office interior design inputs and outputs
ok. i think i'm going to tryto get started because it looks like it's 10 past. so my name's eric howeler. i'm an assistantprofessor here at the gsd. and i'm currently on leave, soi've been keeping my head down. but i have beenworking for the gsd. i was just in chicagoorganizing a conference called adaptive architecturesand smart materials.
and as a resultof that, the dean asked me to share someof that information with you, because it was afantastic event in chicago, and we try to sort of bringsome of that back here. the other thing i shouldsay is that i teach studio at the gsd, secondyear typically. i also teachconstruction systems class, which some ofyou were in my class. so a lot of those thingsthat sort of informed
the conference in chicagoand some other things i'm going to show today were sortof developed in that class. and in a way, even thoughit's an introductory class, some of those ideas sortof evolved from that. so i should also say,a couple years ago i got a grant fromthe dean's office for junior faculty research,and i researched the future and history of glass. and some of that alsokind of informed this.
so the talk istechnologies for design. and it's the first-- i'm goingto talk-- is that all right? i'm going to talk a littlebit about merck and gsd. and what happened wasa couple years ago, i was contacted by merck,the german pharmaceutical, chemical, and lifesciences company, to do some design research. and they said, well, we've gotthese interesting products. we're thinking about how totranslate liquid crystals
and display technologiesfrom the device world into the architectural world. and that was a prettyinteresting challenge. and we helped themsort of visualize what the impact of this couldbe at an architectural and urban scale. they liked that, andthen they thought, how do we sort ofengage with the broader architectural community?
and so they proposed thiskind of merck gsd technologies for building initiative. so merck is actuallygiving money to the gsd for an initiative to talkabout building materials, and how that could impactarchitecture and urbanism. so at first, youthink about merck, you think aboutpharmaceuticals, chemicals. and you think, what do thoseguys know about architecture? and how might that researchapply to what we do?
because they just seemlike two worlds apart. and thinking aboutthat and trying to figure out how tobridge this world, it occurred to me thatwe think about materials for architecture. we think about mud andwe think about stone. we think abouttools and wood, how we can sort of push the limitsof materials in architecture. and merck comes at it froma different point of view.
they look at thearchitecture of materials. they look at the kindof chemical level, the kind of molecularlevel of materials. and what they've been lookingat is performance materials, smart materials,liquid crystals. and the fact is thatpretty much everybody has some merck in their pocket. they supply liquid crystals forall of your display devices. so all your smartphones,all your tvs,
all your computers havemerck inside of them. and this technology whichallows glass to become display is what they'reinterested in looking at, how that can informarchitecture, so how that technologycould impact architecture. and some of theresearch we did was looking at some of thesetechnologies-- you know, glass-- already has somany dynamic qualities. but with this liquidcrystal, glass
becomes all of a suddenvariable in its optics. it can go from almost opaqueto almost transparent. and looking at that as aproduct and thinking about, how could we use that to sortof unlock the possibilities for architecture was sort ofwhat we were tasked with doing. so first we sort oflooked at the material, and what couldliquid crystal do? these are some of thesort of display samples that you could sort ofuse it as a touch sensor.
you could use itas an interface. you could think about howit would change over time. and if you scale that upto the scale of a facade, the possibilitiesare pretty exciting. but before we did that wesort of said, wait a minute. what is glass at thesort of basic level? and it's a container. it's an instrument,an optical instrument. it's an environment.
it's an atmosphere. it's an interfaceor an accessory. it's architecture ora brand or a fetish. but we sort of remindedmerck that architecture has been sort of part ofarchitecture for a long time. architecture's alwayssort of enlisted architectural materialsfor atmospheric effects. and if you think about a gothiccathedral and the role of glass in that, it's anarchitecture of persuasion.
it's an architecture that isa special effects machine. and so it's nosurprise that if you look at the history of modernarchitecture, the use of glass was used to evoke akind of utopian vision. colored class associatedwith spirituality, associated with transparency,democracy, and so on, was part of the kind ofimagery of the modern movement. and in 1926, mies wassort of visualizing a kind of future architecture30 years before it
was technically possible. so it was highly speculative. mies also imaginedthese interfaces between inside and outside,between man and nature as this kind of almostnothingness, this kind of surface and interface. and i like to say that buildingtechnologies and materials produce side effects. they produce cultures.
and the window producesthe culture of seeing. and the culture ofseeing has ripples throughout popular culture. so the scene fromrear window where he's looking through this windowat his neighbor unwittingly becomes a witness to a murder. so the culture ofseeing is somehow tied to the questionof the window and to the building technology.
at the same timeit sort of produces cultures of consumption. window shopping, thekind of urban window, the kind of urban life that'sseen through the window. so the kind of banal,everyday object, the kind of productsthat we might specify, all of a sudden i try to sortof expand it and think about it as a kind of cultural artifactthat produces modern life, that produces urban life.
so digging a littlebit-- and some people that were in my classwill see some of these and remember them,because they're sort of familiar--i'm always struck by these birds on theneue nationalgalerie. gallery. because mies wantsthem to go away. he wants everything to go away. yet the bird stillsort of persists.
