 Well, welcome everyone. I'm very, very excited to be speaking with Lucia Ale today. Lucia is a recent kind of faculty at GSAP who was hired a year and a half ago and is teaching for the first semester, but of course an incredibly well known figure in the discipline for many reasons. I really always think of you as a bridge. One, you know, as a bridge between practice and discourse practice and theory as someone who really has practiced but then kind of drifted towards a kind of more theoretical perspective but still trying to connect those dots as a bridge between engineering and architecture. So you have both formations, which is very unique probably for an architectural, for an architectural historian and also, I think, a bridge between cultures, personally, and also in your scholarship, kind of sort of, you have been from the European perspective for some time and making visible other histories from North Africa, from the Middle East, and a bridge between preservation and architecture as well. I think you've become a sort of really a spokesperson for the question of the monument at a time when monuments are really coming under question, under attack, some coming down, others kind of emerging. So it's just like, you know, what does it mean to be someone who's kind of bringing all these things together at the moment where things are shifting and are being in fact pulled apart. So my first question would be, what do you think about architectural history at this moment? I feel like it's been in a sort of incredible movement that has happened over the past 10, 15 years, like a new generation, the formation of aggregate. It's just like this kind of the notion of the collective actually almost emerged in architectural historians, where practitioners were failing, so I think that's very interesting. You think about that, right, the collective used to be the space of practitioners and historians sort of took it over with this new generation and so, so you know it's so alive, architecture history, and wanted to get your thoughts about. And that's great to know that that's what we seem to represent a kind of aliveness I think of it that way certainly. It's strange that you should say the bridge that you should attach that figure to me personally I feel that that's how the field is I mean in a way I identify myself as someone who's very lucky to have been to have arrived in the field when there was no longer a sense of separation, either from discourse in the studio, let's say or on practice, or from the rest of the humanities or social sciences and indeed now even the technical discipline so I feel that there's a very robust discipline we are pretty robust we have journals and conferences and groups and and disagreements and this is usually a sign of vibrancy. And definitely, it's true that thinking, let's say the practice turn or the technical turn in in the social sciences, the turn to interdisciplinarity in the humanities. This is something that architectural historians have both benefited from because architecture to repeat the very old adage has been very interdisciplinary and of course it has a technical aspect. But not only we've benefited from it but now what we say really has begun to matter, because we, as a discipline have robust institutions and have a place in a voice. We have a place also among the fields so where it's going I'm not sure exactly but it's certainly this active decentering. It's very, it's very kind of exciting at the same time humbling, because things move fast, and to be a scholar in a moment when this is a very humbling experience and in that sense I actually feel lucky to be in an article school where, in a way you have feet on the ground boots on the ground in the form of students and practitioner faculties and links across so it's humbling. Yeah, certainly. So we are all humbled in this moment to kind of being very much, I think, driven, you know from, from, from below from around us from you know, sort of call for action and, and, you know, it's been, it's been a long time since this call for action is so centered on issues of pedagogy and, you know notions I mean we've been talking about decolonizing curricula for some time but there's a sense of urgency now and a specificity and question mark as to can we do it and how do we do it and, and, and so I wanted to get your thoughts on certainly the kind of question that the history theory sequence has is going through right now at GSAP and you know where are the moments, you can't do it all but there's kind of moments of interventions that are that are staking the project more solidly somehow. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm new to the school as you as you know so I'm discovering that in a way the history theory sequence has done its work before many other schools by making literally putting a question mark at the end of architectural history, or at the beginning of the sequence that you take as a student arriving at GSAP in architecture at least is not architectural history but questions in architecture and that's been really it's by first semester teaching it so it's a great learning curve for me. But what's nice is that it's still anchored again in the text in the primary text and so we historians have techniques to we also have a material culture, and we get students to be engaged with this original literature. It's not so much not every culture was able to write down what it was doing architecturally architectonically, but there are ways around it so I find that that's very exciting I also arriving at Jeep GSAP realize that this, the built environment at all scales really is present, even in conversations with other history theory disciplines, certainly with historic preservation people