michael [inaudible]has told me now that everyone willcome to the room when i finish my presentation. tonight we will attend a lectureof lola sheppard and mason white, lateral office, thatis called "undisciplined," that they have prepared for us. lateral office wasfounded in 2003 and this officehas gained respect and internationalprestige thanks
to a very specialcommitment to what they say in their own words,"design as a research vehicle to pose and respond tocomplex, urgent questions in the built environment." said with these worlds,one imagines a frozen image in the middle of nowhere,especially these days that we are in thesame situation, and driven by peopleisolated and super serious and concentratedin studies and experiments.
but knowing them,and many in this room know them even better thanme, it becomes instantly obvious their vitalityand their sense of humor, the need of communicationand the will to collaborate, characteristics that theboth share and give them, i would say, aneasiness for teaching, which is their second activity. i'm not so sure. i'll have to check in the web.
lola is an associate professorat the university of waterloo and mason is anassociate professor at the universityof toronto daniels faculty of architecture,landscape, and design. this gives me theopportunity to say that both studied and receivedtheir masters of architecture from harvard graduateschool of design and that both will be comingsoon to teach optional studio, so we will have tonightjust an appetizer
of what they will bring later. their awards and meritsare many and are important. lola is the recipient ofraic young architect award, mason of the 2008-2009wheelwright fellowship that we give in this school. they worked, beforefounding lateral, at other offices like jeannouvel, peter rose, machado silvetti, and other ones. and to synthesize along series of awards,
i will mention just the 2011holcim foundation award, the 2011 emerging voicesaward from the architectural league of new york city,the 2010 canada prix of rome and the 2014 special mentionfor their arctic adaptations exhibition in the canadapavilion at the venice biennale of 2014, the lastone, a special mention that could have become,in my opinion, if the jury had been formedby more architects and less curators.
books. it is almost requiredbut comes spontaneously-- i promise, it's notthat kind of intention-- that the permanent lecturerspublish and write books-- good books, polemiclooks, beautiful books. and in their case,they are co-authors of a pamphlet titled coupling--strategies for infrastructural opportunism ofarctic adaptations, a beautiful book that collectstheir work for the biennale,
and the forthcoming manynorths to be published by actar, and that is suspectedas their confirmation, maturity, et cetera. as a quick intro to theirwork in an academic context, i would like to refer to tworelated and relevant aspects of their practice. their techniques of designand their strategic thinking that have posedthem in the center of many different debates,paradoxically and precisely
today because of theirlateral situation. i'm sure the today, withthis title and discipline, they will bring a polemicattitude and relationship with the integration ofall the relationships of different disciplinesthat they did with. let me make a kindof interpretation. we have seen in thelast decades how many of the promisingyoung architects have specialized themselvesin micro or macro scales.
many oriented themselvesto installations and adopted the limits of thescale of digital fabrication to produce miniaturearchitecture. others, with a similarapproach but a different vein, as, for example,atelier [? beau ?], with other [inaudible],insisted in this fascination with miniature scales. others jumped fromthe building, that's considered such an oldfashioned thing, into the city
and then continued scalingto regional, national, continental, intercontinental,to finally jumping to the earth andthe solar system. i understand well thebeauty of these two poles-- i think iunderstand it, at least-- but i have to say thatas a professor of some of these talented youngdesigners in europe, i have never beencompletely comfortable with these practicesthat i saw and see
as a relatively blind escapefrom the practicalities and the conditionalitiesof our profession, an escape that many timesdrives many of these architects to frustration, in away, because it's not that easy to incorporate in ourdiscipline long periods of time that ecological orterritorial processes demand. the confidence of a client neverlasts more than five years, and we have to be ableto do the whole thing in very short periods of time.
i mean, this is superpractical, but i consider this a very important issue,one that many times hasn't been considered. for those that are practicingmicro architecture, i think that manyof them, especially in the south ofeurope, were dealing with beautiful researcheson very small things, while developers andpublic institutions were building like crazy,believing that they were
waiting for them andthey could wait for them, and then the game is over andthey have nothing to show, and they areincredibly talented. this is my [inaudible]. it's not about the beauty. it's about the practicality. in any case, the interest oflateral in the biggest scale problems that they have andthat ecology has brought to the discussion andthat need expression
at a territorial level can beconfounded with the very nature of their work. as i said before, designas a research vehicle to pose and respond intelligentquestions in the built environment is their main topic. i think it's a gooddescription, and this means that design is the keyword to understand their work. it looks like aconventional formula, but i think that it'simportant to underline it.
i'm sure, in any case,that after seeing today's presentation andto see how strategically their projects alternatethe scales at play and how much careand craft is posed in the minimal scale ofa house or an ice mast, or even the amazing stonemodels made by the inuit and presented in thebiennale in venice, we will understand thatin the arctic landscapes and territories they chooseas their research fields,
the conditions are soreluctant to human life that the presence of designmeans literally life. it's not a kind of[inaudible] aspect to be considered ornamental. and the best possiblestrategy in these cases is always the intensificationof very few key small spots, transforming them inmoments of total design. the work of lateralcan be seen, then, as a collection of huge scalegeographical [inaudible]
or as a microscopic collectionof super intensified moments of total design, catalyzingthe primitive huts of forgotten territories. or, more precisely, andthis is my interpretation, as an impressive andsophisticated orchestration of macro, micro, andconventional scales that manifests itselfas the [inaudible] integration or convergence ofdifferent design techniques in a unifiedenvironmental strategy.
i will have to discuss thiswith charles [inaudible] during dinner. that is not casualthat the training both have had in thisschool is as architects. this training isprobably what permits them to design the miraclesthey are designing. please join me [inaudible]in welcoming lola and mason. [applause] thank you very much,inaki, and thank you
to the facultyfor the invitation to speak here this evening. it's a pleasure to see so manyfriends, so many colleagues, and even a few former studentsand former teachers of ours all in the room at once. we're going to try to occupythe podium at the same time, as you can see. we don't often get to beable to give a lecture at the same time, too.
this is also a great opportunityfor lola and i to do this. sometimes we're in differentgeographies at the same time instead. but we saw thisis an opportunity for a reflectionon our recent work and maybe a personal stocktaking on current dilemmas through this work withinthe design disciplines. and so we wanted to usethis opportunity, again, to look at provoking threefundamental questions.
and this is, i'd say, in away a 10 year anniversary for us reflection point onthis idea and the very points maybe inaki alluded to atthe end about the status of our training. so what is thedisciplinary field? what is the statusof disciplinary within which we operate today? second question, whatare the tools and modes to operate within this field?
and a third question,what relevancy does spatial practice havein a post-global condition? you'll see the term"spatial practice" is something we'requite interested in. in fact, it's thesubtitle of the book that inaki referredto called many norths. so lola and i are goingto go back and forth on some of these questions. discipline.
disciplinary hastraditionally been about knowledgeproduction, but it was foucault who first calledattention to the discipline as a, quote, "system ofcontrol in the production of discourse," end quote. english scholar shumwayand messer-davidow unpacked the historicallineage of disciplinary, articulating in 1991, quote,"the various connotations of discipline haveuntil recently been
entirely positive. to call a branch ofknowledge a discipline was to imply that it wasrigorous and legitimate. however, the namedoes not reveal that knowledge is producedin regulating or controlling knowledge producers, nor thatthe training of disciplines produces the acceptanceof disciplinary methods and truths," end quote. interestingly, themetaphors most commonly used
in discussing thescope of disciplines are often geographical ones. for instance, it is common tohear of territories or fields or frontiers which disciplinarypractitioners annex or map or explore. sociologist thomasgieryn observes, quote, "the intellectualecosystem has, with time, been carved into separateinstitutional and professional niches throughcontinuing processes
of boundary workdesigned to achieve an apparent differentiation ofgoals, methods, capabilities, and substantiveexpertise," end quote. disciplines differsignificantly with regard to the permeabilityof their boundaries, and most scholars believethat the permeability of disciplines'boundaries are related to the uniformity and coherencedemanded of its practitioners. architecture has,since the 1960s,
been active in borrowingfrom other disciplines, although it isunclear to what degree that borrowing is reciprocatedwithin those same disciplines. law professorrobert post stated, "when we speak of adiscipline, therefore, we speak not merely ofa body of knowledge but also of a set of practisesby which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed,implemented, preserved, and reproduced," end quote.
