andrew blauvelt: i'm pleased to welcome blairsatterfield and marc swackhamer, partners in the houston and minneapolis-based houminnpractice, an award-winning architectural collaborative that in many ways typifies what we might calla new millennial approach in the field of architecture. blair and marc first began their collaborationsin 1998 in houston, texas, where blair has been a visiting critic at rice university,his alma mater, and a professor at the university of houston. marc swackhamer also studied at rice university.he's currently a professor of architecture at the university of minnesota college ofdesign.
since their formation, their collaborativehas grown beyond the immediate physical geography of a shared locale, and even beyond the duoitself to embrace a much larger network of collaborators. what i find most intriguing about their collaborationis its multifaceted embrace and reflection of contemporary social and cultural life.rejecting the more convenient models of both professional practice and academic research,they have instead carved a third way, or perhaps it's better to say they have incorporatedthe best aspects of both worlds, bridging the acts of research and making. self-admitted grazers, their interests arewide-ranging and eclectic. their deliberately
slow evolution of ideas is often predicatedon leveraging larger networks of people and open-source-inspired platforms. it actively explores new materials and newapproaches to design and fabrication techniques, and embraces a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinaryapproach to design. in addition, i believe it challenges the traditional definitionsand distinctions between experts and non-experts. their work has received such honors as thefirst place in "i.d." magazine's environments category in 2007, an r&d research award from"architect" magazine in 2008, as well as features in other publications such as "dwell" and"fast company." most immediately, their work will be featuredin a group exhibition, "envelopes" - it's
one of those tricky... it has lots of parenthesesin it - opening at the pratt manhattan gallery in new york next week. so, we're very pleased they were able to fitus into that. it must be a crazy installation schedule. please help me welcome blair satterfieldand marc swackhamer of houminn practice. [applause] blair satterfield: are we live? we're live.great. i'd like to thank andrew, everybody. marc swackhamer: do we need to turn that oneoff? no? we're good. blair: i'm good. i can't see anything, soi'm just going to start again. andrew, thank you. i'd like to thank everybody at the walkerfor bringing us here and working with us.
like you said, we're in a crazy point withthis installation at pratt, working around the clock. i've been traveling a lot lately,as well. the whole experience has been i would have to say seamless, which has been nice.so, thanks to you and everybody here for making this happen. i'm going to start out by trying to explaina little bit about how we see ourselves, and i'm going to start by talking about x's ando's. marc and i are both huge sports fans, which differentiates us a little bit fromsome of our colleagues in the design world, and i'm going to put on my coach's hat fora minute here. it's a horrible picture that...
marc: blair actually spent a halloween dressedup as his hero, mike ditka. blair: i did. my wife is a classically trainedsoprano, so we'd go to musician's parties as the scariest thing i thought a musicianwould see, which is a high school football coach. i went and terrorized them. but, what i want to talk about a little bitis x's and o's. x's and o's are typically used to describe things in opposition, andwhat we'd like to do is try to take the idea of x's and o's to describe collaboration. so, when you deal with x's and o's, typicallyyou're getting a group of people, teams, working against each other. we come up with a commonstrategy or common agenda, we line up across
from one another, we execute missions typicallyintended to destroy the other side, and that's what we do. that's what x's and o's are about. but for us, we see x's and o's as a way into taking advantage of difference. so, here clearly we have something that's very iconicallyminneapolis on top, and i think pumping some juice into getting us here, if i'm not mistaken. speaking of pumping juice, at the bottom wehave a symbol of a now sadly defunct houston icon, which is the houston oilers, but oilbeing a very prominent thing that houston is known for and people think about. it sets up a series of differences betweenthe two places: minneapolis famously cold,
houston famously hot. we have different viewsof what the future is about. you lampoon it; we actually down there... i say "we" in thecollective, like i had anything to do with it. but, there's a group down there that dealswith outer space. some similarities: there are dreamy aspectsto both places in a way that marc and i sometimes envision ourselves when we're alone. thenthere are some things we can't explain, some pairings that make absolutely no sense, butare dynamic, and they're interesting to contemplate. they bring out very strong reactions in people,and we think that that's an important thing, too. so, we look at x's and o's, and to us, x'sand o's are a way to situate ourselves in
