 OK, here we are for the fourth panel. Theory from discourse to practice. Theory and history have been the solid platforms for references to build the necessary intellectual body of practice architecture. Today, the contingency and the solidarity that our complex world demands of the architecture needs a blurring of the boundaries between theory and practice. Critical practice together with practical critique is the question. Some emerging practices operate generating new theories of design through their work. And we have invited three of them to our evening session. Fala Atelier. Ana Luisa Soares and Felipe Margarales founded Fala Atelier in Porto, 2013. Their work is a model of contingency and use of architecture as an instrument of exploration of the poetic condition, hidden in banal contexts and very low budgets. Their practice is an expression of how to build powerful narratives with very weak ingredients. Lanza Atelier, Isabel Martínez Abascal and Alessandro Arianzo have been involved from the beginning of their professional years in the blurring territories between speculation, research, addition, curatorial, and professional work. Isabel was for three years the creator of Liga in Mexico City and both, separately and in collaboration with other colleagues, have designed plenty of installations and small projects. In fact, in 2015, they founded Lanza Atelier in Mexico City. Plural was established in 2009 in Bratislava by its two partners, Martin Jancock and Mr. Janak. Its aims is to propose architecture with emphasis on its social and cultural relevance. Their strategy to address present complexity is based in the statement that architecture is a common language with a formal and structural grammar and vocabulary. In a context where architectural production is in the hands of private developers, and I'm seeing that it's not the only today, the office is in a context search of generosity, trying to find the potential in the pre-existing and in living space for the unforeseen. The moderator for this panel will be Andrés Jaque. Andrés Jaque is an associate professor of professional practice at Columbia Gisab, where he directs the AAD program. Jaque is the founder of the Office of Political Innovation and Architectural Practice based in New York and Madrid. He works in itself a collection of incursions into the fields of action that we have proposed today, from sustainability to politics, from technology to theory. So he's the person to close this session. So thank you all, first of all, for the invitation and for the opportunity to be here today. Even more with such a heavy theme theory. It's a very, it's a very heavy, heavy word. Okay, thank you. So since our, since, ah, I'm just gonna put the time. So since our theme was so big and so heavy in a way, we went back to the email of the invitation where there was a small comment on the side talking about how important it would be that we would be able to frame our practice and to frame how we became a practice for the audience. So we took it quite literally and that's what we're gonna try to do today in 20 minutes to somehow say where we come from, where we are and what we believe to be where we are heading. And this office showed up before today. Our practice started while working for other practices. We are part of the generation that was born between 87 and 91, the three of us and the four of us. And we are students that did Erasmus. We are students that did internships abroad. We are architects that started mostly dreaming about becoming our own heroes, of becoming our heroes, I mean, and we started by mostly trying to absorb from third parties. So between Japan, New York, Switzerland, Portugal, Slovenia, Gothenburg, so Sweden, Singapore, we were a bit everywhere and we were just somehow collecting from all of those places. But the office, the name followed the whole practice started in Japan in 2012 at the Nactizing Capsule Tower, specifically on that one. And this was where we understood how much we were willing to sacrifice the three hours of sleep we had a day to become an office. Because despite the fact that we were working 16 hour shifts in very fantastic offices, we were still finding the energy to discuss together and to create very radical competition proposals to trying to convince our family members to do house or well, a dog house work, whatever they could afford. We were trying to sacrifice everything because we believed that if you're gonna work 16 hours a day for something, do it for yourself. That was the motivation. And so we came back to Portugal, we invited Ahmed to join us. Ahmed had a very different education from ours. He came from Ateha Zurich. And the worst teacher you ever had was probably the best teacher we would ever dream of having. And he convinced us that the real way to go was Switzerland. It was this idea that we were gonna do competitions in this scenario where in this kind of Eldorado of architecture competitions and we did it and we did it once, twice, three times, 20 times, 50 times, and we lost all of them. And we lost, well, we know how to lose. We lose in style in a way we could say. But it generated a moment. It generated a certain energy, a certain speed. We bought an office. The office was 25 square meters. We were free, it was perfect. At some point we were already 10 and it was still 25 square meters. So we were using only one table so you can see this was the daily scenario. So if you had a client, everyone would move around to one side and we would discuss on the other side. If we were discussing a budget, a project, if we were talking about anything, everyone was part of it. So this idea that the whole family sits together for dinner was a kind of daily routine. And it became our laboratory. It became the place where we tested options, where we designed proposals, where we discussed architecture, where we discussed budgets, contracts, the whole thing. So in a way it became the perfect scenario for our practice because despite the fact I'm supposed to address theory, everything we do is driven from very banal commissions, very low budgets, most of our clients they don't care at all about architecture. So it's actually a kind of, you know, the Don Quixote metaphor. We are creating our own windmills to create and pick our own fights. And this became what we call the Fala family. So the people that came, that passed by, that left something, that took something with them. And all of them in a way they are responsible for whatever we are today. And if we are here talking today, it's because at some point all of these people were through that room. And this is what Fala was. So as a conclusion, Fala was a ghost town. It had literally zero, nothing built, no real commissions, no clients. It was a series, there was a series of expectations. There was a huge ambition, but all the deficits are actually fake. And what happened is that with time we started understanding that we were not gonna build a city from scratch, but we can replace one of these fake facades at a time. And maybe if everything was okay, one day we might be a full city without fake facades at all. And so every commission we got, we addressed it with all our energy. Like we were invited to design an exhibition for the Lisbon Trinale. And they didn't give us budget. So we paid for it, we built it, we carried the metal, three tons of metal to the second level on our backs. And because I mean, that was what we had. That was what we could do. And when we got some prizes for competitions like this was mentioned, we got for the Chicago Biennale. We couldn't build it because it was too expensive and because we didn't got the first prize, which is also important. But we thought, what if all of this energy is channeled to something else and we design our first built project which was a house for a bird. And the fact that the client was a bird doesn't make it less of architecture. It was a very demanding client. They have a series of specific requirements. And when we went to take the photos on a bird fair because there's a bird fair in Porto, people wanted to buy it. So I think let's say the clients were happy somehow. And as time passed by, we started via the weirdest possible scenarios. We started getting some sort of private commissions mostly due to this gentrification process that is happening in the south of Europe, mostly in Portugal, where everyone can get a nationality if they spend 500,000 in investment. So if you need a passport, you know, call us. And what happened is that we got one project like this, another project like this, another project like that. So we were somehow transforming given perimeters. So let's say the building was already there. We were somehow doing interior work. We were discussing architecture, talking at, we were discussing Palladio to refurbish a bathroom. So it was kind of very schizophrenic. And as these commissions kept piling up, at some point we had our first building, which of course was half a building, a kind of Frankenstein, because again, there's a given structure and we need to operate on it. And we felt like, what if we react to the context, this kind of old granite heavy context and we play with the cheapest, lightest materials? I mean, we are talking about a building that is built with less than 250 euros per square meter. This is less than a third of what social housing costs in Portugal. So the client didn't want to work with us. The client doesn't even know we are called Fala. He knows Philip. That's the person he always talked with. So we know I exist. He doesn't know anything else. And he couldn't care any less about the design proposal, but he let us have a certain... So we made a wingmill out of him so we could find him and we created his project. And as this kept piling up, we got to a point where once in a while, the clients were not paying attention to what we were proposing. So we were pushing the envelope as far as possible. Other times they were, so we had to paint them in white. And other times we were the clients. So we did a kind of hybrid between both because we didn't have enough money to do the first one. And as the projects kept piling up, we started understanding that our work was divided in two layers. One layer was this idea that projects are the core nuclear of architecture. So you do a project, you do a house, you do a museum, you do a school. And a second layer would be the tropes. This idea that our themes within the projects that repeat so many times that at some point they become a project of their own. And this is a trope we like to discuss a lot. We call them careful mistakes. The idea that you make mistakes on purpose, but you treat them very gently. And sometimes the projects, they become a lot about a certain element, about a certain column that holds nothing, about a certain circle or dot that marks an entrance. And as the office started expanding and started having more and more work, we started touching different kinds of structures from 600 square meters palaces in, I don't know how you do, we use the metric system. I really don't understand your system. So from 600 square meter palaces in the historic center to houses of 12 square meters, I mean, from the city center to the suburbs, we started intervening these given structures and changing them. And at some point we were finally invited to design buildings from scratch, houses mostly for single family houses for young families, most of them also in the suburbs. And we started for the first time having the opportunity to do those blue models of several volumes just to see how the house is gonna look like. We didn't do them anyway because we didn't have the time and we were not paid for that. But we had finally the opportunity, if so, to test such a tool. We are obsessed with the geometry of plans and how rigorous and let's say, stiff a plan can be. So at some point we thought it was a good moment to look back and to draw all our plans at the same scale with the same graphical code to try to understand what else we were trying to do besides these individual projects. And we understood that somehow these tropes, they were actually binding all of them. They became some sort of archipelago. They were not individual islands anymore. We went back to the collages that somehow became a thing. I mean, we do them as a working tool, not as a communication one. And somehow we understood that they grew up to be seen as something else. And we put them all together. And we started, because we had compiled so many of them, redrawing all the elevations and also bringing them together with the drawings and the collage and creating this kind of triangle of this kind of romantic love affair between these three elements and to try to understand what hell are we trying to do? What is really the message behind the architecture we are trying to propose? And as such, we also try to do this study where we try to merge via the drawings all the information and the core of the intentions of each project into a single drawing. And as the projects kept piling up, these drawings started getting more and more complex and more and more deconstructed. And somehow they are not easy to read, mostly for people who don't know them, but they say so much to us. So they became a kind of cathartic element at the end of the project that somehow summarizes all