multi-, trans-, and inter-. although the tug between aninterior oriented and exterior oriented design disciplinepersists, since the 1990s, we have experiencedconsiderable momentum toward the discipline'sexteriority that may have entirely realignedthe balance in favor of transgression. the impacts of the shiftare evidenced in its theory, in its mode of practice,and is ultimately
embedded within architecture'scontemporary pathology. this may have arrived throughthe various prefixed versions of disciplinary itself, whichinclude multi-, inter-, intra-, post-, and possibly itsmost robust form to date, trans-disciplinary. advocating fortrans-disciplinary research, many have suggested that, suchas this case, gary brewer, quote, "trans-disciplinaryresearch responds to the observation thatthe world has problems
but universitieshave departments." this claim, suggesting thattrans-disciplinary work is more oriented towards problemfields in the life world. however, interdisciplinaryis a term that many use without aclear sense of what it means and whether there actuallyare shared understandings or intentions. in other words, is thisinter- actually mutualistic? at a more localcapacity, there continues
to be exciting thoughunruly interbreeding amongst the design andspatial disciplines. for example, any combinationof architecture, landscape, infrastructure, ecology,planning, engineering, or urbanism have offeredfodder in the last two decades for new disciplinarypursuits and in some cases the launching of newacademic programs. this has yielded an opportunityfor considering the expanded field for thedesign disciplines.
the notion of the expandedfield as initiated by rosalind kraussin her 1979 essay "on new understandingsof sculptural practices" has attained strong crossoverinterest in architecture. the charting of a shiftingdisciplinary field and its offspring has beenof consistent interest, speculation, and skepticismamong theorists, critics, and contemporary historians. for example, anthony vidler's2005 text in artforum
offered his reading ofarchitecture's expanded field where he writes, "followingseveral decades of self imposed autonomy, architecturehas recently entered a greatly expanded field." he goes on to suggest fourdominant principles emerging from this expansion,quote, "ideas of landscape, biological analogies,new concepts of program, and a renewed interest informal resources," end quote. in 2009, we alsoattempted a charting
of the expanded fieldas problematized by the renewed interest inthe promise of infrastructure. this is the coverof the architecture issue of the new york times. you wouldn't think it wouldbe the architecture issue, but it is. and the field tolocate infrastructure within and amongst thedesign disciplines, arguing thatarchitecture's absence--
i can show you this drawing. this was in the pamphletarchitecture number 30, trying to locate infrastructurerelative to landscape and urbanism in a kindof klein field diagram, and offering that thisactually opened up other possible interpretationsof the spatial products that include productivesurface, a civic conduit, or a programmed container,arguing in a way that architecture wasnot within that field
because it could beatomized at the periphery. undisciplined. this leads us to the possibilityof the undisciplined. this practice is notanti-disciplinary, nor necessarilymultidisciplinary. instead, questionsmay be provoked outside of the discipline,although the methods of response remainwithin the discipline. looking outside ofa discipline is not
to avoid its particularitiesbut rather to expand and clarify the questions, and ultimatelythe agency, that it can have. examples of this areforthcoming, but how does one operate within an undiscipline? so we've given afair amount of-- i don't know if we'vegiven thought, but we certainly thoughtand debated internally, what is the roleof the architect in this undisciplined territory?
and we've gotten increasinglyinterested in this idea of detective work asa productive model for thinking aboutalternative ways of practicing and researching. and in particular, the workand methods of a detective are a useful analogy or model. the foundations of crimefiction which brought forth the modern detective novel,such as conan doyle's sherlock holmes, held the use oflogic and early forensics
as tools for finding reason. interestingly, fictionsometimes preceded reality. so, for instance, 15 years priorto the real world application, sherlock holmesproposed in the novels the use of fingerprinting,and scotland yard only much later appropriated this. and so there's aninterest that we have in how projects emerge atthe intersection of research and undisciplined truthsand discounted fictions.
in contrast, the postmoderndetectives or investigators such as umberto eco'swilliam of baskerville in the name of the rose,who find reason and logic get him nowhere. competing narrativesobscure linearity, and instead, truth isoften found accidentally. what makes crime fictiongripping and relevant to our purposes here is that theoutcomes of that detective work are sometimes less interestingthan the process and procedures
at work in the detective work. the mode of thedetective requires a malleability of approach,sometimes dramatic shifts in scale, and the abilityto look at something anew in an effort to anticipate orrespond to the unanticipated. agatha christie's miss marpleis an interesting figure because she works througha kind of analogy. crimes always remind herof a parallel incident, and she has an ability tolatch onto casual comments
and connect it to acase, and so there's a working through parallelsbetween unrelated precedents. colombo, who we'vebeen fascinated with, is interesting because inthe actual television show, it reverses theformat of the whodunit because the crime in factunfolds at the beginning and the show is really aboutuncovering the pieces of crime. so the procedures reallybecome the core of episode. and the character ofcolombo is interesting
because he dupes suspectsthrough a seeming absentmindedness andeffectively tricks them into revealing information. and then weconsidered magnum pi, who makes it look effortlessand has great wardrobe, but decided that theeffortlessness seemed misleading, so we've had to moveon in search of another model, and we've landed on theidea of lester freamon from the wire, who i'msure many of you know.
we like him, a, becausehe's the antihero. he works in a team andhe's often secondary within a louderset of characters and, perhaps very aptly forthe analogy to the architect, he begins his career in the showdemoted to the dusty archives precisely because he'dasked pointed questions that had made people unhappy,and he basically sees his career resuscitatedover the course of the show, working in particularon wiretaps.
and he famously saysin the first season, "you follow the drugs, youget the drug addicts and drug dealers, but you startto follow the money and you don't know where thef it's going to take you." and i think we're reallyinterested in this idea of following the money, pursuingleads that, a, you may not know where they'regoing to take you, and that you alsobecome immersed in the environment whichyou're investigating.
it's interesting that hiscontribution, in a way, to the show, or hischaracter's contribution, is largely one of revealingnetworks and recognizing patterns of behavior. he is, in a sense, theears of the wiretap. so transitioning to thisidea of the undisciplined and of the disciplinetoday, there's an interest also inextrinsic factors that surround thedesign dilemmas.
the detective workbecomes a tool to look at contexts andquestions and disciplines that we may not be familiarwith and, in fact, that very unfamiliarity forces us tolook with a kind of precision that we sometimestake for granted within our own discipline. the performance ofany design depends on the alignment andadaptability between the system and its environments.
although risky business,charting the extrinsic attributes of thediscipline also reveal hiddenpatterns, and therefore opportunities for design. henri lefebvre theproduction of space has had significant interest inarchitecture, urban planning, art, and sociology. using a conceptualtriad, lefebvre attempted tounderstand how space
is produced by including spatialpractice, representations of space, andrepresentational spaces. he writes that, quote, "thespatial practice of a society secretes that society's space. it propounds and presupposes itin a dialectical interaction. it produces it slowly and surelyas it masters and appropriates it," end quote. in other words, the adherentssimultaneously adopt a system and produce its modifications.
both lefebvre and latermichel de certeau each use the notion of thetactical in opposition to architecture and the city. spatial practice is a formof resistance or subversion to design. we would argue, however,that spatial practice can be understood more broadlyand as a continuum of scales and degrees ofspatial intervention. it might be bottomup and subversive,
but equally might betop down and engineered. it might leave no traceson the territory or very clear imprints on the land. equally intriguinghere is how have these undisciplined spatialpractices impacted disciplines. speaking more personally,a critical criteria for us in terms of navigatinginformation is asking, can it be spatialand in what way is it a spatialpractice of some sort?