it still sort ofmarks that surface. and sort of, in a way, undoesthe kind of nothingness that mies sort of sought. and the other presence inthe neue nationalgalerie is the question of condensation. and so even thoughit wants to go away, even though mies wouldlike it to be nothing, it's still something. and it's still anatmosphere apart,
and it's subject to the rulesof dew point and condensation and so on. so the condensationsort of drizzling down the face of theneue nationalgalerie sort of insists on thekind of material presence of the envelope, its kindof stubborn presence, and reminds us of its roleactually as an atmosphere. the role of glass incontemporary architecture, we do see practicesorganized around issues
of viewing, framing,sort of controlling the reception of nature, thereception of place or site. and architecturepersists in using glass as a material for framing viewsof landscape, for example. and the presence ofthe glass is not, i think, completelyacknowledged. but if we think about questionsof energy, as we do at the gsd, and questions of, youknow, local energy effects like the urbanheat island effect,
we understand that glass andenergy are somehow at odds. we look at cities like phoenix. the use of glass in this contextseems sort of counterintuitive. and if we look at the kindof explosion of construction in certain contexts,we have to wonder if glass is an appropriatematerial in these places. so the kind of architecturaldream, the kind of mythology of glass, the kind ofeconomics of glass, that's sort of running upagainst the kind of fact that,
how can a glass buildingbe considered green? one bryant park wonall kinds of awards. it's leed platinum or something. but it's still anall glass building. which from a kind of solarheat gain point of view you might wonder, well,how could that be? it doesn't seem to make sense. one bryant park, lookingclosely at the facade we see the kind of frit patternthat masks the spandrel,
that tries to sort of blurthe line between vision and spandrel glassand sort of mediate the impact of the [inaudible]heat gain condition. so think about merck andwhat they have as a product. and the role ofarchitecture is this kind of interface betweeninside-outside between individuals, betweenindividuals, users, occupants, and their environment. i sort of went back andi looked a little bit at,
what is the window, really? and this is an imageof a tv in a window and people watchingtv through the window. and if you look atads for tvs, you often think of the tv as a window. and so i thoughtit was interesting that merck is comingand saying, we've got this tv technology wewant to put in your window. could we turn your windowinto a display device
with the same technology? so that seems superexciting to speculate about how that would transformfacades from simply envelopes into sort ofcommunicating surfaces, heat regulating surfaces,all kinds of exciting ideas. so looking at theirtechnology, they're looking at liquidcrystal technology. it has benefitsin terms of speed and switching range, dimming,all kinds of good stuff.
but i think beyond a kindof technical description, i think the consequencewould be more at the scale of architectureas sort of urban face, as a kind of facade. what happens to thefacade of architecture once it's all glazed, once itbecomes kind of a communicating surface? and looking again at themoments within architecture that glass is utilizedfor these functions,
these are the imagesof the farnsworth house that we'd like to look at. this is an image ofthe farnsworth house when nobody was looking. the blinds are drawnfor privacy, probably for heat gain. this other image with thekind of roll-down shades. this sort of undoesthe aspirational image of what thisbuilding wants to be.
and you don't have to look far. the flatiron buildingat a certain moment was covered with awnings. this is solar controlledin a very basic, very straightforward way. so some of thesethings, we've sort of forgotten about whenwe design buildings. solar control is sucha necessary condition. mies-- i mean, gorb alsofound out the hard way
with his salvation armybuilding on the left. the original taut, neutralizingskin, hermetically sealed on the right, retrofitted with[inaudible] to sort of control the impact of the sun onthat west facing facade. and so what are the sort oftools that architects use to control heat gain? so foster's willis faber &dumas building in ipswich, one of the firstsort of all glass, patch fitting buildingsuses tinted glass, right?
so this building atnighttime looks awesome. in the daytime it looks so dark. it looks solid and impenetrable. so tinting glassis one mechanism for controlling heat gain. and i always love this slidefrom an old curtain wall ad where the kind of tintingand the reflectivity is something that'ssort of being played with in the glassesof the police officer.
so strong, reliable,good under pressure. other tool is reflectivity. architects haveused reflectivity sometimes in a kindof banal way to create sort of generic stuff. and in some cases, like thisbarkow leibinger building, a highly speculative wayto return the building into a kind of kaleidoscopesort of special effects machine. other examples of reflectivityhave used it, i think,
in different ways to createdifferent architectural effects. and then architectureside effects, right? that walkie talkiebuilding that famously melted the car, that'sreflectivity sort of gone awry. other strategies foran all glass building, like the seattlepublic library, you should know that asan all glass building it's gaining lots ofheat, even in seattle.
and so the architectsunderstood the structure as a kind of shading device. but also embedded within theglass is a kind of micro mesh that does regulate heatgain on the faces that actually see the sun. so there's apermanent, adapted way to regulate heaton this building. all the faces that see thesun have the micro mesh to control thatheat gain question.
and because it's mylecture, i can slip this in. this is a little projectthat we did that makes place through controlling sun. shade in phoenix isthe way to make place. so we designed a kind ofsun shading structure. it actually harvestssome energy from the sun and also sort of playsthat back in the nighttime. so shading, fixed shading,sort of specifically selective of points of viewof sun angles to create
place in phoenix. one of my favorite examples,jean nouvel's institute de monde arabe in paris,famously deployed an aperture, sortof kinetic aperture, which had many effects. i think it created an incrediblesort of pattern on the facade. when it worked, itactually regulated the light sort ofcoming in and out, and produced these kindof incredible shadows
in the interior. that sort of recalledislamic pattern making traditionsof the architecture he was referring to. so upgrading on many levels. and other strategies likesejima's toledo art pavilion, toledo art and glass pavilion,use kind of layered glass. so we understand glass notas nothingness, but actually something, something that'slayered and aggregated.
