 My name is Kaya Koo for those who don't know me. I coordinate the urban design studio here at GSAP and the fall urban design studio, which looks at the Hudson Valley. And I just wanted to tell you briefly two reasons why I wanted to have this kind of conversation. One is that I would like for all of us to have more dialogue within GSAP across our disciplines between architecture, planning, and urban design. And so this is an initiative to take that step. And it's hopefully only the first in many conversations where we're crossing these boundaries in sort of this more informal Friday lunchtime setting. And then the other reason is that since I've started working in the Hudson Valley and teaching a studio about an area that is largely rural, I thought that it is interesting to see how much of that work in rural environments we actually all do. And that given that sort of this role versus urban divide is often in the news as something that is dividing, it's ought to be an interesting way to look at it and see if or what architecture contributes to the conversation about how it might not be a divide, that how urbanization is part of both the urban areas and the rural areas. And so we will all kind of share some projects that are either studio projects or our own projects or thoughts about projects to generate some ideas and to kind of kick off a discussion about this topic that we'll hopefully also continue. And starting off to frame the conversation is Noah Chisholm, who many of you know who took the theory class in the summer. And then I will follow with a presentation after me, and I'm Pes Hattes, who's the director of the AAD program. And Galia Solomonov, who's been teaching here longer than all of us in American AAD. And we'll share some work on that, Chisholm and Noah Chisholm. Thanks to Kaya for suggesting this idea in the first place. We had this conversation starting a while ago. And it's nice to see it coming to fruition in a slightly modified format. So I'm the non, you know, typically in GSAP, I find myself as the non-practitioner as the historian. And you know, historians are going to historicize. So that's what I'm going to do today, try to give a context or a set of parameters, theoretical parameters, or the conversation that we're going to have, a really more provocation than anything else. I mean, the projects that we're going to look at from Andres and from Kaya and from Galia will really be the fundament for what we're talking about today. But I just wanted to give you some thoughts to start to think about while you're looking at the project and also to give a sense of just sort of general ideas around this question of the rural. So I'm using notes here and I'm flipping over here. So I want to start with something that I think a lot of you have seen, especially in my class, which is the idea of the transect. And the transect is this idea that's coming out of the new urbanism. It is a form of kind of understanding the rural urban divide. And as you can see, as the transect studies people put it, transect is a cut or a path through the environment, showing a range of different habitats. Biologists and ecologists use transects to study the symbiotic elements that contribute to habitats where certain plants and animals thrive. And of course, also human beings also thrive in different habitats. Some people prefer urban centers and would suffer in a rural place. The whole idea of suffering, first of all, is something I think we need to talk a little bit about today because there's this an oscillation between the urban and the rural where sometimes, and this is something I think will come up in a lot of the conversations today, the preference for living in a rural area versus the preference for living in an urban area and the ways in which there's this oscillation, both historically as well as contemporarily. So this notion, and this, by the way, is language from the Center for Transect Studies, which is part of the New Urbanism, the first place. So some people prefer urban centers and would suffer in a rural place while others thrive in the rural or suburban zones and then presumably would suffer in the urban space. This, the Alexander von Humboldt sectional map of the Ecuadorian Andes in which he gives both atmospheric as well as topological and topographical information around this journey that he takes throughout South America, which is seen as, in many ways, the first transect study. And as the Center for Transect Studies says, it is taken from the southern tip of South America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and is vertically exaggerated. So it's not so much of a transect as we saw even in that earlier. That was like a 10th century Chinese scroll painting in case you didn't get a chance to look at it, just showing, oh, I guess I can use all sorts of things and stuff today, the transition from the rural to the urban. Not why I spend too much time on the whole idea of the transect, but it's important to recognize that there is a kind of trajectory or maybe even a teleology behind the notion of transect studies. And I don't mean to be putting this forward. In fact, I'm gonna critique it in a moment. The idea of the transect is something that is unassailable and or the inevitable consequence of a rural-urban relationship, but it is something that, especially the people who conceived of it, the new urbanists have this idea that this is in many ways the best way of understanding historically the relationship between the urban and the rural. Moving forward to Patrick Getty's Valley section, which has an even more and greater historical resonance in the 20th century. This is the introduction of the human. And this is one of the things I also wanted to bring in. I know that a lot of you read the essay by Neil Brenner called Hinterland. And one of the things that to me anyway is conspicuously absent in that essay is a conversation around the individuals that are making up that trajectory between the Hinterland and the urban area. And so I want to convince you and or suggest some certain ways in which the human needs to be reintroduced into that. So Patrick Getty's is one of the people who recognizes that there is this kind of organization of different professions. So the fisher, the gardener, the peasant as you move up into the valley into woodmen and miners. So there is this relationship constructed between the human and the way in which the population utilizes that section. The next in that sort of trajectory would be Ian McCarg's sort of section through from design within nature, that this is more about what McCarg or the Transix study people would call eco zones, which is again now deliberately leaving out the human element and talking about the natural components. And it would only be that the natural components that were left over after their natural utility would be used or that were at least valuable for this kind of sense of naturalism, whatever that means. And a lot of terms by the way that I think are gonna come up in the conversation today, nature, hinterland, wilderness, wildness, all of which I think is really important to problematize and not to take it for granted. I think that's sort of the whole underlying concept of this set of dialogues. In this case, the design within nature, sorry, the design with nature is to use the parts of nature that are at least valuable as natural resources for the inhabitation or the utility of capital production. And then we have finally the Center for Transix Studies Transix, the smart code Transix in which there is this very specific kind of zoning system in which you have these different Transix zones, each one of which is organized from the natural. I mean, these two are highly suspect and highly artificial zoning categories, the natural, the rural, the sub-urban, the general urban center and the core. And this too is something that I bring up as a means of critiquing the notion that one can in fact categorize and or put those into such rigid foundational terms. Let's go to the next one. And suggest that one of the problems with the Transix is it is very idealizing and linear concept that doesn't really account for the unexpected zones of disturbance or for that sort of gray space that exists between and among those sort of interstitial and liminal spaces along the Transix. And by imposing this sort of very rigid, teleological linear progression that what it's really doing is suggesting that the relationship between the rural and the urban is mono-directional, that it's reinforced by the vectors of capital insofar as those are determining the movement from the rural into the urban, doesn't take into account the necessary blurring of the lines between those different zones for those different T components and between what we're here to for autonomous zones, but now we need to think about the ways in which these things are dependent on each other. And here's the first of several quotes that I wanna share with you that I think will help to articulate these ideas a little bit better. So this is a quote from the poet and naturalist Wendell Berry from his book, Home Economics. In which he writes, the awareness that we are slowly growing into now is that earthly wildness that we are so complexly dependent upon is at our mercy. It has become in a sense our artifact because it can only survive by a human understanding and forbearance that we now must make. The only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture and the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity. And there is this really kind of resilient notion of the ways in which the rural needs to be maintained and not just the rural, but the wild or the wilderness or the wildness. And I wanna suggest the ways in which those sentimental and or nostalgic categories are in fact counterintuitive and counterproductive. This is a quote from a book by George Mombio who's written a lot of really good things about the climate crisis. This is from his book called Rewilding in which he's talking about the uplands of Wales, specifically an area that has been conventionally agricultural and that has been experiencing a sort of downturn of fortunes. The Mombio, and I'll first kind of contextualize it for you, he argues two things. First, that environmentalists are arguing that the flooding of these areas are due to the climate crisis and therefore making them less available for agricultural purposes. Specifically these two rivers that come into the area, the Severn and the Y, but in fact it's the overgrazing of the land by an abundance of farmers that are using this for sheep farming that's having the greatest impact on soil erosion. And so the second thing is of course that grazing is a part of a sort of sentimental attachment to an agrarian lifestyle in these areas that people are accustomed to. And so the support for this persistence of the agricultural imaginaries ironically overshadowed by the fact that the wildlife tourism brings in as much more income to the British economy. In fact, five times more. So if you read the text, grazing is one of the least productive uses to which the hills could be put. Despite the vast area it occupies and the subsidies it receives, farming in Wales contributes just over 400 million to the economy. Whereas if you look down a little bit lower, you'll see that wildlife-based activity which is tourism, walking, other forms of utilizing the land for recreational purposes actually brings in 1.9, what is that? 1.9 billion dollars I guess. And the National Ecosystem Assessment shows that across most of the upland of Wales switching from farming to multi-purpose woodland would produce an economic gain. In other words, the current model of farming far from being essential to the rural economy appears to drag it down. The barren British uplands are a waste in two senses of the word. Again, this idea that the maintenance of an agricultural lifestyle is endemic to that site and therefore needs to be propagated when in fact there's demonstrably a much better usage of it which in fact encourages this a different kind of sentimentality and a different kind of nostalgia which is the escape from the city into the wildness or the wilderness of that area. Go a little bit forward and talk about migration. So migration, this is from a study called Scaling