1757 in architecture

Transcription

Thank you very much for being here. It's been a long day, and there's still a lot of fun to happen at 5:30 with beer and dogs. So we want to start, and I think this is going to be a special event right now. This morning I mentioned something about the work of the school and the way in which the focus was both on, in a sense, the educational, the research, the diversity of issues that are in the world, and the way in which we feel the sense of responsibility to participate in things, to be active, to be doing things which matter. A big component of that kind of project is also the access, the contact, the involvement of faculty here at the GSD, who are themselves really good examples of the various kinds of practice, of research initiatives, activities. And at the GSD there are different types of faculty, those that are really full-time academics, those that are somewhere between academia and practice, and others who are primarily in practice who also participate within the Academy. I think one of the issues today is the question of what is really the nature of contemporary practice the US? And the characteristics of practice in the US are often very different from what you might experience in Latin America, what you might experience in Europe, what you might experience in Asia. Historically, the American context has been very much suited, if you like, to corporate practice, the idea of large-scale practices that are highly specialized. Their knowledge base is very deep and they're able to operate globally. What has been harder, probably, in the context of US are the kinds of practices that are able to operate at a multiplicity of scales with a diversity of topics. But at the same time, they are very nimble. They're smaller scale and they're experimental and they're innovative. There is, in fact, a tradition of experimental practices, but many of those are not really involved in building things, of doing things. So how to be truly innovative and experimental, at the same time to be really committed to the practice of realization, of actually implementing projects, is something that is less visible, in a way, and much harder to achieve in the US for a variety of reasons. There are regulatory reasons. There is something to do with legal situation of practice here. It's something complicated in terms of the nature of procurement of work itself, and also the construction system. So this is why I'm very happy that I'm able to introduce our speaker here tonight, Florian Idenburg, who actually teaches here at the GSD. And that is really something that's also very important for us, that people who are here at the GSD, students, should be exposed to some of the world's leading practitioners, but some of the most significant innovators in the field of practice. Florian is the founding partner of a firm called SO-IL and is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture here at the GSD. He is also the 2010 Laureate of the Charlotte Kohler Prize and a 2014 finalist for the Prix de Rome in the Netherlands. SO-IL is an idea-driven design office that brings together extensive experience from the fields of architecture, academia, and the arts, a creative catalyst involved in all scales and stages of the architectural process. SO-IL approaches projects with an intellectual and artistic rigor fueled by a strong commitment to realizing ideas in the world. SO-IL is headed by partners Florian, who is here, and Jing Liu and Ilias Papageorgiou. SO-IL has worked on an array of projects ranging in scale from the master plan of a cultural campus in Shanghai, China to a series of prints for the Guggenheim Museum. Projects include the flagship store for Benetton in New York, student housing in Athens, Greece, the Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis, the Frieze Art Fair in New York City, and the Kukje Gallery in Seoul. The work has received numerous awards, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, where they realized their installation there, the AIA Young Practice Award, and the Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural League. SO-IL has been widely featured international publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Domus, and in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urbanism, Studio X in Beijing, Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands, and the Benaki Museum in Greece. The work of SO-IL is part of the collection at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Guggenheim Museum. Please welcome Florian Idenburg. [applause] Thank you, Mohsen. It's always an honor to be introduced by the Dean. This room, it's a humbling room, in a way, to speak here. I don't know, it might be the design of the room, the depth, and also the wall of seats that you have there in the back. And soon you'll see that that's seating that really gives the audience agency, in a way. It talks back. It stimulates a very direct dialogue between the speaker and the audience. But not only the design of the room. I think also the extent of what happens here in this room, the vast array of speakers that come through, the ideas that are being discussed, the designs that are being contemplated. And so I think for all of you, you'll find out that this room will in some way play an important role in your trajectory of becoming an architect. And interestingly enough, and what I thought today is I'd speak-- we'll show some of the projects that Mohsen introduced. But I also thought it'd be interesting to contemplate a little bit or talk about the becoming, or the way in which our ideas were formed, sort of the shaping of our thoughts. We are still a relatively young firm and these things are still in transition, and we're still developing our voice. And so I wanted to start with some key projects from the beginning that helped form our practice. And so for us this room is actually also, in some way, instrumental, because it was here that I met a man, a gentleman called Mohamed Sharif, who at the time was a teacher at RISD, and he was here on a review. And he was also the director of a small space in Los Angeles called the LA Forum. And we had just started our practice, and for some reason we had a nice conversation. He was there, director for a year, and he asked us to do a survey of our work in that space. It was very interesting because we hadn't done any work yet at that time. And so he said, fine. I'm going to be director for a year, so you'll get the last slot. And so the title of that show was to be determined, because we had no idea what it was going to be done. And as we start to think about what would be shown in this exhibit, the idea of "to be determined" started to actually become a very productive working title, because "to be determined" can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, and Mohsen spoke about it in the introduction, there's a strong commitment-- I'm from the Netherlands, Jing from China-- to build, to make architecture, to make physical the ideas in the world. So it