and actually,interestingly, the cavity, it would typically be aone inch sort of sandwich of glass with aninsulated glass unit, is now a two footor three foot cavity that's actually inhabitable. so sort of taking thatcavity zone, that sort of thermal buffer, andsort of spacializing it at the scale of architecture. so interesting device.
and produces social effects. people in the cavity and peopleinteracting through the glass. and one of myfavorite descriptions is there's so much glassthat at a certain point it, it becomes a kind of presence. it becomes a kind of solidity. and florian pointedout, there's, like, 26 layers of glass. you could draw aline through and cut
through 26 layers of glass. so all this to get atthe question of, what is the window for architecture? what are itstechniques and devices? and how might we sortof start to think about what that could be inthe future from the inside out, from the outside in? one of the things that--any real estate for sure will sell the view.
and i think thisis one bryant park. and so that was thequestion of, like, how do you sell that view? but also thinkabout how you could start to managethat in a simple way without the kind of presenceof physical blinds and so on. so the idea of screeningor manipulating the optical propertiesof glass simply electronically seemsvery appealing.
and so some of the work that wedelivered to merck at the time was thinking about, well,what are the conclusions for them coming at architecturefrom the outside, in a way? and we said, well,energy will move to the foreground ofdesign, and all surfaces will become opportunitiesfor generating energy. we also said thatarchitecture will integrate display technologiesin all of its surfaces. urban spaces willcommunicate with audiences,
creating newcommunication channels. user produced contentwill start to occupy some of this new sortof media landscape. sensors will transform spacesinto responsive environments. responsive to the inhabitants,but also to environments. and the internetof things, which i think this fallsunder the category of, will eventually recede from theforeground to the background, and these things willsort of disappear.
but i do think--one of the things that i was telling merckis the future building envelopes become smartinterfaces, responsive environments, responsive toinhabitants, become adaptive, communicative, and integrated. so that was the kindof pitch to merck, why architecture wouldbe important to them. so they agreed to give ussome money, and then we said, we're going tohost a conference.
we're going to call it adaptivearchitectures and smart materials. and we chose to dothis in chicago, coinciding with the inauguralchicago architecture biennial. and i even put on a whiteshirt for the event. [laughter] but i invited liz diller tocome and give the keynote. and for me, liz was someonewho understood, i think, that building technology'snever just a technology.
it's always a kindof cultural artifact. and i mentioned the slowhouse in my introduction, because the slow house,even though it was unbuilt, was always about thewindshield of the car and the panoramic view. and the house, the spaceof residing or living was somehow sandwichedbetween those two sort of visual moments. and as you know,as you may know,
as i hope you know,the-- where's my mouse? that view, which is akind of panoramic view, is actually displayed insidethe house on a tv screen. and the tv screensort of plays back footage of that same viewfrom a different time or a different season. so it's never justan unmediated view. it's always a view that'ssomehow mediated by media. and so way back in 1994when i first saw liz speak,
i was really impressedwith this idea that she was looking atarchitecture not just as material but also as media. that she was thinking about howarchitecture functioned sort of culturally, and how anarchitect might practice in that space using technology,using media technology, but also buildingtechnology to advance certain arguments about how weuse architecture to normalize certain conditions, howwe use it to frame nature,
how we use it tosort of position ourselves relative to thenatural and the man-made. so that's why iasked liz to come. she came, and she actuallygave a great talk. she showed the recentlyopened broad, where, you know, the broad uses a kind ofthick skin to manage light. and this is, i think, a newterritory for diller scofidio. sort of into the kindof very precise kind of formal language.
but ultimately, it'sstill about that kind of experientialatmosphere within. so highly technicalsort of description of panels andgeometries resulting in this kind of breathtakinginterior, which is really a kind of architectural effect. so back to the questionof architecture persuasion to the gothic cathedral andto the role of architecture in building technologies asproductive of these effects.
so she showed this in chicago. she also showed this, whichi wasn't so familiar with, which is a project she did atthe fondation cartier in paris where they installeda kind of smart bucket that would goaround the gallery. and i don't have hervideo, which was very cute. but it would go around thegallery and it would park, and then a drop of waterwould land in the bucket. and then the bucketwould roll around
to another part of the gallery,and then another drop of water would land. so this was a kindof clever insulation that they did in a jean nouvelbuilding, which is famously all glass, which apparently leaks. and apparently johnnouvel was not pleased. but the sort ofinnocence of the bucket and the kind ofplayfulness of it, i think it sort of pointed outsomething about architecture
and envelopes andissues of leaking. in the conversationwith liz, mohsen and liz sort of discussedlots of things. mohsen brought upthe buckets we have here at the gsd, thesebuckets that sort of still-- stupid buckets. they still point out the factthat architecture does leak. so questions ofleakage and envelopes were the subject ofdiscussion there.
