 It's a real pleasure to have Sheila Kennedy and Franov Yolich with us this evening to present the work of their practice, KVA. It's particularly a pleasure for me, I've known of and followed with admiration KVA's work since I was a student at a school that will remain unnamed tonight. Already then, Professor Kennedy had a reputation for being a unique and groundbreaking educator committed to advancing her students' design capacities and intellectual breadth as she strived to broaden their approach and understanding of what architecture is and what it can do, not only as a discipline and a practice, but also for the public good and the world at large. Student work coming out of her design studios was always impressive and the envy of many other students and studios as it combined great intellectual rigor and a dedication to thorough experimentation through material innovation and a focus on making, opening up new possibilities for architecture to engage reality through materiality. Her studio's cutting edge explorations which pushed burgeoning computational and fabrication technologies towards the performative rather than the merely formal stood in stark contrast to the more conservative formal attitudes which prevailed across schools at the time. Since then I have continued to be impressed with KVA's intellectual and critical contributions and especially their early and in many ways pioneering commitment to design research as a form of practice. KVA's material research unit, KVA MATX, has put forth in fresh ways how material experimentation can today be generative for architecture at a larger scale, weaving together localized cultural knowledge and production with broader questions around energy, global urbanization and climate change. As with their early portable light project which was exhibited as part of MoMA's design and the elastic mine in 2008, KVA's ability to develop a technology which cut across the fields of architecture, material research and development, product and fashion design demonstrated designs agency in enabling social, political and environmental engagement through design and architecture. Today KVA's practice is yielding some of the most compelling environmental and technological thinking and work at the building scale. From their interactive building parts such as with the 34th Street public ferry terminal to the smart curtains and shades of the soft house and to the digital brig veneer of their Tausser anthropology building amongst many other projects, KVA's work inspires us to think across scales and systems with precision but also with imagination as they strive to create new living typologies and experiences always skillfully integrating hard and soft infrastructures towards the reimagining of low carbon living for the future. I think it's fair to say that very few architectural practices today have succeeded in bridging technological performance with the pleasure of architectural experience and creative design and aesthetics with an unwavering commitment to social and environmental engagement. Through teaching, research and practice they have drawn together a highly complex and contemporary set of ingredients and concerns to produce an equally complex and varied architecture understood as a constantly reinvented form of knowledge and practice as well as a powerful form of advocacy for a more sustainable human footprint on the planet. Both of them continue to be committed educators. Sheila as a professional practice at MIT and Fanner as a regular distinguished visiting professor in many of the great schools around the country. Please join me in welcoming Sheila Kennedy and Fanner Violet. Thank you very much. You could carry on with that. It was quite nice. Thank you. Do you switch this over? Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here with so many people that we know and to be standing here. It seems that we were here a short while ago for the symposium on energy and in particular embodied energy that was organized here by David Benjamin and others. And if you're interested in the kind of written version of this talk, I would refer you to our piece, the piece that I wrote in that book. But what we're going to do tonight is a little bit different and I think it will be certainly going to be nice for us because we're speaking together. I'm going to take the first part of this talk front of the middle and then I'll try to corral things up at the end if that sounds good to you. So tonight we're going to be proposing three partial paradigms, three kind of imperfect paradigm shifts as a way to sort of organize our work. And we'll be talking really about our work in practice tonight and less so the work that Fronto and I do with students when we teach. Before I begin, I do want to recognize those people at KVA MadEx who contributed to the projects that we're going to share with you tonight, including a couple of folks who are probably here still at Columbia. So what we want to do is kind of open up a polemic which is a little bit different than you might expect perhaps of KVA MadEx. This is the march that occurred at the Women's March here in New York City. But it really could have been seen from the testimony that happened last week. And there is a thought that one hears across many schools of architecture and from many young architects that somehow politics lie outside of architecture that we need to hit the streets, get out there, agitate and vote and we do. But there is then a kind of a polarity between this image of an engaged citizen outside of architecture and the kind of idea that architecture is a world of forms that can be exchanged fairly and perhaps unfairly as Anna Miyake has argued at MIT. And these are kind of two poles and we would like to present a spectrum of ideas that might inhabit the fairly large divide between these kind of ideas. And this image is an image that we look to a lot. There are many and we have a collection of kind of labels and also collection of advertisements. But the same forces that are kind of organizing our very unusual political moment outside of architecture are operating on how we do architecture but we tend to not see that. So the incorporation of all materials in architecture, the corporate kind of hold on our major architectural components, ceilings, walls and floors, is something that is transparent and we think sometimes that in order to be political we have to hit the streets. So we want to argue or at least propose or at least provoke that an architect is political by being at the center of her or his discipline and by taking back the wall which is a phrase that we use which means sort of looking again at how we can alter the materials and systems of practice while still being in practice and that's the trick. And of course this is the trick too on the blue marble. We live on a planet. Good planets are hard to find and this one is small. And so in this sort of iconic Apollo image of the Earth which was called actually given a material name, the blue marble, we understand how everything must be understood together. There really is no away from our planet. So running through the thread of this talk is the idea of soft design which is quite simply put an act of the imagination that understands nature, all of nature, all of technology and all of the built environment as a single spatial system. So this sounds trivial to say. So what? What's the problem with that? But then you begin to think that there is no away. You do not throw something away. You throw something into. You throw something into something else. And so all of these constructs that we've inherited which is part of this apparatus of walls that has been set up that we've inherited from modernism is not trivial to try to imagine beyond. So I'm going to show two projects relatively quickly that take up the imperfect paradigm of nature factory, two words that we graft together very deliberately. We might think of one as being sort of industrialized and the other as not, but as we'll see these two terms actually kind of imprint on each other and overlap. The first project is a project that we did recently in France. It's called Climalin. And so it plays with idea of climate. Climalin which is linen material and also malin which is a kind of French word for street smart. So all of these things are kind of wrapped together in this line of soft goods that we developed with Le Maître des Mystères who's a weaver of linen in France and Bouchard who's a distributor of textiles also in France. So linen is pretty amazing. It's kind of highly unnatural, natural material. It blooms one day a year and in Leo in the northern part