spoke to the determination to realize work. And at the same time it speaks about an interest in leaving things open and actually searching for something. So where, say, "Untitled" actually doesn't-- is deliberately not a title, "to be determined," in a way, speaks about a state of anticipation. Something will come. There's a promise of that. But what it is is something to find out. And so since, actually, then the idea of to be determined, also the idea of indeterminacy, has been something of a theme in the work, something that we are exploring. And you should not forget in 2008-- so we started our office in August 2008. September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, not because we started our office, but vice versa. Suddenly it made us realize-- it raised a lot of questions. It asked us, what does it mean to be architect in such an unpredictable world? Maybe you remember one third of the offices in New York closed. Half of the architects lost their job. What's the relationship between architecture and the economy? How can we practice, if you're interested in realizing work, in such a volatile and unpredictable environment, where architects, in a way, promise-- if you engage an architect, the act of design, it's the idea that afterwards things will be better. But at the moment, if things are so unpredictable, how can you actually be a real practitioner in this uncertainty? And not only economical, also environmental. The tsunami in Japan, and later Sandy in New York, they raised questions about, what can design actually do in such an unstable and unpredictable realm? Can we actually design against these types of destabilizers? And I think the last, and actually secretly biggest, destabilizer of, say, physical space is obviously the continuous expanding universe of our virtual realm? And so where maybe in the past architecture had a much stronger role in shaping social relationships and social imagery, this gradually and so much more strongly is taken over by the virtual realm. So what is the role of physical architecture in a continuously more virtual world? And so I will show a number of projects. I will start quickly with two installations. As a young firm, you do many of these. But they will help, I think, explain how these different themes, these different ideas of destabilization have affected our thinking as a practice. So the first project is the Young Architects Program, MoMA PS1. As you all know, every year the MoMA asks five firms to propose something in their courtyard. I'm sure you're all very familiar with this program. It's a warmup series, so over the course of a couple of weekends in the summer, it's an event space, there's music, there is performances and what have you. So the brief is very, very simple. It's provide a party space in the courtyard. But the brief was also very difficult, because it's the MoMA. It's a place which gets an incredible amount of attention, and actually the question is, what do you think is the state of architecture today? Or find a response to the question of the state of architecture today. And so this is 2009. 2010 is when it opened, but 2009 is when we thought about it. And so these ideas of destabilization, both economical, environmental, and, say, technological, were ideas that we wanted to bring into this project. But at the same time, we thought of the MoMA not just as a place, as a museum, but also, in a way, as the treasurer of the ideas of modernity, right? The modern movement. The idea is that, through people's agency and through design, we have some sort of control over where this world is heading to. And so we started to look into also the history of the modern movement itself, and looking at the Bauhaus legacy. And this is Oskar Schlemmer's [german], or Pole Dance, which is a dance he designed in the '30s, which questioned the relationship between man, the human body, and structure, and tried to find the human qualities within structure. And we were fascinated by this idea of an installation that would question the relationship between us as beings and the structures that we create. But rather than the modern structures, which are top down sort of structures that offer things that you can grab on, we were interested in this idea of a structure that's actually weak, a structure that we have to take care of, something that is actually maybe a metaphor for our world today, a supple, responsive, and deliberately unstable structure. And so we started to play, as we do a lot in our office, with physical models, with flexible, loose, and weak structures. It's the Cartesian grid, the modernist grid, but it is one that is not offering any stability. And so our proposal, presenting to MoMA and their directors, was basically to fill the entire courtyard was a weak grid, a grid that was always on the verge of collapse, covered by a net. And then we designed a number of activators, things where people would start to interact with the system and start to set it in motion, and one movement would put the entire thing in disarray and out of balance. So we presented this to the MoMA, and obviously they were very excited that we said, we're going to fill the courtyard with a structure that's always on the verge of collapse, and there's going to be 5,000 drunk people in here. So just before we went, we realized we needed to do one thing, which is we had asked BuroHappold if they wanted to be our engineers on the project. And we faked this image that looked very, very structural. And we said, don't worry, the whole thing has been calculated. And so, because of that, we won. So the next day we called BuroHappold and we said, congratulations, we won. And they said, what did we win? And we explained what we were doing. And they said, that's very interesting, because it's the opposite of what we do. What we do is we design uncertainty out of the system. And what you designed is actually a system that is trying to absorb as much uncertainties as possible. This cannot be calculated, which was exactly sort of the message of this installation. What we can do, they said, is build it. And so we started the next day. And we got some poles, we started to play. So these are glass fiber poles on surf mast bases with bungee cord and a net. And it seemed to work. This is Ilias, our third partner, a graduate from this school, by the way. And so this worked, and it looked fantastic, until the next day we got an email saying, can you please come and clean up the mess. But what's interesting is that through trial and error, and through experimentation, this is the only drawing that exists of this project, the only working drawing. Here you see how we calibrated the amount of cells to find the right balance between something that was stable and very unstable. And gradually it found its form in the courtyard and became a place for play and sort of sensorial emergence. Here you see the balls that were there, put as a sort of the game, but a game without rules, where people could imagine their own games and find out the things that we hadn't