 Great. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for your time I'm really excited to talk about this topic to talk about how we measure Embodied environmental impacts what that means and what it means particularly for both research and practice So I'm going to focus well to lead off I think I Get to be in an interesting place of representing both practice Discourse and research at the same time a lot of that is the functions of the firm that I work at So it can care in Timberlake. We spend an awful lot of time delving deeply into questions of materials construction tectonics And performance from a wide variety of attributes in a holistic way We also operate with an esos of design that sees design activity and agency as being empowered by analysis Not hindered by analysis and I think that really fuels a lot of the question asking that we're able to do So I'm not going to focus on any particular building projects. I'm going to really talk today and use this time to Try to formulate some thoughts and talk about projects We've done in terms of this larger question of how we actually measure environmental impacts and what that does for us as designers So few questions more questions to throw up there that really fueled this inquiry within our firm over the last You know five to eight years We've been asking about our own buildings and that maybe you've been asking about the projects that you work on I want to make these questions as tangible as possible So we don't kind of float off into the realm of abstraction and kind of theoretical construct So some of the types of questions I'm talking about are things like What precisely is the relationship between energy efficiency measures in a building and total carbon footprint? What are the trade-offs between durable industrial products and bio-based materials? How do insulation types contribute to environmental impact across the project? What is the ramifications of all of that foam that we're seeing in a passive house project? How do I make sense of that? How do I calculate it? How I talk about both the meaning and the narrative as well as actually quantify those impacts? Can we better articulate and quantify the value of building reuse and? What environmental impacts in my building cause long after it's usable life? So one problem that I want to put out there is that none of those questions can really be answered by tracking embodied energy and It's early in the day others might take the stance as well But from my perspective the problem is that energy is not an environmental impact at all It's a really poor proxy for environmental impacts mega joules are very Mathematically convenient unit to work in I think as architects and engineers were very comfortable with them Some environmental impacts do indeed track with fossil fuel consumption and combustion But all mega joules are not created equally. I think very few people would argue against that point So understanding our role as designers in shaping the environment demands that I think we be a little bit more Sophisticated in our thinking about environmental impacts and energy So while some environmental impacts do track here I think that we can really embrace that complexity and figure out how to wrap back measurement into our design decision-making So fossil fuel consumption from my perspective is really not just a question of global warming potential Land use transformation habitat loss water pollution. They are indeed difficult to quantify We do know how to do that math, right? I'm going to talk a lot about that math today and hopefully not get too technical for folks But the material decisions we make in really everything that we build carries environmental burden to terrestrial Aquatic and atmospheric systems and I think that what we're trying to do today to some extent is be real about that and see those landscapes of extraction of production and consumption simultaneously So when I'm working on a structural schema for a project when I'm thinking about specifying steel I want to throw out there positive question that maybe I should be thinking about that landscape in which the steel is produced Maybe that should factor into my design decision So this is a Qan'an steelworks in Tangshang It's the largest steel manufacturing city in China and the environmental impacts of that and to air quality in particular of that steel Production will never be felt by the inhabitants of the buildings that you build you can't measure it You can't censor them in your building you very very much contract those impacts And you can think about them as a designer what that ramification is for your design Because for the five point five million people who died prematurely every year from air quality impacts That's quite real and I think we have some obligation to grapple with those numbers and try to figure out as Imperfect as the science may be what that means for us So for better or worse when I think about the wind turbines and solar panels and high efficiency MEP systems that are part of our green Building toolkit, I do try to remember that rare earth minerals come from somewhere and that when we're driving a market for green building products We also are contributing to talk to practices and often very far locations So a current term like when we began digging deeply into the practice of lifecycle assessment moving away from strict embodied energy Calculations we did it because we found it was much much more useful in terms of fueling discourse and furthering our understandings from a quantitative framework and also from a narrative and a rich conceptual structural framework of What materials are where they come from and how they track across product systems life cycle assessment of course is a Schema and a quantitative