of France the hills are like completely blue like this while the flax plant blooms. It's also an ancient material. You might think that we work with new materials but increasingly we're working with extremely old materials and linen is no exception and it's been used for thousands of years for its absorbative qualities. And so our client approached us Olivier Ducatillon. He's the gentleman in blue and he asked us to electrify linen. He said could you put LED lights in it and maybe make it conduct electricity? And we said, you know, maybe but let's look at what linen is and let's look at what its properties are and let's see if we can kind of turn up the volume on those properties and augment them in some way. So we got to know Olivier and his loom. He has these very old kind of pre-World War II doby looms which are mechanical but not automated and he weaves 100% natural linen which are grown right outside his river in the fields. So we began to look at absorption kind of on a different register in this project and we began to look at wasted heat in the environment. All the sources, the small little, it's like a million and one things about her that are giving off heat right now. For example at this podium on the screen, the computer, the lights but also in the world your car seat, your radiator, your cook pot, your thermos anything that might be containing heat that's just kind of we're not amortizing in any way, it's just escaping into the atmosphere. And we thought about how we might be able to capture and hold that heat and or coolness with a 100% natural face changing material that's made out of vegetable wax. So here's another French company, Winko, that makes this face changing material. Our clients wanted us to develop a super absorbative kind of supra natural linen that would absorb heat and cooling and be a kind of supra natural but still 100% natural linen material. So we started with the Winko face changing material coated on the back and of course the linen absorbed this very quickly and then using Poincaré which is kind of a fun textile software where you can define every warp and every weft and it also matches up really well with Adobe Looms you can take this digital output and you can analog it with a mechanized loom. We were able to define where all the threads could be face changing threads and also threads that could change according to temperature. So we're just going to show you one project here. It's a scarf, it's called the Barrow Scarf and it's a scarf that borrows your heat or your cooling from the atmosphere and plays it back to you. So it's a pretty simple gesture. The scarf is made out of linen and it's 100% natural linen with 100% natural face changing material in it and you would start by just like tossing it onto your radiator and as the material begins to take on the ambient heat from the radiator it changes color as the thermochromic thread begins to be activated so kind of like flax like pattern begins to appear on this. Here is Davis wearing one of the first prototypes. The kind of interesting thing was that this linen is manufactured by the meter, many many meters of the same material with the same weave but depending on who you are and how hot you are you get a different heat signature in this. So you create your own pattern depending on whether you've been biking or whether it's winter or summer or if you're sitting down and relaxing and so forth. So it's a way of kind of having your body, your body's own heat and its response to this material on your scarf create its own pattern. So it's mass customizing with a mass produced material. And here's KVA's own Ben Widger bicycling into Maison-les-Objets which is where all of our climates and soft goods were shown last year. The next project I want to talk about in terms of the Nature Factory paradigm is thicket. I could really call this thicket in islands. This is a very different scale project. It's a large city building project that KVA did with 32 riverfront organizations and Tom Leder Landscape Studio in Berkeley. And we were responsible for a competition where we competed with a couple of other architects internationally for this five mile stretch of the river, Mississippi River here in downtown Minneapolis. And we won the competition and the project has been unrolling and I'll catch you up real quickly on what has been happening. This is St. Anthony's Falls right here and this is a very impaired part of the Mississippi. It has a lot of pollution, less so from the heavy industry that used to be along and still is along the edges, much more so from a thousand and one sort of innocent gestures from your aunt putting fertilizer on her lawn, from the salt that you might put on Winter Streets, all that bringing nitrogen and bringing salt into the river. So the first thing that we did with our team was to kind of re-propose a new map of the city, a map that would superimpose all of the urban water systems which you can see there in blue, the daylighted storm drainage confluence, the urban flows of water into the natural flow north-south of the Mississippi here superimposed against the flyway which is a great bird migration way with all of the kind of species wanted or unwanted, loved or unloved that currently inhabit that stretch of the river. There's a massive amount of wood on site, old railway ties and so forth and working with Yann Nippers, we developed a kind of an L-beam solid bridge where we could amass all of this wood and curve in order to create strength and bring people to the waterfront for the first time in a long time. So you can see here an image of these bridges that kind of turn and they dive and sort of jump and dive over portions of the river where the parks, the national parks department doesn't have access. So we can't wait around for all the land to be acquired. So this was kind of an agile wooden trail system that sort of jumped the rails and formed some connectivity along the Mississippi. So it's all made out of this sort of massive timber and you can see it kind of curving there in the background as it jumps from point to point, not landing on anybody's property that doesn't want it. They asked us to put a lot of birds in the rendering on this project actually and we obliged. And it was really a fascinating kind of backstory to this because everybody in Minneapolis really wants the eagles to come back, the American eagles, the great majestic birds that once inhabited this part of the river. But nobody really wants the bee larvae to come back. But if you look at the food chain, of course the bee larvae is instrumental to the food of the minnows, which is instrumental to the larger river trout and so forth that the birds need. So to increase the carrying capacity of the river, besides bringing people to the river and bringing their attention to the state of the river, we also had to try to get the insects to come back to the river. So in the Nature Factory paradigm, we sort of looked at nature's debris, not as debris but actually as a sort of actual ready to go building material, if you will. So every year the river brings tons and tons of driftwood and washed up wood. And through Thicket, the Thicket project, we tried to organize this wood. We tried to find ways that it could become a kind of cladding. And we put a sort of a little bee sugar on the ends so that our bees could begin to kind of burrow into this thicket so it could begin to be eaten away by the insects and changed out every year when the tides came, the winter floods came and ebbed. The story about islands is just very brief. There was an island, an important island that was here called Halls Island, one of many in the Mississippi. And then to get the channels going for barges, these islands were gradually either taken out or appropriated. In fact, Halls Island was bought for $95,000. And it became a parking lot. And that was the site of the first development. So our project River First proposed to actually recreate and restore, remove the dredged material to restore Halls Island and create the first sort of natural river park that you will be able to swim in, certainly in the upper Mississippi and certainly in the Minneapolis area. So we are involved in designing the park building with a thicket cladding and also in the design of the park. And it's not every day that you get to make an island. So this is sort of an odd nature factory kind of imagery of what could be terraforming or is it actually natural restoration as the dredge is removed from this island and the island itself begins to take, the island that was always there begins to appear. This is what that island looks like