to journey we show our projects and get very list of oh you have so much money you live in paradise and so on no, it's not like that we have our own problems but the trick now to be of course and this is not me who has to tell you but the trick would now be of course to exchange ideas across the culture of the economic borders and to see what you can use in other people's work so I have no suggestion but maybe I don't know maybe there's something there it's more like an offer or something or like a kind of a I mean it was a tricker now it's election time again so everybody is building like crazy and our culture there is a Byzantine church and he came with a big dozer he took down the walls and he put one meter on top of the whole terrain with this and now on top of that he's building a house now I mean what is this what actually is it why is it a law why is no one stepping in is it a cultural question or is it an economic question or what exactly is it it does come down to ethics and culture in a way I mean so maybe those people who are doing that they think it's totally okay whereas in some other part of the world actually it's a personal thing the good thing about it is he doesn't have a foundation so he's protecting actually the huge music which I know is underneath you could think about it if you want to be positive think about it that way he's doing a kind of Koroma thing but on the other hand there is kind of a need for starting to look at things understanding and also seeing the work and slowly throwing the custom to that I think there is a desperate need in all places have you ever worked in China? yes what was that like? terrible I'd like to know more because of course the change in Istanbul it's fast but it's also super fast I mean we always defend Istanbul it's a city in terms of in terms of China and India other developing cities and other developing contexts so I would be very curious about how Swiss Germany operates in China which should be available absolutely, it's kind of obviously there's no ways you're right, we don't we did well we speak China again but we're short before this so what happened was a friend of ours worked at Helsinki Emerald she went back to China and she knows Ayraway the guy who was doing Koros 100 sides all and this guy needed some I would say like experimental people who would do the first wife so they invited us and a few friends and we get some houses for them and he was completely lost in translation basically enough, somehow that guy and I we got along very well maybe because he likes to smoke cigars and I was also smoking cigars with him and then he invited us to be part of the competition for a huge school as big as Tokyo Arayala but it's a boarding school for 3,000 students aged in the garden to be safe 3,000 students from scratch in the desert somewhere in the city which they just put to the desert so we said we went there and we looked at the competition and he said don't worry, you will win so we went there and we did a project and there was nothing it was so difficult there was nothing there to touch there was nothing to start from so we started actually from that idea up there is it that a 5 year old child has to live his whole life so we organized the whole project in groups of families it was like we developed a social project we handed it in and tried to add some kind of Chinese Mongolian Mongolian cultural stuff which we didn't understand at all so again that was maybe cynical but in hindsight so we went there and we were actually inviting to the mayor's office one month before the official deadline we showed him the finished project and he liked it very much and then there was competition day our team flew over and they presented everything and all the other teams had like these big documents and we had one letter because they told us to come up with a fee and apparently our fee was 10 times as high as the fee of the next team and we won the competition so then they we were very happy and they said, yeah the fee we don't have to talk about it half of that fee you will never see it will work in some places some of the money we can give you but not really can we just have the digital fireplace there is huge office in Beijing who will do the work for you and I tried desperately to get into contact but I flew several times in Beijing I tried to put relations with the guy I don't act as the corrupt people but I said if you want I can invite you to Switzerland I can invite you to that recommendation letter I will not pay for everybody not a chance and now it's built we've never been there we've seen pictures of some American tourists some teaching it was shown at school it looks remotely like our rankings so in this kind of a cultural complex we have to create from nowhere and also you lack a complete understanding of the culture and also the socio-economic complex and you are not also finding a way in the world because I think it's useless then you are just a kind of a retext for them to throw around the money among themselves your valuable part is still giving the first idea if that's enough I mean in that time you could have done another project that would have been closer to the real life of it so it's a question of I don't think it's possible to translate into any context I think there are certain limits the thing we learn in China actually is that we are your kids and that was very valuable to Lesley we understood ourselves much better the kind of city we like the kind of discussion culture we like the kind of work we like to do we are very slow also