the battles that we had, again, with the windmill. And we were lucky enough to see most of the projects we designed being built. Some of them are ready finished, some of them are under construction. And for us it was always a moment of, what do you say, reassurance to go back on site and to look at that facade we designed and to see how it was showing up, how it was actually composed, how it was built, what was actually hiding behind the white surface and so on. And to see the different stages that in order to achieve that beam at the end, we need to somehow do some sort of planning of the beam long before. So as I said, our theory comes a lot from this very practical necessities and our construction, as you can see most of these photos is the least high-tech thing you can have. I mean, this is a house of 350 square meter again. So everything was very rough in that sense, but at the same time quite delicate and sometimes things change, like the client says it doesn't like pink anymore, so you can only do blue doors, but the elegance of the column that doesn't touch the ceiling remains there and somehow all of these references that we brought from before, from Shinohara to Markley to Siza to Bota to Tsukazegawa, they all found their own space in our bookshelf and at some time in a project here and there, sometimes stronger, sometimes less. And I mean, for us it's very important sometimes to say that despite some of the interventions seeming extremely subtle, they come from very, again, very brutal, very rough interventions and more important than the plasticity of it, this is the cheapest plaster one can have. It's about how all of these small pieces, they represent very severe corrections on an architecture that we wanted to deny to an all. And we got used to see architecture in a before and after condition, mostly because most of our projects they started with given structure. So this idea that there's a before and there's a promise of an after. And we also got used to see them as the after and the after party, you know, when it's actually built. So if this stage represents the architecture itself, that's the celebration moment because it's the moment where it actually happened because to a certain extent, most of the times we start a project, we don't really believe it's gonna go all the way until the end. And we were lucky enough to start teaching in different institutions in Europe and as we start teaching, we also found a time, I don't know how to do some research projects and as we did these research projects, we focused on the themes that attract us the most, which in this case, it's a very specific typology from Puerto, we call them the ugly ducks, buildings that our parents don't like. And at the same time, these obsessions of the references that we also had from before, which are much more majestic, found their way through, in this case again, in the US to the Chicago Biennial where we depicted a series of houses from the turn of the 70s to the 80s from Japan. And recently, we found our work as the motive of exhibitions, which is, it's quite a, in a way it's super nice, my parents like to tell it to their friends, but at the same time, it's quite an uncomfortable position because it takes away the seriousness of our discipline and somehow puts us in the realm of art per se, but it's something we are still getting used to. And this is how the office expanded between projects, exhibitions, commissions, collaborators, talks, you know, everything was happening everywhere. So if more than saying that we are a Portuguese office, I would say we are an European office, but it's in Portugal we work and in Portugal we are now with this problem, which is the excess of nostalgia, fake nostalgia, because everything that is old, even if it doesn't hold anymore, we preserve it at all costs and everything that is new looks old. So somehow it's becoming quite complicated to do architecture in this scenario. So front facades are protected because more important than the locals are the tourists and they came to Portugal to spend money in our visas and to see old stuff. So we need to keep the old stuff so that they are happy and then we make the back facades the main facades of architecture. So our front facades are facing the back and our back facades are facing the front. So somehow this architecture became very proud as in this specific project because it was a manifesto project. There was this, it's revolting that you are, that you have people within a desk for 500 kilometers away making decisions on what tourists want to see instead of actually discussing architecture as it is. But as a consequence, because we do this pretty much alone, our project is designed as this kind of autist creature and this is how the city sees it. The city is not very happy, but we fooled them because on the permit we just said natural stone cladding, we just didn't design the pattern so they never understood what was gonna come after and now they evaluate our permits with twice the attention. And so this is a little bit how we feel. Everyone is clapping but they don't really know it what and sometimes it's how we find ourselves. And now we are in this condition where we are designing these buildings in quite interesting scenarios because the city center got to prices that are completely out of scale so all the investors they are moving to the servers or to the half, it's still important but it's already kind of suburban area. So we find ourselves in this scenario between where housing blocks, factories and the train lines stand and we are asked to design the most straightforward development with 15 studios for students and you can feel that a plan suggests a certain sense of repetition because the minimal area of course everything is very efficient and very rule based but at the same time, what if you have 15 times the same thing but you have 15 things that are different from each other, including the bathrooms. What if you find a way where every single room is designed in such a way that if you do a storyboard you never have twice the same perspective. What if you test it in a way where the materiality repeats itself but you always find a way to create some sort of distinction that makes each of these apartments unique. As you can imagine, the promoter couldn't care any less. This for him, again, this is not a windmill. This is a gigantic fan of those that you find in the oceans. It's really the enemy we created and again, as long as we are inside a budget they are fine with it. As long as we respect the Excel sheets they send us so that's what we did and we felt like as a provocation because this is the highway where about 1.5 million people cross every day. We thought what if we say something about our architecture not by writing foul on top of it but by making it friendly, by making it look like a cat and cats they say meow. And what if we find a way where this kind of positive energy goes like a boomerang, it goes and somehow comes back and brings something together with it. As I said, we were lucky enough to see some of the buildings finished. So this is our first house, project 23 and it was, it is about to be finished any moment now. The second house, and we usually call it the pornographic house because the relation between private and public programs is very direct. And after that house we created the second house which is now also under construction which we call the erotic house because there's a very big negotiation between private and public programs. Different clients in program, different houses. And for us it was quite something to be able to work many times in scenarios like this where you have this very original architecture and you need to fit in because of both local regulations and the requirements of the municipality but at the same time you feel good with it. Our architecture is not stick to any kind of, stuck to any kind of language preconceived ideas so we are okay with everything as long as we manage to do a good project out of it. And sometimes we get projects like this. This is a very funny one. This is a clothing factory from the 80s that previous owner designed to look like a house so that it would fit in the context. It's a very fucked up house but it was his ambition that this was fitting to the context. And he asked us, the second client, so our client, to transform this into social housing. So we felt we have maybe an opportunity to transform the factory that looked like a house into a housing block that looks like a factory. So what if we play with this kind of semantic in a window and what if we somehow find a series of rules in which the factory somehow stuck in the middle of the woods because this is a very special neighborhood. And we play with all of this. So this is the bathroom of one apartment. You can go out and go to the bedroom of the other one. So you can have a very promiscuous lifestyle with your neighbors. But it's all about this idea of reacting to a certain scenario, to a certain given condition. And inside the project is the thing we could afford. 180 euros per square meter. I know I say many times these numbers but it's really, it's a limitation for us. We believe that we could do more if we had the conditions, but we don't. So as Ahmed many times says, we transform the commissions that no one else wants to take into the possible architecture we can achieve. And once in a while, very rarely, this happened only once, we got a commission to design a public building. And in this case, it was very small public building. So a small gallery for the Sao Paulo Biennial because they had a satellite event in Porto. And we were asked to design together with a few other architects, pavilions to fit some art pieces. And for us, you see, like the moment they arrived, they started designing for lease, for lease, for lease. Because I mean, we didn't know how to react to it. There was no bathroom and no kitchen to design. So we just got so excited. And we designed this foley. And we designed a detail with, you know, like half of the beams are actually faked. They are just hanging. So they are doing nothing there. And everything is about how the blue is cut by the pink and how the curve is intersecting the structure and so on. But everything is about a certain sense of contradiction. But it was probably the most joyful project we did in the office. Like designing a cuckoo clock of some sort. And then we got back to normal. You know, we got back to, okay, make an apartment out of this 30 square meters granite shack. And when we started working on this and we had such energy from before, we felt, okay, now we cannot go back. You know, it's one of those things. When you give a few steps in that direction, you don't want to return to where we were before. So we started doing all of these tests, both in terms of the scale and language of the object and in terms of the detail and actual texture and expression of it. And we actually made, we convinced the client to go all the way through and to design this house that actually has all the possible constructive techniques at the same time, wood, metal, granite, concrete, brick. But in the end, it's all white. No one has to know about that. And because we fucked up with the detail, we had to double the roof, but everyone says it looks very good. So we are happy with it. And then we find this kind of sexy elements within this very small house. But what it really matters to us is the fact that we made a shower that is nine meters tall and you can see the sky when you shower. And that it has a very strong expression. And the client was very happy because he had a supermarket in the back and he said it does not notice the supermarket anymore. So he's very happy with it. And we are very happy because somehow this was the first client that ever came to us and said, I know your work. I want you to do a project for us that kind of follows the same approach of your other architecture. And this was unique. In 105 projects, this happened once. So it's quite fantastic. And this is a factory where another client asked us, I need an elevator and a staircase to fit regulations, but we were not very convinced with that. So we did 100, 1,000, 2,000 tests on how we could make a facade out of this. And we proposed that the whole infrastructure had to integrate would somehow become a very proud moment that would become a new phase for his company. And this is an intervention that in plan occupies about 1% of the factory. But in terms of its public appearance, it's became 150% of the factory. And finally, to end, this is our baby. This is our new office or the building before it became our new office. Because recently we understood that we had to expand. We had to grow. And because after five, six years, 10 people in 25 square meters is not okay. At least in Portugal, it's not okay at all. And clients started noticing that. Contractors started noticing that. So we bought this building. We made a, we gave a leap of faith. We invested a lot. We fully transformed it. And it's now finished. And to make it even more, let's say compatible with this idea of the Fala family, me and Anna live on the last floor. Ahmed lives on the middle floor and the office operates on the ground floor. So somehow we took this idea of living and working together quite too seriously. And I would like