today. And we also made an app called River Talk, which we'll talk about the history and the future of the river. So Frano's up next. He's going to be talking about the paradigm of perpetual building. Thank you, Sheila. I'd like to now explore the idea of the perpetual building, the second paradigm, through the concept of opacity and the material paradox that the discipline of architecture has constructed around the idea of masonry and its status as a contemporary building material. Throughout history, the thickness of brick has been characterized by its permanence, its excess, its messy transformation from clay to a unitized building block contributing to the architectural idea of the habitable pochette. But we now know this is not the case. We see examples here for instance the drone mason that dematerializes the brick entirely. It becomes super light and can now fly through the air at will, except for one problem, as we know this is not actually a brick. It's a block of polystyrene due to the weight limitations of this digital mason. Guided by parametric algorithms, the brick has become thin, a digital bit of information. The fiction is a brick that is fully digital and fully controlled in a Euclidean universe that is knowable, governed by geometry, and the resultant of finite element analysis. And then we have the singular tectonic image of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, which I'm sure you've all seen. The opaque weightless mass of a monolithic spaceship that effortlessly floats silently above the earth, evoking carved black masonry stone. The vessel's strangely familiar material is reminiscent of naturally occurring spaces and structures such as grottoes, caves, and concretions. Yet it also suggests an unknowable and utterly alien nature that is free from the earthly forces of rational Newtonian physics. This new interest in opacity poses an obvious question, yet one that is often left unasked. From what materials will this new architecture be constructed and who will make it? The architectural choice and treatment of this impassive materiality presupposes a position of fabrication that is caught between the artifice of thinness and the artifice of history, and impossible return to historical narratives of thickness, to a raw natural material that is simply formed. So at the Tauser anthropology building that was built about two and a half years ago, we were interested in this kind of conundrum between the thick and the thin. How could we begin to work with, as I'm all mentioned, a veneer building in ways that provided the kind of thickness of the material that we've understood for many, many years, for centuries, 6,000 years, to be precise. So we inherited this building which is, you can see the one in the middle there, sort of a classic vintage 1970s building, two-story library, and we were asked to transform that and add two stories to it. But with this building came all kinds of issues that were confronted in the 1970s, or at least people forgot about. It wasn't accessible. The walls were so thin in terms of the cavity that mildew and mold was growing. But most importantly, it really lacked the kind of identity that this anthropology department was looking for. So this was the transformation of the building to something that really began to understand and challenge this idea of thickness and yet at the same time understanding that we were using conventional materials, conventional construction techniques, we were working with masons who knew how to build veneer brick, but they didn't know how to build the brick that we've come to understand through history. So what the challenge was was to create an entrance where we really focused our attention on a surface that was then folded. So how do you fold brick? So we began to use through parametric designs ways that we could find just that kind of right angle where both the raking and the corbelline of the facade could meet at a fold point, which you see here in this image. We advance in. There we go. So here you can see the technical details of the wall and its fold which starts at the bottom and moves up to the left. It was really interesting in that the contractor, the mason who laid the brick, looked at this part of the building and said there's no way I'm going to do this. I cannot build this. So fortunately the general contractor took it on as a project. And it really took working with the union. This is the local three in Dorchester, the allied bricklayers. And coming to grips with the fact that you just have to start to lay this out. You have to stack it with dry stacking, trying to find that fold seam and finding ways to use veneer brick in order to provide the kind of depth that we were looking for. And as they began to build the wall, questions came up. For example, we didn't want to have a control joint. For a wall of this size, you would have to have a control joint someplace. You have a limit to what you can do with veneer before you start to get a kind of cracking. And so this wall maximizes that and isn't a single control joint in the entire wall. And so after this, you begin to understand this kind of thickness, and then as you enter the project, you notice that there's a kind of very thin liner on the inside. And this is sort of the heart or the home of the anthropology department. It's where they meet. It's their living room space. And what we were interested in doing was creating a kind of grafting in a way misused the wood wall. We were interested in creating perhaps even a different species of wall. A wall that combined many different things, combined lighting, combined acoustic performance, so that it's like, how many times do we see the edge grain of plywood and say, oh, that's a new species? We're really trying to push the idea of wood into something other through this kind of idea, this fantastic idea that you find in nature. So looking at that interior liner began to combine these different systems in terms of their performative values. You can see here the acoustic material, which is just alder, also coincidentally made out of alder branches. So we're using wood materials and wood materials, different species, to make this kind of new material, a view of that interior space, the natural light coming down, another view there. And so in this project, in Rochester, we're trying to take this idea even further of working with masonry and working with the kind of thinness of masonry, working with a program which is an unusual program. This is University of Rochester. It's a data science institute. It's a new data science being a new department and a new discipline, which is trying to redefine itself, needed to find a place that was highly flexible, a series of large laboratories, a lot of circulation space where people from different departments could come to this building and run into each other, sort of disrupt their daily routines, disrupt, in fact, their research modalities by coming here from the sciences and from the arts, from languages, from history. This is what data science is, is the place where people mine the data as part of their research. So we were asked to make this sort of very simple box, if you will, and then we broke the box to begin to allow the program inside to be expressed. You can see here, it's positioned on the campus. It became the last building to close the campus, so it became a very important space for the campus. And so how then, if you're doing something that's highly flexible that has this kind of veneer on it and tries to maximize the space for people to meet on the inside, we were forced right to the edge of the skin, and so we began to challenge ourselves on how could we transform that brick. And we began to be interested in the identity of the building, the fact that through kind of associations of windows and the kind of binary of the one and the zero combined could create a kind of elevation or facade, which is really very important to any building, but particularly in brick, it becomes quite a challenge, especially with contemporary construction, a kind of streaming information falling through the building facade, which you can see here. This building was just open in the last fall. So we've come full circle. Brick as a contested material paradox made with mud and perceived as an authentic matter of raw earth, something that is incredibly primitive and worked by hand in a mix of wet, thick, heavy malleable mud. This is really what happens. You've seen very crisp kind of detailing and elevations, but this is the sort of back story of this material. However, in some ways, this is really just a fiction. A fiction of brick as