even representationalconventions are often tested in an attemptto chart the multiplicity of spatial practices. reflecting on thesequestions of disciplinary, modes of investigation,and agency of design, we would like toshow recent work and also to situate thefoundations of the work informative earlier work. so the first project that wewant to show, and hopefully
work through quickly, isan older project called water economies/ecologies,farming the salton sea, which dates from 2009, but was,i think in many ways, formative for us interms of engaging this idea of a problem wherethere's no clear solution and without knowing exactlywithin what disciplines it belonged to, or withinwhich disciplines one might appropriate. so it began with afascination with the questions
of the imbrication ofwater infrastructures, urbanism, ecology, and theeconomies of large agriculture. as we were slowly unpackingthe challenges facing the us, it became clear that oneof the challenges in the us is that many of thefastest growing cities are also in the most waterstrapped regions, which you see fairly clearly in this map. so there is ever more elaborateinfrastructures required to sustain cities' agriculture,and so in particular,
the colorado basinbecomes a litmus test of this hyperinfrastructuralized landscape. every mile in the last60 years has essentially been damned, aqueducts, canals. so this is the basin. you see the coloradoriver, and there's a coding for all the aqueducts,pumping stations, canals, waterways, et cetera,that basically manage and redistribute water toservice cities and agriculture.
and in a sense,nowhere is the impact of this infrastructuralizationmore apparent than in the salton sea,which really becomes a registration of the rapidtransformation with which landscapes are created, erased,and, in fact, rediscovered in quick succession because ofthe constant transformations that happen. and so here's the saltonsea, which-- actually, i'll go back briefly-- is justsouthwest of los angeles
and was basically created whenthe all-american canal breached its banks in 1905 and basicallyflooded an ancient inland sea. and immediatelyafter the flood, it was designated as an aqueoussump for the imperial valley, which is here,which is the tenth largest agricultural regionrepresenting a $1 billion industry in the us. and so really, the saltonis a terminal lake, which means it has nooutward flow of water
and is constantlyincreasing in salinity, and basically receivesthe aqueous refuse with all the fertilizers andtoxins that the imperial valley agricultural region produces. and it becomes very clearthat really, there's a sustaining of agriculturein desert conditions, and one might question whetherone should be sustaining agriculture in these conditions,and that it's sustained largely by this complexnetwork of canals.
the all-americancanal is a moment of highly politicalinfrastructure where essentially the americansdeviated the water that would normally goto mexico in order to service the americanagricultural zones, which is to say that alsoinfrastructure is political. and so early on, thesalton was a kind of riviera for california. it was a highlysuccessful tourist zone.
the sea was stockedwith fish and so there was recreational fishingand boating and so forth. and then between the1960s and the 1990s, the sea went intomassive ecologic decline. as the toxins startedto accumulate, you had massive fish dieoffs, you had bird die offs, and of course, as aconsequence, you also had the evaporation of tourism. and that's how it gets it name.
the name, in fact, comes fromthe highly saline, salted landscape, that is the sea. in the 1990s and early2000s, there was a sense that it had hit a tipping pointand something had to be done, and so there were a seriesof engineered proposals that were submittedby various groups, and this is a matrix of them. and all of them really reliedon large scale engineering, either pumping water hundredsof miles from the atlantic
and desalinating it,building huge barriers and allowing part of the seato survive and part of it to die off. but really, the salinitywas seen as a liability which couldn't be overcome. and so part of our interestwas really in saying, could one actuallytake this condition of hyper salinity, whichis the essence of the sea, and actually try andsee it as an asset
and imagine a setof infrastructures that might respond to theenvironmental conditions in a far more incrementaland adaptable way than the large scale engineeringprojects which we just saw? and at the sametime that one right shift the conceptionof the salton from a refuse where thisis the engine of the region and imagine aredistribution in which the salton becomes again anactive economic as well as
ecological agent. basically, we startto develop a notion of a soft infrastructuralsystem of pools that could take on variousroles that could increase three or diminish innumbers and in roles depending on the changingneeds that the sea might need. this is a masterplan that basically looked at a set ofinputs and outputs, so inputs of tourism and outputsof new recreational activities,
inputs of water andsalt and outputs of new agriculturalproducts, and outputs of ecological systems,and maybe also the notion that the salton would reconnectto a kind of hinterland. so not only isthe project trying to work at the scale of the sea,but also an extended landscape. and so the projectbecame a series of four types ofpools-- production tools that would takeadvantage of the salinity
to harvest kelp andseaweed, harvesting pools that could harvestfresh water and salt, recreation pools ofdifferent salinity which would takeadvantage of the salinity for differentrecreational activities, and then the habitat pools thatworked as floating wetlands, and it produced a new,land-based landscape of water programsand a new landscape within the water body ofthese floating pools that
could aggregate moreand be brought to shore and docked for harvesting. and so this new industriallandscape might emerge and a new recreationallandscape might emerge. we've always been interested intrying to think through scales and appropriatingexisting technologies, so looking at existingtechnologies of floating wetlands and movinglarge volumes of water and floating fishfarms, and looking
at how they could informand be appropriated for new technologies in terms ofalso evaporating and harvesting fresh water. and so really, the projectwas about a change from a mono economy, which is how thesalton currently works, to a much more diversifiedand complex economy, which produced on the one handnew economies and presumably more robust ecologies, but alsoa new public realm that emerges from this infrastructure.
and in a way, that theproject also began-- lola said we werepresenting a project that was formative to us. it began, let's say, i thinkin quite an undisciplined way in the sense that wedid not know how to operate. we were looking at it entirelyas a question, as a problem. and in fact, it wasa point at which, of course, in a lotof deep research, a question of whetherthere was to be
a design proposal within that. and so this idea of theundisciplined looking, i think, was an essential selfdiscovery in some ways in the project at salton sea. now, i'm going to try to showthree projects as a triptych, and i'm going to showquite a few images but i'm not going to talkfor very long about each one because we want to spend themajority of our time talking about some work we've beendoing in the last three
and a half years in the farand high north of canada. but i wanted to show theseprojects as maybe another way in which we're lookingat design's relationship to environment, and i thinkthis idea of environment or the notion of environmentis a very productive term through the way inwhich it's bound by all of the disciplines. so it's a useful prodat this question. the first one i'm goingto show is the most recent
of the three. it was for far rockawayin queens, new york, and it was a verylarge event that you're familiar with from2012, and it's affected the east coast in adramatic way across new york, and it spawned awhole host of interest in resiliency andresilient urbanism. in terms of our interest inthis site, this is the site. it's one of the largestundeveloped sites in new york
city in far rockaway in queens. it was also one of themost badly hit areas. we wanted to look at a softway in which an urban scheme intermittently, dependingupon the dramatic nature of the event, that it had theability to absorb and respond to those events. so in a way, thisplan that you see is a plan first ofthe water, first of the zones in the newproposal, the proposed
scheme in which watercould be taken in, and that yieldeda set of spaces. so in some ways, the first actwas to design a negative space, was to design the void. and the urban scheme aroundit, the built form around it, also was one that wantedto adapt or adopt also traits of that environment. so something likethe boardwalk, which is so significanticonically to that area,
spawned theseminiature boardwalks which would help navigate highwater events that would go back within the neighborhoods ina perpendicular connection. meanwhile, the urbanfigure or the urban form was running in thisdirection and they operated as a kind of dune. so in a way, dunes andurbanism were hybridized to create a setof neighborhoods, and each one of theseboardwalks would
help unify or create connectionsacross those sandy blocks. this is a very large scale. of course, the designwas mostly notional. we did work up a seriesof urban figure types, but really, this drawingwas meant to show, let's say, the role thatthese pockets would play. and depending upon theirshallowness or their depth, they might either bemore waterlogged or less. they might haveprograms that could
be used on those spacesthere were more permanent or ones that were moretemporary or fluctuating. and there you cansee, again, the coast and the series of duneswhich these blocks took up. it may be a bit more apparentin a section drawing. another moment in that project. maybe there, you can seethe boardwalk cutting across in the perpendicular direction. each one of theseprojects, again,
was about collaboration,both considering the architecture, the buildingof these individual housing blocks or bars, as well as therole that landscape would play a local and a largerregional scale, and the larger urban figurealso being equally important. looking within one ofthese sponge pockets. the second project we'dshow is much earlier, 2007. it was a two phasecompetition in reykjavik to reimagine a downtown airport.
