 The second panel is about this practice that today is becoming more and more usual of small offices working abroad. We could say that transnational practice of emerging offices is transforming the classical idea of international architecture or architecture for sport, because these small offices are being able to create a very sensible and engaged relation with the context they work, very different from the context where they work from, and this dialogue is really important and necessary. So the question is not how to export architecture, that perhaps was a problem 20 or 30 years ago, but how can we be local in many places? How to bring to the locals a new reading of any environment we work in. So this idea of being a foreigner and showing the locals invisible values of the context they live in is the essence of this second panel. Samuel Barclay and Jeanne are the principals of case design. They could be part of several groups today, but we have selected them from this discussion about from local to transnational, they are based in Mumbai, India and they respond to contextual conditions working with makers, artists and technicians in South Asia, Middle East and Africa. Fumika Simura and Iko Kobayashi are terrain architects, some of their projects are in Indonesia or Africa and are produced for very needed communities, making a scarcity virtue and working with very local skills, materialities and climate conditions. They also teach in Japan. Ingrid Moye and Christoph Seller are based in Mexico City and Berlin, working in Mexico, Europe, Kurdistan, Iraq and so on. And also teaching in different cities like London, the A.A. or Mexico, Universidad Iberamericana and they are one of the third practices for this panel. The moderator will be our dean, Amaland Rao, inspiring of the idea of global thinking that founds this imposition whose book will get there when we cross the bridge, launched yesterday, tells the story of the flexibility of her office to understand different geographical contexts and social environment. So enjoy the panel and let us come to the front to Samuel and where are you? Okay. I went to school undergrad not too far from here and always came to Columbia for a lot of these symposiums and lectures so it's a great honor to be here, we appreciate it. Ana and I started working together about four years ago and we both come from backgrounds where we were sort of very fascinated in making, in craft and workmanship. I grew up in my grandfather's workshops where we were always doing sort of very different kinds of projects. Ana was sort of raised in a house that was being built as they lived in it and so for us the way that things come together and how they're assembled and the people who are making them is really critical to the way that we've always thought about our work. So the idea of who makes it, the idea of where is it made and then of course what is it made of. We found ourselves in India. I went there as part of graduate studies and sort of fell in love with the place and the way that things were made, the collaborations that you could have with craftsmen doing the work that you're conceiving of but also engaging with them conversationally to develop something incredibly rich. This is an image of a brick kiln so the sort of race course around the outside or the bricks that have been made to put the space together but what's always fascinated us is the sort of primitive nature that is still available in building technology. We can build the way we did 2,000 years ago but at the same time we can build in pretty sophisticated ways. Despite the sort of primitive materials that are there, the artisans and crafts people again that we work with are incredibly sophisticated. They are able to work with very, very detailed and precise materials and out of that we are able to engage with them in dialogues to sort of produce things that I just think wouldn't be possible in other contexts so these are a series of door handles that we sort of take through sketch, through prototype, these are wooden samples on the bottom left that then get turned into brass that then get put on the door and then eventually go into production. And so for us this is such a treat to be able to engage with them again and create something that is not merely our vision but also is a conversation that evolves through comfort and pragmatism and hopefully elegance and beauty. We also have a collection of sort of furniture and lights, things again that we've developed primarily out of projects. This has been a sort of organic offshoot of our architecture practice. Most of these have developed specifically for projects but a lot of times they're simply a sketch that gets made, an idea, a conversation, a reference that we pick up. So a lot of what we try and do is also based on observation and then sort of following that up with the sort of intuition of how to take that observation that we've sort of looked at and translate that into something that is physical and practical and simple and hopefully again beautiful. And then all of our architecture projects or interior projects or even the furniture we've worked very closely with these craftsmen and part of it is that they're the people who build it or make it but they also become very much part of the design process. And for most of our projects we start construction even before the whole project is designed. As soon as there is enough to start we start and we really try to leave a lot of things open to be able to make the decision when the time is appropriate and this project for example was a small cafe in Dubai but we constructed it and built it entirely in India in a workshop of our carpenters that we work with and we came into the workshop with a sort of conceptual idea and a sort of general design but the whole design was developed through collaboration with these carpenters like all the details all the how the construction works it was really a collaborative effort and at the same time we also make a lot of models that for us as a tool to not only understand the design and work on the design for ourselves and within our team and in our studio but it also becomes a tool to communicate ideas whether that's with a client but very often also with people on site like all of our models always get a little dirty because we always bring them to the site and we use them in very different ways and for example the one the model on the right is much more refined and detailed and really tries to communicate the intentions that we have and the one on the left is a quick model made from the earth on construction sites that just tries to quickly understand and talk about ideas with the construction people on site and what makes our practice in India and in like all the projects throughout the world that we work on may be different from the lot of practices that both of us come from from Europe and the US is the way drawings and models play a role through that design process and what's what we always try to do we don't see a drawing as a as a document that's that's fixed or that's that's static and it becomes very much a tool to start a dialogue and instead of this thick packs of papers of construction documents we we try to make as less drawings as possible and a lot of our drawings are also made on site and these two these two images are the drawings are actually made by the people like the people holding the pens are the people who are constructing the buildings so they really become part of that design dialogue and the collaborative efforts of creating the buildings and apart from that from that design process the way materials play a role in our practice is also very important and that's the part where what it is what is it made of and that's of course very much related to this craftsmanship and these artisans who build it and also the availability of materials in a lot of the places where where we build the image on the right is a mock-up for a school that we're building in India and the use of a very cheap marble was in this case less expensive than simple plywood cupboards for for storage and just that discovery and that way of thinking is for us can only happen because we collaborate with the people who build it and because we we go to the places where these materials are coming from. This is an image of that same school and the photograph on the top left as you guys might recognize are Pekionis paving for the steps to the Acropolis it's the photograph I literally pulled up my phone I showed it to our head Mason I said this is what we want how do we get it for next to nothing so we began this conversation and the image on the bottom left in the paving you see on the right is basically they would go to stone