methodology that's been around for over two decades and it's been kind of Kept a little bit at a distance for architecture and construction So it's been embraced heartily by to a certain extent product Manufacturing packaging for sure alternative fuel use personal computers But architecture and buildings aren't really just complex Products, right? We see them much more as dynamic systems where hundreds if not thousands of materials come together at a moment of construction But they also continue to flow in and out of that building over its full life cycle And I would argue that life cycle assessment wall complex and wall a little bit tenuous and difficult to manage Creates of incredibly rich framework for tracking all those materialistic flows But also for helping us wrap our heads around these very questions of scale and complexity of the actual design objects That we put out to the world and our role in all of those systems So since no one's to find life cycle assessment yet today, I'll do that So life cycle assessment as you know for buildings and construction We talked about it is tracking all the material and energetic Flows for a product system or a service across its full life cycles starting from resource extraction through Manufacturing on-site construction Occupancy and maintenance demolition recycling disposal end of life And all of the flows that continue across that full system So there's three problems for pursuing life cycle assessment and architecture One which I alluded to a little bit before We have this bill of material problem inventory is incredibly challenging harnessing all of the details and the flows of what all those materials are where they came from Really in my mind, that's a data problem and that's a computation problem. Those are two problems that are I'll say manageable talk a little bit later on about the conflicts there But there's strong methodological grounding for that type of accounting The second big problem that we found as practitioners when we started engaging in life cycle assessment and where when it was set over and over And that it wasn't either practical nor feasible to do so at the speed of a design practice Rather than as an theoretical discourse was resolution So if your modeling resolution is not of a sufficient scale to actually show your design iterations in your design decision The model is not particularly useful So we found that we needed to create tools that actually would work with the resolution of design and at the speed of design So that we weren't really just dealing in typologies and rule of thumb and Then third we really felt personally and I think this is probably shared by many that life cycle assessment is not particularly useful If it's done at the end of a project, but that really it's an iterative process And that what we sought to do rather than sit and complain about the agency of architecture or lack of understanding The limitations of education Was to say if this is a problem that we need a new tool We should just make a new tool and figure out who we can talk to and how to bring enough folks to the table and computational knowledge and methodological accuracy To really test out and see whether or not we can do LCA in practice That's the largest I've ever seen this slide a little audacious when it's that big So we set out to build this tool. It's called tally you can download it. You can use it It's been available for about two years now and we're continuing to work on the tool And what tally does I'll try to go through this a little bit more quickly is it's a plug-in for Revit that it integrates LCA databases and a methodological framework into a building information model So architects contract materials and services across the full design delivery workflow Starting in schematic design conducting incremental comparative life cycle assessments all the way through the end of their buildings So what the model basically does is it's connecting a lot of the information from your bin model Those material quantities are pulled into a tally Revit model. It connects to LCA databases There's an incredible amount of translation that has to happen there to actually Retrieve the material quantities required to conduct high quality LCA And it produces a whole lot of reports and outputs that you can grapple with as a designer Full building LCA tracks across all of the Life cycle stages, which I'm not going to get into at this point some which are a little bit fuzzier spending a lot of time right now working on construction data This week actually and I also like to think about LCA particularly in designing construction as a collaborative practice So what we're trying to do is build tools that actually allow lots of and require lots of different disciplines to be Working within the framework that they have the most information So really trying to actively connect the knowledge of a particular project that comes from the architects and the engineers that are doing that Specification doing that detailing understanding of the building is constructed and bringing that together with the environmental impact data with Manufacturing data etc through this flexible framework that can actually feed back into academic research as well So just flip through these basically within tally you harnesses the building information model You define a scope of study you isolate that study the whole building or a component of the building you can compare options LCA is really comparative optioning tool at its heart And I don't have time to get into it But what the tool is really doing is mediating between the complexity of Required as I said to conduct a full building I'll say we are accounting for all the materials that really are going into that assembly the coatings the adhesives the