 Before we start, kind of an open house is a huge effort for the school. A very enjoyable kind of, it's a joy to do this. It's a moment to open the school to many people, like many of you that are coming here to be with us today. But it's a lot of work. I want to thank Stefan Bodeker and Kendra, who is around in Atlanta. And the faculty that contributed to this and the IT team and the AV team and everyone, it's a lot of work and it's great. But we also are here to celebrate Hillary's sample and to discuss with her her work and to actually learn more of what you've been doing in the last years. And I'm incredibly happy that this can happen during this open house lecture today. And actually, you gave the 2016, right? Open house lecture. So there's been a long time since last time you spoke here. And it's a great opportunity. Hillary is the IDC Foundation Professor of Housing, Design and Coordinator of the Housing Studio at GSAP, where she began teaching full time in 2011. She's an architect, a researcher, a teacher and an intellectual, I would say, a critical activator in many different ways and committed to many different causes and sensitive to many things that happen to architecture and as architecture. And along with Michael Meredith, Hillary is the co-founder of the New York based architecture and design studio, MOS. I actually am so glad that we can celebrate your work because I think that there's so much that is happening in this transitioning from research, design, teaching and sort of activism. And I think that it's often something that because we look only at what part of MOS work or your research, your books or your teaching we missed and it's probably a good opportunity to see how these things are traveling from one of your activities to the other. But on a personal note, I remember very well the first time I saw your work in 2004 in the Tate Modern, in the exhibition that was dedicated to Fear Week, Fear Week celebration and then there was this amazing puppet theater with the Corbisier, the Tiny Bear and all these beautiful things. But I could not stop looking at what was surrounding these amazing characters and was this puppet theater that it took me a while to find out that was designed by MOS, these very young architects at that point. And actually 2004, it was a year after you founded your office and I was then trying to find information about MOS. Who are these people MOS that did this theater? Where is this theater? And then I found that this theater was temporary, so it was no longer there. I remember I traveled to the GSD and I had the first thing. Where is the theater? The puppet theater? What puppet theater? The carpenter center has this puppet theater and then it was no longer there, but it was everywhere else because Fear Week was making it very visible. I think that your work is actually something that it's also transforming the geographies of architecture and operating as an international architect and working in a connection with New York and Mexico and working in tiny towns in the north of Europe and then it's sort of reconstructing what being a planetary architect means, not necessarily in Hong Kong, but kind of a different geography of little towns, places where things are happening, where you're doing your schools, the school number one, the number two, the number three in the houses. And I think that's also something very important. In an interview in Madame Architect in 2020, you said that you saw more in the model of starting a practice by doing small-scale things and building up. Part of keeping most small offices for me to truly work at some capacity on each of the projects carefully and intently and to think about the work as a whole. We think about our work as a body and a collection of things that are not unrelated. And I have the feeling that we were talking about this now that in your work being smaller big is actually not that much of a difference. You pay attention to the tiny rock that is stands by the house number 15, I guess, in Chicago, or the bicycle as much as to the big building. And I think that that's actually something that speaks of how you see architecture, something that is a continuum probably of many things that happen and that helps saving people's lives and society's lives. You've received so many awards of recognition, so I have the long list. I will read some of them, but sometime probably I got tired and I won't stop and I will stop. 2013, the American Academy in Rome. In 2015, the National Design Award in Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Holstein Award for Sustainable Construction as Asia Pacific Region. 2014, the Krabbs Hall Hall School in Denmark, the A.I. New York Excellence Award, 2010 American Academy of the Arts and Letters Architecture Award. In 2009, you won the with After Party, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. In 2008, the Architectural League of the New York Emergency Voices Award. In 2006, the MacDonald Artists and Adam Studio. Well, so many things I will stop here with, but because I also want to talk about your books. And what is for me very unique is that the killer is working in different registries, in different languages, in different kind of runs to a certain extent, developing a very different voice in each of them. It's something that the connection is not so obvious and you have to dig a little bit to understand how things connect and that's actually the beauty of that. You identify what's the specificity of each medium and you're working there differently. And your book, 2015 Questions Concerning Health, The States and Wellness in Johannesburg, that was connected also with your teaching, was raising questions concerning health and reports on public health and cities that became more and more important. Actually, that was opening a conversation during COVID here at the school that you helped organizing. In 2016, Maintenance Architecture with MIT Press was actually a big way of transforming the way we could approach buildings, looking at the detail of how things are carried through time and care and it was including already a concern about caring as a source for architectural design, aligned with many other discussions that were happening and I was thinking that that was actually happening simultaneously probably to the work of Maria Pucilabia Casa that was announcing that in the future, designers would be dealing with matters of care and that was sort of pre-monitory of that. With most, you did so many books. I think the crockies that was dedicated to your firm was actually quite amazing in many ways. 2018 unfinished encyclopedia of Scale Triggers without architecture that was first presented in the Istanbul Biennial in the Forum of Accordion and then in the Venice Biennial and there was bringing all these two instances in life and acknowledging the agency of those and how the questions of representation were very much happening through the language of architecture very specifically and that was really exciting to see also how it became part of Princeton. Now it is the background for all the discussion that happened in there. In 2018, 44 low-resolution houses in Princeton School of Architecture that was also an exhibition, 2019 houses for Scale, 2031 vacant spaces, looking at the way the city was transformed by the way things were moving online, 2032 a book on making a petite call which also brought together many people to provide input on pedagogy as part of the architecture. I love the way your work as a designer is organized bureaucratically, like I already mentioned, house one, two, three, four, five. I actually was concerned that I was missing some of them but you're in house 17 right now at this point then school number three, I think. But I also want to say that your work as activists was very important for me. I think your women writing event series that you organized here was actually giving a voice to a number of designers beyond that were women that were writing and actually it was something that was connected to your experience. You were mentioning in an interview also Hillary that when you started studying in Princeton it was very unlikely to find designers that were women and those that were women were often asked to be strong and write them that that was something that you were trying to find an alternative to. I also want to say that I love this beyond building objects design things other than buildings I would say, more than buildings I would say even and I remember in the Chika Bayenial how beautiful it was to see all these constellation of objects around the house that were accounting for actually many, many things, many other technologies that are needed for houses to work that was actually challenging the notion that architecture is this kind of strong technology that impose itself to any other form of technology and scale. So with this I think it's a great moment to start the conversation with Hillary. I would encourage everyone to take notes and we will continue that with the debate afterwards that is open to everyone and hopefully very much participated