 It's really a great pleasure to introduce tonight our first lecture of the spring semester, Christian Cares, coming from Zurich and Berlin, and clearly one of the rising stars of architecture today. For me, this became particularly obvious at the last Venice architecture Biennale, curated by Alejandro Aravena, where Cares' interventions had one of the most memorable presence. On the one hand, it was in his installation Incidental Space for the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini, a surreal object like an explosion of foam, seemingly with an exterior, but actually, as you kind of moved around with nooks and crannies and a kind of really interesting interior, the object seemed to speak about presence or rather a kind of ephemeral presence about process, an object that had its own life and experiment with its own rules, and that really used the space of the exhibition to explore questions about architecture, how it's made, perceived, inhabited, and what are new formal or rather, in this case, maybe formless sort of properties and possibilities for its presence. And then, on the other hand, and at the other end, in a way, of the Biennale was Cares' participation in the Italian pavilion, where he filled half a room with his project for the Porto Seguro Social Housing in Brazil, a project he's worked on for three years or from 2010 to 2013. And there, looking at this question of social housing, were drawings sort of at all scales, both of the housing at the scale of the neighborhood, but also many, many drawings of the different units trying to really kind of get into questions of morphology, organization, aggregation. There were models, kind of really a real investigation in terms of understanding that housing. And so in many ways, while these two projects registered something quite unique and different, at the same time, I think they highlighted a uniqueness to Cares' own approach, while they seemed to opposite investigations at first and certainly with very little possibility to assume a kind of signature or style or a narrow and immediately recognizable set of interests with incidental space on the one hand as a kind of formal explosion of excess and materiality and the Porto Seguro social housing on the other as a kind of rigorous analysis of housing aggregation. In fact, the more you thought about it, the more you saw a kind of intersection between the two projects, kind of same search for let's say the fundamental search about architecture itself. And more specifically, a search of what not is visible but rather what is invisible or rather what Cares has once said to be his interest in discovering the underlying rules of the game more interesting to him than the game itself. A kind of deep knowledge and discovery of what is underlying architecture. In an interview for his 2009 El Croqui, Cares says, the story of a specific project is ultimately a random game variation or a random sample of a rule, but being abstract, it remains invisible. It is communicated only indirectly through the project and as you say, it's also open to surprises. Ideas are not visible. The moment an architect tries to judge ideas on the basis of their visibility, he's working stylistically or referentially and is no longer addressing the basics. And so his work, while not immediately spectacular has become internationally and increasingly recognized for its rigor, its internal consistency, its combination of restraint and neutrality with at the same time, great impact and a sense of timeliness. It's also uniquely hybridized. You can sense his love of Japanese architecture, especially the recent investment in lightness and aggregation, consistency of materials, austerity even and a certain formlessness such as with Ishigami or Fujimoto, a kind of hybridizing that works with the European precision and technical expertise in construction, as well as the pursuit of very clear and strong singular architectural entities. But it's also clearly personal and with a special sense of time I think and here I could say a little anecdote we spend this afternoon touring to, that was Keres' condition for coming to New York. I have to see something interesting. And so we went to Rudolph's beautiful house and house and to the Modulator and I have to say in an age where architects are kind of dropping in and out including myself, as fast as possible. It was really inspiring to see someone take care and take the time to really see architecture. Christian Keres was born in 1962 in Venezuela and he was educated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. After extensive published work in the field of architectural photography he opened his own architectural office in Zurich in 1993. He's currently a professor of design and architecture at Ithe Ha and has spent some time in the U.S. in particular in 2012. He led the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Amongst his key projects are the Kuhn's Museum, Liechtenstein in Basel, the apartment building on Portus Trasse in Zurich and the house with one wall also in Zurich and he received first prize in competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in Poland. He's received many awards. Amongst the most recent are the 2015 Halsam Award in Europe as well as in 2012 was made a fellow at the Royal Institute of British Architects. Please join me in welcoming Christian Keres. Thank you so much. Not only for inviting me to New York, but also for spending the entire afternoon with me and for the introduction. How do I switch to the lecture? Okay, good. Actually, you referred to the Biennale of last year. This is also when we met the last time in Europe and I would like to start the lecture with a project we showed at the Biennale and also finished the lecture with another project. One project was also shown by invitation by Alessandro Aravena and the other was actually presented for the first time even before we knew who will be the main curator of the Venice Biennale and before we knew what was the title. So it was like being invited to the same event once through the main gate and once from the backyard. And maybe this is also one of the reasons why these projects are so different but how they relate to each other. This is what I actually want to kind of work out specifically in this lecture. And in this lecture I will focus on very few projects. I will only show four to also enhance this specific question how do these two projects relate to each other. The title of last year's Biennale was reporting from the front and it was supposed to show that let's say the field of architecture dramatically changed within the last years and the places where architecture works and also the topics on which they would work that they are different in terms of what is the social environment or also changing climate condition and how can these affect architecture. And this let's say there were like two titles. If you look carefully one is the sentence reporting from the front but the other is this is much bigger. So I would say this is the headline of the Biennale is this figure standing on a ladder. And this is a German researcher that was carrying this ladder from the desert to once in a while step on top of it to have a different perspective. And this metaphorical picture was actually also suggesting that it is not only about being involved in actual problems of our time but it is also about the question how would these change our perspective our understanding of architecture. And I would say this is also for myself the main interest. If you say sustainability is only a question how you save energy and fuel. Sustainability is a technological