 Good afternoon. Welcome back to the second part of our symposium, Constructing Practice. It is a pleasure for me to introduce the guest speakers of our third panel entitled Collaborative from Collective to Transdisciplinary, which brings together three practices that have formulated and tested alternative forms of elaboration within the practice itself and across other fields and practices. We are delighted to be joined by the following guest speakers. Laurel Broughton from Welcome Projects LA, Suzanne Eliasson and Anthony Jam from Grau, Paris, and Guillermo Lopez from Mayo, Barcelona. Andres Kake from G-SAP will moderate the session. Please join me in welcoming Laurel Broughton, our first speaker. Well, first off, thank you to Juan and Rique and Amal and the whole Columbia team for putting this whole day together. I found the morning panel to be sort of emotional watching all of these practices sort of divulge their sort of inner workings and secrets. So I'm going to be, I think of it sort of more as telling a story here. And so I want to welcome you to Los Angeles. It doesn't rain in Los Angeles very much. So our umbrellas have become useful things or useful tools for other things. As an icon, the umbrella appears over and over again in this case as a kind of graphic or part of a cute branding pun. It appears as a magical instrument in children's stories or as an object that conceals the potential of some sort of conspiracy, such as with Josiah Thompson's Umbrella Man. Or as a kind of semantic prop in the annals of surrealism, as Magritte might say, it's silteniously playing here as both a repeller and concealer. Or as a flexible transient architecture, as in this 1955 photo by Renee Barry of a woman in front of Ron Champ underneath an umbrella. For us, though, it is the umbrella's capacity to gather and to protect that has provided a useful way to think about how to formulate a practice and particularly one that meanders through traditional disciplines. And so Welcome Projects is just that. It's an umbrella that holds what can at times seem like very disparate work together. Through all of it, it is the binding interest to explore our relationships to the things around us and how we can see and interact with them in different and potentially new ways. Our work oscillates between ideas or architectures or utilitarian objects, and I'm going to use the umbrella as it appears in a handful of projects as a sort of subterfuge, if you haven't picked up on that already, to talk about the types of work we do and how we practice. So the Village was a series of drawings that was published in Zing Magazine in 2012. In them, there is developed a small urban enclave constructed from everyday objects. The sort of self-inflicted requirements of this enclave were that there would be a civic building, a big box store, a strip mall, housing of several economic classes, a recreation facility, a museum, and an office complex. Elaborating on some of those programs, the bowler hat became the villa, the cordless phone, a high-rise apartment building, the makeup compact becomes a multi-level gym with a swimming pool, the open book, a trust-structured big box store, and finally an umbrella, which becomes a museum with a rotating restaurant at the top. Each object stays simultaneously itself while becoming something else. This last September, I was invited to contribute to the annual architecture and design issue of the magazine Art Papers. And this issue, the theme was swimming pools, and not just any swimming pools, but swimming pools in Los Angeles, a la this famous David Hockney classic. I sent them this big conceptual idea. They responded, ha, no, we're not dipping our magazines in swimming pools. So if they didn't like the wet magazine, then what about a dry one? But like the sort of soppy mess before, a magazine in a clear pool-shaped bag was dismissed quickly on logistical grounds. But I continued doodling. And what is useful about the doodle as a practice is that it is the agent of double-seeing, upside down, backwards, and in between. The poodle, as I came to think of them, is a daydream. They exist somewhere between a common word and a shape. A poodle associated freely are made of colored pencils and pen. And some 30 poodles later, I submitted what I suggested might be marginalia, tiny and pop-up scattered throughout the issue. And unlike most things that would be included in that issue like scholarly essays or slickly designed pool projects, I figured that they would be oddly ragged, maybe stupid, imprecise, and made by hand. I also figured there might be a good chance the editors would say no. When I went to my mailbox this spring, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the poodles had become the cover stars of the issue. In Shedd House in Malibu, California, which was a collaboration with Michael Boyd, we jump in scale from the doodling of swimming pools to the design of actual swimming pools and the houses that go with them. We were approached by a client who wanted the Southern California fantasy of modernism, but they wanted it new. And so the party of the house is essentially two Shedd figures that are rotated perpendicularly against each other and form a kind of team plan. Completed in 2016, these photographs were taken after the clients had moved in and the interiors were obviously completed. This is the intersection of the two Sheds, which forms an open, continuous living and entertaining space. And then the extents of the Shedd figures are more contained spaces for reading and sleeping. But my favorite images of the house are the ones we took before the interiors were completed, capturing the house suspended in a moment where it could be a stage for almost anything to happen. The three bears might be waiting for you in the kitchen for some porridge, or you might have just missed Alice as she rushed in to get her bathing suit at the point on the interior where the two Sheds meet. And so practicing under a kind of umbrella allows for a finished building to be an instrument for storytelling in ways that architecture might typically shy away from. In 2009, like most of my friends and colleagues and a few people earlier in the morning, I found myself amidst the great recession and unemployed. And it was during this time that I began a project that, depending on context, is the one that we are probably most well known for. Welcome Companions was a line of objects and accessories. This is the first Welcome Companion that we produced, wagon number one. It was produced originally in a very limited edition, i.e. made by me. I'm also standing in that photograph. A very limited edition essentially meaning a series of one-offs and eventually placed in several shops in Los Angeles and in New York. And everyone who saw the wagon called it a puppy. And it was quickly published in a series of different places, but in particular Newsweek. And it was its publication in Newsweek, which I think actually