by this very, very vibrant environment. Thank you very much Hillary, please join me as open. Good evening. Thank you all for being here and thank you Andres for the wonderful introduction. It's been a while, yes, since I lectured here. So I mean I do it weekly but this is a different matter. I wanted to maybe start with some thoughts around, yeah, I clicked my thoughts here I guess, but in some ways it's maybe a little uncomfortable for me to give a talk alone in some ways because I'm always doing my work with others. I think Michael and I have built this practice over the last, yeah, now 20 years and we are always saying that we do this conversation together or that we're never less than two. So I think for me that also has become very important in everything we do and also in thinking about that role as an architect and designer because it's a very different kind of space than when I was a student and when I was asked to start to think about working as an architect. So I very much think about this all the time that we're constantly in conversation and that that conversation also is not so private and that it's become maybe more public and we're really interested in that, that the space that we work in and the kind of work we do is done with other people all the time. And I think this is also one thing that is more and more underpinning the work that we're doing and I think what's so special about architecture and important about our work is that it's obviously an art and many of us are working in that way. It's obviously science, but it's also service and I think to be able to work in this space in this way is kind of an exception. We can think of other professions that are serving the public. Journalism is one way for sure, is an interesting conversation I had relatively recently about the role of journalism and that journalism is maybe very close to architecture and that journalists have ideas, but it's only after going through a kind of process of interviewing or talking to a public that the ideas are transformed into other ways to serve the public. I don't know what this means exactly in terms of a method for architecture, but it's definitely something I've been thinking a lot about and how we begin to work. And so some of the ways that we're thinking about architecture goes through a different process. Let's say our way of working starts in different ways, depending upon projects, but we're always working at those kind of similar things and so writing, we always in a way start with writing as much as we start with drawing and think about ways of collaboration has become more and more important to the way that we work. So collaboration in the case of let's say this project I'm going to present around education, collaboration for the sake of collaboration and trying to do more of that in our practice and collaboration around making. I think these are the kinds of themes that I wanted to present mostly for this evening. And this sort of start with this project. This is a school for students that are between high school and university. This is in Denmark. It's a little bit north of Copenhagen in a town called Skiveh. We were invited by the director Kurt Feinstein to reimagine studio space for the campus. So he asked us to both look at the idea of making new studio spaces and also to think about the master plan for the campus. So it's a kind of small campus and there were existing buildings and he wanted to see if it was possible to repurpose those buildings. The challenge was that he also at the same time along with the faculty were asking us to think about possible futures for different kinds of disciplines. Art, architecture, photography and graphic design. And could we think about the way that the students would work that would give them new possibilities for making but also what he was also saying maybe not so explicitly but was that the campus was bifurcated and the students weren't engaging each other as much as the faculty thought they could and how might that be possible? So to really make a place that could be about interdisciplinary work. And so looking at the existing and thinking about these new studio spaces also in the context of the campus design which he had already worked with this is a house design, guest house designed by Jorge Pardo and some studies here looking at how to expand the existing buildings but was really important to us that when we were thinking about how students would work that everything on the campus was very internalized and it's a very beautiful campus. It's between a body of water and a forest. So we also were thinking about ways to be part of nature and to just try to make new spaces that the students hadn't had experienced before. It's not really a traditional campus and so we began by these very forms that were repeated. Often we do like to repeat things in the kind of repetition and ultimately seeing that the buildings being so low and very dark weren't really a kind of way that they could think together more broadly. So we proposed that instead we would make something separate and that in the case of the studios by pulling out these buildings a little bit from them they could still use them and then use this space but use them separately. And that's kind of one idea we had. All of the studio spaces then are really kind of open space but by their nature of coming together produce open courtyards and then these other shared spaces and that are covered. Spaces that are not like anything else on the campus. We made a small booklet as part of the work. This comes together at the end with photographs but we work a lot as Andres was saying in books and always for me especially I feel I'm always thinking about the idea of a book, something in addition to the building and this comes on sort of following on a series of videos and software. So we've always had a practice where we're making and thinking about the built environment but to accompany it other strands like us are threads of ways of looking at architecture and thinking about it. It's very fun on the one hand to do that work. It is a lot of work and we spend a lot of time in the office probably being inefficient. This is not a normal is an unconventional way of working probably. Although there are other architects that we have thought a lot about and we in our way collaboration is also in our minds thinking that we're kind of collaborating with them to that they are have come before us. Obviously the Smithsons Alice and Peter Smithson or Atelier Bow Wow. I think the offices that are and there are many that I could list but those come few to my mind but that this accompanies the way that we would work and think about building in part and this will come out more as I talk hopefully in a little smoother way but that is really also about making bigger conversation more inclusive conversation and also space for others to come and join us in talking and thinking about architecture together. In some ways that's what I'm most excited about now today in practice. So this is the some construction photos and this is an existing kind of manor house Atelier Bow Wow also did a four boxes studio down here. So we were in really good company. Part of also the studio project was to think about the rest of the campus and the space that's left behind. So I'm very interested in how architecture becomes in some ways a focus for us, for users but also that it can be a background for other things and that it leaves space for others and this is also part of the collaborative thinking. I think try to make an argument for that. Some of our drawings talking about the space something in sections and details but the idea that students can begin to see through see through the space. This is the relationship. So a kind of studio space but housing at the same time. The projects in general are in a way very modest. We work with an economy of means. These are very simple cement cementitious panels separated with a stainless steel channel to allow light to bounce around. We spend a lot of time looking at other artists work, architects work, we really value and appreciate someone like Agnes Martin's work that sort of search for perfection but obviously there's always imperfections especially in construction but that idea of the line here and the large scale windows are something we use a lot in our work in this case for the students it's a way to see each other's work through the space and share. The windows then became actually more surface to pin up and draw that kind of full scale light box out to our space for rest and leisure. Here you can see a little bit more of the reflection. Other spaces, this is a photography studio so it has a screen to make it dark and a relationship to the context down here through weather. And this is a little bit what I mean by in the way that we worked on this project and the sighting of it, you can see the Jorge Pardo house behind these studio buildings in the back that I mentioned in the beginning were actually torn down in Pam Vitegar a Swedish office out of Stockholm built more studio spaces that