anticipated. All these pictures are things we found on social media. So the thing really became sort of an open structure, a catalyst for interaction types of play that we had not anticipated. This was something sent to us by the lawyer of MoMA saying, you are fully liable for whatever happens in this structure. And ultimately-- yeah, this continuous interior. And you see there were some other projects that I won't highlight we also worked on. But some of the poles got connected to speakers that could be activated through moving the poles, and it's a little bit what you see here at work. So with this project, we realized that we were interested in seeing what the role of architecture can be in sort of the space between the public and the private, or when you start thinking about realizing work and making physical work, this is obviously an art installation which is not funded in the commercial constraints of building a real project. But how do you do this when you want to really realize not temporary buildings? So what is this space of play, or this space of resistance, in this ever-expanding globalized system? I'm going to show one other temporary project that also affected our thinking, which was for the Shenzhen Biennale in 2012, which was a redo. Terence Riley was the curator there of the Strada Novissima, , which was the theme of the Biennale in 1984 by Portoghesi in Venice. And so the brief here was, make a facade and show your work behind it. And this seemed to be the question of what architects are being asked today. Make a skin, and the market will define what happens behind it. And so we got interested in this idea of figuring out how can we-- if the layer of the facade is the only sort of space we have to operate in now, today, as designers, how can we deepen that structure? If that's our space, how can we give that as much depth as possible? And so we started to think about, also, building on this theme of, obviously, Postmodernism that came out of the Strada Novissima. How can we work with the idea of the deepened facade, the deep skin? And we started to [inaudible] tricolonnades. We started to look at a colonnade as sort of a deepened structure, as a space between the private and the public that can be used as an exploration. And so from the outside the space looks very stable. But as you go in, you see that there's a series of bracketed spaces built out of triangle columns with, on the front face, marble, but marble laminate as thin as paper, and on the backs a mirror. And so as you enter the space from the outside, it suggests a very stable space. But as you enter, you enter into this space of endless reflectivity, sort of a very deep space made by very thin, three-millimeter laminates, but trying to find a sort of expanded space that happens in the deep facade. So that's a second theme. And I will show a number of other temporary installations we do to sort of tease out these ideas that then affect more permanent work. So the first is a gallery building we did in Seoul, Korea. So this is a picture of Seoul, and on the right I think there's a layer. Over here is where the old palace is. And in front, in this area, is where the old homes stood, where the servants who worked in the palace lived. As it is one of the few areas left in Seoul that still has very beautiful old housing stock. These hanok homes are one of the few left, and because of the fine grain of the city, it's a very beautiful and attractive area for tourists. And there's little coffee shops and such. And it's also a place, now, where galleries are moving into. It's the gallery district of Seoul. On that site we found an older image. This is literally the site of the building. It's a contemporary arts gallery. This image was very interesting because it shows relationship between the physical structures and its environment, and how the two merge into one another. And it's both very graphic and at the same time very atmospheric as an image. And so the project we were asked to do was one large space for art. It's Kukje Gallery. This is their first gallery. This was their second gallery. We had to make some changes here. We did the landscape of the whole area. And we needed to make this large box for art. The brief was very simple, especially for art that doesn't exist yet. Make as big a box as possible. And so we started to see what was possible. And in a way we emphasized the box by just making it completely clear and pushing on the entrance, the elevator down, the stairs down, and the stairs to the roof, a very clear and crude diagram. And as we went to present, we realized that this is too hard to be situated in this old neighborhood here. I wanted to point out the old courtyard homes that surround this site. So we needed to find a way to introduce something that would negotiate between this hard diagram and the context. So we left to Seoul and we wrapped the model in a silver stocking that created this permanent unclear edge and boundary, in a way disguising, if you want, the crudeness of the diagram, and at the same time negotiating the space between the outside and the box. Our client, a busy lady, had two minutes for the meeting. She took off her glasses. She said, I like it. Make it. And that was it. And again, we had no idea really what this was going to be. We realized it needed to be strong, and as an exterior skin it needed to be pliable. It needed to take on a complex form. We didn't want to shingle it or triangulate it. We didn't want to create a structure to hold it. It needed to be light, to be flexible. But what takes on this complex curvature without having to break it up in discrete pieces? And so in research, we came across chain link mesh. And chain link mesh is basically rings that interconnect in a very simple way. But they allow, as you see here on the left, a beautiful accommodation or very round forms. And they are strong, as you can see. And so this exists on the scale of the body, but it doesn't exist on the scale of the building. So we started, actually, with thanks to the laser cutter here at the GSD, experiment with sizes of rings that seemed to be appropriate for the scale of the building. The interesting thing, and I will come about this later, is that, actually, the building is always very close, because it's such a dense area that you can never actually see it from very far. So we had to find the right scale on an architectural level. We then started to experiment with why does it take on this elastic shape? How does it actually fall in this form? And we found out there's a certain directionality in the material, and on the one hand, it's completely stiff, and on the other hand, it's completely flexible. So this is the same sheet, just in two different directions. And so we could map the amount of stretch that the thing had. We mapped the entire area. It's cropped wrong in the image, but you get the point. And then we started to talk to some friends, engineers, Front, Mike Ra, who I'd worked with in the past. I said, are you interested in helping me figure out how to