to end with this image. The best movie that Spielberg did in my opinion where Peter Pan grows old. So he becomes an adult and he starts having all of these growing pains. And he goes to London. He starts a company, you know, long story. The point is the whole movie is about Peter Pan learning that he has to go back to Neverland and he has to fly again and he needs to fight hook. And there's all of these 90s, terrible special effects. And what is the crucial message here is that Robin Williams at some point is told that the only way for him to fly is if he understands why is Peter Pan in the first place. And the reason is that despite the fact that he's growing, that he's becoming an adult, that he has responsibility, that there's a whole life that is not told to us when we are kids that somehow happens. He can only fly if he's happy enough. And if he understands why was Peter Pan in the first place. If he understands the joy and the pleasure that being Peter Pan brings. And this is why we are truly convinced that Robin Williams was the best Peter Pan and is the best metaphor for a young practice like ours. So thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. We are really grateful for being here among this amazing group of people that has been so inspiring throughout the day. So thank you Columbia University. Thank you, Juan Eredos. This is a photo of our studio in Mexico City. Lanza Telia was founded with other very specific plan in 2015. We knew that Lanza was going to be a project in itself and then it would span until there were no boundaries in between Lanza and our lives, which actually happened. In Spanish Lanza it's a noun but also a verb. It's an action and so we believe that architecture is an action. After some years of practicing individually, Alessandro collaborating with architects as Mauricio Rocho or Frida Escobedo. Here we have a floor plan of the opening exhibition at Archivo Design and Architecture in Mexico that Alessandro did with another colleague, Rodrigo Scandone, and an image of the Victorian Albert Museum, some of Pavilion by Frida Escobedo with whom Alessandro did this project together. And me lecturing in San Paolo and collaborating and developing some curatorial projects. We have here an image of an exhibition at the San Paolo Viennale, at the Museum of Modern Art in San Paolo Viennago Vardy that Guillermo Viznique with me as he's seen develop and a floor plan of, it's the conceptual scheme of contemporary art exhibition that I curated in an contemporary art cultural center in Spain. So after all these, we happen to be together living in this very amazing building by Oscar Neymario in San Paolo. When the Mexican government after building a seven kilometers long bike path in a margillan neighborhood in the north of Mexico City realized that they had planned no restrooms for it. Alessandro was hired to mend this situation and we decided to do it as a team. Restrooms were not the only lacking thing at the bike path but also vegetation, shadows, and mainly any kind of infrastructure that allowed people to gather in the public space. So we designed some restroom and shadow modules exploring their relationships in between inside and outside. We usually use references as driving forces for each project to help us focus on a specific concept and try to go deeper into it. So because of having to supervise the construction of this project, Newborn Lanza moved to Mexico City where they actually stayed until now. We started to work from our living room and we got an invitation from Saloto Buono, an Italian office to participate in a book after Super Studio Five Fundamental Ads. We were selected to be under the topic of law which we liked a lot and we wrote an extract from a Super Studio text exchanging some parts to introduce our biographical story. We just re-read this text a couple of days ago and it made much more sense now. So I'm gonna read an extract. At night we both redream all the architecture we had separately produced. We redream all the buildings we had built and all those we had lovingly measured. We dreamt again of our love for stone, steel, crystal, of that catalog of for an oriental satrapy certainly written through a fear of death but also written with a furious love for a life of reason for a rich and barred life filled with all the shades, transparencies in glow of marble and mirrors. So these are photos of almost every bed in which we slept while we were living in different countries. The idea that is present here and that we think it's important for the way of doing things at Lanza is the concept of atlas, of selecting and collecting reality pieces and putting them together to find or to suggest a meaning, sometimes a new meaning. So when we move to Mexico, I have this, we have the empty apartment and we have this housewarming party and we start to use the slide projector I bought like a Japanese projector that only allows you to put two slides at a time. So we start playing to super juxtaposed to two slides at the same time of my grandfather. So we start playing with this layering of background and figure at the same time. For us, this was our first project without a client. So at this moment, we took every project or any idea we had very seriously. So after finding Alexander's grandfather slides, the connection that was there in between this process of superimposing layers and our work is the idea of putting together several meanings in a single spatial concept and depending on how the user focus his or her own perceptive lens, they will experience something different. When curator Jose Sparta invited us to do an exhibition design for a series of shows that were going to happen at Hume's Museum. We decided folding screen that the museum could store in a very small space so that they could reuse it. We decided this folding screen out of wood and brass and because we were still working from our home in the ground floor of our building, there was this wood shop because we wanted to control the production of the folding screen from close. We decided to work with this woodworker with whom we've been working for four years now. The exhibitions that you see here have been taking place since four years now and we hope they continue to. First one was on Jesse Krotowski, a Polish theater director. So we wanted to create a very dramatic scenographic atmosphere and this second one was on Californian architecture critics, Termacoy. So we wanted to give it a much brighter atmosphere. This is the third and last one till now on Young Cage that Hume's Museum put together on their own. At some point a final year student came by to interview us for his thesis project about architectural representation, Alejandro Marquez. Some weeks later he called to say he wanted to work for us and it was perfect because Isabel was starting to work at Lee Gaspes for architecture being the executive director and she was going to spend more time outside the studio or home. So we accept the proposition. First Marquez's challenge was doing this model for our first expansion of a house. We had a trip to Spain so we asked him to make the model and we just say goodbye. So when we returned this was his model and he was hired. So that project, this is a Felix Gonzales Torre's piece. It's called Pools that actually saying about two things cannot touch each other. In this case the water splits from one place to another. So being the project and extension, we actually were building another facade in front of the jassing facade. It was a blind facade, the client bought a small piece of extra terrain so let me explain the story. The house had a real problem in the living room. It was very hot, it had a greenhouse effect. So they want to change all the facade. We made a lot of options and at the end they decided that they didn't want to touch the house because they had a very apprehensive relationship to it. So we decided that the main objective to make the hot go away is to make more crossing ventilation. So there was another problem that the rooms didn't have a hallway to go to the second room. You have to pass through the first room. So we got the idea to make a second hallway to organize the rooms and the heat on the living space actually changed a lot. At that moment we made tattoos, we're still making tattoos. So we had to pay an employee and we also needed a space because I was tired of opening the door in pajamas. So the tattoos were the side job that actually was financially in the studio with this. We just wanted to give a message to the students that it's normal to be broke for the several years of practice, so don't worry and keep on. So with these tattoos we're allowed to move to our first office. It's still our same office till now. This is Alejandro Marquez working on the floor. And because of that first tattoo, the brother didn't want to. Well, the story is we received an email about having another appointment for his big brother. And the brother actually wanted a tattoo. So we were super confused about if the house was a house or a tattoo or where it was going to be. So this house is in a forest between Mexico City and Toluca. It's a very fancy housing complex. The terrain is 2,000 square meters. We were impressed when we got there. We wanted to make the house privately because they were very close to the highway and there was a lot of noise, like constant noise. And the houses around that house were very yelling or terrible. So we decided to have this wall around the trees. And so the house is a single floor house. And it has a adjacent building in front of it. So we wanted to have surrounding to take some part of the woods by our own. We wanted a house that could contain nature. So we wanted to domesticate a piece of the landscape in order for it to become the domestic garden, the family garden, but still being a forest. Throughout the process, the client cut much more trees that we would have loved to. But still, we are happy. We spent one year designing the house. And we've been two years building the house. So this house is the same age as we are at Landsa, I think. So it has grown with us. We brought lots of side construction photos so that you can have a sense of how things are made in Mexico. It's a very crafty and handmade base construction system in general. So we get to work really closely with workers and craftsmen. We're doing many tests for this lattice work. After, yes, as I was saying, almost two years, the house is almost completed. And the client moved there a couple of weeks ago. So through these years, we were doing lots of exhibition design because there were temporary projects we were allowed to experiment a lot. Because those were public clients, institutions. They were not so, they weren't going so crazy about what they wanted. And they had to maintain the discussion and the conversation in a professional level. So we were enjoying this kind of projects a lot. This is a show on Wundergerso, an abstract Mexican painter. We designed this series of U-shaped forms made out of straw. This was an adventure because we had to introduce lots of tons of straw in the museum. And at some point, we received a call from the curator that there was a bag next to a Lucho Fontana picture that we sold it. And we promised we would never use straw again inside a cultural center. So this exhibition had eight curators working at the same time, each one with a point of view of Wundergerso. So we wanted to reproduce a painting in three-dimensional space. And each curator has his own cell. So the straw bale worked very well for isolating noise and the temperature because we opened the space after, I don't know, how many 15 years. It was closed, hopefully, because of the sun. So it was interesting to having an empty space. But if you go through the space, you actually see the people inside the cells. This is a competition for the Lucho Museum. We were continuously refinding geometries that we had used before. And we were working on redeveloping them. We decided for this competition to use the perimeter of the patterns that the pavilion had to be and reproduce it with a more organic curvy geometry. We also didn't win. But everything we, at some point, designed stays in the back of our minds and continuously comes out again. We started getting some projects published. It's always nice to have some acceptance of recognition. This is one of the last exhibition design projects we completed in our first year and a half of life. This is at the Mexican National Palace. And it's on the public three-story collection. In Mexico, if you're an artist, a self-declared artist, you don't have to pay your taxes with money, but you can pay with artwork since 40 years now. So people have this idea that artists are giving their lost pieces, their war pieces. And this show was trying to show the country. So this was the tax office. It was the first exhibition doing here. It was, I think, around 3,000 square meters. I think it's the biggest building we've made because we couldn't touch the walls or anything. We didn't have any misographic infrastructure. So we decided to build the infrastructure permanently for this space. So we did these frames to hang exhibition panels. We work a lot with physical models. As you can see, this allowed us to work very closely with the curator that, of course, wanted to move panels