are bigger and different but for me I'm in a way very proud of this cement because it lets other work happen in relation to building. I wanted to also present this as a little bit of an older project but important I think in our line of work and we have thought a lot about the way that we practice and the kinds of things we want to work on and keep working on. This is in the form of a house but it's a visitor center for a museum, the Museum of Outdoor Arts based in Denver that has been supporting artists through their nonprofit, their museum at the nonprofit and supporting land artists for the past 30 years or so and they invited us to make this visitor center on a kind of ranch in New Mexico where Charles Ross, he's a New York based land artist has been building a sculpture since the 1970s and so they asked us if we could think about the visitor center through the idea of a kind of gross and we started, we had actually two schemes. This is a video or stills of the kind of longer house that we proposed and then this is the house that actually was built. We made two videos for this and the models in a way I think are always very large scale. They're also made really with just paper and they're made by hand for the most part. We have been doing other digital forms of modeling but this process is very easy to make in terms of, I shouldn't say it's easy because it's not that easy but it's basically just a kind of paper, it's all recyclable. This and this is more than 10 to 15 years old now I guess the kind of image but it's something we were doing a lot of the kind of writing stories, making videos and kind of also making mock-ups. We made larger scale mock-ups. We made a book also with the interviews of other kind of engineers but also the client talking about the importance of the idea for people to come together here and observe nature and participate and look at and experience the artwork which is still ongoing and he hasn't finished it so it's kind of interesting. It was also important that this is a kind of experimental house, it's completely passive off the grid there's no heating or cooling, everything is very small. This is about 1200 square feet. The cladding is aluminum shingles and completely recyclable. We've been thinking about these ideas for a long time and are always trying to work on them. The Krabush home in the school also complies fully with Danish energy codes. So it's very strict kind of space. And the idea with the sort of solar chimney can be open and allow air to move through. So when the doors are open and the windows are open and the window is open, it pulls the air through. We also think a lot about the idea of forms related to kind of history of the American house. And I guess some of the roofs that the fact that they're pitched has really to do with environmental conditions as opposed to making a kind of statement about postmodernism. So anyway, that's really the kind of driving force of this. But this is a house for an artist and kind of brighter. The idea is that we had done the artist studio a few years before. And if this is to become a kind of foundation for the future, does the house really stay a house when it will no longer be a house? And can it start to take on different scales of intervention and different kinds of spaces, different time periods and also be something that is relatively easily maintained? So these are some of the kind of questions that came up in working on this project. Again, there's something about using an economy of parts here that we begin to have more experience with and thinking about the kind of relationship also to building in the surroundings the kind of local condition of maybe more agricultural works. I'll talk more about that later, but that this is really very simple material that comes in one foot rolls, coils, and is applied on site kind of storage or thinking about archives for this. Kind of at the same time, we're thinking about how to work more in some ways more efficiently and yet thinking about ways to give more variety in spaces and experiences. And this is a project that we were invited to design a platform for design, which was part of ADO and Mimi and Eric did the wonderful renovation of the building. And this was to be something that occupied the entry space. And so through a series of benches, we proposed that a way that they could fairly quickly reconfigure their lobby space for a number of different public conditions. And we studied model, and we also worked with Mary Ping, a fashion designer, slow and steady wins the race to design these work jackets that had many pockets and it's kind of pleated aluminum fabric for this. And we've been working with Metal for almost 20 years in a variety of conditions and scales. They also had asked us to think about giving them some kind of instruction book and we together in the office thought about how we could make a book with that. And we invited other people like Enrique Ramirez to write an essay. So it's a kind of perpetual thinking of space and bookmaking. We're also working on and thinking about how we can more actively engage in public spaces with clients. This is for a younger artist and gallery owner who had a space on the ground floor which was a kind of double height space and wanted to think about how they could have both a kind of lived work but also gallery and change the space however they needed for whoever they were going to work with and could we help them think about this and try to also make the space in some ways very durable but draws upon things like the existing block wall in the space, this sort of metal stair, inserting a mezzanine, using a curtain like other New York studios and then ground with a kind of dotted grid. And thinking about the relationship between design and design objects has also been a kind of running thought through the work. And here we were invited to think about the space that was not really retail, was not really gallery but the client who was very young was very interested in trying to make a really exceptional space for New York through the idea of making objects and he commissioned many designers to make objects for his space called chamber and the chamber is now on more online but this was in the base of Neil DiNari's HL23, the bottom of the high line. So it was a little bit of a leftover space. When we arrived at the space it was completely empty and except the ceiling was full of all the parts for the rest of the building upstairs. And so anytime you see these kinds of lines that means there's something serving upstairs. And so we had to think about how to deal with that. It's not that we would have designed that like that but then left sort of created these vaults and space in the back. And so also designing pieces for the exhibition space and things also like just how to make very directly a kind of office space and storage for that. So we're always making these pieces and we make everything ourselves in a way we have become also fabricators of this work. So there's a lot of thought and thinking when we make something and even our drawings we also really like to make references to the work that we do as architects of something very simple like the marble pattern milled on marble but that the wall is adjustable through these threaded screws to give more space. As we're working on these range of projects that Andres already mentioned but we were invited by Mark and Beatrice to participate in exhibition in Istanbul on the human and for me I have always drawn figures in my work particularly I guess obviously being a woman in architecture the representation of the figure is really important to me and how we, if we treat our scale figures badly I don't know what we're saying about the people who will use our buildings so I think it's important to think about so I think it's pretty important to pay some attention to that but we started a project that took also years these books take a very long time now and we work with many people on them that's not just us and basically taking a kind of canonical drawings and removing the architecture and drawing and leaving the figure as a kind of collection so this is unfinished encyclopedia this drawing is Felix Candela and it's from Avery Library part of my work also and I feel I spend a lot of time and I'm very interested in archives. We also had done an exhibition here around called The Other Architect that which was from the CCA in Montreal where we worked with many objects that architects had done that are beyond buildings but always thinking about sorry, I don't know why it's too big but the figures and for me also it became a real revelation too about figures that are not drawn and what we don't show as architects and what we should and in some ways it's also an invitation for others to start to think about this more carefully and expand that. There's also quite a wonderful experience in talking with a variety of people about these scale figures because there are stories of course behind them that are getting lost over time and maybe some are very valuable and would be great to