shops and take all the offcuts right and so literally the shops would try and get rid of it because normally they had to pay somebody to truck and take it away so if we backed up with with our truck brought them to site all we were we're getting the material effectively for free and there's just a little bit more investment in the craftsmanship and the time and energy and effort to to lay it down but again it's a detail that there's no drawing of this anywhere even the the the lines on the ground of how it's laid out and the patterns are all just marked in chalk as a full scale drawing and we do make drawings in our studio but we also very often especially when it comes more to the details the architects and designers in our studio make a lot of models and from but very quickly in this process we engage the people who make it and then we start making mock-ups to understand details or the way it's constructed and through that process we come to the to the final design and it's not for us it's to to be local or to be relevant for the place where we are constructing something doesn't always mean that we engage with local craftsmen or people who are constructing it we also try to pull in collaborators from other parts of the world whose view or opinion we think is relevant for the specific project and for example it is this is the same school and you see all this colored chimneys on top of the buildings they are solar chimneys the whole building is passive passively cooled and we developed that system with together with the climate engineers of trans solar who are based here in New York so that was but they've they've modeled with a digital model they modeled the whole school and developed the system with us which was very specific for this valley where the school was built in India we've also collaborated with this is a friend of ours from Copenhagen she is a visual artist who does a lot of work with color so she was you know just sent me a message one day I'm thinking of coming to India is there anything that I can work on so within you know one or two days we were on Skype another one or two days later she had her plane tickets and she came and using natural pigments PVA effectively Elmer's glue and a mixture of lime and cement she developed all of these colors for the school was just adds a whole nother layer that we would not have been able to achieve with you know with our I'll say limited knowledge but it was really valuable lesson for us that wherever we can sort of draw in these people who sort of share our values and our and our not just our vision but just what we aspire to achieve in a place or in a context anytime somebody who shares that and has that expertise we want to try and grab them and bring them on board we also started working on a project which is not in India but in Zanzibar in Africa where the presence of craftsmanship and like of course the distance between our studio and building there is very different than the projects we've been doing in India so far and that's but the way we've worked on it is quite similar we again used a lot of models to not only understand and develop the design within our studio but also to have that model as a as a document to communicate with the people on site these are some images again of sort of where the materials are coming from how they're quarried we jumped on a flight with the clients flew over to the mainland looked sort of went up into the hills and found the places where where the stone that we wanted to use would come from so for a guest up for us again the understanding of of where the materials from how is it processed who's going to lay it down and then really investing and engaging with those people to put it down in a sort of careful and thoughtful way that sort of trust deficit that is naturally there between I think designers and builders is something that we work really really hard to overcome and to achieve that engagement for us it's very important and we do this with every project is to have a site architect a person who is full-time present on site who's not only communicating and sort of bridging the gap between what we've thought about and what the builders are building but also can respond to that in a very intuitive and very quick and open way so for the project here in Zanzibar we have an Italian architect who worked in our office who now lives in Zanzibar in this working with these these people and he can really it's it makes such a difference to of being presence there every day and being able to establish these relationships to understand which of the builders is good in certain part building certain parts and like trying to direct that but also to have them be part of of the problem-solving that needs to happen on site and to have their knowledge and their expertise brought into the project this image on the right is the client standing against the wall and the gentleman on the right is a permaculture list who's based in Zanzibar he's from Germany he's trained as a chef his wife is from the Philippines and they've just come to this island and sort of developed this it's a school they're developing a large residential compound and they're really advising us on what kind of worms we need to propagate how we build biomass so that we can construct soil the entire site is basically just covered with rock at the moment and so we're literally growing a farm we cannot bring in soil it's just this cost prohibitive so we're putting in things like papayas and bananas that you you sort of grow it cut it down create the mulch to establish that that fertile ground the image on the left is drawing made by our landscape designer who's a friend of mine who works out of New Zealand I had made some gardens with him in the south of India and so again it's just finding these people who can add value and add input but really sort of share share our values and the third project that we're quickly showing a little bit of is a project that we started about a year ago in Bali it's not the construction will like the actual construction will start in a couple of months but our presence on site has already been established we've built the full design as a one-to-one mock-up on site in bamboo this is sort of have the frame the frames of the buildings present on site and partly that was because the site the topography is quite steep and quite irregular so it was for us a method to understand where trees are growing or how the slope where we need to cut or where we can shift some buildings to to have that work better but it was also a way to for the clients to to understand the design but also the structural engineer who we met on site for the first time standing in this bamboo mock-up and we could work together with him to resolve some of the structural issues and we did we built this with a group of local farmers who were able to help us build these bamboo structures and for us that presence is also very important that we established that relationship with the people who are from from around where we're building and we are the foreigners coming in and sort of ruining their peaceful village but instead of doing that we try to engage them and have their input also in in the projects and this is a photo of our small workshop in Mumbai you can imagine it's spaces at a premium in a city of 22 million people and I think what you know as Anna touched on earlier what what we really try and do is is create as designers to create objects artifacts drawing sketches that try and illustrate our ideas but that really facilitated dialogue they're not explicit sets of instructions they are things that are prompts whether it's with the client or the builders or whoever it is and then to try and create a space where these things can can exist in our in our presence whether it's on site or in our own space and then to the the idea of practice and intentionality which I just wanted to very briefly touch on is we've really thought about that I think in a lot of ways the way we think about our projects as Anna mentioned that we most of the time start before we really know where we're going we have a sense for it there's a framework there's some really basic drawings or sketches but we really try and sort of jump into that and then as the context evolves and as we have all of the the sort of parts in place to make the decision that we need to we try and then pull the trigger and execute that thank you let's go to the front Terrain Architects from where you are okay okay Terrain Architects from Japan okay good morning and my name is Ikko and this is Fumi we are co-founders of the Terrain Architects which is a Tokyo based firm established in 2011 we are currently working on the project in Japan and Uganda