Fences Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe which talks about the ways in which the migration patterns which you see. Many of the people from this study were from Benin City and so I've identified that on the map. But the places to which they go which are primarily Spain and Italy are very resistant to allowing them in. And this is yet another problem that we have with regard to the understanding of the population of the rural and the urban. That in fact most of the people that are coming from these areas are from urban environments and they're coming into not only cities but also into foreign land irregularly meaning not following the typical routes of migration and they're asking to be integrated into the local economies with primarily an urban experience and there's this I think a kind of conceit that immigrants coming in are not necessarily acclimated to an urban lifestyle. Therefore they're expected to be working more in the agricultural sector which in fact is not what they're training is whatsoever. So this relationship between migration and the city is another complicated one I'm just reading here. Migration is historic and multifaceted phenomenon involving humanitarian, human rights and demographic issues. It's not so much necessarily about the urban versus the rural as it is about these underlying and I think it's important to acknowledge the human rights issues has a deep economic, environmental and political implication generates many different legitimate and strongly held opinions and not always is strongly held or legitimate and not always the legitimate, legitimate, strongly held. You wanna make sure I'm not going over. Do we have no idea how long I've been talking? What's that? No one's keeping time. No one's keeping time, okay. So let me again I'm just, I'm really trying to give some provocations here rather than trying to make any bold statements necessarily. But if we look at Benin City you can see that even the parameters of it, you know in the last 20 years starting out in 2000 with the yellow and then increasingly creeping outwards we see that there is this inability to really identify what even constitutes the city of Benin City. This is a city right on the coast just a little bit south of Lagos. And so thinking of urban citizens leaving there, the urban is no longer something that is simply located at the core but is rather something that becomes increasingly peripheral. Once again, problematizing the notion of what constitutes the city versus the outlying areas. And as we think about this notion of migration we also have to think about the relationship of climate crisis to both migration as well as to the urban and rural. And what I want to sort of end with here is the idea that most of the migration that's happening in the world is happening from rural to urban despite what I was suggesting before. And yet it's those urban areas especially those along the shoreline that are the most unstable and the most vulnerable to climate change. So as we have this rural to urban migration we also have the kind of forces pushing people out of the city because of the increasing likelihood of them being uninhabitable. And I have several different images that show just the different loci places of vulnerability of altered shoreline of numbers of people living close to the shoreline. And I think that one of the things we need to consider as we're talking about this rural urban. By the way we're gonna be talking about this in a sort of global sense and I'm certainly talking about it in a more global theoretical sense as well but it's also something that's very grounded in the sense of the vulnerability of cities and the ways in which they are both taking in immigrants but also facing the very real possibility that those immigrants are no longer along with the existing residents no longer gonna be able to inhabit those cities. And so you have, and this is very significant crisis so you have for example about 2000 refugees from rural Bangladesh moving into Dhaka into slums in the peripheral areas per day. And yet Dhaka itself is already in a very perilous situation. So that kind of rural to urban movement in some ways is going to give way to unnecessary spreading out of the city and a necessity of understanding different ways in which to incorporate and to absorb these massive amounts of immigrants. I mean this is true also of, I'm just skipping through stuff because I wanna let everybody else have a chance to talk. But immigrants leaving from the Tanhim refugee camp in Thailand, primarily Karen people from Myanmar who have been religiously persecuted and their relocation to places such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Jacksonville, Hartford, Omaha, Fort Wayne and Ithaca. So also thinking about not major cities. It's another thing, maybe this is where I'm gonna end is not that when we talk about the rural urban we have to realize that cities are of many different scales. Even when we think about the US context we're not talking just about New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, but these are cities as well that have their own specific and autochthonous relationships to the periphery. And so with that I want to, let me see if there's just one more quote that I can, maybe that didn't have one more. Anyway, I'm gonna leave it there. But what I would like to leave you with is simply this, well not this image but the idea that is provoked by this image which is just one of a number of studies, regional studies on about the environment and climate change and the vulnerability of these spaces just thinking about how populations are going to be or the question of the population is going to be problematized in these various areas and the complications in particular with regard to the urban and the rural that I've mentioned before, rural residents or rural immigrants coming into the city but then finding themselves in a situation not only of a lack of employment opportunities but also into deeply unstable environmental conditions. Anyway, okay that was a little bit all over the place but hopefully it gave some stuff to think about and hopefully this will act as a kind of backdrop to the projects which are much more grounded and specific and focused and that we're gonna see from Kaya, Galia and Andres. So thank you very much. Thank you Noah. I already feel very provincial taking our station from the global to Germany. What I wanted to share with you is the role that architecture and architects can play in rural areas using the example of a model that is over a hundred years old called IBA International Baustellung or an International Building Exhibit which is a framework that has developed over time in Germany as a way of using architecture to revitalize cities mostly or to sort of demonstrate a new way of life often to a general audience. So before I go into the IBA Turingen which is a state in Germany that is currently ongoing and really focuses on a rural environment I wanna give a brief history of what these International Building Exhibits are and so here's an image of the first one which was an artist colony in Darmstadt. So together with this sort of grand exhibition hall this is an opening ceremony. There was a number of artist houses in that neighborhood. They're still being used as residential houses then. At the time, so this was the time of Jugendstil, Art Nouveau and it was sort of trying to demonstrate what was then envisioned as a modern way of living. Followed in 1927, this is one of the most famous International Building Exhibits where modernist architects from all over Europe came together in Stuttgart also relatively small city in Germany to build the Weißenhof-Siedlung. Here is, you know, this is an example. These are the two houses built, designed by Le Croix-Busier and Pierre Gennari that still exists. I believe one of them is a museum now. All of the other houses are occupied. And here again, sort of the drive was really to demonstrate a modern way of living. That what was dictated by the organizers was the flat roof, but I don't think any of the architects participating in this exhibition had to be convinced to use a flat roof. That was sort of the mantra and also really sort of the, it was very much sort of a style of architecture and a showcase of architecture. I'll show one more as an example of how this has changed over time. There were several in between in Berlin actually, focusing primarily on housing. What really changed the scale of some of these exhibitions was this one in the west of Germany, which was sort of the rust belt of Germany and which took on an entire region to demonstrate how this industrial architecture can be used for public purposes. Iba Emscher Park, and this is an image of a playground next to a decommissioned industrial facility. And so this was a large 800 square kilometer or landscape park. But now I really want to focus the attention to this current Iba. And so I want to say that between the earlier ones that were really showcasing architecture, and there are still a number of Ibas that are doing this, this framework of using the idea of an exhibition to be a catalyst for a place for change has really taken off. I think currently there are sort of at least five simultaneous international building exhibitions going on in Germany and neighboring countries. So there's one in Vienna, Basel, which is sort of a tri-state exhibition. And they all go over a number of years, as you can say, starting with conceptualizing, developing project ideas, and eventually the completion of buildings. And so what, or buildings or parks or projects to a larger extent. And what you can see in this one is that it's really sort of shifting the framework from the idea of completed projects as buildings to being a facilitator to really envision change together with residents. And so this is a state, it's in the center of Germany, really in the center of Europe. As you can see on this map, it is what was the former East. It is a state also that, this is what this map is supposed to show, that is heavily forested. It doesn't have any large city. So it's a conglomeration of small towns and it's experiencing what a lot of rural areas all over the world are experiencing, which is the opposite of people moving to the city, which is a decline in population and aging of population. The average age in the state is, or the median age is close to 50, 49.9. This compares to New York, where it's about 36, I believe. It has over 45,000 vacant buildings across the entire state. Has it in 40,000 jobs in the forest management and wood timber industry? So it's a different scale of living, a different economy. One of the other interesting facts that's on this map is that one in three residents in the state are engaged in some sort of non-profit civil society activity. So there's a huge interest in working sort of for the common good. And this is really what this international building exhibit sort of set out to do when it was formed in 2012. It's sort of thinking about forms of participation and how they can act as a facilitator and as a catalyst to use, to create, they're calling it resource conscious projects with values oriented towards the common good. And so they're using the international building exhibit as a brand, but also as sort of a way of attracting talent into rural areas that often do not have it. There's, so one of the places in the state is Weimar, the place where the Bauhaus was founded, and an architecture school still exists, but beyond that, there isn't a lot of sort of design, planning and architecture talent and these small towns and villages don't necessarily have the professional staff that they could sort of write just the design brief or a design competition, or even do a feasibility study for what their towns need. And so this is really what, in this case, rather than sort of just commissioning these large and prestigious projects, the primary focus of this international building exhibit was to sort of catalyze and be project managers for processes that where the people that wanna be engaged can participate in the change in their towns and villages and landscapes. And so I wanna show a few examples that I think are sort of prototypical building typologies that you find in these rural areas and show a little bit of what they have