an authentic matter with the capacity to somehow express and abstract in pure Newtonian world that is ruled by gravity and human labor. There is an alternative. So this friction frames a contemporary narrative of opacity that fuses archaic and contemporary attitudes toward materiality, tectonics and form, an intertwined strategy that is increasingly present in architecture today. Worked by my students at the same university that Amal mentioned, which we'll go and mention. Architects like Barossi Viega, Jimenez Lai, Christy Ballyet, Brandon Clifford and others are kind of interested in this kind of modality. This works signals a renewed engagement with this matter, a clear distancing from transparency as a predominant aesthetic of modernism and cultural expression of modern technology. Instead of aggregating bricks, for example, as predetermined individual units, we might think of them as a contemporary material that is both digital and physical. This reconception would conflate material surface and an expanded autonomy of form while still recognizing the complexity of brick's messy theater of construction, its wet mortar, unrelenting weight and relationship to industry material extraction and labor. Not only should the tension between surface image and tectonic construct be revisited, but also the political should be sought in the discourse of the tectonic. In the refusal to make transparent architecture's dependency on various forms of labor, material provenance and manufacturing, perhaps ironically this new opacity could recode the lack of agency that haunts the discipline of architecture in our contemporary moment. While it is always tempting to subscribe to an aesthetic meta-narrative, this opacity does not glow, it's not animated from within, but from without. A blank and mural surface upon which a discipline's desires can be projected. Opacity is not a static condition or simply the lack of transparency. It is an active, deliberate and perpetual building strategy that acknowledges a productive ambiguity of possible readings and narratives while refusing to choose among them. Sheila, would you like to take your turn? Our third partial paradigm is unpacking the wall and if we think about the wall as a kind of conceptual handbag, we'll want to open it up, lift it up and shake out the contents and open the wall and by wall I mean all the surfaces of architecture to those things that are not architecture. And in this next couple of projects we're going to talk about the work that KVA has done in kind of examining the inner contents of the wall and in particular putting infrastructure on the table. This project for the East 34th ferry terminal may be familiar to you and here we're really trying to let the water itself become an actor. In the next couple of projects we're looking at natural forces like water, wind to become architectural agents to be incorporated in the architecture and to speak. The site is East 34th Street and we're familiar with this view of the water in Manhattan. It's the horizon, it's the surface, the mirrored surface on which the ferry boats go forth and back. But underneath is an important body of water that few people in the city know about and it is not in fact a river but it's an estuary that has tidal flows each day that connects Manhattan with its freshwater reservoir up in the estuary here. So these flows that move back and forth are really what flush out and protect the kind of freshwater body for the city. So in the ferry project we wanted to go beneath the surface and go above the surface of the water. So it turns out that every city has these ambient digital layers and in New York City the GPS system was sort of un-amortized. It exists on Staten Island. It was there when the harbor was booming after World War II. And so we appropriated this GPS system for real time passenger messages for the ferry boat commuters for working for using your mobile phone and also to tell us something about the river itself. East 34th Street ferry was quite quite a successful ferry landing. It's catalyzed a lot of development in its area and we developed a system. We make these kind of kooky little videos to show kind of animation. But as boats come in and as the current is blowing in one direction these three skylights in the roof canopy of the ferry station take on different colors and different speeds that reflect the flows underwater of the river. So it's direction, it's speed and when people come across as they are doing now there's a kind of an energy and an interruption in the system that tells people that if you're looking down on this to come and catch the ferry. So fortunately we have a celestial body that's very steady and not likely to change in the moon. And so we can use the internet to accurately predict all the tides of the East River reliably for the next 105 years and even arguably thereafter. And so with our interaction designer David Small we developed a system, you can see the lines, the purple lines are this kind of energy or noise in the system when people cross underneath it that can use rings of LEDs in the skylights to designate the flow direction and also the speed of the currents of the East River. So we're trying to use the fantastic thing about building on a pier is that you have this long horizontal aspect and so we're using the reflectivity of the water to correct and double the proportions and also bring this other character which is the movement of the water into the architecture. This project was built almost entirely off-site and this is the kind of example of superdumb construction that sometimes can be smart. We have a very simple masonry structure that's sort of ultra cheap. It's clad with a mostly a mostly simple system and then we have a little bit of steel and two layers of textile canopy, ETFE here. You can see here one of these oculices, these skylights kind of hanging down like socks these would then be tied to the taut inner lining and the only structural problem that we had with our engineer Michael Stein working was the problem of the potentiality that the roof might actually lift up and fly away. You can see the kind of effects between the double layers of wall and also the skylight with its ring of LEDs. It's connected with city bike now. I'd like to also talk about soft house in the same way as kind of expanding and opening up architecture to this time the force of wind and the ability to actually see wind and understand that the domestic theater we could call it is not separate from that which is outside but really they're one in the same. This is sort of challenging to do in a passive house in Germany because the passive house is predicated on a very intense singular barrier and very limited amounts of glass and a lot of different material elements that are welded together and that are hard to disentangle at the end of the life of the building. We began to look at the turning mechanisms of plants and of course the sunflowers, very well known young sunflowers actually track the sun and at night they returned back to their original kind of neutral position. And so we became sort of fascinated with the idea that we could have a canopy that could actually move and track the sun and harvest energy. So this was another international competition for the IBA in Hamburg, the International Baustang that KVA won with our team of German engineers headed once again by Jan Nippers who we work with a lot and the idea here was also super dumb a podium of work and two stories of residential above and a canopy made out of flexible solar materials that could adjust for summer and winter and that could turn to the east and the west as project is facing due south and track the sun as it moves. So we became very sort of fascinated with the different kinds of ways that collective energy of the Baustang could become the public identity of this building and we had about a year with our team to bring this technology into fruition and the German Federal Republic gave all architects challenges and we had three challenges to develop the flexible technology we called them twisters on the exterior to make a solid all-wood construction which I'll talk about in a second but I'll also talk about the importance that carry LED light deep into these kind of long box-like residences. So a year is not a long time to make new technology, make it meet building code and also make it meet passive house German standards but Jan Nippers, I thought I would show you Jan Nippers here, brave man that he is who agreed to work with us testing the twisting power of this to lock up and become tight in situations of storm. Jan also was a proponent