tie-backs All of them were the brick and really figuring out how to translate what is a representation of design intent And the necessary abstraction of modeling and architectural drawing into that real material quantities So it connects to the Revit materials takeoff you assign and create a bill of materials that are stored in cash Parametrically in the model links to a database that's constantly evolving and upgrading. Oh geez and it generates a whole series of reports The you then have the output of the model is that it shows you you allows you to kind of slice and dice those Materials and assemblies in a whole variety of ways. You're also seeing the mass by materials And I won't get into them individually, but then we use the Tracy 2.1 EPA impact categories So you're not just seeing energy or carbon, but you're also seeing all of those trade-offs between a Citification eutrophication global warming potential ozone depletion smog as well as those energy numbers that we know and love And as I said really this is the way we use the tool the most is as a as an optioning tool So I'm just going to go through these a little bit quickly because the amount of time that I have But what I wanted to do is give some just really clear not dig into the actual case studies But try to elucidate the kinds of questions that can be asked when using a tool like this And I've tried to pick some really really basic ones because LCA can ask a very very very sophisticated questions But I think it's also at its most meaningful When it can scale and I think that we need to do a better job of understanding not just what LCA results mean But also how they can answer the everyday questions of design and architecture and how this can be a methodology that can be used not just by the most sophisticated or research rich or Boutique firms, but how this can be of service to all our architectural designers and engineers in some form whether it's this tool or Some other better better tool that hopefully comes along So we can start to look at this is just showing very quickly the relationship between those embodied The embodied carbon in this case of the building and operational carbon The pie chart being actually a terrible way to look at that material because it presumes a certain building life and doesn't really call into Attention and quite the resolution that we actually know all of those different inputs that flow through the building Just to note very quickly that if we care if you do care particularly about climate change I'm sure you're very familiar with this idea of while buildings will last for a very very long time There's a certain strategic imperative to be thinking about those earlier carbon inputs What we're putting into construction and buildings in the next 10 years and 20 years which places even more importance obviously on the embodied carbon of materials like Excavation and concrete aluminum steel, etc So we can start to see very rapidly what the contribution is of different materials now Just breaking up by CSI divisions for this building And focus right in because we know for sure there's an awful lot of concrete in this building It's an awful lot of steel in this building. So a very very simple question That can be asked is really How can I easily assess the benefits of specifying low cement concrete mixes something we do all the time? You know as a rule of thumb, it's useful It's incredibly helpful to have some real numbers on that so that when you're making those decisions You have the environmental impact figures right next to your costing to your site utilization to your constructability figures, etc So in this case, you could see really quickly through just a simple material Substitution of upping the percentage of scms across the building and we could zoom in on a piece-by-piece basis within the model We start to in this case drop the total carbon embodied carbon of this entire building by 24% Just by switching to 50% scm rate So in a different kind of project a small residential project What I really like about running LCA's on these projects is that the materials are much more tangible and smaller in scale And they've been really useful for us in terms of thinking about the relationship between embodied impacts and Particularly in energy efficient buildings where a lot of those rule of thumb Maybe go out the window and I don't see a lot of consistency between the specificity of projects I'm a big topic here. This is just showing a view zooming in on a more material by material basis rather than those CSI divisions Also straight out of the model and zooming in here on just Isolating global warming potential and energy so This was one study that we ran Looking at a change that had been made during CA for constructability reasons and a switch in Insulation materials and we were really curious that switch was not made for environmental impact reasons It was made for cost and constructability and material resources I wish I could have had some Icelium foam in here alas not the case But the switch was made That's what the two options are here one was that as design one is an as-built option and you'll see primarily a big shift in div seven so what happened is that there was a switch to A foam insulation and a dropping of that mineral wall and we were really interested not in fighting that per se But really understanding what was the ramification of that change as so we've reran our energy model We've reran LCA model and we were able to really understand what that meant for the building In the last quick case study, I'm going to show us for a project. I'm actually working on right now. This is a Brown University It's an engineering lab And this was one where we worked through Starting and what I would say is schematic