been doing. And since this is an ongoing process, a lot of it is also work in progress. The first one is industrial buildings. And industrial buildings that, here in New York, are often being used, you know, discovered artists until they turn into expensive housing. In a small village, they are vacant. This used to be a mill originally. Then in its last industrial use, it was a factory for fire extinguishers, has been vacant for 20 years, was designed by one of, Egon Ayaman is one of Germany's rather famous modernist architects in the middle of nowhere. It's a small village of 15,000 people. And so it's really difficult to sort of envision a new use for this. And here, the IBA invited architects from Berlin for a workshop to sort of generate ideas of what could happen here. And these are some of the early sketches to begin calling it an open factory and take this on as a project where it was clear this has to develop over time and over a long period of time to sort of see what kinds of different uses can come into the space and make use of what is, you know, a really nice building, but also very difficult to program with a large big company. One of the first sort of physical interventions that they did is that the project management team of the building exhibit themselves moved in and realizing that it would be really difficult to heat a large building, industrial building like this, efficiently, so instead they installed these sort of like home depot greenhouses inside the office space that during the winter months, the larger floor plate isn't really heated, but heat is in these little greenhouses is generated mostly through the off heat from their computers and potentially, you know, a small additional electrical heating on the floor. And this was a way how they could begin to occupy this really large space over the course of the last two years. And then here's kind of a floor plan diagram of what the, you know, one entire floor of this building now looks like and different greenhouses have different functions. So some are office space for two people and other are meeting rooms to sort of begin to just occupy and use the space again and be present for others to participate. And then another project they have started is that they invited artist collectives or architecture offices to turn the building over the summer months into a hotel and a space of experimentation where this idea of a factory can really be tested. And so this becomes, so this is the hotel lobby improvised all the furniture was built by sort of workshop participants. So artists take up the, you know, being the directors of the hotel for a week or two weeks and invite different activities to happen in the space. And the activities are usually developed around creating equipment or furniture to be able to activate the space. And so a lot of it also then stays in it and allows the next users to continue working with that. This is another example of what I also think is sort of typical of this rural environment where there's a much greater consciousness of working with the materials that are local. And I mentioned earlier forest and timber industry is a really big part of this particular landscape. And so trying to understand how architecture can be, you know, sort of modern but also work with the traditions of building. In a region like this is something that the EBA was trying to promote through this project. What you're seeing here is a medieval castle that similar to the factory actually for a long time had no owner or no use. And this has to do with complicated German history of East and West and sort of, you know, the owners of the castle leaving the country and it kind of lay fallow until after reunification this young person all of a sudden found himself to inherit this property. He happened to be an architecture student at the time. And so it developed into a place where he himself is experimenting with architecture. And one of the projects they completed recently as part of a design built workshop with a nearby architecture school is the former sheep barn that is now being used as a place to stay overnight for that same design built workshop. So since 2012, they invited architecture students to stay there for three weeks to build something with them and learn sort of building techniques. And in this case, it's really sort of the goal was to build it entirely out of natural materials. So it's a wood frame house, the insulation are these little clay balls that are used, there's no vapor barrier or whatsoever. And it was built with students. Here's an image of the hopping off festival where they installed these swings temporarily to enjoy the space as it's still under construction. Here's an image of the finished place. So the students of the design built workshop essentially built the place where the next generation of students next year will then be able to sleep. And the entire construction is sort of a wood construction that is a demonstration of the material of the locality but also of the practices that were used in almost 1,000 years ago when the original castle was built. Both are not to the tradition but also not to being very climate conscious with construction. Here's a floor plan of the, so one thing that they said on the site was originally a sheep barn that was that was so dilapidated that they had to demolish it. And then as they were building a program in the castle what they realized that we have a very successful cafe that we're running now but we only have one bathroom. We don't really have a kitchen. And so this building enabled them to sort of add all these uses in addition to the space that I showed in the image earlier where you can stay overnight. Another sort of typical typology especially in Europe that you find all over the place is every village has a church. And like in many other places, congregations are shrinking. They are sort of the landmarks of their villages and towns. They're the tallest buildings. They're in the center of the village. And so this project was a competition to generate ideas of what to do with churches in this region. 99% of about 2,000 churches in this region are landmarked. And so this ideas competition in the image shows the exhibition subsequently of some of these ideas was to what can we do with these places other than being churches that are difficult to maintain with dwindling congregations? How can they continue on being significant markers in the community? And so here's one idea that I wanna show. The art is an obvious sort of idea that many people showed. Here's another one that's kind of a twist to it. And this is a map of an area that is sort of a hiking trail. It's an area that is used for cross-country skiing and hiking. And here one of the ideas was can we turn these churches into sort of hostels? And can we do this in a way that people who are hiking this entire trail which will take several days can really just go from village to village and stay overnight in the church? And can we do this in a way that there's some sort of interaction with the local community so that you come to the church not just to stay overnight but you come to have a dinner to maybe even go to the local library to start a dialogue with people who are in this village. And similar to the factory in the beginning, one thing that this International Building exhibit does is that it sort of encourages pilots. So this is one pilot church that now has this sort of, what you don't see here is that you can curtain it off the bed so that you don't sleep in this giant space if you don't want to. But essentially just build a bed in that church. There's also another area where it has some tables and chairs for communal dinners. But it was in first pilot to say, well, is anyone in the village even interested in doing that? And they were overwhelmed by the response. And how little do we need to start this change to use the church as accommodation, to use this church as a public space. They have movie screenings in the church now and sort of regular dinners. And when the architects who came to propose this and kind of built the pilot to the site, they started just building this little room here. Sort of people showed up and said like, hey, I used to be a carpenter. I heard there's someone, my help might be needed here. And so building the space already sort of generated the type of interaction that the project was hoping it would do with the people that come visit. Last example I want to show, and this is also something that's quite universal. At least I can think of several train stations in the Hudson Valley that are not really train stations anymore because we have ticket machines. And there are historic buildings, but nothing happens in them. And so this is a village, I think 500 people live here. The train station was empty, the train's still going by and it's stopping. And it actually unloads a lot of tourists that go hiking for the day in this area. And so here again, IBA, the International Building Exhibit, served sort of as a project manager to attract more international talent organizing a design competition. It brought in design students to do, what could you do with this train station as a studio project, and ultimately help the community to apply for grants to create a cooperative, to turn the train station into a grocery store. Because that is also a phenomenon that you find in a lot of these rural areas that there isn't any grocery store left. And so now the interior is a cooperative run grocery store that's run by the community. But the reason all these things are on wheels is that whenever there is a community meeting, they just move the stuff out of the way and it becomes sort of the community center and the meeting space. And the image that I shared previously is the design of the outdoor spaces that was then, it was a competition that was won by an office from Berlin to combine the renovation of the interior with a renovation of the outdoor spaces to create sort of this public forum, also on the outside. And all of these are really small examples where really sort of the role of the framework of the building exhibit was bringing the capacity and to manage, to kind of connect a village like this to the design world, to the planning world and to grants, to apply for public funding to make these projects happen that otherwise would not happen in rural areas like this. I think this was my last image. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you everyone for coming, but I'm super happy that Callia invited me to be part of this and this long conversation that is already being very productive. And I'm really happy that you're bringing this discussion and very, very fond and very, very good fun of the work that you're doing in the Hudson Valley with the whole kind of urban design people. And I'm really happy also that you're promoting this conversation between architecture, urban design, and also bringing different voices and different approaches to it. I'm also very, very moved by the work that Callia presented and also by Noa's words that I feel very close to many of the discussions that probably all of us share. I would like to start actually with this because in a way, this is an image that it's talking of a way for the urban to be seen as very isolated as thinking about itself, let's say, and something that is meant to be only talking about urban realities, about fashion, about finances, about design in many ways. But there's no way for us to think of the huge growth of cities in the last years without thinking and making the connection with what is happening in other rural areas that are being urbanized. And this is a photograph of the COVID digital system that is being used by Cabot gas company to digitalize and map the mineral assets in Susquehana Valley. This is in particular part of the Marcelo show. This is something equally urban that is very much related to the concentration of power, finance and technology that is happening through urban constructions that is operating underneath and within the rural. This is actually the way that the same reality is manifested in a particular house that is totally embedded or kind of organized as a rural setting where the same reality is not manifested through the financial asset but is rather manifested as a kind of difficult to understand