Upcoming lecture series we have just a few announcements. Tonight we have Dr Marcos Cruz visiting from the BARTLIT in London on the twenty ninth February twenty ninth Bill Sharples from shop architects will be joining us. After that Francisco pocket Roger guess a graduate of Georgia Tech and currently the dean at University of Puerto Rico. That's March seventh. Scott Ingram March fourteenth a practicing artist. MARTIN You can find coming up on March twenty eighth and finishing with Phil Bernstein on April fourth so we have quite a lineup as we work our way through the semester the night it's yes Sarah. It's about that is that better. Now I need to turn it down a little bit. One moment. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW LET'S GET IT CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW testing testing. All right so it's with great pleasure that I introduce Marcos Cruz who's the director of the Bartlett School of Architecture in London where he's also studio master of in Mark unit twenty a word on the Bartlett the Bartlett School of Architecture at the University College in London is unquestionably a world leading Center for Education and Research in architecture based on a vision of a society where autonomy equity integrity and most importantly creative innovation the drive to produce inspirational and useful ideas objects practices representations systems and technologies is crucial. To the realisation of a sustainable innovative and diverse world. Dr Cruz is a leader at the Bartlett his very teaching activity as a researcher a tutor and critic has been carried out at many schools of architecture including U.C.L. the University of Westminster and the University of California Los Angeles. Cruz studied architecture at the E.C. asap and Porto while also frequent courses at the E.T.S. A B. and Barcelona. After moving to London he gained a masters degree in architectural design in ninety nine and later a Ph D. by design research in two thousand and seven is investigations about Neo plasma Matic architecture which focus on a contemporary discussion about the body the impact of biotechnology on architecture. He's one the recently wrote one they are of be a president's medals research award for outstanding Ph D. thesis that was in two thousand and eight. Crews co-founded the A Tell us a Marcos and Marjon in two thousand combining the practice and teaching of architecture along with experimental design research. Currently he and his partner Marjon Collette the are working on a major mixed use Project for Taipei Taiwan Cruz is an author of flesh and vision in two thousand unit twenty in two thousand and two unpredictable flesh in two thousand and four Marcos and Marjon interfaces and enter a Faces in two thousand and five a Didio plasma Matic design in two thousand and eight and Ph D. research projects in two thousand and nine published by the Bartlett It's our absolute pleasure to host you please join me in welcoming Marcus to Georgia Tech I am of. Can you hear me. Is this is a slow. This is. OK. Michael thank you very much and thank you to Georgia Tech. We had this really nice conversation in. A few months ago and at the bottom and we quickly found out that there were quite interesting sort of. Differences and similarities between both institutions and therefore for me it has been a great pleasure to be here these days and. And sort of. Make use of this generosity of being showed around to all the different corners of Georgia Tech. So I guess I'm going back really with a a sense of this place which is great. Thank you. I thought quite a bit of what I was going to show you. Because in a sense being the director of a school but teaching there for much longer. Since one thousand nine but also being in practice merges a lot of things and sometimes people expected to be sort of the direct of the school that only talks about the Bartlet the other times you sort of supposed to be the teacher that runs a unit for many years but then you also the practitioner but then you also write. So what I thought was that today I was giving you a bit of a cross-section through lots of topics that interest me and some of them reflect. Clearly what the bottle is standing for I think in in sort of. More general terms. Some of it is the root is the result of what the bottle does it is about but some some of it is also what I'm interested in and therefore I speak for myself and not for my colleagues. As Michael was saying I think one of the key interests that the school has is to promote diversity. So in a sense the the the the unit system with all these different tutors really create many different schools within one school and. It's not. It's not a continuum there it's actually quite a bit of fight between people that believe in very different things. So quite a bit of the work that I'm going to show you is very much sort of my own research but mixed with also work that I do with students. And I thought the best way to sort of sort of explain what this cross-section is is that I think there is a continuous continuous needing process in architecture which means that there's a sort of intellectual and design goal that one a sort of working on and sometimes you you break your bread and you have the final product but for a long period of time what you're actually doing is digesting in the kneading process your the various information that comes into into the stall and and I clearly have to open my eyes and and declare my bias. I'm I'm not afraid of the eclectic at all. I'm much more afraid of the purest. Maybe because of my background being how fortune is and how German maybe because of being at the maybe because of being surrounded by people that are not afraid of the collector can actually rather enjoy it. I'm not afraid of the hybrid either. And I'm not afraid of of the unpredictable and the unfinished and probably been perfect. So these are sort of just to give you a sense that what I'm showing you is not a complete theory but is a cross-section through the. Kneading process that I'm going through. Which I share with the students. Now the other thing that happens is that the unit is not a consistent clear group the unit that I run since ninety nine is in the way a research unit where there are different strands of Investigation and the different strands means that there is a there are parallel interests that run through through the units and we don't determine what these strands are they come up almost bottom up because the students have their own interests of their that they develop and the grate. Moments in the unit are when in a particularly somebody in a way introducing a new field opens up new doors and that's a new strand of investigation that that kicks off that year so I would call those projects the memorable projects the ones that really where the opening up of of a new conversation of a new discussion. This. This is a bit like the lights be turned off because the the. These lights are on the side. It's just of that's great. For the show this image first because this was done by a student a few years ago and he was working in one of these small cubby holes that the bar that has these sort of endless tiny small spaces. And although he was working in Shanghai. He was doing a project that I think was the best portrait of what the Bartlett was was about which was the sort of when you see it from at night and you look at it from the outside there is lots of stuff going on that you haven't really an idea of of of the different activities inside until you go inside and you have this explosion of small microcosms and these microcosms clearly are within the units the spaces that the particular students develop. Throughout the years. So as I was saying this this for me was really a sort of portrait of the small of the small worlds that the individual students sort of create inside a building which is far too overcrowded. And I heard Georgia Tech was of crowded but I I think it's nothing comparable to the overcrowding of what we are facing at the bottom but that has it has a funny advantage. Which is that the intensity that is generated in such a crowded space create sort of places like these. This was literally where the student was bringing all his toys in working on this tiny small computer doing all these animations and needed clearly to create his own. Space and I think that is very much the case for a lot of students that do not work in an impersonal place they work at in in their own world in create their own microcosm as I said and this isn't for instance what the space looks like at the end of the year when the students all together. Make a display of models. That. The National into the external examiners I think the environment to work environment is for me something quite crucial because I don't different schools of architecture around the world have very different spaces very different studios and this is always for me quite extraordinary because Gowdy had such a studio and the other day I had had a teacher that came to me and said you know if I would know all that in our days. You work in offices. I would have even started star to study architecture. And I said What do you mean that you wouldn't start studying architecture and he said Well an office and nowadays as such are ordered Vironment it looks basically very similar to where lawyers work or where sort of any other. Other agent in big corporate companies work and architects lost the sense of the outer layer and I thought that's interesting that that's actually quite scary and said And therefore I think the possibility that is given to schools of architecture to to make people used to environments which are much more very much their own and also a place where there is almost a sort of extrusion and explosion out of the brain of the author into the space where we're designers working. I think is an. Fact it's an important aspect. Now I think there's a there's a very very important tradition of the market which I call the electoral thinking electoral design process. You could look to for me is