Nordicity

Transcription

Michael [inaudible] has told me now that everyone will come to the room when I finish my presentation. Tonight we will attend a lecture of Lola Sheppard and Mason White, Lateral Office, that is called "Undisciplined," that they have prepared for us. Lateral Office was founded in 2003 and this office has gained respect and international prestige thanks to a very special commitment to what they say in their own words, "Design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment." Said with these worlds, one imagines a frozen image in the middle of nowhere, especially these days that we are in the same situation, and driven by people isolated and super serious and concentrated in studies and experiments. But knowing them, and many in this room know them even better than me, it becomes instantly obvious their vitality and their sense of humor, the need of communication and the will to collaborate, characteristics that the both share and give them, I would say, an easiness for teaching, which is their second activity. I'm not so sure. I'll have to check in the web. Lola is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Mason is an associate professor at the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. This gives me the opportunity to say that both studied and received their masters of architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and that both will be coming soon to teach optional studio, so we will have tonight just an appetizer of what they will bring later. Their awards and merits are many and are important. Lola is the recipient of RAIC Young Architect award, Mason of the 2008-2009 Wheelwright fellowship that we give in this school. They worked, before founding Lateral, at other offices like Jean Nouvel, Peter Rose, Machado Silvetti, and other ones. And to synthesize a long series of awards, I will mention just the 2011 Holcim Foundation award, the 2011 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York City, the 2010 Canada Prix of Rome and the 2014 special mention for their Arctic Adaptations exhibition in the Canada pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2014, the last one, a special mention that could have become, in my opinion, if the jury had been formed by more architects and less curators. Books. It is almost required but comes spontaneously-- I promise, it's not that kind of intention-- that the permanent lecturers publish and write books-- good books, polemic looks, beautiful books. And in their case, they are co-authors of a pamphlet titled Coupling-- Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism of Arctic Adaptations, a beautiful book that collects their work for the Biennale, and the forthcoming Many Norths to be published by Actar, and that is suspected as their confirmation, maturity, et cetera. As a quick intro to their work in an academic context, I would like to refer to two related and relevant aspects of their practice. Their techniques of design and their strategic thinking that have posed them in the center of many different debates, paradoxically and precisely today because of their lateral situation. I'm sure the today, with this title and discipline, they will bring a polemic attitude and relationship with the integration of all the relationships of different disciplines that they did with. Let me make a kind of interpretation. We have seen in the last decades how many of the promising young architects have specialized themselves in micro or macro scales. Many oriented themselves to installations and adopted the limits of the scale of digital fabrication to produce miniature architecture. Others, with a similar approach but a different vein, as, for example, Atelier [? beau ?], with other [inaudible], insisted in this fascination with miniature scales. Others jumped from the building, that's considered such an old fashioned thing, into the city and then continued scaling to regional, national, continental, intercontinental, to finally jumping to the Earth and the solar system. I understand well the beauty of these two poles-- I think I understand it, at least-- but I have to say that as a professor of some of these talented young designers in Europe, I have never been completely comfortable with these practices that I saw and see as a relatively blind escape from the practicalities and the conditionalities of our profession, an escape that many times drives many of these architects to frustration, in a way, because it's not that easy to incorporate in our discipline long periods of time that ecological or territorial processes demand. The confidence of a client never lasts more than five years, and we have to be able to do the whole thing in very short periods of time. I mean, this is super practical, but I consider this a very important issue, one that many times hasn't been considered. For those that are practicing micro architecture, I think that many of them, especially in the south of Europe, were dealing with beautiful researches on very small things, while developers and public institutions were building like crazy, believing that they were waiting for them and they could wait for them, and then the game is over and they have nothing to show, and they are incredibly talented. This is my [inaudible]. It's not about the beauty. It's about the practicality. In any case, the interest of Lateral in the biggest scale problems that they have and that ecology has brought to the discussion and that need expression at a territorial level can be confounded with the very nature of their work. As I said before, design as a research vehicle to pose and respond intelligent questions in the built environment is their main topic. I think it's a good description, and this means that design is the key word to understand their work. It looks like a conventional formula, but I think that it's important to underline it. I'm sure, in any case, that after seeing today's presentation and to see how strategically their projects alternate the scales at play and how much care and craft is posed in the minimal scale of a house or an ice mast, or even the amazing stone models made by the Inuit and presented in the Biennale in Venice, we will understand that in the Arctic landscapes and territories they choose as their research fields, the conditions are so reluctant to human life that the presence of design means literally life. It's not a kind of [inaudible] aspect to be considered ornamental. And the best possible strategy in these cases is always the intensification of very few key small spots, transforming them in moments of total design. The work of Lateral can be seen, then, as a collection of huge scale geographical [inaudible] or as a microscopic collection of super intensified moments of total design, catalyzing the primitive huts of forgotten territories. Or, more precisely, and this is my interpretation, as an impressive and sophisticated orchestration of macro, micro, and conventional scales that manifests itself as the [inaudible] integration or convergence of different design techniques in a unified environmental strategy. I will have to discuss this with Charles [inaudible] during dinner. That is not casual that the training both have had in this school is as architects. This training is probably what permits them to design the miracles they are designing. Please join me [inaudible] in welcoming Lola and Mason. [applause] Thank you very much, Inaki, and thank you to the faculty for the invitation to speak here this evening. It's a pleasure to see so many friends, so many colleagues, and even a few former students and former teachers of ours all in the room at once. We're going to try to occupy the podium at the same time, as you can see. We don't often get to be able to give a lecture at the same time, too. This is also a great opportunity for Lola and I to do this. Sometimes we're in different geographies at the same time instead. But we saw this is an opportunity for a reflection on our recent work and maybe a personal stock taking on current dilemmas through this work within the design disciplines. And so we wanted to use this opportunity, again, to look at provoking three fundamental questions. And this is, I'd say, in a way a 10 year anniversary for us reflection point on this idea and the very points maybe Inaki alluded to at the end about the status of our training. So what is the disciplinary field? What is the status of disciplinary within which we operate today? Second question, what are the tools and modes to operate within this field? And a third question, what relevancy does spatial practice have in a post-global condition? You'll see the term "spatial practice" is something we're quite interested in. In fact, it's the subtitle of the book that Inaki referred to called Many Norths. So Lola and I are going to go back and forth on some of these questions. Discipline. Disciplinary has traditionally been about knowledge production, but it was Foucault who first called attention to the discipline as a, quote, "system of control in the production of discourse," end quote. English scholar Shumway and Messer-Davidow unpacked the historical lineage of disciplinary, articulating in 1991, quote, "The various connotations of discipline have until recently been entirely positive. To call a branch of knowledge a discipline was to imply that it was rigorous and legitimate. However, the name does not reveal that knowledge is produced in regulating or controlling knowledge producers, nor that the training of disciplines produces the acceptance of disciplinary methods and truths," end quote. Interestingly, the metaphors most commonly used in discussing the scope of disciplines are often geographical ones. For instance, it is common to hear of territories or fields or frontiers which disciplinary practitioners annex or map or explore. Sociologist Thomas Gieryn observes, quote, "The intellectual ecosystem has, with time, been carved into separate institutional and professional niches through continuing processes of boundary work designed to achieve an apparent differentiation of goals, methods, capabilities, and substantive expertise," end quote. Disciplines differ significantly with regard to the permeability of their boundaries, and most scholars believe that the permeability of disciplines' boundaries are