our physical phenomena by which the water of the aquifers is mixed with methane through the kind of failure of fracking in conduit in this gas to basically the places where it is extracted and it's mixed with the water. It's manifested in this kitchen as fire. This divide is a little bit more complex to explain than the kind of classical division between what is urban and what is rural because it's in the same space. It's happening actually overlap, literally overlap. It's connected. It's actually entangled with each other but there's a huge divide of power. There's a huge divide of technological mobilization. There's a huge divide of the capacity to make decisions. There's many other devices that are equally formal, equally material, equally spatial but are overlapped. In this overlapping, it's very difficult to explain as Noah was saying with this kind of linear depictions of the division between the rural and the urban. And it's what I think we all are struggling to give sense to provide with a critical frame and to find tools to intervene and to bring the traditions of architecture and urbanism, urban design, urbanity, fairness, legality, policy, accountability into this sort of space that is so prepared for resisting all these forms of civilization. This is the work that my office has been doing in the last years, looking at domesticity, looking at cosmopolitis, looking at public space, not as something that is divided clearly through space but something that is entangled with other things and where design needs to be a little bit more complex to being able to mediate. But this, of course, is also translated to very concrete experiments, actions, prototypes, but also actions in themselves. Like this house, for instance, in Ibiza, in an area that can only be described normally as rural but in the way that is colonized by the financial capacity that cities are producing the capacity for people to concentrate wealth, it's really what is explaining its evolution. This is a house that actually was designed for an archeolector, but we did it in a way that those forces could be compatible with the maintenance of the ecological wealth of this location and finding ways for the architecture to mediate and make it compatible, the two layers or even architecture setting limits for the action that these dwellers could bring into the ecosystem. This is crucial because, of course, Ibiza is such a rich ecosystem but there's really not democratic power at this point to stop the possibility for people to build a house within the limits of urban regulation. But what architecture can provide is also ways for this architectural action to be also not damaging the aquifers, preventing the trees from being, from disappear, making it possible for the spills that are damaging so much the soil to be prevented or to prevent from them to happen, basically. This is another work that we developed a few years ago which is very connected to the work on the churches that Kaja was explaining. This is the old minor seminar in Placencia, city, colonial city, like one of the cities where the conquerors of some parts of South America came from, like Tujillo or Nancortes, for instance. This is actually the minor seminar where in the 15th century people at the age of 12 were being trained to colonize the rural. So this tiny city that again, as Kaja was explaining, was, it's not a major city, it's something like 20,000 people and never it's been bigger than that but actually had an impact. It was the industry that was preparing for humans to expand colonizing the rural. What is very interesting is that these priests that were trained here, they lived here for a few years and they were trained to basically know how to bring all this urban ideology to the rural when they were aging was something that was not longer urban. They were kind of a mix between the rural and the urban and they needed a place to be brought back so they could get geriatric services in a place that was making it sustainable or financially feasible. So our task was to transform this minor seminar into a kind of older residency where they could, were basically the cost of taking care of all these people would be reduced and made feasible. What is interesting is that this building, we thought of it as an embassy that would allow for all this knowledge that these people have treasured by being in touch with others in the rural areas could be brought back to the city from the capacity to grow things to the use of energy, their kind of responsibility in using energy to their knowledge of nature. Many of these traditions that were actually not urban but rural, what is the way that the architecture could enact them and could really promote them as part of the CPU. So basically what we're trying to do is basically to see what is the way that the cultural, the kind of exclusive, the stylized or kind of stylists is also related with all the realities that are much more beautiful, much more complex, much more kind of inclusive and much more rich in the way we see them. But how do we prepare also? This is the basement of the Barcelona pavilion, which is the place where all the broken pieces of the upper part, the things that age, the experiments that failed, this was the covering of the pond where they called this country. So actually this is the material that used to cloud this and it was tested, this plastic and it didn't last good curve with the sun. So it was removed and taken down there to the basement or this is the place for example where the employees have lunch. For me what is important is to see that there's these other spaces, these kind of what we normally call the footprint but the footprint is not a kind of collateral effect. It's a real part of the realities we live by and it's our task to understand the way that we can deal with disentanglement and be responsible to it and bring policies, civilized sensitivities, accountability into those relationships. For the last year we've been working in Corpus Christi which is this amazing, this is the Laguna Grande, this is working, yeah. Sorry I think I messed it up. Was it working before at one point or not? Yeah, Laguna Grande is this amazing ecosystem in Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi for many people is when I ever say oh I'm doing a project in Corpus Christi and it was super ugly, Corpus Christi and then I say Laguna Grande and then they say Laguna Grande is actually disgusting, it's as pinky, it's brown, it's actually super beautiful and it's such a rich ecosystem. It looks like this from above but the experience of seeing it from above is not the same that you would have there. It's very different, actually for me it's very important to avoid these kind of representations of things from above or like this kind of Google image of the globe and we can control where it is. We actually want to move down there and that's what we're trying to do. Actually this is exactly what we're doing. When you look down to the Laguna Grande, the Laguna Grande is such a valuable ecosystem. It's so biodiverse, it's probably one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the US but the thing is that the S-pieces that are there are not kind of, they look rather ugly and this is actually very nice but there's ugly piece and it's brown, it's true and it's kind of muddy but at the same time it's super, super rich and but it's very much damaged by two very particular situations that could be found all around the world in rural areas. One is the fact that the whole Corpus Christi is a huge industry for oil. So all these offshore facilities are basically invading the whole coastal line and it's not only the kind of operational damage that they produce but the accidental damage, they're permanently the site of accidents and there's spills and there's boats that are really old and poorly maintained that are throwing things and it's legal for them to do that. So basically the whole industry being overlapped with this huge amazingly important ecosystem it's permanently being damaged. The second thing is of course climate change, silver rise, a CDP in general of the oceans, all these things that we're seeing and that of course we know that are damaging in very particular these islands in Corpus Christi. Actually the place where we're working is an island is this one here. This housing we call it island house or island caring house and you see that we've been collecting, it's been super difficult actually to find information but we've been collecting different images and I would like you to see within time the evolution of the digital covering of the island. So this is 2004 and you see how different it is from what we saw initially. So in the last decades basically the kind of the vegetal and the trees community in the island it's been severely reduced due to acidity, pollution, salinity of course the lagoon is being mixed with salty water so the concentration of salt is increasing, increasing, increasing and as a result of that you see that also you see the gradients of colors, this is becoming progressively whitelist which means that it's losing a big part of the minerals that are retained in the ground. So the loss of roots from the vegetation implies immediately the erosion of the island and the fragility of its borders and with blood. The loss of one of the most important ecotones, ecotones of the Laguna Grande which is the kind of these coastal lines where a big part of the biodiversity is produced and preserved. This is not something that people are not aware of. Actually there's a huge movement in Corpus Christi and we're working with them. These are some of the things that they're doing from these promotional videos of some of the NGOs and associations even individual, sorry, super valuable piece. And we're working with all these people from chefs that are working with ESPCs that they collect from Laguna Grande as a way for people to understand the wealth of two people that are organizing the demonstrations. So this is not something that people, people in places like Corpus Christi are not stupid. Obviously they're totally informed, very precisely, scientifically and politically informed. They have legal advisors, they're lawyers, they're doctors, they're biologists, they're marine scientists. So it's not that they don't know what's going on but of course it's not easy to find or to gather the political influence to change things. I think that there's things that we can do as architects and actually technology is part of the problem. So we're thinking of the way soft architecture can also be part of this. Could also be a communication device but also be making or providing solutions and we're doing this tiny, tiny thing here. This is a house, a cabin actually that is replacing a previous cabin that was falling apart. It's a family that would use this a few weeks a year. So basically they wouldn't use it that much and what we propose is to do a house that was not catering to the humans but actually would work as a device that would hot or cater to the forestry here, to the plants that are still here and to empower them or at least slow down the process for them to be damaged and give space for the whole lagoon to be rethought and to give sort of a space as a principle, precautionary principle that would allow for humans to get time and human institutions to find ways to deal with this. The idea would be that the house is actually collecting rainfall and it's connected with sensors that are inserted in different parts of the island. So when the levels of acidity and conductivity this means salt in the, concentrated in the soil increase they would release this water and basically reduce the concentration of acidity and salt in the soil. Something as simple as this would really help reverting the cycle of erosion of the island as we've been studying it. So the house normally we would present it like this is the way humans arrive. They have their staircases. It's a super minimal, minimal house. You can imagine what everything that we're trying to do is to really reduce the footprint of this in the islands. You see what the bedroom is here and what is the way that we're dealing with space. It's a tiny, tiny house. And then it comes to this kind of only single space for everything kitchen, living room and another bedroom