problem that can also be solved in a technological way. But I think it only can become interesting and relevant for architecture if it raises the question how will this affect our own understanding of our own design process of architecture. In this sense we showed one project that was in reality a total failure in the sense that it never was built so far. And we worked five years on it all together and it still is a for us or let's say for myself a project because it helped me to change my own understanding of architecture because it was a possibility to discover certain possibilities that exist within architecture but that I was not aware of. So in this sense the contribution at the Biennale was much more to kind of make clear that if I work in Brazil if I work on a favela it is not about kind of teaching other people how they should live or trying other people to make their life better because I know myself how it should be better but much more about changing my own awareness or my self restriction. This is a picture of a favela in Sao Paulo and I would say it's quite crucial to understand that this is one city. What I mean is these high rise buildings in the background and the favela in the foreground they belong to each other. One exists thanks to the other. People that are living in the favela they work for people that are living in the towers and for example there is a huge hospital for the rich people that live in these towers nearby where mostly people for let's say cleaning and helping come from the favela and not only that they make a living out of that but they also get a free treatment and there is a very close exchange between these two cities. So in this sense I would also kind of look at it at the favela as a specific urbanistic pattern which one could also say has many advantages. Not only is the density of a favela much higher than in this example below of modernistic Gropelstadt in Berlin but it's also much cheaper, much faster to build. There are much more people living there. It's easier to change. It's more dynamic. So when we were approached by Sehabi Urbanistic Planning Institute of Sao Paulo to make a proposal to upgrade the favela we actually thought that this is something we cannot do because the favela as such is pretty well working and also quite beautiful and so our proposal was instead of introducing new programs like a theater or new spaces like a basketball field or something like that to just take the existing quality which is the density and develop this density further. Unfortunately, technically it was not possible. You would have to demolish all the houses underneath. It would be totally new intervention and the demolishing of the existing favela was then also the reason why we thought it is in the end a very literal and maybe also stupid idea. And I have to admit that this first proposal was done before I ever visited favela and these pictures which I'm going to show you now are done through a stroll through favela for two weeks and I was sightseeing in this favela and also the pictures are more, I would say, idealization of the favela and they are more attempt to capture the beauty of the favela. Not only the obvious, let's say, sculptural quality of these self-fabricated houses as you can see in the fore and middle ground but also the specific quality of very small urban spaces which maybe could be called atomized spaces in comparison with normal or with a modern or classical city as we know it. And these favelas are undergoing constant changes. As you can see on this picture, this is an abandoned house that one of the neighbors used again as a garden and this garden that is done with pet bottles and sculpture in the background and different plants is, let's say, a specific aesthetic or a specific beauty as it is hard to imagine that a landscape designer you know could invent it just working on a blank paper in an atelier. And we thought of the very first project as a kind of settlement of individual houses. Each of the housing units that you see in this floor plan and there are over 30 different units is different from each other to create also an outside space which is constantly changing. This design was done without the knowledge of any, let's say, rules and regulations that exist in Brazil. It's done without knowing how much a unit could or should cost. So in this sense it's a pure, conceptual proposal. But the main contribution is that instead of upgrading the favela which seemed pretty much okay for us was that we said we would prefer to extend the favela. And it was also, let's say, a discovery for me personally of a scale which I haven't witnessed which I haven't experienced to that very moment when I first visited favela. And this small scale or kind of the quality of density of space, the labyrinthic quality of space was also in the end a triggering point not only for this project but also for other projects to come much later. You can see for example here that the buildings are nearly touching each other. The space here or here is as it is in existing favela 40 or 60 centimeters so that you can only walk sideways. In this sense this project would be as illegal as any existing favela. This approach to understand the favela as an equal expression of a village as any other vernacular city is not something new. This is a page out of a book from John Turner where he compares at the bottom of the page social housing by the government, South American dictatorship, which is obviously more than to control people than really to create a nice living environment. And this in total opposition to the favela which is shown on top of this page. And there is nearly no difference in the perspective in the aesthetic how the favela is represented in the article by John Turner as it is shown in the book that you all know by Rudofsky architecture without architects. But to work within a favela also kind of requires an understanding of the favela that you cannot get just by strolling through or by sightseeing. So this whole project was developed together with a PhD work that was also done nearly in the same period of time by Hugo Mesquita who was also living in favelas for this project. And we thought a lot about how can we understand the structure of the favela. Many exercises that we did. And what you see differentiated in colors is that some houses have different connections how they relate to the street surrounding this block. For example there's the typology of the house which maybe is not standing directly on the street but is one or even two plots behind it but has a direct private access to the public street. And this typology is not only in the sense of how does it relate to the city but also how it is built. This is just one overview of all the houses that stand in the second line behind the main streets and are. The plants they were extremely detailed Hugo Mesquita drew not only all openings but also all furniture of each single house and was talking with all the house owners you know what is the story of the house so that he could not only kind of give a representation of the final favela how does it look today but was also able to tell how the favela grew and the four type case studies that he chose also relate to each other through the ages. One is a very old settlement. The other is a very recent one and through the overview of these different stages of design of growing of a favela we could also assume you know how these favelas would develop in the future. And you can see by looking at the drawings the favelas are everything but informal actually they are very rigorous they are done with a lot of understanding of economical