but i want to talk about theconference itself and some of that content. i organized it into fourpanels, histories, materials, technologies, and ecologies. and that was a simple way tosort of bring all these people together and havethem sort of perform a kind of series ofdiscussions and series of presentations thatwould have a certain arc. so in the first panel i invitedterry reilly, todd gannon,
eve blau, aaron betskyand blaine brownell. and i agreed to moderate them. and i invited thempartially because i think this whole discussionof materials in architecture and surfaces was somethingthat i remember from 1994 when i moved to new york and lightconstruction was the show everyone was talking about. and it had just replaceda show that everyone had been talkingabout, which was
deconstructivistarchitecture, 1988. so between 1988and 1994, the moma had shifted from a kind ofinterest in french philosophy and sort of complexform to terry reilly's light construction, whichseemed to indicate a shift away from form and towards surface. and towards, in a way, thematerials of architecture. and i thought that wasreally interesting at that time, at the same time,bernard tschumi was
sort of promoting the paperlessstudio, the immaterial of architecture, the digitalstudio, while the gsd was still sort of talking about materialsand poetics and construction. and so there was anopposition set up in the '90s betweenthe kind of columbia school of advanced formand computational design, and the gsd's sort ofwere still about material. and not that longafterwards, the gsd had an exhibition calledimmaterial/ultramaterial
that toshiko mori curatedhere in the gallery. and that was a kindof reaffirmation that the gsd is stillinterested in physical effects. in 1997, materialconnexion opened. the gsd acquiredall this material in the materials library. so this was a moment whereit was sort of up for grabs. was the gsd going to go digital? were they're goingto go-- were they
going to stick with thekind of material culture that they'd had? so i thought terryhad sort of launched this whole thing in1994, so i invited him to come and present. and i thought, 20 years? let's have some look back. let's think about, whatare the consequences? and he talked about jeannouvel's fondation cartier,
he talked about toyoito's tower of winds. he talked a lot about mies,and was mies really believing that the glass wasn't there? and he actuallyfound this drawing where mies actually renders theglass as a physical presence. so in his mind, he's like, yes. mies understood actually aboutthe optical effects of glass. he wasn't simply ignoring. he was actually veryconscious of that.
so terry presented a kind ofrecap of light construction. todd gannon came along, andhe had published the light construction readera couple years after, sort of affirming the factthat light construction wasn't simply theory light. it actually had a kindof incredible scholarship that went with it. and todd sort ofbrought in high tech. and he said, we shouldtalk about high tech,
because that wasaround the same time. and he was sort of bringingup reyner banham and some of reyner banham's interestin the high tech movement. so todd sort of brings inhigh tech architecture. cedric price, archigram,and this other question of envelope. how minimal can the envelope be? and then eve blau came. and some of you maybe in her class.
but she blew my mindwith a presentation that looked at thebauhaus, it looked at mies. and she was saying,typically the bauhaus is understood as glass,just as a material thing. it's a kind of industrial thing. but she was actually lookingat my moholy-nagy and some of his photographictechniques, and how he really celebrated reflectivities,different optical effects. so i think eve sort of tookterry's light construction
and sort of gave us a lot morehistorical context for both the bauhaus dessau and tugendhathouse, mies, but also sejima. and eve has been lookingat sejima very closely in contemporary architecture. so i think she was able tosort to take terry's stuff and sort of bring itright into the present. and the last speakerin the first panel was blaine brownell, who isprolifically sort of publishing books on materials.
and he showed some quiteprovocative new materials sort of communicating from the left,nontraditional communicating architectures to the right. high tech facades. he's a big championof new materials. he writes a monthly columnin architect magazine. he was reallylooking at the future of these potential materials. i should also say, i skippedover aaron betsky who
came along and sort of kickedthings open a bit and said, we don't need hightech architecture. we actually need lowtech architecture. and he sort of disrupted,a little bit, the panel by saying, you guys areall crazy looking at all this high tech stuff. and really, we needno architecture. so that was a little bit ofa recap of that discussion. but for me, i wasinterested to know
if these things aretechnique-based-- and i think eve made agreat case that moholy-nagy and mies were actually usingvery particular techniques. i was asking, well,how do we teach that? how do we teach thosethings in school? what's the pedagogicalfunction of materials? where materials seem so tiedto construction that if we're in an academic context,how do we actually look at those very carefully?
and a couple days agoi met with a student who's doing a thesis on materialeffects using simulations. and i said, well, what aboutreal material prototypes? shouldn't we be teaching that? and we have a greatmaterials library here. so for me, it raised lots ofquestions about, at the gsd, how should we teachthese techniques? the next panel wascalled materials. and kiel was nice enoughto agree to moderate.
we invited jan knippersfrom stuttgart, skylar tibbits from mit,gail peter borden from usc, and sheila kennedy from mit. and these guys werestarting to look not just at the kind oftheories of materials, but actually, how could thesebecome highly speculative? and jan showed thempretty interesting work he'd done on plastics. he's written severalbooks on polymers.
and he showed thisproject that he worked on in south korealooking at simple sort of actuated facadesand how they might work to create this sortof literal kinetic facade. and so this is a pavilionbuilt in south korea that jan advised on wherethe kind of pressure on the plastic panelactually allows it to sort of cup and actuate. pretty impressive stuff.