in Africa so for us the definition of transnational is being balanced in relations between respecting the local people and maintaining our identity local I sorry the local energy and maintaining our identity so we are going to talk about how we have designed the six years of our practice so both of us were born raised and educated in Japan so Fumi raised Japan in 2006 after graduation and they spent one year in Ireland working for Boyd Korea Architects and trouble many countries and a couple of places in Africa and I left Japan during my studies and lived in Uganda for one year and also lived in Mali for a year and I came back to Japan to finish my master course I think it is one of the reason why each of us trouble not to see a sort of famous architects designed by superstar architects but to see more about local usual architecture respecting the people's lives the picture shows the village where I stayed for a year in Mali so it is called Tele Village of the Dogon I was much interested in how people live in the village and how these houses are built by the local people to know that I stayed with the local people and try to measure and record their houses so we met first time on the survey trip in China in 2004 when we were a master course student it was for the measurement survey of Hakka housing we are both excited to see like an architecture representing the context directly we share we shared our interest in architecture without architects. Year 2010 was a pivotal year for us Japanese ready had an idea to build a small library in a remote village in Indonesia and she had an interest in our unusual experience of Lord then she asked us to design and supervise the construction its construction this project is a reason we decided to work with us as a team it is an important project for us that we learn how to be involved in different contexts as architects though the success and the errors of this project at that time whom he was working as a research associate at the University and I was working for a firm we asked the client to give us as many opportunities as possible to visit the site instead of an amount of the money so we didn't have any idea how much was a proper fee when architects design and architecture of Lord we visited the site carefully observe it and its surroundings and also collected information as much as possible in different context we found some similarities in the lives of the local people and our familiar custom like eating sitting and sleeping on the floor for us usually use tatami mat we call it floor intimacy so this is the concept drawing these are many small steps under one simple roof so we try to develop an idea by this our cultural similarity for the project so of course using local materials and local labor is what crucial we can't access easy to this mortgage it should be made you should be maintained by the local people so we try to achieve our idea while using local matters and labels then construction started many difficulties appeared so one of them is about people so there are so many misunderstandings with people who are involved in the project like translator contract and so on so as a consequence we lost extra time energy and money so another one is in the communication the picture shows its construction so there was an internet communication to like Skype in 2010 but it was not widely used so it was hard to get timely information though it was quite important so we learned organizing a good team was quite important so these pictures show library after completion though there were so many challenges for us we think that the idea of our design was simple enough to transfer to local builders and attractive enough to children to maximize maximize their ability to play with steps and the floor on reflection of the experience in Indonesia when we got the opportunity to design and supervise the geometry project in Uganda we decided to put more time on this project at that time for me finish the full-time contract at the university and she encouraged me to quit a firm for this project so it was because we wanted to dedicate our time energy and passion to this exciting project so we established our firm in 2011 so I had experience living there for a year in 2003 so we thought that was also an advantage for us so there was not so much research except the general information about architecture we carefully collected the useful information which is reliable for finding what is possible on site so we decided to deeply integrate ourselves into the local lifestyle we are eating local food speaking local language as much as possible dancing with them arguing with them and so on of course there are some difficulties that we don't experience in Japan in Tokyo like frequent blackout terrible traffic jam and unpuncture people but we could adapt and we felt comfortable in their culture climate and custom so I I visited there for the first time it's in 2011 and I also like to live in there so as we decide as we had decided we spent much time there on the reflection of the experience in Indonesia but new problems emerged because we spent too much time there we had got too close we lost our outsiders view so we realized it when we thought about problems like because it is a dangerous place with many bogglers let's make boundary walls high or because there is strong sunlight and some heavy rain let's close the building so those were locally-minded solutions in a bad way I think but things change when I came back to Japan and I drew this drawing for some architecture exhibition it represents a few things so one is the strong contrast of sunlight and shade and another is the seamless connection between inside and outside and the people can walk through in and out of the shade along the walls so what this drawing highlights is its climate and its brick walls both are too usual for local people so what we we have done is I think is extraction of the elements of the site or I can say selection rejection pruning and cleansing to see the essentials with an outsider's view and a little more about brick walls one essential thing that we focused on so local people take them for granted recognizing them as cheap materials however we recognize them simply as beautiful regional elements so we tested the strength of bricks at the laboratory of the university Markeleli University there so it shows the weakness and instability of structure members so we came up with an idea to using them as formwork of reinforced concrete and also finishing materials and how we transferred design to the local people is so we prepared many physical models and drawings and more importantly both or either of us stayed at the site to communicate with local builders so it was what we learned from the experience in Indonesia and architects being on site is efficient way to us to be a good relationship with all the people working on the site and another good thing is when we are on site we ask ourselves many times what are we doing or what we should do or who are we some kind of identity questions so it's a kind of a training to get confidence or struggle to get confidence during the long construction process and in 2015 finally the dormitory completed and opened so exposed brick wall were realized in its geography right on equator and through the process of selection and piling bricks masons workers develop a kind of pride for local bricks that they have thought no value and what made as possible is our outsider's view once we had lost it we could find essential elements amongst usual ordinary things and we were satisfied with what we had done but we wanted to do something new or more actively so in 2015 before the completion of the dormitory we organized a workshop so we thought a workshop would be a nice to see exploring what is possible in a different context and through our experience in Indonesia Uganda and Japan we were convinced that the building something in a place with many constraints like Uganda the place we had our project maybe a good opportunity to redefine those constraints as essential elements or essential regionalism which strengthen the outcome so the process of the workshop today's research today discussion from design and three days construction so nothing is special on its schedule but two characteristic things we let students do so one is to draw sketches and even Uganda students have smartphones with high resolution cameras but we let them draw sketches on the first day of observation so one sketch at the center of this image is a little bit above so close to the ground there are vegetables with earth like tomato carrots and middle of the kiosk there are leafy vegetables in vivid color to attract buyers and spices are hung with