issues. They are very disciplined. But the main interest in the end was for us not much the houses themselves but much more and this is only the let's say interest that you can have if you work with a structure like this what is the outside space? How do these singular individual housing relate to each other? What do they create as urban space? And we were thinking of this urban space in many different ways and one of the exercises how we approached the urban space is that we took patterns not only from existing cities but also from textiles or paintings and tried to scale them. As you can see there is a house unit here or here to imagine what could be the urban space that would be possible if all houses are built at the same time by one singular architectural office. And this actually brought us back to the starting point that with having just a couple of modules if you would arrange them in a totally differentiated way that this outside space would also allow to have an utmost variety, a much bigger variety than all samples that you saw in the previous picture. This is a differentiation of public, private, squares and alleys and as you can see this composition that looks at the first hand range actually allows a lot of usable space. The space is actually created through only five different houses, two houses with two levels, two with three and one with two mesonet on top of each other. These houses fulfill all the requirements that are given by the state so that they could also cost between 30 and 50 thousand dollars which was the given budget. Each house would be repeated 90 times but always combined in a different way so that the exterior space would constantly change. The single houses, they maybe are very simple and as such not so exciting or interesting but for us the most interesting element in this design was the exterior space and this exterior space you can only imagine if you also represent, build all each of these 450 housing units. The project was developed up to the building permit and abandoned so building permit was also not really rejected and there was a documentation of over 100 A0s and quite a complicated work to give all the detailed information that was necessary. Instead of building the previous project this is what was built in the end because the plot was occupied by drug dealers who used the drug as a real estate operation and also defended their plot and it became one of the most dangerous places in the whole neighbourhood and therefore the people of the favela had to organise themselves and occupy a plot from the neighbourhood and this is what they built in the end. It's extremely done in very short time, they occupied the plot and built overnight a city. You can see these are all tent structures and these are built houses. All the single units here, they are just bedrooms sometimes for individuals, sometimes also for entire families and they share certain spaces as living rooms or to watch TV or with sanitary facilities, showers, toilets and so on. The plan had an economy and a rigor that I never would be able to achieve. The exhibition in Venice was titled Selective Chronology so it was not saying how terrible, how bad, we never could build this beautiful project but it was much more kind of re-evaluating these five years to kind of think about all the moments where we captured something that might have an effect on other projects built by others or maybe that we could build once in the future. The table showing the drawings that Hugo Mesquita did and otherwise it was a chronology of the entire working process but only, let's say, highlighting these elements of the process that we liked and the other ones we just let disappear. I could also say it's not so much an exhibition. It's much more a work to create the archive of a never-built and all these models already existed but they were done in paper or cardboard and were already destroyed a long time ago and for the Biennale we just read in a different scale. What you see on this table, for example, is an analysis of houses that we found within existing favela and on this table these are examples by the municipality of Sao Paulo and here are our own trials to come up with new apologies. Is it now better? Okay, sorry about that. So we also didn't design the tables for the exhibition. These tables were actually designed by Carlos Garpa for the university and were just a loan of the university for architecture of Venice. Among other things you would see also the biggest problem that you would have in building this structure which is under the ground all the sewage system, studies of the spaces in between the houses, detailed studies how you could live in a housing unit like that because these people are not just poor but they also have TVs and other things. And it was actually rather surprising for us that people would look at these things quite intensely because we had so many, let's say, shows going on in other spaces where you would have huge video screens and huge models and many different things that were specifically designed just for the Biennale while we just laid out on the table what we already did a long time before. I don't really believe that there are categories within architecture beyond the experience of the architectural space. I don't think the program, the site is really something that could define the quality of architecture. In this sense we didn't, after this project, became specialists of favelas and did many other projects but certain ideas that were revealed within this project were important for other projects. And the house Okamuka which will be built this year where we already started the construction site early in January wouldn't be possible without the experience of the project for the extension of a favela even if there is not any singular obvious connection in terms of a brief or plot. The plot is a bit at the border of Prague. You have a view on the city but it's maybe not a great view and this was also one of the reasons why we thought of building a house made up of all with small spaces. I did a series of apartment houses, houses with three apartments in Zurich and each apartment in these projects was only mainly proposing one singular open space and this was the opposite. This was a house with 52 spaces and these spaces themselves are quite small. They are all circular but the quality is not the single space itself. The quality of the project much more comes from how these spaces are related to each other from the labyrinthic perspective looking from one opening like this one you would see this space and if you would look through this door you would see this space and again this opening shows that space and so on. All these openings that also have no doors would give an understanding of a space which consists of small units but they all belong to each other. They form one passage, one figure of spaces. So this is also let's say one single space, one sequence of spaces and this sequence will change from one level to the other and to the next level. And as you can imagine that also the distribution which apartment is looking on which side is arranged and which part of the building would change from one level to the other. This diagram is showing how the apartments develop from one floor to the other and it's maybe the most essentially the most reduced representation of this project. And this also reveals how actually close the favela project and this project are linked together. This is how we in the end articulated the urban space. We first built modules that were consisting of three, four, five or seven houses or just one house and then these different