document that and talk about them more. I drew this figure when I was at OMA and a woman sitting in a Martin Van Severn chair so anyway, someone at rest but in a really nice piece of furniture and anyhow, but that was more than 20 some years ago. So okay, as we have been working and thinking about projects and the kinds of things we want to do that we work in a particular way that we try to produce a culture within the office and that culture is also about the way we make things the kinds of things we're making and we're always thinking about these things together and then now that the conversation we hope and will stay working in this way but has really been expanded to be with other architects and so this is a housing laboratory I was invited to help curate and as a kind of competition, a group of architects around housing prototypes in a way to show as a kind of platform for how you could build in Mexico. So we were asked to help curate this competition result and also make the education center so the laboratorio de Vivienda is this building here this kind of long bar building very thin and the kind of garden of housing prototypes by 32 international architects I'd say probably 80% of them have offices in Mexico and started to think about this. Originally the architects were asked to design these units that would make up something more of a neighborhood not that they're to be built in the singular houses these are not single family houses I think it's really important to understand the context but effectively what had been built and was being built in Mexico are houses that are more or less all of the same there's not a lot of thought into the and this I'm talking about a kind of mass development not other kinds of things but a kind of lack of services and also shared spaces. So we thought although this is a relatively small site we could try to aggregate them in a way that would produce shared spaces at a smaller scale with smaller elements between the houses. Each house is designed for a specific state in Mexico and Mexico has 10 different microclimates so the houses were all designed for a very specific location the architects had to then again redesign this space for this location which is about a two-hour drive north of Mexico City. So a lot of work it was very interesting to me also in the kind of evaluation of the competition entries in that the majority of the Mexican offices had submitted full CDs and some of the American offices were really sketches and it showed I thought an interesting difference in the relationship to working, to methods, to just a kind of a way that we see the world and maybe in different lenses and through different means and that has really stuck with me. And anyway, I don't know it's a maybe I have questions around it but I think that's really important. Again, here this project is a way to sort of move through the space and the housing is for social housing and it's for workers, it's workers housing. The client was a young architect who founded a group with an inside in Fonavete which is Mexico's social workers market lender so effectively some kind of bank in a way but they had agreed to fund this group that then sponsored many design competitions and projects and built many projects during a kind of five year span. So this is just one of many public works that were made including public spaces. And so the education building is really a space for convening conferences and classrooms. They store the models and drawings and there was to be a cafe and so you can see the kind of space here. This project also was a project where we thought a lot about making a book and as part of the presentation and the research we compiled a book with all the other offices. So here we really thought about all the conversations we had had, it took a while. We spent probably more time in preparing for the construction and the actual construction so this was a very different experience for us but we had to write and defend why we selected the architects. There were originally almost a hundred offices that participated and maybe could have argued for all of them but we were charged with 32. So anyway, and then we asked all the offices also to write something about what influenced their ideas behind the design so we could talk about that a little bit more. This project has to do with looking at houses and more research I would say into a kind of selection of houses and thinking about them in scale in a more uniform, sort of in a more uniform presentation but then also to highlight in a way and this is a part maybe for me the most interesting is the relationship to materials and a kind of selection of those materials against the houses. And continuing in a way the research into architecture and houses we were working as I said on the CCA the other architect and had this kind of I think amazing experience being able to be up close with these different objects that architects had made and writings and TV shows and these kind of wonderful things and thinking about how this relationship to public and to also thinking about children that maybe there could be more done to talk about that with them and what is the experience in sharing architecture in a way that talks through the things that we like and know how to make like drawing like telling stories, talking about design and so we had started already thinking about how we wanted to put together a book around making a house and I think also for us how do I expand the canon? I think when we were students we were very limited in what we were supposed to study I tell my students this story a lot and so it's much harder today. You have so many choices and you have access to images and information all the time. So in some ways you have to understand what you are really interested in and try to work with that. So this book became about a kind of very a direct story about a family looking to buy a house and instead it turned into a kind of exploration of houses and then learning about how to build a house maybe not just any house and they decide to sell the house and so the book is really about a search for architecture. We're also continuing the ideas around houses I think we're thinking about this really very seriously but trying to also question what that means houses are not housing in some ways and now I'm gonna talk about housing soon, promise. But in this case house 10 became really a house that has at its heart a kind of square cut out but it's about these sort of pieces these kind of rectangles that are all the same size a form and relatively the same size aggregated together and re-imagined the space for living. So each bar is a room, a kind of kitchen, three bedrooms and another space that could be used for kind of guest room a sort of bathroom and entrance. Each of the bedrooms are this exactly the same and this was something we started to think about through our corridor house project that we did for the Chicago Biennial in that if we really want to be serious about equity issues around equality I think this has to begin at home and whatever size that might be and this is something we also try to look at in housing and so there's no master, right? We get rid of master builder we get rid of master bedrooms all of it this goes away in favor of other things and living becomes around the courtyard the house is built between a garden in the center and a forest and so it really becomes a space that is for an extended family it's also for someone who has mobility issues and challenges and so really how to reimagine how we live, the usefulness of the spaces the space became a school during COVID the space, the house couldn't become many separate rooms all of the doors slide so in theory it could become something else in the future and then there's other just more fun things to have the house in terms of color architecture for us this seems to always fall to things being more gray or neutral colors let's say and colors really happen in the landscape in the furniture thinking about that I think things too like research from the corridor house where the whole house was built out of sheets of plywood also happened here where instead of cross framing beams it becomes this planes, the details, lots of color it's easier to change color than architecture things in the garden is really about a kind of medicinal herb vegetable than so much flowers so I wanted to talk a little bit too about nighttime I think for us we're really interested in architecture and particularly when we talk about things in the public realm that it is about day to night and I think we're in a way responding to a time period where renderings were very popular and always seemed to be only at sunset or sunny days with blue skies and as architects we have to work with more than that and this is this artist studio James Caspere who's also a photographer and who works in a way very similar to how architects work he makes scale models and photographs them sometimes the models are of spaces and places he has never been and he imagines what they might be like at this time as we were