List of lakes and reservoirs in Shenzhen

Transcription

It appears we've begun. Thank you, everybody, for being here this evening. I know that it's a particularly challenging time of year. For those of you who were here on Monday evening for [inaudible], I apologize, but I'll reiterate my sense that most speakers would rather be here in late June. And so we end up with a lot of our visitors landing in April. We have tomorrow at noon in Stubbins the final event on the landscape series within the GSD public calendar of 2014-15, which is a talk and a conversation with Inaki Echeverria, a Mexican architect urbanist. He's been here doing an option studio this term based in a particular market in Mexico City. And so please join us in Stubbins, 12:00 noon tomorrow. It's a great pleasure to welcome Alfredo Ramirez, Eva Castro. Thank you guys so much for being here. I think for many of you who know the back story, you know, the origins of landscape urbanism, that project in the mid to late '90s in Chicago and a conference at the Graham Foundation in '96-97, then led to kind of a spin off, or the transfer of knowledge to a whole variety of places. Among the keynote speakers at that talk at the Graham Foundation was Mohsen Mostafavi, our dean. And of course, Mohsen then had just landed in Bedford Square, London, and then would go on the following year, '97-98, to launch the AA unit in landscape urbanism. That project with Ciro Najle has been quite well described, well documented. And it has, I think, quite a lot to do both with Mohsen's interests, Armada's contribution to the affair, but also really the DRL, the Design Research Lab at the AA, and kind of years and years of research and kind of pent up demand for a progressive, digitally savvy, and design-based approach to landscape in a culture of a school that hadn't really had a landscape program. Since that early phase, landscape urbanism has matured and is now, in what I've referred to in print, as a kind of mature phase. If I'm feeling a little bit less optimistic, I might even say middle aged. Our friends in the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany, said recently that landscape urbanism is in its operational phase. And I think that's a part of why we've got his attention recently. And a part of that operational phase has been a range of practices around the world of note, many of whom we've been able to host here in the recent days and years, including members of our own faculty over the course of the last six years. And on that list, of course, we would be remiss without acknowledging the central role of Ground Lab, the collaborative work of Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez, and others. And so, it's in that context that we're pleased to host this evening's talk. Alfredo Ramirez is a Mexican architect among other things. He is most recently director of the AA landscape urbanism unit and has also been a graduate of the program in the middle aughts 2005. Eva Castro, previously director of AA landscape urbanism and both co-directors of Ground Lab, are doing among, I think, the most interesting both built work but also speculative design projects at the intersection of landscape urbanism and emerging urbanization around the world. They have lectured, exhibited, and taught internationally over the course of the last decade. And I think they're work, and in particular, I have a soft spot for the thing they did in Longgang City, this kind of relational urban modeling meets the development of a piece of Shenzhen. I hope you'll join me in welcoming them-- Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez. [applause] Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for inviting us to be here tonight. And it's clearly a big pleasure to be back somehow at a landscape urbanism sort of home, if you wish, and to be able of talking with other peers about what we have been doing lately. We have a sort of-- oh, sorry-- is also kind of quite a pleasure to this kind of happy coincidence of meeting with Alfredo just right now and being able of doing these together, which we haven't practiced in a long time, a dual lecture. So it's going to be a little bit colloquial and hopefully not too kind of disorganized. We've allotted double the time, so please. So we can go all the way till 9 o'clock. Whew, that's a relief. Get too old jut leave, OK. So in a way, what we are interested is in this kind of feedback loop between academia to praxis and back from praxis to academia. This is something that we have been practicing since I started to direct the landscape urbanism master program at the AA. And subsequently with our first competition, the Longgang competition, which we are not showing today-- sorry, Charles-- we developed these kind of sort of a narrative of trying to work out in academia issues and aspects of landscape urbanism that we are interested. And normally practice doesn't give you the time to research in depth and then apply in it. And by the same token, work that we then developed within practice has always become kind of a form of injecting new briefs within the academic work. So in this way, our work kind of has expanded from, I don't know, very, very large scale projects such as the Loggang project in the second slide on top from the left hand side, which is a-- what is it-- 11 square. 11 square kilometers. That's right. To tiny, small projects, such as the one right below, which is a garden that we have built recently in Beijing, which is, I think, a 1,000 square meters. And in a way, this has always been woven with something else, which is the interest in a kind of tectonic development within the landscape. In other words, just to do a mea culpa, we are not landscape architects. We are architects kind of intruding somehow in the landscape architecture field, and thus having a very strong interest in morphologies that can establish a dialogue with the landscape. From the point of view of the work that we have done in academia, one of the first things that we were interested when we started to work in the AA landscape urbanism master was to push the boundaries in term of the scales that one could work through the landscape. So in other words, we were interested in the landscape as a form of urbanism. And lately, we have even expanded this scale that you could call it the master planning scale, such as the project in the left hand side, into larger what we call territorial scales, really at a kind of a regional scale operating with the prototypical strategies. So we see the territory as a field research. And this is why it's quite important at the previous images that we showed you, because in a way, I think the territory terras has no kind of scalar constraints. And this allows us to move from projects with similar set of techniques in a-- I went to say in comfortable way, I hope so-- and kind of in a very open manner. If you want to add something at some point, you can. I will at some point, hopefully. Yeah. No we haven't organized it quite like that. So contemporary conditions are framed by the exponential growth of the world's population as witnessed in recent decades. This growth