modules were later on attached to each other in different ways and only because let's say these molecules are so different from each other we could generate this variety of exterior space. And this is not only let's say a nice picture for a lecture but this is exactly the hand sketches following the hand sketches that were crucial for the design of the project itself. Here you see that even though this space is very complex it is built in a very simple way. It nearly looks like a game. How these different spaces and parts of the program relate to each other. Of course we never worked like that in the office on the project but maybe it has more to do with this quality of game. I never built any circular space in my entire life so since these spaces were also so small it was ideal to make a mock-up one-to-one within the office and we also used these circular spaces for example all the office meetings were inside the model we also had a bed there to see what is the perspective of this space if from a horizontal position etc etc The client he makes bodybuilding so he is rather strong and we had nobody as strong as that in the office so we asked the cook from the restaurant opposite the street if he could not try out the throne and as you can see it's very comfortable and this is very crucial because this geometry is so unusual and strange that actually for each wardrobe for each toilet we built a one-to-one space to really test if it's also a comfortable house and all the spaces that need doors like bathrooms or wardrobes are between the circular spaces so that the circular spaces could remain open and could be experienced as an entity during a couple of years we did several projects for China and I loved to work in China, I have to admit it but obviously China didn't love me so we never won any competition or the commissions that we had were never built and it's somehow strange coming from the oldest democracy that exists in Switzerland the main reason why I like to work in China is the freedom that you have which doesn't exist in our country I mean politically yes but if it comes to architectural competitions it's one of the most restricted areas if you want to develop ideas in a competition and this is also one of the reasons why many offices do not make any competitions in our country even if it's very well paid if you win it otherwise not and I guess that another reason why I like to work in China is because I didn't understand or knew China I think if you don't understand the place where you work your work can become much better because knowledge or experience also goes together with a loss of adventure with a loss of creativity, with a loss of innovation so maybe these projects that we did for China are pure fantasies about a China that never existed and that maybe also never will exist anyway this is Guangzhou the tower is as big as the Eiffel Tower not even bigger and this is the landmark of Guangzhou they also have here in the background the opera by Sahadid this was the plot the interesting thing about this commission was it was not kind of a commission for an object but for a park with free museums so it was the unique opportunity as an architect to not only design an object but to design an entire landscape and part of this landscape would be some objects, some houses so we started with investigation what other buildings are there that have an interesting relationship with the landscape you see here a building by Oscar Niemeyer this is Vienna this is Rome a forbidden city etc etc and it was also necessary exercise to get an understanding of the scale of this enormous plot and this enormous program which including commercial and parking was over 250,000 square meters so the starting point for the design of the house was that it should not be a part of the city but a part of a landscape garden so this is the first kind of trial you know how these houses could look like so that they would obviously belong to the garden and obviously not to the surrounding city and the let's say challenging thing is to also understand these houses not just as objects but also to imagine houses that would propose a space that would belong to the landscape garden that would be something like an extension of this landscape garden and not as a closed space so these are not only models objects but these are also representation of spaces we will have a look at this model here this was the interior of the same model and this interior would be big enough to relate to the landscape outside it would be a place where people could come together meet, rest, play big enough for trees and sculptures where nature, people, art would come together another this time museum of calligraphy and I will show you, no this one, this model here made out of balloons that were cast in plaster and again this is a picture from the very same model a model which is only 30 centimeters big and just with some textures and some sculptures to give a scale and eventually this model might look a bit childish or pure fantasy model but in the end if you see the model cast in concrete in the scale 1 to 100 you see that these very first initial purely conceptual studies were directly related to the final outcome of this competition and that the scale, the relationship between the human body and the main space is actually coming from this initial studies but also the idea that this is not just a closed space but there are intermediate spaces that would create a sequence leading into the park surrounding this building it's probably the only feasible project we did for China because it has a very simple structure it consists of self-supporting shells while the slabs are kind of holed with columns so it's a very simple basic scheme of columns and slabs and then the roof again is a hanging shell structure and also the entire facades are built out of spheres you could also easily imagine that this is the focus point of the project which you would have to really control while all the rest is maybe more for the curators to decide how to arrange the spaces specifically this is how we imagined the museum would look from outside this was another museum I don't remember for what I think for science obviously for science but let's say all these free museums they were following very simple geometrical and structural rules how they would be built up it's much bigger than the Pantel but it would also rain inside so there's no glass roof and they always ask for movies I'm sure the birds would love it I don't know why there are so many leaves in the air but I guess this is called artistic freedom what is a museum of calligraphy? of post-war calligraphy of Guangzhou to be very specific and our museum was much more relating let's say to a workers' club as it was built in communism a place to educate, to entertain and to bring people together much more a place of distraction than a place of contemplation and this is the lobby which goes over the full height of the building maybe the biggest effort or contribution that we did in this competition is that we didn't think of a museum as an icon, as an object to be shown on pictures or that you can drive by but it's really a space that you can enter also without paying a ticket also if you're not specifically interested in post-war calligraphy from Guangzhou Guangzhou has 8 million visitors each year so we thought it's also important to create a space that would be an offer for all these visitors in 2015 I was invited to make a proposal for the Swiss pavilion and I was quite suspicious about this invitation because I'm not very successful in Switzerland I lost all competitions I did in the last 