from side to side until the very last moment. There were about 300 paintings and 50 sculptures. So we decided that we didn't want to show the paintings in one wall at the same time. Instead, we want to have a time and a recorrido. This panel is allowed to have moments of intimacy throughout the show, closing the cross views and allowing you to spend more time in each part without creating rooms. So at this time, we've been making a lot of exhibition design. We did a lot of projects that we didn't actually build. This was for a museum underwater. We start testing our carpenter also, like doing replicas of chairs we liked, doing furniture for offices, doing research in drawings. This is a series of vernacular houses in Mediterranean in some book I found. And redrawing them in axonometric, Egyptian axonometric. So try to define when I was drawing outside or when I was drawing inside. This is like a regular meeting in our office and some other models we would like to show and back in the yard we can see it just. This is our Jesse Cancelina. This was about one year after moving to our office. We are still a four people office. So we were approaching all scales, like furniture as architecture and architecture as furniture and the small scale projects all of us to, as I was saying, to experiment more and to test out concepts and ideas. And I think it was the first time we had like more projects at the same time. So doing the same scale models and drawings helped us to actually realize in which size we were thinking. This is the biggest thing we had had so far. So, well, this is also drawings for furniture. This is like past year, a little bit more, having more ideas. There was supposed to be a dining table that it's actually activated without the human. So when the human uses it, it breaks it. So it has like a certain way of dealing with the non-use. There is also an exhibition design within Argentina where each curatorial project also converts into the center. Two years ago we were one of the winners of the Architectural League Press for Young Architects. We are very grateful to the League for having support us to do actually a piece of architecture inside the gallery. This means that mainly only other winners arrived with ready-made, very nice things. They were a very nice bunch of people. And we spent three days covering white paint, trying to build this curvy wall inside that blinded with the walls of the gallery and inside of which we built five dioramas depicting our work. Yeah, the main idea was to erase the architecture from the exposition and not to be one more piece. So at once when you got into the room you couldn't see the piece. And after a little bit of curiosity you approximate to the curvy wall and actually see the dioramas. The dioramas are placed in the regional orientation so the curvy wall responds to that matter. It was also a political issue in that time because Trump was elected and the wall was starting to gain attention. So you actually were crossing the border or the wall to see the work we did in Mexico. So we're going to keep some other photos. So this is a table that we wanted to start drawing in elevation. We didn't want to start drawing any plan for the table. It's a table for 26 people. The client is also a client tattoo. So while I was tattooing him, he mentioned that he was going to have his second anniversary and he rented a gallery. So I was like, clean space, big table, let's do the table. And just we played with the optical illusion of having different heights for the table and different relationships to it. The office after two years. We kept experimenting with different materials, different shapes of the same thing. You said the furniture that is activated by the user and the next step towards a medium-sized installation that it's actually a group of spinning panels. At one point, we earned the Fonca grant. So in Mexico, we have like 400 of these police stations. They were built in the 80s. They were supposed to work for surveillance or to call an ambulance or a fire for any emergency. Right now, they're underused. So we redraw all of them. There was no information. We drew the map and tried to transfer them into public infrastructure, having a water tanks or small libraries or urban compost centers or even playgrounds. They were at the end, there's 16 typologies we have in Mexico where we're shown as a moment near to the table they built. At the end of last year, we had a collaboration for the first time with other three architects, Toa and Alberto Dereis, inspired by this idea of equilibrium in Mexico City in between water and built mass. We erected this pavilion with earth blocks, done just with a pressure machine or on a pond. The walls are three feet thick, but still they are transparent through the holes. So this contradiction is very present. This was one year after the earthquake from last year. So this material, the money we got to do the pavilion, we use it to buy the blocks and then use the pavilion as just an excuse to buy the blocks and then send them to the community center to continue building it. So this material is going to be used at Oquilan, this small town for a community center. The blocks are just simplemente apoyados, there's no concrete or anything and they become very liquid. The workers just put them and after one week they just grab them and took it to the truck again to send them to the final destination. We're almost there. So just to finish, there are projects that we haven't managed to materialize and they keep coming back until we have the chance. So for years this small library pavilion has accompanied us and now we hope to build it in Sao Paulo. Thank you. Okay, Martin, Janco and Michal Janak were the first being today in the morning here. So this is your moment. They were 8.30, they were. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's been really a pleasure and all these days like it's wonderful. So thank you very much all the speakers. So we're called Plural, we are from Bratislava which is in Slovakia, in central Europe. It's a capital of Slovakia, 60 kilometers from Vienna approximately. We are a small studio of three people, sometimes four depending on the collaboration but the core is three. Martin established the studio 10 years ago and I joined in 2013 so there is a kind of a generational gap between us which is interesting and also that's what influences us in a way. But we will also talk about our kind of pre-conditions of our work as we are in this theory block and it's difficult for us because when we are talking about it we thought like okay if it's from theory to practice maybe for us it's more from practice to theory as we are now more engaged in academia. I'm doing the PhD in Faculty of Architecture in Bratislava and we also started to more theorize our environment especially the Bratislava as a city because we have been fascinated by it and we have been fascinated by it as a condition that is not usually seen as pleasant or good or is seen as something that has to be changed. This is a project by Collective Val which was an artistic architectural collective in the 60s and the 70s consisting of conceptual artist and two architects and this is what they produced. They produced these projects that would kind of reflect the architecture of that time in a way that these were the monumental projects and it also shows that perhaps this could have been possible in that time in Bratislava. Bratislava it's interesting because it's a product of 20th century before it didn't exist as it is existing now it has been basically colonized by Czechoslovakia after the First World War and since then it has been rapidly urbanized and so it doesn't have this kind of a classical tradition or a tradition of classical urbanism and it still doesn't have this kind of an image of itself it doesn't know what it wants to be or it sees itself as something completely different that it really is. So all these kind of regimes in 20th century all these new ideas of what the city should be like came to the city as a tabula rasa and tried to overwrite it. So also the theoreticians and historians called it unplanned city because so much in the city was planned but was put together in a more unplanned way. This is the map we did as our endeavor in trying to document what Bratislava is. We call it project Bratislava and two years ago we conducted a workshop with students and we tried to do this more logical study where we would try to draw how we see Bratislava so you can see this kind of a different island of different urban conditions and we deleted the areas which are more mixed and this is how you see actually also perceived Bratislava as some kind of a very discontinuous conditions of artifacts of islands that collide in certain areas and there are various urban ideas and also various sizes. You can see, yeah, for instance, you can see the modernistic estates, the huge modernistic estates on the outskirts. There is not the whole Bratislava. Actually Bratislava has a footprint of Vienna even though the population is maybe one quarter. This is one of the largest modernistic estates in Europe. It has almost 200,000 inhabitants. It was built in the 70s and the 80s and all this is the core of Bratislava like what was before the First World War Bratislava was only this. So you can see it expanded rapidly and until 1970s it didn't have actually any kind of a regulation plan of how it would expand. So it would expand very dynamically and speculatively in a way even though it was planned. So you can see it in this sketch of one of the most important architects, Stefan Svetko. And here you can see various artifacts of projects which were not built but they were planned to be built in the 70s or 80s and he put it down. And also this is a story of Bratislava that so many of these projects were planned but only fragments of them had been implemented such as this transversal axis which is pink. And he proposed the various projects on this axis. Only one has been built is the famous inverted pyramid but also other public facilities and buildings were to be placed there. So first the regulation was put, only one building was built and then nothing else was built. So it created this kind of a tension and very complex situation as could be also seen. For instance here which is a different situation in the center of Bratislava and you can see blue foam is the structure from the 19th century then the white foam is the department store from the 60s and the orange foam is proposed regulations from 10 years ago. And you can see like even despite all the power of the government back then it was not possible to implement the idea of the modernistic complex in its fullness like you can see the situation being kind of awkward and complex. So this is our environment and this is also how we are perceiving the architecture because we are from this environment as something that is more free and but also that can allow certain complexities out of autonomous architecture. So this is a continuation of our research project. We mapped actually the outskirt of Petroalka, the largest modernistic estate and we've seen that on the perimeter actually it's being occupied by a new structures and along this ring certain new linear city is becoming to be. So there are these kind of inverted situations where not the total ideas are not implemented in the fullness and also the in-between spaces are being occupied. We documented it in this at Russia way and also in video and photography and others. You can see it here. So very complex situation on the outskirt and it complements the Petroalka in a way that it's all that the modernistic estate isn't. So perhaps that's why our position as architects is something that we see ourselves as in the position of this kind of instability and we have this kind of a tendency to use the minimal means to do the maximum and to use the form perhaps monumental and very specific form in this kind of a very unstable situation to establish certain relationships as is seen for instance on certain exhibitions designs or for instance in our proposal for and project for the bookshop which we've seen as something even though it was a bookshop and it was an interior, it was something public. So also the form had to address this kind of a publicity and so we use this monumental form of staircase to make it, to signify the publicity and also to signify it as a point of the map. Also what we see ourselves is perhaps represented in this image of Bruce Neumann dance on the or exercise on the perimeter or square. It's establishing this basic relationships by architecture of we see it inherently as something public and by very specific form we can address something that is very uncertain and unpredictable as could be seen in this project. It was a seminar pavilion for Slovak National Gallery and you can see all this complex situation here where actually the gallery is Renaissance courtyard building with the new addition from the 1960s, a very monumental one. So it's creating this open courtyard and the Slovak National Gallery wanted to do a program there during the summer but the space needed some kind of a definition but a formal definition so by the minimal means of this spatial grid the space of the courtyards was measured as you can see here in red and it allowed to