doesn't even exist anymore as a magazine, which led to a kind of practice where the actual physical making of ideas into useful objects could be a viable option. And so the project of Welcome Companions today is comprised of 14 collections. Each reinterprets everyday objects and accessories to tell stories. We seek to inject a sense of play and suspense into the objects we interact with and depend on on a daily basis. And to suggest the novelty that function isn't wholly dependent on utilitarian form. Welcome Companions are produced in limited editions in Los Angeles and the umbrella even reappears as part of our logo mark. And they've been featured in publications including the New York Times, Vogue, Paper Magazine, and they've been sold in boutiques globally. And of course we sell them on our website in our web shop at WelcomeCompanions.com. And our smallest umbrella was produced as part of a sticker sheet that was commissioned originally by Urban Outfitters. But the umbrella has also appeared as a real object in our work. As used as a kind of building material in Gallery Attachment, which was a project done in collaboration with Andrew Kovacs, which was sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Where composites of multiple objects, the umbrella being one of them, are constructed and arranged to become a kind of field of play or intervention in a parking lot in Chinatown. And then as a few of us here today were, we were invited to participate in this year's Chicago Architecture Biennial Make New History. The request was a model of a photograph of an architectural interior to be included in a room which was called Horizontal City, Room of Plants. We chose a pair of photographs of Le Corbusier's brief flirtation with surrealism, the Bestigli apartment. And what has always been fascinating about the Bestigli is how the design conceals what would be an unobstructive view of the Parisian skyline. The high garden walls blocking all but the largest urban monuments, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. But oddly in blocking them, it also scales them to small objects. In our model, a magic shift occurs with the suddenly small urban landmarks resting on the walls above a new urbanity of objects, a top hat, a cordless telephone, and an umbrella, among others, making a new city below. But for us, an architectural model is never simply an end in and of itself. Each of the wooden objects has a dual life, first as a building and then as a prototype for a collection of toys. Taken out of the city, each object can be disassembled, mixed up, and reassembled into endless configurations and odd combinations. The toy set will eventually be produced under Welcome Companions as yet another category of object that will go out into the world. And then to finish, we recently moved our studio from this building and I'm sort of sad to see this illustration go because the building inside the building seems to be a good way to sum up our practice as always being in search for a kind of multiplicity in how architecture and design can be in the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for this invitation. It's a pleasure to be here. GROW is an office of urbanism and architecture based in Paris and founded seven years ago. We start the office with four people and we have in common the fact that we were a student of a French urbanist which is Jamel Clouche and we work in his office which is the name is LAUC. And we start the office with the idea to create a collective intelligence. It means that the sum of the group is as the each individual. And we choose a name for our office. It was GROW and GROW means gray in German. Gray is not completely black. It's not completely white. It's something in between and in between it's quite large. And in this sense, gray is a metaphor of the place where we work. It means the contemporary city, sort of suburban city, more or less weak, more or less disconnected, monofunctional but we always work in metropolitan aspiration. It is within this metropolitan condition that we speculate. I think it's important for us to say also that constructing and building a practice is also an economical project. We are I think we're quite fortunate coming from middle class families in the western world but we don't have the luxury to not need to work and we don't have the network for work to come to us. So we do speculate in order to get work but we try to speculate keeping in mind the subject which is our interest and the subject that we are concerned with within our profession is housing. It relates a little bit to our background. Certainly we come from, we studied, we both studied in Versailles and with Jamil Kluge. I studied for a year in Chicago, looked at social housing, the Robert Taylor Homes, etc. and we have always wanted with our practice and with the work ever since we were, we graduated to deal with the spatial and the social conditions. And for us housing is let's say the programmatic aspect which allows us to do that because we look at housing as something that relates to the urban condition. And this drawing shows I would say the main focus of our office and the objective that we have in the everyday, in our everyday practice is making city with housing. As I said it relates to the idea that housing is a reflection of the city and it's, even in weaker urban environments housing always relates to an urban condition. But it's also in the time that we operate starting the office in 2010, it's also a societal and a political challenge. We operate in Europe and in Europe we were able at least in France in the 90s in the early 2000 we were making mixed use neighborhoods, urban renewal projects and now there is a housing crisis, quite large in France, enormous in Sweden which we know also quite well. And this requires us today to build large amount of housing, it's often in monofunctional settings. And so the question of how you can make an urban environment, how you can make city with housing is a real problematic question for us. So how do we do that and how do we relate to that in our work? Well the first aspect for us is to look at what it is to live, what is housing today from within housing. And we think we're in a very interesting time today for that because the role of housing is shifting according to us. Shifting because the family composition is shifting, because relationships between the private environment, work, leisure, etc. is blurring. And all these aspects, technology also is allowing us to deal with more shared spaces. And so the role of housing is shifting but it's also becoming for us a more central role in the urban environment. It's a place where sometimes you work, you spend more time and it becomes essential. So that's a first aspect. But it also to us, it relates to the issue of form. Because from the moment that you have to build large amounts of housing, the form that the urban form that we produce is an issue in itself also. And