of the Brett Stopful building construction. This is an all-wood construction that's super simple. We did not go to a corporate entity like FinForest or CLT manufacturer but just to a local wood builder, a holtspout in the region who takes dowels of hardwood and havers them into bunches of softwood just like you can see. And that softwood sequesters a ton of carbon. These are the four units on the truck nearby to the site being driven to the site and then set up on the site. We used natural sheep's wool insulation. All of these kinds of very radical nature materials. Saoirse Ferrari in fabric and then natural larch which is regionally what they do for a rain screen in this part of Germany. And we are actually able to get rid of the traditional barriers that would normally be constructed between units. There are four units and normally you would have a wall between these units but we are able to kind of just suggest the division of property by the tensile member that comes down and the little ladder that's connected to it so that you have that kind of expression of harvesting energy together. The sections are very important to us. You can see the different positions of the twisters and the there's water pumps, DC water pumps and battery charging for last mile car service for the residence's electronic vehicles. And then the squares in orange show the curtains which do everything that a normal curtain does but also more. When you have a solid wood structure where does infrastructure go? I mean you've kind of blown up the hollow wall and you've made a kind of thickened wood wall and so we were able to kind of make vertical chases where we needed to for some of the plumbing. And then we developed a technology solution of very low voltage electricity which was curtain tracks which you can see here and curtains that move and become a kind of an actor reflecting light in the house in this very, very simple kind of very reduced architectural interior. And as those curtains move they create little mini rooms very much like how in ancient times you would put a tapestry around your bed so these are sort of instant microclimate rooms that occur from the curtains reflecting your heat and picking up on the heat from the radiant floor in winter. This is a video, it's pretty subtle but it's showing that as the wind blows the trees very gently outside the light moves at that same speed through these curtains so this is one of many applications that you can have for the curtains, we call this one the visual breeze. And I'll just end this section on the soft house with video from Swedish television. We didn't design that bird house but it did get placed there. It's kind of weird when you're designing a speculative housing development you don't know these people they are simply living in the soft house all of the units are sold and they've actually elected to have the building downstairs in the workspace. You can see how the curtains move they do cartony things like subdivide space then you'll see in a minute upstairs they move from a normative position against the windows into this kind of more intimate figural position by the bed. So I'll show you really quickly the last couple of projects ratchet strap pop up we could have gone in perpetual building because it's about the churn of the churn of tenant spaces but we became very interested in how we could get away without any walls so this is totally unpacking the wall and putting everything into furniture and so from a single sheet of plywood and one strap and tension we devised a system whereby you can get a pretty rigid desk surface from just securing it to two points and then we tested that as part of a project that we did in Berkeley where Kyle and Zana pop up this table and that we brought that then to a project that we were asked to do a headquarters project by Meister environmental lawyers and this is in the banana building in Boston it's near our government center it's a kind of notoriously difficult to work with building again a modern relic of the of the 1970s and we decided to eliminate all walls or as many walls as possible and to also eliminate all architectural finishes nothing, nothing the whole thing is no VOC paint by Benjamin Moore and the ratchet strap furniture so we completely eviscerated the space there was not much there to begin with we managed the acoustics with some channeled wood and we developed this furniture for the environmental lawyers it was like super ultra simple all tied together with the ratchet strap and the more we kind of got rid of architectural finishes in a funny way the kind of stronger the brand presence became so it was a sort of a really odd example of kind of taking everything away but getting sort of stronger image back we took the floor plan and kind of squeezed all the private offices that the lawyers originally wanted into these little tiny kind of talk rooms we randomly programmed our router to go in and out of plywood to make acoustic grooves which kind of revealed this sort of strange painterly kind of quality of where the checks and boats that were in that plywood began to be apparent that you couldn't see from the surface and it's kind of a very super simple space so it's a this is the US headquarters and the same cut files and the same strategy and the same generic products the no VSC paint the ratchet straps and the tiny little bit of drywall that we still need for fire proofing are also available in northern Europe and also in Asia where they work and then I'll just conclude with the kind of post electrical vegetal world project that I'm working on with Michael Strano at MIT it's the nano biotic plant it's a plant it's a building infrastructure which is kind of like where all of these categories overlap nature factory unpacking the wall and maybe also perpetual building it's kind of crazy this is a skanky diagram at MIT people are big on this but what we can see here is that forget what the source is nuclear, coal, gas it doesn't matter basically you need that much 100% of illumination so there's a lot of waste right now with our electrical system particularly when it comes to illumination and plants are not just products they're not things we eat or grow they're actually a technology in and of themselves and they're an amazing platform for technology and they glow now you may not be aware of this but satellites can see this so you're going to see very slowly in this video that north spring is coming to Europe spring is coming now to Canada and a little bit north to Russia and that's coming because those plants are getting off light they are fluorescing the satellite eye can see them the machine eye can see them but we can't see them with our own eyes although it is theorized that maybe birds can see the light of plants but in Michael's lab he is developing a way to introduce three coenzymes some luciferase and two other coenzymes in the modification when these plants die they're dead so this is a partial augmentation of the plants own electrical platform that with the nanoparticles shifts the wavelength so that light can emit and of course being an MIT lab the very first thing that Michael and his team thought of was imprinting MIT which you can see there glowing in these arugula lights so right now we're really on to leafy green spinach arugula watercress it's all good and you can eat it too afterwards but what's amazing is that plants actually communicate with chemicals they talk to one another and when they have problems and issues they tell their fellow plants that as well like for example insects are eating me that's a chemical response and a signal that's sent to other neighboring plants and so by sending these different chemical signals Michael's team has been able to take the plant and turn it on and off we've also been working with slightly larger plants taking the coenzymes and just using gentle air pressure or hand pressure to take the coenzymes and introduce them into the leaves of the plants and so we're beginning to think about how you could at home take the coenzymes and just rub your own plant leaves with them and get a plantern or a lantern that is a plant and we're beginning to look at the infrastructure by which this could happen with lotion for example this is the leap process of rubbing on how this could be an apartment it could be in a developing world it could arrive by federal express you could simply put it on to your plant to massage it on and you would have a glowing plant that is bright enough to read a book by so this is where we're at right now if you bring your book very close to the nanobiotic plant you can read by it the intensity