related to the uniformity and coherence demanded of its practitioners. Architecture has, since the 1960s, been active in borrowing from other disciplines, although it is unclear to what degree that borrowing is reciprocated within those same disciplines. Law professor Robert Post stated, "When we speak of a discipline, therefore, we speak not merely of a body of knowledge but also of a set of practises by which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved, and reproduced," end quote. Multi-, Trans-, and Inter-. Although the tug between an interior oriented and exterior oriented design discipline persists, since the 1990s, we have experienced considerable momentum toward the discipline's exteriority that may have entirely realigned the balance in favor of transgression. The impacts of the shift are evidenced in its theory, in its mode of practice, and is ultimately embedded within architecture's contemporary pathology. This may have arrived through the various prefixed versions of disciplinary itself, which include multi-, inter-, intra-, post-, and possibly its most robust form to date, trans-disciplinary. Advocating for trans-disciplinary research, many have suggested that, such as this case, Gary Brewer, quote, "Trans-disciplinary research responds to the observation that the world has problems but universities have departments." This claim, suggesting that trans-disciplinary work is more oriented towards problem fields in the life world. However, interdisciplinary is a term that many use without a clear sense of what it means and whether there actually are shared understandings or intentions. In other words, is this inter- actually mutualistic? At a more local capacity, there continues to be exciting though unruly interbreeding amongst the design and spatial disciplines. For example, any combination of architecture, landscape, infrastructure, ecology, planning, engineering, or urbanism have offered fodder in the last two decades for new disciplinary pursuits and in some cases the launching of new academic programs. This has yielded an opportunity for considering the expanded field for the design disciplines. The notion of the expanded field as initiated by Rosalind Krauss in her 1979 essay "On New Understandings of Sculptural Practices" has attained strong crossover interest in architecture. The charting of a shifting disciplinary field and its offspring has been of consistent interest, speculation, and skepticism among theorists, critics, and contemporary historians. For example, Anthony Vidler's 2005 text in Artforum offered his reading of architecture's expanded field where he writes, "Following several decades of self imposed autonomy, architecture has recently entered a greatly expanded field." He goes on to suggest four dominant principles emerging from this expansion, quote, "ideas of landscape, biological analogies, new concepts of program, and a renewed interest in formal resources," end quote. In 2009, we also attempted a charting of the expanded field as problematized by the renewed interest in the promise of infrastructure. This is the cover of the architecture issue of The New York Times. You wouldn't think it would be the architecture issue, but it is. And the field to locate infrastructure within and amongst the design disciplines, arguing that architecture's absence-- I can show you this drawing. This was in the pamphlet Architecture Number 30, trying to locate infrastructure relative to landscape and urbanism in a kind of Klein field diagram, and offering that this actually opened up other possible interpretations of the spatial products that include productive surface, a civic conduit, or a programmed container, arguing in a way that architecture was not within that field because it could be atomized at the periphery. Undisciplined. This leads us to the possibility of the undisciplined. This practice is not anti-disciplinary, nor necessarily multidisciplinary. Instead, questions may be provoked outside of the discipline, although the methods of response remain within the discipline. Looking outside of a discipline is not to avoid its particularities but rather to expand and clarify the questions, and ultimately the agency, that it can have. Examples of this are forthcoming, but how does one operate within an undiscipline? So we've given a fair amount of-- I don't know if we've given thought, but we certainly thought and debated internally, what is the role of the architect in this undisciplined territory? And we've gotten increasingly interested in this idea of detective work as a productive model for thinking about alternative ways of practicing and researching. And in particular, the work and methods of a detective are a useful analogy or model. The foundations of crime fiction which brought forth the modern detective novel, such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, held the use of logic and early forensics as tools for finding reason. Interestingly, fiction sometimes preceded reality. So, for instance, 15 years prior to the real world application, Sherlock Holmes proposed in the novels the use of fingerprinting, and Scotland Yard only much later appropriated this. And so there's an interest that we have in how projects emerge at the intersection of research and undisciplined truths and discounted fictions. In contrast, the postmodern detectives or investigators such as Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, who find reason and logic get him nowhere. Competing narratives obscure linearity, and instead, truth is often found accidentally. What makes crime fiction gripping and relevant to our purposes here is that the outcomes of that detective work are sometimes less interesting than the process and procedures at work in the detective work. The mode of the detective requires a malleability of approach, sometimes dramatic shifts in scale, and the ability to look at something anew in an effort to anticipate or respond to the unanticipated. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is an interesting figure because she works through a kind of analogy. Crimes always remind her of a parallel incident, and she has an ability to latch onto casual comments and connect it to a case, and so there's a working through parallels between unrelated precedents. Colombo, who we've been fascinated with, is interesting because in the actual television show, it reverses the format of the whodunit because the crime in fact unfolds at the beginning and the show is really about uncovering the pieces of crime. So the procedures really become the core of episode. And the character of Colombo is interesting because he dupes suspects through a seeming absentmindedness and effectively tricks them into revealing information. And then we considered Magnum PI, who makes it look effortless and has great wardrobe, but decided that the effortlessness seemed misleading, so we've had to move on in search of another model, and we've landed on the idea of Lester Freamon from The Wire, who I'm sure many of you know. We like him, A, because he's the antihero. He works in a team and he's often secondary within a louder set of characters and, perhaps very aptly for the analogy to the architect, he begins his career in the show demoted to the dusty archives precisely because he'd asked pointed questions that had made people unhappy, and he basically sees his career resuscitated over the course of the show, working in particular on wiretaps. And he famously says in the first season, "You follow the drugs, you get the drug addicts and drug dealers, but you start to follow the money and you don't know where the f it's going to take you." And I think we're really interested in this idea of following the money, pursuing leads that, A, you may not know where they're going to take you, and that you also become immersed in the environment which you're investigating. It's interesting that his contribution, in a way, to the show, or his character's contribution, is largely one of revealing networks and recognizing patterns of behavior. He is, in a sense, the ears of the wiretap. So transitioning to this idea of the undisciplined and of the discipline today, there's an interest also in extrinsic factors that surround the design dilemmas. The detective work becomes a tool to look at contexts and questions and disciplines that we may not be familiar with and, in fact, that very unfamiliarity forces us to look with a kind of precision that we sometimes take for granted within our own discipline. The performance of any design depends on the alignment and adaptability between the system and its environments. Although risky business, charting the extrinsic attributes of the discipline also reveal hidden patterns, and therefore opportunities for design. Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space has had significant interest in architecture, urban planning, art, and sociology. Using a conceptual triad, Lefebvre attempted to understand how space is produced by including spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces. He writes that, quote, "The spatial practice of a society secretes that society's space. It propounds and presupposes it in a dialectical interaction. It produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it," end quote. In other words, the adherents simultaneously adopt a system and produce its modifications. Both Lefebvre and later Michel de Certeau each use the notion of the tactical in opposition to architecture and the city. Spatial practice is a form of resistance or subversion to design. We would argue, however, that spatial practice can be understood more broadly and as a continuum of scales and degrees of spatial intervention. It might be bottom up and subversive, but equally might be top down and engineered. It might leave no traces on the territory or very clear imprints on the land. Equally intriguing here is how have these undisciplined spatial practices impacted disciplines. Speaking more personally, a critical criteria for us in terms of navigating information is asking, can it be spatial and in what way is it a spatial practice of some sort? Even representational conventions are often tested in an attempt to chart the multiplicity of spatial practices. Reflecting on these questions of disciplinary, modes of investigation, and agency of