designing this project we were also working on a pan at the laboratory and I was making other trips to Mexico and he started working on a series around Barragan's houses and it was interesting to sort of see the kind of scale and the detail because it was abstracted and not the same and I thought it was just a very moving and his work is obviously and called very emotional and he also rarely ever uses scale figures so these were some kind of interesting things for me but part of this project in his move out of the city to do his work and make a studio and make a living space kind of combined was also to have a space for community exhibition so part of this space here is to also allow for the public to come and see work that he curates with others it's not his work but he's making a space for a community within that trying out different kind of materials different lighting so some of the you can see some of the models it was also a conversation around as a photographer he really wanted a totally dark space but we said well you're in this beautiful setting you should really see it so we had many conversations around that and ultimately served like really small details but designed a way to have a blackout shade but really for me the process of working on multiple models at once and going between them and seeing how they take shape and what happens to them it felt very close to the way that we work as architects we've also been working on a project with Tatiana Bilbao she invited us to participate in also a group project was Productura and Macias Paredes and for St. Louis very close to the Pulitzer Foundation and to design a low, well more middle income house for a family or household and so again here are sort of crude drawings but the bedrooms are the same and which was really hard to convince them to say because it had that desire of market and wanting certain things like master bedroom became a challenge for the realtor how will I sell this if it doesn't have a master for instance was one thing we were asked about but we really insisted we thought it was important and do you think it's important so this is under construction there are multiple each house is built four times over within this space so as we're working on projects we're doing research doing research with students and this project vacant spaces came out of kind of a beginning of another a longer period of time of research which really started with the foreclosed show at MoMA which was curated by Reinhold Martin, Barry Berkdahl and you know it's something we have thought about for a very long time that whole experience which was really incredible for us as young architects or younger architects I don't think of myself as a young architect and so starting to look at vacant spaces and cataloging this and researching it in New York in relation to the housing crisis this was assembled all with publicly available information but New York has something like 55 million square feet of vacant space and this is a crisis before COVID event but the fact that our zoning and doesn't permit housing at a lot of the kind of ground floor spaces we thought important to look at New York is we often celebrated so much for the skyline which of course I love to but the majority of New York is really only two stories it's in a way radically underbuilt and could really be thought of much more carefully and so we sort of went neighborhood by neighborhood looked at this collected things like being empty for 638 days it's just hard to understand how that can be possible and what could be done instead there has to be something to try to change that and make opportunities for people to occupy those spaces through housing through other needs of the communities anyway did some small design sketches just to show what maybe you could do this work is being done at the same time as where we're invited to work on two affordable housing residential buildings in Washington DC and the kind of row house, the site was sloped we had to navigate a kind of staircase and very low budget, very bare bones kind of construction in this and the next project I'll show we really advocated for a variety of unit I don't want to say types but units, different kinds of units and there are real differences between working on housing in New York City and Washington DC and that was really enlightening for me especially to kind of go through that process and see that more ideas around thinking about households and multiple units and in this case a much larger project both of these projects are in neighborhoods that the mayor's office picked four sites and in this case the line that separates the street is Maryland, so it's the furthest out you could possibly be in DC and so in a way we were kind of critical of the fact that affordable housing wasn't located more centrally this is an hour walk to Langston Terrace so that gives you a sense of the kind of location but also a slightly awkward site we started to think about ways what we wanted to do most with housing things like single-loaded corridors through views to the apartments from the street to the courtyard, to the courtyards we made kind of ground floor this is also for it's 100% affordable housing it's 75,000 square feet and it has 63 units and 13 are for the social services so we worked with the social service provider for a kind of entrance can talk a little bit about that process but in this case I'm really trying to think about not only who's living here and the experience of walking through the space this is not double-loaded corridor but how to always have light at least light trying to get light and air in those spaces but also to think about people working in those spaces we spend so much time talking about housing and who lives in the apartments but we know from the past failures of housing it's also about who maintains the buildings this building also has a penthouse this is the penthouse it's almost unheard of in a way in housing but by the kind of code and zoning for DC we were not allowed to technically have a fifth floor even though it's the fifth floor but it was acceptable to have the fifth floor and call it a penthouse so we were like, okay, that sounds good we'll do that so anyway you get 100% affordable housing and a penthouse all in one project, it's kind of great but this sort of building off of ideas from foreclosed and then also from another exhibition at the Venice Biennial that Monica Ponsiglione and Cynthia Davidson curated where we also made a book and wrote about a kind of housing and use so in a way, again, the kind of repetition of things this was originally the model and we made really, really large windows like really large, we knew there was no way this would be happened to be built but we knew that if we didn't do this if we did exactly what they said they would make them even smaller and so we said, we're gonna just do this and not say anything and so of course it got value engineered and the windows wound up being smaller but these are still much bigger than what they usually build and we were able to do that I think and the windows also are the built things sorry, the apartments are single studio up to four bedroom so a much bigger, sorry, a much more diverse set of things than typical and particularly in New York so just by comparison, just a few more and I'm almost done, this was a competition we recently finished, sorry there's gonna be a lot of green here in Paraguay we were invited to submit for an international housing competition this is in Chakarita in Ascension and so we collaborated with Cripo de Arquitectura and Domo Faden's office we were based in Buenos Aires and our three offices worked together collaborating on this housing residential building set of buildings is a very prominent site it's a site that has been occupied for a long time all of the residents were interviewed some chose not to go forward and were relocated others said they wanted to be part of this and were interviewed and everything was designed according to their requests for what they wanted in their units we tried to put everything, consolidate the housing to make some density to also think about the way that public space works and particularly in a kind of neighborhood residential area we wanted the residents to have access to outside space, to have some shared space but also to be able to maintain that space so that's part of the form it's a kind of intense site so a lot of site work required and one way it's a very low sort of low-tech project but strangely high-tech we got this very detailed drone imagery sent to us so we had never experienced something like that before in the work okay and then I think I'll sort of try to wrap up I have just a couple more things we also work more and more on the kind of metal work and through objects and furniture and working with Manera which is a gallery in Brussels that works with architects almost exclusively and thinking about projects that we can make that are part of in this case trying to think about making a public space outside and bringing people together through this