and jan is also teachingat the technical university in stuttgart and has a practice,knippers helbig structural engineer-- advanced engineering. so that was interestingto see how polymers might have their own logic. sheila kennedy, who has a firmcalled matx, or materials x, showed a number of projects. one of them justdown the street here, the tozzeranthropology building,
where they sort of speculatea little bit about bricks. there was plentyof kahn references. what does a brick want to be? what does it not want to be? why are we stilltalking about the brick? but sheila showed thisproject with some others, looking at sort oflogics of aggregation, logics of assembly. and she's one ofthese people that's
so incredibly thoughtfulabout the most banal things like drywall and bricks. skylar showed some of thework he's doing at mit. he's got a lab calledthe self-assembly lab. i'm sure you know him. he's talking about 4d printing. how do we print with embeddedmagnets and things that will allow things to sort ofcurl up and self-assemble? he's 4d printing.
he's 3d printingmaterials that have a degree of control inthem, so he can sort of manipulate them after the fact. he sort of famously talksabout architectural material and architectural labor. and if materials areself-assembling, how could we remove the question of laborfrom that equation, which is pretty provocative. and he showed this cutevideo, which i love.
basically if we take aframe, like a space frame, and we assembleit on the ground, there's all thisincredible labor of lifting andarranging and fitting. and his argument goes,well, why don't we sort of use the space above theconstruction site as a space and actually allowmaterials to, in a way, self-assemble by providingthem with, i guess, sympathetic faces to match?
and i think thisprobably took some time. but it's still prettycompelling stuff. so after eight hours,you get a cube. 16 hours you get a beam. at a certain pointyou get a lattice. and i love thesoundtrack, you know? easy. and so it lands. and then you've got thespace frame assembled.
so pretty compelling stuff. they had an incrediblediscussion about-- well, you try to put thesepeople together, kiel and skyler and sheila. sheila's like, well,there's no silver bullet. there's no magic material that'sgoing to sort of transform architecture. it still requires intelligence. smartness isn't in the material.
it's actually in the design. so that was a prettygreat discussion. the next panel,technologies-- mariana agreed to sort ofmoderate this group. and thinking about not justthe materials themselves, but actually their systemsand components, how they sort of aggregate intomore complex systems. chuck hoberman who teacheshere, famously working on all kinds of kinetic ideas.
hanif kara, whoalso teaches here. structural engineerworking on so many sort of complex andinteresting projects. dennis shelden, who teachesat mit and gehry technologies. and marc simmons,who i think we're trying to get to teach herefrom front envelope consultant. and so this panelsort of, i think, got into more sort of complexissues of architecture. marc basically said, look.
my job is hard enough. i have to deal withall these things, and that's just a facade. and so he was sort ofskeptical of the idea that adaptive or kineticwould be really the future of architecture. he was saying, look. i have a hard time getting anoperable windows to not leak. this is from the premierefacade consultant in the world.
so i think he wassort of putting the brakes on some of the sortof enthusiasm for the word adaptive. and i think rightly so. then he went on to show, like,about 100 projects that he's consulted on, and some of themwith great big moving parts and some of themwas moving lights. but he went on to say, look. this is my world.
i sort of work in thishighly complex thing. and if you guys don'tbet on adaptability, think about there'salways complexity and managing complexity. but he was sort ofcautioning against this sort of uncritical embraceof adaptability. which was interesting, becausethen chuck hoberman came along, and his whole thingis kinetics, right? he's like, well, ibuilt my whole career
around making these thingsmove in dynamic ways and wonderful ways. and chuck showed all kindsof products he's done. structural kinetics,deploying structures. i found the most interestingones were the ones where he's working on envelopes. he's formed a jointventure with burohappold. they're looking at howlayered facades have different ways ofregulating heat gain,
again, by moving materialin space with these very small movements, creatingquite beautiful, actually, and simple, unlike the jeannouvel project, facades. and he also showed thesevery large stadium roofs that he's working on. and then dennis sheldencame along and said, you guys, forget it. i'm actually interestedin information. and actually,information's what drives
all this sort of complexity. he's one of the foundersof gehry technologies. and he showed anybuilding, whether it's the kind of louisvuitton building and aaron betsky had trashedearlier, all this complexity, all this exuberance,it really comes down to kind of spreadsheets andmanaging the information. and that's something thatarchitecture should really leverage, our ability tomanage these complex systems
through our softwares. so he sort of made a case forinformation as our medium. not material, notform, and irregardless of material and form. but he also made the casefor gehry technologies producing platforms,collaborative platforms, not just software. so that was interesting. mariana did a great jobof curating a discussion
about innovation and risk. you know, whose role is itto innovate at this scale? is it building industry? is it architecture? is it the academy? and the last groupwas called ecologies just to sort of give it theimpression that the conference actually have an arcand a trajectory, and things were gettingmore and more complex.
and at the end, we couldtalk about complete sort of synthetic,comprehensive buildings. and so florianmoderated this panel. we had frank barkow, jeannegang and martin henn, michael meredith and matthias schuler. all sort of, except formatthias, all architects. but also people that had sortof pulled it all together. and in a way, it was importantto sort of end on something sort of not justparticles, but trying
to end on something atthe architectural scale. frank, who you know, he'salways interested in technique. he's interested infabrication technique, producing its own vocabulary,materials having effect. proposed for these solid,lightweight concrete sort of load bearingfacade elements that have kind of heating elementsembedded in them, which i think is awesome-- anawesome sort of way to develop prototypical partsand then speculate about what
those could mean at a low riseor a mid rise or a high rise jeanne gang showed afew different projects. one of them that struck outto me was the solar carve tower, which was a kind ofinverse of the kind of hugh ferriss or the kind of newyork setback skyscraper because it sort of flipsthat around and talks about, how is the sun actuallymoving, and how might a kind of strategicsort of carving actually improve its solar performance?