had led to way to a ruthless urbanization of the world. The urban age impacts on metropolis and cities, in which the majority of people live, which at the same time is intrinsically linked to wider territories. Countless resources and energy are needed to support the urban age in the form of productive territories, such as farmlands, as well as the necessary extraction of materials to supply and build our cities and metropolis. It has also expanded human efforts to control natural resources in an efficient and optimized way, not only to use and distribute them, but to maximize the profit they generate. Alongside these aspirations of a total efficient and optimized control of nature and its resources, it has provoked an increment in the risk associated to natural disasters. Globalization has insured not only free movement of people and goods, but a planetary exchange, both legal and illegal, of matter and energy. The insatiable thirst for sand, for example, necessary to be build our cities has accelerated mechanisms of erosion and exacerbated soil depletion all over the urbanized world. This has caused nature and landscapes to be consumed in a rather unprecedented manner. And it has provoked a clash between development and environment, whilst also generating a new form of awareness. And the Chinese faces is by no means a coincidence, but is actually something that is happening now, that within the Chinese body of clients, conversations that one would have, I don't know, five years ago and would find no common ground, are now always part, intrinsic part, of requested briefs. But then, not always go ahead, but in any case. Now I need, at this point, to make a little disclaimer, which is everything that I said before sounds like we are really gearing towards saving the world. And we are by no means doing that. The second part of the presentation, it's not to directly linked to answers to all of that. But what we think is that as designers, it's very important to assume again a sense of responsibility that during the '80s and '90s kind of vanished. We started to become like service providers. And we advocate for a position of the designer as a cultural producer. And in order for this to take place, it is intrinsically necessary to be critical observers of what's going on. In our field of research, then to this extent, is again the territory. Yeah. So lately, we've been trying to define what it says in the slide, our field design research. What is that? What is we are interested in? So we are trying to frame the work under this word, territory, for three main reasons. The first one is because it allows us to work in a cross disciplinary environment. As Eva mentioned before, we are architects working in sort of landscape projects, but at the same time in urban large scale master plannings. So in a way, these type of projects or developments that we develop, they are always necessary to-- or they need to get the input from other disciplines. So territory allow us to work within that. The second thing is also to avoid the compartmentalization of these categories, you know, like not to be saying that well, I'm an architect. I'm a landscape architect. I'm an urban designer, and therefore, I'm focusing specific realms. So territory allows also to avoid that and to try to generate a different kind of approach to specific projects. And the third is the understanding of territory, taking the words of [inaudible], as understood as a political technology, which basically means the understanding of the projects or the type of projections that we work on as an artificial, not a social, cultural, and political construct, which is aimed with a certain objective, which tries to measure land, tries to control the rain. And in that sense, it also gives a political approach to that, which is what Eva was explaining before, not like this critical reading of the [inaudible] in which we work, and also taking a certain responsibility of what we are doing with our projects. So within this frame, Ground Lab uses landscape as a model of connectivity, scalar, and temporal operations, through which the urban is conceived and engaged with. Ground Lab aims at intertwining of design, architecture, landscape, urban, a special structure with the use of ecological processes [inaudible]. Territory in here is diagrammed as a landscape, a complex and process of ecology to the manipulation of the ground. Oh, sorry. So the ground-- we will sort of try to describe kind of in a brief manner what the ground is for us, sort of the next images. But in a way, I think what do have understood, maybe we should have understood it much earlier, that the actual kind of a ground of operation for us working with landscape urbanism, with master planning, with landscape architecture, is the ground. But we try to understand the ground almost as a kind of a-- as a form of solidity that begs to be eroded and to be worked in forms of cavities and to be multiplied. Because we understand that as the ground where the actual public space takes place. And the public space is for us somehow synthesizing many of the preoccupations that we have when we speak about processes of urbanization and the city. OK. So in spite of the public realm, we are concerned with the idea of the ground as one of the main substances from where to explore the material potentials of urbanism. Central to the interest is the belief that the ground is the last bastion of public space, a territory within the city that need some more urgently to be addressed. As it has, of course, the political capacity via its physicality to deeply affect its surroundings. From a material perspective, a work seeks to redefine the geologically self-contained solidity often associated with the ground, shifting from notions of monolithic finitude towards multiplicity. We propose a morphological engagement with the territory. And in doing so, we recognize the importance of positioning ourselves as designers in relation to the city and generate responses to the existing fabric, interacting with it instead of dissociating from it, establishing strategic links and forming new affiliations. From a historical point of view, the material engagement with the ground becomes an operative mechanism to transcend the aesthetic, academic systems of composition, as well as to oppose to the disengagement of the modernist project from the ground. From a programmatic point of view, we understand the ground as an artificial construct generated in order to address morphological, technical, and programmatic necessities. It expands its notion from a purely utilitarian state to acquire further social, spatial, and political specificity. Physical operations within the ground, such as thickening, lifting, bifurcating, duplicating, and stacking of the ground, may foster a new synthesis between landscape and architecture and promote new spacial arrangements and beneficial adjacencies, such as public podiums, infrastructural green spaces, urban patios, land bridges, pedestrian networks, urban terraces, and so on. Thickening the ground, for instance, attempts, at least in our case, to solve the inherent