through through through okay and maybe just two more so this is recently we just finished building this greenhouse clinic and this was for a triennial in Guangzhou right now it's built inside a museum but I'm working on finding a home for it in a public space I think would be great the sign comes off so it can be just a structure and we can talk about that later but I really started thinking about the way that you know we tend to use spaces in certain ways and have a sort of fixed way of thinking about them and I you know have been teaching these seminars on clinics and health for quite a long time and the challenge around going to a clinic and you know the kind of embarrassment maybe people feel like they don't want to go into a building that has a sign on it that says clinic and yet go to a greenhouse and there's no question around that and maybe it's a little idealistic to say that you know we could make this space and expect people to come to it but it's more about just a kind of provocation can we start to break down how we think about types and things and you know what could those be a part of that comes out of maybe looking at the work of someone like Alison Smithson Peter Smithson that did a clinic for a company on occupational hazards and in that clinic space they had a gallery devoted to sort of work hazards and it was just a very unexpected kind of condition and something I was interested in trying to work with here so it's a very simple little lead made parts it's all recyclable it comes apart easily this was put together in just a few days and this is really something that we've thought a lot about over the years of doing these variety of biennials because often you're invited to make these projects and you know what happens to them and they you know they come down and they're maybe thrown away or you have no control over them as an architect and we thought well at least we could start to make things that we knew what could happen to them or we if we had to we could take control of them more easily so things like recycling and making things in part so everything out of aluminum is what happens and a lot of the work now that we're looking at so Petita Kohl we were invited to with the director of the biennial and the Ansab School of Architecture to design a pavilion for children to learn about design children teenagers and so this is we made this proposal the height is really scaled for kids so only kids can fit under and they have a very different relationship to the structure here and we also started to think a lot about what this means and again like all of these projects and for many of you in your offices we all have these ideas and not all of them come real but they can move on to other things and create space and a way to invite others to participate so we started to think through this process of how well how would you make a design assignment for someone here in this space and we started to ask other architects and designers to write design assignments and which started which then became a book but different you know these different kinds of spaces that are over the years have been occupied with other kinds of objects and things things to make we originally this was supposed to be up for six months it's my understanding it's still up so it's almost five years so we're really proud of that that it's used it was used during COVID and this became then a book about making it so again we're really interested in this idea of making and collaboration and how how how what we do is in a way background sometimes for for other things so I think with that I'll end thank you first something very maybe minor but for me very exciting the way there's two things that I love in the way that you represent architecture and present it here the first is the this light thing like you're occupying that space that is almost dark not yet or already kind of racing somehow like it's it's early the morning late in the afternoon something like that that you mentioned it also this kind of confetti feeling that there's there's been a party or it's it's like the remains of pistil it's like it feels really like there's dust around the stones the leaves left there I have the feeling that it seems to be either not yet ready or or too late and it's too early too late when we arrive to see your projects and I have the feeling that there's so much that your space that you're pretty sad living for these maintenance or things to be built or things to be completely in the work of the architects is of how it feels that there's that space that is given to others and you always talk of doing architecture in the company of others and I wonder what's kind of the way you prepare for those other participations to happen through your architecture yeah I think I mean I think we're we're we're making things all the time and thinking about you know how the spaces might be used and we can't always know who uses the spaces right and it's a way to acknowledge that and think about yeah that we're just making things for other people all the time and sometimes these things are you know not not a service but it is we are still in service in some ways and maybe we don't talk enough about that and I think if we want to really make architecture that's radically inclusive or it can can be that that has to seep into everything we do maybe or at least I could be a goal that's what you talked about the project that you've been doing in Mexico the laboratory of the pbl that you just said that the architects coming from the us were working differently to those from Mexico that some that they were bringing more sketches versus Mexico or architects in Mexico that were that yeah maybe you can tell us more about that yeah I mean it's a you know I think it's maybe has to do a lot with the way that we work here and the expectation of how we work and that there it's very you know where there are the five phases and we're expected to do certain things in a particular order and maybe also if you are you know not sure the extensive that you don't do as much I'm not sure but there is definitely there is definitely a difference in the work and the presentation in the documentation that was submitted and I just I just found that to be very interesting and in our experience of working when we started working on sorry Krabbe's home you know Kurt Feinstein said to us you know I only need you to present the kind of list of materials that you want to work in I don't need renderings and just tell us what you won't work in and at the same time we were working on another project and we were asked to just make as many renderings as we could you know and we were like wow this is incredible and you know so in a way from there these these very international experiences have allowed us to think very differently about how we work and the things that are asked of us and I think we have always you know sort of just tried to imagine different ways of working and this gave us more you know more ability and encouragement and also being inspired to to to push more on on certain things how much how important it's been for you and for kind of the network of people you are in conversation with to have sort of a common discussion I'm thinking that there's names that came coming up through your work like Tatiana Bilbao, Adam of Fyden, Productora there's a network of people that are either in Argentina or in Mexico or in Europe that that in Japan that somehow are part of a cohort and I have the feeling that that's very different to other ways of being a practitioner that doesn't seem to be a sort of a competition but something different maybe another form of competition but something that somehow it's building a dialogue between colleagues or or a sense of colleague right yeah totally and yeah I think in a way this began in part I mean as I said Michael and I were always two never less than two right but from the time we were a part of the Ordos 100 yeah and with Jacques Herzog and Ai Weiwei kind of curating this group of architects many of us of course stayed in touch and colleagues and friends and so there's sort of that through Moss but also through teaching I mean I have an amazing kind of cohort I'm always working with in particularly in the housing studio but I so the conversations are are never alone I feel like I mean I have my opinions of course and thoughts but I am more interested in a way to have a culture of conversation and be able to engage that and I think that's really important and I feel also the students on this generation and the last few have been very interested in that as well we're not seeing you know necessarily partners but larger groups forming together and making practices and I think it's very exciting and it's very it's a very different thing from baby art generation you know I love the project in Paraguay and I there's something that I find very interesting this idea of the public as an extension of the of of domesticity actually when we look at your work there's always there's there's all these kind of house number one house number two or three four or 