so it's not aboutmaking the glass more resistant to the sun. it's about making theglass sort of look away when the sun comes. so in a way, thathas consequences on the form of the building,formal consequences, and i think formalopportunities. and then matthias schulershowed some other work he's been doing withdifferent architects,
including frank gehry-- thisis from novartis in basel-- identifying within this formthe different territories, the different zones. some zones you needto control, some zones you don't need to control. and how being selectiveabout-- or being smart aboutenvironmental systems, working with theenvironment, how they could put their energyliterally in certain places
and not in others. and then using pvs andother screening systems strategically positioned tomake this building, which seems like an energysort of train wreck into something thatwould actually embody some sort of intelligence. but matthias schuleractually ended by saying, we do it for the people. it's actually about--at the end of the day,
it's not about this formalexuberance or this kind of technological showcasing. it's really about the waypeople experience space. whether it's sort of ina curtain wall building, or within a park-like setting. this is from the milan biennial. and one of thespeakers, martin henn, is designing the merckheadquarters in darmstadt. and he showed aninnovation center
that he's workingon where they are sort of deploying alot of these materials as a kind of showcase. it's actually apretty cool building. it's got this sort of quatrefoilorganizational structure. it's meant to sort of pioneernew working environments. it looks a little bitlike the media lab at mit. lots of kind ofsectional conditions. but within it,there's also the idea
that you could sort of showcaseall these different products. you could showcase thesedifferent glass products, different lighting products. merck makes oleds. so this becomes a corporateheadquarters, also a kind of showcase building. and they had i think asort of great discussion at the end about the roleof technology, innovation. should it happen in the academy?
maybe it's a partnershipbetween the mercks of the world and the [inaudible]of the world. that kind of-- somehowputting it together. but i think ultimately wehad a panel of architects, and the question was,should architects be pushing these innovationsthrough their work? can we broker someof these conditions? and i think the answerhopefully is yes. so that was a kind of superfast summary of the conference.
i have to say, wedid do an exhibition for the conference, whichsome of the team was here. we built it in boston. we drove it to chicago. or sophia drove it to chicago. installed it in the space. and it really-- ithink for the event, there was a conferencehappening inside. there was material outside.
and i think it gavepeople the opportunity to see some of these materials. not just to seeimages, but actually to sort of touchsome of these things. and i think it sort of-- i thinkit was important to complement the content of theconference with actual things that you could hold and touch. and there were, i think, momentswhere the people from merck were sitting there wasarchitects saying, hey,
let's collaborate on something. let's work. so sheila kennedy waslike, let's talk about pvs with the merck people. and i think there areresearch opportunities that will come out of thiskind of conference as a kind of matchmakingsort of situation. at the end, the germanswere happy with the event and the conference.
so i think what that setsup is the opportunity for the next conference, right? for the next seriesin this initiative. and i've already startedthinking about that, even though we're stillrecovering from the last one. i do think this questionof display architecture and communicatingspaces, i think could be a really interestingnew direction to think about. not just thermalperformance, but actual, how
do we use display technologiesto make architecture a broadcast medium? so very quickly, thetrailer for the next one is-- think about architecture aslegible, as print, as digital. the transformation oflighting from illumination to communication. the idea that lightingnow is becoming a signal. and how do we think aboutthat in terms of architecture? venturi early on wassaying, architecture
is about kind ofbillboard, literally. and all of our surfacesbecome display surfaces and they display content. they have inputs,they have outputs. what are they communicating? are they communicating theirenergy consumption patterns? are they communicatingother kind of content? in a way, it makes allsurfaces into interfaces. and what does thatmean for architecture?
if we're used to sort of lookingat a surface of the screen, what happens when we startlooking through that surface? a surface to look through,not a surface to look at? and screens are notjust about looking at. they're also about touching. how do we use sort of thetactility of architecture to think about what it could be? and then because i stillhave a little bit of time, i'm going to show you one--two little projects that we've
been working on at the borderwith mexico and [inaudible]. the federal government isbuilding a new border crossing to improve sort of wait times. you could wait sixhours at the border. we were asked tomake a proposal here. so we proposed a screenthat's one pixel high by 600 feet long. and the idea waswhile you're waiting, you want to know thatsomething's happening.
so we're basicallytaking the information from the system to broadcast iton the facade on this screen. and so every timea car goes through, there's a burst of light. and that somehow communicateson a very basic level that the border isnot just impermeable. it's actually highlypermeable, and there's movement happening there all the time. this video's a little funny.
but i think at a timewhen the kind of rhetorics around borders is goingoff the charts, the idea that architecture functionsat these limits as interfaces, not just to sort of prohibitor allow passage, but actually functions at these momentsto communicate something about architecture. so it's not just about,don't come in or about saying, bienvenida orsomething cheesy like that. this very modest installationcan visualize flow.