5 years no matter even if we were the most economical the cheapest, the most rational the easiest to build whatever quality you could have I also mentioned that a Swiss jury could appreciate so we thought it's quite hard to represent Switzerland as being excluded from this community of Swiss architects and it started with an interview you didn't have to show a project I went there and I was actually quite sure they would say very nice to meet you, goodbye and I said well actually I don't like the Biennale especially not the one for architecture I think it has nothing to do with architecture because you only see drawings, models, photography I don't even know why it's called Biennale for architecture anyway to my big surprise they thought ah you're very critical sounds interesting and we were invited for the second stage and we thought the most important thing to participate in the Biennale for architecture in Venice is to bring back architecture to the Biennale to build something, to make a space to say there is no exhibition but this space and this space is the exhibition but then comes the second question what space should it be and we thought it's important that this space is exactly not a space that is referring to something else that it's not a space that is propagandistic there were several exhibitions in the MoMA in New York where in the courtyard a house would be built that you could visit for example Marcel Breuer built one beautiful pavilion but this pavilion was also kind of it was a house to live in it was like a propaganda for a new lifestyle propaganda for modern architecture it was not an exhibition space it was a house to live in that was exhibited in a courtyard of a museum so we thought the most important quality of this space should be that it's not referential that it's not referring to anything else than itself and there was about five days before we had to hand in this competition total crisis and I rejected every model there was in the office and said this is all garbage and you know even if you would take if you would just be able to imagine the space in the garbage it would be more exciting than all that we consciously produce so far in the office and it would be better to make a cast of what we have in the garbage than to continue to design so next morning a very young ambitious intern literally took what was in the garbage and made a plaster cast and we were all amazed by its sheer beauty you know and think this is actually the space that we are looking for but how to build it maybe it's enough if you just scale it these were other trials you know what is if you have plants is it nicer to have a cast of plastic or wax or you know and when we won the competition we started to increase these procedures of space design and the studio looked much more like a laboratory for chemistry or like a kitchen and the methods how to produce the quality of the space became more and more refined the title incidental space is also to a certain extent ironic because we did over 300 models so you cannot really talk about the incident these are different materials that were used as in every good restaurant and the cook will not tell you the recipe so no one really knows what the form of the space that in the end was built comes from but use your own imagination and you know I always think how you design physically has an impact on what comes out of it you know if you use a pencil or if you use watercolour or if you use materials and different kinds and to a certain extent we also try to design the design process much more than to design a space so these are some of the 300 selection and what was interesting is that by having different materials you would not only receive different forms of space but you would also receive a different ornamentation of the space and what you see on the left is always the same model as on the right and on the right you see the details so you know are the forms very smoothly do they have breaks are they detailed are they etc etc my English is just not good enough to explain what is the what are the different qualities of these in this sense we always looked not only at the outline at the form of the space at its detail and these are pictures which are scaled that they would represent the same models as here in one one so the interior let's say selection process was always between looking at the space itself and then looking at its ornamentation and the first room was a wallpaper room very good for selfies you know for those people that have no time Aravena himself he said you know we should always think about people that only have two minutes so since it's a bit complicated to enter our space we thought okay in two minutes you can reach the wallpaper room make a selfie and go to the next pavilion it's also good to have something to look at you know at boring openings this is one of the initial models and this is the rendering of the same model it's a rendering because it visualizes something which is much more abstract which is the cloud of voxels of singular points which were with a 3D scan evaluated this is actually what the scan would look like it's more like a triangulated landscape than a form a part of the initial model the render and the surface of the pavilion itself and you could say that actually this is just a printed 3D printed render while this is a flat render but they are kind of just output out of the precise same digital information and to my knowledge this is the only project where the render is not pure cheating where the render is also like a construction plan the model that was selected I think it was number 180 and here you see all the points that were necessary for the scan as referential points it also had to be destroyed that you could measure it from different sides also this is not a picture it's a construction plan you see this thin line here this is the skin of 2 cm of fibre concrete I mean does this make sense a project like this and a lot of people ask me what happened with you sickness, is it contingent you always worked with structures and now this but this is also a structure and I try to explain it this is what we do usually in architecture column and slabs and you see that the slab needs a certain thickness because otherwise it would not hold and you could also imagine doing something else then increasing the thickness and this is that you increase the surface and what you get is a larger stiffness and it doesn't matter you know how you scramble the right expression the paper it will always be stiff and you could do reach the stiffness with less material so in the end there is also something extremely rational in this form and you could think of this form as a structure as a load bearing structure this is the interior shown from the outside it's the cast that was necessary for the sprayed concrete and for economical reasons and also to finish in time we produce the different elements in different materials this shows all over 200 parts of which the entire surface was assembled we have here the time and this is each of these 270 parts you know you can see always are here the cast is produced here the spray concrete comes here it's shipped to Venice, it's assembled so the whole logistics was quite challenging and I would say with an ordinary client or if the developer would be our client we could never make such a project in such a short time the mold was molded in foam this was done by students other parts were done with 5x milling and other parts which were more complex they were 3D printed it's actually very simple to show this movie that you can see how simple this project actually is so there's