design, but it's a IPD project So we don't really have design phases where we're doing really after rapid iteration of the curtain wall and cladding strategy for this building so again talking about multiple modes of analysis Running simultaneously, you know, we're in the room with Contractors cost estimators of the sod consultant, maybe a glass consultant though not in this case Doing that multivariable assessment. That's just part of design practice And so what's interesting about this process to me is that it allows you to have those environmental impact figures at your fingertips and Be at the table because I think what I find in practice is if you don't have that data You really can't have this conversation So in this case what we were doing is working through a series of sod iterations I won't get into these in detail, but started to just play out with those other variables How they compared and where we found room for optimization again here looking at some of the insulation that was nestled Within an assembly that we thought a lot of the environmental impact would have a lot more to do with the cladding materials and the coatings and sealants But actually again some of the substitution and moving towards a material We weren't even really paying a lot of attention to a choice of insulation at SD helped us really think about this system differently So in closing I just want to talk about you know call attention to LCA And I hope I've painted a picture of LCA as a tool that extends our capability to think as designers and to look well beyond the building site So yes, LCA is complicated. It's imperfect. It's difficult to use It's difficult interpretation is still a real problem in an industry in a community that doesn't understand these topics very well I think that's a charge we all need to be held accountable to But also as a designer I see no inherent conflict between striving to create beautiful high performing enduring pieces of architecture We'll also striving to understand the larger impact that our designs have on the world So I hope all of you especially those of you who are practicing care deeply about the built environment Take up this challenge as well. I find it not pessimistic but incredibly optimistic that the built environment does not build itself and Every environmental impact that's out there is a design decision that somebody made So I'll stop there. Thank you. I think this is a Really going to be a very interesting conversation and I'd like to thank Amal and and David and the other presenters for The invitation and for the very provocative thoughts that they've given us So far and I'm sure will I'm going to take a little bit of a different take on embodied energy and I'll present on three Partial paradigms and I I would argue that probably the largest creative challenge today concerning embodied energy is is not so much doesn't lie so much in Trying to figure out how to measure it, but still is fundamentally about how we imagine it how we actually Wrap our brains, which which themselves are material around this question I'm not going to talk in detail about these projects I'm just going to refer to them in the background in what no doubt is going to be a whirlwind tour of these paradigms after I set up this Provocation But if you have any questions You can you can ask them at KBA Maddox and we'll try to get back to you or you can check out our our website So I want to start actually sort of at the very beginning very quickly Just saying what you know, what is? the definition of embodiment or embody And that is the energy that's on the one hand incorporated That's sort of constituent within matter. That's a state of material being that's sort of a fact of nature if you will But it is also at the exact same time An expression or representation or projection of that state of being that's a fact of culture And I think material culture is very under rehearsed In the history of architecture, so I think that the difficulty The trick is to understand these two parts of embodiment That it's an incorporated thing that that's sort of Inescapable and that it's also a representation, but we have to I think understand these two things as one idea that the natural world and the social cultural and technological Built environment is really part of a single spatial system So all the materials that seem to to sort of stand alone As an object of architecture or the built environment are part of a larger plot a plot that is thickened in the case of architecture by all the circumstances of its constituent extraction How it comes into being how it's transported? How it's assembled and how it is taken apart Abandoned and returned to nature over time in the short duration or the long duration and this new embodied materialism that I'm interested in is really demanding a revision of how we think about about materials Matter is no longer a kind of passive Inert substance that we can kind of control that's described in the kind of traditional mechanistic worldview But it's actually associated with its own agency materials persist in time They can leak they can spill they can be contaminated and they can produce their own unpredictable results So what I what I would like to do is is Try to think about ways in which practice can Challenge the way that materials come to us in their pre-processed forms and standardized dimensions and I think that the palette of Contemporary architecture is actually incredibly reduced and instead of being able to innovate with materials Architects are asked to choose among standardized material commodities that are on of the marketplace And so I'd like to present these partial paradigms very quickly As a way to kind of reflect on the consequences of design on embodied energy How can architects