that is something that we feel is very little discussed, at least in Europe and in France. But it has an impact on how we shape our cities. So the relationship between the urban form and the housing from within and how we live is essential to us. And that's something that we deal with in every project. To work we have a set of methods that we use. For example we work a lot with references. It's important to us here, you see a lot of housing typologies that are existing projects by other architects that we have redrawn. And that we use as a tool when we work. We draw them and then we look at how they can produce applied to different territories, how they can produce continuity relationships on the urban scale. And that's an important way of how we work. We have a typological toolbox that we keep adding on to and of course uncertain typologies relate to specific climatic conditions or cultural ones. It's not something that we can just pick and put on the map, but it's something that we work with. And we also work a lot with colors. Color is a tool for us, very important. It's not a matter of aesthetical concerns, it's more about how we can express and have a common language. We use a color code, of course green relates to nature, but for example we use blue every time we speak about economical activities. And we use red for housing. It helps us housing in a model, in drawings, in plans, everything. It helps us within the office to have a common language and to discuss things easier. But it's also a choice to put red on housing because it highlights the urgency of the question for us. And that's our main focus. And all this motivation question, our role within the profession and the link between architecture and urbanism. We are not only architect within the site and we are not just urban planners dealing with the master plan. We work on the link between these two. We work both for the public sector and the developers. And for us it's really not the same way of working. When we work with the public, we try to push them to go from the urban scale to the quality of housing. And when we work with developers, we also try to force them to go beyond the limit of the site or the building and to try to make connection with the environment. And this is a sort of zoom-in and zoom-out method. For us this method is a way to imagine how to produce an architecture of today. It means connected with the environment and how to imagine a more pragmatic urban planning based also on architectural realities. And this is for example a commission we did for the public sector for the city of Bordeaux, south-west of France. It's a five-year project that we did with a landscape architect, Claire and Michel Courageau in Coderron where 45,000 people live. The task was to get the city under evolution of this existing neighborhood where there is a strong life quality here. But an unclear urban condition and this lack of understanding and vision creates a lot of conflicts. It means that projects are systematically blocked even if there is a strong need and demand for housing here. And to clarify this, I would say bazaar, we identify four existing urban fabric. The first one is individual urban fabric with villa, swimming pool and private garden. The second one is a big collective urban fabric with residents and big trees. The third one is a sort of mixed urban fabric. And the last one is a shop which is traditional urban fabric in Bordeaux. And the goal of the project was to radicalize and optimize each of these urban fabric in introducing new housing typology adapted to each of them. And for example, if you take the individual one, the idea is that we can make something denser without losing its individual qualities and natural qualities. And for that, we started sort of research at the office on this kind of housing. And for that, we came to Phoenix in Arizona to visit some product by Alfred Biddle he did during the 60s. He has built several projects that create a proximity between individual housing and the natural environment in a strong way. And everything is connected with a structural grid and the grid is connected to the streets, so to the public domain. And this picture is a case to the apartment he did during the 60s and it's a three-unit apartment. And following this system, he developed other projects. Here it's a plan of three front-end apartments. It contains 59 apartments. There is a very strong grid which is connected to the public system also. And it is a reference that we push a little bit. And then when we come back to Bordeaux, we discuss with the city and also with the developers about the potential of this individual urban fabric. And one of them asked us to test a sort of prototype in Bordeaux. And the question was how to replace one house by 15 dwellings. So I think this very short development of a project which has been going on for five years doesn't allow you to understand a project, but maybe to understand let's say the relationship that we seek in each project that we work with between the architectural typology and when we say typology it's let's say the interior plan, the living qualities of housing and the relationship that it creates, that it has with urban fabric. It is something that we use when we work on optimizing existing conditions because we work on projects, existing sites where there are issues of densification, but it's also something that we work with when we start from scratch. We're not going to go into this project, but just to give you an illustration, this is the kind of reversed approach. This is a work for a private developer. And so the private developer, it's called Vossa Kronan, it's a Swedish developer, wants to build 6,000 new dwellings on a natural setting, a natural land that is empty today. And the idea behind building 6,000 dwelling for the developer is not the idea to create an urban condition. It's just because on this site there is a closed subway station and in order for the city to open the subway station, they need 6,000 people dwelling, so about 13,000, 14,000 people here. So it's an economical issue for the developer. But we worked with, exactly in the same way I would say as in Koderon in Bordeaux, we worked with starting from the living conditions that are the objective, starting from the architectural typology, working on prototypes of urban fabrics that can be produced and that can create urban condition. The thing you look at here is you see the blue as economic activity. Of course it's a diagrammatic simplification of it, but what's interesting for us in this scale is that when we speak about urban fabric, it's that it's not only about the spatial, the physical environment, but also what goes into it. And so for this project, for example, we work with other architects, Swedish architect, we work with landscape architects also. We worked with climate engineer who put in all their expertise into how this fabric can appear in Sweden in the climatic conditions. And