the world. initially, our collaborative beganwith the two of us being separated, which, for those who know us very well, is a goodthing. when we get together, we tend to screw off and not really focus on our work, so ithink that distance is actually a healthy, healthy thing. what we found is that through our practiceand by adding people with different points of views and different ideas, our work becamebetter, and it became - we became - better equipped to address some ideas that we wereinterested in. so, the two peecol people, for those of youwho collect vinyl toys, that you see there that aren't marc or myself, dave hutman, whois an engineer here who basically runs all
the fabrication shops at the university, issomebody who's intimately involved in the majority of our work, and somebody who we'reworking really hard to pull in in a more formal way into our practice. then the person knitting way on the west coastthere is susanna hohmann, who is another person who deals with a lot of our textile work.she's a former student of mine who, via mongolia and the felting university of mongolia, endedup in portland, oregon, and does a lot of product design. she actually has done work that's been launchedinto outer space for nasa, and she's worked for nike and things like that. she allowsus to really accomplish a lot of things with
materials we're interested in but not intimatewith. these two people are really heavily involvedin our practice, and we'd be remiss not to talk about them as such. so, the group begins expanding. project toproject, we find people around the country that can begin to impact what we do. so, thex's and o's become less about difference and more about drawing from regions, areas, andpeople who think differently than we do to help us manifest our ideas. this, in a lot of ways, is the way we viewa team, not lined up across from one another in a pitch of battle, but more as an ever-expandinggroup of individuals that helps us realize
a lot of our vision. marc: to step back and talk about the x'sand o's in a different way, blair and i come from different backgrounds, and i think inour work we try to leverage those differences to productive ends. these images are drawings that both of usdid early on. these are drawings i did actually as an undergraduate student at cincinnati.cincinnati, if you know anything about the program, the school of architecture thereis a very nuts-and-bolts program. you know how a building goes together in a way thatyou wouldn't at a lot of other schools after graduating there.
the kind of hand drawing that i did was prettyspecific when i was there, and taking that to rice as well in developing a kind of sensibilitythat was specific to me that grew over time. contrasting that with blair, who actuallystarted his undergraduate career in medical illustration and has always had a kind ofkeen interest in drawing people and the body and that found its way all the way throughgraduate school to rice and was a big influence on his thesis. we kind of come at all of our projects, includingthe law prototypes that we are going to show you from both a technical perspective wherewe invest a lot of time in researching and investigating materials and also assemblagesand different types of materials. as well
as how those materials and assemblages canbe invested and impacted by a kind of curiosity about program and about how people and humansuse the materials that we're making. and so, there's both a kind of technical and seriousside to it but also a kind of mischievous and human driven side to a lot of the workthat we do as well because of these kind of distinct backgrounds. this is a drawing that is sort of a love noteto martin... blair: yeah, describing urban developer inhouston and what he was doing to the modern fabric and then giving us his version of whatcurrent architecture should be. marc: so, a lot of times i'll call blair upand i'll say something like: look we've got
this wall and we've developed materials forit and we have a kind of a idea about the assembly of those materials. but, one of theproblems might be say there's a thermal bridge in the project. so, i ask him to sketch on ideas about howwe could address the issue of the thermal bridge. what i usually get in return is asketch something like this. blair: which makes total sense if you lookat that it's a pirate stands on the burning deck. there's heat moving through one sidebut the piece of wood in the other side that makes that break for him and when we weretalking about connectors, could be built a wall basically around the idea of a thermalbreak.
so see there's a foundation at the bottom.connectors, the whole deal. it's there. marc: point being, blair's brain works a lotdifferently than mine, which is a good thing. blair: which is good. marc: and so the drawings that we producetogether i think take on this in-between zone between our two sensibilities and andrew mentionedthat our work resides sort of somewhere between academic research and conventional practice.i think that stems from not only our different locations and the places where we teach andwork but also from our backgrounds. and even from the way that we represent our work andthis gets at also the way that we communicate to each other about our work which we thinkis interesting.