contradiction of marrying design disciplines related to vertical dimension, such as architecture, and horizontal structures such as landscape. In trying to solve this sort of self-imposed hurdle, in pushing the boundaries of common sense and the preconception of what constitutes inhabitable space, the expending notion of the ground opens up to door to alternative modes of imagined architectural landscape and ultimately the urban environments which we inhabit. By intensifying social interactions, they create new realignments of programs and functions. In short, they provide a fertile ground to rethink newer urban urbanizations, challenging existing notions, and current trends of public, private, and semi-private space in the city. So we have attempted to sort of separate the projects that we will show in four sort of rough categories, manufactured grounds, infrastructural grounds, tactical grounds, and tectonic grounds. These, needless to say, I call it artificial categories. And it is very much so, because each project is about much more than a single category. But what we are trying to do is to show parts of each project, rather than a complete project. That sort of tries to address to make it a point of our concerns in each one of those categories. Yes, we are also trying to match each of the categories. With the word ground. With the word grounds, but in relation to the academia. So basically, we will show, for example, in manufactured ground, a couple of projects, and also how they could be related with a work in academia, or how that work that we've been doing in certain projects have been extended through the research of the unit we have at the AA. So the first project we're going to show quickly-- [inaudible] Well, manufactured grounds. It points towards watch a type of projects in which we understand the space in which we are embedded as artificial. Now, they are a social construct. And they use techniques of remediation, for example, as projected tools, rather than separating the tools into a different disciplines, but trying to use them to generate the space we are interested in. And also, all of them are kind of linked with a kind of public realm, public space, as the main driver. So the first project is called ground ecologies. This project is a competition we won in 2010 for a district in Shanghai in an area called Jiading. As you can see here, this is Jiading, which is a district outside in the outskirts of Shanghai. And basically what they claim was after was the redevelopment of an area which was basically an industrial core. Or what you can see in there as blue roofs, they are all industries. And we got basically a map that says the different intensities of these polluted lands that we got. So basically what we did was to try to understand the different techniques and mechanisms in which we can remedy that land and match it with the way in which we can propose a new program, a new redevelopment for the area. There were several constraints. And we have to maintain the grid of the city, the infrastructures that was already in place. And at the same time, there was a zoning master plan, which was specifically telling us where to place residential, were to place offices, where to place different types of programs. So we wanted to challenge that zonification given by the client. And so what we did was a collection of different areas with different degrees of pollution. And we generate an artificial topography. The artificial topography to that [inaudible] technique of [inaudible], in which we create-- sorry, the different colors show different excavations or valleys. And the lighter color shows hills. And they were arranged through environmental conditions, such as wind direction. And what we did in this project was basically to try to generate a ground in which by this artificiality of creation of that topography, we tried to resist the actual programmatic, or the programs that were imposed in those zones. So actually, the ground floor was restrained from our technique, from our project, to actually be used for private use. So-- I mean, I think it's worth mentioning that this was before kind of a Chinese government as Chinese clients developed this awareness about sustainability, kind of ecological behavior, et cetera, et cetera. So they were not interested at all about remediating the ground. Or they at least would not understand why it was necessary. So we really had to undergo quite a process of explaining to them why the remediation of the ground is important. And then that was actually the way of accepting them, or getting them to accept that we would generate kind of a big, green voids within the city that could not be occupied for a certain amount of time, hence would have to remain as public space, which is-- I mean, on the grounds of purely public space, we could never argue for it. Because state the actual public space doesn't exist as a concept, as a category, in mainland China. So it had to be really argued from the point of view of it is necessary. It has to be. And this is only a kind of temporary byproduct. And at the same time, we also complied with the program we were given. So it was a kind of sort of negotiation without persistent from our side to occupy the whole space in a zoning strategy, but at the same time by lifting the programs on top of those topographies, we also complied with that idea that the client has. So these are some zonings of the area, specifically the commercial zone and the business center as they normally like to call them. And the development of some architectural typologies that were always inhibiting on top of this ground, this artificial ground that we built. And at the same time, the continuation of that artificial ground, it's extended in the business areas with podiums that were also working in the areas where we didn't have topographies with the same purpose, not to allow the public space to expand in those business areas. And these are some images that shows how that ground is organizing the bottom of the buildings and the development of that, and how they might look. [interposing voices] Well, we're not really interested at that the stage so much in the architecture as what would be the final kind of outcome of it. What we're interested is in the possibility of generating a ground that would behave like a series of plugs in a way, with enough specificity and kind of a self-assigned differentiation, that whoever would come to do then architectural part would have a house and different things to respond to, which of course is the nightmare of any developer. But it's what we consider that kind of starts to operate as the resistance to certain forms of capital flow, however naive that might sound. This is a competition that we did in 2013, in which we got the first prize. It's in Shenzhen. And it's a whole frontal area, which was quite an interesting competition. Because when they started with the project, somehow they knew that they wanted some form of a landscape urbanism way of operating within it. So in fact, they kind of-- the long fingers that run, those three long fingers that run into the water, is