we worked with transportation engineers, for example, who worked on the street system and how it evolves in the future and how the urban space should look like. And so all these conditions, and then you add the issue of affordability for housing, all these conditions come together in something that is in the end physical. It's a form, but this form has meaning. And this is the way we work in a lot of projects. We also redraw existing urban conditions and we draw them on this scale because we feel that this is from trial and error. We feel that this is a scale that really helps us relate to this. And making city with housing this issue that concerns us for us and working on this urban fabric scale is also our kind of answer to the issue of sustainability and more, I would say, resilience. But to the fact that we need, I was put off by the fact that we only have one minute left to speak, but it's enough, we're finished. I'm going to try to get back to what I wanted to say, resilience. It's our answer to resilience also is how this relates to the urban fabric and how designing for change also is designing urban structures that are able to support resilience. And just to conclude, we wanted to show you this quote by Ian McHarg, who sums up really well this relationship that we deal with between the housing and the urban form and who is a huge reference for us. I'm just going to read it to you. Form and process are indivisible aspect of a single phenomenon. There is no such thing as an abstract form. There is no such thing as a capricious form or unmeaningful form. Form and process are indivisible. If one wishes to describe an atom, molecule, crystal or compound, one can describe it only in formal terms. If one wishes to describe a cell, tissue, organ, organism or ecosystem, one can do so only in formal terms. All form is meaningful. Thank you. Our last speaker, Guillermo López from Mayo. Hi everybody. I'm Guillermo López. I'm here behalf of Mayo, an architectural office based in Barcelona and run by four members, four partners. First of all, I wanted to thank of course Juan and Enrique for inviting us here today and of course GSAPP for making it possible. I want to start this short lecture with an image that in our opinion embodies pretty well the way we understand architecture. And even if we don't see anything here, this is a work of art of Michael Asher. He was commissioned in 1974 to an exhibition at Claire Cooper Gallery in LA. And what he did instead of producing a set of objects or sculptures was in fact removing a wall. He removed the wall that would divide the private parts of the offices from the public part that would host the exhibitions. So what is the thing that is interesting for us is that in this case architecture or an architectural action can become significant. Let's say it has implications. No architecture, architectural justice neutral. Of course, Asher's lesson was for us important when he started with our very first project which was the design of our own studio. This studio was in a 40 meter long building existing in Barcelona. So what we did, of course, the first thing we were really aware that the way we designed this project was the way we were designing our own practice. So we could not detach the way we thought of our practice from this space. What we did in this space which was mostly in ruins with no windows and of course very divided because of that it was kind of cheap, I have to say. It was opening an exterior room in the middle, so we divided this space into parts interpolated with the street, this one. This was the patio. So this poly part and the rear part where we work. In the front part, of course, we have meeting rooms and so on, but we also have a small gallery. I bet this is the smallest gallery in the world. It's like three square meters. And we ran it together with a designer, Koto Kledet and with a curator called Moritz Kink. He was the former director of the single and he's now living in Barcelona. So we run all the three of us, this small gallery. And it's been important for us because we're really engaged in some processes of art and design that I wanted to take into architecture. While in the front part we have this gallery in the back in the rear part, that's where we work. And what we did was designing a 12 meter long table and where we work in a kind of horizontal hierarchical way. So it's important to understand that before doing this project we gather together with a lot of people from other disciplines. I have to say mostly friends, two graphic designers, two building surveyors, landscape architects and tour designer. So since we were in the middle of a savage crisis in Spain, we needed a very flexible structure and that allowed us to increase and decrease. So depending on the project we can work on our own or we can engage the whole table to do something. This light structure I bet that allow us to survive during all these years. And the important thing is that, and I will talk a lot about this during this lecture, is that we created a format for our practice. And of course we've been working with this idea of formats, not just in our practice but also in our projects. This is the first competition we won in 2012. Of course we had worked before together but very punctually. So we started as an office in 2012. I mean a serious office or something like that. So this was the plot. It was a huge plot. Due to the crisis in Barcelona there were a lot of plots that were empty waiting to be built. And we had to propose a kind of ephemeral urbanism so the plot was huge like 3000 square meters and we had a ridiculous budget. So what we decided instead of doing a project was designing some structures of use to design again a format in order to allow things to happen. So we did not draw even a plan. We just could write in a sheet of paper some rules, a set of rules that could be applied. So what we did was spending the most of the budget in creating a very light infrastructure with a lighting system which allowed not to close the space. So it could be open 24-7. And then we created that grid that allowed a lot of things to happen afterwards. Of course we were working with this idea of unfinished it and it was kind of problematic. We really like it but what happened is that people are not used to unfinished projects. So we appeared in all the newspapers in Barcelona as the creators of the Aglis Square of the city. Of course we were really happy being the most at something even if it's in Aglinas it's super good for your first project. But the provocation worked and what we achieved was that the project had started to grow. So we just set the conditions and everything started to happen. All these layers started to come according to the needs of the neighbors and of the area and finally it got made. But of course we don't use this idea of formats just in build projects. We've also been involved with addition and publishing and we were the editors and in