strings above and some chickens are in the cage underneath the seller's chair not to escape and above them there is a corrugated roof offering shade against deterioration so those were analyzed when they do they drew them and those kiosks are very ordinary they're everyday building and so so many is there so but drawing sketches is a good way to make you cool down and keep your way a little bit away from what you're looking at and another characteristic thing is I think to open the team to local so this kind of small scale kiosk can be fabricated by themselves but we let them to find someone or some places to do each progress like a cut apply board cut steel pipes assemble parts and so on so they didn't bring their technique but ideas how to make so I think this is what we are doing so our small firm makes more people involved and make the team bigger so as a consequence many people participate in the long process of architecture so the final images show an ongoing project in Uganda so this picture shows the carpenter's mason's gatekeepers and also intern students quantities of air all are participating in this project so six years have passed since we established our firm this kind of network is what we also have established so these people are familiar with the previous projects so we are happy that new clients have seen or heard about how we were involved in the process and have visited the buildings we have designed so now our firm is involved in some project in Uganda and some in Japan so there are commercial facility like this it's this Japanese restaurant and educational facility and private houses it all values in scale and program so though our physical office is in Tokyo the number of projects in Uganda is increasing recently so now our challenge is to figure out the proper sites for our firm we are planning to hire more staffs because the number of the project is increasing but we want to keep the smallness of our firm so what we want to keep our smallness is firstly we started our practice from the very small library which was within 70 square meter we both love to think about small spaces so the scale becomes bigger and secondly we want to dedicate our time to be on site so this is for working with communities and for us to be more involved in the projects so we think we are working to feel that we're involved in the whole process so this is in kind of this is so satisfaction so as the end of this presentation so when we work trans-nationally so we want to keep in mind two things so one is being balanced in respecting the local identity while maintaining our own identity to help our outsider's view and also being balanced in collaboration with local people thank you great thank you the third practice of this panel Ingrid Molle and Christoph Seller from Mexico City so thank you for the invitation again we would like to talk a bit about the way we work as others do or have done already as you said Juan at the beginning it's an intellectual exercise to establish a practice and we were obviously at the same challenge at the beginning and we decided being actually in a condition of working for a practice at the time how do we find out how we work together and how well we work together apart from the fact that we work together in that firm but how do we work together as authors so we decided to do a series of case studies to test ourselves and these are just the first two that we did like a house a tower and other typologies so for the house we set ourselves a fictional plot in this case it's actually a lake in Mexico and we decided to do a house along that lake in this case it is as you can see that the house actually becomes a little lake and it you know the roof is the swimming pool and all of this so it reflects the surrounding I don't want to go more into detail the second case study is for a tower and of course we were each time exploring the the the borders of that typology so in this case this was again a fictional plot so we were extruding a certain territory into a tower shape that then led us to also thinking the tower differently so for example the the core gets split up in the individual necessary elements and you obviously achieve something else then if you already have a brief to work from. Another key element for us in in our office that didn't we didn't plan this but it happened as we developed the office is the collaboration aspect we've been collaborating with different people not just the typical things like engineers of course landscape architects etc but we've been collaborating a lot with artists we didn't have this in mind at the beginning but it's something we've been doing for more than four projects I guess in the office and for example this is a project that we completed last year in Bristol in England and it's a collaboration with a Scottish artist called Katie Patterson and this is just to show you a little bit of the process basically the the image on the right is a built final image and the one on the left is an image of the 3d model that we did in Mexico of course we work in many ways with sketches with drawings with 3d models but for example in this case we were we had to work very precise I mean in a way when we work on projects in different continents we sometimes have to develop actually rather a lot of work in the office to be to control and to understand as much as we can of the project and to communicate it as best to the other side of the world so the communication with the with the artist was very much through Skype of course we went there many times but so that's why we developed this very detailed model where we for example this is a kind of grotto space where we had more than 10,000 species of woods and each individual piece of wood had to be modeled and accommodated so it was a very refined and delicate work that we didn't have to translate and luckily we got a really good team and a very good communication so we managed to make the project almost one-to-one and this is just to show you a little bit the sketches that we showed through Skype and through emails to communicate on one side with the artist with the University of Bristol where the project was was done and yeah to communicate even what would go where and even on site we would be taking Skype with the phone and communicating ourselves to tell you a little bit about the project just quickly it's a it's a permanent artwork in Pavilion in the University of Bristol in England and the commission was to host or to show a collection of wood of more than 10,000 different species and we decided together with the artist to generate a kind of grotto space where you would exhibit the wood and a person would go in and look at all these species then this is another project where we had a collaboration with an artist this is an open competition international competition that we entered and we won the first prize together with an artist a German artist Albert Weiss very good friend of us and this is a memorial for Martin Luther it's in the center of Berlin just behind Alexanderplatz and also something important to mention is the collaborations we've been doing with artists are not as in some cases that the artist conceptualizes the work and then he asks the architect to develop the the piece in these cases the artists have been in our opinion perhaps a little bit overwhelmed with the scale of certain projects and they've approached us because perhaps we're close friends or in the case of Katie Patterson they just found a work interesting or I don't know but so they've approached us to conceptualize a project which is which has been a really interesting thing for us to not start a project just thinking as an architect but conceptualizing it intellectually together with the artist and then developing the project so in this case for example we're developing this memorial that is public space and it's integrating light and in a so in this case we're working with high technology developing new technology have to have these led fields in the floor to have certain messages and quotes in relation to Luther's work I won't explain you all the project because it's quite complex but just that you get glimpses of the project this is another case of a collaboration that two weeks ago we won first prize again and in this case it is for the University of New Mexico State New Mexico State University sorry and and this was an open competition again to enter with art it was more an art competition we entered together with an artist from Berlin she's called Sara Schoenfeld and in this case we had to design a piece an element that would go into the technological laboratory decorated like that is like a computer lab and they had they gave us this wall this