establish certain possibilities of a program to happen there. Quite frequently we use references to discuss certain ideas, special ideas basically but also to relate ourselves or our work to relate to the history of architecture. We are not scholars so we work with it in kind of a naive way where we basically strip the reference or the precedence to its basic essence and we use it as some kind of a guiding principle throughout our projects or throughout the preparation but also later by explaining our project. For example here we were fascinated by the this in-between space by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and it became some kind of an image or some kind of what we wanted to achieve with this house in a house that we did a couple of years ago and there was a certain need to maintain a delicate relationship between the plot the garden and the house so the house was set back from the street line and it was surrounded by another part of it called outer house and this way we created some kind of in-between space that is neither a house and neither a garden but it's some kind of mediator between these two environments and so we can say that it's a question of privacy but it also somehow questions the traditional dichotomy of the interior and exterior of the house and garden. But it was also a pragmatic this division of program into inner house and outer house was also a pragmatic. We wanted to be very effective so we comprised all the basic dwelling program of the house into a very compact volume of the inner house which is quite a moderate size of 12 by 12 meters so it's not a big house but we by enclosing it into some kind of extension called the outer house it gains a new quality or the we somehow were able to work with this contemporary paradox that we architects have to be extremely effective or cost effective but at the same time we would like to achieve some kind of a generosity or spatial experience so in this sense we were able to or at least we think we were able to achieve a very clear formal plan but also a very diverse one and interesting thing about this is that you have basically the same rooms in all the corners but the way they are open towards the outer house and the space in front of the window the part of the outer house which is once a patio and then some kind of a narrow corridor and then some kind of a terrace that opens towards the garden makes each of the rooms unique in a way. Another symptomatic thing in Slovakia is that public authorities, the state and the cities they try somehow to avoid taking care of the public program or the public buildings somehow trying to, so they're somehow unable to find the proper use to it. This is also the case in Žilina where there is a synagogue which the city gave back to the Jewish community but the community is so small and weak now in Žilina that it's not possible for them to take care about this building. So they made a call to use this building and we have become initiators or we have become part of initiators of the renewal of this building together with a group of public enthusiasts from the same city that have already some kind of cultural center there and we have initiated this process of transformation of the synagogue into a new cultural space in the city. By the way, the building was designed by the famous German architect Peter Behrens. It's almost unknown, only a few experts on his architecture know about it. The process was, for us, something completely new. There was no funds, there was no plan. There was, it was based on voluntary work. It was based on small donations and small grants and there was a lot of people involved who tried to somehow define the way it will work or how it should work. There was no coherent construction documents so it was a complete insecurity in a way. For us architects that usually or traditionally we are maybe trained or used to environment that we can control things, it could be really frustrating. So we had no other choice but to find other strategies or find other ways to deal with this situation. So we decided to selectively or productively lose our control and we had to learn what to choose or what is important for us and what we have to keep under our control on what can be just left for the others to finish or to contribute. As this might seem a disadvantage, it also has one big advantage that is time, which is the luxury that not many of us have today. And we used it in some kind of real-time testing of different spatial ideas for the building. We called it pre-openings. It was basically once in a while during the construction process and the gradual process of transforming the building, we opened it for the public. There was exhibition or there was some kind of special event and it was not only good for us to test the architectural solution to make it grow only into extents that are somehow appropriate for the particular place and particular context. But it was also good to make the whole initiative more visible for the public to acknowledge that there is something happening there and to really start to believe that this could really happen because it's like this kind of project is kind of, in terms of its importance of the building or the size of the building or of the investment, it's kind of unprecedented thing in Slovakia, maybe in whole central Europe. What we learned about the building through time when we worked with it is that in a quite short time of its existence, it's less than 90 years probably, it changed its use numerous times. First it was a synagogue, then later during the Second World War it was used as a silo for grain as a storage, then later it was rebuilt into a theater and then later it used as an aula of university and later as a cinema. So what was fascinating for us was that this building was able to sustain all these changes in a way that it didn't damage it in a way that wouldn't be reversible. So to use Aldo Rossi's terminology this propelling monument is something that is some kind of example for us that this is like kind of architecture that we are really interested in and we would like also to do in future. So something that is able to survive. In the end the final design is quite simple, it was just dividing the space into a half wide gallery and half synagogue, it's divided horizontally in the center of the space and the bottom part is used for events and exhibitions and the upper part serves as a presentation of the building itself. But it has been a very interesting experience for us and we learned a lot about control, about the need for a certain openness of the project which learned us something that we also do with other projects now and that is that we need to keep in mind that our project has to be open at every stage of the design, then later construction and later its use and post-occupancy etc. So in a way maybe we can say that with these experiences we have somehow learned to enjoy this insecurity. So thank you very much. The beauty of the work, the quality of it, how cheerful it is. Also what's the concern that all of you have with the places where you're working, either the cities in which you're working but also the societies that you're part of and even the environments. There's always references in all cases to for instance the economy and what's the way that you're making the best of the resources, limited resources to work with. There's concern that often cross your presentations about variability. What is the way that you can introduce heterogeneity in dynamic that is simplifying what cities are about, materially, aesthetically. There's also a kind of a concern of kind of something that cross all the presentations in a bit, it's a certain bitterness about your limited slot that you're given to work and I think that's something that it's part of the task of being now a practitioner that we are all facing a moment in which basically there's not that much of a demand of what we do but still there's great efforts in occupying a space and the results are really meaningful and again changing in the places where you're working. But I would like to start with a change in the context that is quite something that it's very important in shaping all your trajectories. Many of you can basically from Europe or work in Europe or are shaped by European traditions and that's something that somehow pose a question of what's the way practice is changing. In many cases the people that you refer to as your antecedents are people that work in a very different context. They have public commissions, they were successful in competitions because competitions were something else than what they are now. But also societies were very different, they were facing different dynamic. Cities were not that much shaped by investors, international investors. Dynamics were very different. When we break down that, it feels that you're talking of things like Erasmus programs, the fact that you've been living in many different places, that you have the opportunity to do research. Like somehow you had opportunities that previous generations never had, but somehow when it comes to practice, the space you're given is much narrower. You're basically not finding that many opportunities to work in the public sector. There's not that many kind of commissions that have to do with the expansion of welfare state, public space, public institutions. And somehow I find that there's a difficulty, a very specific difficulty on being trained in traditions like Aldo Rossi and having Aldo Rossi or CISA as a reference. But then having to work for private clients with the smaller commissions that are driven mostly by economy. So maybe this is something that we have to address, because this is kind of an articulation that you're all dealing with, the need of some sort of take a tradition that was built on base of the kind of celebration of societies, equalitarian societies, welfare state, the capacity of architecture to build a space of commons. And then you have to bring that into commissions that are mainly private housing or gardens or commercial architecture. And for me that's something that is very exciting. I must say that it's a huge endeavor and a very valuable one. So maybe we can start with this. I think we live in a different time, not only because we have different opportunities, but because we also need to share them with many more architects than the previous architects had to do before. So the fact that nowadays, at least in Portugal, the number of architects per capita is huge. So the kind of works that maybe at a certain time in history would be easily spread by the few architects that were practicing. Now with the lowering of public investment and the increase of number of architects makes us forces to be a bit more flexible in what we do or what we accept and trying to find other kind of work. Because the perfect time where an architect was the hero of the city doesn't really exist anymore. So I think it's really about adapting to the conditions we have. I don't know if we can actually change the fact that there are no public commissions so what can we do with the private ones? It's also maybe that this could be the reason why we are more interested in an open architecture that perhaps is built for a private client but in 50 or 100 years it could become public, if you never know. So maybe that's subconsciously that's why we are interested in this architecture not very specific for one year but being open to other ones. And also being somehow interested in well each project being public or private has certain aspects that are more collective and that's why maybe we are interested in those aspects of those projects even if they are built for private clients. In our case because the ones based in Latin America maybe our case is a bit different because in Mexico at least there are many things that need to be done much more than in Europe somehow this is generalizing but I hope you understand me and despite there are not many public commissions people have the feeling that they have to do the things on their own because they've been doing it like that since ever. So young architects have the opportunity at least to do things no matter the scale but I have the feeling that we are always doing things it can be a table, it can be a house we usually only show things that are already I materialize so we haven't brought designs for housing building something we're trying to get into but because of having been educated in Europe and based in Latin America I really see this huge gap in between what you are able to do in places in which constraints are much higher like Europe or the States and in places like Latin America in which things are much more free, organic, self-done I guess Alessandro's the Mexican part of Lanza can talk about it better but this is my opinion I do believe we have three personalities in Lanza like the private, the public and the contests the free one so the private one you always deal with a client that shows you a bunch of internet images so it's kind of annoying I mean it leads you to somewhere but at the end you just don't want to see anything about that you have the public clients that they have more money and they're not so apprehensive about the space you're going to make and in this case we have the opportunity to make a femoral architecture that in