First of all thank you very much Julie
it's a great great conference so

far we can see that's dense
there's a lot to talk about.

Two amazing presentations and
also a really nice chance to speak with

the women from the women in architecture
group so I'm very excited so

what I decided to do is kind of were
reversed maybe I didn't get the right memo

but I'm trying to kind of
reverse the conversation and

ask how do we how do we
see the in measurable and

specifically how do we how do we imagine.

A kind of a very different
to material world.

Had a longstanding.

Love Affair with materials
of all sorts and

I have a very broad idea of what is
material which extends into into program

into the dialogue and
the mention between inside and outside but

I did want to offer one kind of
definition one framework for

this idea about the change that I think
we're in the middle of which is material

evolution of a very significant Khan and
it has to do with the energy transition

but it also has to do with the whole set
of materials by which we make things.

And I think we're going soft not in
the sense of being senile necessarily but

looking at a new relationship.

A new way of seeing things that has to do
at its center with understanding nature

wild nature technology and the built
environment as one spatial system so

this sounds very very simple like so
what but

if you think about the consequences I
think that there are very challenging for

architecture and there are potentially
very profound because there is no a way.

A In this system right we can't throw
anything away there's no place that

isn't part of this and everything that
we thought was was Nature is really

a hybrid nature culture this is a kind
of an idea that that Latour has

talked a lot about but that there
is no pure nature anymore and nor

is there a technology apart from
its environmental context and

consequence so I do I do have
a kind of short period of time

today and I'm just going to focus on
on four projects that show different

kinds of of instantiations
of of the the play

between materials technology and
and nature.

In this first project the TAAS or
anthropology building I want to talk about

the kind of expansion that can
happen when when very simple dumb

materials like bricks for
example can come in contact and

be organized with our digital
networks through computation so

in in the work of K.V.A.
Maddux a lot of what we do

is try to look historically at
older building techniques and

take something that's actually
quite quite ancient at times and

expand its potentials digitally and we do
this in the framework of a building so for

us as architects the the projects
that we do are our medium for

for exploration so here on this slide
you can see this building from one nine

hundred seventy one it was Taz or library
this is the Peabody Museum we're on

the campus of Harvard University here and
our task was to take this building and

to save the footprint to save the all the
steel to save this the concrete structure

but to remove the brick because
there was mold damage and

to transform the kind of
identity of the of the F..

Apology department so
we added two stories and

I want to talk in particular about
this entry pavilion which for

us was a very kind of opaque
almost Mayan archaeological

artifact so what we did was to
begin with the dimensions of a door

which you can see here and since we had
an existing foundation that we had to work

with we couldn't stray too far from that
but we could develop a system by which

we could adjust the massing of this
envelope with a global geometry and

link in units tied to this geometry
through computation link in Brick units so

I think that what this what this
did was provide a a pattern and

a three dimensional expansion
of the ancient brick technique

of Korra bowling and to do that in a way
that wasn't necessarily aggregate to but

that was holistically based on the form of
the massing itself so rather than being

a appliqué or being postmodern if you
will it was tied actually to the form and

if we were to adjust the form we would
have an entirely different pattern of

brick and what became interesting
in this process of digitising brick

of creating a kind of digitally organized
brick is that we then of course

had to build it that's always always
a consequence of of of architecture or

sometimes can be a consequence of
architecture so we worked with our local

masons to develop ways of testing what our
three dimensional digital model showed

testing that against the actual reality
of the slippage is the stacking and

the dimensions of the bricks
that we're using.

I think actually there's an image here
very Boone on our on our team here and

you can see of a kind of three Dimon.

Effect and the very unique patterns
which are happening here on on either

side actually which are specific and
appropriate to this particular mass and

we change the massing the brick building
effect would also change i'm so

you can see the way in which this
catches the light in different ways and

there's a play of using a very
contemporary wall system and

you know which is let's call it thin and

kind of thickening it up
with this idea of a digital.

And I'm just touching on certain
parts of this building but

inside the building there's a large
light well which you can see there above

that of the second floor and this light
well is the long of this building it's

a technical center it's where air is
exchanged it's where daylight comes in but

it's also the social
center of the building and

it's built around a geometry
which has one all line here and

it spirals up as the atrium turns to
kind of catch more northern light and

I'd like to talk a little bit about
the cladding that we developed for

this light Well I'm using
the idea of the graph of.