a lot of times obviously we talk on the phoneall the time but we also send a lot of photos and drawings back and forth and annotate those.these take lots of different forms. sometimes they're simply sketches that are kind of scannedin and then maybe supplemented with tone and value and diagrammatic notation. sometimesthey're sketchbook sketches that we draw over the top of and sometimes they're photographsthat are actually drawn over the top of and annotated. these become a very rapid pacekind of back and forth that serve as a brainstorming session over a number of days. you can see right here the image of a carheadlight in the seaming and the detailing, which then instigated the whole set of otherideas which then we looked into more formally
and more deeply to influence the materialityof the wall project. so, this difference is something that we really enjoy and that weleverage and use as an instigator in development of our work. blair: and maybe a sort of clean way to addto that is when we look at drawings we think about them, aggregating more than we thinkabout drawings that i do and then hand off so that you can do your own drawing. there'san openness and a looseness and a willingness to give authorship over which as we bringmore and more people into the operation i think is healthy and it predicates a relationshipwith somebody who hasn't worked with us before and i hope that those who work with us findthat refreshing. i kind of get the sense that
they do. we really want to bring people along. marc: yeah, like dave and susanna are notpeople who are carrying out the will of what we do and make it happen. i mean, they'reas much authors and contributors to the ideas of the project. we'll speak to specific momentsof that later in some of the work, but the work would be very, very, very different,both formally and materially and in terms of how it is detailed if dave wasn't involvedor susanna wasn't involved or if some of the other people like marcus down in houston,marcus martinez, down in houston who we work with.
so, it is a collaborative effort. blair: to put a little bit of a cap on usand move toward the projects that we like to show you to maybe demonstrate a littlebit of what we have been talking about so far. a lot of the work resides here, whichis single family housing and this is semi by choice and semi by happenstance. the first break that we got as a collaborativewas a bone that michael bell threw us by including us in the 16 houses show which had a volumethat came with it. and if you were to ask us in a sidebar conversation and often inpublic we tell you we had no business being there, but michael saw something in what wewere doing and gave us the opportunity which
was great. and that project, the 16 houses project wasbuilt around the idea when housing was still our greatest hope, which isn't so much anymore, for achieving financial stability and the notion was, in the very poorest open citylike houston where land values were relatively low, one way that you could get people establishedinto the system and give them a toehold is to basically act as a public co-signer forthem to enter the housing market. they could get a first house to reinvigoratea downtrodden neighborhood and then start to move up the ladder to success where theyultimately i guess live in the suburbs and not participate any more. but, that was thenotion and the idea was that we'd bring 16
architects in and have them participate inthe house. so, we did that. went through a series of projects that looked at the houseas an area for ideas. we pretty quickly came to the conclusion andwe both shared this interest in smaller scale work at times, that the real place of interestis here. architects have really done very little innovation on the wall. and so thethree projects that we're going to take you through deal with... marc: residential. blair: yeah, the residential architecturalwall that this stick framing, stud framing for a variety of reasons. it's affordable.it doesn't take really skilled labor to accomplish.
it's sort of a diminishing returns game thatpumps profit out and all sorts of things that we could probably debate and argue about forthe rest of the evening but we won't. the wall itself became the place where webegan to look at doing our project. so, from houses that you see on top... i guess i canuse this here. from the houses that you see on top that we were looking at, draft house,poor house, which is another play on words. it was porous but it was also for people whowere not financially stable. we looked at those two things and became interested inhow the detail could begin to affect the whole form and move to drape house and then througha series after that. marc: so, the first wall that we developedwhich was a part of a competition that instigated
draft house, it was held at the southeasterncenter for contemporary art. that exhibition traveled around the country in the museumsand long story short, when it came through minneapolis to the wiseman, they asked allof the - there were about five local architects who were part of the original show who arefrom minnesota. they asked them to produce supplemental work for the exhibition, becausethe exhibition was primarily comprised of posters. so, we took that as an opportunity by gettinga nice grant from the metropolitan design center. we took a portion of our entry, whichwas in the exhibition, and blew it up to full scale, just to see how it would play out inreal materials.