iceland is well knownfor its energy capacity and also well knownfor its remoteness, and this figured quitestrongly within the scheme. the site downtown, thisis the city airport. reykjavik is here,about 180,000 people, and this is still anoperating airport-- you can fly in andout of it-- but it was slated fordecommissioning, so they were wondering how it might beredeveloped within the larger
urban figure of reykjavik. so we looked at the ideaof this is the existing figure of the runway. again, almost designingthe void first, could we designate that zoneas a space in which there would be void or openspace or green space, and then withinand around that, we would populate variousurban typologies or building typologies.
and each one ofthese runways would take on a trait relative tothe aspects of that region. you can see thesecond drawing is a superimpositionof the old runway and maybe in this newrunway as a public realm. so the total figurehere, and maybe different from the rockawaysproject, which was more about a series ofbar buildings, this was really about a courtyardor creating enclosed spaces
within the block. there were specific programsthat they gave relative to, let's say, a university,other more commercial zones, and then they asked for smallerfabric, lower grade fabric, a bit further southin this scheme. and each one of these runawaystook on a different trait, which i'll show. this was the productionrunway, which really tried to harnessgeothermal energy
and look at the role that itcould play in agriculture, and also tree farming. reykjavik does nothave that many trees, but it was something thatthey were using a lot of, so it was a chanceto boost that. but it also, because of thevast geothermal reserves of the country, whoare also always trying to figure out how to harnessthis into new economies, there's the idea ofa kind of server farm
underneath the runwaywhich would take advantage of cheap energy, and the heatreleased from the server farms would basically theexcess heat would be used for the greenhouses and marketsand various above ground programs. so there's a kind of reciprocitybetween above and below ground. and the second runwayfigure was called the recreationalgreenway, and this was a series of discreteislands or pockets of program
with greaterdifferentiation, and they were meant to cutacross the urban figure to create variable accessto that kind of program. and the third onewas a civic greenway that took on muchlarger programs and had the largestof the open spaces. i think that part of thequestion of the greenways was not so much thatthey were really voids, but they were voidscharged with programs,
whether it was landscapeprograms, civic programs, production programs. it was a charged void ratherthan a purely open space that was undefined, let's say. and the thirdproject in the series was a project we did in 2012with luis callejas, lcla, was the klaksvik competitionin the faroe islands. you'll see some similarstrategies applied here operating at a different scale.
this drawing is notcoming up totally well, but klaksvik isactually up here. it's the second city of thefaroe islands, a very surreal environment, the regionhere, in that it's a very remote andvery small island but they have 11 soccerteams, for example. they're similar to some ofthe other traits in reykjavik. you'll find a uniquegeology and few trees, very rocky geography.
and the role that these peaksand valleys or these mounds of old earth pileupon have dramatically influenced inhabitation. so you see, let'ssay, the city form is really one of thisu shape and really about a coastal occupationalong these breezeways. and actually, wind is avery significant impediment to public realm in the city, andone of the charges of the brief was to address the almostinhospitality of open space
due to the way in which thisdramatic landscape funnels wind between its landforms. something we gotreally interested in as a design team was a verylocal character of the role that the roof plays andthe diversity of roofs, and actually began a verysoft science of cataloging these roofs andtrying to understand, and also the rolethat color would play within this landscape.
you see that a lot innordic environments and in the highnorth in general. color is a verystrong attribute. and we looked at, let'ssay, this argument. as of now, klaksvik and manyof the other towns in the faroe islands are made up of manysmall, individual homes. what would the public realmbe, but could the public realm be a sort of aggregationor a belting together of individuals, and could youthen obscure that individuality
through subdivision? and then again, the roofbecame a really strong figure in understanding thatidea of a transition from the individualto the collective. and we began a gameof relationships between that figure, this boundtogether individuals acting as one and altering itsrelationship to the ground or to the space below it. and that also yielded a seriesof landscape rooms or landscape
figures that we wanted tosee in complement with that. the brief had askedfor development at this zone at thehead of this outlet. we were interested in lookingat this larger area and to look at the continuity of water,and again, these rooms to appear also within the largerband of this undeveloped zone. but really, the primarydesign intent was up here. the programs they'd asked forwere very curious programs. some of them werecalled culture house,
or there was a maritime museum. some of them, actually, wemade up like a cinema house because they didn't give us asmuch information in the program as we'd hoped, so that yieldedthis set of figures of where water would be,where was vegetation, where were buildings, andwhat was this new public realm that they were really askingof how could this be achieved. coming back to theroof and the role that the roof playedrelative to the environment,
buildings were operatingin different ways relative to wind. so for example, these twobuildings at the headway were really about diminishingany wind intensity coming from this direction,and any that wasn't stopped by that would bedisturbed by this peaked roof to create enough spacefor some wind protection within this larger zone. there aren't very manypeople within this town--
i think it was about 18,000--so it was really a modest size. we didn't want to overdesign that public realm at this downtown intersection. these are sectionsthrough the project, looking at some of thefigures relative to the water. and i think that completesthe triptych of projects we wanted to show thatwere in some ways looking at this idea ofdisciplinary intersections. so in some ways, thatmay have been the project
we were most disciplined. we probably stayed closestto the fields of architecture and urban design. but i think one of thethings that that last project in particular, but all ofthem raised for us also, was on the one hand,architecture's response to environment and theidea of local vernaculars and how one might imagine localvernaculars sometimes emerging from environmental conditionsor in the case of klaksvik,
also literally reinterpretingexisting typologies. so very quickly, oneof the things that we, in our undisciplinedmoments perhaps, is that we do a lot of things. so we design projects,we enter competitions, we do installations,and as inaki suggested, we also edit booksand make books. bracket began as a byproductout of intranet lab, which was formed in 2008 with mayprzybylski and neeraj bhatia
and really was a responseto the existing landscape of publication and anambition to reimagine how one might curatea set of discussions relative to architecture. and it was intentionally calledan almanac, not a journal or a magazine, in this ideathat an almanac forecasts, that it projects what is tocome rather than taking stock necessarily of whathas been or is, and also, interestinglyenough, deals
with predicting weather in orderto anticipate yields in crops. so this relationship ofenvironment and ecology and productivity are nicelyintertwined in an almanac. the first issue, which masonedited with maya przybylski, was called on farming and lookedin the broadest sense at ideas of harvesting, productivity,collecting within the built urban and non-urban landscapes. the second issue, whichwas called goes soft, which i edited with neerajbhatia, looked
at ideas of softinfrastructures and soft systems as methods for dealingwith contingency, adaptability, andincremental responses. one of the things that i thinkhas been very productive for us in the reciprocal relationshipbetween books and design is that often the questionsfeed back and forth. so certain ideas that may havelingered in a design project become an issue to be tabledwithin an issue of bracket, for instance, and vice versa.
and i should say thatbracket's subtitle is called "architecture, environmentand digital culture," and it really seeks to lookat the very intersections between these three fields. so the last issue,which is coming out, i hope any day or any week,is called bracket at extremes, which i co-edited withmaya przybylski, which looks at-- aptly relativeto some of the work we're showing-- thequestion of extremes
as somethingproductive in design, that it's less a tendency thatwe may have to want to restore, remediate to an existing orpreviously stable condition, but actually that theconditions of ecological or economic orpolitical instability actually become new grounds andnew opportunities for design thinking. so relative to some of theseprevious projects and some of, i think, the questionsthat bracket tries
to ask, a lot of our workover the last six years, five years has dealtwith the north, and it really emergedout of this question of how architecture canrespond to questions of scale, to territory, andto environment. and so most of us have a mythicnotion of what the north is, a sublime beautyand all the images that we see onnational geographic, and what we got interestedin is the recognition
that in fact there arepeople living there and there are spatialpatterns and practices, and that actually very fewpeople were documenting this. there's also a whole setof other myths surrounding the north, mythsthat are also facts-- the of imminent potentialsof oil resources and mineral resources, the changing climateand the subsequent changes in sea ice extent, and a lotof political rhetoric as well. and certainly in canada,we have a rather.