fact we were here some years ago explaining precisely the format of this magazine. And it's been for us important to apply this idea of format to everything we do even this magazine which had a very clear structure which was really good for narratives to write narratives. Or of course we do as a practice we do not understand theory the touch from practice and we think of both as a whole. So this is one of the researchers that is ongoing in the office. Of course it's led by Yana Puchane but more and more it's starting to occupy the whole office and when she started to research about it started in New York precisely. And she started to investigate on the Waldorf Astoria which is according to Ramkul has an extraordinary building. But she of course it is but she realized that behind it there was a net of hidden yet very extensive net of these kind of ordinary buildings that were working the same way. So we kind of learned kind of three three ideas which we really like it to apply in. Hello. So how much better. So by means of this investigation and of course they almost the four partners while the four partners are into academia somehow. And we really believe that academia is a good place to test things and then break back to to work and push forward discipline. We started to think of three concepts that were here like the ordinary and there was the understanding the house as a system. And the other one the other one was thinking about generic spaces or the house as a hierarchical space. So departing from these three ideas contained in this investigation we started to think of applying them in our work. So when we won a competition of building a housing block that we just finished one year ago we wanted to to to apply and introduce this idea of the house as a format of and of no hierarchical house. Of course we had in mind this typologies of traditional domestic housing blocks in Barcelona which most of them had this same similar size rooms and we wanted to apply it into our project. And of course we had tested this before and in an exhibition we made devoted to the book of George Breck Space Dispasse where we created a set of generic rooms that would allow to become that become specific precisely. By means of the works of art and objects that were set there by the curator. So when we tried to apply this into our project of course the demands of the client had to do a lot with this. He wanted a flexible structure that would allow to increase or decrease the size of the apartment according to the changing needs. And of course we wanted we wanted that all these all these rooms had not a specific program but the inhabitant would be the one that would give it to them. And of course we had in mind many of the floor plans that we have studied before and this one is especially interesting. This is a really unspectacular floor plan I would say almost without queries but at the same time super radical. This is the San Remo and it was designed in a way that by means of simple doors you could enlarge the size of your apartment. So the building was not anymore a lot of stacked apartments but let's say a set of rooms that made it a huge organism. And this is the floor plan so what we did was creating similar sized rooms that allowed to be like reconfigured and so on. They are pretty small like 53 square meters but they look pretty big since they have this diagonal and the position of the bathroom is essential in this. Of course we made this set of collage trying to represent this idea of how objects can give the specificity to these generic spaces. And these are some pictures we really like them and we like those on the right side because they are so boring. I mean you look one by one they are boring but when you look to them as a whole they start to work. Of course we always create these kind of rules for all the parts of the building so for the floor plan as I said the rooms. And here we just reinterpret the tradition and got some of the let's say cliches that were used during the 60s and 70s even with the materials so we used them in the floor plan. And of course in the facade we did exactly the same we tried to make the most archetypical generic facade of the Chamble. I think we succeed because a lot of people think it's a refurbishment. That's not the first time somebody tells and we are really happy when that happens. So I could describe all the parts of this building according to a set of guidelines or a set of rules and in fact every time we enter project what we do is drawing it and after we try to describe the rules or the guidelines that we used to make it possible. Maybe it's a desire to make it kind of replicable. And if we had to make this exercise for our own practice I think there would be two rules and there would be maximum rules, maximum rules and always read carefully to the full notes. Thank you. Thank you for these excellent presentations. I will go right to the point. I propose three topics of discussion. The first one is in your work it seems to be great violence in a way between being super engaged and not being engaged at all. So I think that could be your first topic to discuss. All of you are referring to very particular urban situations that are very critical and at the same time your work could be seen as engaged in some moments also as playful and disengaged in other moments. So this is the first thing. The second I think it's occupying space. All of you are kind of your presentations are really could be read as struggles or battles to occupy space. In that respect that space is different. Your space is maybe the space of the city the housing crisis. Your space is also the space of media and even market in your case. It's also even the space of your office. And the third question that I propose is more intimate and it's very directly connected to what this this long day is discussing that is the production of your own practice. The making of your own through design and I think this is this. I mean your three presentations were really good at that. You were explaining how you get constructed. And what is important for me is that you were explaining that space where you're kind of emerging as practitioners very differently. For instance in your case is very much the narration and the storytelling and how that can be activated from objects media and how that circulates. In your case is a crisis housing crisis that is happening in certain places in Europe where you found the possibility of producing and constructing your practice. And in your case is a kind of a financial crisis that you address through the transformation of space that became the hub of a network of collaborations. So three questions are the ones that I'd like to start with. The first one are the tension between being super engaged and being not engaged at all. The second one is what is that that you do to occupy space and why occupying space is so important. The third one is the different strategies that you're deploying