The graft as a kind of an interesting and
sometimes disturbing phenomenon

where two very different living things
are deliberately brought together and

they coalition together and
it's a form of augmentation and so

what we did with our team was to to map
out where where regions where daylight

would fall all the way around the light
well and also begin to map out regions

where we would need acoustic attenuation
where we would need to absorb sound and

then we developed a method based on
the kind of natural capacity of birch

to both reflect light and
absorb sound so kind of augmenting.

Augmenting the natural seemingly so-called
natural properties of of the Birch and

then we developed a very simple code
by which we could take these panels and

graft inflicts on using the algorithm and

customize a panel having more
reflectivity or more sound absorbing

material as we went.

So we became very interested
in this idea of augmenting

actually going beyond what is nature.

And the next project it kind of shows us
that there's actually nothing more surreal

more unnatural the nature in some ways
this is a field of linen in France and

we did a very deep dive into natural linen
on this project which is called clean and

there we learned that you know all of
these linen flowers bloom in one day so

there's a kind of an effect that
propagates itself and then it goes away

and so we were asked to work actually by
the French government and a consortium

of very traditional linen weavers who are
using a very traditional dhobi flattened

here that is only a dentist there they're
from dentist there in the MAC and

some of his colleagues looking at
the textile that we were developing So

our challenge was to try
to create a new form of

linen that would be augmented but
still one hundred percent natural So

I'm I'm abbreviating our process here but
what we decided to do was to integrate

phase changing material into linen and
to create a linen that could play

with the kind of ambient wasted heat
in our daily environment and so

we began looking at a number of different
sources which you can see here radiators

Carthy that heat up.

Casseroles in the kitchen light bulbs
that give off too much heat and so

forth and
with our our manufacturers we settled on

a variety of different products that
were exhibited this fall in Paris and

going forward are a curtain and a scarf
and I will show you the scarf here.

So what we did is develop a way to
integrate a micro encapsulated.

And vegetable based face changing
material directly into linen and

linen is super absorbed to the dries for
a long time mummies were wrapped in

in linen so it really soaks up the micron
capsulated face changing material and

it's it's interesting what
can begin to happen so

this being France everybody
enjoying scarves and

linen scarves being like an important
kind of market segment for

the manufacturers we developed a linen
scarf that would have you can absorb heat

from the body you could also charge it
through just the daily just the gesture of

putting it on your radiator and
as it began to heat up the scarf

material would change color according
to how much heat it was received in

these bands which could be a little bit
like the linen growing in the field that

are thermal chromic thread
that we wove into the linen so

we can we became pretty interested
in the idea of a heat signature

that you could have a mass produced
element that could be done in great

bulk to be woven in great bulk with
the face changing material integrated but

each user depending on their particular
thermal context would be able

to generate a different pattern for
this and

you can see my colleague Ben wager here
a K.V.A. trying on an early prototype.

I want to kind of take this idea a little.

It further and ask you to kind of imagine.

A big transformation in all the materials
that go into making an architecture and

to think about a sort of bucolic
image like this actually is a network

a network of information a network of
a college e a network of certain materials

that obviously sort of have
a relationship with one another.

And this is was the kind of beginning for
us for

a project that we recently completed
in Germany for the soft house.

We want to prize working
with a very fantastic

engineering team in Germany and

our project was to participate in the
international building exhibit which is

one of architecture's oldest and
most venerable.

Explorations of urban culture that
take the form of a bill to work so

everybody in the EVA and there were many
international architects was commissioned

to build a built work which
is now being lived in.

So with the soft house we imagined
a kind of a transformation of

the time scales of the House and of
the infrastructure we imagined a very very

simple base that could be used for working
you could have your office in here where

you could rent it out as another apartment
and then a very simple two story block and

generating electricity on site
with a kinetic facade and

distributing that in the form of curtains
and in the form of curtain tracks so

this we make these very kind of kind of
dumb simple videos to kind of explain to

ourselves what it is that
we're we're trying to do and.

I think it has to play through
forgive me one second.

Yeah you can see that that the twisters
are moving to the east and

to the west the houses facing south and
as it moves through these various

different patterns are made from this
very very simple kind of facade idea that

user interface and
that movement as this tracks the sun

will be the thing that will actually kind
of produce the affectation of the facade

so that this one building has many
different ways of looking and

being depending on where the sun is and
whether people are are opening or

closing the sun for views So
our proposal was to actually

try to create an active house
a house that was networked and

that was responsive to its exterior
environment and at the same time we were

asked to make this housing project
be a certified passive house so

that was a little bit challenging because
we had to meet all of the German passive

house criteria while exploring
this new idea about being active.