one of those cases that is a sort of lateral think an electoral design or as much as I had always in Japan or or one of my great favorites and I'm probably going to be a bit out of place here with Bruce scoff. Michael just said my god I haven't heard this name for a long time. I mean we did quite substantial visits to Bruce scoffs buildings and I must say they are very much part of what my references are and then when Michael took me around yesterday. There's a there's a a very local amazing eccentric John Portman with with these sort of buildings which I think are totally unpredictable. You would never imagine when you go from the outside and step into this interior. Now obviously what Portman was doing was not this sort of stuff he was not designing it with the conversationally and lots of work that students do in our unit in our days is very much. This I mean this is now an old minuter image from the otaku as you can see with such an old thick screen but I think the the it symbolizes a lot of the the work methodology that I said I sure I saw then the other day which I think is even more interesting which was done by a student at the R.C.A. the Royal College of Art which is really this immersion tolt all immersion which is sort of on the limit. But I don't mind that actually I think this is probably part of the system but you also need to take the cap off at some point and look around and get more involved with other people. Now the tradition of the lateral designers as I'm considering them and classifying them has to do with a non-linear process of thinking and designing it's finding all sorts of other routes. In other issues that might influence the design solutions at the end I mean this is for instance a student that finished very recently. Who who was obsessed with crossbreeding different. Digital fabrication techniques and she used six different ones in the model and. There was there was a conversation going on and still is which is a slight fear that there's a digital modernism sort of taking over or probably already in place and therefore this is a sort of wish to not to be on one line of one skill or one expertise but cross-breeding there. Destroying the boundaries between. These different techniques. This is another student for instance that spend a lot of time. Scripting. But it was a very good sort of hand. Sketch and it did amazing drawings. He wanted to interfere the process literally with his hand. So what he does is he creates a whole process of design where by scripting and using pretty particular parameters creates three D. models which he then slices sketches over them effect arises the sketches you parameterize them again and gets into a sort of circle and then I think some of the work is really quite interesting because it's actually handwritten it's interfered with a hand and it's not only a set of parameters that determine what is done here and one has to say this is then obviously also in collaboration with engineers that discuss with him and and help him to use some software in order to to design these structures. Another typical lateral thinker was a student a few years ago that was working in a scale of one hundred to one and I when he came into the city. Excuse me one hundred to one. What are you talking about we can't even see what you're what you're designing but in fact he was he was working with people in laboratories and and talking about the microscopic and then of scopic scale of of materials and how they the cell of a structure on those scales might. Have an extraordinary relevance for us in the future when when we talk about the different materiality. Another student that rather than working in the studios of the Bartlett which are too cramped anyway went into the fluid dynamics Department and the nearing department of U.C.L. in that all the studies of models in the in the tanks in the water tanks. So the precision of the water tanks the the regular flow of water. Was interfered with these different physical models that he then with the help of some of the Ph D. students there developed so in a sense the study of of the environmental was not done through simulation but really physical immersion in the water or another one which was even more crazy because you really spend almost all his time in the microbiology labs that at U.C.L.. Constructing these one to five prototypes for a façade which were responsive not sure but later more work of or of this. Now the first topic I would like to talk about is is about skin. I just realized that all the images are cropped. Which is really sad. So you always have to imagine that on that side there is sort of another. With that goes until here or leave it will be OK But anyway I think the most important metaphor that architects use in our days is the word skin. It's. It's totally pervasive it's everywhere. There's no building that doesn't have a skin which is amazing is intelligent readers and there's a lot. There are lots of metaphors that architects have been in history always introduced into their vocabulary. Many of them come up actually from. Biology in the in the in the body. But they're often also risk to be misinterpreted and I'm I'm very interested in the notion of skin in for various reasons but I also understood that there was a big limitation and this comes from reading also an article that. The historian age and forty year olds a very small article in in a publication that the Bartlett. Sort of organized a few years ago where he talks about this problem he says skin is probably the most important matter for that skin implies a sense of sadness when you talk about steen you're actually talking about a membrane. And he says quite blandly there is no term that architects use right now. That implies a sense of thickness of mass of three dimensionality. The skin is flat the skin is the dermis is the thinnest part of of of the body and for me. That is quite relevant because when you start thinking of how people use that word in fact it has that. Connotation with a sense of flatness and thinness now I'm interested in the opposite and in finding a a word and concepts that have to do with the three dimensionality of the skin and in history. The idea of the skin has been used in very very small. I mean this is clearly from the past the idea that the facade of a building the skin of a building was like an open book was a space for narrative. You know these extraordinary tiles This is in in my hometown portal where the tiles are sort of part of the tradition for environmental reasons but obviously the the the religious dimension. Allows for this whole narrative to evolve. But the another sense of skin in the religious environment obviously this theatrical side of what I mean is work and the whole Baroque period. Where there is the three dimensionality and clearly a. Dynamic composition. It's a sort of manifold. This is a completely different understanding this is much later. Obviously the idea of the mask the skin that is masking something internally and so the the relationship between the inside out and I'm obviously not going to spend any time explaining what it is to me and others. Spoke about but the fact that there is a a sickening moment which is that place where the lady of the house sits who's sitting both in between inside and outside but really inhabiting the mask a much more sort of close to us understanding of skin is obvious the idea of the skin of the building be structure. But there's clearly a rational efficiency behind the modern understanding of skin at a time. This is fascinating because the high tech the English high tech turns the body the building is a body inside out. It brings the viscera on to the outside in an almost grotesque sort of fashion. It doesn't it doesn't want to have a skin it wants to avoid the skin and actually have. The all the guts on it's for Sun. Future systems use the skin in the different mold they think about it as a garment as something that you have almost like a fashion dress. And he clearly when he was alive he talked about it as looking at back of her bum and on other references like that. This is a project we are working on Martin and I and this is much more to do with skin is being considered what I call flesh and now when you look at in English. What. Flesh means in the dictionary in flesh is a lot of stuff. I mean flesh is sort of the most and big and inclusive word that you sort of can get it's body. It's to itself it's pulp sometimes as bone pulp and skin. It's also philosophy full term. Obviously that for the French from a lodge a knowledge just has a big importance but it clearly has something of a thickness of of matter and I think in the era that we are getting into the post digital era I think matter is becoming more important. It's not so much about the process as about the materiality and even more philosophical terms. The the presence of matter and how we manipulate that. This is another project we're actually working on right now and here skin is is much more sort of peeling off muddy and cold that it's fully aging which is another sort of matter for coming from. From skin the vocabulary. And this is this idea that there is a much bigger sort of manifold construction of different components that all together create in and habitable condition. I mean the environmental conversation overseed I want to get in too much into that but this is our project we're doing in Taipei. Where the three dimensionality of the skin again is sort of multiplied. And created and the depth introduced in it to the media side of skin is obvious importance. The idea that you have the spectacle of lights and an architecture as it were almost as big shoal and then a project that I know very well because when Peter and Colin were doing the competition they invited me to be part of this team. So we worked together on the consoles grants. And that is the idea that the skin is clearly a middy attic. Place for this play of information and therefore often Peter's reference to the Gothic and the idea again of the of the open book of the narrative