Transcript
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Presenta a la ponente y sitúa el interés por su trabajo, destacando la experimentación material y el contexto de Bahréin. La autora introduce los tres ejes de su exposición: sitio, materia y gesto.
Speaker A
Are free.We have maybe 15, 20 minutes for talk, for questions at the end, but let us know,
Speaker B
you
Speaker A
know what, how are you doing?So, everybody, welcome to this extraordinary opportunity to hear the Anna Holpa whose work has just sort of exploded, I think, in the States in particular.
I'm aware that in Europe and other parts of the world, your work was more well known than it's suddenly become in the United States.I mean, there's a couple of reasons for that, I think, as you'll see right away.One is that this kind of remarkable material experimentation and material to constructional experimentation that we talk a lot about in the States, but never seems to happen, although it seems to happen in other places in the world.The kind of radical consequences of that are pretty astonishing in Anna's work.The second is where a lot of the work is being done, which is Bahrain, which is, you know, it's just off of our radar screen.
It really is really quite astonishing.I remember at first seeing the buildings going, these are where they're where and how.And then.So I think that's its own fascinating story.So with no further ado, I think the work's going to speak for itself.We're thrilled to have you here, Ane.Thank you so much.And with no further ado, let's get this rolling.And if you were in person here, as in Mexico, you would hear applause.Now you're just going to hear silence, but you're going to see hands moving at least here.
So let's get this rolling.And thank you again for joining us.
Speaker B
Thank you, David, for the kind introduction.Let me share the screen.
Here we are.Share up.
Yeah.This is visible.
Yep.Yeah.So I prepared a talk for this evening to explain, let's say, the motivations behind the work and the process of working the way, how we develop the work.And it resolves around three key understandings, sight, matter and gesture, that are quite interrelated, as you will see in the talk.
Explica su enseñanza en ETH Zurich y el enfoque del estudio Material Gesture, donde la arquitectura surge de la investigación material. Muestra ejemplos con textiles, paisajes volcánicos, aguas termales y colaboraciones interdisciplinarias.
Speaker B
I thought, yeah, here we are.
I thought I start with what I do as a professor of architecture at ETH in Zurich in Switzerland, where I have been teaching now for a couple of years.What we started as a studio called Material Gesture, and we have added sight to that understanding as well.And here you see one of the studio outcomes.This was a semester on textile.What we do in material gesture is, let's say, we develop the architecture solely from a material investigation and the techniques of working a material, the techniques of sourcing material, the techniques, let's say, of.
Working with a material and that this informs basically everything of the architecture.So its form, its way, how it is constructed, etc.So there is not so much of another assignment in it.Besides that we have let's say each semester a topic, a kind of topic.So.
So this was a topic on textile, as we were in a full pandemic mode and we thought ISO textile is one of the most adoptive materials, adaptive materials.So we can, you know, students can work from anywhere.
So that is a material that is very much bound to the history of architecture.If you has read Gottfried Semper, for instance, on the origins of architecture, textile is there key.And the outcome of this studios is always model based, very large models.We work in a very old scale.One is 15.
It's basically the biggest we can work to have the most material performance.
We I show you two semesters.One is called Sites.This was taking place in Kyushu island, which is a southern island of Japan, a volcanic island.And we worked with, let's say, the gestures of a volcanic landscape.So of a.
Of a landscape that is in geological terms, super fast moving and super fast changing and even, let's say we can witness that well ourselves.And when we visited the island, the volcano was very active, so it was spitting ashes and fumes all day long.We couldn't go very close to the crater because of its very strong activity.And that was maybe also the main interest to be in a landscape that is very much bound to change.And how to work with that.
How can we use this phenomena, let's say, in working with architecture.
For that, one of the key sources was Michael Heitze.Well, I don't have to explain to you who is Michael Heitze, as we are here in an American context.But what I find really beautiful is what Michael Heitze explained when he bought a property in Nevada, that he bought a property purely for its material reservoir.So that all the raw materials that are basically there were at his.Were at his availability.
It could just source them directly and work with them to produce the work with.And I thought that's very.A very beautiful understanding in the sense that when we talk about site, when we talk about a place, the place for our architecture is that we always talk about at least two places because we also need to source our building materials.And how can the sourcing of material and the construction that we then construct most of the time at another place, how can these be linked?And that was what one of the underlying questions in this development of site.
So here you see a few of the photos of the trip we did of the landscape, the onsens, the very strong mineral presence in this onsens or in this clay bath here we see sulfur, an old sulfur quarry and limmerlite, a very iron rich clay soil.Here up close we have always, we invite a lot of experts.This were Japanese professor that explained us the chemistry behind what we were looking at.
And in Beppu, here on the left, cooking based on the thermal activities.So the hot water that is used, hot steam that is used directly to cook with.And you see the beautif century old deposits of minerals that have set in this kitchen over time.Research of course on the volcanic activities on the Azo sun, but also let's say our more ancient relationships with the landscape.We went to a Buddhist temple where they worship certain rocks and mountains.
And a very recent landslide that caught our way.And here's a project by Anna, who uses the water that comes from the hot springs by 120 degrees Celsius.So I don't know what it is in Fahrenheit, but very hot cooking water, let's say.And how this in Asian techniques was used to let it drip off a bamboo mast to cool down and use for different uses in the, in the thermal bath.And she made a kind of research in how to lead that water not over the traditional bamboo, but over a kind of membrane that could be the roof of a place, a kind of textile shaped roof.
And through this roof strategic points would drip down and would create different kind of temperatures in the baths that were underneath it.Another project is, I go very fast to them just to give you a kind of understanding how we, how we work in these things.Joel, who worked with the sedimentation as I showed you in the, in the old kitchen in Beppo, and how in an architecture this could use as a kind of time recording, as a kind of patination that sets quite quick and in a few months would result in a kind of heavy mineral setting, let's say on its structure.
And another student, Sandra, who worked with the tide differences in the seasonal tide differences, let's say in a hot spring, a very iron rich, as you can see by the, by the colors of the red.I think this is called the Spring of Hell, I think because of its high temperature and its red color.And see, nowadays these hot springs are tourist attractions.So they are very much controlled.And the overflow, the natural overflow, seasonal overflow is being controlled by irrigation channels.