design, we would like to show recent work and also to situate the foundations of the work informative earlier work. So the first project that we want to show, and hopefully work through quickly, is an older project called Water Economies/Ecologies, Farming the Salton Sea, which dates from 2009, but was, I think in many ways, formative for us in terms of engaging this idea of a problem where there's no clear solution and without knowing exactly within what disciplines it belonged to, or within which disciplines one might appropriate. So it began with a fascination with the questions of the imbrication of water infrastructures, urbanism, ecology, and the economies of large agriculture. As we were slowly unpacking the challenges facing the US, it became clear that one of the challenges in the US is that many of the fastest growing cities are also in the most water strapped regions, which you see fairly clearly in this map. So there is ever more elaborate infrastructures required to sustain cities' agriculture, and so in particular, the Colorado Basin becomes a litmus test of this hyper infrastructuralized landscape. Every mile in the last 60 years has essentially been damned, aqueducts, canals. So this is the basin. You see the Colorado River, and there's a coding for all the aqueducts, pumping stations, canals, waterways, et cetera, that basically manage and redistribute water to service cities and agriculture. And in a sense, nowhere is the impact of this infrastructuralization more apparent than in the Salton Sea, which really becomes a registration of the rapid transformation with which landscapes are created, erased, and, in fact, rediscovered in quick succession because of the constant transformations that happen. And so here's the Salton Sea, which-- actually, I'll go back briefly-- is just southwest of Los Angeles and was basically created when the All-American Canal breached its banks in 1905 and basically flooded an ancient inland sea. And immediately after the flood, it was designated as an aqueous sump for the Imperial Valley, which is here, which is the tenth largest agricultural region representing a $1 billion industry in the US. And so really, the Salton is a terminal lake, which means it has no outward flow of water and is constantly increasing in salinity, and basically receives the aqueous refuse with all the fertilizers and toxins that the Imperial Valley agricultural region produces. And it becomes very clear that really, there's a sustaining of agriculture in desert conditions, and one might question whether one should be sustaining agriculture in these conditions, and that it's sustained largely by this complex network of canals. The All-American canal is a moment of highly political infrastructure where essentially the Americans deviated the water that would normally go to Mexico in order to service the American agricultural zones, which is to say that also infrastructure is political. And so early on, the Salton was a kind of Riviera for California. It was a highly successful tourist zone. The sea was stocked with fish and so there was recreational fishing and boating and so forth. And then between the 1960s and the 1990s, the sea went into massive ecologic decline. As the toxins started to accumulate, you had massive fish die offs, you had bird die offs, and of course, as a consequence, you also had the evaporation of tourism. And that's how it gets it name. The name, in fact, comes from the highly saline, salted landscape, that is the sea. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a sense that it had hit a tipping point and something had to be done, and so there were a series of engineered proposals that were submitted by various groups, and this is a matrix of them. And all of them really relied on large scale engineering, either pumping water hundreds of miles from the Atlantic and desalinating it, building huge barriers and allowing part of the sea to survive and part of it to die off. But really, the salinity was seen as a liability which couldn't be overcome. And so part of our interest was really in saying, could one actually take this condition of hyper salinity, which is the essence of the sea, and actually try and see it as an asset and imagine a set of infrastructures that might respond to the environmental conditions in a far more incremental and adaptable way than the large scale engineering projects which we just saw? And at the same time that one right shift the conception of the Salton from a refuse where this is the engine of the region and imagine a redistribution in which the Salton becomes again an active economic as well as ecological agent. Basically, we start to develop a notion of a soft infrastructural system of pools that could take on various roles that could increase three or diminish in numbers and in roles depending on the changing needs that the sea might need. This is a master plan that basically looked at a set of inputs and outputs, so inputs of tourism and outputs of new recreational activities, inputs of water and salt and outputs of new agricultural products, and outputs of ecological systems, and maybe also the notion that the Salton would reconnect to a kind of hinterland. So not only is the project trying to work at the scale of the sea, but also an extended landscape. And so the project became a series of four types of pools-- production tools that would take advantage of the salinity to harvest kelp and seaweed, harvesting pools that could harvest fresh water and salt, recreation pools of different salinity which would take advantage of the salinity for different recreational activities, and then the habitat pools that worked as floating wetlands, and it produced a new, land-based landscape of water programs and a new landscape within the water body of these floating pools that could aggregate more and be brought to shore and docked for harvesting. And so this new industrial landscape might emerge and a new recreational landscape might emerge. We've always been interested in trying to think through scales and appropriating existing technologies, so looking at existing technologies of floating wetlands and moving large volumes of water and floating fish farms, and looking at how they could inform and be appropriated for new technologies in terms of also evaporating and harvesting fresh water. And so really, the project was about a change from a mono economy, which is how the Salton currently works, to a much more diversified and complex economy, which produced on the one hand new economies and presumably more robust ecologies, but also a new public realm that emerges from this infrastructure. And in a way, that the project also began-- Lola said we were presenting a project that was formative to us. It began, let's say, I think in quite an undisciplined way in the sense that we did not know how to operate. We were looking at it entirely as a question, as a problem. And in fact, it was a point at which, of course, in a lot of deep research, a question of whether there was to be a design proposal within that. And so this idea of the undisciplined looking, I think, was an essential self discovery in some ways in the project at Salton Sea. Now, I'm going to try to show three projects as a triptych, and I'm going to show quite a few images but I'm not going to talk for very long about each one because we want to spend the majority of our time talking about some work we've been doing in the last three and a half years in the far and high north of Canada. But I wanted to show these projects as maybe another way in which we're looking at design's relationship to environment, and I think this idea of environment or the notion of environment is a very productive term through the way in which it's bound by all of the disciplines. So it's a useful prod at this question. The first one I'm going to show is the most recent of the three. It was for Far Rockaway in Queens, New York, and it was a very large event that you're familiar with from 2012, and it's affected the East Coast in a dramatic way across New York, and it spawned a whole host of interest in resiliency and resilient urbanism. In terms of our interest in this site, this is the site. It's one of the largest undeveloped sites in New York City in Far Rockaway in Queens. It was also one of the most badly hit areas. We wanted to look at a soft way in which an urban scheme intermittently, depending upon the dramatic nature of the event, that it had the ability to absorb and respond to those events. So in a way, this plan that you see is a plan first of the water, first of the zones in the new proposal, the proposed scheme in which water could be taken in, and that yielded a set of spaces. So in some ways, the first act was to design a negative space, was to design the void. And the urban scheme around it, the built form around it, also was one that wanted to adapt or adopt also traits of that environment. So something like the boardwalk, which is so significant iconically to that area, spawned these miniature boardwalks which would help navigate high water events that would go back within the neighborhoods in a perpendicular connection. Meanwhile, the urban figure or the urban form was running in this direction and they operated as a kind of dune. So in a way, dunes and urbanism were hybridized to create a set of neighborhoods, and each one of these boardwalks would help unify or create connections across those sandy blocks. This is a very large scale. Of course, the design was mostly notional. We did work up a series of urban figure types, but really, this drawing was meant to show, let's say, the role that these pockets would play. And depending upon their shallowness or their depth, they might either be more waterlogged or less. They might have programs that could be used on those spaces there were more permanent or ones that were more temporary or fluctuating. And there you can see, again, the coast and the series of dunes which these blocks took up. It may be a bit more apparent in a section drawing. Another moment in that project. Maybe there, you can see the boardwalk cutting across in the perpendicular direction. Each one of these projects, again, was about collaboration, both considering the architecture, the building of these individual housing blocks or bars, as well as the role that