our way of seeing it or understanding it it's the most permanent one because of the how do you register the things that are happening now and the contest as you say I truly don't know which projects are the ones that win pavilions right now what kind of thinking behind the architecture is the leading ways of doing I would like to add just two small details the first detail is that even while doing the smallest piece of architecture for example a house for a bird the I think architects should always look up and bring in Caesar and Rossi and Ginahar etc to discuss a bird house it's somehow an insult but they don't know about it so it's fine and the second thing is that I think there's a lot of we talk about a lot about ecology and sustainability in these days and there's a certain sustainability understanding that what today so let's say we don't have the commissions that those architects had 20, 50, 60 years ago but we have a lot of commissions now that those architects would not do at all so maybe what is happening now is that we are the young practices of today they have the opportunity to create a model that maybe in 50 years is going to be again in this innuendo somehow a big part of the audience here it's an audience that will graduate soon for instance will start their practice in the next months, weeks or thinking of doing it maybe one thing that cross your presentations that for me it says something of the time but in a way it's very productive in all your practices it's a mixture of optimism and kind of not optimism a mixture of kind of being very aware of what's going on in the world but also being happy to having the opportunity to do things this is something that somehow it's the engine and it's following many of the independent practices that as you Felipe said are very much contributing to bring our discipline into criticality making it politically active in order to this kind of maybe stupid thing but in my opinion quite serious of how to be optimistic at the same time being not optimistic and knowing what's going on in the world I would still say I mean I don't know where we're going to be in 20 years from now or 50 years from now but I doubt that we will say more with the projects we will do at that time assuming that we grow somehow than what we say today with the small commissions we have now a level of effort and sweat and passion that we have and an energy that we have that probably comes with the age that I or that we might lose with the years that I think makes every of this very small jewelry boxes we are asked to do much more special than maybe what the big architects are doing today we enjoy more architecture than Norman Foster this is a fact there's no discussion maybe I would just dare to add my favorite quote of Franz Kafka that there is infinite hope in the universe but not for us so maybe this kind of contradictory situation is just needed and it's not possible to somehow overcome it or it's not even desirable I think we still need all both these or all these forces to somehow negotiate to to continue to produce work I think that the bitterness you're referring to comes from this idea of the architect in a role in which he or her she wants to do more than hero she's asked for but this is a positive driving force for me and there's also the joy and the fun of trying to subvert what you're given and do much more trying to cheat or to tease the situation and often much more and the pleasure of finding a material the pleasure of designing a detail the pleasure of seeing something flat become something in 3D exists in any kind of project so I think we decided a long time ago that as long as we were having fun at this we will continue and that was the main goal yeah and taking advantage of architecture right now is understanding that it's completely free so there are no rules I mean we have gravity, we have clients but we also can play with those very much to have freedom I think it's if we think about that it's a bit hard to be an architect nowadays or a bit harder let's say if we don't have fun in what we do it's gonna be even worse so I think it's more about that we really need to enjoy what we are doing so that all the other boring parts or things that we would like to change but we can't are not so important and so heavy for example the first time the house that Philip showed with the tower, with the pink triangles only when it was really built and painted it was like this really happened and that moment is very special and very important and we think all the work we had until then it was worth it because we see things happening so I think the optimism is at the same time realizing that reality is reality and we need to face it but it's easier if we enjoy doing it but we need to remember that there are problems and things that we cannot change in the daily life of an architect and I think also the architecture lives in the drawings and in the models I mean you don't have to build it always important that you don't build everything you're thinking or projecting because five years later you actually realize that it was a mistake the idea you had so I'm glad that architecture can live in the paper also and you get used to it and to have those ideas always floating in the office and mixing around and then you have another that is going to get built so you just have to live your own world and try to express it when you're able to our partner Hamid he often says maybe architectures should be a little bit like like being an adolescent a teenager if you don't regret anything that you've done before maybe you didn't do it properly so it's sometimes good to regret a few of the things that you've done it means that you grew somehow I was going to say that the magical thing about going a step forward towards materializing something and this is the lovely thing I found about this very particular symposium that it's about constructing is that when you start building you engage with different actors that you haven't been related to at the academia or at the studio in between architects so you start talking with people from different disciplines, different professions different tasks and that's also a very joyful moment in which you gain some acceptance so it's essential to look at the situation and find certain aspects that could be you can play with in your favor you work with what you have and find some beauty in it but there are limits of course and it's like I love the last chapter of architecture of the city or like even it also says architecture never can be avant-garde you have to use politics to change the city so I think all of us should be more political be architects or doctors or lawyers and we all should be more political citizens in order to change the city and the problems but in a way all of you are facing huge political disputes in every single presentation in which you were referring to a situation that is very political and that is broadly dispute not only in the places where you're working but globally maybe this is an opportunity to get a little bit more in detail for instance I would like to refer to some of the moments of each presentation in which I think that you're facing big things and of course you didn't have the time to get in depth so maybe that's the moment because those limits can probably be explored there and what's the capacity for you to theorize on that and also to build a position through your design so for instance when you were talking about Bratislava and the way the city is evolving you were talking of many difficulties that have to do with whose gaining agency in those transformations what's the impossibility of architects in many ways to affect that what's the way global capital is affecting places like Bratislava large or Europe so maybe this is something that you can explain a little bit how you negotiate without how you basically position yourself and what is that that you can do through your work on that for instance in your case Isabel and Alessandro in a similar way to Mihal and Martin you're also facing with the fact that for instance water in Mexico City is a huge dispute that is producing inequality it's very much dividing society and you're working with that also you were talking about taxes when it came to design this particular gallery to show the artworks that artists are giving us payment for the taxes so you were also touching something that is crucial in Mexico and it's in the heart of inequality so maybe you can tell us a little bit about what's the way you could really intervene those realities through design and what's the way you conceptualize and position yourself through your work and in your case you were talking for instance of Porto and the way Porto it's been totally transformed by gentrification but a very particular kind of gentrification that comes together probably with the fact that Portugal is attracting capital through tax incentives and that is becoming this part of like many other places in Europe that is becoming sort of a maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit offshore location and that's happening through architecture and through the value that historical architecture as you very well explained happens so all of you are kind of your projects are pulsing the capacity of architecture to conceptualize to take position to think of the way design is part of huge disputes political disputes but also disputes that are calling for new ways of thinking about the agency of architectural practices and the way we understand what's the way the materiality of architecture is part of larger discussions and larger dynamics so maybe we can do a little bit of a round in which you tell us a little bit more of how you dealt with this what is the way you found your architecture could find ways to be part of that and to make a change there or not and what's the way that you could position yourself through your work in this particular political and kind of cultural political, social, environmental disputes maybe you want Mihaly and Martin you want to start maybe I will start and Mikhail will continue right now or it's in almost the last 20 years in Slovakia most of the cities are shaped by a private sector it's almost 100% state is not investing if it is really like a small percentage of the whole amount of the city fabric this is actually and it's like 10 offices that do build the whole Bratislava so it's very homogenous it's very washed out almost and it's like a thing that we cannot somehow, that there is no discourse and even if there was some discourse on this level we wouldn't be able to participate because no one is interested in what we think about it or no one calls us for some kind of as you saw there is no, we don't have any residential project no collective housing for example if you compare it to the northern or western part of Europe it's like the collective housing is kind of big issue and it's supported also by this many times by the state so what we did is also what Michael showed is that we did some kind of our personal research or reading of the city to somehow define it and to pose questions we did a workshop and then we did an exhibition and this way we try to somehow make our points legitimate to gain some strength and to be a voice in a way but it's like in the process I would say right now yes we are trying to take advantage of the situation that the city is small and almost everyone knows everyone so if you say something that has that is of a relevance that it's then most possibly you are also hurt so we are trying to take advantage of it but we also want to do it step by step and really analyze the city in a way that we intuitively know what do we like about the city what do we like about the condition that is seen as disadvantages most of the people think that it's bad that Slava doesn't have an identity or such an image of itself we think of it as a quality that there is this kind of instability that there is no this kind of identity of ok Bratislava is this and we can then capitalize on that now it's like it's still an open kind of an identity so yeah I just wanted to say that it's often it's pointed out that Bratislava wants to be like Vienna or Prague but it's not possible it's basically not possible that the fabric is not there anymore or it never have been there so it's a completely different substance yeah we love how rough it is how discontinuous it is and and we see it as a potentially as a model for metropolis in 21st century with its morphological diversity of the complexity it offers so we want to build on pen and perhaps build some kind of a theoretic model on that but we are still use it as a something to read but I think that's what it is it's essential to see all these disadvantages as possibilities for something better so referring to the water issue which I think it's so important in mainly in the city that's like Mexico city of course when when the Europeans arrived the Spanish arrived they found a system of interconnected lakes that was Tenochtitlan and they slowly start to dry them out out of hygienic reasons but also out of ignorance and century after century the city start losing and losing more lakes but the very deep problem in the 19th century and 20th century when the underground aquifers start to be exploited so much that actually the city celebrated its