And she proposes to have a more natural flow where this overflow in certain seasons takes a larger area around the hot spring and then dries up again.And in this way creates a kind of sedimentation and a coloring pattern over time that we could witness as such.And in this approach, what I very much like in this approach to take certain material conditions and the conditions also of their place, is that we can have a very interdisciplinary approach to this.So, besides the architects, so in this time we had a memorial of Atelier Bauer with Alex Lehner, a Swiss architect, Anton Gazia Beryl from Ensemble Studio.But we also have, let's say, professor in geochemistry and petrology, or we have artists or structural engineers, geothermal sciences, etc.
To have a very specialized understanding of the material, the materials or the.The kind of condition of materials that we are interested in.
Pasa a su práctica personal y a cómo empezó a pensar la arquitectura desde procesos artísticos, el azar y los dibujos espontáneos. Presenta un proyecto de museo en los Países Bajos donde el paisaje se convierte literalmente en plano arquitectónico.
Speaker B
At our understanding and research into it.And not necessarily directly in that sense, an architectural application, but that the architectural application or that the possibility of, let's say, how to work with it in architecture is being discovered through our engagement as architects.It another project was stone, very, you could say, very classic building material.Where we had three sites.One of the sites was a knife quarry in Switzerland in Pfals.
And the two other sites were the Carrera Mountains in Italy, where the Carrera marble is sourced, and a site in Jodhpur in India with a redstone quarry to have very distinct size and distinct histories and specialisms of quarrying and working the stone.And one project was by Arturo, who researched the very large monolithic stone quarrying in ancient Egypt.And here you see an unfinished obelisk which was cut out directly out of the rock in its overall shape.And then this one is unfinished as it is still in its original quarrying position, which makes it very beautiful.To research how the ancient Egyptians have been able to move extremely large sizes of stone.
And his idea was to work with the marks and the way how stone has to be queried to produce the largest one piece stone work he could imagine.
And that dealt with the fact of the diamond wiring, diamond wire cutting in three dimensions.So to be able also to hollow out in a way this one piece of stone to reduce weight and directly define with that hollowing out a kind of spatial condition for the architecture.And another one, a couple of students, a duo, worked on scagiola, which is an ancient Italian technique about mimicking stone, not by painting it, but really by mixing pigments in mineral, often gypsum, lime based material that then is carefully arranged, that it looks like stone.And the beauty of it is that you are not bound to a certain dimension of stone.That comes for querying.
So you can make a stone that is endlessly big in a way, and that's continuous as one large drawing, one spatial drawing through space.
This, in short, as an introduction to what we do, what I do as a professor in the.In the teaching.And now I will explain a bit how this works in my own.In my own practice.When I started off in 2009, which was like five years after my graduation in architecture, after I graduated, I worked for these five years for an artist, mainly with the reason that I actually didn't want to become an architect.But I thought I would be better off as an artist.And one day I found out in a conversation with the artist I was working for that he said, it's fine to become an artist, but you should realize no one is asking you this.You know, there is no.There's no question for this.You could just start.
Which made me rethink my relationship actually with architecture and what I could consider that architecture could be.That became the main question and that I called.For a long time, I called that a possible architecture because I was studying, I was looking into processes, or let's say, ways of how art was, how.How artists would start a work, how artists would.What was the.
The leading processes in defining their works.Rather, I was much more interested in that than in.In the outcome of the.Of the work itself as a final end result.And one of these things was chance that I discovered in artists from the Dadaist period amongst Jean Arp, for instance.
So I started making these drawings, this kind of pencil drawings, this very.You know, the druddles you make when you're having a phone call or when you are in a boring lecture, you know, they are unconscious drawings in a way.They do not directly depict something.And for me, I was very much interested in these kind of drawings, to discover them almost directly as a kind of plan for architecture without having a program or any other definition to define a plan with.So here, you see, I was filling in one of these drawings as a plan for a small house.
And these drawings were also done in a variety of ways.Inkblot drawings, as you can see here, drawings that are made basically within a few seconds with a big brush on paper, repetitively made hundreds of these kind of drawings.And then I could discover within it an architecture, as you can saw here, the plan.This is the model of that plan.It's a small tower stacked on top of each other.And for me, the relationships the drawing would enable to discover and as space, the spatial Relationships within.Within its plan, but also between the inside and the outside were.Were, let's say, were method of this discovering possibilities, rather than I had preconceived ideas on what this relationship should be about.And that for me was very much a joy, as the process of working.
Would be, let's say, taking a journey without knowing where your destiny is.And that is a very, for me was a very liberating, a very exciting process.And here you see some of these things.Most of my projects at that time were either art commissions within art institutes.So there was anyways, a lot of freedom to take in the way in what would be made out of it.
This is the interior of a temporary exhibition space.And then I had a first commission, or it started off as a competition, which was a competition for a museum, for an UNESCO heritage site in the Netherlands.An old defense fortress of the 18th, 19th century.And they gave me this beautiful map of a part of this fortress where they had scheduled the new museum with an eroded landscape.With a landscape that was not its original state, but its current state of nature that has taken over and has formed and eroded ground bodies.
And I thought it would be interesting to take the drawing of that landscape literally as the blueprint for the architecture.So here you see the landscape view as it is a building that is built under the ground the same way as the fortress is built under the ground.So we see just the two courtyards, but you see how the lines of the architecture are literally defined by the height line drawing, which is of course an annotation way of drawing a landscape, but nevertheless one to one in its.In its relationship.So I would just copy the lines.
And then the museum, as you can see on the right is this rectangular volume that on one corner attaches to the existing fortress and captures under the ground all the height lines that we see above the ground.So all the different curvatures of the walls are formed actually by the.By the landscape drawing.And what happens with that kind of approach is that there is an architecture that.Here you see the two walls of the enclosing walls of the two courtyards is an architecture that very much embeds itself within its landscape.