16 and they share something that they when they're represented they seem to be expanding somehow but I think this expansion is different the one in Paraguay it's not the kind of single family unit but this collective housing also is in very let's say different situation or conditions that it's it's really kind of social housing every location of people that were were living actually probably informals yeah sort of men in the way and and the houses are actually constructed the infrastructure of the of the of the Europe are right of the public space now I think there's there's a very different moment for your work there like the expansion that you were talking about for instance in this house this beautiful house of the of the where you discuss equity and you were talking of the medicine kind of plans the medicinal plans that but here is something different it's not like the the expansion of the individual but rather something that is produced collectively by all these houses being expanded outside right you know I wonder what's that meaning for your work yeah yeah I hope so I mean I think well foresee I mean it's um challenge but it is a conversation amongst many um and um you know the you know it's very challenging housing in general um because often um let's say the projects in DC we don't know who's going to live there in this case this was very different so a lot of it was driven by the requests of the users and um you know that also trying to ask about having these relationships to exterior space and also being told maybe no we shouldn't do that or so to say but it could be a really good idea and and and trying to ask for that so the the relationship to outside space um in that way at the ground at the roof at each kind of level um offered hopefully in a way that was at some ways at more equity than what would normally have been perhaps how do you see yourself as a practice that and short of a cohort of people in conversation that started your your office in the early 2000 early 2003 right yeah and very soon a few years later it was the financial crisis and the the eviction crisis and working on housing means something very particular for for people that actually learn how to work on housing those crises right and then with so many other crises coming however your your uh there's sort of a way for you to register that I think your work of care for instance is definitely working on that and and somehow in parallel there's also more of a reflection architecture I'm thinking for instance of your book on this family finding a house and selling the the the Malafarte the real Malaparte and the and the and the how do you see these different ways of uh orbiting around the east who are dwelling happening uh both as a discussion among peers and as a broader kind of struggle for societies converging in these different lines of working in your in your practice or research and all together yeah I think well I mean the I guess it's also in some way maybe else it's the different scales your question you're asking about different scales in a way too the different scales of working but different scales of the conversation and um you know the the houses for sale book um in a way at the same time is really understanding how uh you have to work to build housing in this country is very challenging um it's overly onerous I think we're don't um as architects you never meet the underwriter who um you know says whether or not they're going to give the funds to the developer to build the project I find really troubling and so as a way you know houses for sale is an anti-difficult in some ways on a day-to-day of practice to that um to not lose sight of the things that um you know and and I think also just we're always uh I'm for me too I'm always learning every single day um I can't learn enough about things I feel like um and so um it is a real struggle in the process of housing and making housing I think it's um it's it's challenging and with the students we are always um trying to address that but not lose sight of the fact that it's our role as architects to be really optimistic and to be knowledgeable and to try to design the best things we can but that's sounding kind of like a cliche but that is um you know really our work and um sometimes it can come down to just knowing ways to get bigger windows but um but it's it's a lot more than that obviously and particularly in dealing with um not dealing but with working with um communities um of vulnerable people and um you know what they need in those and learning how to ask for things honestly as an architect and particularly in in um the residential projects like the one in DC because it was not so easy to access social services and to know what they need um and I part of that then led me to you know I wrote a text around let's say staircases um and you know I was thinking about at an Giuseppe I included their work in that um project and a writing project and um you know just how to um try to at least go after one part of this equation which is so overly complicated here you were telling me before that now you're very excited about publicness working with public right with the public with the public space and beyond right right uh what did you do well I think I mean but you know it's very yeah I don't want to keep saying it's really hard as an architect because it seems um we all know that but uh you know to start in the US um and at least in art generation really was about starting in small ways and houses and then you you know you have to have this practice where you build up in scale incrementally um you know in other places around the world maybe there are more opportunities for competitions and things to do to work at a at a bigger scale um and so I you know it's not that I didn't want to work in the public um but it's it's not um it's not that easy and as you mentioned all these different crises um you know you get to a certain point and then something happens and sort of undoes that work and so um you know the books are one way to also begin to um show kind of interest and um expertise what have you or opening more so opening the conversation so the interest in the public is also about that too that it's it's beyond many scales of public I think books and paper and things moving from one media to another because I think there's a lot there right like you're taking things from one media putting them in another making them go back to the virtual and basically take things from reality the rocks and then you put them in your go-ins and then the rocks end up being a rendering on a fabric and in a chair and um becoming kind of a cushion and I think there's so much moving from one place to another and I think the paper actually that's something that you love because in a way it allows you probably to move things easily from one right but there's very specific projects that come out of that I love the scale figures the project yeah because it very literally is bringing things to to the one-to-one scale and then we see what means to be excluded through architecture and what are the bodies that are produced through architecture and that was actually great that it was in the in the Istanbul Biennial I remember in the actually it was in the studio it's right it was so there very beautiful and basically we would enter the room it would be these scale figures and it was monstrous you know not necessarily a good way like to see how architects were depicting the humor right then there and what's what was missing there and there was a tension there but also beauty in the way that it was done with this kind of magic language of the silk and the and I think there's something of this delicacy of how things move from one place to another that gives some space you know to suspend a little bit the judgment for a while until we understand what's happening right then something like that that they have the feeling that it's very important for you right yeah totally when you saw today the drawings I saw that you have read to all many things right like I remember a lecture that that you gave with Michael in Princeton right after you published the the book of your words and all the projects were done in colors and with you know a huge life around it somehow today you were presenting other drawings right that were with black line on a white background and wonder why yeah and that's exactly right to do all many things too yeah I think we're just always experimenting I think how to have an unconventional practice and challenge the way that there are certain expectations around drawing and what we should do and some way also about I guess I'm I'm interested in that architecture there should still be a surprise somehow when you see it also in person that this expectation that the rendering tells us everything if I think we should we should still have delight and surprise and so maybe there's a kind of reductiveness in the drawing and the plan because it's really a placeholder for other things to come I don't know maybe maybe we can open it now there's many so ready but you want to start here