that can happen on the skin clearly not reflecting in a contemporary sense. What is the interior of the building so clearly also separation and when you thinking in terms of our contemporary body a separation between the notion and identity of our skin and what our in our interior body is. So for when we would working on grants and I was not part of really of the construction phase. But when you're working on it. We spend a lot of time discussing skin and the the topic was skin and pin which was really a circulation route and then this wrapping around and the law that was three dimensional lies then the competition was one. Basically because after we got the thick book with all the descriptions of the program which was endless We decided to put all that program into the skin of the building so the skin became an inhabitable. Space. It became flesh it became literally something much more tactile and and haptic and this is the first model that was done which I worked on with latex one. Just after I finished my master's degree and it was the first three dimensional ization of what the can styles was supposed to be it was actually much more of a biotech building at the time as we thought it now. This leads me to another topic which has to do with classifying a phenomenon of materiality which I call the in Lucent materiality and I think the twenty centuries spent a lot of time in this duality between the are paid and the transparent and this went back and forth and obvious the whole modern movement made a statement of transparency and and three an empty space even going against the idea of presence of walls. And then you get sort of in the sixty's after the crisis of the modern movement. A much more interesting moment where the idea of these embedded space that is translucent rather than clearly transparent starts taking over and you get people like Grimshaw clearly alluding to that sort of imagery of Barbarella when with his Space Center where you you sort of are fascinated with the idea that something is is is sort of there but you can't really exactly see what it is and when you take. Even further to get the idea of the National Library project of Rem Koolhaas at the time there was a real issue about the translucent aspect of the building. It's this. Against of quite. Not totally clear relationship between the interior volumes and objects and the composition of the interior and how that had. Some sort of effect on the facade. This is my own work and some of the that I did with money and where again the idea of latex and the embeddedness is coming back and even some sort of X. experimental. Funny model that at the time I was doing the in the Masters where people were inhabiting skins and in the facades and even the first project I did at the time which was a performance in a latex wall. Where I was keen on exploring this much more direct haptic relationship with our context that could be malleable could be flexible and I call that in Lucent because it's an embedded translucency and similar to our skin. You don't have the notion of trend so light actually doesn't go through it's trapped inside a substance that is much thicker and has a lot of imbedded material and I think that that is something of a contemporary. Condition that I think in flight path enabling. This leads me to another issue which has to do with the body in my Ph D. thesis one of my arguments was to say that contemporary architecture to a large extent failed the body and that is because the body got into sort of. Out of fashion. I think a lot of architects took the body for granted. They just settle for this is sort of some old fashioned people that talk about the body because they they want to sort of have a nostalgia of old spaces or or sort of sensory understanding of space and a lot of the from Knology went into that that's not so much what interests me for me it was much more fascinating to question who we are really in the spaces we inhabit. And a lot of the descriptions that exist in cultural studies go far beyond what architects are talking about and what they are they understand. Actually I think a lot of architects take it for granted that it's the body is literally a functional being nothing else there is not really honest I static to the body. There's no other dimension and if you go back to the west. Traditional of the of the body there clearly different steps that we went through different concepts that influenced what our understanding of the body is nowadays. This is the classic period obviously with the body the body of posture the body that is living sort of in harmony with its context. It's a it's a body of of symmetry to a large extent and of beauty you move a few hundreds of years further and the descriptions tell you a story of a completely different sense of the body and I'm I'm obviously looking a lot into not just the readings that and the writings and of their time but a lot of the illustrations of it and that then then at the time and you get a bar or a body that is monstrous that is actually a covered with a very porous skin. There is that there's a horrific ugly side to the body which is fantastic people are are in sort of in great and Shankman but also fear of of this grotesque body. This is the grotesque body of the Middle Ages. You have again a few hundred years later you get the baroque body and the baroque body is sort of an intrinsic it's still a period where the society the Western society very much. The Europeans Western society in the stands. The notion of of the floppy fleshy sort of fatty body as being a sense of health and it's sort of part of the ice that one sort of enjoys the. Whimsical side of the body that is not really perfect but it's seen as a virtual But very soon after there is a big big break in the concept of the body which is the period of the eighteenth and then one thousand century and you have a radical shift. You have an understanding of the body which becomes gendered becomes mainly a female body the body has a very pale skin the skin is a thin membrane. It's the reflection of the Interior that has to speak for the interior of the skin is not perfect in peace. You're then you are an ugly person and there's a clear sort of relationship between both it's obviously a body posture is a is a is a man is a body of control and up images show that symbol time is the there's also a mechanistic understanding of the body. A sense that we sort of operate like a machine the twenty century is far more and bigger. This is far more difficult to understand what sort of body conception there is probably there are many you know you have the all the oven gods have their own representation an understanding of the body and clearly I'm saying this because there's a relationship between them standing of the body and and the and the design of spaces where the body is the what the body inhabits. And so you get the Futurist body. If that is the dynamic when you get the social realist body there and you get to you to clear the geometry eyes body here and then the most effective most influential one. Which I show in a minute is obviously modular but we went over that period I think we're living now when you look at the illustrations of artists in the whole discussion in the in cultural sciences is is is a lot to do with going back to the monstrous side to be in for a perfect side of the body to body that is fragmented to a body that doesn't have this unity. Some artists even call it obsolete and I remember arriving in London the ninety eight and there was a show at the our city called wrong bodies and I went to see it. This is the Institute of Contemporary Art and we have all these handicapped artists making a statement that the audience. We had perfect bodies had the wrong bodies they had the perfect ones they had the contemporary bodies and that was a big shock but fact what you realize is from a whole cross range of people there's a time. Erik body there's a hybridized body. There's a cyborg in body and that would be sort of the most generic sort of term it's not necessary decidable for the cyborg in body it's something that is Bill still being under construction and the identity of the body. It's being searched for as I said the modular had probably the biggest impact and it's it's it's also probably the only moment in history where an architect can scenes a body that has a serious impact on other arts and other fields but this is obviously as we've all know a standard body the body that is measurable is neutral and and has this sort of standard. Sense. Now when you look back of how architects drew the body. They usually drew it exactly as they drew that their architecture is a clear relationship. This is a Mendelssohn drawing ladies. I mean the dresses are literally how his buildings look like. And you get a sudden and right. Look at that I mean that's clearly sort of a plan and that's the representation of the body and I mean I don't go too much into depth because that is sort of in the election it's in its own right but you get all the Rossi drawing bodies but then this is overseas are drawing bodies in and I was telling Michael to this the fact that some of the work is really quite surprising when you walk into the nurseries and you fits into space is completely wrong and then the lady the the nurse says no you have to sort of go on you do onto your knees and once you are the height of the of a child you look at the space and you understand it differently so there's a sense of presence and the body really clearly. As inhabitants understand and in and generated this space. This is Norman Foster and I show this this image because as you can see that's a reflection of of the architecture that he's producing and it goes even this far as that and that is the body is becoming a diagram. It's only a sort of thing the there. It's a it doesn't really mean anything anymore and probably the spaces he produces have a bit of that it's a completely mechanized look it's even a place where I think a sort of mechanics. Building or a car. Industry. Now I'll leave that