engage embodied energy in ways that are actionable? Via design that open up on new prospects And I don't want to preface this by saying that for sure these paradigms are in fact partial Because they're incomplete and in many ways. They're perfect But the usefulness I think of the idea of the partial paradigm is that it's a way to advance knowledge about a problem When the contours of that problem are still uncertain So it's an approach to uncertainty and risk in practice Which connects very well to the discussion that we just had So these partial paradigms are about walls Factories and nature and I'll start with unpacking the wall Of all the things that we've sort of inherited from modernism nothing is more Intractable then are more resistant to change than the materiality of the modern wall and the modern wall has sort of been owned by a series of different Corporations you can see here that the Sackett advertisement is saying this country is being plastered with the products of United States gypsum and I think that this this This definitely Has it persists today And one of the kind of simplest things but most complex things as well as for architects to to challenge the wall What if we take back the wall? This is both a political and an architectural proposition In the soft house on the walls and floors and ceilings become a kind of enduring carbon bank That offsets the carbon footprint of the construction The project recovers an older forgotten technique a bretchtop full softwood construction Here you can see dowels which are hardwood being inserted into layers of softwood So the entire house is made out of solid wood In a very thick wall that can be built not by a factory as in cross laminated timber Not shipped but made just a few kilometers away by really any local carpenter And when the wall becomes a solid wall on the domestic infrastructure is displaced it literally comes out of the wall And We developed a system where the consequences of unpacking the wall or rather packing it solid with wood Released the infrastructure allowed the domestic infrastructure of light of energy generation To to be differently materialized as a series of textiles that move I'll just let this little clip run And say that when the wall became wood It also is a way of questioning the passive house and exploring a kind of a lifestyle that shifts experiences and expectations of What it might mean to live in a passive house lifestyle Sort of moving from a passive house to an active house And an architecture that moves in response to the environment You know, it's a little bit Weird to see people living in the soft house When you make a house like that and then you understand that people are living in it And and evaluating how it works. It's really quite a quite a sensation I'm going to move very quickly though and try to Try to Get through this the second Partial paradigm is future factories And here I think it's important for architects to think about Inner city factories, how can we actually design the environment where materials are processed and made, you know in the heart of our most dense cities This is a project for the North Bennett Street School, which involves Understanding how the the all the wood and material or most of the wood and material that flows through these workshops Has a prospect on to the city and is recycled back to the city in the form of wood pellets This project looks at a different kind of factory Here we try to propose social media and we look at the kind of abundance of a natural material driftwood and The factory is actually a social project of collecting this of organizing this and of Dipping it in insect food, which is a natural sugar So that the wall itself the thicket wall can be made of wild wood So we can have a material that can be naturally variegated and needs very little Very little energetic input to be used along bridges And trails in the in the city of Minneapolis Rewriting the map and kind of thinking about how Natural materials almost untouched could be incorporated into the larger systems of the city and its architecture this project has to do with distributed factory it is a Project where we thought very carefully about waste where we think about how Something very simple can be given a structure can be tied together And utilized and you see here Kyle and Zana are going to be assembling this table And you'll see just kind of how simple it is so that can we use the idea of Distributed fabrication to create a new kind of workplace one where We have open making not only in the fabrication of furniture, but also in the kind of in in the kind of specification of the architectural shell We tested this using primarily just three materials paint no VOC paint and drywall To produce a zero carbon workplace that could be replicated In three different areas in the world so the more that we tried to reduce the palette of this We just tried to reduce the palette of this sort of interior Design the more in a certain way that that we eviscerated this the more sort of strong It became so we are able to use local Manufacturing in those sort of urban factories that I described in the northeast in northern Europe and also in the Hong Kong area And last I want to touch on sentient natures The idea that natural systems themselves are a platform for technology Here we were able to incorporate the flow of a river as a kind of an actor within the East River ferry project Allowing on the flow of the river the flow of people who are arriving into parting from boats to trigger a series of interactive Lighting that spoke to the speed tied and current of the East River Another river project a real-time river really thinking about the materiality of energy itself a very Low energetic photovoltaic material that can be made