large wall where we had to put an artwork there and we in discussions with the artists we decided to to use their information or the knowledge of the university that is put in the hard disks so we are actually melting the metal of inside the hard disks and we're impregnating some plates with this knowledge or with this metal and with these we create this open field of vision and in the space so we play with the reflections to make new networks of communication and links within the laboratory yeah as a next point perhaps it's interesting to talk about the process how we tackle a design or a tackle a task to to to for an installation for for a building in this particular case this is a screenshot of various models showing actually from the top left for a museum building from Mexico City so how we start first with a massing of course I mean this is something you're very familiar with I imagine but then obviously through the breaking down through the brief etc getting narrow and narrow towards a proposal different ideas coming in shape start again from from from another direction etc until you actually arrive at the bottom right at the proposal that then in this particular case is a multifaceted layered building that sits within a green park so that's why it has this extensive outdoor areas terraces although it has a recessed core a glazed core of exhibition space but we really wanted to push here also the typology of your museum how you exhibit how you use a museum because we were in the context of a park so we said let's use also the outside of course this is from Mexico City you have a moderate climate throughout the year so you can actually do that especially for me as a European this is a very exotic approach and I found this very interesting to play with the next project is a park with some buildings that we also entered a competition and invited competition this year and we won the proposal so what you're seeing here is a 26 000 square meter park in the middle of Guadalajara and this is a new development or whatever's why it is actually getting built right now it's one of the largest developments in Latin America at the moment and the park itself is a collaborative process with lots of different parties so in this particular case we worked actually with Arab the engineers with the group that we still knew from our work at Herzog Timaron so we're the same group we actually collaborate on several projects and in this particular case we did together as authors the design and instead of just providing a inhabitable green space we actually asked ourselves what is a park in the sustainable matter and how could you design a park sustainable or is a park in itself already sustainable because it's just growing by itself so we figured actually a park is almost like a building it has to be maintained it's very difficult to to realize and in this case we actually incorporated the for example the storm water design in the form of a dry riverbed that then gets flooded at times and it contributes to the landscape so this is like a miniature version of Mexican landscapes of course local plants local species etc but the engineering is inherent in the proposal and this gives you a glimpse of the complexity of it so the park itself obviously you know grows also dies off certain parts we create biomass and with the biomass we fuel also the cooling of the auditorium which is underground so this whole thing becomes a very complex system that is the tries to be a benchmark ecological project as a park together with public buildings and this could only be possible in the collaboration with engineers of course because we don't have the in-depth knowledge and obviously the engineers themselves couldn't do it themselves just like that either so it's only the the joint effort that makes this happen and these are photos of another project that we're doing actually which was mentioned before in Kurdistan in Iraq the Kurdish part of Iraq which is obviously at the moment sadly has other problems than constructing buildings and nevertheless this is an ongoing process for several years we got the commission by a german NGO in 2013 to do a memorial in the middle of a desert the memorials for a genocide that Saddam Hussein committed on the Kurds in 1988 it's called Anfal and we were commissioned to do a proposal for a memorial so what you see here is actually the ongoing conversation the constant convincing of various parties on the top for example is a meeting in Berlin at the foreign ministry because they are supporting the project on the left more different delegations coming to Germany us going to Kurdistan since this is also a bottom-up project we are working obviously very closely with the clients which in this case are the survivors mainly women in their 50s 60s so you see a picture in the in the middle and doing lots of political agitation almost towards the project to make it happen so we find ourselves as architects actually as the authors of a proposal in the middle of this process and in order to make this happen we have to participate in this otherwise it would not work and it would not make a step further and this is actually the proposal it's worked around and artwork that we arrange in the circles photograph of the survivors and in the middle we have this message in a way that obviously symbolizes to start with the void but then grows into a park or into a garden that's alive into a new landscape as a signal of hope perhaps and all the program is developed around it around the ring as there is archives galleries etc etc and something that is really important for in a practice for every project even if it doesn't matter if it's in Mexico or abroad the scale of the project it's been the materialization of the projects and with this I mean that we we have a very carefully careful development of the project since the beginning since the conceptual phase but we are very interested in how we translate that information into the realization and and we achieve this or we try to achieve this through understanding as much as we kind of a project through the architectural means that we have that are drawings and 3d models other types of softwares etc but also being on site even if it's on make in Mexico or in any other countries we we see it in the same way and we're very interested also in working with projects that perhaps don't have the largest budgets and for example we are an office with that is not so interested in selecting materials from a catalog that many other offices might do and we of course do but we like very much the idea of rethinking the materiality of the projects very specific to each one and this is for example a very small showroom that we designed in Mexico City and we had a very small budget and we decided to use very simple materials that are coming rather from factories or or that are used for other things not necessarily for what we are designing and and this gives us a lot of room to play and to and to design and this is for example a house that we completed beginning of this year in also in Mexico City and here we worked we were very interested in integrating craftsmanship of course I mean Mexico this is one of the things we have we have and we we love to use and we we designed this floor that is used inside and outside the house is the same surface and we worked with local marble to create this kind of terrazzo that is kind of like playing with the landscape and and with the house itself and we also develop for example this this object or this product that we are it's a standard clay brick or block and we are applying a kind of artisanal or craftsmanship work to it that is this this metallic cladding and we're developing with together with some local craftsmanship in Guadalajara or near Guadalajara actually so we're developing a kind of catalog of these blocks and we're trying to generate a product that can be sold also in stores same as when you buy the the standard block but having this additional local value and people can use it for anything they want it's not just for our projects but we're trying to bring this out in the market and this is for example a project in well it's coming out from a project we did in Sangalen it's an exhibition design we were commissioned to do this year and it was for the textile museum in Sangalen and it was an exhibition on technology of textiles and we were commissioned to design all the exhibition but also including all the furniture so we developed a catalog of objects that were tables and plinths walls etc and we we thought that the material of these objects had to be related to the technology of textiles so we actually found a product that just came out to the market that is a concrete a