it can communicate in a modesort of beyond language. it doesn't have to saybienvenida or welcome or anything. but i think it remindsus that architecture has this role atthese interfaces, and has this role tosort of communicate in different channels,in different ways. one last thing i wanted toshow before i'll ask you for some comments is we justbuilt this project in roxbury
for a new government center. we didn't build the building. we built the sculpturein front of it. the building is by mecanoo. it's a governmentbuilding in boston. the brief was, how doyou build something that represents all theneighborhoods in boston? and so there was an ideathat with 21 neighborhoods, we can create this sortof bundled structure
that sort of relieson other elements to be kind of self-buttressing. and then the idea is that thesculpture is a map of the city. and it sort of conveysall the 311 data, which is basically howcitizens are interacting with the governmentto sort of improve the city by reporting trafficlights, potholes, trash, whatever. but i think it's avery modest idea.
but essentially, citizensare participating in the constructionof their cities and the managementand operations of their cities in differentways through different devices. and if you see a potholeand you report it. maybe they'll comeback and fix it. but what this represented for usis a highly rich set data set. it's a data stream that'sconstantly updating, that has veryprecise geotagging.
and so we know exactly wherethese reports are coming from. and for us, itwas an opportunity to take these data sets anduse them to sort of create the content for thisinteractive sculpture. and it's not interactive-- just,i touch it, it changes color. it's actuallysomehow broadcasting a kind of larger network ofinteractions between citizens and the city in apretty rich way. and so this was a projectwe built over the summer,
fabricating the componentsinto this kind of bundled spire which had lightingelements within it. and just a quick videoof an interaction. so in it's normalmode, it's sort of flickering when thingsare being reported. but there's also anopportunity-- and something that the city wanted--for kind of real, sort of one-on-one interaction. so it's not justabout these kind
of bursts, these kind ofseemingly random bursts. they were saying,how do citizens interpret this communication? and how might theyunderstand themselves relative to this sort ofdialogue that's going on? so this a little bit offootage from a test where we're allowing a user with ahandheld device to sort of trigger a behavioral patternin the sculpture, in real time. so that's opening thisfriday at dudley square,
and you're all invited,5:00, to come and see it. bring your smartphones. but i think for me, itdoes represent a mode where we're thinking aboutarchitecture a little bit differently. that it's not about envelopesystems and mechanical systems. now these are becomingkind of synthetic. it's not about a 2d surface. it's about a kindof 4d situation
where envelopes and buildingsystems are becoming much more interactive, much morecommunicative, much more adaptable, and reallykind of 4d surfaces. so stay tuned forthe next conference. thank you. [applause] how was that? was that ok? i try to faithfully representwhat happened in chicago.
i'll give you a littlebit of an update. but also, let you knowwhat we're working on and what we're looking forwardto, other kind of events or a research opportunitiesto work with industry. i think it's pretty unusualto have an opportunity to work with someonelike merck who has their own sort of agendas,have their own research funding. but to bring anindustrial partner
in to a school likethe gsd and think about what we could dowith someone like that-- with someone-- with a companylike that to do studios, to do workshops, todo material research. so i think that's prettyexciting to sort of think about what they could do forus, and how we could help them. because they're desperatelylooking for design. they just don'tknow how to do it. so i think that'ssomething we can
help them think about theimpact that they would have on the built environment,something that they're not used to. any thoughts? i have a thought. i really appreciate yourusing the plural-- i really appreciate you using theplural of technologies. there's thistendency in the media to talk about technologyas if it were something.
and technologies makes itclear there's many of them. you've obviouslyidentified and inventoried and played with some of them. are there some that youhave imagined or wished for, but we don't have yet? [laugh] well, isn't-- what's his name? marty supposed to show upany day now, any moment now from back to the future?
today? so i mean, i thinkarchitects are about futures. that's our job is to speculate. we're often asked to thinkabout the future of that, and glass, the futureof this or that. i think that's what we do. that's what we do bestis sort of speculate. and it's not science fiction. it's always about, like,what is in the present that
might sort of createa scenario where a future might be possible? so possible futures, nearfutures, and near casting, i think. so i think as architects,we're sort ideally positioned to do that kind of near casting. i think designers in thisschool are great at it. i'm not sure-- marty had this,like, hoverboard thing that he was looking for thatdidn't materialize.
i think the hoverboardwould be pretty cool. i mean, we've beensort of going away from the kind of purematerials and looking at media as a material. so this next oneabout communicating, like, what if every surfacewas somehow a display? active, beyond kindof aspect ratios. but that may not be a futureeverybody wants, you know? for sure people would say, well,i don't want all that stuff.
but i think it'sinteresting to speculate about what wouldhappen in those futures with those technologies. other thoughts? what does this meanfor me at the gsd? you know, there's an incrediblematerials library down there, right? you been down there? i mean, amazing.
i feel like thestudio's being up here and the materialslibrary being down there, it's one of the problems. we don't go down there enoughto engage with real things. maybe we're tooenamored with our-- it's also online. it's on the web. yep. physical.