into an adaptable simple kit that provides light and cells and charges a cell phone For use along their Amazon River in Brazil So this is a project with many partners where we're trying to rethink the kind of larger East West Supply chains and substitute those with less carbon-intensive North South Supply chains. It's the first project. I think certainly in in in South America where all of the Infrastructure is made by hand. It's a different kind of making we worked with local women maker communities So the women who are making the soft infrastructure and the women who are using the soft infrastructure Are both benefiting and it's been used for Landmapping so there is a kind of a new equation a new merging of agricultural elements people technology and river as a way to kind of produce a real-time conservation and then the last Nature's sentient nature's example is some ongoing research with Michael Strono's group at MIT Here we're looking at how carbon fiber nanotubes can be introduced into plants to augment their natural fluorescence Plants are always fluorescing They give off light. We just don't don't see that light And the carbon tubes allow the plant to live and to become a kind of platform for technology And to give off light in the visible spectrum So what that means is that? We don't need people The plants themselves will be able to tell us on how they how they feel and they'll be able to kind of reflect contaminants in the urban environment Such as heavy metals and and carbon dioxide, so they'll be a way in which the plants themselves can signal to us How they are? I'll stop it there because I'm out of time and I hope that we can continue the conversation in the panel. Thank you very much Well, I guess I guess one thing that connects us is That we're both involved in practice in one way or another and I guess just to throw it open The there are many kind of carbon calculation tools out there that are kind of crowd sourced What's your what's your thought about about engaging engaging the internet Engaging multiple voices and forums in terms of potentially crowd sourcing something that that tally does I Think it's a it's a great question. I mean I think we been engaged in a very hearty and animated debate about open-source data and open-source platforms for both scripting as well as the data that you bring into such tools and I think the way that I like to think about it is in terms of Of information and that there's a lot of pieces of information that come together in these types of models or other related forms of modeling and And that at the same time, there's your balancing Questions of transparency accessibility legibility with quality evenness Act I won't even say accuracy Utility and so I think that when I when we talk about lifecycle assessment and Community organizing and and opening up that platform for discourse. I think that there's a lot of possibilities for Open data. I think there's a lot of possibilities for open programming I think there's also a way in which different actors innately because of the complexity of this modeling have to come to the table And so what expertise they bring to the table? Will be unique to those actors. So our our tool pulls from one of the largest peer reviewed third-party reviewed LCA LCI databases in the world And that's part of our partnership with think step that was really important in terms of really proving that a tool Like this could be made could be verified and could be accurate There's also a lot of intelligence in the tool that draws from architectural knowledge construction knowledge that LCA practitioners don't have Right, and I think that's that's the conversation that we're starting to have of what forms of information and knowledge Come together in these modeling platforms. I mean we can throw it out to the to the to the audience But I think it's sort of interesting to sort of ponder you know The utility of of a tool of a tool you know is is climate change You know is is is carbon emissions really solvable by a single tool and if it is should that tool be open sourced And shared around the world etc. And I'm just sort of thinking about lead the lead system the lead system You know and of course as practitioners we have to Use all these systems therefore. We've done many lead gold buildings. We've done passive houses showed etc But you know you don't want to fly under the flag of these these kinds of measurement metrics, I don't think Because lead has not really changed the practice of building lead has not really opened up New prospects for practice. It's allowed us to kind of incrementally adjust Adjust the The kind of worseness or or betterment of the parts that we use So I'm I confess I'm a little bit uncertain that this moment in time is really the moment when we are when our best move is Measurement, I think just wrapping our minds around what it is to be material today Is you know it's challenging? Sure, I mean I think a quick response to that is I think LCA has has virtually nothing to do with lead I'm happy that lead is starting to actually Reform itself to actually measure environmental impacts, which mine in my opinion. It's never done And I won't go on a whole diatribe about the lead system. It's not particularly interesting I think in this context But I think I I will defend measurement I think one and I think architects have always been able to capture part of our skill is in capturing complexity and I think we actually do gather a lot of different variables together and evaluate our designs and I wonder why Measurement in this capacity measuring environmental impact causes so much anxiety or ambivalence for architects You don't hear the same Critique of there's probably more uncertainty around energy modeling Right a very imperfect