part of a James Corner master plan, which he won and has been kind of built, or at least tested right now. And then they called for a second competition to develop a secondary set of fingers, which in their mind would originally be also run into the sea, but with a kind of a less scalar prominence than James Corner's ecological corridors. What we propose instead, it's kind of a cross fingers of a green system that would start connecting the ecological corridors, but that they would have their kind of biggest momentum in the positioning of the tube stations. So we picked the exact kind of positions of the tube stations and public transportation that this was already been planned and proposed. And we used it as a way of creating a network combined with a bicycle rental, so that we would facilitate, if not to enhance, the use of public transportation, which is a big issue in China. I mean, there is not enough. There are too many people. But also, there is a certain tendency towards using cars. Within that project, we also had a unit, subunit nine, that needed to sort of a plug onto one of the ecological corridors. And so what you see sort of here in the bottom of the image and in the middle is these two sort of a part of much longer fingers, with a kind of an interconnection that zigzags in direction towards the coast. What I think-- OK-- I think what is important to mention in this project, this is why for us it really has to do with the manufacturer grounds as well, is that was they were expecting just some form of a green landscape running across. What we set up is a system by which all the water produced by the adjacent plots to the green fingers would be recycled and managed within the corridors. So this, on the one hand, generated a kind of a specific quantity, let's say, of water bodies in relationship to green areas to make it kind of self running and sustainable. But on the other hand, what we proposed back is that these quantities could be reflected back into the maximum amount of buildings or density that they should sort of use within each one of the units. Those are some images of our particular subunit that starts to show kind of land bridges, where the green system is kind of running to the buildings, where again there is this interest of thickening the ground, multiplying activities, and kind of with ongoing green. Some sections where also it shows the relation with a current sort of infrastructure that was proposed by the planners, and all the various existing levels, if you wish, that are already existing within these master plans. So at this point, we would like to show quickly one of the projects we developed, well, the students develop in the program, and which one of the basic ideas was to take forward this idea of manufactured grounds, and from an academic stance. So this project was located in China. We stayed in China for four or five years doing some research with the students. And one of the projects was in the outskirts of Beijing, again in an industrial area similar to the first project we showed in this section. And so the main purpose of the project was to, again, trying to find out the different levels of pollution, the different stages at which this pollution came about, and the different ways in which these elements of remediation could happen. But in this case, as opposed, let's say, to what we did in Jiading, which was framed by the programs and the clients' brief, what the student did was to try to use and take forward a specific thing they were using to try to develop a system of organization and a system of urbanization that could also include different type of programs from the specific technique. So there was a non-negotiation between the client and us. But it was an academic exploration of the technique. And the technique they used was basically the machinery that was necessary to develop that cotton field remediation technique. So they studied quite detail a number of different truck movements and machinery throughout the landscape, and how that landscape by being remediated and being formed by these movements could also offer different special qualities. These special qualities were studied with different models. And they were also not kind of framed only in the development of the ground. But they were also informing the way buildings could start being emerging for that ground condition. So students did development of several topologies that could be inserted within those specific grounds, within those specific techniques that were used. And the actual development of the master plan or the program of the students was directed or linked to that specific technique. So in here you can see the organicity, let's say, of the project and the guidelines along which all the buildings and the programs will be inserted, respond specifically to that technique. And this a kind of an image that shows how it would look like now if you take that to that extreme. The next set of projects, we call them infrastructural grounds. And in this case, they are all related with somehow the idea of natural disasters. Because in a way, some of them-- well, the majority of them-- are linked with flooding conditions. But at the same time, we use these conditions to try to explore infrastructure, us, the way in which we can generate landscape, we can generate a specific territories. Well, it just happens to be that two of your projects have to do with the flooding and what are related issues. To mobility center in [inaudible] obviously has nothing to do with that. But for us, the category of infrastructure what has to do is with a kind of a using kind of in an opportunistic manner, using what is necessary to remediate, or what is requested by the client to kind of turn around the table and produce a byproduct that is relatively unexpected that goes beyond the purely engineering solution, if you want. So the first project is called Latent Landscapes. And this actual project actually start from an academic exercise in a program I run in Mexico City, which is called a visiting school. The program is based in Mexico City and the conditions that Mexico City, geographically speaking, has. In this specific case, what we did was to kind of enhance the project is to [inaudible] and try to present that to the authorities. So basically, this project is located in an area which is here. It's called Chalco. I don't know how familiar are you with the conditions of Mexico City. Mexico City sits in a valley. And the majority, let's say, of the footprint of the city is located where it used to be a system of lakes and wetlands. And as it happens in the last part of the last century, Mexico City grow in an exponential way. And there were a lot of informal developments like Chalco, which were sitting, let's say, in the outskirts or in the periphery of the main areas of Mexico City. And the issue of Chalco is that because it wasn't planned in a kind of traditional or conventional way, it was a sort of informal development. It's located in one of the worst areas. Now, it's actually flooding every year, or more or less every year. And sometimes it's quite [inaudible], or quite