and so this is the way that a lot of our wallprototypes continue to propagate and flourish is through these opportunities that we see.where we're not necessarily being asked to do this per se, but we use it as an opportunityto kind of drive the research forward and to see how far we can push it. so, the "drapewall" is a full scale detail on the first full scale prototype that we produced. the idea behind the wall is that it's comprisedof lightweight, portable, hand stackable bricks that are held together with a tensile aluminumframe. and is lined, the whole surface of the inside of the wall is lined with whatwe were calling a smart quilt. so, it has a weather barrier, insulation, and then aninterior surface that contains all of the
intelligence that you need a normal wall assemblyto contain. so, it has things like heat running throughit. basically, it's like a big electric blanket. andrew: awesome. marc: it has operable, manually operable,panels that are closed and opened through simple waterproof zippers that are used inthe camping industry. it has lighting built in to it and so forth. and this was the first time that we workedwith dave. one of the things that really amazed us about working with dave, the first time,is we wanted to vacuum form these panels. and dave didn't really have access to a vacuumformer. we couldn't really afford to have
them shopped out to another vacuum former. so, dave and the guy he worked with at thetime, rob, both, they basically built their own vacuum former. they just collected partsfrom around town, and ordered a few things online, and built a four foot by two footvacuum former in about two weeks. and it worked perfectly. amazing, amazing people. blair: and it's an interesting point to thinkabout, something we'll talk about later, which is the willingness not just to engage toolsbut to sort of create your own tools as we work through some of these problems. marc: right, which is kind of driving a currentline of research that we have.
so, this is the performative quilt. if theoutside, the panels, and the vacuum form pieces were made by dave and rob. this is when wealso, when we first... well, not the first time. this is actually the second time weworked with susanna. and she produced the quilt piece on the inside. she also has used each of these as an opportunityto develop her skill with molding felt, and working with the material, in pretty sophisticatedways using big presses and steaming the felt to form it into shapes. which is an old technologybut one that she is leveraging in a new way on these wall projects. blair: and sort of a parallel story, she didn'thave the presses at the time that this project
was underway. and she was in the process ofdisassembling a car. and she basically dropped the engine out of the car, used it as weight,to help to kind of force the press. so, again, there's sort of a triage type atmospherethat goes on with a lot of these things. and it's been a tremendous advantage for us, becauseone of the things, back to a sports analogy, that i learned early on. it's really not abad thing to be the slowest person on the team. it's a bad thing to be the fastest personnot on the team. we found by being kind of the slow pokes everyonce in a while and having these people just, on the fly, figure these things out, we'veaccelerated our learning curve quite a bit to the point where we can now anticipate problemsand actually engage in things that, before,
we were kind of standing on the sidelinesand watching and learning about. marc: and this is, down here is, an example,a nice example, of some of the back and forth that we do. blair was i think at his folk'shouse for the weekend and ran down to his mom's sewing machine and kind of ripped outthis prototype at a small scale. first run, at the quilt, we scanned it in and drew overthe top of it, and wrote ideas, and sent it back and forth. and that evolved with inputfrom susanna into the quilt as it took shape on the final wall. so, here you can see some of the performanceissues that are taken care of by that interior quilt. it's able to be heated. it's able tobe lit. it can open up and ventilate the interior.
the outside wall is actually porous and aircan move through it. so, it's a bit like a rain screen. and the quilt can be opened. you can let lightin. it would be pre-wired so it could provide power. and it also had a bunch of storagecompartments in it, as well, which took advantage of the depth and the thickness of the wall. so, here you can see the fabrication and theinstallation process. and that kind of evolved. and this speaks to another interesting collaborativeopportunity. once the wall was built, i was asked to take the project and give it to ateam of mechanical engineering students who would use it as their senior project.