of the plant light is growing and its duration is also growing and I'll end with this image and idea of tree partners we're working Michael and I with a company in Thailand to work on tree partnering humans taking care of taking stewardship of trees that in return give them ambient urban light so those are the three partial paradigms and thanks for your patience in listening to us I'm going to jump directly into it so there will be very little of kind of summing up because I don't think the body of work that you shared and produced needs any of it I have a couple of questions also coming out of some of the things we discussed throughout studios today but also throughout I'm core and like the material research that we are conducting in the studios itself so I was wondering thinking about also like not just like accessibility to technology but then also sustainability in the larger sense and like how this to a degree has changed and shifted ways the way we think about it throughout the last two decades if you think about environmental technology and how it's applied also within the context of trying kind of something I want to underline here like how does this stands if you look at like emerging practices vis-a-vis to a degree like technological accessibility and like how technology informs some of the things the way we also rethink sustainability within the built environment so you're kind of wondering a bit like how does the low tech, high tech how do we think about assessing technology maybe like looking at the soft house in general where you introduce material very very early as part of the design process that then like fundamentally informs in a way like a kind of very tectonic way of how the project behaves right more so in an analog rather than like in an informative or kind of technological way I think we do try to think about material early and that's a kind of self correction because I think in the discipline we can go pretty far in the design process before really understanding what those surfaces and geometries that we're working on really are and so from early on we sort of made a commitment with the German government to make this thick solid wood house and so that had gave some parameters into the project but we are interested in the project of taking back the wall in this case returning to actually what is a very ancient wood tradition that sort of fell out of favor around the time of World War II when the Germans were taught to use concrete and other steel and other materials for their houses after the war and also to fuel the kind of rebuilding effort in Germany so those practices became lost and I think a lot of what we try to do with materials and technologies is to remember to actually just deliberately go back and kind of remember those forgotten things that we've kind of developed a sort of cultural amnesia for and bring those to the forefront So would you say like light as a material or as a solar powered technology within the context of soft house like some of your other projects like variables, adaptables, the scarf to a degree like reinforces like an idea of sustainability or visualizes it the one way or other as a kind of like haptic experience Well it's true that the soft house and light itself is both tactile and optic and you know through the lens of kind of modernism the optic is been preferred so none the less we do look at the curtains but you can actually also touch them so it's not really an escape from that modern idea of light as a thing that we see but it's more kind of overlapping heat and lights capacity to also reflect heat which is part of the job that those curtains do I also think the word accessibility is interesting in the context of technology and infrastructure and I think the key that we found working with infrastructure over the years is and the challenge to is the question of scalability we are I think accustomed to thinking about infrastructure let's see from the from what we've inherited from modernism is big very coarse grand freeways, transportation that kind of thing right and so as we begin to look at technologies that continue to be developed which are much closer to the kind of solid state the micro and even now just the sensing then I think we're able to move between the scales much more quickly and even question some of those larger order course infrastructure so light for example is a perfect example of the scalability question I mean light you know you can deal with solar technology and infrastructure yet at the same time you can deal with light from the finest micro scale from the LED and then connect to the plant itself right so as a practice that is both and I think it's fair to say like embedded in research and academia like working within the kind of culture environment from variables to adaptables to adjustables like is there point where you negotiate scale in regards to okay fabric picks up a certain kind of responsibility versus like a brick picking up another kind of responsibility within all the way to I mean you were both talking quite a bit about like the detail in the context of also like material technology but from a very ephemeral point it was quite wonderful to see particularly if you look at and we earlier today spoke about the whole like off-white like virtual upload approach right and you change something 3% and all of a sudden something new again and like this is great and like I you know love him and was his birthday yesterday actually but the interesting thing is like you are kind of like not so much like in the 3% camp right like but more in the 97% camp you are very little off the shelf it seems I mean the brick you could say is like registered as a datum but like the kind of like everything else is more on the 97% side sometimes you even invent the problem true we definitely invent the problem but I'm thrilled that you saw 97% of transformation I would honestly say sometimes it is actually just just 3% but it appears the trick is to make it appear 90, 96 or 97% because there are many things that are standard like you know dowels and pieces of wood and bricks and concrete and plywood and part of the whole kind of ethos of material misuse is the kind of idea that we can or the idea that we can receive standard materials in their standard forms and misuse them take them beyond their prescriptive uses that they were quote-unquote designed for or to do and make from that a kind of new set of materials but it's a little bit like like the practice of everyday of everyday life Michelle de Certeau you're not creating de novo you're actually you know inhabiting the apartment in different ways or you're speaking a language just with an accent there are degrees in which you can actually affect change and we can debate whether those are impactful or not but the thing that has been most important to us is to try to challenge those corporate norms take back the wall as I think in our ways both of us have tried to say and doing that while still being in practice that's the trick right because the projects that you see at whatever scales are made with the exception of the MIT nanobionic plant project which is an academic research project all the rest of those projects are projects of practice and the way things were set up between KVA and mad ex the relationship was never really the same it wasn't equal but as we work over time I sometimes have a hard time finding a way to distinguish the two which has been the kind of the mission all along very clearly different structures very different kind of funding structures and now what's interesting is that they I think there's a big debate isn't there about research in academia about how effective it is we look at different historical models Bauhaus, other and how do we do amazing research inside schools of architecture but how do we make the scale jump and get that outside and active in the non-academic environment that's what was so interesting I think about the soft house being a governmental project sometimes hard to imagine within the local and the context that we are in or the other way around thinking about not just like any house within the German context but also the passiveness I think I like that you stretch the terminology quite a bit an active house really an active house that happens to meet the passing house code I have one more thing when you look at to a degree some of the most powerful tools in thinking about efficiency like technology, sustainability or a sustainable future of sorts is the one way or other an engaged and very aware public what are some examples that KVA approaches in designing for engaged agents rather than