upstairs. But this is the big part. This is the part where everything starts. It's the collection of water that is from the top. So the actual house is more like a reservoir with a minimum footprint and the minimum for people to stay there. It's more like a 10. We did it with, I mean, this was a huge discussion but we're designing it with Resalco still. Actually, it's like we started to work with wood and structure but it's always our surprise how when you really go into the numbers and you really go to the calculation to bring wood industrially kind of safe or something that we could rely, we could really use the structurally. It means that the amount of mega joules that are invested in just bringing the wood to this side where there's plenty still available, basically, it's much higher that the bodied energy of the steel. And this is not something that we're doing as a single project, it's a purpose that we're doing in several rural areas because one thing that we think is that every single piece of architecture should be engaged with this. For instance, this is a house we're doing in Murcia in another rural area. With all these houses, you see there are basically units that are totally not taken into account the way the whole area of Murcia that in the past, pre-industrial past of Murcia, pre-carbon emissions, Murcia was understood by the Islamic culture as a huge garden and that biodiversity has been lost in the last years. That's actually water gardens, what you see there. So what we're doing is this house that takes all the great house that the house is actually producing all the organic material and it's creating this cauldron that you see that elliptical garden that is basically reproducing and creating the conditions, pre-industrial conditions for the species and the biodiversity that still exists in a tiny way in Murcia could be preserved and could be again, again in a continuum. We see this as a little bit of an activism project. All these houses around here were investing a tiny amount of money in just using the water that they throw into the sewage system and the organic material that they're putting into a system that is basically using trucks to take things away. Basically, things would totally change in the territory of Murcia and we're doing the same in the school that is also in the rural area and I would like to finish with a few slides of this project because we're, again, I think that in the same way that the urban is invading the rural and it's our task to use also urban capacities to turn the effects of architecture to use them to reverse processes that are really damaging the rural. I also think that there's a question about how the urban can be ruralized and what is the way that we can also make the best of the presence of the rural within the urban. This is a project that we're doing in Benetia, the TVA, the Tisenbornemitza Contemporary Art Academy in Yudeca, it's this St. Lorenzo Church and the number of other buildings that we're transforming but I'm not interested in that image, I'm interested in this one because the whole foundation of Venice is actually the result of the Dolomites, the forests that were cut very close to Venice and were mobilized to basically make it possible to stabilize the islands of Venice that constitute Venice. All the foundations are basically a kind of rural, natural construction being engineered to stabilize the land. So all these forests that no longer exist are concentrated now. This tiny point in the geography of Italy is basically the result of mobilizing that huge extension of forest that no longer exists. Actually when we see Venice, it's inevitable to see in the areas that are not that well-cured how nature is bringing back, it's being brought back and actually these days we're not only seeing, this is actually from today, this is not only coming in the form of that but basically nature is that. So it's very important not only for architecture to do things but also to undo things. This is the way, this is a very old 14th century image of what Venice looked like and this is basically a rural settlement and we can see how the land, the presence of the soil, the vegetable gardens, the kind of coastal line is something that was totally integrated in the city. These are images and maps that we've been collected in the last two years. These are parts of the Venice that are still like this and that tell us what's the story. This is the way that Marta del Canale, Capri Santa del Canale looked in the 19th century. So what is that that we've done to the mediums we live in to basically divide, produce this huge divide between nature and the urban, rural and the urban. And what is the way that we can do this? Because I think that's the basically our task now. What is the way that we can really learn about what's happening in this part of the architecture of Venice? This part that is highly controversial, this is where the silver rights will operate should basically bring back the rural and find other ways for architecture to coexist. These are parts of our project there that is probably long to explain, but it's actually an embassy that is trying to connect the oceanic system with the particular architecture of San Lorenzo. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Katia, Noah and Andres for participating in this and I'm looking forward to discussing this with you. So this is two talks. First, as an architect because I thought that what one does and what one thinks not always align and I wanted to have a discussion about what I think but I know that I have to present it from who I am and what I do. And so in the Hudson River, over the last 20 years, I've done six projects. And so I'm going to present these three of these projects very quickly. And of course, I'm looking to these projects from New York, which is my base. So the first project is the Abicon. It's a building of 1929. That was a factory for Nabisco. So the Nabisco factory was, the cookies were done in Chelsea Market were now, you know, at Chelsea Market and then the boxes were done in Beacon and they were connected by train. And so what is that, urban or rural? The grain was coming, not from New York State but it was coming from other States via freight, via train freight. And so this building was abandoned for 40 years before we worked on it. And it was a $27 million, it started at $17 million, went to $27 million for 300,000 square feet. That's $90 per square foot. Just to give you an example, the MoMA addition that just finished, it's $700 million for the same amount after it's $700 million renovation that was done 10 years ago. So it's $1.4 billion for something, the same amount of square footage that we're talking about. Right now, there are 68,000 visitors a year to the Beacon, 250 about a day. When we were designing this, we thought that the parking lot was too large because we were thinking, you know, maybe 20, 30 people a day would come, a thousand people a year. It's a daylight only museum. Summer hours are different than winter hours. It's open until 6 p.m. in the summer and until 4 p.m. in the winter. It was completed in 2003 before we had LEED certification. And so this is the building and of course we inherited a beautiful building to start with. All we did was not to mess it up, not to put ourselves too much in the equation. And so the parking lot has the same column grid as the columns inside except that the columns on the outside are trees. We planted as apple trees, but apple trees are harder to maintain. And so these are crab apple trees that are easy to maintain. I would much rather have you eat apples from your parking lot, but that was an image we couldn't carry. So I'm going to just show very quickly. So a lot of things were done, for example, they don't really have an expression. For example, this cruise and the wood, it's designed in a certain way to be efficient and beautiful and long lasting. But so stainless steel screws are three times the price of a regular screw, but instead of five cents per screw, it's 15 cents per screw. But stainless steel screw can be there forever and there's no waste in it. So the detailing is so that there's no maintenance and there's no repainting and there's no extra effort to maintain the building. Also, there are some additions in the building. Today I only showing slides of the finished work. I'm not showing the work that it was done because my objective is that you do not see my work, that you see the result, but not actually the work. We recycle the wood from one building, 60,000 square feet, repair the other, and then put so concrete in one part. And so it's a daylight only museum and so the way we capitalize on the light was by making a white roof. And so there's more light inside and outside because it magnifies, it reflects. We did all the installations with the artist. We developed all the details with the artist. That's Michael Heiser and his dogs. They only light, there's emergency light and then there is light for art installations. And then there are a lot of other art related projects that I think they had somebody that have created a kind of corridor. Atlas Studio, Magasino, Poli Stalix Foundry, which we work with, Art of My, and then of course there's culinary culture and a lot of institutions of higher learning. This is a house that I'm working on now. It's a $4 million house, 3,000 square feet for a couple. It's off the grid. It's solar energy, geothermal heating and cooling. It has a satellite so that it will be off the grid. Sceptic system. It has a water catchment and it has an electric car that is solar charged and lives here. So the couple that uses this house does not own a car any other place. They move in public transportation to this house, but this house will need a car because there's no way to get from the train station to the house other than by car. This is the land. This is a sketch that in the beginning I always envisioned the couple that commissioned the house to be on high heels. I always envisioned her on high heels in the house. So it's in nature, but it's very urban. This is the land and the house, it's built to appear to be one story house and to take the car underneath. So this is the view from when you approach the house and that's a view from the trees. Nobody will see that view. This is the house under construction. It's concrete. This is the house under construction. This is the mechanical plant as the mechanical storage were there last week. And I took a picture because I thought there's a lot going on. So this is for two people, 3,000 square foot tiny house. It has a mechanical equipment, probably bigger than this building, because it's all transferring of other energies into electrical energy. So this is a geothermal well that is being well, it's being drilled so that the house can be comfortable without being on the grid. These are the window frames, aluminum window frames that will go in these openings that's being installed. It's a high precision frame. The glass came in today. This is a window. The glass, I don't want to even think about the footprint of the glass. And so the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the owner in the bedroom. This is the gym. And this is another house that is also for a couple. It's a state that used to belong to Vigolo, the French, the American ambassador to France under Lincoln. And so this couple bought this state that has been vacant for a while. And so this is the state with our renovations. This is where we imagine will be. And so there are a few things that we're proposing. And then we're proposing like three different piazzas or places. One is where the offices will be. These people are moving to this house to work. So this will be the campus for his office. Then they are going to move by water from the train station to the house. They also plan to commute by train. And so this is the farm piazza with that we do have a farm to the north and then a chicken coop behind the farm. And these are things that we're planning. And then we're planning a swimming pool in the front and a new kitchen, but we're probably keeping most of the house as it is. And so this is the view from the house, from the pool to the other shore. The house, the pool. The view from the pool to the other shore from the shore to the other pool. Of course, intentionally