landscape would play a local and a larger regional scale, and the larger urban figure also being equally important. Looking within one of these sponge pockets. The second project we'd show is much earlier, 2007. It was a two phase competition in Reykjavik to reimagine a downtown airport. Iceland is well known for its energy capacity and also well known for its remoteness, and this figured quite strongly within the scheme. The site downtown, this is the city airport. Reykjavik is here, about 180,000 people, and this is still an operating airport-- you can fly in and out of it-- but it was slated for decommissioning, so they were wondering how it might be redeveloped within the larger urban figure of Reykjavik. So we looked at the idea of this is the existing figure of the runway. Again, almost designing the void first, could we designate that zone as a space in which there would be void or open space or green space, and then within and around that, we would populate various urban typologies or building typologies. And each one of these runways would take on a trait relative to the aspects of that region. You can see the second drawing is a superimposition of the old runway and maybe In this new runway as a public realm. So the total figure here, and maybe different from the Rockaways project, which was more about a series of bar buildings, this was really about a courtyard or creating enclosed spaces within the block. There were specific programs that they gave relative to, let's say, a university, other more commercial zones, and then they asked for smaller fabric, lower grade fabric, a bit further south in this scheme. And each one of these runaways took on a different trait, which I'll show. This was the production runway, which really tried to harness geothermal energy and look at the role that it could play in agriculture, and also tree farming. Reykjavik does not have that many trees, but it was something that they were using a lot of, so it was a chance to boost that. But it also, because of the vast geothermal reserves of the country, who are also always trying to figure out how to harness this into new economies, there's the idea of a kind of server farm underneath the runway which would take advantage of cheap energy, and the heat released from the server farms would basically the excess heat would be used for the greenhouses and markets and various above ground programs. So there's a kind of reciprocity between above and below ground. And the second runway figure was called the recreational greenway, and this was a series of discrete islands or pockets of program with greater differentiation, and they were meant to cut across the urban figure to create variable access to that kind of program. And the third one was a civic greenway that took on much larger programs and had the largest of the open spaces. I think that part of the question of the greenways was not so much that they were really voids, but they were voids charged with programs, whether it was landscape programs, civic programs, production programs. It was a charged void rather than a purely open space that was undefined, let's say. And the third project in the series was a project we did in 2012 with Luis Callejas, LCLA, was the Klaksvik Competition in the Faroe Islands. You'll see some similar strategies applied here operating at a different scale. This drawing is not coming up totally well, but Klaksvik is actually up here. It's the second city of the Faroe Islands, a very surreal environment, the region here, in that it's a very remote and very small island but they have 11 soccer teams, for example. They're similar to some of the other traits in Reykjavik. You'll find a unique geology and few trees, very rocky geography. And the role that these peaks and valleys or these mounds of old earth pile upon have dramatically influenced inhabitation. So you see, let's say, the city form is really one of this U shape and really about a coastal occupation along these breezeways. And actually, wind is a very significant impediment to public realm in the city, and one of the charges of the brief was to address the almost inhospitality of open space due to the way in which this dramatic landscape funnels wind between its landforms. Something we got really interested in as a design team was a very local character of the role that the roof plays and the diversity of roofs, and actually began a very soft science of cataloging these roofs and trying to understand, and also the role that color would play within this landscape. You see that a lot in Nordic environments and in the high north in general. Color is a very strong attribute. And we looked at, let's say, this argument. As of now, Klaksvik and many of the other towns in the Faroe Islands are made up of many small, individual homes. What would the public realm be, but could the public realm be a sort of aggregation or a belting together of individuals, and could you then obscure that individuality through subdivision? And then again, the roof became a really strong figure in understanding that idea of a transition from the individual to the collective. And we began a game of relationships between that figure, this bound together individuals acting as one and altering its relationship to the ground or to the space below it. And that also yielded a series of landscape rooms or landscape figures that we wanted to see in complement with that. The brief had asked for development at this zone at the head of this outlet. We were interested in looking at this larger area and to look at the continuity of water, and again, these rooms to appear also within the larger band of this undeveloped zone. But really, the primary design intent was up here. The programs they'd asked for were very curious programs. Some of them were called culture house, or there was a maritime museum. Some of them, actually, we made up like a cinema house because they didn't give us as much information in the program as we'd hoped, so that yielded this set of figures of where water would be, where was vegetation, where were buildings, and what was this new public realm that they were really asking of how could this be achieved. Coming back to the roof and the role that the roof played relative to the environment, buildings were operating in different ways relative to wind. So for example, these two buildings at the headway were really about diminishing any wind intensity coming from this direction, and any that wasn't stopped by that would be disturbed by this peaked roof to create enough space for some wind protection within this larger zone. There aren't very many people within this town-- I think it was about 18,000-- so it was really a modest size. We didn't want to over design that public realm at this downtown intersection. These are sections through the project, looking at some of the figures relative to the water. And I think that completes the triptych of projects we wanted to show that were in some ways looking at this idea of disciplinary intersections. So in some ways, that may have been the project we were most disciplined. We probably stayed closest to the fields of architecture and urban design. But I think one of the things that that last project in particular, but all of them raised for us also, was on the one hand, architecture's response to environment and the idea of local vernaculars and how one might imagine local vernaculars sometimes emerging from environmental conditions or in the case of Klaksvik, also literally reinterpreting existing typologies. So very quickly, one of the things that we, in our undisciplined moments perhaps, is that we do a lot of things. So we design projects, we enter competitions, we do installations, and as Inaki suggested, we also edit books and make books. Bracket began as a byproduct out of Intranet Lab, which was formed in 2008 with May Przybylski and Neeraj Bhatia and really was a response to the existing landscape of publication and an ambition to reimagine how one might curate a set of discussions relative to architecture. And it was intentionally called an almanac, not a journal or a magazine, in this idea that an almanac forecasts, that it projects what is to come rather than taking stock necessarily of what has been or is, and also, interestingly enough, deals with predicting weather in order to anticipate yields in crops. So this relationship of environment and ecology and productivity are nicely intertwined in an almanac. The first issue, which Mason edited with Maya Przybylski, was called On Farming and looked in the broadest sense at ideas of harvesting, productivity, collecting within the built urban and non-urban landscapes. The second issue, which was called Goes Soft, which I edited with Neeraj Bhatia, looked at ideas of soft infrastructures and soft systems as methods for dealing with contingency, adaptability, and incremental responses. One of the things that I think has been very productive for us in the reciprocal relationship between books and design is that often the questions feed back and forth. So certain ideas that may have lingered in a design project become an issue to be tabled within an issue of Bracket, for instance, and vice versa. And I should say that Bracket's subtitle is called "Architecture, Environment and Digital Culture," and it really seeks to look at the very intersections between these three fields. So the last issue, which is coming out, I hope any day or any week, is called Bracket at Extremes, which I co-edited with Maya Przybylski, which looks at-- aptly relative to some of the work we're showing-- the question of extremes as something productive in design, that it's less a tendency that we may have to want to restore, remediate to an existing or previously stable condition, but actually that the conditions of ecological or economic or political instability actually become new grounds and new opportunities for design thinking. So relative to some of these previous projects and some of, I think, the questions that Bracket tries to ask, a lot of our work over the last six years, five years has dealt with the North, and it really emerged out of this question of how architecture can respond to questions of scale, to territory, and to environment. And so most of us have a mythic notion of what the North is, a sublime beauty and all the