The high differences are small height differences in the Netherlands, but nevertheless significant for the Netherlands.And where the landscape goes up, literally the architecture follows it.And then there is a central courtyard that has a large, very large architectural model of a part of the Dutch landscape with its rivers and dikes and polders, and shows the way how the defense mechanism used to work.And the architecture Is our spaces under the ground with windows through this court charts that have everywhere a different curvature, different curvatures of the walls from.
And everything follows basically that that curvature sort of windows, the glass in it, everything is.Is morphed to this and follows as a kind of enormous constraints the curvatures of this landscape.It was always a project very easy to explain to all, everyone involved, and extremely difficult to make since there's no system in it.There's no engineering thought behind it.It's purely following the gesture of the drawing from the landscape as its only constraint, but also it's constrained throughout.
Describe la complejidad constructiva del museo y cómo el encofrado, el vaciado y el acabado manual hacen visible el proceso de obra. También introduce su interés por interconectar material, construcción y lugar.
Speaker B
And the beauty of it is that the light to all these different curvatures falls differently inside the spaces and is ever changing, as we can see here.And that when you walk under.When you walk in this museum and you're under the ground, you have all this kind of strange corners as a kind of fragments, puzzle pieces in a way that link one space to the other.
And when I was.When we were constructing this building, this was for me also the first time I had a full construction under my supervision and my responsibility.I was lucky enough to have a client that believed in that, that I should do that.And I was also my engineering interest to think this project throughout, it's all casted on site in concrete without any dilatations, because of the.
Heritage, the archaeological heritage, because the site was also an archaeological heritage site.So we could not make any pole foundations.So we need to make one big massive building that would lay by itself on the ground, which made it very, very complicated.And then there was a form work, of course, that had to follow this curvatures of the landscape everywhere, specifically.So that was quite a tour of which to make.But what for me, the most interesting part of the construction was that I had carefully traced this form and had drawn this in all the.On the building construction drawings.But when we cast concrete, what we actually are building, what we actually are constructing is the formwork.And that the formwork leaves defines in a way, with its imprint, the concrete.So the concrete is a fluid material when we cast it and sets and hardens.
And in that process, we need to contain it.So we contain it with a formwork.And that formwork became my interest.And also that the casting off is a process.It's not something what we draw in architecture school as something that is fixed and defined and more or less shows a certain kind of end image of it.
But that actually it's a process in which we can intervene a lot as architects during a process of making and how this intervention can be used throughout and can be of a potential to define also the architecture for that.One of the.No, actually the first project I did in Bahrain was an extension of an old post office that had to be rehabilitated, renovated and also extend it to stay as the main post office in Bahrain.And what I did with that extension was to after the casting of the concrete to let it be hand chiseled throughout so that we don't.We have in a way a very lengthy process of working on the.On the building itself rather than on something that was defined by a drawing that, that interested me.So the building and the hand chiseling is.Is a very simple but a very laborious act.
So basically there's a small pickle and a small hammer and then you tap into the concrete step by step by step.So that took a few months to get this kind of pattern.
And I was mainly interested in it.Besides the beauty of the surface, it creates that a process of working in a way is recorded in the architecture and is made visible in the architecture.And that kind of understanding that let's say what is produced, what is a process of making and what is produced at the place is something that I'm exploring at large.
Relaciona el trabajo con las condiciones de Bahréin, el uso de materiales locales y la influencia de sitios arqueológicos y paisajes minerales. Explica el desarrollo de piezas moldeadas en arena, aluminio y vidrio para distintos proyectos.
Speaker B
And how, let's say also how we can interlink the sourcing of material, the construction at the place to construct a building, how these things can be interwoven.Here you see on the left the Tuik Mountains, which is the.
The base let's say of the valleys that are the region of Riyadh of the capital of Saudi Arabia, where we do now a project as I will end my talk with.I will show you a bit of this where we are now and you see here a sand site just of plain sand.Often a building site looks at the start, looks like this.And for me the interest is how this construction at a place by taking its material that is already, that is already there.We see here in Bahrain this is a burial mound on the left side, this is of the Dohmen period.
So this is a few thousand years before Christ.So these are like 5000 year old erections by the Dohmen civilization as a way to bury their ancestors.And the beauty is that it is basically material taken from its place and remodeled and placed in a different form to make this kind of mound of material.And on the other photo, on the aerial photo I took one of my first visits to Bahrain, I took from the airplane.This is land reclamation on coral banks which is basically taking sand from the sea bottom and put it on top to create new land.And both are constructions that you could, say, deal directly with the material presence and its possibility to construct on the same place.
Another for me, very important source is Petra.This is in Jordan.These are also grave tombs that are made by the Nabataeans 2,000 years ago, roughly.And these are photos taken by Bas Printer, a photographer that I have been collaborating a lot with.And what I find very beautiful is that the architecture here is not so much of a construction, but more like a sculptural act.So it's material taken out of.It's sculpted out of the mountain.So the mountain here is the direct material presence, material reservoir that is sculpted by honing, by cutting out to define architecture with beautiful interior spaces, as you can see here, where we can see the coloring of the stone much more strongly.Very simple, basic kind of spaces.And then in the 2000 years, how that architecture has been eroded again because of the soft limestone rock.
So you see this kind of variations between natural form and artificial form.Man made form without being able to draw a very clear division line between these two.And I started working with that kind of interest.And this was the first project I did already in 2011 in the Netherlands, where I started casting directly on the ground, puddles of concrete, pigmented concrete, that then are formed by its small topography of that landscape.So that form is not defined at all by me, but by the landscape and directly within a material.So without any translation through drawings that I had done in the past.But that matter is formed by another matter in a way that it is a cast of one material on another material.
And this is a method that we use now.We are exploring quite a lot throughout different projects and in different materials.
And my interest in one of the things that I find very that appeals to me is that we describe often for this project, a method of casting, rather than we make a precise drawing of what the elements or the result should be like.So the result is often given out in a way to the contractor and his team, and therefore creates also quite a bit of unexpected results.And it is a method that is very efficient in a way, because we cast these things directly on the building site.That is one of the things that I very much like of being here in Bahrain, that we have no vegetation on the ground where we have the mineral presence.I mean, in Texas you also have that.