with this kind of rendering. And this is the other part of the lecture, the critical part. So this is a bumper sticker that I saw in Costa Rica when I was traveling a few years ago. If you love nature, don't visit it. And then we befriended a guy that had the bumper sticker and he had another sticker inside his house. If you love art, stop buying it. And so this is, so what am I doing? You know, what am I doing if I love art and I love nature, yet I'm doing a house and I don't buy art, I trade art with my clients that are mostly artists. And so I trade art and I have an art collection, but what am I doing? And so a way that I sometimes think about what I'm doing is that when you have a cat and it will not heal by itself, right, you have to heal it. But you're also altering the course of nature. I mean, what would happen if you didn't stitch a cat? And so I'm thinking that a lot of the things that we do is work on things that are bleeding. And so I like this idea of suturing landscape or cities. And I think of cities not as beginning and end. I, you know, one of the things, the article that you sent, Katya was so good in thinking, you know, how do you account for a city? Like where would New York City end? And so when you think of cities, you think about this, well, this idea of transect is very interesting to think about these stages of sickness. And then the other thing is like, did the city create the economy or did the economy create the city? The city and the economy are interlink. The city needs the economy to control what it doesn't have, to control the energy that it doesn't have, to control the food that it doesn't have. And then there is this other idea of Bishanshra Kabati, this idea that if the seven billion people that we are, we're willing to live at the density of New York City, we would all be in the state of Texas and we could live the entire rest of the world untouched. Which is of course not a possible thing, but it's a very good visual image to keep in mind because we could actually replan our ground completely. Of course, this is a very purposefully naive way of thinking of it, right? And then there's Bernard Schumann, our previous dean, where he says architecture is not about the conditions of design, but about the design of the conditions. Is it really, can we really design the conditions? And so I'm thinking this is like a mountain, like a build glass mountain. It's a very impressive building when one sees it. And this is a mountain in the middle of the city in Rio de Janeiro, several mountains that are part of the fabric of the city. And this is a very key person for Joseph Boyce, is a very key person for me to think about what we do and how to be critical of the things that we are. And so he was, he fought for the Nazis, German fought for the Nazis. His plane collapsed in the middle of Russia. He was totally burned. And so Russian peasants rescued him, covered him in animal fat, kept him for months and then he returned to Germany after the war and became an art student and an art professor and he was fired as an art professor and then his art practice was one about merging nature, art, pacifism, and political ideas. And so one of the pieces that Dia owns of Joseph Boyce, it's called A Thousand Oaks and it's a commitment of Dia to plant A Thousand Oaks they have planted about 40 in Chelsea, but so it's an ongoing project. Another piece of Joseph Boyce, he moved into a gallery in 1970s and lived with the coyote for a month. And so the idea was that the coyote is an indigenous animal of the Americas and he was, he was proposing himself as a conqueror and so he was trying to re-orchestrate the relationship between the land and nature and the coyote and the human that comes into the territory and so he lived with the coyote in this kind of suspended tension for a month and you could come see him. This is another architect or engineer, Eladio Dieste from Uruguay, he did buildings with brick and everything was brick. The floor was brick, the walls were brick, the roof were brick, the structure was brick, the decoration was brick, and so the idea was that and the bricks were always local and so the idea was that local bricks if you make a foundation, take the earth, make bricks, in the eventuality of the building, it stops being used, it will go back to being dirt and so it's a circular process that's the structure and the wall and that's the end, thank you. I was sort of traumatized a bit by that and we took the hand out of the hand and then we were looking at your hand and I thought maybe that was you and we were looking at your right hand and that was the left hand so I felt okay. But I wonder about what you said if we don't suture a wound that it won't heal but of course sutures have always existed and there's something probably incredibly fascinating about what happens if you do just leave them and in some cases obviously you wouldn't want to do that in probably most cases but if you did, the body would resolve itself in some way and I wonder how that trying to impose that logic on the city versus the rural, the urban versus the rural whether it's necessary to create something that is as pharmacologically sound as a suture and a bandage and whether there might be something valuable in leaving it to heal on itself. I wonder about that. You know, I think anyone that has dealt with any medical situations in their life, right now I have a toothache, right? We have things and we always wonder what is the relationship of involving medicine and it's a complicated one. Sometimes it's, sometimes we do it, sometimes we don't and we make certain judgments and I think in architecture it's similar. We are at a point where we need to examine you know, damage that we're doing. I guess what I'm saying is like there's a difference between the intention and the actual action. And so I'm just throwing that idea out there for all of us because whether you're a politician or a practicing architect, you deal with the degrees of that implications. I think that's where, you know, some of these examples in Germany that are very light and sort of pilot projects play a role rather than sort of forest the intervention when you are working in a resource-scarred environment and you're often sort of faced or you're forced to improvise, you're forced to tread lightly to test out whether a larger investment is even worth the file or be accepted. And we had a meeting conversation when we talked earlier about are these places really resource scars and some of your projects suggest they're not at all? Or what you suggested with the image-related tracking was also that there are enormous resources, especially in rural environments, but they're in the hands of large corporations that have to be extracting and creating these structures in the environment for a long time in the sort of disapointment and urbanization for the city. I kind of feel like this image of we would all fit into the size of Texas is completely ignoring that the extra capacity that we used to support that population even if we weren't a lot of large pensions. Yeah, you know, with the, I think this question is very interesting, but design is happening all the time. So it's, we were, with the studio I'm doing here, we were traveling to William, Illinois, and we had a meeting with some people from the silica mining industry, and they told us that they're already planning for 99 years ahead. So they're already- 99 years? Yeah, years ahead. Like, basically they already know what they're going to be extracting in a century from now. So it's, while artists are having this discussion whether we should be planning or not planning, we should kind of leave things to flow. There's others that are planning. I think the question is not whether we do things or not, or whether architectures should stop and we should have more time, because that's not really happening. Like, basically what is happening is that there's a way to construct territorial realities that is unscrutinized, that is really concentrating power, that is, and I think it's been put up by architects to know what our legacy and our kind of traditions are and our traditions, when it comes to the city, but also to the rural, are very much about accountability, creating public space, providing forms of urbanity and kind of civilized ways of co-existing. And that is something that, in my opinion, we should not believe, because somehow loose, like it's something that, somehow if we don't do that, if we don't do our job, design will still be happening. There will be homes, there will be roads, there will be instructions, there will be actions on the rural. The only thing is that they won't be or kind of thinking of urbanity. They won't be thinking about distribution or kind of equity. They won't be thinking about sort of civilized ways of creating societies, but rather about other goals, like destruction, consecration of capital. And I think our world is mostly that. It's kind of, at this point in my opinion, a practice of certain kinds of dissidents, of course, not super radical, but certain levels of dissidents. But I think that that would assume that we're better. And I want to agree with you. I want to agree with you, but it reminds me of an architect friend of mine who went to work for Doctor Without Borders. And so he spent 30 years working in Africa building hospitals. And then he was here for a trip and we went to have dinner and he said that when he returns to a village where he has put a hospital, he sees all the other things that came with the hospital, the drug tests, people that are alcoholism. He said, before, people would die in a hat by their village. Now they go to the hospital, but the hospital brings an entire host of other things from our world to them. And so I think this idea that, yes, we can do things better, and it will happen without us and it will be worse. Yes, but at the same time, we are part of the problem and the solution. We are not better than the problem in a way. But maybe there's two things here. Why is that, sorry. I'm just very interested in this because I think if you understand the patches that we have, urban, non-urban, rural, I mean they're all in a way dominated by some agency or not, right? I think they're interesting. And when you kind of go from the top to you down, there's a lot happening. And who is you and who is me? And if you think about all the indigenous population, if you think about, now it almost seems like we're kind of like going back and looking at Zapatism, looking at Korea. Korea is kind of the epitome of modernism, but it's really, really the whole richness of Korea was like thousands of good farms until 30 years ago where the basis of the economy. So I agree with you. I think it's really like how we position and when you're saying me and them, you know, this question of alterity. I mean, you know, like you said in your presentation, like you showed the island, I mean, people there are not stupid, right? And I think the kind of catch is also how we position the need with them. I mean, in a way I have the feeling that there's two things that we're discussing. One is like, I mean, like any other professional body, we have certain kind of contributions to society, and it's not that, maybe it's not that we're better, but we have certain responsibilities, like others have other responsibilities. We have a few that we have to care about. And I think that it's not easy for us because we are not fully independent. We have to gain the support of others to do our work. We have to convince people we're kind of an agent among many, but it's true that we have certain agency, an agency that we negotiate, but also an agency that allows us to contribute with something. Then the second question that I think, Galia, you're posing, which is super interesting, is that distance between the intentions and the effects, right? And I'm thinking, I agree with Kanya that the cases that you showed today were super relevant because they were happening within time. And I think probably it's about the how. How do we intervene in a way that there's, I mean, I was very, very excited about the development of the precautionary principles in the environmental policies of the European Union because it was basically about this. It was about when we're doing something that we don't