a first layer and this layer is very important to capture all the details the details have a precision of half a millimeter and then at the end the third layer are the fibers which are sprayed on the mold and this actually gives the stiffness, the stability the man that you see here was trained in Hollywood and his specialty was to have elements that you can use in film and move very easily for example artificial rocks for westerns things like that very experienced person without him the project would not be possible the different parts before shipping and this is how they were brought together on site and now everything was in theory so precise half a millimeter and only a computer can do it wow but in Venice we realized that all parts have a different precision of half a millimeter and the joints are up to 4 centimeters but it's also a very simple material so all joints disappeared pure magic and we wanted the people to take off the shoes but this is not because we were afraid that this space would get dirty also not because the floor is not stable but because we wanted that you really can feel the floor if you go in a mosque you also take out the shoes we actually more wanted kind of a respect and that people would also more carefully behave in this space which is actually quite a dangerous space we are really very lucky that we had no accident at all because everything that is in this space is forbidden we had some visitors this is Patrick Schumacher he runs the office of Sahadid I tried to explain him that this project is the future of digital fabrication and that everything else is the past he very hardly tries to enjoy the space Wang Xu felt very familiar he was telling me of monks living in caverns and relating to Chinese scholar stones Sejima just liked it she didn't say a word but I guess she liked it you know this space is not just about challenging or about bringing the front to Venice not reporting from the front but bringing the front to Venice and thinking what is today feasible how can we produce a space how can we think, how we can imagine a space but it is a specific project it is an architectural project and even if it was very adventurous in terms of finance in terms of schedule and all these stuff the biggest adventure was how would this space be in the end what would his quality be and I was always afraid that this space which covers a surface of something like 25 square meters would look small and somehow ridiculous now that it's kind of finished and the Biennale is over I can admit it this was my biggest fear much bigger you know that we cannot hold the budget or it will be not finished at the opening and so on we also already had the title the unfinished space just in case we would run out of luck and let's say the main idea of the space is that by expanding the surface by differentiating the surface by having an extremely detailed surface by having a continuous change between different ornamentations of the surface that you would get a space that you cannot easily capture a space that expands in different directions a space that would look infinite even in reality it is the total opposite of that and that was you know I think only if a project in architecture raises architectural questions it can have a relevance within the discipline of architecture and I think it doesn't matter in the end if you build in China, Brazil, in Switzerland if you build for the rich or for the poor it only matters what are the spatial, the architectural qualities that you can come up with and only this also makes it acceptable that architecture is so hard to do and so expensive and if there is something that relates to projects I think it is that we did it both in an extremely naive way I never did any project in Brazil I never entered favela before I worked on this project I was never interested in digital fabrication I had no idea what a 3D printer is but these are only tools these are only possibilities what you can reveal in architecture and I think this naivety is also in the end a reason why we were somehow as total outsiders the first one who ever built a purely digitally fabricated space that you could walk around in it and I think this naivety is also absolute, crucial quality and I wanted to finish the lecture with this because some of you just started their study last week and I think this openness or the starting point of not knowing is absolutely crucial for achieving something thank you just a quick note for those of you exiting we are experimenting with wine and cheese after lectures so that's GSAP experimentation actually and I do want to be mindful of this storm outside our bunker so I think we should keep this a little bit short but I wanted to no, no, please stay it's the only safe place in town so thank you Christian for an amazing lecture and I do think that it's quite inspiring to have it at the beginning of the semester I think you did do what you set yourself to do which is to try to kind of really create a line and a sort of consistent line of investigation between all of these projects a real search into form and formlessness the spatial qualities of architecture kind of tectonic qualities of repetitions of aggregation but also I would say questions of density which I think that it's a new understanding of tectonic where density now is kind of playing a bigger role and I saw that between the favela and the last project of course plays with scale and especially in the collages where often the people seemed quite small and I was surprised even in that last image so the kind of real sense of trying to expand space through representation the investigation in between spaces, the gaps and of course questions of solid ground I also, you know, when I mentioned your interest in the kind of Japanese architecture of recent years there's a somewhat of an absence of section and I think has been not space for section as a kind of much more either volumetric or planimetric and there's also always an abstraction but at the same time it's always material so the kind of experiential comes into play but one of the, with the sort of sense of roughness whether in the models or even in the collages the cutouts have edges that are kind of rough but I did want to maybe start with this question of representation because it's very present in the presentation but also you've mentioned it often designing the design process rather than the project itself and going back to the question from the front and the kind of play between the title and the image of the German archaeologists which I also was quite fascinated by for me it was a sort of question of it was for me undermining a little bit the premise of the Biennale or creating a tension where you can't engage only from the ground if you don't create a distance and an abstraction and a representation in architecture it was very hard to kind of advance a kind of architectural project and so I think your project certainly did that it was both from the front and underground but also kind of abstraction and a question of representation and so I wanted maybe to stop a little bit on this question of representation for you the question of process in the office and the presence of drawing but especially the presence of collage and models and how is it... for example I guess my question would be you're naive about the projects that you enter or they can be first but then there's a kind of consistency in the way that maybe you design your design process versus the kind of end product which might be something so the consistency would be more along the lines of your design process and search and modes of representation rather