do this? And so once we had defined the size we liked, we started to do stress tests, and with that information, we were able to map the entire facade, map the entire building, actually, every single ring. They helped us with putting it in CATIA. And so the whole thing existed sort of in the virtual realm, the virtual space. And in the meantime, in our office, because this thing had never been done before, we built it on a 1 to 10 scale to understand both, in parallel, actually, the physical and the virtual. And at that moment we felt quite confident that we understood how it would work. And so then our question was, are we going to translate this is Korean in the hope that there is somebody who will make it for us? And then we thought, maybe it's better to just try to make it ourselves. And so we went to alibaba.com, and we typed in ring mesh. And believe it or not, very quickly we got a lot of responses over the chat, mostly from Anping, an area in China. The lady who was the most persistent had a chat name, Skype name, Ring. And so after Skyping with her for about a month, they sent us this. And this looked very promising, and so we emailed more and more, and we really established a relationship. And I don't know how many people of you have met somebody online. But the moment that you go and visit that person in reality is always a very interesting moment. So we flew to Beijing and drove for five hours through the countryside towards the southwest, and ended up in Anping. And Anping is a particular town, where Ring guided us to very small courtyard, pretty much the space that is here in front of the chairs. And in the back was the brother of Ring, and he was welding this together by hand. At that time we had promised our client that we would produce this, and that we were on schedule to deliver. And so here's Jing explaining to Mr. Ma-- this is Ring, this is Mr. Ma-- that we needed half a million rings together. And so it was clear they couldn't deliver. And this is Mike, and we were nervous about how to deliver. But then Ring said, you know, everybody in this town can weld, so that's simple. Why don't we figure out a way to do this collectively? And we did. We worked with them, together with the village, to come up with a much more systematic way in which this could be produced. And so at some point, we had about 60 people work together on hand welding this into this skin. [video playback] [speaking chinese] He's not professional, so just to show you. Yeah, yeah, I know. That's great. [end playback] And so we spent a few months in Anping, ultimately to make 14 large swaths. This was the local car wash that was used for the cleaning, and here a few old sheds that we used for quality control, where we're actually looking at every single weld. The schoolyard was used for a mock-up, and we got approval by the locals and the building. In Korea it was already going up. It was shipped, it was hung, and we wrapped the entire building. What was interesting-- here you see the palace, here you see the old, small-scale neighborhood-- was that, as I mentioned, you could never seen the building actually in its entirety. It's always sort of hidden within this fabric. And you walk through a few alleys, and then suddenly the building itself is there. We could weld these things together to 14 swaths with the same technique, so it's a completely seamless, sort of tight-fitting dress that goes from the roof to the ground. And at places where these volumes, they push out the skin, and they create these sort of interior spaces in between, sort of a deepened pochet, sort of a deep skin that you can go up to the stairs or into the building as you enter through the glass vestibule. Inside, a straightforward white box with daylight from above. You think light in spaces for art is very important to help you orient where you are. And here the stair that peels off to the exterior and then ties back into a theater, which sits underground, and offices and deal rooms where they sell art. And here you see the relationship between the old and the new in its form response, and also here in detail, the very detailed, traditional crafted roof of the hanok homes. And then, with a similar attention to detail, the technical, digital models that we fabricated for our roof edge. And so you see also in the light over time, it changes the presence of the box and the skin. So this idea of layering, we can use between, say, building and site, and also between different groups of people. This is a project we did sort of concurrently in Soho in New York for a completely digital company, Logan, a video production company. They mostly work all in the cloud. They do work for Apple and for Lexus and for other of those types of companies. It's all render-based. And they also work only with freelancers. And so anyway there's only four people in this company, and they needed a space for them to be able to work together that allowed different groups of people to work at different times that were not necessarily part of the same company continuously. So we decided to make two very long, 20-foot-long, continuous tables with a very strong infrastructure in the middle for them to plug in. Same here. This is servers and a mechanical room to cool the servers, a photo studio, editing booths here, entry, reception, and then the meeting room. Executive meeting room is here, and offices and assistants sit here. And we just cut the table with a glass wall all the way through the middle. So our question was how do we create a space where you're not too much disturbed by another group working, because these groups, they sort of cluster around this table working on separate projects. Naturally, as a loft space, the natural thing is to leave it completely open. But we wanted to create some sort of sense of intimacy and division and separation, and at the same time not have it closed off by booths or walls. And so what we did is we created seamless fabric walls that layer sort of between these different work spaces, and also layer between the exterior. And so here you see this wall, which is a double wall, and the space beyond, in which another group is working on a different project. So through this you get this layering of different groups, different teams working on different projects, still sort of aware of the other in space, and at the same time somewhat hidden and protected from it. The ceiling is also stretch fabric with lighting above that can be adjusted. The color of the screen is very important, the quality of the colors on their work screen. So it needed to be, lighting-wise, also very carefully calibrated. And the old building, the old Soho loft building, is present, but much more as a ghost. So you see this is the heating system with steam pipes that sits behind this layer. It's a screen. And here the meeting room, cut off by a glass wall, the editing booths where we corrugated felt-- it needed to be very absorptive as a material-- and two spaces next to each other, where one sometimes, in a way, appears as a reflection of