open because I think the issue of the body is totally unsolved. I mean I don't draw bodies and into our buildings and I think we are in crisis in a funny way. Maybe we don't need to but we are I think one of the first generations of architects who really don't use the body. We don't represent it. And there was I think a journalist in The New York Times that spoke about the scale ease that is it sort of known here it's it's a Ph D. student found it out and the Staley's are all these Photoshop sort of top models and guys with the dog and. Skateboarders that we put in buildings that absurd to complete it. So they don't speak for the buildings where they're in they're done for town mayors or or for politicians to look at and they give scale that's the only thing they do they don't they don't relate at all to the buildings in fact we work computationally and we don't work with autism means that we can't draw our selves into them. The feel a real fear we it's sort of it's not for us. People like Jonathan to leave even go further than those they say that there is the body is associated with a sense of dirt and architects photography and there's a whole history about that that architects are obsessed of not having people in their in their in their buildings whether it starts another conversation these images I'm showing you have to do with a more typological understanding. I don't have problems with type ologies I mean died. I'm sorry I'm I think type ologies are as valid as topologies as ecologies as most forward G.'s I think we have them all the conversation about topologies was just another added layer. But it should remove the value of type ologies and in I think the in the interest for me is to go around cities and discover all sorts of odd. Inhabitable corners and bits that have to do with a three dimensional ised skin condition the flesh of the building in particular when it's between the inside and the outside and these are all sorts of corners I mean this is endemic Medina's with the Scottish Parliament. You know. What is the obsession to create these small militias to sit somebody in the midst and some minister to drink a cup of tea and I'm not sure whether it's ever used but the idea that you spend a lot of time creating these these these extruded. Corners in Asia than in the buildings. One of my great favorites. Again I'm completely out of fashion I'm sorry but this is Charles Moore or early work. I think this periphery of the of of the buildings amazing is absolutely amazing. There is no clear division between the inside and the outside. There's a real manifold construction that has an extraordinary depth and allows all sorts of different possibilities of how we inhabit this this sort of space. Obviously Lautner with his sculling House and the inhabitable seat in the in this wall that can open up in the summer or quite interesting experience I had a few years ago when I was doing my research and I went to a friend's place who I then realized was living in the village sheets of Le Corbusier and Paris and you go you go into this house and I was having a sort of. Overdose of Le Corbusier time going into the archives but actually sleeping in one of the rooms of his house as well to sort of the over the top but the nice moment was to go up to the roof and discover that it was a nice seat and I think I hadn't heard of that look or be easier to design something for people to hang out and just have a comfortable nice time is obviously very nice relationship where you visually arced sitting here and then you're looking through the square estrie down and there's a very small Ingle nuke a very funny horn or a totally unspoken undescribed it of the building. It probably doesn't fit into the category of the whole modernist conversation that existed Bob one sort of leave that out of the of the history but yet what explains that is that is that piece there and it's all about composition usually story and sort of the. As a composition. Decision making of the car busier but what you don't realize is that there's a seat in the back that's why they're actually stretching out and I think history is full of bits that are sort of not read explained totally and you get to probably the most published building in our history of architecture which is and you know you have the Bulge the big bulge. And look obvious it was clearly what I call the warmest and there's a whole history of war lists people that are fascinated. Fascinated with walls and the thickness of walls. And you get sort of discussions about the bulge but not really there's hardly any as far as I know hardly any description about these confessionals the sort of they are there but there's no no description because again it doesn't fit into the compositional discussion of in and description of the work. Now I was obsessed to know whether corpus you look or busy or ever drool these confessionals because they were not mentioned they were never published and there was never a long section published. So when I went to the archive. I realized that there were lots of sections. It's just that nobody ever published them. So there's a sort of unpublished material that you get there where it looks like sort of Gothic small chapels these confessionals. And they're these these sorts of new study created in the wall where obsessive drawn even more they're small descriptions here that describe that this is almost like the interior of a shell. So although the building is so rough and it's really like almost like a sheep with its sort of fur and there's an inside an outside sort of continuum. When you get to the confessional that the only place where he's obsessed and describing to only a Muslim you that it had to be completely polished like the interior of a shell and I think that's that's interesting. That's fascinating. And you know lots of details enormous amounts of details about his body confessionals you think that's interesting. No one. Talks about the confessionals and they seem to be of serious importance for the men that was so the design of the overall but really giving a lot of attention to this moment where one inhabits the wall and then I look back at the plan that sort of was used to. So I said probably this is the most published plan ever in the history of architecture and you realize that what is drawn into that is wrong. Which means that actually he drew it at some point or some collaborator there but it was never updated there was a whole detailing process that went through so as you can see the the confessionals are actually slightly bigger and they have four nieces now that made me think I don't have the time and really be interested in that but probably somebody ought to go there and actually measure the whole church and redraw it because it probably doesn't fit with the reality at all. It's sort of a fiction this plan that is published all the time. Why do I say this because it. It interests me how architects spend a lot of time with the bulging and three dimensional ization of walls and and this physical substance that is far more than only a division line far more than a partition and the idea of the membrane of the partition clearly has to do with the thinness and flatness. I think that is so pervasive is again as one of my great favorites this is who was at the director of the Barcelona school in the Catalan modernist period in the early twentieth century and this is the cousin. Which is probably you know located in the most prominent amazing space location of us one of which is really on top of the peseta grassy area. So where the main avenue finishes we don't top there because a force that was built as one of his late works. Now the the building and didn't tear of the building was pretty much destroyed but the only thing that remains is is a sort of old plan and there is a it's a beautiful condition here. It's a real sort of. Construction of how the interior in the exterior sort of gradually is constructed into this sense of Peps and the cubicles at the time the toilets which were very innovative technologies were brought by Dominic and mountain air onto the facade which is also quite odd because you would expect them in sort of the most intimate space somewhere hidden in the interior of courtyards that you get there. Up there. The service goes but no he puts them on the main facade of the building so probably had other genders like environmental agendas at the time. But nonetheless the feeling that these spaces don't. Finish with a flat wall that has a few balconies but it's much more of a three dimensional space of occupation as is for me. Interesting. And so what I call the inhabitable interfaces is something that I realised quite a few people throughout the twentieth century where very keen on so conceptually if you think about the sensory central visual arts. There's a whole description about this building in reading it's late stage although it was already approved never thing changing completely the system and then everything is brought into this significant envelope or you get. Woodson's inhabitable exhibition Combs obviously has shown which which is all about walls and for those that don't know whole show was almost double as the size before until there was a sort of conversation with the with the clerics and they said there was not sufficient money and so he literally didn't have a Xerox machine but that's exactly what he did he just zoomed down it's the same building that just simply that small which means that specially he didn't care really about space. What he cared was about this envelope this relationship with the with of surrounding facade that was where the meaning was was isn't and and up on the top there you get all sorts of other moments in private houses where small nuke small corners small interesting eccentric moments happen for all sorts of. Reasons which I think are are quite interesting. This has this had a sort of reflection on some of the work that we did for some competition work. These are inhabitable columns for the time here a museum where you have a sort of