fabric concrete so it's a mix of of certain fibers that is made into a concrete concrete very thin plate that we were able to work with as if it was a fabric so I mean I won't go into detail of how it works but the point is that we were able to make these almost draped shapes and objects that looked like fabrics and were as thin as fabrics but were very strong and we were able to put very large heavy objects on top of so this exhibition still ongoing and then we for example this is a small shop we did in Mexico City it was a very limited budget one of the first projects we did actually and a very complicated existing space so we liked and enjoyed very much this this experience of working with very very few means and we decided to use for example local wood to create a skin that will allow us to let some light into the space to also this have certain views outside and let some views in every now and then and we worked also with local craftsmanship to to use copper we selected copper as a metal that we will use all throughout the store and yeah that's it thank you very much thank you well thank you that was really interesting it's also always interesting to you know group people around themes as broad as you know transnational or and obviously you're quite varied in your practices and approaches but i'm going to try to sort of thread commonalities maybe more in the attitude rather than in the work and try to be somewhat polemical so that we can extract some some kind of reflection clearly i think all of you and and i would say probably will find throughout the day that whatever that division between local and global we're much beyond that now and everybody is operating in a very networked very informed very agile way but but i think it's interesting to figure out how that is is possible rather than just claim that we're beyond that i would say that there is maybe a sense of retreat that one finds in the in the let's say how you've articulated or positioned the practices i mean if i think of you know the 80s or or the kind of retreat into academia that happened here in the u.s where the world was moving too fast or there was a kind of sense of the commercialization or for whatever reason there was a kind of return to the disciplinary that happened really within the walls of academia it seems to me that if i just look at the three practices there is a kind of retreat but that's different right it's either retreating it's just interesting that at the moment where we're still talking and we're still experiencing you know global urbanization high speed transformation issues of migration yet like all these climate change your position is we're going to work in a small rural village and build a library or we fell in love with Mumbai and i mean just hearing you speak there was a kind of i was thinking about slow food there was like our resistance is that we're just going to learn to eat again actually and take pleasure in the taste so you know and and you know i think you in your case you're a little bit more more in between but nevertheless there's a kind of radical there's a choice well you know we may not be in a rural village but we're going to work in Mexico which is extremely dense and exciting but still you know there's a kind of hybrid uh uh you know possibility so so that there's a kind of sense of retreat there's obviously and this is this is maybe more the result of the the time uh of the practice versus which is uh which is the engagement with scale small is good you know small is another form of resistance or or i think that you know if rem still like you know pose the question of scale as the fundamental problem for architects for the future you like nope no actually really we we're not we're not so interested um and and i want to kind of open that up a little bit craft craft is definitely a way to move beyond the local and the global right reconnecting with making and materiality and how things are made and whether you're engaging with kind of uh the labor uh as part of the design process or or local materials or finding materials or you know that craft is the way out of that issue and and uh but there's also then as a result of craft craft becomes it seems to me takes the place of history in that the only history that's interesting is the context the climate how things are made it's the vernacular history not the disciplinary history there's no nobody none of you mentioned besides having worked at another practice before there's in the sense of a legacy historically uh of of engaging and again i'm i'm being very polemical here but and there's a kind of well we're we're starting from scratch a little bit and we're kind of relearning the basics um collaboration of course is critical i think and and it's you know the more minds come together the better it is and i see that you know it's very interesting to see it in our students i would say that 10 years ago maybe students wanted to work individually and now they actually seek to work in teams and there is a kind of complete shift of how the creative process happens and but but i was very intrigued by the fact that collaboration doesn't mean oh we have to collaborate with only local artists so that we can know it's like that's my network you know we need color we're gonna and so there's a kind of lack of self-consciousness which i think is very um refreshing and there is a sense nevertheless that the practices are also operating somewhat as art practices i mean because of the scale the engagement with the materiality with making with you know being on site you were also saying being on site and there's this kind of re-engagement and as a result you know before um uh before ingrid and and christoph i was going to say also no competitions like if there was a general two generations ago was all defined by competitions and i know you you're entering competitions so i'm going to change that from no competition to very little speculative work you know you're not spending your time thinking through speculation thinking through questions of representation the model is a tool to build it's not uh an object that is architecture in itself so in in that sense for me it's also a kind of rejection of a whole historical moment that you know claimed representation as the object of architecture almost um and um process versus product right we're i mean i know that it's also the theme of the of the day is to think about the process but uh you know it it's there's no the you are a little bit more object oriented but you are very all of you very process oriented and and part of the pleasure is in the is in the process um uh but but nevertheless the idea of of realization is really key so these were my sort of reflection on if we took three you know of of uh groups to to think through um and so i guess the the big questions for me are what would you agree that there's a sense of retreat or you know like is is the choice of operating at a certain scale or in a certain place is that really a choice or is it actually a result of losing so much agency that the only place we can actually act is in the rural village in Uganda as architects because we no longer are at the table of big decisions that are shaping our cities you know so is is that is that an active kind of finding a site of agency or is it more like we have really very little space to go and so that would be my first question and related to that is the question of scale i remember Andres Lepic maybe some of you know uh you know his uh which his um uh small small uh small scale big change at MoMA which was a show that he did in i think 2010 which kind of was was really interesting um but is that true it you know is is is does does small imply big and is that even important that we engage with those you know big issues of of of scale so and then the third so so the first is the question of retreat and agency the second is the question of scale um and the third would be this this uh sense of your engagement with the discipline and its history whether that's even relevant or interesting or whether there's a kind of in a way very modernist kind of rediscovery of well let's just learn how to build again with what we have where we are for certain needs and and there's a kind of freshness in that act of moving away from um a kind of critical introspection of the discipline perhaps i start um in regards to scale i would say um the moment you start your practice obviously there isn't often a choice you know it's like i don't know if i speak for everyone but in our case it was literally like that we had to also see what comes up and um it's not that we say we don't want to do big buildings i think we're very open it's a it's a dynamic process also how to