images that we see on National Geographic, and what we got interested in is the recognition that in fact there are people living there and there are spatial patterns and practices, and that actually very few people were documenting this. There's also a whole set of other myths surrounding the North, myths that are also facts-- the of imminent potentials of oil resources and mineral resources, the changing climate and the subsequent changes in sea ice extent, and a lot of political rhetoric as well. And certainly in Canada, we have a rather. Hawkish prime minister who likes to declare, use it or lose it. Although who we would lose it to is unclear. There's a well known historian who said our greatest allies are the month of January and February. It's really hard to invade four million square kilometers of Arctic in February, I can tell you. But again, the Canadian North crossed 100,000 people a few years ago, and that's covering four million square kilometers. That's probably the population of Harvard spread over a very large territory and in very small communities. The largest two territorial capital cities are about 20,000, and then you're quickly down at 7,000 and then down to communities of 1,000 people. So there's tremendous distribution of small settlements, and in many parts of the North a very young population which is producing this interesting hybrid of tradition and modernity. So you've got kids on Facebook listening to hip hop but going out hunting on the weekends, and that hybrid culture has also been fascinating to us. So this is the reality, in a way, on the ground. These are a set of figure grounds that actually some of the people in this room have worked on, trying to document the footprint of these towns. This is the capital Iqaluit, and this is its reality on the ground. In many parts of the North, you don't have sidewalks because of permafrost. The ways of moving through towns are very different. At the same time, you have an importation of southern models of housing, of education, of language, et cetera, so you get these somewhat suburban bungalows or houses sitting in a dramatic climate. You have entirely different infrastructural networks because you often don't have roads. Everything is flown in or shipped in, and you have, as I said, this mixing of contemporary technologies and traditional practices. We've spent a lot of time traveling through the North, although we've still only barely begun. This is Mason in the depths of January in Iqaluit. An architect selfie. We've been to, between the two of us, every cirumpolar nation and interested also in the differences from nation to nation, and then even within Canada, the dramatic difference from east to west. So when we first started, we were fairly unfamiliar with the topic, and there was a question of, how do you begin this research? How do you look at four million square kilometers when actually, at the time, we didn't know a whole lot. So we began with reading very broadly and very laterally or horizontally about, in a way, everything we could grab our hands on. We started to develop a way of trying to classify the information we were coming across. So these were a set of cards that became our initial ordering device. So we had issues of ecology, issues of housing and settlement, issues of culture and education, transportation, monitoring, and resources, and these forms of classification have stayed with us. So we read and the cards multiplied, and they became a way for us to record interesting phenomena that we came across. On the one hand, they were forms of different spatial realities in the North, and that they might become productive to design questions later on, but at the beginning, we really didn't know where this was going. So they continued to multiply and became part of an initial exhibition that we had organized, but in many ways also became the seeds of a book that we are now just getting ready to complete called Many Norths, Spatial Practices in a Shifting Territory. This is the ToC, so you see, in a way, the five primary categories still remain. And the book is really, as the title suggests, looking at this broader sense of spatial practices, and it's intentionally broad in the set of issues. We could have just looked at housing, we could have just looked at settlements, but I think we quickly recognized that, in fact, you couldn't understand architecture without understanding logistics. You couldn't understand architecture without understanding how one hunts or how one mines resources and that a mining town looks no different than a permanent town and that, in fact, these are all intertwined. And there was also a deliberate intention to be broad in the ways that we documented. So we developed essays that look at a historical context for each of these themes. We developed timelines that provided a general overview of each topic. We conducted interviews with specialists, sometimes scholars and sometime Northerners, on various topics relative to the different chapters, and then we developed a set of case studies that are really a moment of zooming in and trying to look at where spatial practice becomes tangible in terms of stakeholders. What is Many Norths? So the next question was, how do you define the North, given such a complex geography? There are many debates about how you define the North. One geographer called Louis-Edmond Hamelin, who is a Quebec geographer, developed an interesting system of trying to classify the North. Called nordicity, and I'll come back to that. But we start to think, how do you define the North? You can look at the Northern Territories, which are the equivalent of our states, but in the North. You can look at the task force line, which is where you get tax benefits for living in remote areas. You can look at ethnographic definitions of where the Inuit live. You can look at the tree line. You can look at the permafrost line, which affects, of course, how you build. You can look at the Arctic ecozone and the vegetation that that produces. You can look at the southern road access, so where the roads end and where you have to shift entirely other modes of movement and transportation. And then coming back to Hamelin, he basically famously said, "There are so many norths in our North" and looked at this idea of the multiple norths, said there was southern Canada, there was the near north, the middle north, the far north, and the extreme north. And really, once you start to overlay all these lines, it becomes clear that the definition of territory in itself is problematic, and what scope do you examine? So we're going to look at a few of these case studies. One, for example, under the category of settlements or urbanism was this idea of land form and the influence that land form has on the production of settlement. This was productive also for the Venice Biennale project. We did a cataloging. This is actually something that had never been done in this context before also, so it's become a productive resource within these territories. But looking at how the figure, or the given shape and the coincidence of landing or the initial seed of urbanism planted has influenced development. Often, this is quite literally land form affecting things like airway strips, because all of these, again, are above the road line, so the figure of the airplane and the airport and the runway is a significant lifeline to the south and resources. So we looked at that, and in this case, affecting a linear settlement based on land, land form. This is the town of Tuktoyaktuk in Northwest Territories, which coincidentally settled on a very small outcropping of land at the north end of the Mackenzie Delta, and as the town began to grow, it essentially has run out of space. This is a dispersed settlement based upon its land form and its relationship to the coast. And then others, quite curiously, here in Arviat in Nunavut, exhibit a concentrated settlement, again based upon developable land. We look at parallel case studies relative to those as well. More specifically, we looked in the urbanism chapter, there's a case study on the growth of the capital, and that's the capital in Nunavut, which is on Baffin Island, and it's called Iqaluit. As you can see by this radial growth, like a tree growth, radial growth of population in each of these communities, and you can see Iqaluit has really been a lightning rod, or let's say a primary all access point for Northerners. It's also a place where the US airway base was in the 1940s. So we chart and collect archival imagery of its early growth as a military town and some of the architectures and infrastructures associated with that, its growth in the 1940s, when it may have acquired its first hospital or power plant, how it grew in the 1950s RCMP, and then some of the initial housing coming into play in certain neighborhoods, and these clusters form until the 1990s, at which point it attained an actual status as a capital, until today, where, as Lola said, it's about population 7,000. We probably have too many of these case studies, so we'll move through some of them faster. As part of urbanism, we're also interested in some of the infrastructures that are unique to the north, and that's part of what we were interested in, is looking at what are the things that are truly unique to this region. One of the things is the existence of utilidors, which are above ground pipes or conduits, really, that carry water, electricity, and waste, and they are in a few towns in the North because of the difficulty of running things underground because of permafrost. So we were looking at Inuvik, which was a town planned and built in the 1950s as a capital for the Western Arctic and looking at the larger matrix of energy and utility systems within the region. But then within the town of Inuvik, it's interesting because it has a combination of trucked water system and trucked waste, where basically, there's a truck that literally delivers your oil and your water and removes your waste, and then there's a pipe system. And what's also fascinating is as you read archival material, infrastructure was really a two tier system. So the southerners got pipes and the Inuit did not, and so infrastructure becomes a tool of social differentiation as well. So we looked at the network of where the utilidor was and