but also the planners who have their own discourse and that it makes for a very different curriculum, I definitely think certainly it decentralizes it more, but questions of land questions of, you know, you now asked a lot about monuments and it's impossible for me to talk about monuments without talking about the land around it and the space around it and in a way that is, in any case the American contribution to monument discourse and monument practices, you know the the national parts, which are the American monumental like that was that was an invention so definitely GSAP I feel is kind of at the forefront of how history can kind of intervene in these in these issues. And it's very nice also to hear you speak about this because I do I do this has been in the works for some time this sort of the programs and the different disciplines coming together right where where maybe the architectural history has emerged as a very strong discipline, but at the same time what's been great is that architecture and planning and preservation and even real estate, you know these different programs are actually much more interconnected in coming together in various ways and I, you know, it's, it's, I find it also fascinating that you are bringing those questions to materials such as concrete. You know, so, so, so like that like really anchoring it and that's the architect, you know, I'm thinking architect in you so you know what is, what is concrete what is the history of concrete but my goodness. No but I mean the conference that you're. Yes, your own work on anchoring some of these questions in the material is the second most common material in the world after water, apparently, I'm told by my engineering friends. Yeah, thanks for yeah thanks for connecting that so I'm, I've done quite a bit since I published my book, I decided to do some collaborative work. I co wrote one essay on Alois Regal and his notion of mood which is very sort of abstract and somewhat in niche, let's say, but then I also did a project with my colleague force megas was an engineer and environmental engineer on the history of concrete. Specifically, the history of the carbonation of concrete, which is the way that concrete fails the way concrete fails is because the carbon in the atmosphere comes to penetrate into the into the concrete pores and eventually sort of complicated sequence of events, the rebar rust expands cracks and the concrete loses its magical power of being kind of like a liquid stone and so. First and I, neither one of whom are particularly concrete experts wrote a paper together asking why did this finding, not change the ubiquity of concrete. And in particular if you take the carbonation equation that says how this unfolds, you can predict that pretty much anything built in concrete with standard dimensions today will fail in about 100 years. So concrete was invented about 100 years ago we have this amazing image of kind of a moving wall of obsolescence that's raking through the built environment. And so rather than simply bemoaning it or telling a history we are having a conference where we're bringing together people who have the knowledge engineers designers is conservators architects. So we're discussing how they, their knowledge of the conventionality of concrete has not coalesced into kind of major public rethinking of the material so that's, that's this weekend, I suppose, when the open house happens it will have been passed so everyone can watch it. But it's great to have to say in terms of interdisciplinary collaborations to work with force with basically an engineer to about the status of basic science, as a kind of knowledge, because even for engineers basic sciences barely something that they used to talk across fields. The, the sciences and engineering are just a siloed in a way that's all the humanistic and social scientific field so it's been really interesting to try to do something out of the box let's say together. And it's also interesting because as obsolescence of concrete is being maybe traced or you know there is kind of old new materials that are, you know, I'm thinking about the conversation you had with Lola Ben-Alon on, you know, like reclaiming practices with earth with bamboo with you with low carbon materials and materials that we've sort of abandoned with industrialization and modernism and now that are being unearthed again. And so this kind of sort of fall and rise maybe that also the students are really hungry for actually. I mean it's been interesting I just had maybe three conversations with Lola and already and she'll be in the conference as well but already you can sense the kind of new wave of teaching about technology and about techniques that really also the has permeated also how we think about the responsibility of the architect and engineer work and the private person and the public person, every private person in the world of a certain in a certain discourse is asking themselves is making calculations every day how much of this material that I use how much, how much do I consume of this every consumer let's say is invested in this kind of calculus and so why shouldn't architecture take a lead in giving people some, some guidance, you know, and not only numbers but also, you know, ways of thinking, ways of thinking how who who's building, you know, practices and not not just being responsible for the drawing but you know what the lines indicate in terms of Well, thanks so much, it's been incredible to have you now really integral to the school and shaping its future with the students with other faculty, and just very excited to see where you take all these sort of threads and leave them in a new in a new way. That's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.