There you have this kind of direct, bare, minimal presence as a landscape in which we can.Which they can directly work.So we work with hardly no Formwork, very minimal formwork, and the materials directly produced on it.And then my first test for this were these models which are called batra.Batra is related to Petra, is Arabic for honing, for cutting, for cutting out of rock.
And you see here that you have then a recording of the rough side of the landscape side with the traces of the digging with the traces that the sand and the different heights leaves as an imprint in it.And we see the pouring side.So we see a material that has solidified and is casted over time.
And you have a perimeter that is not rectangular, but you have something that is more or less freely formed.So you have this kind of all this formal, formal gestures in a way to be able to work with, rather than you have something that is a clearly defined form, for instance, in the plan or something like that.So these are things that are produced without any drawing.They're produced by a definition of how much material, more or less the size, etc.And that's it.
Here you see your first kind of architecture that I formed within model with it again, a photo by a bus printer.And here we do that.
We started doing this work in different materials.We do the casting in metals, mainly in aluminium or aluminum, as you say, also in glass.We do this casting methods.Very interestingly, when you change the material, the whole specialism of being able to produce something changes radically.So the method of forming a material on a mineral granular material is as an idea, the same.
But the way how to be able to cast is creates all kind of new of defines all kind of new researches of how that is then possible to do and different specialisms to be involved in.For instance, here we see the aluminium aluminum casting that we did, which is basically always a holocaust.Everything that is cast in metal is a holocaust, because otherwise you would have an enormous mass of material that would be very heavy.But also the thermal differences by such a material, such a body of material to cool down would be extreme and would crack gigantically.So you cast always hollow.So any sculpture that you see or that you have destroyed in the recent times are hollow sculptures.If you knock on them, you hear a hollow sound.And therefore that you need to make two molds, an inner and an outer mold.
And the molds are for larger castings, always sound sand is chemically bound together, or in the past would have been bound together with any kind of sticky material, from sugar, molasses I saw in India, to clay kind of grounds, or these kind of things.But the principle is always that the mold is and that after the casting, you can break it and you open up and then you have the metal, the sculpture that you want to take out.
So there is this kind of.And what we did was we use sand also as a base to form its base form with.So you have this kind of doubling in the.In the sand presence.And here you see on the right, an aluminium cast that we made as shutters for windows and the main door of a building, the Green Corner building here in Bahrain.
And here you see another one in glass that we are working with.I show you in a bit.And by.
Profundiza en el edificio Green Corner, donde las piezas de aluminio y hormigón registran el paisaje y la variación del proceso. Aborda los retos estructurales de trabajar con masas irregulares y la colaboración con ingenieros.
Speaker B
Also by the material differences also, the performances, of course, are very different.
This is the entrance door of that green corner building I was referring to.And since the aluminum cast of the metal cast in general is a hollow cast, you will have the, say, the print of the landscape, the print of the sand as a positive form in it.But also you have its hollow form.So you have the negative of that landscape on the other side of it.And we use that in a way that when you approach this building, you approach the hollowness, the negative of it as the.
As the entrance door.And on the right side you see the shutters.Because this is a building where its purpose is to store art in.And to do art restoration for paperworks.Since that is a very light, it's very sensitive for light.
We made the shutters in front of the windows that you can close and in a way block out the light.And now I will explain a bit about the building, but maybe.Oh, yeah, sorry.I wanted to show you also.This is that what we define as formwork is where an element in a way stops.
So where the perimeter is, which then in a three dimensional material, form becomes a kind of section of it.
And for me, in this kind of cast really evokes even more strongly the idea of a fragment of a landscape.But for me, these are real fragments of landscapes as they are taken as directly as formed by an imprint of a part of landscape.But they also like miniature landscapes, like models of landscapes.We can easily imagine mountains and valleys on this aluminum cast that you see here.But these sites, they also help because they are the ones that have a precise definition.
And in that sense we can easily stack them.So this is the site of this Green Corner building.It's a four story building where we use the concrete as a.As a complete, as a structural material as well.So that is basically its main structure that defines and holds up the building.
And here we see it here with a bit more distance and all these concrete elements are directly casted next to it on the building site itself.And then after it's cured, placed into the building.And also the floor slabs are done in the same way.And in that sense, we have all different times and all different acts of moving around that sand on the building site as a recording of its own process of construction.So we see all its variations.
And if you look at every single element, some elements might be more beautiful than other elements.Some are more strongly pronounced, some are very more flat.
But that's, in a way, the joy of it, that there is no repetition in it, but that every element in that, by the definition of making, is different.You see also here on the ground floor and on the left picture, the entrance door that is open in this photo.
And inside, the floor slabs, as I said, are also casted on the ground.So it gives this kind of ceiling, because at the ceiling, we don't mind if it has a relief.And the floor then extends the top of that ceiling.That is a flat concrete.And you see here the window shutters that we can slide in front of the windows to block out the light.
And this is the building in full facade.
It's very.It was.It sounds simple to construct, but for the structural engineering was quite a complicated question.Because in a way, as an engineer, you don't want to deal with uncertainty.And here there was a big uncertainty in the sense that we do not know how the mass distribution is per element.
And therefore we have difficulties in calculating how the forces will develop, how we have to reinforce with steel, these elements.So we came to certain kind of rules how to define, how to deal with uncertainty in the structural engineering.One of these rules was that we do not define the mass distribution, but we define the total mass, for instance, So a total amount of concrete for a certain size of elements as well.It was one of the things.
How to incorporate, let's say, this kind of uncertainty.And I work with all of these projects with one structural engineer, which is called Mario Monotti, Swiss engineer, that we have a lot of joy in finding out, in a way, new principles for structural calculations because of the nature of the building design, of the architecture.
Presenta un proyecto de souk y luego el nuevo instituto de arte en Riad, ambos basados en técnicas de moldeo y en el uso de bordes naturales. Explica cómo el vidrio fundido, la excavación en el terreno y la luz controlada definen el edificio.
Speaker B
This to show you another project which is a similar way, but where we actually used the natural material as a border rather than as a surface.