where the water infrastructure was and energy infrastructure. One of the byproducts of the utilidor is it has produced a more compact urbanism than some other communities, but it also produces this amazing, in a way, mark on the land and becomes part of the landscape, and often doubles with walkways, and you see children climbing on it, so it becomes part of the built landscape. Another thing we were looking at is snow fences, which are built outside of cities-- you see them here in blue-- to control the development of snow drifts. They basically redirect snow so that it doesn't land on the city but outside of it, and they basically become part of the landscape of many northern towns. We looked at things within architecture such as foundations, which are a crucial challenge because of permafrost and climate change and unstable ground. So, as I said, you often don't get sidewalks and roads, which produces an unusual notion of territoriality. And then there's constantly innovations being tested in terms of how to prevent the buildings from warming up the ground. Sometimes they're raised on piloti, sometimes there are thermosiphons, sometimes they refrigerate the ground below, and so forth. And it produces this almost second architecture to the architecture itself, which is the whole system of foundations. These are systems of thermosiphons that basically draw heat out of the ground to keep it refrigerated, effectively. And then some of these innovations are also used on infrastructure. This is the Alaska pipeline, which is also using thermosiphons. As I said, we also looked at things like logistics, so something like sea lift. The whole central and western Arctic has no roads, so everything is delivered by boat once a year from Quebec and a few other towns. So basically, if you want your Ikea sofa, if you want your cat food, if you want your new chair, Christmas comes in August in the north. So we were looking at the routes by which these boats deliver, and also looking at the logistics and spatial reality. So you get these huge sea containers, but most communities don't have ports to accommodate them so they actually have to moor in the bay, and then you get these little smaller barges that have to go back and forth for several days unloading the sea cans. And then many of the sea cans, in fact, stay up in the communities and are co-opted as storage or workshops and things like that. So they also, in fact, become inadvertently part of the built environment. So we'll maybe go through a few of these a bit more quickly, but you can see the idea was to look at issues of mobility and certain innovations, again, that might be happening at an engineering scale or at more of what might be arguably a top down scale as a form of spatial practice, this one in particular, and then, let's say, its contrast, the idea of Inuit trails. How do Inuit, indigenous people in the North, how do they navigate? How do they read the ice? How do they read the snow? How do they locate desirable routes on the land? Actually, a lot of this work is done by a gentleman, Claudio Aporta, and we actually were interpreting some of his more data based research into spatial form, of which he has also a wealth of GIS information that fed into that. Or even, again, at the more grounded scale, the sled, the qamutiik. How do you pack for a trip? Sea ice is a significant ecology in the Arctic, and its role. We look at the different descriptors, both in Inuktitut, the native tongue, and its rough English translation, of these different kinds of sea ice types and its role in hunting, its role in navigation, how ice is tested. So how does one monitor the ice? You have these different techniques by different actors, let's say, and for different purposes. And again, these are treated as an equilibrium, not with any basis of one being scientific and one not, but in fact, all on a similar plane. We referred earlier to other forms of monitoring. Militaristic monitoring. This is the distance early warning line developed collaboratively between the US and Canada with the threat of Russia at the time, ongoing Cold War era. And these were very specific figures on the ground and had very specific structures associated with them in terms of communication, in terms of foresight. And another kind of city, let's say, in the North, or another perception of that territory. Extraction is a significant one. It's the lifeblood of the Canadian economy. Looking at, for example, diamond mines in Northwest Territories and some amazing innovations in terms of access and siting and the great lengths that one would go to to hit this exact acupunctural point from an engineering standpoint. So again, going between mining and then going to something as small scale as country food and hunting. This one is particularly interesting. This is, I believe, about mussel farming, which in northern Quebec has one of the largest tidal changes in the world, I think up to about 30 feet, 35 feet. This happens over about 11 and a half hours. Inuit will go in the space between the top of the ice and down by the bottom of the water where you can access these mussels and will harvest the mussels and then return back up and move on to the next route. It's considered incredibly dangerous, of course, because you have to get your timing right. Yes. So there's this space underneath the ice that, again, is sort of invisible but, due to transfer of knowledge and the ability in which to read the land and understand larger cycles, the space then gets revealed. And I think part of why we've been looking at all these things that might seem tangential to architecture is that I think we would argue that all these other spatial practices in fact are forming the seeds of an emergent northern urbanism. And I think part of our role was much of the work was done by anthropologists. We read more scientific papers than I care to imagine, but in a way, we saw part of our role as documenting and visualizing and spatializing information that has, to date, rarely been documented in visual form. So maybe we'll take the last 10 minutes to show an abbreviated version of the Arctic Adaptations project, whose subtitle was "Nunavut at 15," which is about the region that had the capital Iqaluit. There are 25 communities in there. It's about 33,000 people. 33,000. 33,000 people within a very large land mass, and they're celebrating their 15th anniversary of some form of autonomy. And so this was a chance as a reflection on this rapid transformation of this region. And so we had this space in Venice, Italy. This is Canada's pavilion, which was designed by an Italian. It's a sort of conch shell quasi-nature effect. I think it was Italians designing Canadian style back to Canadians. I think that was the intention. Anyway, so a lovely hexagonal space to work with, so that was a project in and of itself. But in some ways, within this small space, we wanted to make very accessible to anybody as much as we could this brief past, present, and maybe a projective future on this region. We organized the cycle of movement through that space in that way. So it consisted of three projects. The first project, which you see alluded to here compartmentalized within the wall was a set of 12 soap stone carvings that we did as a workshop with Inuit artists to make of iconic buildings in the region, and there are some amazing ones, as you can see. Some, again, we've already alluded to, the distance early warning radar stations. Some were more recent. This is a 2003-2004 school building. Some were from the '70s. This is a Quebec firm, Papineau, Gerin-Lajoie, whose archives are at the CCA. That's an igloo-like research station. Also by PGL is a school, and you can see some of these buildings here. This is the Nakasuk School in Iqaluit, all out of pre-fabricated fiberglass panels. This is the airport in Iqaluit. This is a house type called the Greenlander house type, and actually, a well known Canadian architect named Ron Thom had designed a church also in Iqaluit. So there were already these icons. And interestingly enough, Inuit carvers are, course, usually carving nature-- polar bears and other animals and some other scenes and people. They had rarely carved architecture, though modern architecture is now an inevitable part of their landscape. And so this was a fun project, talking about right angles and certain degrees. Actually, they were most excited about using the power sander. I had never seen so much excitement over a power sander, because usually they're using a radial sander and carving rounded, more sculpted shapes. This was about flatness and angles, for the most part. So we used these as representations along a timeline of a past. This was about an architectural past. The present condition we thought was really about urbanism and was about the figure of settlement, which has now become Arctic cities. This is a set of land form figures. We took a radial swipe around each one of these 25 communities, again, to treat them as though they are islands in some ways, and looked at their land form compared to their built form as these sets of diptychs. And also, there were a photograph from a resident of that place. A kind of self portrait of each of those communities was paired with that. So you always got the community in physical form as a land form, as a built form, and as a photographic self portrait. And those were displayed on the back wall, all 25 of them alphabetically laid out. The wall had a peekaboo window in which you could immerse yourself temporarily in that photography. These were milled out of laminated Corian, so kitchen counter material, actually, ironically called Antarctica, was the material type. DuPont makes it. They named it that. So we literally had an army of amazing students and helpers that basically documented every single built structure in Nunavut. It was kind of nice. Nunavummiut would come to the exhibition and say, that's my house right there. And you thought, OK, we got it right. And we should say that the whole project was really a team project. Particularly on this last part, which is the Nunavut futures, we ran a set of competitions in five schools of architecture across Canada. Each school would work on one theme and a team of students would be selected. They would travel to the North, and the briefs were developed