and so a team of four or five, i think five,mechanical engineering students used it as their, developed the wall further, as theirsenior project for the engineering exhibition at the end of the year. and they developedit using... the goal, always, of the wall was to not have a frame. and, in the finalinstallation at the weisman, we ended up to having to have a... it was a very thin framebut ended up having a frame. and so the task given to the mechanical engineeringteam was to develop the panel further into a frameless system. and they came up withthis z-shaped panel, which then evolved further into "drape house," which was exhibited ata housing exhibition in los angeles. and that's this project here.
so this grew out of... i co-advised this groupof mechanical engineering students with a mechanical engineering professor who alsohad an architecture background. so, it was really great, another one of these kind ofhappenstance, sort of collaborative, opportunities to work with a bunch of students who didn'tthink anything like i did, but tackled this problem from a completely different angleand come up with a system that, ultimately, was novel and nothing like i would have, thatblair and i would have, designed but influenced the project in a different way and pushedit in a different direction. blair: and not to sound totally aw shucksabout a lot of this stuff, and that's not a poke at you, but we like to think that weimpact the people we collaborate with, as
well. because i know a lot of the engineersthat we've dealt with and comment on the fact that there are things that they don't considerat all in an approach to a project. it's primarily locked into one or two specific performativeissues, for example. so, we really like that aspect of it, too,that it is an exchange of ideas and an exchange of learning opportunities that happen. marc: so, these are the final installationshots of the "drape wall" at the walker, i mean at the weisman. then, you want to go through? blair: either way. second round is "cloakwall," which is a project that was funded
largely through... marc: the digital design consortium, whichis another collaborative group at the university between computer science and architecture. blair: right, and it was part of a show called"here by design." marc: right. blair: right. another good opportunity forus and another project where the team actually expanded quite a bit. so, in this case, theform of the brick changed, we really did a lot of work and learned from the prior projecton how we could begin to stack this thing and make it work without crutches, basically,without a support.
we pulled a lot of the performance out ofthe drape and out of the wall and put it into an etfe curtain that would hang on the insideof cloak wall and as we began to speculate, become sort of the weather barrier all theway around the wall. marc: etfe is like a fancy kind of basicallycellophane plastic that is really strong and incredibly clear, and you can fill it withair, and it has really good insulation properties. blair: it's also clearer than glass. blair: it has a greater transparency coefficientthan glass. it's what they used on the natatorium in the olympics in beijing. marc: yeah, in the beijing olympics.
blair: it has some interesting properties,too, in that it's self-healing when it burns. it doesn't run when it burns, it tends tolocalize and stop the flame itself. so, it really is an interesting material. in theory,it's more recyclable, it's lighter to ship. there are a bunch of things that recommendit for this type of application. it also gave us the opportunity, thinkingabout etfe as a potential product, it gave us the opportunity to engage another tool,which is the light-welder. you can kind of give the back story on where that was. marc: yeah, so there's, in the college ofdesign, there's a lab that's run by karen labat and missy bye called the human dimensioninglab, and they have a full body scanner where
they do studies on new ways of sizing differentbody types and so forth. and also they've got a bunch of grants to buy really cool gadgetsthat we wanted to tap into. so, one of them was a radio frequency welder, which uses aradio wave to actually weld two materials together. they had just gotten it and they hadn't usedit yet and they didn't really know what they were going to use it for necessarily, andso we wondered if we could take this etfe and sort of seam it with that, and it turnedout it worked. so, it was another nice opportunity where all the resources at the universitywere able to be kind of leveraged. blair: so, we actually did weld together aseries of plastic skins that we then inflated
by mouth and worked on some other aspectsof a wall. there's another collaboration with gary meyer, who's a professor of mathematics? marc: computer science. blair: computer science, in the school, who'sdeveloping software, and again, marc has a little more of a tight relationship with thispart of the project, but a software that could basically predictively map and model paintcolors, drawing them from an environment, say from a photo, directly, and then processthe data and come up with a series of arrayed paints that would be emitted as chips. and one of the things he was also able todo is predictively embed a flop color into
that paint. so, when you see the car go bythat's purple, pearlescent purple, and it flops to a darker color, he could not onlyput that into play but also predict what the color would be and how it would flop, so wouldit go up down, would it go side to side. so, we came up with this clever idea thatwe could draw colors out of the site and make our house disappear visually from the world,which, you know, why wouldn't you do that? so you can see, in the actual prototype, wehad him run numbers for us and pump out the paint, and as you can see from the photo here,we drew those colors from the image on a site that is a piece of property that dave, i think,owns, to make that building do that. but, we began to think about it, and it seemedsort of like an empty sort of joke to do.