hawkish prime minister who likesto declare, use it or lose it. although who we wouldlose it to is unclear. there's a wellknown historian who said our greatest allies are themonth of january and february. it's really hard to invadefour million square kilometers of arctic in february,i can tell you. but again, the canadiannorth crossed 100,000 people a few years ago,and that's covering four million square kilometers.
that's probably thepopulation of harvard spread over a verylarge territory and in very small communities. the largest twoterritorial capital cities are about 20,000, and thenyou're quickly down at 7,000 and then down tocommunities of 1,000 people. so there's tremendousdistribution of small settlements, andin many parts of the north a very young populationwhich is producing
this interesting hybrid oftradition and modernity. so you've got kids onfacebook listening to hip hop but going out huntingon the weekends, and that hybrid culture hasalso been fascinating to us. so this is the reality,in a way, on the ground. these are a set of figuregrounds that actually some of the people inthis room have worked on, trying to document thefootprint of these towns. this is the capitaliqaluit, and this
is its reality on the ground. in many parts of the north,you don't have sidewalks because of permafrost. the ways of moving throughtowns are very different. at the same time, youhave an importation of southern models of housing,of education, of language, et cetera, so you get thesesomewhat suburban bungalows or houses sitting ina dramatic climate. you have entirely differentinfrastructural networks
because you oftendon't have roads. everything is flown in orshipped in, and you have, as i said, this mixing ofcontemporary technologies and traditional practices. we've spent a lot of timetraveling through the north, although we've stillonly barely begun. this is mason in the depthsof january in iqaluit. an architect selfie. we've been to, between the twoof us, every cirumpolar nation
and interested also in thedifferences from nation to nation, and then even withincanada, the dramatic difference from east to west. so when we first started,we were fairly unfamiliar with the topic, andthere was a question of, how do you begin this research? how do you look at fourmillion square kilometers when actually, at the time,we didn't know a whole lot. so we began with reading verybroadly and very laterally
or horizontally about,in a way, everything we could grab our hands on. we started to developa way of trying to classify the informationwe were coming across. so these were a setof cards that became our initial ordering device. so we had issuesof ecology, issues of housing andsettlement, issues of culture and education,transportation, monitoring,
and resources, and theseforms of classification have stayed with us. so we read and thecards multiplied, and they became a way for usto record interesting phenomena that we came across. on the one hand, they were formsof different spatial realities in the north, andthat they might become productive to design questionslater on, but at the beginning, we really didn't knowwhere this was going.
so they continued tomultiply and became part of an initial exhibitionthat we had organized, but in many waysalso became the seeds of a book that weare now just getting ready to complete called manynorths, spatial practices in a shifting territory. this is the toc, soyou see, in a way, the five primarycategories still remain. and the book is really,as the title suggests,
looking at this broadersense of spatial practices, and it's intentionallybroad in the set of issues. we could have justlooked at housing, we could have justlooked at settlements, but i think we quicklyrecognized that, in fact, you couldn't understand architecturewithout understanding logistics. you couldn'tunderstand architecture without understandinghow one hunts
or how one mines resourcesand that a mining town looks no different than a permanenttown and that, in fact, these are all intertwined. and there was also adeliberate intention to be broad in the waysthat we documented. so we developed essays thatlook at a historical context for each of these themes. we developed timelines thatprovided a general overview of each topic.
we conducted interviewswith specialists, sometimes scholars and sometimenortherners, on various topics relative to thedifferent chapters, and then we developeda set of case studies that are really a momentof zooming in and trying to look at where spatialpractice becomes tangible in terms of stakeholders. what is many norths? so the next questionwas, how do you
define the north, givensuch a complex geography? there are many debates abouthow you define the north. one geographer calledlouis-edmond hamelin, who is a quebecgeographer, developed an interesting system oftrying to classify the north. called nordicity, andi'll come back to that. but we start to think, howdo you define the north? you can look at thenorthern territories, which are the equivalent ofour states, but in the north.
you can look at thetask force line, which is where you gettax benefits for living in remote areas. you can look atethnographic definitions of where the inuit live. you can look at the tree line. you can look at the permafrostline, which affects, of course, how you build. you can look at the arcticecozone and the vegetation
that that produces. you can look at thesouthern road access, so where the roadsend and where you have to shift entirelyother modes of movement and transportation. and then coming back to hamelin,he basically famously said, "there are so manynorths in our north" and looked at this ideaof the multiple norths, said there wassouthern canada, there
was the near north, themiddle north, the far north, and the extreme north. and really, once you startto overlay all these lines, it becomes clear that thedefinition of territory in itself is problematic, andwhat scope do you examine? so we're going to look at afew of these case studies. one, for example,under the category of settlements orurbanism was this idea of land form and theinfluence that land form
has on the productionof settlement. this was productive also forthe venice biennale project. we did a cataloging. this is actuallysomething that had never been done in thiscontext before also, so it's become aproductive resource within these territories. but looking at how thefigure, or the given shape and the coincidence of landingor the initial seed of urbanism
planted has influenceddevelopment. often, this is quite literallyland form affecting things like airway strips,because all of these, again, are above theroad line, so the figure of the airplane and theairport and the runway is a significant lifelineto the south and resources. so we looked at that,and in this case, affecting a linear settlementbased on land, land form. this is the town of tuktoyaktukin northwest territories, which
coincidentally settled on avery small outcropping of land at the north end ofthe mackenzie delta, and as the town beganto grow, it essentially has run out of space. this is a dispersedsettlement based upon its land form and itsrelationship to the coast. and then others,quite curiously, here in arviat innunavut, exhibit a concentrated settlement, againbased upon developable land.
we look at parallel case studiesrelative to those as well. more specifically, we lookedin the urbanism chapter, there's a case study onthe growth of the capital, and that's thecapital in nunavut, which is on baffin island,and it's called iqaluit. as you can see bythis radial growth, like a tree growth, radialgrowth of population in each of these communities,and you can see iqaluit has reallybeen a lightning rod,
or let's say a primary allaccess point for northerners. it's also a place where the usairway base was in the 1940s. so we chart and collectarchival imagery of its early growthas a military town and some of the architecturesand infrastructures associated with that, its growthin the 1940s, when it may have acquired its firsthospital or power plant, how it grew in the1950s rcmp, and then some of the initialhousing coming into play
in certain neighborhoods,and these clusters form until the 1990s, at which pointit attained an actual status as a capital, until today,where, as lola said, it's about population 7,000. we probably have too manyof these case studies, so we'll move throughsome of them faster. as part of urbanism, we'realso interested in some of the infrastructures thatare unique to the north, and that's part ofwhat we were interested
in, is looking at whatare the things that are truly unique to this region. one of the thingsis the existence of utilidors, which are aboveground pipes or conduits, really, that carry water,electricity, and waste, and they are in a fewtowns in the north because of the difficultyof running things underground becauseof permafrost. so we were lookingat inuvik, which
was a town planned and builtin the 1950s as a capital for the westernarctic and looking at the larger matrix ofenergy and utility systems within the region. but then withinthe town of inuvik, it's interesting because it hasa combination of trucked water system and trucked waste,where basically, there's a truck that literally deliversyour oil and your water and removes your waste, andthen there's a pipe system.