extreme, the conditions of this territory. And you can see in here some of the mappings with it, in which all the area is prone to flooding. It's just different extremes in which some of the areas are more prone than other areas. So what we did was basically just try to understand the area as a kind of artificial collection of water. And we did a run off study of Chalco using the actual streets of the area. So what we was a project that creates the streets as infrastructure that could actually control that flooding scenarios. But at the same time, they could provide, again, public space to the people in Chalco. The issue with public space in Chalco is that there doesn't exist any green area, or at least there is one or two in the whole territory. But the majority of the people uses the streets as a public space. They kind of run street markets along this street. And so what we basically did was a number of prototypes that could be inserted in different areas where we [inaudible] the main run off through the streets. And we developed these prototypes that are basically what you might call sustainable urban drainage systems, which are informed by the programs, by the buildings, by the activities in which they are inserted. So some of them become small plazas. Some of them become a sort of the infrastructure for those street markets to happen at different times of the year. And the project was using just basic landscape engineering techniques to control that flooding. And they were aimed to produce this type of linear landscape that enhanced the usage of the public street, where at the same time controlled the issues of flooding in that specific zone. And this is an aerial view of how that kind of strategy would look like. The other project which is also within this section, it's called Mobility Centre. This is a competition we won in 2012. It is located in a city called Innichen in the north of Italy. [inaudible] Hm? But what did I say? 2012. OK. It was 2013 when we won this competition. Basically what the town wanted to do is to move the existing train station closer to the city center. And they wanted to connect the town in the south with the north part. Because right now-- well, of course the train is kind of separating both areas, not only because of the railways, but there's a highway also running in between that. And also the brief called basically for that relocation of the train and the connection of the two parts of the city. And what we did was to try hybridize the different programs that they were asking for. So instead of generating a kind of architectural development of the station in separation of the underground, what we did was to put together to kind of sink the ground below the train lines. And so this sinking of the ground, what it does is it generates the underpass. We insert the train station and the facilities necessary for that train station. And by doing that, we generate a plaza which tried to articulate all the areas around it, a church, a coffee shop. And also, it links it to the city center, which is in here. So in here you can see that we concentrate all those facilities, the train station somewhere here, the plaza which leads you towards the other side in this direction. And here you can see some images of how that project looks like. So it's not a landmark in itself. It's a project that is trying to hide itself within the infrastructure that is necessary in the area. And basically-- Sorry. That was kind of part of what we understood quickly to be important from the brief. Because this is an incredibly conservative par of Italy, if it's possible any part more conservative than the rest of Italy. But for them, the tourism is kind of closely associated with a kind of mountain formations and the south Tyrolean typology of the kind of double pitch sort of typical house. So they would have never accepted or wanted kind of an emblematic train station that speaks out of something else than what they have been kind of sort of niching and carving in for the next whatever, the past whatever, 50 years. So really, the kind of body, the essence of the project, needed to be something very much grounded on to the landscape. And it was possibly also the only way of getting them to accept something of certain degree of experimentation, no? Yeah. So finally, all the excavation that we produced in here, let's say the practicalities of the project, we locate kind of artificial topographies next to the main highway. So it could work as a show room for the city. Now we insert some buildings along this highway using the elevation that was provided by the topography. So the passersby can actually see what, in terms of local products, the city can offer. So that was a way in which we used the byproduct of those excavations. And what again, some images of the station from the plaza and how you access that station. And this will be our first project built in Europe. Because we are kind of, finally after two years of waiting, and kind of caught in the budgets and so on, finally kind of going ahead with the final negotiations with politicians and local community. So I think we will start quite soon on that one. So this project might be familiar to some of you, Charles and Chris. It's kind of, I don't know, a big crying moment in our life in Ground Lab. Because we got disqualified for nine minutes of late arrival, which I still cannot kind of put up with that. But anyway, despite that, I think it's quite a nice project that is definitely worth it, kind of discussing. So it's in Taiwan in the city of Taichung. And the area that you see delineated in there was the area to be assigned for the park, which in Taiwan, likewise in China and many other places, in general, when they think about developing a park, the park serves as a first step of kind of a revalorization of the land and kind of changing of views of the land use adjacent to it. So most of what you see adjacent to this very kind of lengthy park two would be developed as residential areas. So the main assertion of the project was basically trying to rate, again, the movement of water. Taiwan is an area where it rains quite a lot, and softening for some flooding. So one of the main ways in which we structured was to do an index of the movement of water, which you can see in here and here. So basically with that, all the different programmatic elements and facilities along the way, in which we will be dealing with the movement of water. In here, you can see the different elements that we produced. And again, there were along the whole length of the park, we produced a number of reservoirs which were fed by this natural movement of water. And by gravity, they were distributing them along of the park. But they were working like pools within a pool within a larger pool. So let's say the deepest one and the largest one, one embedded into the other, one would be the ones that will retain the maximum amount of water at the times of flooding risk, which I think it was like two, three months a year, right? And then these would kind of go off naturally towards the south of the site, but then also as the dry season appears, then