meandering pathway. Throughout the space and then the possibility to get into some of these. Suspended. Cones. This isn't in the year two thousand to. Another project where the the notion of the inhabitable roof kicks in. So where we take similar to the stretch of grass. Gratz the program. All that this or the small rooms or fit into something that is sort of bulging out and then creates a tension between the ground and the and the suspended roof another case with the lab columns for The New England by a labs. This was in two thousand and one and and then then in a sense the project we did for the book fair in in Lisbon where again the sense of mass the sense of weight the sense of of of of a piece that could be occupied in this case less inhabitable walls although some of the spaces are sort of inhabited. But the idea that there's a is a gradual informal occupation and also a more haptics relationship people simply touching the building and and getting into it and this is sort of the image of the auditorium there's a cup here another door and how that sort of relates back with the with the surrounding with the castle of Lisbon of all the Lisbon with a sort of likeness and of like if it's in view now context is something that interest me in that it brings me. Maybe back to my origin and I think for all those that do P.H.D.'s you can't stop one at least that you do a Ph D. by design. You can stop being autobiographical then you start knowing yourself in ways that you didn't know because you spend so much time working on topics where you have to read digested sort of hundreds of times that you realise that what you're talking about is a. Something that has to do with you but also to do with others and for me the big influence of my background when I started back in Portugal is the Brock period of of the Northern Portuguese context and what is what is interesting about it is that although the Baroque is mainly flaps and when you go into Central Europe it's to do with the plan a metric impact on the landscape the baroque period in northern Portugal arrives hundred or two hundred years later. Therefore there are all sorts of other things happening but because it's topography up and down what the architects do at the time is they start building into the hills so they create these extraordinary sort of pilgrimage routes up on to the hills and this is already a sort of rococo period and and create a much more fascinating relationship with with the surroundings. This is this is a back and forth we're going with the the main sort of Rock Church designed by an Italian architect and Simon equal are not Zani with this again very strategic position of of organizing and relating to the surrounding to the context. Now why does the baroque interest me and I heard just the spend a bit of time talking about of Iraq which which surprises me. Since you were so against it. Of a while ago but maybe I'm glad about that because I think we are living in a period where the many people ation of geometry to achieve something that maybe is not is not really correct or there's no truth about it. It's probably false but it's constructed. It's absolutely manipulated. It's something that obviously but I mean you but I mean he was a master of he was a master of geometry and he controlled geometry so that you achieve cathedrals in tiny small chapels you create infinity in spaces that were very Finot you created a sense of dimension and effect fullness. That was going far beyond even his means but because he was saw aware of the theatrical and and. Enjoy metric capability. Now that's for me. Interesting because it's back to the Portuguese northern Portuguese baroque which is less tectonic than the Italian one. It's also all there but there's less money at the time similar to an hour a less money available and therefore what the architects do and mainly these craftsmen as they introduce. What what modern I call sort of the dimensional. Construct into into gothic and romantic churches. So you can create this sense of depth with this exuberant extraordinary sort of complexity ornamental complexity into a space that is in principle rather flat but becomes much more in-depth. And I think there's a there's a lot to do with what we are doing right now. I mean last piece here. He obviously wrote quite a lot about it and I think there are interesting affinities I mean this is probably some of the impact it has on some of the work that might in my Again did this was for the extension of the museum and of the May in the horse where this whole letter is a sort of creating a shadow play and this was a quick installation we did in the in our solar exhibition in Hamburg. Again I start another theme something else that interests me that is going on. Which is what we call the Napster's and that's the south Follies the snubs those are just small constructions. And I think in academic environments lots of people do them because they're at their bit of a gymnastic moment they are a nice way of testing out techniques. I statics all sorts of possibilities and this is this is becoming a bit archaeology because it's also just let a laser cut always a water jetted. But still we still do them very quickly would students distance relationship between two D. and three D. an assemblage in a very quick and short period of time this was done with in a workshop of seven days in Taiwan with students with different layers a cut. Sort of materials. This was done in a fully for the. Food Festival in London and come with street park. Or one that is actually not not in various directions but is much more sort of this wonder come or this three dimensional space this is the bottled exhibition. Some official exhibition of with unit twenty work again it's really a shame that part of the image is gone. I'm not sure that the person will see the technician could get to stun but it's a real it's a real shame because it sort of just seeing health. Anyway. They're going to be some of the images. Do appear. Anyway this is this is another one. There's again a sort of our air carrier and then a plane carrier and then the different patent score in petals on top with with the different work that is being exhibited at the final show. These are OK because of our narrow is the wide once we've it it's fine it's fine. This was another another installation so I'm showing you a bit of work that we always do when we get to the final Some of the students don't only exhibit their own work but we construct something which in itself becomes a bit of a of an exercise and interesting test field and back to the idea of flesh in the in the two and a half to mention ality and probably also the notion of been loosened although this is not an Lucent is the sense of the embeddedness and this was while we were working on a project in. In China which I'm actually not getting into detail here but this was a photograph. That money and took off the biggest carved marble stone on Earth which is actually at the entrance for one of the main temples of the Forbidden City. And that's quite incredible. The fact that you have this subliminal. Emerged. Sort of world narrative world sort of very odd but not exactly it's all existant in in this rather thin layer. And obviously one of the great characters of our history better Nini who I think was a much better sculpture than architect who was the master of material and for me it. It gave it gives us a big challenge. Still in our days which is to think that even with our digital fabrication technologies are we able to control the material in such manner and such virtuous man as he was that really starts speaking like human flesh or marble really start speaking like. Silk or any other material and I think that that is a fascinating capability when the material starts behaving like another one simply because it's so well crafted and so well produced so when we had then an exhibition that I curated. Last year which I called Sublime flesh. At the Christ Church for the fields which is a beautiful baroque church by Nicholas Nicholas Hawks more in East London. We designed these. These what we call the Bernini folds which is a it's a whole table for all the models that were exhibited at the time and the attempt was to create something that although this was form and it was milled it really had a feeling that it was a fabric and and that cost us quite a bit of time because you've almost through all the software you can to try which is the software that speaks the best language for for that type of material that you're trying to achieve. What this was doing is. You know what I call the falseness is creating a rather complex milling process from both sides but much more than the fabrication process itself I think it's it's it's amazing that you still get that which is you still need to finalize a with the odd thing where the imperfections then you're trying to send it in and maybe that's something that is not a bad. And I remember back again with on one of the field trips to stay at a lot of vets and the fascination with a lot of hats. The obvious the ministry of Le Corbusier I think is not this is not so much to do with the compositional side again as so many people have repeated. But maybe to do with the imperfection of the place and the fact that you have the feeling that the Craftsman left sort of two minutes ago because it. There's a presence of that side that contradicts in a way the the technological sort of approach that grew Corbusier had in the lot of his work and maybe there is something that interests us now that has to do with fabrication processes that remove us in a way from it but the need that our presence at the end is still there either because we want to leave it imperfect and with mistakes or because we want to make a more perfect but we need to give it a touch. I'm not sure this is then sort of the result of one of the. Installations the walls that we designed for the Royal Festival Hall for the three hundred fifty S. Royal Society exhibition quite recently. This leads me into another into another topic. Which has to