the other. So I'm going to show a few projects that deal, actually, also with this layering, but more spatial rather than material. This is a competition we did for a museum of contemporary art, independent public art space in Belgium called Z33. This is the city of Hasselt. They have a beautiful walled garden in that city, and in that stands this museum. So here you see the old historic town of Hasselt, and here you see the walled courtyard. This used to be a monastery with a church in the middle. And this is where the nuns used to live. It was all bombed during the war. And they left the ruins of the church as a memory for destruction, and at the same time they built back a museum for art in 1958. And so the brief here was an invited competition to actually renovate this building, make it up to code, bring it up to energy codes as well, demolish this building, which was a school that was built in the '80s that was not being used anymore, and expand the building into here. And at the same time, move the arts programs that were happening in these old houses of the Mennonites also into this-- or the ladies living in the convent into the space. It was also very beautiful. This is a very dense commercial center in town, but the only way to get in was through this gate here. It was the only way to enter. And there was something very beautiful, sort of the resistance that this structure offered to this very commercial but now historic town in Belgium. The programming is very experimental, very bottom up, very do it yourself, very emergent ideas. And because it was public money, the question was, how do we open this up to the city? We felt that there was some sort of power and some value in keeping this wall or keeping this edge as a somewhat protective shell for this project. So this was a diagram we generated early on, where we used the wall that was surrounding the garden, in a way, as a filter that would help you transform your thoughts and that would help sort of change your thinking. We thought, how can we create a structure as a filter? And so not expanding on the existing building with some sort of very new, strange, iconic thing that was the brief. So we said, why don't we work with the existing structure and find a way to create this idea of permeability through the structure? The existing qualities of the site, they were very simple walls and openings. What made the existing building particular was actually its idiosyncratic openings in very quite plain rooms. And so we started to think, can we come up with a scheme where we only think about the relationship between the wall and the opening? Especially for a museum, it is mostly about walls and openings and how you move through these spaces. And so where the traditional enfilade organization, which is traditional museum organization, is one where the doors are in the middle and you go from room to room, this is a very traditional way of telling stories. And for this institute that was about new ideas for a new audience, we thought this is not the way in which you should be telling a story about an idea. We navigate space differently. We browse through space. We create our own stories. We don't want to hear stories being brought top down. And we started to experiment with different relationships between the opening and the room. And so if this is a traditional one, this may be a more modern one, where the visitor flows through the space. We, through a script that we wrote mostly to impress our jury, worked out a very carefully calibrated relationship between wall and opening. We ultimately set on the idea of having the opening right at the corner, but alternating. And this gives you spaces of complete enclosure in a corner, and as you come to the other corner, rather than being forced into the other room, you suddenly have a choice. You have to make a choice, and there's three different ways that you can go. And this would completely change the way curators could organize space and could tell stories. You could have parallel stories happening sort of as a checkerboard system, where you can have shows that are related, but not necessarily the same happen in parallel through the space. And we took the system, we took the old structure of the building and we just sort of expanded upon it in the same rhythm. And then we made the same changes, both to the old and the new, and gave them the entire system throughout. And this is the model with the entry on the oblique through a courtyard into the existing space. And so old and new came together, not by really adding, but actually more by carving away, by taking away. This is the plan, and it generated, through this act, actually, because it was in this historic context-- although it's a very simple and rigorous operation, it created a great variety of different spaces. And because our program was not so clearly set, because they were anticipating programs that hadn't existed or were still to be determined, we thought it would be much better to give them sort of a set of rooms, a set of rooms with specific qualities that they could fill in over time. They could be used as galleries. They only had to add some white wall. But they could also be left bare and used for reading rooms or study rooms. We were able to create a little bit of volumetric difference by giving part of the room skylights to break it up and make it fit better into the historic context of the entire wall. And so the project became part of this wall and continued to act as a filter to the garden. We became second, but luckily we could realize recently in Amsterdam, in a temporary show for an arts collecting couple, a private collection who showed their work for first time at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, we could realize parts of this to sort of experiment with this experience. And in this case, although the reason behind it was somewhat different, we thought what is interesting about the same system that forces the visitor to make decisions, it's very similar to so collecting art, where, as a collector, every time you're forced to choose a next step and see how that relates to the art you have collected before, some way this installation gave the visitor a similar type of experience. Find new relationships between different artists, and at the same find many different ways to move through the building and move through space, and create their own stories through the space. And this idea of portfolio of rooms and some of the ideas of skin feed into a design for the Shrem Museum in UC Davis, which is currently under construction. So this is Davis, maybe some of you know, part of the UC system. It's the one close to Sacramento, an hour north of San Francisco. And it's the part of the UC system that's mostly focused on agricultural disciplines. So there's a lot of bioengineering and gene modification happening here. So this is the university, and you see the long, or expansive landscape of the Central Valley behind it. Many of the people, many of the students who go to the school, they end up