with Nunavut partners that had knowledge on the ground, and we looked at five themes. We were looking at housing, education, recreation, arts, and health. And so the Nunavut organizations would bring knowledge on the ground, the students would bring an open minded curiosity, and then we worked with a set of five architects that are either based in the North or doing work in the North, and they brought a depth of experience in terms of design challenges and realities and so forth. The whole exhibition, as you can see, privileged model and three dimensional documentation as a key tool of representation, but the future projects were always worked at three scales. So there was a territorial scale, a community scale, and an architectural scale. Actually, I'll come back to these. The working at three scales was intentional, and it was part of an argument that, in this context, buildings are not about a singular building on a singular site but about how things can work as networks or distributed, how they can share resources, either digitally or through mobility or so forth, so the idea that architecture could engage a larger territory. And the other key interest we had in the models was how to represent a dynamic environment. So a recognition that in this context, you have freeze and thaw, day and night. You have people, and species, and vehicles, and moving, but also sea ice moving, and snow moving, and wind moving. And that somehow, the model could try to recognize this dynamic environment. The models were always paired with a set of dynamic animations or projections that basically documented everything that was ephemeral in the environment. So the physical models, static things, documented architecture in a conventional sense and the projections dealt with the dynamic. So at a territorial scale, it would show networks of projected movements and distribution of program. At a community scale, it might show where snowmobiles might go, where people might go, and so forth. The projects also try to deal with, in a way, the call that Koolhaas had made of elements. As you've seen the extensive inventory, there are unique architectural elements within the North that are calibrated and adapted to the environment. So all the projects dealt with a reinvention of existing types, whether it was foundations or roofs or building envelopes or porches or cold storage that would get somehow reinterpreted. So some of these elements. Each of the five projects had always those three animated models, a single axonometric describing the program of this new proposal. So this is part of the futures. You saw the past through carvings, the present through urban model making, and then the projected future through architectural propositions on those themes. This is the housing scheme you're looking at now, which we worked on with the University of Toronto and the Nunavut Housing Corporation based in Iqaluit. And so some of these elements that we would look at that would be particular, whether it's a wall, a particular kind of Arctic balcony in this case, or a foundation is, of course, key, as we mentioned earlier. So each of these five projects, this is the architectural scale model. There's a set of three radiating around one of these tables with their animations unfolding at the three scales. We're looking now at the health team's proposal. So there was an intentional consistency amongst them. There's a very careful use of black and white, in particular, white. In fact, we treated the exhibition space as a kind of blackout space from which to highlight or erase through a subtractive erasure to reveal the work. So all the carvings and the topographic models of the communities and the animated models were all intended to be the bright elements in the room. This was a recreation project, which was really about the culture and practice, for example, in Greenland, of-- Going out on the land and playing with economies of tourism, but also practices of going out into cabins on the land for hunting, and then playing with vernaculars of fuselage, of small airplanes, merging with more traditional cabin structures and cabin types. So we'll end with a video of this piece. I don't know if that's ready to go. We do that. So I think one of the reasons we've gotten interested in the North is in some ways, the reality is always stranger than any fiction one could imagine, once you find out how to get an Ikea sofa, or how people hunt, or how people monitor snow. And I think that, in a way, that context forces an in depth way of looking and forces you to look anew because all the preconceptions we have about architecture or urbanism are thrown out the window. We've often debated, if you're designing a public space, what do you call it? It's not a plaza. It's not really a public space because that's a southern trope that we're importing. And I think that that recognition that we don't have the tools even to talk about the terms is both daunting but I think really empowering, and I think in many ways transferable to any context. The North has provoked that in a radical way, but our very first project we ever worked on was called Flat Space. It looked at exurban retail corridors, and in many ways, we had the same reaction. We don't know what the terms of engagement are. We don't even know what to call these things. And I think that the lessons for us that the North hold is less one of us bringing knowledge there, but in fact, much more us learning to unpack an environment and learn from it and read it in ways that force a responsive and innovative set of design practices. Thank you very much for spending your Thursday evening with us. [applause] We're running late, but of course, if you have any questions, comments, observations. We have still some minutes, and we can use them to have some questions for them. I have one just to warm up a little bit. I have been pointing out the words that you have repeated more in my mind-- lateral, environment, detective, tactical, extremes, brackets, spatial practices. This is the one that is more repeated. Procedurals, almanac. This hasn't been repeated that much, but I liked it a lot, the idea of the almanac as something that projects into the future instead of trying to recollect the past. I think that all of them are very difficult to categorize. They are very vague, in a way. Spatial practices in plural are trying to [inaudible] to the [inaudible] and to the disciplines, so this is very consistent. The whole discourse is quite well constructed in terms of the terminology, not only in terms of what we have seen. I think that you have, in a moment, mentioned the figure of the anthropologist. I think that it's quite interesting. I was thinking of the archaeologist, in a way. The way you are dealing, especially with these amazingly beautiful project, in my reading, it's very much like an archaeologist. You take all the pieces and reconstruct the world. You learn from the material culture, which is a word that you haven't used, but I think that in a way, the exhibition at the Biennale pavilion and your work, the taxonomies you have employed, the materials that you have used, using the Corian Antarctic, I think that all of these is very much like the recollection of documents, materials, and reconstruction through the material culture of a way of life or a way of using the territory. I think that maybe, this can be a kind of other way to look at your undiscipline attitude. It's more based, in my opinion, not in natural sciences but in social sciences. It's just a comment. I don't know if you want to extend or we open to. I think it's well summarized. I wish you had given our closing comments. Thank you for such a wonderful lecture. I'm curious as to how your definition of ecology has changed since starting to work in the Arctic. I saw some examples of new ways of thinking about ecology-- form as ecology, ice as ecology, light as ecology. I'm just curious as to how that's changed for you or influenced you as you've been working. We'll probably have different answers so I'll give Mason a chance to answer as well. I think probably initially, we may have come with-- I don't know if it's the naive, but the conventional notion that at least architects have, the food chain, the plants, the species, and so forth. And I think that increasingly, this idea that kind of humans, even in the North where the impact of humans is ultimately still relatively smaller, the imprint that they have, that they're interconnected. Or at least for us as designers, what becomes interesting is the moment where ecology intersects with some sort of spatial practice, again. And it's funny because, in fact, in our initial research, we had ecology as one of our categories and then actually in the book deliberately removed it because it wasn't a spatial practice that humans partake in, but that it's actually everywhere. There are artificial ecologies in the form of the roads, the buildings create their own ecologies, whether it's through snow accumulation or so forth. So I would argue that I think the change maybe is in recognizing the imprecation of humans and, I'll say, "natural phenomena," which is problematic. There's large quotes around that. Nothing to add to that. It's a great presentation. I find it particularly interesting that Canadian architects are taking on the importance of the geographic turn in architecture to, in many respects, either inject or re-inject, reclaim some form of political agency. I'm curious, going back to your bowing to the prime minister of the country, in many respects-- Not bowing. Well, no, not bowing. Definitely not. I'm wondering, has there been any reaction of the state or the government to the work that you're doing? Because in many respects, there's something extremely coy also in terms of the forensic work that you're doing, which is in many respects both presenting in a very neutral, almost like borrowed engineering manner of rendering technical information that's politically charged, which all of a sudden remaps the North no longer at, let's say, one to one million, which is the privileged map I think that the central government is using, and you're bringing a material, spatial, social, cultural, anthropological scale to the discourse through these drawings, which makes the work extremely powerful and also