do with the interest in the sacred sensible in the sublime and therefore So my relationship with the Baroque and the world of the sacred and the religious and in the spiritual I think of being interested interesting. And as I said at the beginning this is a route of investigation in the units that not everybody follows from time to time there's somebody that wants to design a chapel and wants to engage in something like that and look for another meaning. Beyond what we're sort of constructing. Which partly goes into the into the to the symbolic or partly goes into the spatial partly into the material part into the atmospheric. This is a Sufi center and modern lie rolled in an article a while of old cold convoluted flow. And this is clearly a sort of joint venture he with his Ph D. which was based on the notion of the vote Lucian and convolution and evolution and and the whole problem problematize ation of that in my world much more into notions of flesh and different understandings on my static the metaphorical literal. Ways. So the notion of the convolution has an impact here. Because of this Internet interfered it twisted. Condition of contemporary geometry and spaces that are really in sort of in ultimate in warding complexity. And in we use the word convolution actually more and more often. And and then a relationship again as I showed it initially with a context where you have a student spending quite a bit of time just designing the small bit of staircase and a lot of this is Scriptures that I remember happened during the consoles Gratz competition much against what has been written hasn't been actually a discussion about concepts of of the building. It was a route about experience was about really how do you get into the building. What do you feel what do you see and how do you behave minutes. That was really the driver of of the building and in a sense. I realised that that was one thing that I was also doing. And I think the expansionists rather than the experimentalists are sort of around they exist and Peter Cook is definitely one of them. As I said to the conversation of one staircase and how that generates the whole architecture around maybe in a bit in the inside outside mold. I think is quite quite a thing. It's quite a moment of experience and then I've again I realised later on after the student has done this work. I went back to Porto and there is this absolutely extraordinary Star case which exists in one of the bookshops and this is the thing that you can't draw I mean you could spend hours and trying to sketch what the bodies their case is and how somebody was mad enough an eccentric enough to. You do it. Obvious UNESCO then sort of says all this is sort of world heritage but the fact that there is this in Falding. German tries ation I think is it's quite fascinating. That is obviously a brutal dynamic relationship of these steps that almost script it in a sense and convoluted fresh as I said with this article had quite an impact at the time on. One piece of work in particular that was a big. Ground opener of simply a different conversation and I think we were going through this period at a time where digital technologies were taking so much over that they were placing all sorts of other things. So people that were into competition or work could not use their hands anymore and hardly anything. It was even a taboo. So you couldn't do it and then you had the other guys that wouldn't not using any competition work and and creating a bizarre sort of stupid relationship or non relationship now Sarah was somebody that came into the unit saying look I'm not into three D. I don't want ever to do it. I'm not interested. Can I join your unit and since we knew this lady we thought. Yes. Let's see what we can do with it maybe something will emerge. We'll why explain this for maybe a bit more in detail is that it's not only to do with somebody who's interested in into the programmatic source somebody is interested to the technique. I think it's a combination of lots of things and it's the capability that the student has for two years to then in his life and her last year to spend really a quite substantial amount of time where she as a designer with her own language starts breaking through and starts really talking about a merger between these two worlds that were at the time completely split apart. At least in our contexts. So this is a theatre for magic and she starts with looking at Houdini and the idea of the magician and the space of the stage and the relationship with the audience and you know what the big. Anyone was thinking she's just designing an auditorium. But that in itself is not really a challenge. Now after quite a intense discussion we realize that when you when you have magic what really matters is the spotlight and the the bit of light that illuminates one particular moment on the stage where the magician is doing magic and the rest becomes a black empty area which doesn't really have a physical spatial presence at the same time there's also the visual cone and so the notion of the cone not as an obsession a priori but as a reflection of what probably magic is about and how this setting the skeptical setting can be created became the like Monte for her work and so she that really doesn't have a sense only was suggested by us once to at least draw these cons and Rhino in a very simple way be able to insect them flattening them and laser cut them that was the only thing that we asked them the US there to do and by doing that she became really the person that was not really doing three D. she still was using her hands a stew was really good at it. To evaluate and and and develop the project through these various measures and at the same time she was looking at an amorphous and to many palatial geometry in space and how that was creating a distortion and a different. Sort of relationship between what we see or what we don't see until you get these sort of under morphic Combs. Not sure if ever. Somebody has seen them which is basically you get that sort of all from the I think one thousand nine hundred century where a mirrored cone the fuse seen from above in one thousand degrees reflects an image out around it and if that image is composed carefully and constructed geometrically you would see the perfect image on that cone reflection. So this is her construction where she applies that Jim metric knowledge. This is the flat side which. I understand but when you look up from above down to the Qantas Maraton you have the reflection of the image on to that and you can read box office in the sense you was applying that sort of knowledge to the to the more sort of patronized construction of of these. Convolve units of of this theater. She was also one of those that had to go out into other departments to laser Cath. Steel and brass. And this endless construction of models where she gradually started really mastering her her own piece. And then lots of drawings and other things but the models would become became really the memorable one because it's you at the end went back into the to the Houdini conversation of the stage and question what really the space was about where was the elephant of that or would you need disappearing and there you get sort of into the detail into the want to fifty detail of of this layered three dimensional ization of of of architectural envelope another topic that is going around in our circles is the idea that we might be facing the return of the figural and the figural is not the figurative now it's the abstract and then in my opinion the abstract has been on the obsession of the twentieth century. It has been a clear Gemini of vision and obstruction and still there is a lot of conversation in lots of architecture schools where the more abstract pattern or the abstract sort of composition is far more interesting. Then when it gets into something too figurative now I think in the contemporary condition is much more about the figural the figural has to do with than a corporal side sort of a sense of. Embodiment or a sense of bodily presence of the architecture that clearly has a reflection of the In and of the curvilinear geometries that are I worked on in and then the in the whole tradition of the of the unit of the sacred. This was a student to be as client that a few years ago worked on this chapel in Havana and he created that constructed manifold of of a of a chapel. With with this incredible elaboration. Another one the chapel of the catacombs of of the student Jay Williams And so this convoluted intertwining of spaces. And the the mashes in the geometries. And and in the sense of corporate ality of the of the architecture the clearly the the buildings have a sort of bodily sense. Another one that again is his skin. Is an extension of a of a chapel of the basilica sentiment in Rome and in the need of the student to look back at the representation techniques of the time when you look at these axles from underneath upwards because the elevations don't work anymore they have such an amount of information. You can't you can't really read them anymore. They have to be constructed and represented differently. And this is sort of one of the final models that is a sort of larger piece with a combined. Still really thought graffiti some other type of representative being all mixed with laser cutting. Or another chapel and mortar and then you get obviously a whole conversation about ornamentation and and the the presence of bodies I mean he is probably the most figurative of all the students who really created the interpretation of the fall of that and as a three dimensional construct that comes from the spending that is rather flat and in the presence of the in the merge of the body with with the surrounding is of importance. I get to my last chapter which is to do with what I call the. Now a lot of the work that you shot that you saw before. Put into his a deed that he published which was called exuberance and in a sense we both work at it in parallel. I have never read his Ph D. he'd never read. Mine. It's