some of theseprojects are really starting with thematerial and discovering what the form couldbe like, starting with the glass with adiller scofidio building. or with the gehrynovartis building, it's starting with theform and then, how can we adapt the material to makethis a pleasant environment, assuming this form? so are there examplesyou could cite
where there's more of asynthesis between material and form? where they're kind of evolvingtogether to create a design? yeah, that's a great point. i mean, i think that the gehry'sa kind of brute force example, i want this form, andi will force that glass into that form. and it's actually prettyinnovative, the kind of cold forming that the gehry sortof did on the iac building
in new york, as we discoverthat glass is actually pretty flexible. within a certain range, youcan actually cold form it. and instead of having amillion different unique panel, he had, like, half amillion because he said, half of these i can coldform into this geometry. i think he's still wrestlingthe form, wrestling the material into the form. no doubt.
but i think he'sstill been pretty pioneering in sort oftesting the limits of what the material could do. if you didn't begin withform, as you suggest, then you said, well, whatcould the material do? if i can bend it,like, half a degree, could i develop a vocabularyout of that half a degree bend? that might be reverseengineering that. maybe the building wouldbe much more subtle
because it would have very,very subtle curves and not these kind of sortof forced forms. i can't think of aproject right now that would be more sympatheticto the material, but i'm sure there'sa way to do it. i also think the idea thatyou build out of glass because it'sefficient and cheap, and then you build in desert. so you tend to code it andput sun and shades on it.
that seems veryunsympathetic to me. and even if it had aliquid crystal in it, i'm not sure it's stillthe right place to build. so i guess we have toask when not to build, when to build in different ways. so, yeah. i don't have the answer. but i do thinki'm just asking us to be more conscious of how weuse glass and when we use it.
what's the fitness ofa solution like that? todd? was there-- i canexplain why i'm going to ask the question in a bit. was there any criticismto over gadgetry? it seems like allyour examples were-- there's a lot of overkillgadgetry, cheap tricks. and then when i lookat my offices in norway and scandinavia and the waywe make our architecture
in scandinavia, it's actually--it's the opposite way that this is going. it's more simplificationand purity in materials. and the way we work actuallyis we work with industry developing prototypes. we don't draw that manyconstruction details until we workdirectly with them. but was there any criticismof all this gadgetry, or was it like everyone waspreaching to you to convert it?
i mean, aaron betsky sortof put up some resistance. that's a problem for me. no, i mean, he pointedout, like, look. you guys are allsort of obsessed with the latest technology. why so high tech? how about low tech? what about no tech? what about no architecture?
so he sort of pushed in thecomplete opposite direction. repurposing buildings,thinking about things people could build themselves. so i think he wassort of pushing back, as you are, on this kind ofsuper duper sort of gadgetry. i mean, i'm notpushing for high tech. i'm actually justpushing for kind of just being smarter aboutthe technology that we use. i do think glass inarchitecture will continue
to be a kind ofmaterial of choice because the economics and theoperations are so attractive. but the question is,how might a speculation at the scale of the particlechange that, change that completely? change the economics, changethe performance characteristics? and i think that's,for me, exciting. i still think at acertain moment in dubai, maybe you justshouldn't do that.
you shouldn't use glass at all. or maybe in norway. i mean, those are kindof extreme examples where you wouldn't be lookingfor an all glass building. you'd be looking for somethinga lot more insulated. but i think that's whatwe want to communicate is that there's anappropriateness of technology. despite all thekind of innovation, we still have toexercise judgment.
i found it particularlyinteresting when you talked aboutalmost like the use of light as a communication tool and thatrelationship to architecture. now i'm just wonderingwhat-- maybe you could speak moreto what precisely you are trying tocommunicate, and the purpose of these communications. for example, i foundit particularly poetic, the last twoprojects you showed,
of how these lightinstallations are almost showing these invisibleprocesses, if i may term it that like that. but i'm just wondering asperhaps a pedestrian watching or looking at theseinstallations, what is the message of thati'm trying to understand? am i trying to understand theactual process that's happening and the kind of more preciseinformation out of it? or is it just understandingthe somewhat suggestive idea
that there is aprocess happening? yeah. no, i mean, it'sa good question. we've been interestedin sort of making architecture more communicative,embedding media in it. and i like to justsay it's always been. it's always had content. the gothic cathedralhad content, and it was trying to convey andpersuade and convert, in a way.
your average building maynot have that kind of agenda. but office buildings,you hire an architect to design an officebuilding, it's conveying a certain condition. whether it's like, oh, thisis a frank gehry building or this is a kindof high tech thing, architecture's alwayscommunicating through form. and i was justsaying, maybe we could expand that to be not justabout form, but actual content.
the question you raise thoughis like at a certain point, there's a superabundance of content. and then there's a kind ofbreakdown of communication where you'recommunicating, but no one's receiving or understanding. so i think it'sinteresting to think about communication theory. there's a kind of broadcastand there's a kind of receiver. there's a kind of signal,then there's noise.
and how do we think aboutarchitecture in those terms? i don't have theanswer, but i do think it's important that westart asking those questions. the facades areno longer facades. they're actual interfaces. and interfaces havecontent, they have users. so maybe it's asubtle thing, but i think thinking aboutarchitecture in those terms, we can start to develop ourown new techniques for talking
about architecture differently. because we talk aboutoccupants, but i think we'll increasinglytalk about users. we'll talk about recipients orreceivers, not just occupant. so i'm trying to sortof ready, i think, a discipline for a future whichi think is almost inevitable. and we don't yet have the toolsto work in that medium yet. anything else? well, thank you very much.