beautiful. But has there been-- and perhaps we'll see with the book and over time-- but are you sensing any reverberations or are there aspirations to take on greater agency as part of your work towards very clear advocacy and agency for a completely marginalized discourse on First Nations, aboriginals, et cetera, et cetera? Great question, Pierre, because in some ways, I'll separate out the Many Norths book project as more of a survey. Actually, no one has seen that content. In fact, it's really been about aggregation of content, and each of the case studies is also shadowed by an interview with an individual who either is from there has done a profound amount of research there. But on the Arctic Adaptations project and some other parallel projects, the temperature on the ground, literally on the ground there, is, of course, one of-- let's say it was built on skepticism because of the history there. So in some ways, I think we're at the early days. We didn't know the depths of the project when we began not just the Arctic Adaptations project but in general, the first travel to the North in 2008. We didn't know the depths of what we were at. It was a pleasant naivete, scratching the surface in terms of the politics there, and slowly you start to see it. We're working on a project called the Arctic Food Network that has some form of legs to it, but it gets shelved when the political winds change. Country food issues are not as much of a priority as some other issues of education are now. So even, actually, it's interesting. Amongst those five themes we set up for the Venice project of education, health, housing, recreation, and arts, I wouldn't be surprised if, depending upon who's in charge, any one of those could be a hot ticket. So the temperature on the ground is one that has been humbling in the sense that we've had to be very patient, good listeners, and a lot of clarification needed on our part to stakeholders, and I think that's actually been a powerful practice learning process for us. And we're actually-- I think Inaki really touched on it quite well with this idea of the macro/micro in the sense that the observations, for example, of country food distribution are really at a macro scale, and then that's daunting to them. It looks heroic. It seems like a large scale project, but in fact, it was a series of aggregating many small points. This is where the architecture side or the design side comes in at the very small scale, so that's where we've really been focusing our attention, and there's some legs with the Arctic College that's up there, who does not have a building discipline. They have an environmental technology discipline up there and they have people that are learning the mining arts, as you might call it, because that's where the jobs are. Design is not where the jobs are. So there's actually another project that I think we would call ourselves complicit within, which is creating local architects. I don't know how that project might unfold, but I think that's actually part of the advocacy work. I would describe the practice as demonstrating the agency, in a way, through the carving was a subtler version of that, but the importance of architecture to take ownership of it within that region, rather than imagining it as a fly in or flown in shipped in product. Other comments, questions? Giovanna. [inaudible] 10 years, I lived in Canada, I never went above Quebec, so it was a great trip, your lecture. One question I have is, because every time I hear speaking about this project, and knowing also all the economic, social issues that there are about education, about access to health, about all kinds of things, I always feel that-- so my question is, why at the end in the representation, what you represent somehow has this deep crisis that I can read and the problems that are there in the North. Somehow, at least in my eyes, they don't come out from the representation. So I don't know if it is intentional, it is because there is still a magic imagination or eyes for the North, or it's intentional that you're really looking at a spatial practice and you really want to acknowledge these things but you don't want them to get in conflict with what you-- I think there's a few different parts. For those of you that aren't in Canada, to give context, almost all the news about the North is the dire-- all you hear about is the drug abuse, the substance abuse, the physical abuse, the lack of education, the failure of health. And that story has been told over and over, and even with some of our partners, let's say the Arctic Food Network, they meet once a month to discuss the problems of food security and confirm that food security is an issue, and one doesn't move forward. So I guess part of us was interested, not in a naive optimism, but in saying, let's consider how architecture can be a tool for moving forward. But I also think-- and this goes back to the question of spatial practice-- many of issues you're talking about, which are absolutely real, are outside the purview of architecture. There's food insecurity because the federal government has dismantled the food mail program that partly addressed issues of food costs and then is exacerbating it, and some of those things are really, I think, outside the purview of what architecture can address. That's why the book deliberately tries to document the things that are spatial, and it may be an interesting coincidence that the social problems are not directly spatial, although in many cases, there are indirect spatial implications. Overcrowding of houses produces health issues, it produces failure to do well in school, and so forth. So they're secondary tie-ins, but I don't think it's a deliberate avoidance of the issues, but rather trying to recognize where we have agency as designers in the broadest sense and where we don't. I think also, Giovanna, you were touching on the representation, and in some ways maybe we didn't give it the time. We may have under budgeted or over budgeted allowances across some of the projects. But I think in the Arctic Adaptations project, things like, for example, the health project, in terms of from where it comes and what kind of program it is, is actually the project related to this social ill, and it's one that's not a clinic, it's not a hospital, but in fact, it's a-- Mental health and wellness. Well, yes. It's a mental and sexual health center and it's outside of the community, and the positioning of it outside of the community is something that was desired by that organization as a safe haven or an escape from a very small community. When one has been violated within that community, the ability to be outside of it becomes important. And then also, the ability to incorporate within the architecture excursion related structures, like vehicles and so forth, becomes important to getting back and forth. So I think in some ways, the representation, maybe we have not described as much some of the programmatic decisions within those, but I think that's where lies a more direct addressing of some of the ills that we, of course, gave too much time to and that a lot of other press does give too much time to. I was just thinking. I was trying to look at the overall project and I kept thinking of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory where he defines a system as something that arises in an infinitely complex environment with many, many-- and I love the way you address so many aspects of the environment. And that a system, through a set of what he calls autopoiesis or morphogenesis, starts to distinguish itself from its surrounding environment starts to make boundaries, and eventually achieves an identity through patterning or through what I think you're calling spatial practices. Eventually, it achieves a patterning and an identity that distinguishes itself from the environment, but that those boundaries are constantly changing and there will be moments in the system that, if it doesn't achieve a kind of autonomy, it would dissolve back into the environment and become chaotic and indistinguishable. And thinking of it that way, I think it follows your idea of being undisciplined because a discipline imposes an identity. It imposes a discourse and it sees the environment through a certain discourse or through a certain discipline. But to be undisciplined keeps that open, and in some ways, a discourse would also see a problem. Things that don't fit inside the discipline are problematic. And the way you're doing it, there's not a problem. I think it addresses a little bit this question. Rather than seeing problems, social or otherwise, to be solved, you see a system that has certain characteristics, among which are social, but rather than solving them, you first have to identify them. And I think that's, to me, the promise of being undisciplined, which is a very, very different definition of undisciplined than something like Penelope Dean or others are developing, which are basically much more empiricist. It just was helpful for me to think of it that way. Wonderful. Thank you. As if I were part of the team. I agree with you, but I think also that this is a more stylistic issue. I think that we have seen, during the whole evening, everything is crafted very carefully but nothing is addressed in a strong way. Everything is just put in the same level of intensity so you don't create [inaudible]. In terms of the scales, in terms of materiality, in terms of topics, in terms of the political or the spatial issues, all of them are there and no one is privileged. And I think that this is also the tone of the lecture. You make a good duet. It's homogeneous, it's constant, and I think that this is something that is obvious in the installation of the m where everything is crafted so carefully. My experience when I visited is that it was a real spatial construction. It was not only informing, but allowing you, in the hot weather of Venice in those days, to experience the atmosphere that you were representing. It was [? amazing, ?] interesting. I understand the idea of the systems, that it is more abstract, but I also think that it's a question of aesthetics. And maybe with this, if you want to add something, and then if not, we can go out to the cold weather outside. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. [applause]