So we have, in a way, when you go to a stone quarry and the blocks are cut, what I find always really beautiful is that we still have this natural perimeter.Or when you slice a tree trunk, in part, you would have this Natural perimeter that George Nakashima used so beautifully in his furniture.
We use just.We basically have a flat base formwork, a table in which we just put sand to the side to define the ends of it.And that are the building elements of a souk which is kind of traditional shopping mall.You could say an Arab, Middle Eastern.In the Middle east we call that a shug.This kind of traditional shopping streets that we can then that we have.We use this kind of differences in the elements to define architecture with.And these are things that we didn't know.You know, all of these forms are defined on the building site itself.
So you can see here, and this is a new building in bigger parts that we did the renovation or the rehabilitation of.So this basically restructures or completes the old streets morphology of this area.And here you see it together with the old shops, the new building are also shops, but at the.Of the photographs they were not yet taken.So now we have, on both sides we have the offerings available.
And the last project that I wanted to show you to conclude with is a new arts institute that we are constructing in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, where we use this kind of technique to form glass grid by casting glass.I think 90% of the world production of glass is float glass.Float glass is produced anywhere in the world.Also in the US you have a large float glass factories.Float glass is on a tin bath is a very fast production method of glass.
But therefore glass, you can only get it in a maximum thickness of like 2 1/2 centimeter, which is more or less 1 inch.I would say that's the thickness of glass.In a way.What you can get.If you want to have thicker, you need to cast glass, which means that you melt grains of glass in a formwork and then let it cure very slowly over time.Because you need to.If you, if you, if you cool down glass too fast, it will completely crack with all the tensions that will develop in it.So you do it very slowly and for already for like a 12 centimeter.So what is that, like four or five inches thick glass piece.It would take around five weeks in an oven to cool down.
And the thicker it goes, the more exponential the cooling down period in an oven is.And it really means the piece stays within an oven.And computerized cooling down happens within that oven.I don't know if you ever saw a work by the artist Ronnie Horne that made his big glass sculptures.I think these glass sculptures, which can be like a meter thick, probably have been in an oven for like five, six months to cool, to cool down.
So to understand a little bit the absolute intensity or what it is to work with glass, but what is also really beautiful, it's one of our oldest materials.We can also observe obsidian stone, for instance, which is a natural glass that we can find in nature.And we use that.We use the casting of glass again in a kind of granular material on which we cast it.And that granular material has an effect that the glass piece becomes not transparent anymore, but becomes a kind of diffracted surface.
And it diffracts the light in it.So the light doesn't go straight through in a way to a flat glass plane, but diffuses in the glass plane.And that's exactly what.What I want to use in the conditions of an art institute, where we have a space that is all around glass, but it's in a way like a light machine, where the different times of a day, the different conditions of the lights, the way how the lights from which direction the light comes, the way how the environment is illuminated, all will work as a kind of subdued wall, in a way of the exhibition space, which I think for contemporary art is a very specific condition, a very exciting condition to work with for sculpture, for performances, etc.And then when there is the need of.To block it off, there are textile screens that can be closed to control the light even more.
And that building is built in the escarpment of a body.As I explained when I showed you the two IQ Mountains.
The valley is a kind of dry river valley with an escarpment of.Around at the place where we work, of 30 meters height that we make a cutout in a kind of Michael height double negative cut out in the landscape to provide space for this building.And this building is then freestanding within this excavation with the idea that it gives shade, partly shade to the building.It gives also, it shows very strongly its mineral presence in a way, what we are working on the site.And that is also what we use as directly as an imprint to form the glass width that we construct this.
This building with.The nice thing also what I. I didn't explain is that because we cast glass in this kind of thicknesses, we can use it structurally.So the.The glass will carry this whole glass facade will.Will carry itself over the whole length of the facade.
And here you see a last photo.How that building is sticking within the wadi.On top of it will be a city development, which is called Misk City, which is all about a development about educational institutes and Cultural institutes.And you see on the right, the bottom of the wadi with the desert trees and the end of the museum.
Comienza la sesión de preguntas con dudas sobre el vidrio en climas cálidos y la sostenibilidad de los materiales. Responde explicando estrategias pasivas, doble fachada, reducción de cargas térmicas y el uso de materiales locales.
Speaker B
And with that, I wanted to end my presentation for this evening or for your mornings.
Speaker A
Thank you so much.I think maybe if you have time.
Speaker B
Yes.
Speaker A
First of all, it's going to take a few minutes for students who have not seen your work for them to unblow their minds a little bit in order to get questions ready.But maybe if you could unshare and we could turn faces on for people in the Zoom talk.
Speaker B
Here we are.
Speaker A
So those of you who are in the Zoom Talk, I'd really be grateful if you would at least turn your, turn your screens on and then let's just do a kind of virtual round of applause here.Very sweet.
So I think let's.Let me open this.I have obviously have my own questions, but let's open this up to questions and then I'll try to manage Orion.If you have questions coming in from the live stream, that'd be really great.But let's open this up to questions.
Dana,
Speaker C
Hello, good afternoon or good evening.I would like to ask one question, two questions in fact, starting with the last project in ksa.
Wasn't there a problem that the project was made out of glass in a climate like Saudi Arabia?Okay.It's a very beautiful project and coming from an area here, we're in Lebanon and 100 Days of Sunshine and we have.When we have a project like that with glass, it's kind of problematic.
That's my first question.
Should I ask the second one now?
Speaker A
Sure.Yes.
Speaker C
Okay.The second one was when you showed us the projects that are carved in the stone, like Petra and stuff.And you showed you focused on the stone thing.
I thought that you were focusing on like, say like the carving of the stone.Of course we're not going to go back to the idea of Petra going back and carving a project within the stone and climbing in a mountain.But I thought that you're going to focus on, let's say like quarrying from the nearby sites.Like for example, in KSA they've got these beautiful mountains of granite or something and building projects.The idea of your concrete is amazing.It's beautiful.It's the first time I've seen something like this.But you're kind of mimicking stone in order to create concrete that's carved out of, out of real life stone.The problem with that is actually sustainability, carbon emissions, the carbon footprint and all of that.Have you really thought about the sustainable factor of your Design other than the design factor, which is okay design and this thing is very nice.