good that sort of business partners keep their own space and out on a me. Even though we do work together and teach together and therefore he had his sort of space there when he invited people and and that his work which I I think is is is great and then I spent time in editing in another eighty called their positive design and what is that this is this isn't the sort of parallel interest in something that I in my research couldn't explain what it was called and if this isn't it's a growing phenomenon that comes from a long time. Where artists have been creating stuff that you can't classify these are sort of they're not really objects. They're not living beings they're not. They're not lumps of flesh there's some things that. Symbiotic or. Autumn cuts calls impartial life and they go from you know for to mislead to Fools was amazed by that. And in this sort of seventeenth century and you get obviously David Cronenberg's sort of one of my great favorites with the whole conversation about Flash and the aesthetics of that but again pods of existence is one of those cases where you think how what does it really mean. Conceptually and who really would design such a thing. Or participate in is another Australian artists working with all these grotesque. Figures. Now I call the male Pleasants I mean in their parliament biology is a tumour. It's actually one of the worst things a sort of can imagine. But the tumour is something that in in medical terms sectional seen as bad. It's actually seen as something literally that has its own growth process independently from the body. So it starts independent getting an independence in its own sort of growth procedure we considered a bad because it affects our own body but the the process itself is a biological. Nutritional process and for me. These are what I call the synthetic Plaza as they're they are they are constructs of of a grotesque nature. That have their own independence of life in the sort of incubate to worlds. This is this is again order parts and you're not so sure with the symbiotic a creating what they call the victimise lever. So there's a bit of flesh there. Being grown in vitro and you know. Harsh with some interesting stuff which is getting into the bio or degradable materials like corn based materials and how they digitally can be worked out. I think that's an interesting side. The sky him younkers of the two you delve that is is doing this research into bio concrete. So for me in magic design what I was interested in is to look at not biology as a metaphor or something that in analogy we look at as as architects have done for a long time but it's really looking at it literally that is matter that is the life that we're starting to manipulate and if you think what happens the world designed it we think that we are sort of the real authors and it's our territory to design the majority of Sciences nowadays design they create the architecture off and they they start manipulating stuff in a manner that we are sort of partly left out and I think there is something that is facing Architects which is when we start designing and and planning stuff that has living matter. We're getting into territory which we don't have under control at all. It creates an enormous i static problem. There's an enormous technological problem there's a need for him to discipline narrative in a way that we haven't faced before. And there's obviously an ethical problem as well. Most of representation when you get to biological stuff to no real flows another sort of software that is being used to make a diagrammatic and understand how. All the growth happen. Can be monitored. This is interesting how the whole scanning world and surgery is being something that actually surgeons in the medical sciences has is taken from architects visualization capability and three D. modeling or where they might influence us sooner or later where they have these vehicles and they can operate by having a whole set of manuals that they see through the. Through the. Goggles that allows them to operate. And on the machines and on flash in a in a quite literal man I mean this really looks very similar to how we sort of work is that they they operate directly on on on living. Bodies obviously they did that with the notion of representation of this hybrid biotech world that is having an impact on on design not only on environmental levels but sort of this sense of the new ecology that are being created is something that this student has been fascinated with and this is clearly another route of exploration within the unit these guys hardly communicate with the the ones that are interested in the sublime in the in the sacred. Sort of talking about other stuff and these are lots of. Growth in vitro growth conditions. Hybridized machines that are partly robotic in the partly grown. Pieces. So you can send see these sort of synthetic robots with this sort of scaffold in which this material these funky types can still grow on. I mean this is then looking at simulation software of of the growth patterns. That was another thing that this guy was looking at and how we sort of predict how we can control such spaces in the hybridity of growth and in structural hardware and in the set of the Burra trees in the sense what this guy was stepping into. Was to break the boundaries of a schism that affected the bottle very heavily which was the world the world of people that were interested in tectonics in general terms in the ones that were interested in in the machine. And they literally didn't talk to each other and you get the cyber in the Titians you get the Victorian is you get the people that really have a believe a blind believe in the in the machine and the power of technology to the machine and the gadget and the ones that are interested in space and tectonics and in more structural systems and the the cross-breed of these two sort of quite extreme lines hardly gets together. It's sort of seen as a split apart. And I think what what the student was sort of interested in is when the envelope when the architecture when the tectonic side is actually interfered with the machines or rather than having laboratories that he was designing that was a sort of shared with machines inside the machines where in inside the. The tectonics of the building you know with lots of sort of follicles and in response of the components to the environment canopy that were full of hairy follicles or water containers and then a set of plans and sections where the laboratory is really like a and a place where as I said all the equipment is brought directly into the into the physical substance of the building and what remains is a set of corals and in between. This is some sort of. You can see from an outside view of how all that sort of occupied. In the roof is partly a monitoring system of the environment but probably also something that was. Controlled by the inside. And there is impact on the larger scale conversations of urban agriculture etc that some of the students are interested in in this. In this sort of chapter. The idea of the new ecology is that you know with artificially created. Water containers and reservoirs and I finished by showing this work because Steve Pyke who edited the the idea with me was really the person that again opened new ground by constructing components that were what I shot at the beginning these one to five scale pieces where you spend a lot of time choreographing the grove. These are already there or from Guy. Now what what I think still is amazingly fresh about it is that he went around town around London and placed these containers that were prepared. With growth medium. And put them in different. Surroundings and this is the reflection of of a bakery. So in a sense what this guy was suggesting was that you know against the modernist understanding of areas being sterile and clean and rather than thinking about responsiveness as something that was electronically controlled or mechanical There was a bio responsiveness. That was clearly the. Bacteriological quality of our space was influencing the growth patterns on these surfaces. These are sort of the the ugly carpets of the bark at that sort of millions of different bacteria. And that sort of reflection on and interesting if you think that this person couldn't work just in the studio. I mean he was working with micro biologists and using their own can be incubated which to large extent were to small that with you know when he had the big ones they didn't know where to put them and had to find a special place. I'll get that was sort of frozen glassblowing for some of the vessels that had done it has had to be done on purpose at the Royal College of Art which was the only glass blowing place in London that could do those vessels. Very rudimentary sort of C.N.C. milling which was necessary to have very accurate thermal foamed pieces that could then hermetically close the vessels. Simple scanning devices that he was putting to. Man it monitor the vertical growth and then when you see it more in detail. The prepared surfaces here which would then gradually grow all the. The years and reflect the occupation of space by those people that inhabited the area before. So you see these come for a components and prototypes and and that one was one that he then worked on even slightly later for Holborn station exactly when the London terrorists terrorist attacks happened so you can see it's quite a while ago. It's still quite quite over of a piece that hasn't been sort of all done and developed further the guys at the London tube were quite interested in this because they were by all logical monitors of the environment. I finished with this but as I set up. I I was interested in sharing more of a. Non-linear process of thinking and the possibility that I think architecture right now is not. Being developed and discussed on one or two levels. I think there's too much of a danger of people saying this is the new THAT WAS deal. That's the thing you have to be part of and that's the knowledge I think there's a much