science, but many of us would argue one that's incredibly important. I'm not surprised I mean, I'm glad that you're defending measurement and we're going to have a whole session on measurement And as a practitioner on what I'm saying is all of our buildings definitely need to be measured But I'm also trying to ask a question and maybe we can have have some discussion and debate about this about The kind of the kind of fundamentals of measurement does it does it or does it not presume that The circumstances of the problem are already understood that that we are selecting within a Closed set of options and that we are not for example, let's say unpacking the wall or considering a really wide range of materials that we could use We're evaluating the You know the kind of conventional materials and trying to pick the lesser of the evil So in terms of on disciplinary terms, you know it seems sort of interesting to at this moment and you know in this conference in the venue of this conference to try to like open things up a little bit and to speculate about What one can do while still being in practice Well still having you know a full commitment to the making of things which is very challenging when we're when we're talking about Embodiment and when we're talking about carbon right because everything has a you know things things are Require energy input. So it's a very challenging discipline that we're in to try to to try to corral and entice and grow Materials to do the different things that we would like them to do so I mean I'm I'd like to maybe with that to throw it open to the kind of wider audience Two things one, you know, whether it's a problem of vocabulary that people in practice now Are not able we don't have a vocabulary to talk about Basically the opposite of fragile the anti-fragile that which you know gets better with stress or some kind of breakdown or issue Or if it is a question of expertise in that biology As in the last talk is a bit of a black box or some of these other Processes are things that we don't don't totally understand or if it's maybe both And can you just get can you just rephrase the actual question in that? Yeah, sure Whether you think we don't have the vocabulary and we should be as architects working towards that or whether we don't have the Expertise and we should be looking for people in groups to partner with I See that's an interesting question. I'd have to I'd have to well for the purposes of this presentation just to Respond to to Zana's question I Think that one of the incredible Powers of architecture and this is going to maybe perhaps sound cliche because we take it for granted But I do believe that the architectural imagination is an extremely powerful thing and it's very unique to the process of design and You know in a nutshell we can imagine a future in the case of KVA. It's it's a near future And we can kind of send out a probe project, which is like a test bed And it goes out into the future it imagines something that doesn't exist before for example the soft house And then you know you as architects create a set of Instructions to kind of get us from the present to that near future which is also moving towards us at the same time So it's like a boomerang. It's it's a way of of getting knowledge about something throwing throwing something out and getting knowledge back And in order to do that I think in architectural education We we really have to Go back to the idea of the imagination in a really robust way because it's constantly being eroded by commercials and scripted things and sort of narrow choices and Optimized clickers and you know boxes and things like that So I'm not sure that it's about expertise outside of architecture, but it's certainly about fully using the expertise of of architectural imagination to Imagine but that's not trivial and understand the kind of this condition of being being in an embodied energy world where your own body is is A material chunk, you know your own brain is a material chunk. Everything is a material chunk and Materiality is like a super fundamental thing that we share with everything else and this planet So I'm kind of making the argument that Embodied energies like a new new materialism that what we can kind of Contemplate through architecture and I I agree with all of that. I think it's an excellent answer I think there's also I Also want to be a proponent for deep multidisciplinary work, and I think that the Architectural imagination is profound. I think architecture does not and should not exist in a vacuum And I think that when we're asking really complicated dynamic questions I think that collaboration is an incredible asset and that I think Imagination is not a substitute for deep expertise and the two work are incredibly compatible So at the same time that I think there's a lot of Rethinking of architectural education that is happening right now and needs to happen I think there's also an element in which by bringing architecture cannot and should not do everything right and many many innovations and some of the best projects and Frankly the most fun projects I've worked on are ones where everyone does the hard work to build up their own shared vocabulary And then collaborate together and bring their unique perspectives to the field And I think there's a really vital role for architects and planners to play in shaping the future of cities and design but I also think architects need to Experience a little bit of humility and also recognize all the brilliance that's around them and try to figure out How to actually tackle project problems collectively and collaboratively The conundrum being that we're in this material predicament if you will but at the same time We have to project and make a kind of an expression of it That's