But if you had really quarried from the stones available in the area, would it have been better?Thank you.
Speaker B
Yeah, so thank you, Dana.
Both questions deal with the concern also of sustainability.And if we do something mindfully in that sense, let's say I live now also for eight years in this region.I'm living in the neighboring country of Saudi Arabia.
And although the conditions are quite different in Bahrain from Saudi, but the conditions of light and temperature are very similar.And I find what I find really what I want to do with this museum is that the specific conditions that we can work with the intensity of light, to use them, you know, not to block them out, but to.To.To use that in this building.
And how did we overcome the negative consequences of it that it also generates a lot of heat is the fact that the building has a double facade.
So there is an inner glass facade, as there is an outer glass facade, which helps to evacuate a lot of the heat because the heat gets actually trapped behind the first glass facade and naturally by chimney effect is evacuated from the building.And another aspect of it is that we place it within, partly within an excavation, which also reduces the heat loads.So at the end we have even we had.We have less heat loads to deal with than if we would have made it a full normal glass facade building.So it's definitely of our concern.
But I think with this kind of solutions, we have found smart solutions in a way to filter out the problem of the heat.But to work with the light that I think for me is essential to use in a kind of specific place as we are working here.
Aclara por qué descartó importar piedra y por qué eligió materiales disponibles en la región, como aluminio y hormigón. Defiende la masa y el espesor como respuestas climáticas útiles en contextos desérticos.
Speaker B
The idea of the stone actually for the souk building I showed you, the first idea was to make a building in natural stone.And I started looking in the region and ended up in Egypt as a place where we built even a one to one mock up of this building fully in stone, completely structural stone, including its roofs.But then I started to become very unhappy with the fact that we have to transport all of this stone from Egypt to Bahrain.And somehow didn't feel right to me to import a material that maybe looks very natural, is very.
Is a lot of.It would take an enormous amount of transport to be able to.To bring here.
For that same reason, I look also at wood architecture in regions where there's actually not much butch as a supply, as something that is, you know, or in mud in rammed earth building, where we actually do not even have clay presence in the.In the site.
It's these things.They look.They look.
They might look correct, but are not so correct if you consider where.You know, where the building is taking place.So in Bahrain, since it is a.It's a very small country, it has very limited amount of resources.One of the resources is aluminium or aluminum, since we have here one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world.
So that is a material that I started working with as a local.As a local material that is here.And the other one is concrete.And concrete, yes, for sure, is not ideal.And luckily at the eth, there's interesting research developing in biopolymers as a new binder to replace cement, but the reality is not there yet.
But if you take a concrete construction up to 40 to 45% is in transport and formwork, and that we have dramatically reduced by the casting techniques.So it's maybe not 100% correct.But on the other hand, it improves a lot on the elimination of formwork.What we have done, that's another research, for instance, that has been done in our university as well, is how can we rethink the idea of formwork?
Not in my chair, but in the chair of Grammoje Kohler, they are doing research in very quick setting, concrete, for instance, as a way how to reduce all the waste and energy that is put in formwork itself.So that's another aspect of Edana.
Speaker A
And thank you for this question.I know it's a question that you must get very often, and I appreciate it.I'm going to.Before I let Charlie ask this question, I'm going to ask another question because one of the things this question must come up to all the time, right.You speak everywhere around the world and the automatic response is concrete bad, therefore.But the interesting issue that I wanted to ask you about was about the desire to achieve mass.Right?So it's this very strange thing that you see around the world happening with these very interesting architects who moved away from the idea of lightness to the idea of mass.
And there's very few ways to achieve these kinds of substantial masses.And you spoke of the desire to do it several times.Right.It's just this thing that you want to get right.And it's one of these things that 30 years from now historians will go, yes, the reason all these architects wanted to achieve mass was.
And then they'll give an explanation.But I'm wondering if you yourself could speak briefly about this desire for an almost monumental kind of monolithic mass, which hasn't been seen in architecture.For many, many years.
Speaker B
Yeah, I think let's say in our modern, modern times we were also able to build light and transparent because we were heavily relying on the systems that would support this, the climate systems that would support this, etc.So we could make any kind of climate condition within a building, despite the kind of membrane or the definition of this building.And therefore we were able to do these things before that, of course, we were relying on a very different kind of conditions of living and conditions of space.We would.You know, I grew up in old houses as a child where it would always be freezing cold in the winter, but very nice in the summer because it would still be cold kind of inside of this heavy stone houses.
I try with the buildings that we make.
To simplify in a way, the systems that we need to put in place to make it work.So I look to something that makes it, that keeps a kind of directness and a kind of maybe something that is more archaic in the sense of the understanding of it.
And the mass, the thickness of things have actually had beneficial properties in, in the, in the, in the climate conditions I'm working in here.Since we have never, it never freezes here.We have the lowest temperature that we have here around 18, 20 degrees Celsius in the winter, and we have a lot of heat that we need to work with.And for that we need to insulate our roofs really well against sun loads.We need to minimize the amount of openings and all of these things.
But the mass, the thickness of the walls of the concrete have actually a very positive effect to it.So that works in our, our benefits.
Reflexiona sobre su preferencia por lo grueso, lo pesado y lo monolítico, más allá de la justificación ambiental. Vincula esa elección con la atmósfera, la presencia física y la apertura interpretativa de las superficies.
Speaker B
But why, why do I not like a thin, thin architecture?I think I like.I.
Speaker A
It's not, it's actually not about not liking thin, it's about really, really liking thick, you know,
Speaker B
heavy, heavy.
Speaker A
It's kind of funny because you see it all of a sudden right in.A few architects were interested in this kind of heaviness and I, I completely appreciate the environmental justifications.I, I'm totally on board with that.
But.But there's something else at work.There's some, There's a kind of monumentalism and a kind of that, that, that seems like also a desire that, that.I mean, it may not be able to not be a thing that you're able to say what it is, but I just wondered if you would venture into, into guessing.
Speaker B
No, it has to do with the.