build a practice um i don't think that i speak from for us now of course there's something bad about large scale um there's nothing fantastic about small scale both exist and i think um in our practice what we didn't show maybe so much was also we do very small scale up to the door lever we designed this is something that we can do in mexico because of the craftsmanship that was mentioned because of the possibilities that are based on the fact that people have a very economic labor rate um to to work which is impossible in europe i mean this is high end luxury what we're talking if you do a similar thing um and uh from that perspective i think it happens that we work in small scale um we also grow i mean you saw one competition over parks or actually it's jumping quite a lot from various scales um uh yeah i think that's in a way but i would say and i want to hear everybody i would say though that you could be working on small scale but speculating on big scale and but speculation is not something maybe the question of scale is more interesting in terms of the question of speculation whether speculation in your practices is something that that is important um yeah i think for us i would mirror that that it it sort of uh came about you know you sort of take what what comes to you the first project we got was the school which is for me the largest project i've ever worked on it's it's 200 000 square feet it's a four acre campus uh it's also still the largest projects that we've done so far yeah and it was pretty large i mean i'm not well but in terms of uh you know the size of it and duration at the same time we're working on you know we made these small brass uh dias that we did in two weeks and so at the same while that's happening we're working on something that is going to take 10 years and yeah i think for us uh we've always been and i don't want to speak for anna but i've always been very interested in the process leading to something that's physically manifested so the the notion of speculation is just i think personally been something that i haven't pursued but uh yeah i think that engagement in there's a richness in that engagement of process of making that was something that i mean now that you speak about process and this was not specifically a question but you touched the point i think to to me and perhaps i talk for from both of us is one of the things that i found most difficult in the practice is to convince clients which can be people uh person individuals or government or institutions to convince people or to make them understand of the architectural process and with these i don't speak just about mexico i really see this as a problem everywhere and it's it's the value that or or the work that is behind the final product that they see that they normally cannot understand and for us coming from practices where process is really important we worked for her so and maron and sana both of us where the process was a key element of of design and there will be a lot of time spent on the on the design process and then when you open your own practice you are willing to go on with this very analytical process and then you face clients that tell you okay you have three weeks but you need to do two models five panels and blah blah blah no so the time that you have to make to produce that work is being eaten and where is your design process left so this is something that has been taking a lot of effort and a lot of time to convince clients government and institutions on on on these intellectual process that is very difficult to grasp or to to to understand the the real value of this so for us the process of the i mean the let me talk about the scale yeah so that we just started at the the opportunity to design the small library but i think the the scale is relating to the how can i say the opportunity just you know because now there is small there are so many small the the project in you also Uganda but for for us like young architects i think compared to the japan and asia there is few architects like us so i think there are some opportunity to get the more the bigger scale but for when we look at the the process of our design i think there is no so big difference for us because now the we also see the small scale of the the details and the project so yes of course there is the different scale of the the project but for our processes be the same more almost same as as architects so it's an it's finding more opportunity whether there's kind of access to labor in mexico that's scale that or whether you can really engage with making and so making is really sort of a key kind of i mean perhaps for us what we find the interesting and living in a way in both worlds because we also come from both worlds england's mexican i'm german but we we do operate from mexico but we do operate from there also two other parts of the world and vice versa and anyway we've worked in various different companies and various different continents even various different cultures so we have our network also spread out so when i was mentioning that we work with arab it's because it's almost the first engineer i would call up if i have a question and they sit in london and because i used to work with him for eight years so this is it's a natural reflex almost and i think this is perhaps one we are one of the first generations to experience this that we have these networks that are not just local but actually global and how can you actually execute work with such a network when you're a specialist as you i think you were saying no that you have a landscape architect in new zealand but you work you know for india and this is something totally common for us and natural for us yeah no i think it's been it's been common for for some time i think the maybe the difference is choosing to move to a place where access to you know where you might have more opportunities or you know versus you know it's not so easy to just move to uganda or to decide mumbai is going to be the place from which i'm i'm going to operate because i love it like that's a next step of saying i i could actually be anywhere um and and learn right yeah for sure but i would say to the students out there i mean i had no i went to mumbai as a grad student i had no preconception of what it would be or what i would find there or what what i would study or who i would end up working with and so it really was a sort of i don't want to say an easy transition but it was something that was quite intuitive and it just sort of at every point that i had to decide just to go or stay or come back or do something else it just sort of felt natural to to continue on that path and so in in that sense it it sort of was easy in a way that i think it wasn't you know a couple generations ago the connectivity relationships with family things like that is is is quite seamless yeah yeah no i think that's really interesting i think it's also interesting um i mean to the to the sense of uh you know acceleration uh that engred uh you've been talking about i think that uh there was a time when architects had more time uh and uh and now we have less time and so it's interesting for me those of you who or even in the previous panel those who teach and use the kind of academic um sort of space as the space of research to to think through some of the problems so that you can actually operate within the the shorter time or practices that this is where the speculative part i was interested in because often we no longer are able to speculate with the projects that are that were given we speculate with with other projects and and then the ideas kind of come back into the i have three weeks to make a model um i mean in your case i think that was that's kind of interesting but but i think you guys are making a very different choice which is you know very much engaged in in the kind of building process as the practice um itself um which which is quite you know quite interesting and in that case i would say um how would you then reflect on architectural education today in terms of preparing you know the students or our graduates to uh you know if representation is no longer really the site of investigation because all what we do here is we draw right i mean it's not that we we're making but it's not that the kind of one to one scale i mean would you would you advocate for an architectural education that is re-engaging construction as kind of fundamental to architecture or building practice or i'm just curious whether your experience now would kind of shape shape how you would think about an architectural education um i don't like i studied in delft and like the part of like the construction part yeah it's very strong there uh yeah but also the