to. And what is that that you're detecting as an opportunity as a space to emerge as a practitioner. Who wants to start. Also by the first one the second one I cannot remember. I would like to think of myself as engaged but I also also have to say that there's a there's a lot of complexity in things. And for instance when I see Michael Asher works I think they're not engaged at all but at the same time they are super political in the sense that he renders visible relationships that were hidden behind. So for instance when we did this this square which was kind of controversial. You could read it just as a let's say autonomous exercise of doing a kind of grid but at the same time it was about provocating kind of reaction and it happened somehow. So of course citizens started to claim for more things. They realized that the budget was not enough or for what they expected at least. So architecture was a kind of a could boost a reaction. It was political in the sense that they could make it make some things happen instead of saying ideologically what you have to do. And that's part of our statement that politics are there but you can use them in a way or in another one. It's funny I think in preparation for coming today I probably made four different presentations because the premise of presenting the practice as opposed to the projects was a kind of existential crisis in and of itself. You guys are laughing so hopefully you made a few other ones. And I think you know one of those presentations was a very straightforward sort of chronological build up of I went to school in this place. I was interested in these ideas. I worked for these people I you know etc. And that and all of that I think is very kind of important in certain ways and has historically been important to sort of the legacy of architecture as a kind of discipline. But I also found in kind of the in your towards your question of being engaged or disengaged that it seems like most of our practices have come out of a certain period of time which is the sort of 2008 2009 economic crisis. Which either you know caused us to react to that in certain ways and so for me working in Los Angeles there is a very kind of heavy legacy of architecture in Los Angeles. The kind of history of California modernism etc. And then you know you move through the decades as you get closer to this time that that legacy kind of continues. But when I started my practice because of the because of the recession. So participating in that legacy was not necessarily an option. And so I had to both sort of construct a new way to imagine how to how to kind of produce design and architecture work. And I think that is the kind of tension where it's both connected to to a kind of larger legacy and context and also not connected. And I think there's also parts of parts of my work that connect to other other aspects of the context of Los Angeles that are not necessarily typically part of the kind of architectural context. Can say a few words about I don't remember three either but I remember you spoke about taking up space and maybe relating to that I think we do take up space in our drawings. But we in a way we take up very little space because very little of what we actually design or draw ourselves being built. I mean we we put in the conditions for other people to to build in the end dealing with urban planning. For example what we showed in Bordeaux it's a five year work we still do it and it's in the end to facilitate other people to come in and build. So I don't think we take up space but we do love space. We do because we really and that's a strong belief and that's in speaking of feeling engaged. We do believe very strongly that physical structures matter and that they have an influence on the way we interact and the way we and coming from France. Which is a country where it's not good to be simple. It's not good to have a complex thought in France. You know speaking about space is sometimes considered a little bit too simplistic. We don't use the word design a lot in France. It's almost it's you know it's something you use in English speaking countries. It's almost vulgar sometimes. No but it's true. But it is you know you have to start. But that's and for us it's this simple aspect of physical structure is very important. I mean even just going from yesterday we were in Paris we arrived in New York. You are not in the same state of mind and it is not just because of the shops because they're the same in both countries. In a way it's also about the physical structure of the city and this matter to us and this is something that we believe in and that we want to push in. And at the same time we do live in an apartment in a space and also this relates to us. So I think the issues that we push there are both related to an economical situation for sure. Housing crisis something that even being from our background which is you know we are not we don't live in the street but we have a lot of friends who have difficulties finding housing and so it's an issue that we are connected to. So it's both being in that situation but also strong convictions that we have because we relate to them physically I think. As opposed to previous panels the way Los Angeles, Paris, Barcelona emerges part of the conversation is not too vernacular not that much or maybe a little bit but not that much. It's not about kind of colonial feelings or the discussion of colonial feelings that divides. It's rather specific in regard to architectural issues like the housing crisis, the adjustments in walls. So I wonder if that's a little bit of a statement here that you are making as a group or as a panelist or as a panel or is something that you would like to discuss. I mean we could have seen for instance gaudy images and how that's the reference to you we could see you know but there's less of that here. It's a tricky question because of course we look to the past but we're not taking past as something for granted. I mean we take the things that interest us and which reject those which are not interesting anymore. So I don't know if I would make a statement about that personally. But what I wanted to answer and it has to do with the third question you did and somehow I connect with this one is thinking of our practice and maybe it has to do with the references too but since we're four and since we understand there's a complicated relationship with authorship. So it's kind of erased when you start the dialogue with other people so this gaudy thing would not happen in Maya because somebody would remove these trencades or whatever. So we just get to the nuclear things and because I think it works because it's also a format and a format is a set of rules that is an open structure that allows a lot of people to participate and involve them through some guidelines. So it's more about the format than about the content sometimes. I mean I think for me in an odd way Los Angeles is something that one has