the smallest kind of a cut out would be the one that retains water. Yeah. So in this case as well, we excavate quite a lot to create these reservoirs, or these kind of water bodies. And we place them along them to generate a topography, also to start producing certain character and identity of the parking lot. So it's not going to be, from going to be a flat area. But it was a different stage in levels that utilizes a seasonally movement of water, and also to give different vantage point throughout the project. And along the water and the topography, there was the vegetation and the planting organized. So you can see the full scheme in here and the different layers, which were organized, again, in the way the water was managed, let's say, on the back. And here you can see a kind of aerial view of that project. Because we had been intrigued by the way in which this sort of infrastructural projects and the way they can deal with that amount of water, as you can see, we are trying to develop ways in which we can actually use landscape literally in its most dynamic way to design large territories. So what we're doing right now in the program at the Architectural Association is we're trying to generate a number of projects in which the scale and the impact they may have, it goes towards an almost geographical, let's say, scale. So we asked the students, or at least in this case, to select one specific landform and one specific problematic in which that landform could be embedded with. This theme what they developed, or what they tried to develop, is a cartography of Europe in relationship to flooding scenarios. So instead of seeing Europe as a kind of limited boundary between land and sea, they tried to generate a kind of gradient of Europe to understand it as an area which is not a line. And it's constantly in movement, especially now with the rising levels, climate change, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, they select one specific area in the south of England in this area here, which is one of the most problematic ones. Probably you are aware that in 2013, there was quite big floodings that UK suffers all along its coast. And this specific area is quite interesting because it's not only affected by this meteorological events, but also because the south area is sinking, like geologically speaking. So it's sort of quite a problem, you know, an extreme problem. And so that corner of UK when it suffered kind of big flooding, it actually separates the tip from the land. And it can become an island. So it's quite a big issue. And with some simulations that the students produced-- well,it isn't here-- you can actually see the extreme scenario. So all this area will be flooded. And of course, crops, farmlands, et cetera, will be some kind of lost. So what the students say was basically, what if we instead of try to fighting nature, or so to fight flooding scenarios in great walls, we work with the flooding events. And so what they did was to select a kind of branches of water that could be inserted into the land. And they study-- well, here you can see the actual simulation of what could happen in an extreme case scenario, you know, the movement of water across the land in a certain amount of time. So what they did was to try to study the area. They see the simulation, the amount of water that the existing farmlands require. And they say, well, what we're going to do is we're going to insert tidal creeks. Tidal creeks will be a landform that we are going to use to basically shape this territory. So we're now going to produce a territory that it's designed in one go. But actually, we're going to now create the framework through which we can insert a number of branches. And through the natural digging that these tidal creeks produce, they will shape the territory. So they study the kind of way these tidal creeks could work, the way you can control it with some walls, dykes, et cetera, and how those branches that naturally are created by the tidal creeks can be shaped for, let's say, human purposes. So they create a genealogy of different tidal creeks. Each of these tidal creeks respond to different programmatic requirements. Some of them are more related to agricultural production. Maybe some other could be related to more city or town necessities. So this is an idea of how those tidal creeks might look like once they are in place. But the idea is that they are not, let's say, formed in one go. They will be slowly eroding the territory and slowly changing almost production systems across that entire sound. So it will become from an agricultural land to a more agriculture based system. And in here, you can see the same simulation which they did to try to understand how those tidal creeks will control the same amount of volume. Because in the end, you're not controlling, or you're not reducing the amount of volume of water, you're just slowing down the movement of water. And then they start basically inserting a number of programs that could be-- well, they could be inserted and working with these water landscapes. So a number of them were inserted and then did some studies in a more, let's say, architectural escape in which buildings start to appear in these areas where tidal creeks will form along several years. I thought you said you were [inaudible]. Sorry. Now I know that we are late. So let's go really quickly. Tactical grounds, it's for us a kind of interesting sort of a category within our works, one that we have not necessarily kind of embraced previously, so to say. Because of course, within the strategic, there is much more possibilities of experimenting with morphologies, experimenting with kind of a bottom up development of projects, and so on, and so forth. However, with these kind of latest projects that we've been doing, where we have needed to work much closer to political agencies and sort of public projects, like properly public, not in China public, so to say, we have started to understand that there is another sort of a tendency within our projects that has to do more with a kind of punctual insertions, kind of a very specific interaction with particular environments within the territory, and that such interventions very often can sort of translate themselves into kind of prototypes or prototypical actions that can be then replicated in other contexts. So the first one. [inaudible] The first one is a project which is an interesting one. It is a management program. It's not a kind of a specific design project given by a client. It's a program that the government of Mexico City is trying to basically form us guidelines for a specific type of landscape. Again, and as mentioned in the previous project, this is the main area of Mexico City, which is a valley. And in here, in the west part, you have a number, well, a system of ravines, which are the ones that in the past were feeding all the kind of system of lakes and wetlands and were also feeding some of the rivers that were crossing those lakes and those wetland systems. So as you can see here, those ravines have been encroached by the urbanization. And right now, if you go there and you