than the kind of outcome of the project as a way to read the kind of body of work for me architecture is a media and it cannot be to a certain extent be represented at all not through photography, not through drawing not through models, these are only tools that help you to reveal an architectural quality so I'm also desperate about all the things that we do to approach architecture and in the sense the investigation on how can you kind of use these as tools to come up with a real space at the end comes also out of this frustration or anger that constantly I think you have to destroy everything everything is shit and out of that comes again let's say a new also representation so this interrogation or this also doubt or destructive approach to any representation produces again and again new forms of presentation in this sense I also kind of have an affection to photography, to drawings, to models but this affection comes out of total distrust and also out of a certain frustration about the boundaries of each representation at the same time I think that architecture is always about ideas and all other medias than architecture itself they always reveal one specific quality of a project this means that the project, the idea of a project can eventually be very well perceived or represented in another media but never the experience of the architectural space itself so the idea of representation I think is absolutely crucial in architecture but every representation has to be in the end a failure because otherwise the building itself would be the illustration of the representation then the building would be representing and the drawing would be the actual let's say artifact that would represent the idea so in this sense I also believe that an important contribution in architecture can be only insufficiently represented by any other media than the building itself and all my projects they were always thought as buildings they are not in this sense visionary they are not utopian they are all in my fantasy built projects in my fantasy so that's very interesting and very different from let's say Peter Eisenman for whom the representation is the project and the building it might be an illustration of that representation but I do think that through your investment in materiality you do create, they become objects in themselves the presence of the material across scales I think is really quite special and I wanted to maybe jump to a second question which is sort of related we were talking at lunch about competitions and how competitions have changed and they used to be really the site of experimentation and now it's become more difficult for many reasons from one they are underpaid and two they don't seem to be as much the site of discourse to the site of the exhibition which has become a real space of experimentation for architecture where in your case especially in the last project it is a building, it's a kind of one to one and that is a one to one in your mind or does that represent something else? I really am skeptical about the Biennale I'm also always a bit frustrated if I go there and after half a day normally I would go to a coffee shop in the Piazza San Marco or to visit a work by Scarpa or a museum or just enjoy the old city because I always think it's so real and it's so beautiful and so often at the Biennale itself I have the impression it's all fake and it's not even beautiful at all so we also wanted to kind of do something which would be as beautiful as a coffee shop at the Piazza San Marco and as real and in this sense not relate just to the exhibition or topic of the exhibition but to the city itself and for me this is a project of architecture it's not a model it is not just the exhibition it's a real project and it's maybe more real than if I would for example build a house for the poor and show it the exhibition or as another example an airport for drones supposed to be in Africa but standing in Venice I mean an airport for drones in Venice is something else than an airport for drones in Africa and I think this difference is crucial an airport for drones in Venice is a model our project was not a model because it's not supposed to stand anywhere else in the world than in Venice and to be visited or used by anybody else than visitors of the Biennale in this sense it's much more real than all other let's say one-to-one markups and this project was also possible or became also kind of a necessity because previously we did all this huge project and totally failed and I was suffering from a lack of reality having worked on all these large scale projects that never will be built and I in the end also felt that the complexity that I was looking for in China that I was looking for with the large scale projects could also be revealed or fulfilled with a very small project and we did something extremely small but I would say it was as complicated as to build a high-rise building and anyway it was the most complicated small building in the world Well I think that's very interesting and I certainly I think that was sort of my favorite part of the Biennale was a kind of invitation to re-engage kind of reality I mean that was an aspect that I thought was successful but what I'm hearing from you is also interesting in two folds I think one is it does seem that generationally or at least as a kind of generation of architect that is very much interested in re-engaging the real in kind of moving you know in this day of an age of ultimate spectacle I mean you know such as our president you know that there is something about the material the reality that is maybe again the future of architecture this kind of reconnection with the material and the idea that there is a difference between the reality and its representation that there are things such as a material fact which I think is in question right now as a kind of ultimate peak of post-modernism and then the second aspect is the kind of post-bigness for many of us where you don't need scale to get complexity you can actually re-engage with complexity at a kind of the scale of the body again there's a kind of rediscovery of complexity of elements which I think Rem's Biennale did try to kind of reinsert like let's start again with the wall and the column and actually he didn't have the column as Bernard noted but you know that there's a kind of return to that bigness in itself is maybe not the only so I do think that there's a kind of line of inquiry I mean would you agree that these are kind of resonant at this moment it was also a project a project without a developer a project without a client we were free to do what we wanted if we would somehow find the money for it and make it possible and I think this is an important perspective and I'm very fascinated by architects that also built by themselves that are not looking for a client but really do their own project like Arnaud Brandelhoeber in Berlin but also what Valerio Giatti built in Portugal for himself are for me like models you know that it's possible to really remain close to architecture by finding your own ways how to do it and that this is maybe more interesting than to participate in competitions that will never raise any debate on architecture that will not be publicly shown that will be not publicly discussed and that you don't get a lot of money for a competition I think this is a major issue not in an economical sense this is boring to discuss but it is about the question what is the value of an idea and if you don't spend a lot of money on the competition that is only on ideas then the idea has no value and if a competition is not a battle which is the best idea but