working in the Napa Valley, the wine area. And so some of the people there, with their vineyards, they thought that rather than just knowing how to clone sheep, it's also very useful if there's some sort of cultural knowledge with the people that come work for them. And so they started this initiative to introduce a more cultural quad here. And this is the Mondavi Performing Arts Center. Robert Mondavi was one of the big vineyard owners, and also here the Robert Mondavi Food and Wine Center. And so the question here was a museum of art for an institute that didn't have one yet, and also for an audience that is not necessarily the audience that goes to museums naturally. And so the challenge was, again, how do we create an enticing space for a generation of people for whom, maybe, visual culture is something that you curate yourself online, where yourself the author. How do you make a space for people to go into to enjoy and to contemplate the art? And so rather than making a strong temple for the arts, a closed jewel, we thought that it needed to be something much more light and open, something that could be easily accessed. And also, the Central Valley itself is very present there as a landscape, not as a natural landscape, but actually as a landscape of production, as a landscape of-- we felt very strongly in Davis that there is some sort of sense of agency and can do because the landscape itself is a productive one. It's one that you can work on, and with that, you can actually, to an extent, control your destiny. And so we were interested in this weird sort of hybrid relationship between the ability to control, and then the unpredictability of the environment. And can we find something that tries to bring those things together? As the site, as you saw, was in a very prominent location along the highway between Sacramento and San Francisco, and also because there was some private money behind this project, it was very important that the presence of the building was also thought of. In some way , it's the first thing you see along the highway. And so we thought, how can we, out of this landscape, in a way, have this form emerge, out of this flat form gently have something that comes up? And this was a design build competition, so there were a number of exchanges, actually, with the jury. And at some point this became a very catching image, an image that continued to come back, as I mentioned, not something closed, but a really open structure, something that is continuously changing and evolving, being shaped, actually, by the participants much more than by us from the beginning. And we started to look at creating, again, very intuitively, this open structure that, to an extent, rose up out of the landscape. We wanted to have the context and the weather have an effect on the experience, and so we decided to cover the entire site with this large, grand canopy that created spaces both inside and outside, not necessarily clearly following the program, but more, through this mechanism, trying to create different types of spaces inside and outside that could sort of find their program. And so here you see this tapestry of different spaces inside and outside, high and low. And we started to gradually project the course of program with a focus on education, and making it sort of the participatory projects upfront, and actually the display of the galleries more set back. This is a continuous field inside and outside, covered by this large roof. So design build is tricky, because it means that you, with the contractor together, go in, and $25 million is the maximum amount of money you can spend. And in four months you need to fully determine how you're going to spend that money. Everything you're over comes-- there is no overage, basically. And so it's very hard, because we were used to experimenting in the process to come up with something that is new and different. But in this case it was very hard to do that, because the contractor, after four months, wanted to exactly know how many screws were in the project and where. We really felt strongly that we needed to find a way to do, with the infill of this canopy, the structure that provides shade, find ways to do that different. During the competition we wanted it just as flat sheets of perforated metal because that was easy to price, and it gave us sort of a very baseline. And because everybody was happy and because we won, nobody wanted to change that. But for us it was very important to continue to think, and specifically the concept of this variety of different spaces, both inside and outside, was something that we needed to continue to pursue. And so with the drought, also, in the Central Valley that's becoming more and more of an issue, we thought maybe through playing with notions of shade and sun exposure, we can create a heightened awareness of the space that you are in. And we started to experiment, although we were already later in the design, ways in which we could control the way shadow would come through these different infill in between the beams, because there's this main beam structure, and then initially we would have secondary steel, and then in there these flat panels. But we first started to see, can we play with the perforation and in some way control the way light falls through different cells. And ultimately the idea came to consolidate both the secondary steel and the infill, and actually, between the large overall steel structure, fill it in with triangular perforated beams, triangular so that they can span all the way, and perforated so certificate that we could get the shadow to come through. And because of the triangulation, also, layering starts to happen in between. So we built a big model and had to go back to all the people that had agreed upon before that this was OK. But we felt that this was much stronger and closer to the concept. And it also gave us a tool to play with this variety parametrically of how to get the shadow come through. And so the three things we could play with was the spacing, orientation, and the openness of the material. And also because it was-- and in order to control, basically, the budget and the knowledge of, or the information in this model, we had to place everything in Grasshopper. And I don't know if Andrew Witt, our faculty member, is in the room today. But he helped us very much with this and is one of the people we work with in the school, and it shows, I think, the exchange that happens between faculty here. But he helped us understand the complex geometry, and then how can we control this through software and directly feed it into the people that were producing it. So at some point we were able to make all these changes without ever losing control of budget. And so we ended up with this variation in both spacing and orientation, and also perforation. And this is now going up. So this is a few months ago. And this is more recent. They followed construction with a drone, and I realized that that would give us a completely new way of doing site visits. If we can have