to get out from underneath of in terms of its history of modernism. And so as an architect and designer it's we're not fighting against the kind of colonial system or there isn't a kind of necessary material history but there is a sense of trying to get out from underneath a kind of idea about what it is. To be in Los Angeles at the same time as to play kind of play with it and play against it. Maybe again I'm not sure if I really understood the question but if we did I would say it's not a statement not at all. It's again I think and I think it's and thank you again for inviting us because it's a very interesting day to see all these presentations and I think what it tells us also is that we have an approach today we live in a world where you're supposed to multitask do everything change jobs every five months be able to do you know a lot of different things and the best way to work today is being a generalist instead of being a specialist. And I think what we feel and what I also read from other practices today is in a way we are choosing to be a specialist in what we do. And it's not because we believe it's the only issue but it's because we feel that this is the issue that we engage in and it's the one we're good at. For example we don't do we don't design public spaces we don't build public spaces. It's not because we don't have an interest in it we do but we feel we're less good in it than other practices and so there might as well be other people who do that. And I think the structures the physical structures that we design in terms of urban planning they can accommodate a variety of kind of urban of architectural typologies and there can be vernacular elements within that definitely and we would even feel happy when they are I think. But it's more choosing to work in a certain field where we feel that we can push this specificity and be good at it. And also because I mean for us we are small office and we also would like to remain a small office because it's a whole other way of working and so you cannot do everything. But this is super interesting because in a way France for a while and the Central European architectural context were reclaiming to review and to rethink the role of the expert and to open the decision making of design to other actors. It's very interesting that you're claiming and you're following a very precise political agenda that is very different to the one that we would find in the 60s. Whereas at that moment being political was opening the design process to other actors. What you're reclaiming is that there's a specific way of dealing with politics from the discipline from a very expert knowledge. This is a very unique situation that probably is confront this beauty of previous generations in your context. Do you feel it like this way? You know being politically the designer was to make a model so other people could so users could transform things. You're claiming a very difficult. I think it's definitely a little bit of a reaction to that but just a little bit. I mean I don't think we close what we're saying is not that we close the decision process to our discipline. Not at all but that we push in a certain way of the subject. But that being said it's true that today there is and it has been for several years in France and in Europe in general the urban profession is opening up participatory processes etc. Which is very good but sometimes the reality is that there is very little behind that. It's a lot of communication and we didn't show any of that today but we work with urban renewal projects for example where we work on site with the people etc. And it's very good when it's really done but a lot of times today it's also a matter of communication and it's also a way for the state almost to disengage in its responsibility because a lot of practices are emerging today working with the inhabitants, buildings, things from within where there are huge structural issues to be taken care of in these neighborhoods and the state is completely disengaging. And so it's also for us a way to say there is a housing crisis is something that cannot be left only to the developers and the state needs to be responsible in that profession and also our profession needs to take its responsibilities I think in that field. I'd like to talk now about media because both of you have been very engaged in media basically. You've been doing quaterns that has a great tradition and many of the research of KitchenLays is also something that was broadcasted to the media. Your work is occupying the media, hacking the media and introducing images in the media. Actually the beautiful Doodle Project is getting to the front page. But the two studies are very different. Yours is in a way quite direct. You're doing a research stance or a statement that is kind of published and you control that. You're kind of hacking these systems. Actually it expands even to urban or theater and everything is packaged with a sense of humor and kind of cuteness. So I'd like you to explain why you're doing this if you can and what is the way that this happened. Regarding our relationship with quaterns and that's really specific. It's not the whole relationship we have with media but quaterns is a very special thing in our wars because now it's over. But it was a really special thing in the office and it makes us think about what it means to publish architecture or how architecture should be shown today. We realize that there are a lot of things going on and a lot of images so the editor has become a kind of creator of content. So you have this immense reality and this huge amount of information and then you have to try to select in order to make a narrative. Of course it's just one narrative but of course that depends on who looks at it. I think for me my interest in media and the way I try to engage my work in media is an interest in audience. And I think it came out for me as a student of architecture in feeling like there was not really an audience for architecture or that the kind of ways that we were being taught architecture and sort of the kind of disciplinary conversations of architecture never got outside themselves. And so I became kind of interested in this idea that you could have this kind of disciplinary or avant-garde conversation that was supported by a kind of institution but there was never a way for that conversation to get outside of the institution because it was almost like once you were supported by an institution the conversation was kind of too big to fail. Like the sort of avant-garde project was in some ways too big to fail. I became kind of interested in trying to use media and images and storytelling in my work as a way to speak to an audience sort of outside I think where I originated which was in an architecture school and working for kind of small boutique architecture practices. And so I would say that that's really the kind of origin origin of it and there are times where it in some ways