simply inhabitants and users and also remembering you over many years like stressing before really anybody else and also in your lecture today that you have spoken about the importance of not just flexibility within space but also flexibility and choice in architecture from large scale approaches like your master plan projects but then also choices of pattern, yes right, yes users, I never really like that word just confession and anecdotal but both of our most recent studios have been adjacent to 12 step programs one in the basement and now our neighbors Hope House a nonprofit right next door so users has a very, has a using and carrying and has a different kind of connotation but I think people I think it is perhaps borderline disrespectful to talk about the public as users as if the public soul role was to use something like to use it to consume it and then to discard it so I think that as many degrees of flexibility or choice as many ways as possible to within the limits of architecture which are quite limiting because when we open some systems we like for we we close down others that's the paradox of architecture but I think to the extent possible offering choice, offering flexibility offering difference through engagement with a textile a space, room a material that would be the goal what gender are your buildings what's that what gender are your buildings what kind of structure might be gender neutral actually the flat pack project I'd say so I mean you know the one of the first projects we did was that was a in a landmark cycle rama in Boston if you ever go to Boston you should see this building that was built 150 years ago with the Gettysburg battle in a triptych but we were asked to for accessibility reasons to switch the genders of the bathrooms so we left the urinals in the women's room because we were both cheap but also because we were interested in the material the beautiful porcelain this combination and blurring of the infrastructure not the infrastructure of plumbing which we wanted to exploit as far as we could but the infrastructure of water of gender arrival I mean I think what's interesting about that is that it's from the outside you could say it's a male kind of phallic object but from the inside it's definitely female yet it's completely opaque that is the quality of the new opacity as you so eloquently expressed it the whole question of the user does also for me suggest a kind of the sort of service industry that we were supposed to be providing I mean these words like user and occupant and that kind of thing because I think one of the things that we're challenged right now by is the the agency the autonomy of agency in architecture as a discipline that we have to maintain where everything is being blurred you know you're both an architect and a writer and a teacher architect researcher and architecture starts I mean it starts to feel as though it begins to not take a second seat so anyway one of the reasons we prototype we have the workshop we work with materials we try to build as much as possible is just to you know put architecture in the face of people in that way when you like in order to ensure that and thinking about absolute like musts for KVA right? What would three of those musts be when you like design for M. Himper, her, Damburg's M here? It must have an idea It must come from your imagination It must be manifested Thank you I know there's questions in the audience who wants the first? Technical issues with it regarding how well the sun shading worked so I was wondering if you had similar issues about how well these sun devices are working or I guess my question is does the use of technology impact maintenance costs which would also refer to the concept of accessibility? I understand the gist of your question I think there is a difference I understand the overarching arc of your question but I would just say that there is probably a difference between the Institut du Monde Raab because that's a sort of highly mechanized system so it's prone to failure one could predict that that system would fail The twisters, the way that Yan and the team design them are not so mechanical they're really more geometric it's about turning and it's a mechanism that's been used in sales for a long time and Hamburg is a kind of place of yachts and sales and there's that winch technology and there's a kind of a technological history that underlies the place that we didn't speak of and then I think that we have not heard about from the owners but then that would be the real estate developer who's really maybe fielding those questions and not the architect but I guess behind your question it's raising in my mind another question which is of new technologies we ask questions about maintenance like yours but of the technologies that we take for granted like curtain walls or even wood frame construction or cavity wall brick do we ask do we scrutinize those same mainstream questions wall typologies as carefully as we do the new I think it's really important to kind of be full 360 in our interrogation about maintenance and not just be sort of suspicious of the new yeah Hi, my question is about the plantern project and so thinking about what you're talking about the usability I was wondering if you're at a point in your research where you're able to say that the light is maybe self-distributing or how long that lasts like per application and what that maintenance would look like for a user and if it is you know what the usability is like yeah it's a little hard to say but it may in a museum near you so you're going to see it there and you can judge for yourself but right now the goal is to create kind of an enduring plant that takes some of its existing energy and converts that energy into light sufficient enough to read a book if the book is really close to the leaves of the plant and I think that we can do that I think it will be a really big deal because it means that you can read with a plant I was really fascinated by your discussion from the city that must not be named of course I was really fascinated by your discussion of language in particular because as someone who doesn't have an undergraduate training in architecture I found entrance into architecture pedagogy very difficult when languaging so I'm interested where your ethos came when communicating projects like where does your how does your spirit drive you to language something into twisters something so very clear to communicate kind of that object in its function for me that's always been a problem because I have a bilingual background and I have a hard time with language so I mean personally I depend a lot on just on drawing I mean on just illustrating making presenting in that language but Jill on the other hand don't you have a degree I have another degree and then other sets of interests I have a degree in history literature and philosophy which is called College of Letters so I like words and I think words really matter I think I used to when I was younger try to be very academic in my way of speaking and I don't know I think as a result of working actually in the Civic Institute project with Anna DeVara Smith I had the opportunity to work with her and you know she basically read me the riot act and just said you know you're turning your back on people you're looking at your slides and you're in a very hermetic discourse here lady and get out of that discourse and then a few years later Gore lost and people were looking at each other and just saying like how can we communicate better and I actually just made a resolution to just kind of like cut the academic jargon and just try to speak as clearly as possible about architecture and speak on behalf of architecture yes we were talking about our projects but I think KBA's main message is that architecture is a force architecture can be political not only by going outside of itself and then dragging issues back to the center of architecture but understanding that the very center of the discipline is itself politicized by the materials we use the choices we make and the way that we define and construct problems so if that's one message that we've given here I mean we're probably speaking to the converted already but there's a inferiority complex amongst architects that we have no power that we're in this kind of highly developer world the service industry like Fronto mentioned and I would just say no that's not the case it doesn't have to be that way Hi thank you so much for your lecture and your words I was really struck by the women's march as you showed at the beginning of the lecture side and coming from a background in policy