very different way than how we practice now and but what is very strong is uh we had a huge model making workshop and so this this the making part of architecture whether that's maybe not so much in how it's actually being built but just a physical act of making models which also like trains or helps you as a student to understand how things are built that was very strong and i think that's uh both of us have also been involved in teaching in Mumbai where we try to to um like uh have students also work in that way and trying to uh not only think about ideas on paper or conceptualize it but also about how how it's being made yeah right right so um i was graded the toke university of the arts so that there was the watercolor painting for the entrance examination so they finished it but it was nice to uh redefine the drawing sketches or the the pictures so to communicate with the local laborers that was wonderful because i didn't realize it before i brought three brave students from japan to uganda to help that kind of workshop but they do well and also they it's kind of analyzing the observation of that site so that kind of things uh that make us rethink about that how to communicate or how we think our ideas so that was interesting for us right i think the drawing is still very relevant i think it's key um and coming back to the subject transnational um we experienced that we actually have to plan almost more than if we were in the place where we are constructing it's a it's a form of communication of course in the case of the the wooden grotto it was literally that we decided to make a 3d model in one to one of course we could have taken a different approach let it happen random but it was perhaps not our way to do this also um and there it was too complex what we wanted to achieve so we really decided to go very much into the detail um of course with the local testing etc but i would say that this is still very relevant and it will become perhaps or hopefully even more relevant i would also include the model making all these abstract forms of representation of trying out rather than just the one to one because the one to one is purely the local i think how do you do the one to one 500 kilometers away i think there you need a tool to to control the scale of making i think so maybe we have time maybe for one one question first of all congratulations on wonderful work all of all of the groups so a common thread between all of you is that you have kind of you have grown up in in in more developed countries and i would say more of structured cultures or societies and i've gone back to or gone to a different culture where the way of work is a lot more organic the kind of from economy wise the countries are more developing so i'm curious to know what are the biggest advantages that you have going from this world to that world and what are the biggest disadvantages that you faced uh in perhaps just one that you could all of pick uh and second question which is unrelated is uh do you have a fear of this kind of transition uh weaning off in a time or having a much stronger pull towards your roots and will you be able to kind of go back to wherever you came from and be um have you ever thought of it just curious well sorry if i could speak to the first one and i think it also ties back to your some of your questions one of the things i don't i don't know if it's an advantage or disadvantage but one of the things that we're very strongly aware of in practicing in in india is that the idea of the profession of architecture really only came with the british it only arrived it's only been there for 100 150 years whatever that history is and but at the same time we work with carpenters who are 60th generations fathers fathers fathers fathers we're all carpenters and the tacit knowledge and the opportunity to sort of work with that skill for us is both an unbelievable opportunity but it's also humbling in the sense that we we rely on them and and they're and we learn from them and we we incorporate their sort of expertise into what we do and and it just sort of i think one of the things we've learned very quickly is that if we can find again those people that share values you can really exponentially amplify what it is you're trying to to create in the physical world when you sort of incorporate those kinds of really rich in in deep histories which i think again it's this this conflict of academia versus what i would call tacit knowledge that as long as you sort of agree socially that that you're trying to sort of swim in the same direction it's a really sort of yeah powerful not just experience and in relationship to the process but also what can be created on that for example speaking of myself i was raised and mainly educated in mexico and then moved away for more than five years between spain tokyo switzerland england and then moved back to mexico and this was a deliberate decision we actually quit the the paradise you know working in a you know like an amazing company in switzerland and you know having a really nice life etc and going back to my own country and the surprise when i moved there was that a lot of my colleagues and friends were really against the idea of me moving back to make like moving back this idea of going back which for me was the total the opposite thing for me was um i saw there an opportunity and and i wanted strongly to go there so this is something that they never understood and i i am strongly i strongly believe in that it was the right decision to to base our office there and i think what what it has given me the time that i was abroad is that i think i'm able to see the reality in mexico in a more neutral way where i'm not so um let's say not so i don't see it in perhaps in such a romantic way of idealizing the the the historical very strong background and but to see it in a more neutral way and i think i'm able to better understand the the balance between pros and cons i think and because i think that in the moment you are away and you you kind of give value to a lot of things from your own country or this is at least what i what i do but at the same time i think i'm able to see a lot of disadvantages and and i think the the way i try to work with this is to stay quite flexible so of course i mean i'm you know i have a german partner where we work in japan and switzerland we know how to do ways in a certain way but we need to stay very flexible and kind of fluid to to work with a place like mexico or which doesn't work like that necessarily so it's been a challenge and it is always a challenge but um yeah go what i found very um enriching is and i think your observation is very true that you're saying you're we are going to a very dynamic or a place with a very different dynamic is certainly true uh coming from germany when you and coming back to the competitions when you want to enter competitions you find you're just not able to do it because you haven't have the history of two years of you know earning two million turnover two million a year and ten and so forth and also you basically find yourself kind of outside and i think that's really a problem in europe honestly i think there's i mean switzerland for example has already a better system allowing young practices also to participate in the process germany is very bad in this i think and many other european countries too and we saw obviously coming from that perspective a very different dynamic in in mexico very different expectations also um which we enjoy likewise from seen from the mexican perspective we have also projects in in europe in germany let's say and we almost um come with a mexican approach to these projects like can we now try something else think beyond the box don't think just in products um specified products the door the wood the i don't know think in what is the wood you know what's and then to to itemize it then again and i think that's in a way the the nice symbiosis that we're finding that it influences both perspectives and both sides all the work actually has affected somehow that we're doing regardless where it is so just so that makes me think that actually in some ways the architectural practice is more like an art practice in that artists always have kind of immigrated to to you know whether they went to berlin when new york became too expensive or you know there's a sense of finding the place where you can actually start to to engage in the ways that you can engage in of course architects were always 20 years later so you know it's interesting for me that this you know this maybe is not the retreat i was talking about but more finding agency in in the place that you can grow from thank you all it was really interesting thank you