really know how it's going to work and it's a sensitive issue, we have to prototype things. We have to do a small test and then scale it up progressively. So there's space, time, accountability. So those unpredictable effects that maybe are not aligned with our intentions could show before it's massively produced and it's too late to correct them. I also think there's sort of, you know, the question is whether we're acting as an agent for the public or the public good or in the name of the public. And then it's maybe more ways to frame it as sort of a general assumption that we could do better because we as designers architects are always just, you know, at the end of the day we're doing something in the service of our clients and we don't always have the choice to choose our clients and often our clients choose us. And if the general public is a client as was in some of the projects that I showed, then you sort of have a different agency and a different ambition for the project. But I also want to come back to this idea of how that might be different in a role in the environment versus the city where I think in some cases I would think with one way in the case that there is very often sort of a more kind of notion to rely on traditional techniques of building or thinking about the built environment that the shared connection to nature of outside your window, outside your door often leads to different solutions, which was to exemplify, for instance, in the example of the sheet bar and it's now being used as accommodation but it was built entirely out of materials from the region. And so I think there is sort of something where we can, in an urban environment, maybe learn a lot from people who live in the world environments of how can we break, live the same way and make an emphasis on teaching children about food that they are and growing themselves to be more and we also make an emphasis in urban environments about the materials that surround us and our buildings and the objects that we use to get a better understanding of where they come from or what energy is needed to produce them. I think that the idea of the public is one that I would like to throw in a question because I was trying to draw out in my presentation that we can't assume that these things are static, number one, number two, there's a kind of enduring belief that the rural community is a much more homeostatic one, that it's not changing and therefore is more embedded in tradition, therefore is more easily served by certain types of participatory practices whereas the urban is the more cosmopolitan is the one where there is a greater flow of different people coming in and I'm not sure that that's gonna continue to be the case and I wonder what happens when that balance of the urban and rural, the urban being of community and flux and the rural being one that's deeply rooted when that is either reversed or complicated or problematized and then the question of who that public is becomes more complicated as well. One of the things I'm very excited about in Western Mass, somehow we have the highest concentration of living buildings in the U.S. But I also wanted to introduce the idea that in rural spaces, there's a democracy to nature and there's a democracy to the openness of nature that is very enjoyable and it goes a little bit with the presentation that you did about Germany with that connectivity between towns where you're assuming that the movement is not necessarily building the building but that the movement is also outside and I think that that is the only monothematic aspect of the rural, if you want to call it something, is that there's this real uncertainty outside versus the urban where we are very much experiencing interior to interior even if the interior is outside and it's still concrete and still in a very unique space. I want to respond to you and then maybe also to you. So I think here in the region, just one of us at Hansen Valley is a perfect example of that fluidity of demographics or who the public is and it's changing very rapidly as you can see or you can sort of see the articles about the Brooklynization of the Hansen Valley and it is a result of economic pressures in the city that are spilling out into the region and for kind of fluid lifestyles like your clients have that is also beginning to manifest itself actually in the opposite so a lot of the local elections that happened just a few weeks ago are now a growing number of young people have moved to the region, recently are participating in the public discourse in their small environments. So I think that's certainly something that I think we're beginning to see more and again it's a relationship to this urban world continuum that allows that to happen that the exodus from rural environments to the cities is now it's being reversed or it's going both ways for economic reasons, so I forgot what I wanted to respond to but I'm also sort of time conscious and I'm more confident for questions from the audience. Particularly in two projects that you presented, the Housing the Island and then the four million couple house and how they are both I presume off the grid and the difference on how they actually achieve that, do you see a friction between those two projects and the dollar they have or do you think it's just a matter of permanence? How long you had to do this? Friction, so friction between if these four clients my couple and Andres Group were going to get together they would get along perfectly well. They probably are friends, they probably go to the Aspen Institute together or some other place, so I'm seeing with the clients that I have now, something similar to the clients that I had 20 years ago that were artists that had no money whatsoever, that had no shows and now they actually don't know how to navigate the world as it is now because they have waiting lists, they're not rich because artists are not really the rich type in a way but they are people whose work is value and so they are always under pressure to produce another show, to sell to this collection, to go to the, and install something in that museum and their lives have changed dramatically and I feel like the people that are now in the internet industries, in all these new industries and they go public and they go, I just sent the project council a week ago because they were comparing with public and it didn't go well and so many times they do these huge circus and it doesn't work and so it is very similar to artists careers in a way and it's kind of like where our, so they get along, I think they will get along, they are kind of, I think they will probably are misfeeds of society in some way, my clients definitely are but it's, my couple wants a house that protects them because they are nerds, they protect them from the environment, they don't really, they want to be there but they're afraid of nature in a way. It's a good question, in a way, I have the feeling that the client's house is not really the only the owners of it, it's really the whole lake, the whole lagoon, so and that's really something that needs to be constructed because the people that are kind of doing the investment of doing this house they're doing what they want they basically want a cabin to go to the island, their relationship with the lake is not that, maybe they're not that informed of the valley initially, like I think your clients are very aware of right now of this kind of environmental dimension of what they're doing. These things are really learning it through the process of doing the architecture, in a way the architecture is a way to communicate with other, with these other clients and normally they have really a cabin there that was basically destroyed, like the water and they would go there to get, I mean, like basically it's a place for people to party. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a place for people to party, that's in a very simple way. And that's the case normally with this island, so it's, do they have the resources to do it? Yes, of course they have it, but I think it's slightly different society in the way that it's a society that is very much embedded in the oil industry in this kind of idea of a very, very dominant way of related to nature. The house is actually a device to reverse that way. And the fact that we're working with activists and biologists is also revolving them in the discussion, so they're learning more about it. And that's something that we found in the world, we were looking at the, that's a specificity, but we were looking at, for instance, people living in Susquehanna Valley, it was amazing, many of the activists were selling their rights, activists again. And of course that complexity is very interesting because if they don't do it, they can frag from their neighbor's house. So at the end, it's the same, but they don't have any money. And all these complexities for me are really telling about the kind of the contemporary condition of all these competitions that we have to navigate and we have to be better. I think we're here to basically try to find ways to reorganize that complexity, in my opinion. No, I'm just pointing to the moderate. Oh, I'm the moderate? Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm the moderate. I'll call on you. I just wanted to kind of clarify a point on this with you. Venice was not built just because of two forests from the Dolomites. The entirety of the Croatian islands were deforested over time in order to build, not just Venice, but other places. I think it's not you, but it's this typical, like Western bias against anything Eastern as having a contribution to the matters of Western Europe. So just so you know, people in most Croatian islands, they used to be very heavily forested with native virgin oak forests. And they all formed the kind of basis of the exact section that you showed of Venice. But the point that I wanted to make it a little bit grumpy, so I apologize if I'm a little provocative. But I'm just so surprised that no one is questioning this term or Neil Brenner. Like, why is the rural a form of urbanization? Like, you know, I can understand that they're interrelated, but why, I'm just so surprised that no one is questioning why we can't talk about the rural on its own terms. It's like using something that it is not to explain that which it is. It's like, you know, you wouldn't call a woman a non-man. You know? You know what I mean? So I'm being a little kind of purposely provocative, but I think that the kind of architectural inclination to look at the rural from the standpoint of the urban is really basically lack of like, not even like kind of competency. Like, we don't understand the rural. We don't understand that scale or that way of intervening within a territory in order to be able to talk about it in real terms, right? So no one talks about vernacular architecture. We all talk about things that are, you know, kind of designed from some other cultural standpoint here. I'll talk a little bit with you. When I was putting the slides together, the images together, the image that I kept coming to my mind is that I was like a gynecologist of the beginning of the 19th century when they were all men, and they were gynecologists, you know, and I feel like an architect, it's a little bit of an old person to operate on the rural because the rural has had amazing infrastructure for centuries, you know, and here we come. And is there a, with our book of doing things in cities, and we are going into the territory of the rural with, you know, being educated mostly in urban environment, all the classes that we take are about the city, the city, the city, the city. So I do agree with your point, and I think it will require this generation of people to think and to study everything that has been done. Yeah. I mean, I understand why you say that, but the question, the metaphor of the woman and the non-woman is actually very good because, because basically it's not that easy to make a distinction. You know, like to make a distinction between what's a woman and what's a man, of course it's very questionable. And from that perspective, from a trans perspective, for instance, I think that we can understand very well how also critical it is to divide between rural and urban, because it's, and I will go to your first argument, basically