and what's also fascinating isas you read archival material, infrastructure wasreally a two tier system. so the southerners gotpipes and the inuit did not, and so infrastructure becomes atool of social differentiation as well. so we looked at the networkof where the utilidor was and where the waterinfrastructure was and energy infrastructure. one of the byproductsof the utilidor
is it has produced amore compact urbanism than some other communities,but it also produces this amazing, in away, mark on the land and becomes partof the landscape, and often doubleswith walkways, and you see children climbingon it, so it becomes part of the built landscape. another thing we werelooking at is snow fences, which are built outside ofcities-- you see them here
in blue-- to control thedevelopment of snow drifts. they basically redirectsnow so that it doesn't land on the citybut outside of it, and they basically becomepart of the landscape of many northern towns. we looked at thingswithin architecture such as foundations, which area crucial challenge because of permafrost and climatechange and unstable ground. so, as i said, you oftendon't get sidewalks and roads,
which produces an unusualnotion of territoriality. and then there'sconstantly innovations being tested in terms ofhow to prevent the buildings from warming up the ground. sometimes they'reraised on piloti, sometimes thereare thermosiphons, sometimes they refrigerate theground below, and so forth. and it produces thisalmost second architecture to the architectureitself, which
is the whole systemof foundations. these are systems ofthermosiphons that basically draw heat out of the groundto keep it refrigerated, effectively. and then some ofthese innovations are also used on infrastructure. this is the alaskapipeline, which is also using thermosiphons. as i said, we also lookedat things like logistics,
so something like sea lift. the whole central andwestern arctic has no roads, so everything is delivered byboat once a year from quebec and a few other towns. so basically, if youwant your ikea sofa, if you want your cat food,if you want your new chair, christmas comes inaugust in the north. so we were looking at the routesby which these boats deliver, and also looking at thelogistics and spatial reality.
so you get thesehuge sea containers, but most communities don'thave ports to accommodate them so they actually haveto moor in the bay, and then you get theselittle smaller barges that have to go back andforth for several days unloading the sea cans. and then many of thesea cans, in fact, stay up in thecommunities and are co-opted as storage orworkshops and things like that.
so they also, in fact,become inadvertently part of the built environment. so we'll maybe go through a fewof these a bit more quickly, but you can see theidea was to look at issues of mobilityand certain innovations, again, that might be happeningat an engineering scale or at more of whatmight be arguably a top down scale as aform of spatial practice, this one in particular,and then, let's say,
its contrast, theidea of inuit trails. how do inuit, indigenouspeople in the north, how do they navigate? how do they read the ice? how do they read the snow? how do they locate desirableroutes on the land? actually, a lot of this workis done by a gentleman, claudio aporta, and we actually wereinterpreting some of his more data based research into spatialform, of which he has also
a wealth of gis informationthat fed into that. or even, again, at themore grounded scale, the sled, the qamutiik. how do you pack for a trip? sea ice is a significant ecologyin the arctic, and its role. we look at the differentdescriptors, both in inuktitut, the native tongue, and itsrough english translation, of these differentkinds of sea ice types and its role in hunting,its role in navigation,
how ice is tested. so how does one monitor the ice? you have thesedifferent techniques by different actors, let's say,and for different purposes. and again, these aretreated as an equilibrium, not with any basis of onebeing scientific and one not, but in fact, allon a similar plane. we referred earlier toother forms of monitoring. militaristic monitoring.
this is the distanceearly warning line developed collaborativelybetween the us and canada with the threat of russia atthe time, ongoing cold war era. and these were very specificfigures on the ground and had very specificstructures associated with them in terms of communication,in terms of foresight. and another kindof city, let's say, in the north, or anotherperception of that territory. extraction is a significant one.
it's the lifeblood ofthe canadian economy. looking at, for example, diamondmines in northwest territories and some amazinginnovations in terms of access and sitingand the great lengths that one would go to to hitthis exact acupunctural point from an engineering standpoint. so again, goingbetween mining and then going to something assmall scale as country food and hunting.
this one is particularlyinteresting. this is, i believe, aboutmussel farming, which in northern quebechas one of the largest tidal changes in the world,i think up to about 30 feet, 35 feet. this happens over about11 and a half hours. inuit will go in the spacebetween the top of the ice and down by the bottomof the water where you can access these musselsand will harvest the mussels
and then return back up andmove on to the next route. it's considered incrediblydangerous, of course, because you have toget your timing right. yes. so there's this spaceunderneath the ice that, again, is sort of invisible but,due to transfer of knowledge and the ability inwhich to read the land and understand larger cycles,the space then gets revealed. and i think part ofwhy we've been looking
at all these things that mightseem tangential to architecture is that i think wewould argue that all these other spatialpractices in fact are forming the seeds of anemergent northern urbanism. and i think part ofour role was much of the work was doneby anthropologists. we read more scientificpapers than i care to imagine, but in a way, wesaw part of our role as documenting and visualizingand spatializing information
that has, to date, rarely beendocumented in visual form. so maybe we'll takethe last 10 minutes to show an abbreviated versionof the arctic adaptations project, whosesubtitle was "nunavut at 15," which is about theregion that had the capital iqaluit. there are 25communities in there. it's about 33,000 people. 33,000.
33,000 people within a verylarge land mass, and they're celebrating their15th anniversary of some form of autonomy. and so this was achance as a reflection on this rapid transformationof this region. and so we had thisspace in venice, italy. this is canada's pavilion, whichwas designed by an italian. it's a sort of conchshell quasi-nature effect. i think it was italiansdesigning canadian style back
to canadians. i think that was the intention. anyway, so a lovelyhexagonal space to work with, so that was a projectin and of itself. but in some ways,within this small space, we wanted to make veryaccessible to anybody as much as we could thisbrief past, present, and maybe a projectivefuture on this region. we organized thecycle of movement
through that space in that way. so it consistedof three projects. the first project,which you see alluded to here compartmentalized withinthe wall was a set of 12 soap stone carvings that we did asa workshop with inuit artists to make of iconicbuildings in the region, and there are some amazingones, as you can see. some, again, we'vealready alluded to, the distance earlywarning radar stations.
some were more recent. this is a 2003-2004school building. some were from the '70s. this is a quebec firm,papineau, gerin-lajoie, whose archives are at the cca. that's an igloo-likeresearch station. also by pgl is a school, and youcan see some of these buildings here. this is the nakasukschool in iqaluit, all out
of pre-fabricatedfiberglass panels. this is the airport in iqaluit. this is a house type calledthe greenlander house type, and actually, a wellknown canadian architect named ron thom had designeda church also in iqaluit. so there werealready these icons. and interestinglyenough, inuit carvers are, course, usuallycarving nature-- polar bears and other animals and someother scenes and people.
they had rarelycarved architecture, though modern architectureis now an inevitable part of their landscape. and so this was a fun project,talking about right angles and certain degrees. actually, they were most excitedabout using the power sander. i had never seen so muchexcitement over a power sander, because usuallythey're using a radial sander and carving rounded,more sculpted shapes.
this was about flatness andangles, for the most part. so we used theseas representations along a timeline of a past. this was about anarchitectural past. the present condition we thoughtwas really about urbanism and was about the figureof settlement, which has now become arctic cities. this is a set ofland form figures. we took a radial swipearound each one of these 25
communities, again,to treat them as though they areislands in some ways, and looked at their land formcompared to their built form as these sets of diptychs. and also, therewere a photograph from a resident of that place. a kind of self portrait ofeach of those communities was paired with that. so you always got thecommunity in physical form
as a land form, as a builtform, and as a photographic self portrait. and those were displayedon the back wall, all 25 of them alphabetically laid out. the wall had a peekaboowindow in which you could immerseyourself temporarily in that photography. these were milled outof laminated corian, so kitchen counter material,actually, ironically called
antarctica, wasthe material type. dupont makes it. they named it that. so we literally had an army ofamazing students and helpers that basically documentedevery single built structure in nunavut. it was kind of nice. nunavummiut would come tothe exhibition and say, that's my house right there.