so, we thought to ourselves, why not makeit disappear to the sun? which, even if you could impact the ambient or the mean temperatureof a house or a building by half a degree, if you begin to deploy that across the spectrumof houses in a certain region, you could have a pretty good impact on energy use, thingslike that. so, the idea is could we make a house lookdark to the winter sun and light to the summer sun so that it would absorb heat in one conditionand emit it, bounce it, reflect it in another? and the idea was just sort of born out ofa product - i don't have the slide for it, but we were talking with andrew about thisearlier - called season shot. and i think some of you may have heard us talk about thisbefore.
my dad hunts a little bit, and he was talkingabout this product that a bunch of bird hunters had developed that used basically a hard starchinstead of birdshot to kill birds, right? and what they figured out is that at roomtemperature, outdoor temperature, it remained hard enough to perform the task, but whenyou took that temperature above, say, 120 degrees, the stuff would melt away and youcould eat it. so, they came up with the idea to pump flavoringinto the birdshot prior to hunting. so, you could kill your bird with teriyaki chicken-flavoredbullets or honey mustard bullets or whatever it was. and we were like, you know, the phase shiftidea of a product like that, while perverted
and probably would predict that you'd haveto do menu planning before you went out hunting, things like that, was really a brilliant idea.and by taking sort of an outside conversational thing like that, which is something we doquite a bit of, we made the leap with the paint, that by maybe orienting it to the suninstead of to an audience, maybe that was a smart thing to do. marc: right. so normally, as you walk by apaint like that, like blair was saying, it'll shift from like purple to yellow or a darkcolor to a light color. and so our idea was that if you could use the point that the sunis in the sky instead of someone's eye level to shift the paint and actually shape thepanels in such a way that you're utilizing
both shape and the color-shifting propertiesof the paint, that the wall will gain more heat in the winter and reflect more heat inthe summer. and so, as blair said, even if it's an incrementaldifference between the two, propagated across many houses or across many seasons, it couldend up aggregating to really huge savings. blair: and it's interesting to think aboutthe chemical makeup of a coating impacting form, which is something that we've been talkinga lot about as we've pushed on with the project. so, here's some images of that project. and the fish-eye lens view. which brings us to the third project and lastone, which is oswall.
marc: right. so oswall, which stands for open-sourcewall, is a project that's been kind of in development for a while. and we actually builtthe first prototype of it down in houston back in... blair: through a, yes, in the fall. marc: back in the fall, through a, well, you... blair: now it's my turn, yeah. marc: yeah. blair: through an initiative that i participatedin called the green building initiative, green building components initiative, that was beingrun at the university at the time. and the
idea was that... marc: university of houston. blair: university of houston. the idea wasthat a lot of architecture schools, especially, don't have a research component that's formalizedand has funding. we're in the middle of probably the biggest energy market in the world, atleast one of them. and so there was an initiative to pull money into the school to develop greenbuilding components and to actually try to push a lot of them through a prototyping phase,a testing phase, and actually get the items to market. a lot of lead initiatives, green initiatives,are handled at the level of - i'm going to
say policy. and i think the dean there atthe time sensed that there was an opportunity to look at smaller components and sort ofbring in another group of people who don't think at that larger scale to begin to impactthe conversation of what it means to be sustainable. and so we were able to get some pretty significantsupport to do testing, pull some people in, actually fabricate a lot of these things inthe city down there. and they were really flexible, and we both appreciate this, aswell to the point where they were willing to fund people to act as ras for marc hereand begin to collaborate across universities, which is something that we're pleased withand think is important to note. marc: yeah. i mean, the idea of a researchproject spanning across different universities
is sometimes administratively hard, but itwas great that it could happen. and so some of the pieces were fabricated here and shippeddown, and some of the pieces were fabricated there and used, and we actually send one ofmy students down to help put it together, jeff montague. blair: who we're sending to new york on saturday. marc: who we're sending to new york to helpus at the pratt gallery. so, one of the ideas behind the oswall is that you could have componentsthat are very precise and are fabricated remotely, that are shipped to the site, and that thoseare then supplemented by a locally-found material, and that those materials come together toform a larger wall.