my natural predilection would be something more like a kind of scholarly journal. And I actually sort of like to force myself into a space where I'm confronted with addressing a kind of much broader audience for my design work. Probably there's already questions. First of all I thank you for the presentations. I love all of your work. I think what struck me in terms of the quick comparison between what happened earlier in the morning and what's happening in your panel I would say is color and maybe color and material, color and materiality. If we were to say that the previous projects in contrast accented materiality I think in all of your work color is extremely important and I tend to think that maybe color represents something immaterial. So for instance when you have a flag of a country that represents the identity of an individual or a collection of individuals you know the choice of color from RGB to I think Laurel's work is closer to CMYK. And in the studio mile I think there's always a dash of white added to a red that becomes pink for instance. And I'm super curious about whether this becomes a kind of representation of your attitudes or so. Can I start again? The use of color is a kind of a statement. I mean in Barcelona we were taught in the school that I was praising for materiality and for explaining how things work and we're not interested in that at all. We prefer a more conceptual approach to things and of course color is cheap so that's a good point for us in the kind of projects we do and it gives an identity by means of a very simple thing. So and again this idea of format, the format for us can get a lot of formalizations so it's different format to form and that has to do also with this idea of color. We could paint it whatever we don't really care about this final thing but about what's behind that, this kind of reflection behind it. I think for me in some ways originally the color was reactionary to the offices that I had worked in where things were primarily white except for a couple of cases. There was a kind of emphasis on whiteness and that the white would emphasize the form better than say color. So I think originally it was just a total reaction where I was like no everything is going to be colored and it's sort of simple in that way and the use of color has kind of evolved to the point where there is, I think in some ways like you guys there's a color palette that gets used sort of over and over and over again. But it's not, I think what was super interesting about your presentation was how indexical the use of color was as a kind of way of practice which I found super interesting. First of all we like colors it's true and it's something quite natural for us to say that the housing is red, it cannot be something else for us. Maybe during the night it's pink or something like that but when we work on architectural projects we draw in black and white like everybody because in this field everybody can understand this kind of plan. But in urban planning it's sometimes we have difficulties also to represent the scale and to represent the, I don't know, but on the A4 it's something that we have to deal with abstraction. It doesn't mean that the form it's abstract but we like this exercise not in an aesthetic way but really to be precise on what we want to say and for us it's really a way to be able to zoom in and zoom out. And the use of color it's like that. And we learn also from graphic designer because graphic designers also are really related to the painter. And for example Paul Rand, which is an American designer, he always talked about the, I don't know Matisse, I don't know Cezanne and for us it's something not, it's true that in France the graphic design it's not related to architecture. It's really to the world completely. And we like the idea that design and color it's something that we, it helps us to work. That's it. There's another question here. Thank you all for the presentations and I'm just trying to find what I kind of saw as a common thread between all the practices was maybe how personal it was to all of you, how related to U.S. people and kind of the way you're constructing a practice as a project in itself. You're, the work that you're doing is you're designing the practice by picking the products you want to work with. And for example with Mayo it's the office, it's the rules for welcome parties to the umbrella. And I was kind of interested in how in all of these projects there was an operation of scaling up or down. And how it seemed to me that this operation tests what you guys hold as values or what your theories and your rules are. It always sort of forces you guys to maybe amend the rules or change the way you're approaching things. And I was curious what you think like that act of scaling things up. For example from home to city and from sort of like the rules how these things change in terms of scale and how they affect what you thought before and what you want to do next. That's a good question. Yes of course rules as I said in these two final statements that you make some rules then you break some rules. Of course also are always related to a previous reading of reality. So there's a kind of dialogue in defining these rules among us as partners. So you try to get all this complexity and transform it into a kind of system that can be at the same time transforming into a form or into architecture or something. So rules are not like universal but they're really particular. And of course for housing we find a set of rules that are quite different. Of course you're going to find some analogies among our works and of course there are because they have to sometimes reflect on this idea of isotropy or the way how you are finally occupied by the space. It depends on a lot of factors and the inhabitants of the citizens I don't know. So we just set the conditions for something to have for the things to happen. That would be the they have in common I guess. I think for me that the issue of scale there's a kind of multiplicity for the to the issue of scale both because I have an interest in design as something that scales so that you can design a kind of system of things that that scale. But I think originally the sort of small scale of the object that we started to work at was out of a kind of necessity which is that I needed to have something that I could a scale at which I could work and produce and be in control of and afford. As a definite part of it. And and then you know the project scale scale up and down. I'm very interested in kind of the scale of of the city, albeit at this point it is purely out of a kind of specula it is a speculative interest. But I was also what I was also really not interested in when I started was I wasn't interested in doing speculation in terms of sort of competitions, which was why I started at a kind of scale of the object being that something that we could literally produce. Okay, so I'm a Simpanel. Let's go on.