whatever piece of rural that we see is not untouched, it's not a given, it's highly constructed. And it's constructed with tools that are connected to the two realities that were happening in cities, that were connected to the institutions of the cities, within perspectives of the cities, are also the result of the way cities colonize the rural. And I understand that you're trying to, you're defending that there should be a, there's a need for a specific knowledge about the rural. And I agree with that, but I can question the cathedrals. Actually, when I was talking about the city, I was also saying that the rural is in the city. And in fact, you can see that easily, you see the animals in the crowd, but you can see in New York, if you carefully, you see the rural in the city. So I agree with you, but somehow I think it's a double thing. I, if that is important, it's about architects, not knowing how to look at the rural. Probably we also have the incapacity to see the city and find the rural in it, or to find the, you know, and I think that the problem is not us, in a way it's actually a kind of art, modern culture, like really needing to understand that things are not that pure, that there's inter-connections, interdependencies, that there's not real lines, and that probably we have to look at more, kind of situate much more in specific situations our thoughts rather than kind of generalizing. And in regards to the, to for instance, where we intervene, it's hardly impossible to find a place that is not already super transformed. And, It doesn't mean that it's urban. It doesn't mean that it's urban, but it means that it's not, that the notion of nature that we have, or the notion of the rural, is not really the one of the 19th century that we're looking at. And not in a way questions the whole kind of division between the binary distinction between, so you're both very relevant. And I think that I would say that, from my point of view, it questions not only our capacity to operate within the rural, but our capacity to operate in the binarism of urban rural. Questions in the back. First, just to brief aside, because I noticed that probably should have died in the air today, I don't know what to stand out here. I'm very conscious, but I'm a room full of young people who shortly will go upstairs and try to make cars. And so they will get jobs and they'll be in the car. So I should point out, it's certainly hard to believe that there's reason by induction, there's reason by conduction, there's reason by analogy. There's also reason by bumper sticker. So just because somebody put it on a bumper sticker, that if you love art, you should try to make art or buy art, that doesn't mean you guys can't go out and try to make art and hopefully get paid for it. And I just want to believe you're sure. That's okay. But my whole question, and this goes to the very half comment by the young one over there. Ruralism dialogue, what I saw were a bunch of very nice, very interesting, I enjoyed them tremendously, but I sort of felt as though I was seeing a bunch of sustainable via rotundas being put in various environments where there aren't a lot of houses. The Murcia house was fascinating in the old Hedda skinny side yard, it looked as though it could actually have been adapted into a party wall format. And so with a lot of the buildings, but I came here, I guess, expecting that ruralism was in fact something about an interest in shaping the tiny 2,400-mile interval between the Davos-sanctioned super-future cities of San Frantangelus and New Yorkington. And there would be an interest, and I said, let's take that, it still can be, but I'm not sure. Is there, I mean, do you encounter the final question? Do you encounter architects who are concerning themselves with the approach that's sort of an infill, or like, how do you deal up the, Brian Rand Jacksonville, which it is subversed in order to become the biggest city in Florida, and you see trucks on trucks in the middle of wild nature, essentially, but not quite. I mean, is there a sense of an interest in trying to, is there a, could there be a project at Columbia to try to take an urban area and provide planning exercise, I guess, but to take an urban area and develop some prototypes for actually getting things back in, mediating the transition. St. Louis has built 4 million people on those 300,000, is there an interest in taking St. Louis and figuring out what should we do with it? Maybe give everybody black clothing in the hip, and then we're going to look at the pros and cons right here, but is there any interest in that kind of dialogue that's going on? I don't want to speak for all of Columbia, but I do want to say that your question, I think sort of following up on the earlier finding question, is this a moralism dialogue, it sort of leads to, this is the first attempt to have this dialogue, and to me the easiest way out to talk about it is we're interested in areas of lower density of human population, maybe, and how that natural and built environment, whether it's touch or untouched or in which way it's touched, is something that we, as architects, shape and as others that voluntarily or, you know, decide to shape it or someone else will shape it. And you're just growing in another environment that might fit that description of lower density into the mix that we, you know, other sort of assumed definitions of ruralism that have to do with nature and agriculture might not fit in, that what you're describing is a shrinking urban environment. And so I don't necessarily have an answer to whether this is of interest to anyone in Columbia right now or a semester, but I do just want to point to the idea of we're not even quite sure yet, whether we all agree on a definition of what we mean by rural, and I think that was sort of part of what the dialogue was about, or I think the idea of having a dialogue, or I think hopefully it's not the last time we have this conversation to sort of think about areas of lower density, really, and in the context, maybe, a perceived political divide between these lower density areas and those impurities that also mean a growth in the case. I really appreciate your comment on your question, and I think we're it's clear to people that are at Columbia that we see in the effort that Katia is leading is that there's a lot of concentration of thought about thinking about the city, thinking about large groups of population needs, and not so much on the transitions from the city to some places, some place else. And so what I've seen in, as a foreigner, that comes from Argentina, a rural, mostly rural country, half of the size of the United States and one tenth of the population, is that when you put your eyes in 20, 30 years, what I've seen is that a place like Beacon, New York, that is 75 minutes north of New York City, when we started working there in 1999, there was only one store on Main Street that was occupied, and it was a cash checking place, and there was one pizza that was next to it, those two. Now you go 20 years later, and it's fully occupied. The mayor has a list of people that want a storefront, and so has architecture and urbanism contributed to that transformation? Yes, we all have, by doing all different kinds of things. And so I think it's important that we examine what has changed, and what you're saying, there's this St. Louis, Germany, this area of Germany with the population, the median age of 50, they all need some retooling. Yeah, I would say that in retrospect, when I see what has happened in Beacon, I was last week in Santa Fe, Argentina, and I was cautioning people not to rush into wanting ecotourism and art tourism and another university, because it's not all good. I guess what I'm trying to say is that some of it is good, and some of it is, the success of it is also problematic, and we kind of need to work in a framework where we account for the problems that come with success of any kind in our work. It's kind of an addition to German comments and the ruralism dialogue in terms of the climate change is a fact, and then it's impacting, let's say, the agriculture and then it's generating migration into the cities, and we see in the future cities will grow, for example, there's an example, Syria, of course, is not just for climate change, but it's one of the facts why Syria grows from 4 million people to 22 million people so fast, and that's kind of the future that the cities are facing, right? And then I'm going to piece out that rural and cities are linked together somehow and work because they're under the same system. My question or comment is, don't you consider maybe, in terms of, again, sorry, like for example, agricultural practices, she's the misdeed in terms of how we mitigate the climate change, for example, in terms of our discipline, it's architects and our designers, it's maybe about our practices in our discipline, so maybe the ruralism should be within the city instead of touching the rural areas, and if it's linked in the same system, she has an impact on the ruralism and the practice, it is for these future migrations and so you can see it like maybe it should be like instead of touching rural working within the city, designing more of a city as urban designers, not as rural designers. I mean, really, there's two ways of operating, there's not a control room for climate change, so there's not a room where you can see all the options and choose what are the best ones, like in the world, like let's move everything to the city, let's put towers here, there's not that level of coordination, it's good that there's not because otherwise we would be in very absolutely absolutist ways of dealing with territorial issues, so what you're saying is very sensible and I would say that that's something that there's many people facing now, like what is the way that cities will adapt to the social implications of climate crisis and many of them are these migrations and at work on that, for instance, in Palermo and La Pedusa and different places it's a huge reality, but also it's important to understand that there's many other sites where architecture is happening now and where that architecture is happening, there's issues that have to do with climate crisis and that architecture needs to be mobilized as any other force in dealing with that and for instance, for me, the opportunities for architects to test things are the ones that also can be possible and I presented today, for instance, two projects of housing because that's something that architects have a great agency on and that there's ways to turn them into prototypes of ways, as a strategist, to deal with realities where architecture has very limited capacity to operate. If you think, for instance, of the possibility of architecture to produce changes by connecting tiny actions, it's huge and a change on that would be immense. Of course, doesn't mean that there's no possibility of, I know a lot of people are not in favor of more strategic ideas of how to intervene the cities. No, I think there's many different layers of action that need to be coordinated and happening, but somehow I think that it's so important to be realistic and to do things and to somehow deal with concrete responses to very important issues. And in doing that, I think there's a responsibility but also capacity. Often when we think about architects dealing with the rural, we think at the scale of urban design only. I think it's very important that we're discussing this because it's also a question about water times. It's about the question about what's the foundation of the building. It's also a question about the way we sense like what we do with very specific with the fences or how do we stop animas to cross backyards and all these tiny discussions of design are equally important and we have to give value to them because they scale up by repetition often and they transform territory by adding one to one to one to one to one. So it's our responsibility also to give a response at the scale of buildings and from with the tools of architecture. We should do it over again. Yeah, I think so. I understand. Yeah. Many of us in the Urban Design Studio will have an opportunity to continue the conversation and see more of us where all of you also get to participate. Thank you, everyone else. Thank you.