and you thought,ok, we got it right. and we should say that thewhole project was really a team project. particularly on this last part,which is the nunavut futures, we ran a set of competitionsin five schools of architecture across canada. each school would work on onetheme and a team of students would be selected. they would travel to thenorth, and the briefs
were developed withnunavut partners that had knowledge on the ground,and we looked at five themes. we were looking at housing,education, recreation, arts, and health. and so the nunavut organizationswould bring knowledge on the ground,the students would bring an open mindedcuriosity, and then we worked with a set of fivearchitects that are either based in the north ordoing work in the north,
and they brought adepth of experience in terms of design challengesand realities and so forth. the whole exhibition,as you can see, privileged model and threedimensional documentation as a key tool of representation,but the future projects were always workedat three scales. so there was a territorialscale, a community scale, and an architectural scale. actually, i'llcome back to these.
the working at threescales was intentional, and it was part of an argumentthat, in this context, buildings are not about asingular building on a singular site but about how thingscan work as networks or distributed, how theycan share resources, either digitallyor through mobility or so forth, so the ideathat architecture could engage a larger territory. and the other key interestwe had in the models
was how to representa dynamic environment. so a recognitionthat in this context, you have freeze andthaw, day and night. you have people, and species,and vehicles, and moving, but also sea ice moving, andsnow moving, and wind moving. and that somehow,the model could try to recognize thisdynamic environment. the models were alwayspaired with a set of dynamic animationsor projections
that basicallydocumented everything that was ephemeralin the environment. so the physical models, staticthings, documented architecture in a conventional senseand the projections dealt with the dynamic. so at a territorialscale, it would show networks of projectedmovements and distribution of program. at a communityscale, it might show
where snowmobiles mightgo, where people might go, and so forth. the projects alsotry to deal with, in a way, the call thatkoolhaas had made of elements. as you've seen theextensive inventory, there are unique architecturalelements within the north that are calibrated andadapted to the environment. so all the projects dealt witha reinvention of existing types, whether it was foundations orroofs or building envelopes
or porches or cold storagethat would get somehow reinterpreted. so some of these elements. each of the five projectshad always those three animated models, asingle axonometric describing the programof this new proposal. so this is part of the futures. you saw the pastthrough carvings, the present throughurban model making,
and then the projectedfuture through architectural propositionson those themes. this is the housingscheme you're looking at now, which weworked on with the university of toronto and the nunavuthousing corporation based in iqaluit. and so some of theseelements that we would look at thatwould be particular, whether it's a wall,a particular kind
of arctic balcony in thiscase, or a foundation is, of course, key, aswe mentioned earlier. so each of these five projects,this is the architectural scale model. there's a set of three radiatingaround one of these tables with their animationsunfolding at the three scales. we're looking now at thehealth team's proposal. so there was an intentionalconsistency amongst them. there's a very careful use ofblack and white, in particular,
white. in fact, we treatedthe exhibition space as a kind of blackoutspace from which to highlight or erasethrough a subtractive erasure to reveal the work. so all the carvings andthe topographic models of the communities andthe animated models were all intended to be thebright elements in the room. this was a recreationproject, which
was really about the cultureand practice, for example, in greenland, of-- going out on theland and playing with economies of tourism, butalso practices of going out into cabins on theland for hunting, and then playing withvernaculars of fuselage, of small airplanes, mergingwith more traditional cabin structures and cabin types. so we'll end with avideo of this piece.
i don't know ifthat's ready to go. we do that. so i think one of the reasonswe've gotten interested in the north is in some ways,the reality is always stranger than any fictionone could imagine, once you find out how to get anikea sofa, or how people hunt, or how people monitor snow. and i think that, ina way, that context forces an in depthway of looking
and forces you to look anewbecause all the preconceptions we have aboutarchitecture or urbanism are thrown out the window. we've often debated, if you'redesigning a public space, what do you call it? it's not a plaza. it's not really a public spacebecause that's a southern trope that we're importing. and i think that thatrecognition that we don't have
the tools even totalk about the terms is both daunting but ithink really empowering, and i think in many waystransferable to any context. the north has provokedthat in a radical way, but our very firstproject we ever worked on was called flat space. it looked at exurban retailcorridors, and in many ways, we had the same reaction. we don't know what theterms of engagement are.
we don't even know whatto call these things. and i think that the lessonsfor us that the north hold is less one of us bringingknowledge there, but in fact, much more us learningto unpack an environment and learn from itand read it in ways that force a responsive andinnovative set of design practices. thank you very much for spendingyour thursday evening with us. we're running late,but of course,
if you have any questions,comments, observations. we have still someminutes, and we can use them to havesome questions for them. i have one just towarm up a little bit. i have been pointingout the words that you have repeated more inmy mind-- lateral, environment, detective, tactical, extremes,brackets, spatial practices. this is the one thatis more repeated. procedurals, almanac.
this hasn't been repeated thatmuch, but i liked it a lot, the idea of thealmanac as something that projects into thefuture instead of trying to recollect the past. i think that all of them arevery difficult to categorize. they are very vague, in a way. spatial practicesin plural are trying to [inaudible] tothe [inaudible] and to the disciplines, sothis is very consistent.
the whole discourse isquite well constructed in terms of the terminology,not only in terms of what we have seen. i think that youhave, in a moment, mentioned the figureof the anthropologist. i think that it'squite interesting. i was thinking of thearchaeologist, in a way. the way you aredealing, especially with these amazingly beautifulproject, in my reading,
it's very much likean archaeologist. you take all the piecesand reconstruct the world. you learn from thematerial culture, which is a word that youhaven't used, but i think that in a way, the exhibitionat the biennale pavilion and your work, thetaxonomies you have employed, the materials thatyou have used, using the corian antarctic,i think that all of these is very much like therecollection of documents,
materials, and reconstructionthrough the material culture of a way of life ora way of using the territory. i think that maybe, thiscan be a kind of other way to look at yourundiscipline attitude. it's more based, in my opinion,not in natural sciences but in social sciences. it's just a comment. i don't know if you wantto extend or we open to. i think it's well summarized.
i wish you had givenour closing comments. thank you for sucha wonderful lecture. i'm curious as to howyour definition of ecology has changed since startingto work in the arctic. i saw some examples of new waysof thinking about ecology-- form as ecology, ice asecology, light as ecology. i'm just curious as tohow that's changed for you or influenced you asyou've been working. we'll probably havedifferent answers
so i'll give mason achance to answer as well. i think probablyinitially, we may have come with-- idon't know if it's the naive, but the conventionalnotion that at least architects have, the food chain, theplants, the species, and so forth. and i think that increasingly,this idea that kind of humans, even in the north wherethe impact of humans is ultimately still relativelysmaller, the imprint that they
have, that they'reinterconnected. or at least for us as designers,what becomes interesting is the moment where ecologyintersects with some sort of spatial practice, again. and it's funny because, infact, in our initial research, we had ecology asone of our categories and then actually in thebook deliberately removed it because it wasn't a spatialpractice that humans partake in, but that it'sactually everywhere.
there are artificial ecologiesin the form of the roads, the buildings createtheir own ecologies, whether it's through snowaccumulation or so forth. so i would argue that ithink the change maybe is in recognizing theimprecation of humans and, i'll say, "naturalphenomena," which is problematic. there's largequotes around that. nothing to add to that.
it's a great presentation. i find it particularlyinteresting that canadianarchitects are taking on the importance of thegeographic turn in architecture to, in many respects,either inject or re-inject, reclaim some formof political agency. i'm curious, goingback to your bowing to the prime minister of thecountry, in many respects-- not bowing.
well, no, not bowing. definitely not. i'm wondering, hasthere been any reaction of the state or the governmentto the work that you're doing? because in manyrespects, there's something extremely coy alsoin terms of the forensic work that you're doing, whichis in many respects both presentingin a very neutral, almost like borrowedengineering manner
of rendering technicalinformation that's politically charged,which all of a sudden remaps the north no longer at,let's say, one to one million, which is theprivileged map i think that the centralgovernment is using, and you're bringing a material,spatial, social, cultural, anthropological scaleto the discourse through these drawings, whichmakes the work extremely powerful and also beautiful.