on myself I was wondering how you all thought the role of civic engagement plays to an architect and if you could elaborate on that and how maybe we could be empowered in ways to civically engage people We've tried to talk about that in this talk so just I would say that for myself getting out there is a good thing I think we need active civic participation voting is essential even if we think the system is broken voting is essential being active and not being an active participant is crucial but all people can do that what can we as architects uniquely do how do we use our expertise I'm going to use that word that very contested word expertise at a time when kind of expertise is being questioned right like do we need it but we go to school for a long time to be architects and we do learn something so we have a certain expertise to bring to bear and I think what Frano and I have tried to communicate try to say is that we can look at how the external political situation affects the systems the components the materials that are typically used for architecture and we can either hack those systems or create new systems or use the kind of process where we kind of use jiu-jitsu and turn those systems in a different way but we can make change while still being in the system while still practicing our particular response and there are many responses out there that are viable but ours is not to go into academia and do very few rare projects there but rather to be in practice and to try to change practice from within and also to put ourselves forward into working in the public domain where you all eyes are on you where you challenge the public to look at the work that you do as architecture that is making some kind of change and as opposed to following the codes talking about being a service industry and all the things that 99.999% of architects do so it's we do follow the codes though liability pause okay I was very compelled by the strong dialogue across all the projects between nature and technology and many variations and I thought that was very interesting so I guess my question is about workflow when you're presented with a new project or when you start a competition how do you manage to link nature and technology with your work without forcing it do you seek inspiration within it or is it more of a natural flow there are two ways to think about that some are we were just talking about this in another context a few days ago some design problems are more top down and some are bottom up a top down project would be like the selco relamp project which is on our website but we were approached by a company in India and they wanted to change the materiality of their street lights and use grow that material instead of having it be concrete and steel and all of that so we knew already that we were making a street light or making a homelamp or whatever it was and we had to look around for natural materials and the vicinity to do that so that's an example of top down process a bottom up process is one where you start with a material like linen I would say clima is kind of bottom up we knew we were working with linen but we didn't know a thing about linen even less about French linen and there's a whole kind of cultural history about French linen as well so you go you visit you look and you form impressions research is also highly subjective that we're partial to it that's why it's also a partial paradigm not only is it imperfect but it's partial to us and then you develop a set you understand a set of properties that a particular material gives you and then you in the case of clima think about how to augment them so we were sort of able to steer them away from let's say illuminating linen to having it use its main superpower which is absorption and just augmenting that with some new capacity yeah the kind of nature technology thing it's hard to do in this country because they're just an abundance of resources and there's sometimes a kind of you know a deafness to that so it doesn't say that we won't work that way and we can't work that way we're here but some of the one of the things about the mattock side of the studio is that it's allowed us to go into areas where there is the resources aren't there like this project that Sheila was talking about or like portable light project and there's a question of need and necessity which is absolutely key to like spark that invention, that imagination and these are these that's been the service in some ways that mattocks has provided us with this ability to practice practice its stuff we've failed so many times horror stories about these smaller projects in the end we hopefully succeed because we've tried so hard but you know it's going to places where there is no technology so where do you even begin? You start with like water or like plants or light or then it's a question of oh okay well maybe we can bring technology well we can't bring a solar panel here because it's like the way is 500 pounds so let's try to find a flexible solar panel does anybody have textile backed flexible solar so these questions wouldn't have happened I don't think if we didn't put ourselves in a position this kind of impoverished position where there's nothing here where do we even begin then you apply those to places like Hamburg because Hamburg in some ways started in Mexico and and understanding how we could then scale up what you're saying is that each project in a way as you get older right each project communicates its lessons to the next so there's kind of cascading effects of things become kind of enriched but you see that in your own studio work over the years too I'm sure you know like you look at all of your studio work and you realize oh I have tendencies you know like I do certain things the same way or I have these same interests across these different kinds of programs and it's the same in practice too this room for one last okay sorry Alec hello so at the beginning of the talk you were introduced and explain is kind of rejecting formality in favor of the performative and that was interesting to me because you've seemed to have found like a very key balance between the performative and making it also somewhat formal so I'm wondering if the performative whether that's bringing agency to people who utilize the spaces that you design or something else like what kind of would you consider is your most powerful tool in impacting change in architecture and then how does that translate over to students who are constantly challenged to find that balance between formality but also changing the practice as they practice said before and you also mentioned opacity before like the power of a narrative that has not settled on one particular narrative so perhaps it's like as you said reaching out and then bringing something back into the center of architecture interdisciplinarity the performative like yeah what has you have you found been to like be very key tools for impacting change well Kristoff said one question sorry I kind of gets at the moment that we're in in some ways because I think having looking at architecture architecture from a critical standpoint it requires you to start thinking about how you practice it and especially although I don't teach that much but how you when you do how you teach it is it always the same kind of done the same way so I think that from the student standpoint I can tell from experience that there is a real interest in a kind of balance between this kind of digital computational world that we are in right now and the idea of the tactile the idea of the material so I mean that's what we do and I think there's a kind of an attraction to that the kind of do-by-learning aspect which we don't tend to do as architects because someone else does it for us so you know having the shop having the ability to work with materials and make things even as small as they are I think that that's key and I think that that's something that is really important to do in the profession otherwise you end up you end up the challenge is that when you go into the profession you're inheriting a profession which is decades and decades old and it will change very slowly not in your lifetime so what are you going to do what are you going to do about that you got to change it and you got to change it though from before you get in because if you get into the profession without that kind of critical thinking and that desire to change then it's it's a beast but I am very optimistic I don't mean to sound like this is not possible at all yep it is possible and you guys are going to need to do it by the way KVA is hiring that's not a joke so thank you