continuous drones flying around over the sites, it could be very interesting. Yesterday the first infill beams came in, made, again, together in collaboration with Mike Ra from Front, with whom we did the skin in Korea. And so this is to be done in a year from now. And so then we continued to experiment to see how this effect could be-- Mohsen invited us to participate in the China Biennale in Beijing two years ago last year. And so we had to do a quick installation, and we were interested-- this is the mesh. In a previous life I worked in this building. It's expanded metal mesh, which is a very simple, flat aluminum sheet that gets punched and expanded. And this is what you do with flat sheets. And we thought, what happens if you start expanding this in different ways? So what if you punch it as a circle and then put it out, you can get a different effect with the same flat sheet. And so we introduced this, and then in China, very quickly, they produced 60 of these flat sheets that then were expanded, pushed out, and we created this installation on the Olympic Square next to the bird's nest. And so here you start seeing a little bit, maybe, the effect of the way in which the light falls through this skin that has different variations and openness. So last project I'm going to show is a project we're currently doing in Brooklyn, in New York. And again, I think we're doing something where we're not sure what we're doing. It's a private art collection that needs a house. Both the art needs to be stored, but also there are gallery spaces and there are artist studios and artists in residence. And so it is somewhat private. There is something happening behind. We wanted to hint at the idea of activity behind a certain skin through its form, actually, a suggestion of something going on, and at the same time communicate maybe protection or more concealment. On the left, Man Ray, The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse. It's an art work that, in many ways, speaks about the enigmatic quality. It's a sewing machine that is in there. So you think it's maybe a statue or something, it's protected. But it's actually just a sewing machines that he wrapped. This is, on the right, [inaudible] is a performance artist. This is a beautiful video piece in which you hear a classical quartet play, and you're wondering what is happening in this tent. And I'm not playing the whole video, but in the end you realize that the string quartet is actually in the tent performing this, and so this thing is moving wildly. And so these two images, in some way, became the idea, or helped us to think about how to hide this art collection and this is active art performance into a space. So we started to experiment with this idea of wrapping around fixed objects. The program, as I mentioned, studios, administration, storage, and gallery space. And we were particularly interested in this idea where, so how expressively do you articulate the box, and where does it disappear into another volume? Where does the expression become really ambiguous? And so rather than wrapping the whole thing in one, which we did initially, we realized that it would be more interesting, maybe, to work with a set of these things, a composition of these things. And after many, many, many studies, we ended up with something that looks like this, in which the openings, the frames, or the ways in which light comes in, either through skylights or through entrances, and the rest is sort of negotiated through this surface. And again, Andrew helped us here with understanding how to translate these geometries first, actually, from a physical model into the computer, and then afterwards, again, how we would build and realize this. And again, apart from the physical-- this is a show we did at RISD with the students. We looked at different casting techniques, and how these forms could help bring in light into the gallery space. So the building itself is actually a series of gallery spaces, a big gallery on the ground floor with light coming in through a courtyard on the second floor. And then here you see the gallery spaces where light comes in either through clear stories or skylights. And so it's quite a modest composition of different interlocking volumes that bring in light in different ways. These are renders we did for an installation that will happen later this year in an institute in New York. And here's some models where we're testing the way light falls through these lamella. So the question of making becomes interesting again. Concrete-- there used to be a strong tradition of quite good concrete work, even in New York. This Saarinen's terminal at JFK. But at this moment it's actually quite complicated to do this double curved concrete, especially if it's not built up out of ruled surfaces, out of flat surfaces. And so here you see the digital model and how it feeds into the structural model. We worked together with Schlaich Bergermann on the concrete shell structure. Here you see the thickness of the shell, and how it varies from about two-inch in the blue to, like, six-inch where these edges end. And so we have now the entire model, again, structurally under control, and are working with different form work techniques and manufacturers how to make this. One of these is actually not far from here in New England, and they built the shelter which is built in Boston by-- I forgot the name-- yeah, [inaudible]. And another technique which is very interesting, which we're also exploring, is actually now the idea of routing out the form work in foam with robots, which is happening already by a German company. And so you see how they have traditional form work, and then with foam they actually make the shape. And so we're exploring these two options and currently building mock-ups on the site. And so this building, well, we should start construction later this year. And to end, we recently did a show at the Storefront for Art and Architecture Blueprint Show that we curated. Cameron, who was also show, our faculty member here. And how to make a show at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Obviously you know this fantastic and amazing project by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci that in a way, again, negotiates the space between the public and the interior, and in a way pushes out and creates this zone where it's unclear if it's in or out. This show happened in winter, and we really wanted to find a way to open the building or have it push into the city and have it be felt through the city. So we decided to shrink wrap the entire building in this plastic that is used to shrink wrap your yacht. And it gave this amazing effect at night, where the light pushes into the street and shows how architecture can agitate the public realm. And we did agitate them. Thank you. [applause] Do you want to take some questions? Sure. So we have a few minutes for questions before the beer and dogs. Maybe if there's some questions, it would be great if you could engage Florian. And here we have a situation where you mustn't be shy. Just it's very-- it's really open. So anybody? Yes. There's a mic coming around. Thanks. Thanks for the beautiful and creative work. I really enjoyed the experimentation with form and materiality. And I find it really interesting, going back to your introductory remarks about the kind of economic disaster and natural disaster with the hurricanes. And we're still dealing with those issues with water shortages, and you talked about draught a little bit, and sea level rise, and all this stuff. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how architecture can respond to some of these ideas of risk and resilience, whether it's this kind of experimentation, or-- I think it's a very key question. It's interesting. Was it last year we had Mass Design here give a talk at the open house. I think it's very, very hard for the architectural discipline, within architecture, to respond to some of these issues. I think it's a design problem, and I do think that through design thinking we can address many of these issues. But I think architecture itself is not the field in which to respond to some of these questions, or not the direct response. So I think what we have chosen is to create work that maybe helps reflect upon where we are. I think what we try to do is create an architecture that make you aware of place and of space. It makes you aware of environment that in a way, hopefully-- and it started with the PS1 thing that is physical that you can touch, where you realize we are actually on this planet rather than on a screen. And so that there is some way that we bring back some of these senses that actually tie you to a place. And through that, you would generate a certain care and a certain awareness. And through that, that would actually create change, not just by answering it with architecture, but actually through an architecture that helps people become more, in a way, aware and sensitive to a place. So that's the way we have thought about architects' responsibility and response to these conditions. Afterwards you can also talk to me when we have a beer and a hot dog, if it's more comfortable. Anybody else? I mean, I think just at the beginning when I was talking about this question, it's a little bit related to your response to the previous question. But the idea of kind of setting up a practice, and the whole idea of making a practice work. I think it would be interesting, if you have any observations, just what it takes to do this kind of thing in Brooklyn, let's say, versus is also your experience of working in Japan-- because Florian also was working with Sejima and Nishizawa with SANAA-- And also what you know from the Netherlands, for example. Any observations about the relationship of conditions to the way in which the nature of architectural practice actually varies according to those sort of geographies? You have to almost kind of operate differently. When you study in the Netherlands, you have five semesters of social housing, because basically the idea is that you end up doing housing, and you feed into a system in which everything is designed. The idea that through architecture we can make a society is very much embedded. I studied at Delft in the Netherlands. It's an engineering school. And that was the idea of what architecture, or what an architect would do. So there's a very strong relationship, I would say, between architecture and the built environment. And as an architect you're, in a way, a servant of the public domain. And when I went to Japan, I realized there are two types of firms, and maybe similar, a little bit, to the US. But basically you have the large construction firms, and they have the very sort of boutique-like, beautiful Japanese work that everybody knows. But in a way, the large bulk of the work is done by these large construction slash design companies. And my role in Japan was help SANAA actually set up, or help them grow outside of Japan, and set up projects and project teams in many different cities and places around the world. And it exposed me to many different practice cultures. And when I was done, I decided I should not go back to Europe, because I felt that the model of the public and the government having control of our environment, and having control over the discipline, was one that might soon fade. And I thought it was very interesting to come to the US-- again, in the Netherlands, you should understand if you graduate as an architect, you get subsidized for a number of years to just do something, which was the way in which a lot of the Dutch architecture from the '90s allowed for an incredible amount of experimentation. But these structures and these support systems were falling away, and I thought it would be good to come to the US and to figure out, can you do architecture in an environment where there's no real investment from, say, the state or the public into these practices? And so the fact that we could start here had a lot to do with being extremely naive, as well, I think. But it's also very easy to start a practice here. Like you can start a company, right, in a day. So I think it's a good place for experimentation. I think the question is, how do we grow now, and how don't we grow in a big monster? Those of you who are familiar, for example, with firms like Foster and Partners or Grimshaw, they grow out of this tradition of so-called high-tech projects or high-tech architecture. Now it's very difficult to imagine that a firm like Foster's, for example, would do something which is very simple in terms of construction. So one of the things that I thought was interesting, because Florian's partner is from China, and on the one hand, you see the kind of parametric investigations that are really trying to understand the modulations in terms of thickness and thinness of concrete shell, structure. On the other hand, they have 500 people in some village trying to weld these rings one by one. I mean, you can't get more low tech than that, in some way. So I'm actually interested in the way that you-- there's certain forms of cleverness or innovation that need to be also embedded, in a way, in the formation, in the thinking of practice if you're going to survive, as opposed to design in a way that is constantly only high-tech, for example, because you just simply wouldn't get the work. You wouldn't realize the work. So I'm just wondering whether that's also something very deliberate. We thought of high intelligence, low cost. How can you combine those two? How can you combine the tools of today with very simple fabrication techniques? of the construction world doesn't change so fast. I mean, certainly if we're going to be 3D printing components and stuff like that. But it's actually much more interesting, how can we use the intelligence to work with very normal and mundane fabrication practices? Before we thank Florian, anybody now is willing to ask another question? Or have you had a long day and we should let you go and have a beer? Maybe a beer. OK. Thank you very much, Florian. Thanks to all of you.