Atmosphere, the kind of feeling it breathes.For me, it's very important to have this process visible, you know, but also the imagination that it evokes.That is all this, these reliefs that they are open for readings.In a way, for me, they are like when I showed you the inkblot drawings at the start of my practice, they were already like this kind of Rorschach drawings that evoke imagination, you know, that they do not its form, its material, but it does not directly represent something or depict something.And for me, that becomes.
In working within the.In a material mass, like also how I can observe a rock is very much present there.And I think that kind of.
This kind of presence of.Of the real presence of material in all its mass and it's.It's.
Yeah.How do I say that?
What I say with the presence is that it really is there.But you have.
It still leaves open for understanding.No, it still leaves open for your way of reading it or you kind of understanding what we are looking at.For me, that's something very to.For me, for something very.To the base of things, to the base of how we as humans work.
No.Or so.Yeah, it's difficult to maybe express.
Responde a una pregunta sobre la apariencia de destrucción en el souk y aclara que no alude a la guerra, sino a la relación entre forma natural y artificial. Conecta esa idea con Petra, los sitios erosionados y la noción de ruinas en reversa.
Speaker A
Let me ask you.So Charlie, Charlie, I'm gonna.Charlie has a question.Charlie's my student, so I'm going to override.I want to ask a follow up question.
So you were talking about the kind of process and then the idea that when you saw the building, you saw the process.But I remember when I first saw your souk building.Right Where.So in theory, the process is that the edges come up against the casting material and that's what you see.But what I first saw was a building that had been destroyed.Right.Like the reading of it was that there were pieces that were broken.And I wondered about this kind of iconographic.And that was actually quite shocking to me because, I mean, obviously Bahrain is one place.But this question of this kind of destroyed cities or destroyed concrete iconography that is associated with certain parts of the world, certainly associated with images currently of Lebanon.Right.Parts of Beirut are just.They're left.And I wondered if you had a particular blowback in with the particular iconography of the souk.
Speaker B
Yeah.
This kind of form, let's say this whole idea of wanting to build this building in stone initially came from the historic buildings that are built in stone, but they are built in coral stone, since there were no real stone quarries or very limited stone quarry on this island.So the stone that they used to build with was taken from the sea and either sliced in small parts, never much bigger than a meter in the maximum length, or in blocks of Coal stone that were kind of cemented together.And if you remove the, if you remove the old plaster layers, you will see this as its base structure.So for me the interest was how can I build nowadays in stone again?Of course, coral stone is luckily protected.
We cannot take that anymore from the sea.
So I started looking around to see how, where I can get stone.And one of these places was Oman and the other place was Egypt that I saw possibilities.But when we built with it, for me it really didn't feel at all anymore part of the initial relationship I wanted to build up in Bahrain.And this photo I showed you with this cut stone was actually at the quarry in Egypt where I was working it.So I took that idea of that.
The stone, even sliced and processed to be built with always has this kind of natural perimeter somehow presence or natural form presence that I took as its base principle for the, for the souk.And yes, we live here in a region with a lot of war, unfortunately, and a lot of.
Tragic disasters in which we are ourselves also part of my family, my wife is Palestinian, our children are Palestinian and Dutch.So I know really well also the ruined sites or what you're referring to in Beirut or in Syria.
But I never looked at it as something that is deteriorated by terror, but something that hoofers between natural form and artificial form.For me, that was a lot more of the, the way of understanding it.So that form can be very defined.But then that, that line gets diffused or crumbled down or, you know, or dissolves again.That's what I find interesting in it.And that's what I try to show also in the ruins, let's say in Petra, where you have this natural form taken over.We could also see them as blast holes, but I see them more as nature redefining or taking over, shaping again, matter.And I think it was Robert Smithson that was talking about ruins in reverse.You know, that our construction sites are ruins in reverse.So that kind of ping pong between a construction and what is its ultimate state, you know, and what can.
What deconstructs again and matter that reforms again.For me, that's the, the main interest.
Contesta a una pregunta sobre cómo sostener la experimentación dentro de la práctica profesional. Explica que trabaja con presupuestos moderados, pocos proyectos a la vez y una definición abierta de la arquitectura basada en procesos.
Speaker A
Let me ask you quickly if you have a few more minutes, we have a few more questions.But I'm cognizant of the fact that it's very late where you are.
Speaker B
No, it's good.But I think Charlie is wanting to ask a question for something.
Speaker A
Yeah, but it's my job to replace Charlie.Charlie,
Speaker B
yes.
Speaker D
Okay.
My question is, Charlie, thanks for the Crazy lecture.My question is way easier than David's questions.So I really like what you talk about when you started working for artists.And like for me art is really about challenging the preconceived notion and challenging the static quo.And you talk about, yeah, artists doing all this stuff, but no one really asking the question.So you switch to architecture.I really feel the same way when I'm was in architecture school.Like in architecture school we are really encouraging to kind of pushing the boundary challenging idea.But for some reason, especially in the state when you move into practice, like everything change.It's like you need to consider like the budget, the building call and the client.
So my question is when you first started your practice, before you're known to be the guy that the firm that experiments with crazy concrete form.How do you work with the constraint work with the kind of friction between all this experimental way to do stuff and like realistic practice.Thank you.
Speaker B
Yes.
The first building, the first real building, let's say what's my architect friends found a real building was the museum I built in the Netherlands.
And they founded a real building because it had real glass in the windows, let's say.And before that I was making all this temporary buildings that.That were also in.In within art context.So.
So there was always this confusion if I would, what I would, you know, be an architect acting as an artist or actually an artist that kind of tries to make also kind of architecture out of it.So there was always this confusion and I was, I'm happy that I insisted that it should actually be understood as architecture.And for me, my discipline is architecture.But that I can.That I have also the freedom myself as an architect to define what architecture is.
And that I think that freedom you always have wherever you are, that you have to work with constraints is also always part of it.Especially the art commissions I had were this kind of no budget commissions.So it was all what you can find.As you know, they were built in wood, for instance, because that was the cheapest sheet material I could find, you know.And that would be just a way how to.