So for the construction of the house
we we kind of went back in history and

recovered the idea of all wood
construction which was once very popular

in Germany but after after World War
two in the reconstruction period

Germans moved away from wood and they want
to concrete and they wanted steel and

glass they wanted all of the kind
of material culture of modernism So

we proposed a kind of a revival of
this very simple technique where you

take soft wood stack it up and
then you take a hard wood peg and

you peg join these panels and as you
put the hardwood in soft wood there's

a bio joint a bio reactive joint that
forms naturally and locks tight and

there are no screws and
no glues in the system it can

be one hundred percent recall recycled and
it sequesters of course a ton.

Carbon because it's solid wood you
can see the four units on a truck

can be made very locally by
smaller entrepreneurs and

manufacturers which I think is
important so you need less factory work

comes to the site gets arrested relatively
quickly and all of the materials in this

architecture were kind of materials taken
from that natural network this is the.

Insulation material which is
a a sheep's wool material.

So I want to talk a little bit about
the interior of the soft house the image

you can see the twister's these
are harvesting energy and

inside there is a way in which that
onsite energy actually can move

into the house a long curtain tracks and
these yellow objects that you see here

represent represent the curtains so

I'm going to spend a little bit of time on
this you can see that we developed a way

of dislocating the infrastructure
because when your wall is solid

you have to completely rethink the wall
and when an architect rethinks the wall

a sensually that's a very big very
significant cultural shift so

we migrated all of the electricity out
of the wall and made it configurable and

put it on the ceiling on this is actually
not a power inverter it's just the power

connection to the to the twister's
that you can see outside here and

this is all direct current power D.C.
power so

no need to have those losses by by
converting the power into AC or into

a higher voltage and you actually gained
about fifteen percent more from your solar

investment according to bureau
happy who were our engineers so

this is a little weird for me but

I'm going to show you people living inside
this off house this is their bird house.

And it's kind of strange for an architect
who has made an experimental project

to kind of actually see how
the place is inhabited.

You can see the light well down to
the lower floor these people are cooking.

They are using their downstairs
as a kind of a kitchen and

their office is on the second floor and
there they are and

in a minute you'll see how they kind
of move the curtains to make space

going from a traditional curtain
to a kind of a privacy curtain

that gathers around their bed and

then you'll see here the twister
is these this is a marine

technology it's a both winch that
we used on the servo drive and

this little time lapse piece just shows
the way in which this is constantly

tracking east to west as well as north and
south so

to my knowledge it's really the first soft
two axis solar solar tracking system.

So I have two more projects I'm going to
show them very quickly I want to talk

about this idea of a network and make
this may be a little bit more political.

About how elements of
the nature like wind or

currents or water can become
actors in an architecture how

an architecture might
actually give voice to.

Elements of nature.

And this is a project in in Manhattan
the East River public ferry

terminal we did this with the New York
City Economic Development Corporation

the Department of Transportation and parks
and so this is a kind of very hard core

client group if you will for innovation.

I won't say innovation adverse But unlike.

This was not a group that saw to make

changes really in the in the ferry system
so the first thing that was interesting

about the site was that we realized
that there is an enormous S.Q.

ery right here to the north and the
flushing that kind of movement of water

through Todd's on the East River out
to the Bay and back is one of the key

things that keeps the fresh water
system around Manhattan healthy.

So that in this project we tried
to reveal and express that and

we were fortunate enough to be able
to tie into a G.P.S. system and

to tie into a number of Internet and

and passenger way finding digital
layers digital networks that

are sort of ambient in the city and
even though these digital

layers are very present
at the site it is also.

You know it is also a part of nature
of because there is no outside anymore

you have wild nature as much as you have
you have wild nature as much in the city

as you would have an urban ism in what
you might consider to be wild nature so

what we did is we thought about
the direction of the water moving and

I'm sorry this is so light but
you'll see that water is is moving

the current moves at a certain speed and
that speed changes according to the tide.

And then when ferry boats arrive and
people move through the system

we wanted to kind of be able to see or
record those flows as well so

there's sort of two ideas the movement of
the movement movement of the water and

the movement of the people on the ferry
station has been very very popular and

has catalyzed quite a bit of development
in that in the area and you can see.