and then you Afra have here first hi thank you for the beautiful presentation inspiring inspiring projects so I have a question about the way you design so you often work on well-known and established topologies and your projects are often an experiment to subvert these typologies when I say topologies I mean both spaces objects but also the way users in a bit these spaces these objects I refer to the pitch and house to the school and the courtyard so my question is can we say there is a poetic of subversion in your work and if so can you talk about it can you talk about design as a subversive actual sure I take that it sounds good I mean I yeah I yes I think so I would agree with that I don't know about talking about it exactly I think we just do it yeah I I mean yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't say we set out to we don't openly say okay let's today we're gonna subvert you know right but you know maybe it's more of also just again like thinking through things we know and trying to learn more things and yeah I think you know being critical too of the world we're in and the things we often have to do as architects or these expectations like I said it's like okay we make a house but now the realtor has to sell it well of course they do everyone has you know we have to get paid and we're not trying to say not to do that but but you know we should look at things new and differently yeah hi my name is Nick I'm admitted student I so I'm not here yet but I really enjoy your talk you mentioned briefly about journalism and its similarity to architecture and that I found that really engaging like architecture as a method of investigation and an investigation as a method of architecture and I wonder how you as an architect and me as an aspiring architect should go about investigating it as an idea before design or in the process of design and how do you do that when you know the communities you're designing for but you also mentioned like in DC when you don't know the communities you're designing for or when you're designing for communities that have been excluded from those spaces like especially like I'm from I live in the bay right now and there's so many people haven't been allowed to live there because of the crisis there's not enough housing how do you design as an investigation design with community process involved when those people are being excluded from the space yeah I think that's a great question I mean I think that's something we talk about all the time here at the school and you know architects often are in these situations of extraction and how do we as you know we're doing our work not do that so I think this is a large part of what we talk about here at the school in the design studios and and then in our office and particularly in dealing in sorry I don't mean dealing but in working on the housing work has been about engaging directly with residents or future residents of these particular buildings and you know in some cases it means sitting in people's living rooms and hearing really what they want and I know it's it's hard for me to think about other professions where you do that right and so I think you you that's what's also very exciting in a way about the work it's challenging but it takes you to many different places yeah like people talk to people like um unhoused people who maybe you're like you're building a affordable housing place people on the street or people with disabilities that have consistently had housing not designed to fit them yes yeah if we go first then we have two other course there's one here yeah hi thanks so much for your talk and it's really cool my name is jazz so architectural writing can often be really exclusive and we can often use language as architects that excludes people and your work is really involved in participation and things like that so um what do you think about when you are making your books especially like the practical um uh how how do you how what are you thinking um to make to make um the more accessible for like children um non-professionals and also um in your process where does the book making come does it come after was it um are you think about it during the process yeah yeah thank you for the question I think um I mean for pretty to call because we were asked to design the school space for children to learn about design um the idea was that we were going to also teach workshops and curate and and it was more than just the structure but then covid happened um so that stopped um as our ability to to go there obviously and um so we had already assembled a lot of material and we said okay let's just imagine we're doing what we would do if we could go in person so that that became the book um and in each of the books we are inviting other people to contribute and um this has gone back to um some of the other books like the blue book um that you mentioned Andres and um you know and one of the things we say is we want you to write about architecture it's not just about us um we're not interested necessarily you know you don't have to say something about our work but say something about architecture that's the most important so in that case the the public is maybe more architects um but you know I think the the you know the houses for sale book for instance is through the CCA in Montreal and also Corini Press um which is um Bruno Menari's publisher so you know we're trying to open up more to other designers um too so and vacant spaces um is again another audience maybe so I think for us we're just there's which we're trying thank you yeah thank you so much I think that it's phenomenal that you are giving today this presentation and this conversation in the context of open house uh just because I think that the word inclusion came out many many times uh I would like to ask you in in light of the variety of uh phases in which you actually engage the process or engage the actors within the process uh both in terms of relationships that you establish or in terms of your role say up to the fabrication uh phase of material which somehow covers the full arch from you know initial provocation concept desire to actualization but then also at the level of uh architecture for example the use of the courtyard in your non master bedroom house and the role of the courtyard as opposed to the single loaded corridor for something that isn't collective in DC so I think that if it were possible to draw a map of say the conventional way in which the process from conception to actualization and use where diagram so to speak I think that you've covered so many spots and ways of somehow producing engagement yeah so I would like just to ask you can you phrase in your own words the relationship between inclusion and engagement I have to think about it for a little while well yeah they're right I mean I think we we're always thinking about both of those things same time I don't know um yeah I'm interested in both of those things very much so um yeah I'm not sure what more to say I um yeah we think about it and opportunities to make things um and that includes making space for many things yeah well yeah yeah yeah yeah and the many people we are talking to and I think also you know we're um you know we really appreciate all of the things we've been able to do and our relationships and experiences and so I think you know how to you know in some ways it's um you know we want to keep doing it and do more of it and we're really interested in in what other people are doing too so I don't know you know just making space yeah thanks hello thank you so much for the representation um first I want to talk about a little bit about what I'm interested in and kind of give your advice on um what so my thesis was based on um just making an architecture and um how we need to rethink architecture in office studio and home and um I created this like prototype where it's a studio desk on wheels and um I'm very um passionate about all of that and um how could I like further all of that through you know some sort of organization and um teamwork with other people and collaborating or how did you start collaboration through um you know your making and through like the books and your office and your representations that's a good question you're asking the right I don't know if you're having an interesting collaborate how do you basically do that yeah I can't fully know these ways of collaborating with others yeah yeah I mean well now I'm I'm just thinking like what does the desk look like what is it made of what do you do at the desk or I don't know on the desk under the desk whatever but um and you know can you make a model photograph it write an essay um ask other friends to help you um how much can you sell it for I don't know I mean um these how can you make more of it do you need a patent I don't know sorry this is like these are the thoughts I have but I would yeah try to do all of those things um I think it sounds great actually the studio yeah desks on wheels we need that upstairs this sounds like a good moment to thank you so much to killer it these are some