That would give the definition of the project.And also now it's not only to define a form that makes the project successful or not.It is to as an architect to bring all the different conditions and different constraints together.One of them is very present is budget.Of course, you know, all these projects that I showed you have, have despite what people think, because I'm now here in the Middle east, but they have actually moderate.
They have very moderate budgets.A Lot a lot lower than what I see in Switzerland, for instance.It's more like an average European building budget that I work with here.So it's not the sky is the limit and whatever crazy form I can imagine, but it is about how to concentrate all of that in a certain kind of specific focus and a specific approach that I first of all want to convince myself of what is my own doubts that I'm working with and that I look for that, let's say as a process of making is in a way of clearing doubts or trying to find answers to things.That is never ending, of course, but it's the driving force.
But also to do that with the clients, you know, to allow a client to take part of a process where the outcome is in a way partly unknown.Not what we are going to do, but that it is the engagement within a process and the arguments for that engagement that are.Are key for the understanding of it.And that that is the where the where the where the where the where the collective interest is.That's what we.That that's what I work with.I don't have a lot of clients and it's also not a process of.It's a very labor intensive process of working what we do.So we do a few projects at a time to make this.These steps.
Se abre un último intercambio sobre la lectura de ruina, la guerra y la memoria en contextos como Líbano. La ponente responde que su trabajo no representa la guerra directamente, sino que busca relaciones más amplias con origen, naturaleza y cultura.
Speaker A
First of all, the next time you come to Mexico, let us know because we'll get you to come to Texas.And if I realized you were going to be in Mexico, I would have changed this online to in person.You know, a lot of people have left because at 2 o' clock here we get.Studios are really itching to start, but there's a few people left and a few faculty left.And one more question from Dana.
So Dana, if you're still good with another question.
Speaker C
I'm sorry, I can't turn on the camera.I have a problem with the net, with the Internet.Okay.And it's not a question, it's just a follow up on what you said about the war in Lebanon and your reaction regarding his building and the building of Mr. Holmes actually as a Lebanese who had endured the civil war and the other wars.And then when I saw your building that looked like destruction, it was actually a surprise because this is just a comment because usually when we try to design we prefer to run away and to forget about the war and we do not want to see it again.But there are a lot of architects that try to keep.They say that we have to keep something as a reminiscent of the war.Like we have to remember it.And then when you explained why you did that, I thought that before you explained it, I thought that there was something related to the war in Bahrain, because I really don't know anything about Bahrain, although it's a close country.
So for me, as a Lebanese, we.I don't.I think.I think usually we try to erase any.Any symbol of any war when.When we want to, like, redesign.It's.I'm not saying like we erase Double Rasa.No, but we don't.We don't want to remember it.We don't want to see destructions or anything like that because, I don't know, the memories are really hard and stuff like that.That's it.Thank you.
Speaker B
Yeah.For me, there is no relationship with any war.
Speaker C
Yeah, I did understand that.I didn't understand.It was more of a conceptual thing.Yeah, I just wanted to put that now.No,
Speaker B
no, no, no, no, no, I wouldn't go.I mean, I have many Lebanese friends, also architects amongst.Bernard Hoori, for instance.Yeah,
Speaker C
yeah, yeah.And he does very crazy.
Speaker B
Might have.Have a very different opinion about relationship.
I have a Lebanese architect working in my studio, but also an architect from Iraq, or I have architects from Saudi and Bahrain in my studio.We are very.I think there's amongst them a very strong awareness, of course, of their backgrounds, of their cultural backgrounds, or where these countries are, how they are working or how they are not working.The hope for better times.And I strongly hope that one day we are able to remove the occupation of Israel and finally have a free land where I also would have a right as a Palestinian to be part of.Because that's simply not possible.And we know that in Lebanon it's not much easier.It's such a shame for all these countries because they're so incredibly beautiful countries with such a beautiful, strong cultural history.
Concluye conectando su método con Jean Arp, el azar y la traducción entre intención y resultado. Cierra agradeciendo las preguntas y la invitación a continuar el diálogo en Texas.
Speaker B
But in the work I make, for me, it's not at all about a direct response or a direct representation of these things.It has to do a lot more in how we give definition to the things that we form and how this definition, how we can, in a way, how we can relate that to.Also to nature and to origin of things.And that for me is much more of a driving force.I don't know if you know one of these early works by Jean Arp, which is called Constellation, it's actually these fragmented black pieces of what were literally paper.
Apparently San Arc made his work while he was staying in Zurich and he, where a lot of data is at that time during the war, stayed in Switzerland and then Zurich.And he was trying to make something, but left, frustrated his studio and teared a work down and threw it on the floor.And he left for a drink or something, and he came back.And that kind of destructive act of taking his work apart led to the base of another work.And that is that work.
That is.I think it's called Consolation.And then something with chance in the title.
And the beauty is that this work does not represent the deconstruction, but represents the ability to see something new, something else, something unseen.And that is the base of the work, which I find always a very beautiful, beautiful understanding of how we can.
How we can produce something that we hadn't thought of yet or that we hadn't.We had no.There were no preconceived ideas.And for me, that is another driving force in the work.How to build in mechanisms that lead in the work to something that I also hadn't imagined yet as such.
Another example I find beautiful in Shanarp's work is the wood reliefs that he would ask carpenters to cut out.But there was no drawing to these reliefs.There would be a verbal description by Janarp.He would explain a certain form he had in mind, and then the carpenter cut out his forms.And of course, there will be in the translations and the imaginations of someone else, a lot of unexpectedness.
And that's exactly what he worked with.And these kind of methods I. I also use and I also incorporate.So, for instance, we define a way of making something, but we do not define precisely its outcome.And that's something that we just set the rules in a way to work with.So.
It's a long answer, Dana, but it touched upon.Thank
Speaker C
you for your time.Thank you so much.Thank you.
Speaker B
Thank you.
Speaker A
Yeah, you know, thank you again.You know, I wanted.I've been trying for a couple of years to get you to come speak with us.I'm so, so glad we get to cancel last year.
You have an open invitation if you're in Texas or even if you're heading anywhere in the States to come down here and spend time in or let us show you this landscape a little bit.Again, thank you so much for your time.