that's the whole crux and the of the paradox of Hi, my name is Tim. Just a question. I think a lot of us are in the creative or design field We're into innovation creating new things. I'm kind of interested in whether your Research or any of the background and sort of the lifecycle analysis Talks about The reuse or reintegration of old materials or existing structures and buildings into architecture because I think we have an issue where There may be enough buildings in the world right now for everybody It's maybe a problem of distribution similar to the food system where we know there's more than enough food in the world for Everybody but it's kind of more of a distribution problem so I guess as creative people how do we grapple with sort of Reusing some of the things that we already have and and I'm not sure but some of the research you're doing Have you come up with any insights on on the sort of pluses and minus of reusing existing infrastructure and buildings and incorporating that? Sure, I mean, I think that's a great. It's a great question. I think the LCA community and practitioners within architecture and design have done a Really poor job of talking about existing structures. I think there's some really interesting work. That's happening right now I could point you to some papers and some studies. It's certainly a big question We do a lot of adaptive reuse and do a lot of work on historic structures And it's why I raised that question of value because I think Value and the value of historic fabric, let's say is a is a really complex question That's that's not oh, it's never just about environmental impacts and it's never just about like the hard numbers and data I want to make sure that's that's clear in this conversation But I think that we have a lot of work to do in terms of framing how those assessments can even be done And I don't mean quantitative I mean, how are we framing that problem in that question? Because I think it's an enduring one for how we think not just about new construction and materials that are flowing through the systems But also as you rightly point out the fabric that exists today, and that's where we really come into this fascinating multi-scaler and temporal questions of Understanding how materials flow across space and time and what those particular trade-offs are that are not just about the embodied Carbon or just the embody the potential toxicity of a material But kind of the fullness of what that architectural expression is as designers. We should be shaping That question right not just receiving the data from analysis that that I think is a Huge area for exploration in the future And I think you know one of the ways that we can shape the question is by kind of getting outside the box Or getting inside the box in the case of adaptive reuse and and I think that that it's it's crazy how Intractable The kind of contemporary material palette that's presumed to be you know architectural That's that as as the as we heard this morning, you know the that's that's affirmed the teddy bear the blanket That's affirmed is that you know steel glass concrete But if you so I think part of this project that your question Refers to is a sort of a project of historical recovery of Materials that were once used and still are available many of them abundantly available whether that be wood Mushrooms plants whatever it may be and thinking of ways As as architects that we can actually kind of recover some of those uses or find new uses And when we recover those uses, we don't just build a log cabin and we we we Use the natural material or the older material in a way that kind of catalyzes something new So something always kind of falls out when when when we change the wall when we kind of change the palette of materials that architecture uses Hello, then I'm incredibly from India. Usually when we talk historical buildings Despite any Attacks of nature or any other forms of we often look at these buildings either from a social religious cultural Context what should be done such that these buildings are observed more from a scientific context like how have they lasted Thousands of years and how have they how do they operate with like near zero energy consumption for so many years because even in There were floods in Uttarakhand in an Indian state the buildings built like thousands of years ago have Stood the floods whereas the buildings built ten years ago haven't so what what should we do to change the debate and change the view that we are looking at these buildings from a scientific perspective rather than just Contemporary history. Thank you Well, your question is an interesting one because it kind of gets you didn't use the word but it kind of gets at colonialism and it gets at the the Very kind of thin recent coat, you know thin the last 50 years Coating that has sort of been exported out out of the United out of the United States of this Modern wall system of this modern construction with its like super super limited pallet of materials and When that is exported into Different kinds of climates Tropical climates wet climates and so forth, you know, it has of course understandably completely, you know different results Although modern buildings sometimes don't fare well here in the United States either So I think that in many countries actually many many people are spearheading a kind of a recovery Or return if you will to a different set of building materials But used in contemporary ways used with computation used Brick masonry that that engages with computation Using rammed earth using a number of different kinds of materials Not in a kind of, you know, so-called primitive way But in a way that really blends high and low technologies and I think that's super interesting. Thank you very much