ask people about those landscapes, they might be aware of them. But they are not really in contact with them. Now these landscapes are separated from the population. And so what we tried to do within that management program, which is basically a written document, was to try to insert design with that so they can instigate a change within those ravines. So we didn't edit the document in which we read. We indexed the movement of water. We understand the slopes and different degrees of the steepness in those ravines. We took one of the ravines as an example. This is a ravine called Del Morale. And what we did was to say, OK. In order to manage these ravines, what we need to-- what you need to do is to insert small tactical projects, which is basically made of an infrastructural part, which is the control of water, the collection of water. The second bit is the accessibility to those ravines. And the third bit would be how to enter those ravines. So we selected specific areas which complies with those three elements I mentioned before, in which you can insert local programs in relation to the urban fabric that is next to it. And they will be building in different phases. They are almost small architectural elements. You have small buildings that allows entrances to them. And they follow this [inaudible]. They have some wetland systems that control and collect certain amount of water. And they also allow water to be infiltrated in the area. So this area with be built over time, depending on, let's say, the amount of money that the government could be applying. But the moment they are inserted, they could expand that network until you reach the whole connection of one of the barrancos-- sorry, the ravines. And basically, what they do is they could be expanded in a prototypical sense to different ravines. Now they utilize the same type of wetlands, the same type of ravines to develop along time. So this is a project we won last October, was it? November? Si. September. And it's in Moscow. We are currently waiting, in fact, for the final contract to be signed and so and so forth, go ahead. Unfortunately, have discovered that Russia is as difficult a place to work as China. And so let's see what happens. But basically, one of the things that is interesting about these tactical projects is that generally, there is a very clear brief of a problem that needs to be addressed, or a kind of a singular issue that is needed to be dealt with. And in this case, this is the biggest park in Moscow. And the problem that needed to be addressed was that this connection between the north part of the park and the bottom side of the park, most people would kind of dare to reach the entrance, which had lots of activities and it was in proximity, or it is proximity, to the urban fabric, where happily there would be enough people kind of moving along. Needless to say, this has to do with the kind of extreme weather conditions that they have. Now within the park, there is an existing structure of those axes that you can see on the drawing on the left hand side. So we decided to somehow clinch onto to those existing axes that were already partly furnished, partly developed, and partly belonging to the kind of identity of the local citizen. And then we simply kind of potentialize it. So we push its identity by generating extra activities, be it kind of in the form of small pavilions, coffee places, and so on, or kind of added soft ground. Of course, also kind of a revitalization of the kind of a treatment of the hardscape and softscape. And you see how fast one can find a project? So that's how it looks like. And now we move into the next one. How are we with time? We are bad. I told that we have done already one hour. So OK, this is a-- We should finish in five minutes. Si, more or less. So this is a project that kind of an invited competition for an international kind of expo parks and gardens in Beijing. And the competition was, the site, was kind of squeezed in between all the kind of master designers' gardens. And one of the things that brief requested was to kind of try to develop a park that-- I mean, it was an explicit about that brief, anyway, the way in which we kind of focused the brief, that would kind of enhance the connection across the site from the gardens on the top and the bottom and sidewise. And coincidentally, to this we were at the time just kind of working on the development of the green systems on the project in Shenzhen. So we saw this and kind of caught it as a possibility to explore kind of a prototype condition that could be then deployed at crossing areas within our green system, which then later on, we did. So basically, is a series of elevated gardens that are framed by tilting walls. These tilting walls frame on the one hand the movement going through, but on the other hand, they really kind of seal and hide the parks or the gardens. So you really need to kind of squeeze in between these narrow corridors and go through them up to reach the actual little gardens. And each one of the gardens is kind of located at a different height, so as you explore them, you reach different kind of perspective points in relationship to the rest of the park and the other gardens. This one, we're going to skip it. So finally, we reach the tectonic grounds. So I think at the beginning of the presentation, we were talking about this. And the tectonic grounds for us, it's-- I mean, it has moved kind of both ways. On the one hand, we have tried to explore forms of generating grounds that then pose a sufficient kind of resistant specificity for kind of making further development not necessarily easy, but kind of to enhance the kind of presence of the public space. But on the other hand, being architects, it's been kind of impossible to resist the temptation to then start to work morphologically with such massing with such buildings and how they can develop this kind of symbiosis with the ground. So on the one hand, we have a kind of, let's say, a tectonic artificialization of the ground, or of the nature, from the point of view in which we kind of exacerbate kind of the design approach towards its sharpness, is kind of a suppose all natural kind of a behavior. And on the other hand, we kind of work with the morphologies of the buildings that kind of go towards the naturalization of the building into kind of establishing this dialogue with the ground. So this is a project in China of our students. You didn't let me see which year, or who, but Jaime Constanza. And it is-- the whole kind of set up of the project is to do with a megalomaniac project that they were planning to bring water all the way from the south of China to the north of China through these kind of right hand side. It appears in here, and a small canal is a huge river. So they started to think about how would it be possible-- it's called social waterscapes. And it tries to kind of dig water from these big kind of infrastructural intervention and to start to deploy it as a means of a kind of a social interaction within the development of the city. So the water presence within the city becomes very much the kind of the identity