sinking today you have points in the city sinking as much as from 40 centimeters to 1 meter so from 2 feet till 5 feet which is a lot I mean Venice is sinking like 2 millimeters a year Mexico is sinking 1 meter a year it's really crazy so to mend this situation you need such a political engagement from the engineer point of view but what we can help more to as architects I think it's in the educational point of view so we try to keep on writing articles being kind of engaged with receiving students or lecturing and communicating and of course the pavilion the community center pavilion with and Alberto attracts attention on this very specific issue of the water but it's such huge issue and it's involving so many factors that architects need like more people involved and trying maybe to be a bit more optimistic I'd like to say that the story behind the taxes collection the history collection which begins 40-50 years ago when some artist friend of Cicados one of the very important muralists David Alfaro Cicados and Diego Rivera was sent to prison because he couldn't pay his taxes and Cicados suggested to the ministry that artists should pay should be able to pay their taxes with artwork so in a way and maybe regarding Mexico as a young democracy from a European point of view I have the feeling that if you come up with a very brilliant idea that that isn't going to cost money to the government somehow you can be listened consistency resistance and try to keep things you want to do and not go to the floor I mean most of my colleagues actually want to build housing developments or make money with architecture or being an architect means to build whatever sorry I lost the word what I'm trying to say is that when things when things get actually rough with some kind that you want sorry I lost the idea please you keep on so in Portugal it's a bit different than Mexico the main problem that we are facing right now in Portugal or it is a problem but it was also a very good thing so Portugal was in a very very big in Europe in general but I think Portugal even more than the rest was in a very big crisis nothing was happening and the prices went super low of everything but even with the prices being super low nobody was actually being able to buy anything even banks were not giving loans to private people so it was a very complicated moment and we actually decided to come back when there was still a crisis on so I don't know why but then we were lucky that suddenly a series of changes in laws and opening the investor the country for for outside investments everything happened a little bit at the same time and everything to develop a little bit too fast and not control so for example it was a golden visas program it was the fact that the north of Africa was super unstable Portugal was in the corner very safe nobody cares about it so it was a safe spot to go they also changed a lot of laws in Portugal regarding refurbishments so for example until 2014 we were forced to if we would want to do whatever works in an old building to incorporate all the handicap accessibility a lift and it was basically impossible to do it in the typical plot of Porto that is 6 meters or 5 meters wide by 15, 20 meters deep to put a lift and a staircase and a staircase with the dimensions for a handicap so it was impossible to work to do renovations in the city center so actually people started leaving so they left the city center because it was impossible to live there no schools, no parking so it was almost an abandoned city and it was a good thing that actually they changed some laws and people started reinvesting in the city center to reactivate it and it really reactivated the problem was that it happened in 3 years 4 years and suddenly it's a little bit too much and the few people that never left the city center or the few people like for example as we went back to live in the city center before this boom happened everything started to be a little bit too expensive for the people that were already there so I think the main problem was there were no regulation in time so suddenly it was important to have money coming and investment happening and the economy evolving but in Lisbon it happened before but it took 5, 8 years Porto is a quarter of the size so of course it happened much faster and the main problem was that there was no regulation but in terms of our work is a bit complicated to actually be able to help stopping that problem because if we don't do it someone else will do it for sure so I think as architects sometimes we try to educate the client but he wants to make money and you should be able to fulfill his wish but maybe trying to make it in a way that in the future if Airbnb collapses or there are way too many companies actually now we don't have enough student housing so it will be transforming student housing so it's not all terrible and maybe a way of incentivating that would be over taxes to people for long-term rentals instead of short-term rentals to make it financial available for it to happen and we can start opening it to the audience so those that want to make questions start raising your hands and I will help directing the microphone but for instance okay Felipe identified that there was an aesthetic discussion going on in regards to how to deal with history with references like the making of history also being selective with modern modern that actual that looks like pretends to look old so you were very much identifying that as a design problem and you were addressing it right? We do and it's a problem because the most powerful people in this chess game we play are not the clients that come from the private sector are not us that do the design we are the artists are the people that evaluate the projects and we have 120% of the power in their hands and sometimes we get letters saying that RAL 600 whatever it's not harmonious and because of this one year of permit process has a reset button and goes back to the beginning and this triggers a domino effect because the client assumes we are incompetent because what is RAL 600 and something you fail on that so it's our fault and we try to negotiate we try to talk and they tell us that no because people like old buildings they like this and they show us a photo of a development that was built last year looking like the 18th century architecture and they say no that's not true that's actually not the case and you try to argue, you try to fight this but on the other side of the discussion this is what the public sector is actually doing but because this becomes such a norm the private sector understands that on a substantial level this is a thing so they come to us and say well I want you to do a building for me and it needs to look like this they already told me this is what it has to be and this starts even getting worse and when we try to negotiate and we try to argue both the people that make the decision and both the people that spend the money they are truly convinced that in 2018 we should build buildings that look like the medieval ages this is an issue this is a big issue and what Anna was saying about the price and potatoes of our daily routine which is we are put in a position where if we don't do it trust me someone else is going to do it and we don't get paid and maybe I'm going out of topic here but it's crucial and even more in an academic environment to say this this is a job, we need a salary at the end of the month and if we have a practice like we have a practice of ten people these are ten salaries Portuguese salaries, low salaries but still ten salaries engineering, site supervision two years of work when you join all of these nitroglycerin bottles in the same bucket you create the conditions for an explosive context and this now it's becoming an issue because between the absolute lack of understanding of the general population towards what architects do my parents still don't understand what I do the fact that 99.999% of the population accepts that things that look pastiche are okay, that's what we should do and that we are not even properly paid in the process the real question is why are we doing architecture I mean this is this is a just to finish what Philip was saying for example in the building that show with the marble facade we found a way to trick the municipality to say it's natural stone, they like natural stone in the front side we changed the tiles for natural stone in the same color of the original tiles so they accepted so it's really trying to find a way of if they can of course ask what kind of stone but they didn't so we managed to do it but only because it was in the back facade because of course in the front facade they checked what kind of stone we were proposing and all those things so it's now I just wanted to go back to the first question that Andres brought on the table at the beginning of the conversation I thought that was really sharp and smart and somehow thanks to the question also I realized how important it is to have this kind of symposiums nowadays because clearly our references as you were referring Andres the way that we have been educated and still nowadays our main references are of practices that were raised and defined in a period of time which reality is so different from ours and especially in Europe and of course the worst thing that we can do is just to consider that that's not happening and perpetuate the way of doing and because that's going to be really frustrating we clearly cannot operate anymore as they did and not only how we design but also how we communicate things our discussions and topics of interest etc and of course what Felipe was mentioning in that process of in this conflict moment at the end of the day we have to keep on going so maybe the way we do it's defining as Felipe mentioned a new way and there's some projects that clearly are related with the new ways of doing as a plural project those for instance those projects that are clearly collective and then suddenly the role of the architect is split and disseminated in the process which has good points because we participate more in a stronger manner in the participatory process, in the design process, in the construction process in the after construction process so suddenly the architect is more involved in other roles and I'm referring I want to bring that back on the table because I want to ask not only plural but also address point of view because clearly for instance in Spain we have had a lot of projects like that one after the crisis and for us it has been super interesting like suddenly a new way of doing was possible but with a lot of good points but a lot of bad points because some of those projects substitute public projects and at the end of the day one of the bad consequence was actually the finance the way those projects were financed so the idea of a discipline that suddenly started to be a voluntary act so suddenly kind of a labor of love so we did it in a volunteer manner and I'm seeing this because I think that still despite those controversies that we faced in Spain it's a new way of doing and that's a lot of possibilities so my question to plural is how do you what do you learn from that by the way the result of that project that I follow it's amazing and I was happy to see images today what do you learn from that how do you see if you have other projects like that or which are the future of those practices I think I tried to say that already in the presentation that it's certain positive attitude or a will to accept this unforeseen or this kind of insecure situation because for a long time we tried to somehow fight it to somehow persuade people that the way it should be it's better than I don't know what you want now and now we somehow I think we learned or we are still learning to distinguish between this kind of productive losing of control that you keep part of the project which is extremely important which is the essence of it and then there are parts that also can be open or maybe decided later maybe this postpone decision is our it also makes the process very long we are very very slow in designing which is also not a very good strategy today but I think we are trying to do to be in a way to survive but at the same time not to be too fast in making decisions and maybe trying to to see if the design works in some kind of prototype way even in the process and then we then we do the necessary decisions at the last moment of the design process I don't know if that answers but in this case we did you get paid? for the new cinema project? almost nothing no because but in this case we went or we entered the initiative as initiators ourselves so we didn't have any expectations of that was also in terms of construction documents part of it was developed completely without our guidance we just saw the printed stuff and said okay we need to check these things later at the construction site and then it was like re legalized later in some kind of legal way that it's possible to do it I think a little bit related to what you said did you feel that the fact that it was a that you as an architect were you were initiating the process did you feel that people looked to with respect more respect or less respect if you would get paid for that project in terms of an argument if it was a normal commission did you get treated by whom by