it's just you know who has I don't know the best office, best working office or whatever criteria there are then then I think it's not really exciting anymore to participate in competitions then it's just another form of speculation and as incidental and random as any other speculation I wanted to ask one last question before maybe opening it up only because you noted it was important that the last project came out of the garbage and if so was there a kind of dimension where it was a representation of waste rather than being waste itself and I'm only bringing that up because I do think that there is a new maybe dimension to the material in the sense of reality that I think is interesting for architecture today which is what do we do with waste and all that it embodies so it's beyond the form there's a kind of weightlessness or weight to the material itself yeah I mean waste is interesting material in many different ways for example I think what you have in a trash box is always very well ordered you know because what you put what you throw first is what is on the bottom and what you throw last is on top so it's somehow in my office sometimes better ordered and structured than what you find in folders where people start to think maybe it should be in this chapter it should be there it's a pure chronology as an example of how you can look at trash or trash box that it's not something in any way negative or it could make you think in different ways I'm fascinated by trash I think that's a good moment to open up Julian you're also fascinated by trash so jump in when you describe the notion that not understanding the place you're working is productive it's a difficult proposition for me because on the one hand it's very empathetic to your description of naivete as a kind of open-mindedness I think especially as a prompt for students but I'm sure you can understand we're also in a very sensitive political moment here where we've seen the disastrous and very far reaching consequences of willful ignorance and I'm wondering specifically about the relation of your favela project to the residents there you describe it as self-organizing, dynamic as working well but I wonder if in that description there's a kind of romance that overlooks the precarity of life there and the sort of incredibly cruel constraints under which that life unfolds and specifically I think one could argue that the systems or the sort of organizational systems the favela that you're looking at are actually spatializations of fundamental structural inequalities in society I mean you talk about sort of constant change which I understand is valid on the sort of small scale of a garden appearing or disappearing but I don't imagine crime rate is suddenly dropping or I don't imagine that residents are suddenly changing their socioeconomic status so I wonder how you see your intervention in relation to these social sides or social symptoms of spatial conditions I'd argue that that's not the architect's role that the architect's role is spatial and the social is maybe not to be addressed Well, what I try to talk about is my perspective on the favela I was not pretending this is reality I clearly also stated these pictures are idealizing the favela and I wanted to show the favela maybe as Goga would show an island in the Pacific, you know which is maybe also you have diseases there and people die earlier and so on but he showed it as a paradise and I wanted to show it in an idealized way because it was for me an escape out of my own kind of understanding of architecture and it had relevance for other projects Of course there is also problems of crime and drug abuse and so on but I can say that the people from the favela which were really very nice clients and also one of the reasons I enjoyed to work for them and they enjoyed what I did so one of the reasons why we worked five years even if he sometimes doubted if it will be built was because we had this very close and intense and good friendly, warm relationship with community leaders and people from the community they understood that this project is also paying respect for their achievements for what they did because I think it's wrong to look at the favela and say well this is the reason for drug abuse I would say it's the opposite it's also a build resistance against drug traffic to a certain extent and at least there is also all these positives aspects and one also has to know how only few people in the end are taking advantage of all these criminal aspects and other people are suffering and trying to defend themselves from these aspects but I would say these are problems that I cannot solve purely as an architect as an architect I am an architect and nothing else and I kind of insist on that because it also means that I have the freedom to do what I do as an architect and if you don't believe in this personal freedom if you also as an architect just submit problems of others or to help others I think then you lose one of the most important political qualities that each democratic country should defend if you don't start defending this main quality by your own profession by yourself who else should defend it one more question thank you for the sharing I wanted to ask about structure because in relation to the earlier work there was a lot of cantilevers kind of the wall and such but now it seems to have moved on to kind of spatial structure so that the physics of it seem to have diminished and becoming few kind of object so can you comment a bit about that on the evolution of structure through your work well for me the structure always comes as a consequence out of the idea of space and the first projects were driven from a desire to create an open wide space and cantilevers and let's say lack of columns or course was a consequence out of that desire to have a transparent wide space in this sense it is a very clear change of perspective but not from one element of architecture to another all the work were always about qualities of space but they were different qualities achieved with different structural elements one more question by means of inventing new structure or making new ornamentation what is the ornament the semester at GSD was called ornamental space and I could think of ornament in a very abstract way that it is an element that can be repeated but from one element to the other you cannot clearly distinguish there are no borderlines so in this sense it is an element that can create infinity and this is something which interests me a lot because also in the favela project the topic is not the small houses the topic is much more this enormous space a space which is maybe kind of atomized because all the squares are small but the entity of having all these different squares one after the other this sequence of spaces is extremely generous maybe even monumental and this is a quality that refers strongly to the quality of the ornament but I don't think of an ornament as a decoration I think of ornament as a way how you can bring things together to define a space I hate ornaments I mean I hate decorations because decoration is something you can take away and in this sense I would hate ornaments as something added I was quite disappointed by the apartment from your new president it had a golden ceiling it was full of ornaments and the space was so low it was so oppressive and this is an example of ornament how I don't like it he doesn't know what kind of space he works in and the space is so narrow but then you have all these things probably the space is so low that you can better see the ornaments on the ceiling well thank you Christian this was really great