The levy systems here which are located
in these large day lighting wells and

these L.E.D.S.
are programmed to reflect the movement

of the of the of the water you're probably
not going to be able to see this video and

see a little better this is how
that is done you can see the speed

how it hits the L.E.D.S. and you'll
see some purple scratches in a minute

that's the kind of energy that's put into
the system when people walk through it so

just with a very simple device a circle of
light we can begin to give voice to a much

more complicated natural phenomenon.

This is the last project I want to
talk about it's also on a river

odds on a big river as
well on the Amazon River

the portable light project
is a nonprofit research and

design project that we've been
involved with for for quite some time.

And I'm going to focus right now
where that brown dot is in Brazil so

we're going to be talking
today about loose support.

Which is the Brazilian implementation
of the portable light project.

And we're working actually on two rivers

points in the host which
are very very important.

River branches from the Brazilian Amazon.

So this is a very simple idea about DI
materializing infrastructure and instead

of making it furniture like like the soft
House actually making a portable system

we're thinking about the materiality
of photovoltaics these are three I.G.S.

panels and we did not invent their
technology this technology but

we did invent this way
of harvesting all or

actually five of these
in a single panel so

in a way we tricked I think it's fair
to say we tricked global solar when

they sold us one panel we actually were
able to use it for five different thing.

Five different panels from the way
that we had them wire it for us so

that made it much more affordable for
us and this is the basic kit

these are the flexible solar panels we
have a very simple high brightness L.N.B.

we have a button on off we have a U.S.B.
port and you can charge a cell phone so

it's as simple as that a very small
increment of power that's used to provide

renewable light and charge a cell phone
but the interesting thing is that this

entire kit that that I just showed you can
be integrated in this can be integrated

into a textile and in the portable light
project in Brazil we looked at how

those textiles could be adapted to local
textiles that were available in Brazil and

made by a team of local Sowers So

this is a very ambitious project we
did this with the I be and also E.P.

which is an electrical utility company in
Brazil and we're really trying to question

the distribution the distribution
the prevalent distribution.

Patterns in manufacturing which
are primarily east to west so usually when

things come to Brazil like batteries more
solar panels they come from China and

we are trying to think about something
it would be a little bit less carbon

intensive there would be a hub South Paolo
there would be a short light up and

then we have the solar panels made
in sun we've put COSI in Mexico and

they arrive to build lend the Amazon
port on so it's a north south

kind of Southern American
manufacturing chain.

These are the sites that you can see here
where we have portable light villages

pilot villages on the Amazon working I
think with thirteen different villages.

And then this is the kind of set up.

It's much more urban than you might think
you think about the Amazon is kind of

a place where from from Hollywood where
anacondas are and things like that and

actually this is one of the most rapidly
developing areas in all of Brazil which is

of course a big big problem and there
are all kinds of materials like Styrofoam

kerosene that that don't mix well with
water and they don't mix well with people

so the portable light project is
really about replacing the kind of

fossil fuel based lighting
with a flexible and

adaptable light that can be folded
flat and bent up into shape and

used and what was interesting about
this project was that we worked with

which is a Makers of women's makers group
here and they created all of the portable

light textiles for these women here
in the north who are the users so for

the first time you have
the producers of energy and

the users of energy who are benefiting and

this is the actual shape of
the kit that is flat here

folds just to this footprint and then
opens out like this is a reflector and

you can see these women beginning
to learn how to fold up and

use the portable light kids and
what became interesting was the sort of

unpredictable power that became
local when you could charge a cell

phone anywhere in the forest or
on the river and also have some light and

one of the things that emerged were
a series of workshops using mapping

we used MIT's public labs mapping
which is a free software which allows

people to make very high resolution
aerial photography by hoisting

their charge cell phones up with
a kite and that aerial photography

is used by the local people to
prove that they own that land and

also to keep track of their.

Their small.

Agricultural business is this is
the president of one community and

she's photographing her or her B B
enterprise she has a honey enterprise and

then she can use various different free
software like can around the cone so

forth to get to geo locate those images
and for example show the Brazilian

government what is happening on the ground
so that she can continue to get her

green green grants which
are important to these people so

for economic development portable light
is being tested in these communities and

I just would draw your attention to
this kind of network where we have

the the vehicles like physical movement
we have all of these different

things cashews be fishing
sustainable fishing and so forth and

portable light and
that you can go by boat go to the NGOs

center download your information
from your cell phone and

with this week of open source
free apps and free software

begin to develop the rights
to your own property which is

necessary and wasn't been able had
been able to have been done before so

we're trying to close that gap between
the kind of global view of the network and

what happens on on the ground thank you.

Thanks.