public or by where were because it depends there were so many people involved in it and everyone was not paid so it was like collective unpaid initiatives it's like something yes it's something that we don't want to repeat and it's not possible because we would starve to that but it was just one it's definitely not a an example how to do it in future we just wanted to try it once we have two questions one here one there maybe you want to start and then you go it's about payment I think it's for everybody very difficult thing because sometimes you really really want to do a project and then you have to make this decision if you go for your like principles or you kind of go for like the nice project right it's really good to try to continue to convince clients that what you do is extremely valuable and why would they pay a doctor or a lawyer fees that they never negotiate they just pay what they ask why do we always have to negotiate and I think it's really good if we I don't know your personal situations or the situation for each project but I think it's very easy for clients to say you're a young architect to see how eager you are to pay you not enough and we've even had it in Holland that like I showed you the competition for the Amsterdam housing earlier today and they invited all these young architects and they offered us such a bad contract I never had it really really low fee but in the contract that was actually mentioned that if we would die during the project that we would have to pay money to the client because they would suffer I mean like this is how it basically becomes so what we did is we just called each other and then we said collectively like we knew they were running out of time is like we want to do this project but we do it for these conditions and we do it for this money and they agreed so I think also by talking to each other and trying to collectively improve situations I think is really important and I think sometimes we can be a bit more brave about it maybe I think you nailed it in a way that the answer is that there is it's not a coincidence that most of the politicians are lawyers and for instance lawyers have fixed rates it's like by law in Slovakia and architects don't so architects have to negotiate so not in each country but for example in Germany or in Austria it's fixed how much money the client should pay for public projects and so it is possible also within EU regulations that you can fix it and then they abandon the system and we actually get paid half of what architects got paid 10 years ago and then we don't even talk about inflation so I think even in the Netherlands everybody feels it's like this dream country for architecture etc but also the conditions for us become really really bad and we are trying really to change it but I think you can only do it as a bigger collective instead of individually it's like in other words you have to become more political yeah but it doesn't mean a bad thing you don't have to become an activist I don't mean being activist I mean just being political in a way that you can arrange the collective action you can act collectively not individually that's what is political I once had a client and I said okay we spent two more years on this project two more years longer than we agreed for so we want to renegotiate the contract because we continue to work we really don't understand because it's really nice that you can do this project I was like yeah but you know I need to eat I just had a baby I need to pay him food right so and then they understand and we could renegotiate but you have to tell them you don't do it out of love only so you need to live somehow no? but Mihal you were referring also how basically practices could be empowered by understanding practices something more collectivized or more based on association also like which is very much connected to the case that you're talking about for instance this competition in which basically all the participants were teaming up to kind of claim the conditions this is something that is very interesting but Mihal was referring to that I think that maybe you can expand a little bit on that I think it's a very rational thing to do it's not something theoretical I mean for instance like I know how it is somewhere else but in Slovakia lawyers have a chamber of lawyers and this chamber can lobby in the parliament and in the parliament there are 150 people and they can do basically anything and you just have to convince 76 people and you can establish anything you want and instead of that like mostly architects what they do is like we have to inform you have to inform the public and we have to make them know what good architecture is and how architecture is beneficial and in time it will come but I mean there are 76 people that can do anything you want if you convince them so I think it's just simple as that First of all thank you very much for your presentation and for the super interesting presentation. I have a question about the space of tiering in your practice to go a little bit back to sort of the students and what will happen let's say after graduation what happens fairly often maybe in the school we were talking a little bit yesterday that some students after graduation they probably get hired by big corporate firms and in which case he or she will work on projects that could relate in some ways to sustainability to technology to certain extent maybe even to politics but probably not to theory and now considering the current condition of the field that I think we got even a better idea after your presentations you know with all the problems related to both private and public commissions I would like to ask how do you find the space for keeping theory as a central element in your projects beside the research that you can conduct related to academia or exhibitions Thank you So for us the only way of working into theory is either lecturing but mainly at the studio either doing an editorial project mostly self publish or you ask for a grant to publish it or doing a research project like the one Alexander was planning with the Fonka grant so these kind of grants allow you to work maybe for six months or one year into specific subject and applying for grants it's kind of job in itself but I mean you have to find an equilibrium to be able to do both I think this is a very good question because I think what ends up happening at least in our case because as I said we start with the praxis and let's say the theory or the juice we can extract that we could call theory comes from an empirical sequence of events but in the end we speak five languages there's a language that me and Ann and Amit speak between the three of us where we use certain kind of words there's a second language that is the one that we use within the office because the office includes a series of people that we need to argue and discuss and convince and maybe it's not as clear for them the motivations of the office as it is for us then we need to talk with a client and we use words like beautiful and gorgeous and nice and I feel cheap cheap is very important and we talk with them in a way that it hurts in our soul a bit but we do it then we need to talk with the contractor and we need to tell them that it's actually tilted it's not straight it's actually pink it's not white and we need to say it several times because sometimes they paint it three times because the three times we said pink someone passed by and painted it in white and they actually try to explain us that we are wrong and then finally we need to talk in lectures and events like this and we can make it seem very glamorous and funny but 99% of the time is painful as you cannot imagine so for the 1% we have here we have 99% of everything else that academia doesn't teach you they teach you how to do museums how to write short stories and narratives they don't teach you how bad it is to have a meeting in the municipality with the client where the guy just fucked up but the client thinks you are a moron they don't teach you this and even if they do and even if they give you the example case they don't give you the feeling you feel on that day so this idea that you have to speak different languages because imagine the following situation imagine one of our small private clients showing up and we try to explain him Palladio and we try and we keep trying and we keep failing and the guy just asks us yes but what are the tiles the bathroom and this is the difference of these courses like if someone wants to know how the handle is going to look like and you are talking about symmetry and renaissance and whatever you are the one that is wrong it's not him because he didn't ask for that he just asked for the bathroom so how do you find the no what Philip said everything is true it's a fact unfortunately but I think an important part is that if we only talk about tiles in bathrooms we get bored so if we don't find the entrance or the theory behind those projects for ourselves has a practice nobody else will care about it but if we don't it's a problem and sometimes it could be much easier just to say yes and do but if we face some projects then the huge effort sometimes we have to convince clients to do something other times the clients just get about the axle shit so we actually need to be the ones discussing among ourselves what to do, what can be interesting or not because there is no discussion at all with clients so we have the two opposites those that only care about bathrooms other technical things and the ones that only care about numbers and if we make a stripe facade or a white facade for them it's the same as long as we fulfill all the square meters and all the the prices and the money so it's really about us has an office trying to find the interest in the architectural discourse because in our case we are reaching in and doing some small research projects but the main thing is while we do the projects and while we build the projects where we get our fuel to actually then find this is an interesting topic and maybe we research on it but as Filippo is saying the practice comes first and the theory evolves we have a question, please, please during the presentation I said I use this metaphor of fighting the windmill every time we find the windmill it's the moment where we are trying to generate theory, let's say, we are trying to create something more because if you want to make good money in architecture just say yes to the client that's the whole message that's the easy way to do it if you really want to do something meaningful most of the times, not always but most of the times you will not be aligned with the client you will create an enemy, you fight you say beautiful and nice and all of those things to try to disguise the actual message it's like a Troy horse somehow you try to... Yes, I think you have to have different strategies to try to send a positive message to the students for example our first strategy we ask for at least three weeks to do a first presentation so that we are sure that that presentation is going to be attractive it's going to be seductive doing physical models we have realized that clients have less doubts about what you are talking about than with images or floor plans or drawings in general so take your time to do a first very good presentation and you will gain many steps then if this doesn't work completely we have the second strategy which is good cop, bad cop you can guess who is the bad cop and who is the good cop so we play this during the construction process usually if this doesn't work we have a third strategy which is trying to team up with the constructor so that you get things done without the client realizing and when he or she gets there things are ready and sometimes when they see it's there they start liking it and if nothing of this works we just learn a new strategy from a friend Emmanuel that he calls the silence strategy so the client says I want this and you just don't answer for days after some weeks he writes back I don't want this I think we have been talking about communication issues about how we are political etc etc etc and I think it's been super exciting but I just want to make a very simple question very straight forward which is once babies are born once your babies are out there what do you think you live to the public what do you think you deliver to the public I think having the dinner invitation months later after you deliver the house is quite a complicated meeting so at one point you have to abandon the house or the project you never stop building you always have the drop that's invading the house but you have to be quite critical when you stop building your project you have to go back to the first sketches and see what the whole process was all about and when you actually see the construction finished it's been two years now for example the client is not the same so and it's sad architecture ended it's like a part of I didn't have a baby but to keep up on a project it's a painful thing but at the same point it's a relief but you don't know what that is architecture for us I think it stops at the moment you give the drawings to the contractor well thank you very much there's so many questions and hands raised but maybe we can do it informally because there's now a possibility thank you very much