of the city, as well as the public space always associated with it. So of course, in order to produce these water bodies, there was a fair amount of excavating, cutting, and then kind of piling in adjacency to it. And this has started to generate a ground condition, kind of slightly topographic, much more anyway, of what kind of originally it is. And they were very much interested in developing a form of architecture, or a form of massing at least, that would speak the same language of that ground, so that you would start reading the massing as a kind of peak points within the ground, instead of a dissociative formation. Those are few images of the development of these kind of water moments that started to serve as social interaction moments, always associated with buildings related to community center, kind of children education, kind of sports facilities. And some explorations of how such ground starts to push a different understanding of a kind of typology to claim such kind of diversity of topography, both more at the horizontal level and at a vertical level, more working, again, with the thickening ground, with the ground condition, with the plugging in. Do you want to start? Do it fast. And finally, what we have, flowing gardens. So this is the last project we are going to show. And it's, well, the biggest project we have built so far. It was part of a huge master plan for the horticultural fell in Xi'an, which was opening in 2012. And well, this is the location of the project in the northeast part of Xi'an. And basically, it was what Eva was trying to explain in tectonic grounds. Only in here, what we tried to do is that kind of seamless integration between architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. This is the master plan of the competition. But one of the most interesting drawings that we produced was this one, in which at least it's difficult to dissociate or to kind of put the boundaries between where is the actual buildings, the infrastructure, the land bridge that is connecting different parts of the project. But also, it's choosing the same type of strategies, shapes, and elements to organize the landscape. Everything was in relation to the way you access the fair, and also how you organize water movement. So in here, you can see the actual project built. There is this background view of the building and how the landscape start to become the walls and the roofs of that building, but at the same time, we have some moments of the project that also project architecture and the elements that architecture in itself could generate within the park. These projecting elements of the exhibition hall produce shadows in an area of Xi'an which is quite harsh in that climate and produce quite interesting spaces for the people to use. Similarly, the greenhouse, which is located on the other side of the project, was zoned from this point of view to integrate within the topography. So it follows the contours of the site. But at the same time, when you are standing on the other side of the building, you actually see in stark contrast then facade of the building and the interior of it. And this is an aerial view of how the project looks from the northeast part of the project. And in which, I think it's quite interesting that relationship that we managed to produce, you know, the integration of the different elements. And one was the blurring of the boundary of the disciplines in one project. And I think that's it. Yeah, that's it. We give you peace. Thank you. [applause] Thanks very much. I know many of you are scurrying back to your work. But given that you wrapped up so quickly, I'm sure we have time for at least one question if anybody has the temerity for a question. [inaudible] Thanks very much. [applause] So I do have a question, sorry. Charles? [inaudible] OK, well, I'll still ask the question, and whoever wants to sort of listen, they can. Yeah. So again, thank you for the presentation. Excellent work, very, very riveting images. I think at the beginning you mentioned you're both architects, right, of course trying to sort of delimit the boundaries of landscape and urban design as well in the process. So I'm curious as to what were the initial sort of motivations behind approaching architecture in this manner, or landscape and urban design, rather than sort of the more typical ways that architects might usually begin to approach architecture, usually as sort of in practice as sort of practices develop, sort of certain motivations, they lean into specific niches. But it seems what Ground Lab is doing very quickly took on a mantel of something that's very new and then has been succeeding in sort of this production of these new ways of thinking. So I was curious as to how you first sort of intervened into that realm? To me, started somehow with the a smaller scale. Because before co-founding Ground Lab, I working-- I founded another practice, architectural practice, called Plasma Studio. And within Plasma, which we did purely architecture, our concern was always related to the development of surfaces as a continuity of the ground, partly because we were working a lot in Italy in this area in South Tyrol, where we understood that possibly the way of going forward in the development of a new typology and a new identity for the area was to think about buildings in typographical ways, instead of continue to think about buildings as kind of traditional typologies. And our language started to develop from there, and our interest in kind of working with the ground. In our case, we didn't operated with the ground as a malleable mass, but we operated with the buildings as kind of unfolding surfaces that always kind of generated permeability and continuity of flows. Then when I started to teach at the AA in the Landscape Urbanism program, we started to work-- I think Longgang was our first project that we did as a group-- kind of we weren't even Ground Lab then. And the idea was to really explore what we were teaching in a way. I think we were a bit shy in the first year. We weren't really kind of working in as much of a larger scale as we would have liked. And then we did Longgang as a way of exploring what is really possible or not with this approach and with the methodology that we were using. So in a way, things kind of immediately get mixed together. You have one or two people in the team that have already been working with the idea of ground from the point of view of the architecture. And then we were working with the ground as forms of kind of obliterating it or changing it to accommodate for infrastructure. And these things kind of naturally come together. But I have to say, it was really a bottom up kind of exploration. It's not from day one, we said, you know, the ground is our thing. The public space is the last bastion, blah, blah, blah. It's more like through doing, we'll learn what the techniques can allow us to produce. And through producing our first steps, we understood what the repercussions of that, politically speaking, could have. So it's really like a feedback loop. I think that's it, yeah. She explained very well. Gracias. [applause]