more fascinating side which is students engaging with work that is very much their own even though they might be feeling part of a family of thought or investigation that this preceded some of the work that I have done. And so I thought I enjoy this parallelism in academia that the space for different investigations to happen simultaneously and maybe they all have to do with a bodily engagement and in a sense of engagement of of us with our surrounding that is probably of a different nature it's not only visual maybe there's something off of a projection of ourselves or a haptic tactile sense or responsiveness or or simply some some some other feeling that that matters quite a lot to us. Thank you very much. A lot of times you were going. Right. I think with the sort of comment you're making is sort of spot on. First of all that the the material side of of architecture has been always seen as lower than the intellectual. Side. It was always seen as much more vulgar when you. You were interested in the haptic or in the material in the in the censors and therefore the karma less which is a sort of excess of of of a certain expression was seen as as problematic. Obviously didn't fall for the crowds or the big crowds and I think there has been a whole tradition in architecture where the the did the level of abstraction the intellectual concept solicitation. So the concept of certain ideas has been seen as a far sort of higher achievement and that I think has inhibited architects for quite a while to embrace. Architecture much more from this tactile side. Now when you read into cultural studies touch is completely back I mean look you don't even need to read it to take a knife or whatever you know it's all about touch the touch sense is so much up there. It's much more fundamental than almost our our vision right now which means that we have a need to touch we have a need to sort of have a different relationship but it goes a bit against that sort of tradition that the twentieth century clearly established and my the reason why I showed the body. Sort of a sequence is not so much as I believe in a linear history. I mean clearly not history is far more. Intertwined and complex than a sort of linear progression of faces. But I think the Morgan body clearly has a relationship. But the medieval grotesque body which is evident and and the the Middle Ages were very much into touch as well and they were much more vulgar and obviously our classic periods are periods of order. They detest that they hated those periods they they saw them with the. You know they they had a a disrespect for that sort of side and I think we can't avoid that the cyborg in body isn't as something of an identity that is being constructed which is not something clearly that you can describe there are lots of nuances to has features that has surely a reflection on the on on architecture that we design and if we are people that digest what's going on around us then. Then we need to face it somehow. And that's why I became unsettled when I realised that either the body conversation was seen as sort of a an old fashioned nostalgic thing you know that a bunch of characters others were sort of interested in answer it doesn't fit into more interesting conversation or work right now all one sort of said Well. So what we are what we are but I think I statically we're not what we are we. We are we are something else and we are being constantly culturally constructed differently in with our context and I think this awareness doesn't make us design but at least it makes us see our design in the in a slightly different critical manner. Now my attitude on that is that I don't think the response through the carnivalesque or through one choice of materiality would be the way I think it's a much more sort of multilayered approach and we had sort of the conversation today it would last about you know how does or does this have an impact on teaching when you have a group of students you see them you have a relatively reduced period of time and you can't talk about everything you sort of have to focus on the theme and. But on the other hand when. You as a designer are designing you are allowed to go through all the stuff together and I think the response to what you were saying the approach to the vulgar and the kind of the less has to be seen in a much more broad way. And obviously with the political dimension one thing I didn't say is that the cyborg in body in a way runs together with a sociological understanding of the neo tribal and I think that's another fascinating thing and it is the No tribalism that Michel Martin. Sali the scribe in the sixty's. I think is still very much the case does that mean we have a sense of grouping and what he called sociality which is not divided by classes or simply by what we do. It's a very fluid unpredictable sense of relationship that we create with people for a certain period and then we often create something else and it's it's politically very difficult to control and I think there is a power on that and there is an interest on that and when when you look at cities I think the subcultures the development cities for a few years and then they disappear again and they they appear with a frequency and then in the stream that is fascinating is unprecedented. I think determine a lot of what our cities are about and particularly interesting cities in the ones that everybody sort of say Olive's is in place not just because they're large is because they are diverse and because these sub groups. Are happening so that there is a sense of acceptance of these different identities that is there's a sense of acceptance that we don't we can't fit into classified orders of of of of social groups. If there is a for the families subliminal unpredictable relationship and then when that is related to the sense of of have to city. And a sense of new technologies and therefore for me the biotech is an interesting new phenomenon that might have a big impact on. I have the answer but I think they this sort of working in parallel. There's something pretty profound that is is probably happening and I clearly clearly don't even want to get the answer I think every project is sort of a small answer in itself. And the digestion through this needing process of of your intellectual sort of the mess that goes on in your own brain in a sense as as an observant person that is walking around with your own in the tennis and the society of the sociological side for instance something that I felt surprising when the other day to Japanese people gave talks that at the bottom of the model. Actually bubble and you. They say they this sort of mildly know each other but they by coincidence one came one day the other one the next day and they spend a lot of time in the lecture observing people thought this fascinating and the Japanese are going again through an interesting period where they are obsessed with their society and they're obsessed with what is going on in their society with people in the relationship one to one between the inhabitant and the surrounding and I asked the question whether. The mire of wall was conscious of this sort obsession that probably was something of a Japanese phenomenon that the metabolised were very keen on and she is she assumed that and she said she actually was it the fact that this society is going through a transformation process where it's becoming too old too old where the old all the problems that we hear. That are facing Japanese society that there's a much more introverted moment of the society as well where they're looking inwards. When we think that that's a that's a fascinating thing. Maybe they're again telling is a few good interesting new pathways of of how to face future architecture because they're doing it naturally without big fear it just happens because they are looking at their society and I think the the great moments of architecture always have been or are you. In interpretation and a very clear astute observation of how society was was changing and how we part of the society were changing and if we leave this out of our conversation we drive it only down one route to another. I think it's just it's it's it's too much of a one line and I'm I feel rather scared or or sad about it and that's why I think the sort of varied academic environments are are quite fascinating because students are facing sort of all this variety and they need to make some sense out of it which is really pretty difficult. Because there's no truth about any of them. It's just a of a bloody difficult juxtaposition of different thought and and different mannerisms and interests and. And some speak louder than others but I think that that sort of moment that one is facing that heterogeneous condition is very much. The reflection of what we are at right now. Sorry I digressed a bit from from what you say but I'm not stupid as an opportunity to. Who are who are. Not that much to be honest but I I I just I'm just very aware that our skin identity or our sense of skin identity which is obviously dependent on each of us we have different senses of ours own skin in our body identity is dissociated from our. Sort of mental or intellectual or psychological identity they are clearly dissociated and and that maybe for the moment. Maybe that's again a period that might be changing again. But there is an independence of how we consider. Our skin to be a temporary condition and something that we can go beyond and therefore still arts comment on the body being obsolete or the skin being obsolete is is is in a sense a big provocation but there is a cyborg and sense of extension through the the media that we have through technology and even the fact that you might have a sense of your body in a relationship with your body for now and then a few years time you have another one and you might have the means to change that relationship. It's an extraordinary sort of thing. But no I haven't spent that much time but I know there are those fascinating new theory coming out of that clearly. Thank you. And.