but has there been-- andperhaps we'll see with the book and over time-- but are yousensing any reverberations or are there aspirations totake on greater agency as part of your work towards veryclear advocacy and agency for a completely marginalizeddiscourse on first nations, aboriginals, etcetera, et cetera? great question, pierre,because in some ways, i'll separate outthe many norths book project as more of a survey.
actually, no one hasseen that content. in fact, it's really beenabout aggregation of content, and each of the case studies isalso shadowed by an interview with an individual whoeither is from there has done a profoundamount of research there. but on the arcticadaptations project and some otherparallel projects, the temperature on the ground,literally on the ground there, is, of course,one of-- let's say
it was built on skepticismbecause of the history there. so in some ways, i thinkwe're at the early days. we didn't know the depths ofthe project when we began not just the arctic adaptationsproject but in general, the first travel tothe north in 2008. we didn't know the depthsof what we were at. it was a pleasantnaivete, scratching the surface in termsof the politics there, and slowly you start to see it.
we're working on a projectcalled the arctic food network that has someform of legs to it, but it gets shelved whenthe political winds change. country food issues arenot as much of a priority as some other issuesof education are now. so even, actually,it's interesting. amongst those fivethemes we set up for the venice project ofeducation, health, housing, recreation, and arts,i wouldn't be surprised
if, depending upon who'sin charge, any one of those could be a hot ticket. so the temperatureon the ground is one that has beenhumbling in the sense that we've had tobe very patient, good listeners, and a lotof clarification needed on our part tostakeholders, and i think that's actually beena powerful practice learning process for us.
and we're actually--i think inaki really touched on it quite well withthis idea of the macro/micro in the sense that theobservations, for example, of country food distributionare really at a macro scale, and then that'sdaunting to them. it looks heroic. it seems like alarge scale project, but in fact, it was a series ofaggregating many small points. this is where the architectureside or the design side
comes in at the verysmall scale, so that's where we've really beenfocusing our attention, and there's some legswith the arctic college that's up there, who does nothave a building discipline. they have an environmentaltechnology discipline up there and they have people thatare learning the mining arts, as you mightcall it, because that's where the jobs are. design is notwhere the jobs are.
so there's actuallyanother project that i think we would callourselves complicit within, which is creatinglocal architects. i don't know how thatproject might unfold, but i think that's actuallypart of the advocacy work. i would describe thepractice as demonstrating the agency, in a way,through the carving was a subtler version ofthat, but the importance of architecture totake ownership of it
within that region, ratherthan imagining it as a fly in or flown inshipped in product. other comments, questions? giovanna. [inaudible] 10 years,i lived in canada, i never went above quebec, so itwas a great trip, your lecture. one question i have is,because every time i hear speakingabout this project, and knowing also all theeconomic, social issues
that there are about education,about access to health, about all kinds ofthings, i always feel that-- so my questionis, why at the end in the representation,what you represent somehow has this deep crisisthat i can read and the problems thatare there in the north. somehow, at leastin my eyes, they don't come out fromthe representation. so i don't know ifit is intentional,
it is because there is stilla magic imagination or eyes for the north, or it'sintentional that you're really looking at a spatialpractice and you really want to acknowledgethese things but you don't want them to get inconflict with what you-- i think there's afew different parts. for those of you thataren't in canada, to give context, almost allthe news about the north is the dire-- all you hearabout is the drug abuse,
the substance abuse,the physical abuse, the lack of education,the failure of health. and that story has beentold over and over, and even with some of our partners, let'ssay the arctic food network, they meet once a month todiscuss the problems of food security and confirm thatfood security is an issue, and one doesn't move forward. so i guess part ofus was interested, not in a naiveoptimism, but in saying,
let's consider howarchitecture can be a tool for moving forward. but i also think--and this goes back to the question ofspatial practice-- many of issuesyou're talking about, which are absolutely real,are outside the purview of architecture. there's food insecurity becausethe federal government has dismantled the food mail programthat partly addressed issues
of food costs and thenis exacerbating it, and some of thosethings are really, i think, outside the purview ofwhat architecture can address. that's why the bookdeliberately tries to document the thingsthat are spatial, and it may be aninteresting coincidence that the social problemsare not directly spatial, although in manycases, there are indirect spatial implications.
overcrowding of housesproduces health issues, it produces failure to dowell in school, and so forth. so they're secondarytie-ins, but i don't think it's a deliberateavoidance of the issues, but rather trying torecognize where we have agency as designers in the broadestsense and where we don't. i think also, giovanna, you weretouching on the representation, and in some ways maybe wedidn't give it the time. we may have under budgetedor over budgeted allowances
across some of the projects. but i think in the arcticadaptations project, things like, for example, thehealth project, in terms of from where it comes andwhat kind of program it is, is actually the projectrelated to this social ill, and it's one that's not aclinic, it's not a hospital, but in fact, it's a-- mental health and wellness. well, yes.
it's a mental and sexualhealth center and it's outside of the community, and thepositioning of it outside of the communityis something that was desired by that organizationas a safe haven or an escape from a very small community. when one has been violatedwithin that community, the ability to be outsideof it becomes important. and then also, theability to incorporate within thearchitecture excursion
related structures, likevehicles and so forth, becomes important togetting back and forth. so i think in some ways,the representation, maybe we have notdescribed as much some of the programmaticdecisions within those, but i think that's where lies amore direct addressing of some of the ills that we, ofcourse, gave too much time to and that a lot of other pressdoes give too much time to. i was just thinking.
i was trying to lookat the overall project and i kept thinking of niklasluhmann's systems theory where he defines asystem as something that arises in an infinitelycomplex environment with many, many-- and i love theway you address so many aspects of the environment. and that a system, through aset of what he calls autopoiesis or morphogenesis, startsto distinguish itself from its surrounding environmentstarts to make boundaries,
and eventually achieves anidentity through patterning or through what i think you'recalling spatial practices. eventually, it achieves apatterning and an identity that distinguishes itselffrom the environment, but that those boundariesare constantly changing and there will bemoments in the system that, if it doesn'tachieve a kind of autonomy, it would dissolve backinto the environment and become chaoticand indistinguishable.
and thinking of itthat way, i think it follows your idea ofbeing undisciplined because a discipline imposes an identity. it imposes a discourse andit sees the environment through a certain discourse orthrough a certain discipline. but to be undisciplined keepsthat open, and in some ways, a discourse wouldalso see a problem. things that don't fit insidethe discipline are problematic. and the way you're doingit, there's not a problem.
i think it addresses alittle bit this question. rather than seeing problems,social or otherwise, to be solved, yousee a system that has certain characteristics,among which are social, but rather thansolving them, you first have to identify them. and i think that's, to me, thepromise of being undisciplined, which is a very, very differentdefinition of undisciplined than something like penelopedean or others are developing,
which are basicallymuch more empiricist. it just was helpful for meto think of it that way. wonderful. thank you. as if i were part of the team. i agree with you,but i think also that this is a morestylistic issue. i think that we have seen,during the whole evening, everything is craftedvery carefully
but nothing is addressedin a strong way. everything is just put inthe same level of intensity so you don't create [inaudible]. in terms of the scales,in terms of materiality, in terms of topics, interms of the political or the spatial issues,all of them are there and no one is privileged. and i think that this isalso the tone of the lecture. you make a good duet.
it's homogeneous,it's constant, and i think that thisis something that is obvious in theinstallation of the m where everything iscrafted so carefully. my experience when ivisited is that it was a real spatial construction. it was not onlyinforming, but allowing you, in the hot weatherof venice in those days, to experience the atmospherethat you were representing.
it was [? amazing, ?]interesting. i understand theidea of the systems, that it is moreabstract, but i also think that it's aquestion of aesthetics. and maybe with this, ifyou want to add something, and then if not, we can go outto the cold weather outside. thank you so much.
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