and we make the analogy between this and thebarn swallow. one of my students in a graduate biomimetics class that i taught, mike kish,did this really fascinating research into barn swallows, and barn swallow nests arereally interesting because they have both universal elements as well as unique localelements in every nest. so, every nest has mud and saliva from thebird, but then you can tell where a nest is from by dissecting it, taking it apart, becauseevery nest has components from within like a five-mile radius of where the nest was made.so, a nest in a rural area might have sticks and twigs and hay, but a nest in the middleof a city might have trash and newspaper and whatever else, cardboard, that the bird couldfind.
so, this idea that there are both universaland site-specific componentry in the wall system was something that was really interestingto us. so, that instigated the development of this kind of universal connector that couldthen be used to hold together a whole number of different materials. so, we've look atthings like standard 2x4s, which is what we're currently using, to bamboo, to even, like,recycled paper or cardboard, cardboard tubes, scrap metal, any number of different materialscould be used to form the kind of tensile elements in the wall. blair: and we started talking about this afterkatrina, and i live in an area where we get hit by a hurricane probably more frequentlythan we'd like to, ike being the most recent
one in houston. and thinking, not only couldyou be opportunistic about the new materials that you use if you have a building strategyin place where you could take shorter pieces of stock, which is what you're often leftwith when a hurricane blows through your house, and begin to use that to rebuild. so, the notion that the detail could alsopredict - or not predict, but be available for a variety of scenarios, whether they'reeconomically compromised or compromised by a major catastrophic event became somethingthat was intriguing to us too. marc: and so we developed this idea for aframework for the wall, and then for skinning the wall we had kind of a different set ofprecedents that drove that. and this is where
the open source nature of the project comesinto play. things like the iphone apps system, or the android apps system. or maybe moregermane and pertinent to what we're doing is a company called local motors who usedan open source design process to design their first car, and it's just going to market now,i believe. you can order one. and they solicited design input from anybodywho wanted to give input. so, product designers from all over the world developed design ideasfor the car and submitted them, and then they ran it almost like a competition. so, theygot a lot of great ideas, they picked a winner, but then the open source nature of it is itcontinued beyond just the initial concept phase.
so, as they ran into engineering problems,as they ran into detailing problems, as they ran into mechanical problems, they would solicitinput from a larger, open community. and they would get lots and lots of ideas, and theywould sort of use those ideas to keep improving the car. and they built many prototypes. andso the car had a longer development cycle than a car typically would, but it has a lotof advantages as well. so, for the skin system, we decided to runour own design competition and treat it in an open source way. so, this started out atthe show down in houston where we passed out these postcards that said, "design your ownapp," and they gave you a space on the drawing to actually draw on the postcard and thenmail it back to us. and we ran it on our website
as well, and so students, practitioners, curiousdo-it-yourselfers, garage tinkerers, anybody who wanted to could participate in the competition,download the specifications, which - we had kind of just a generic size and shape forthe apps - and then submit their entries. so we, in kind of communicating how we envisionedthe wall performing and acting, we did just a series of scenarios where we envisioneddifferent types of apps that were possibilities. so, you have things like a window app or anair intake app, different types of shapes that could be performative in nature. so,they might begin to collect solar energy, or they might harvest prevailing breezes insome particular way. and so we aggregated some of those acrossthe wall to give people ideas to kick things
off about what some of these apps could do,and then we actually designed a few of our own apps and put those on the website as wellto further instigate ideas. so, things like the whirligig app, which mightbegin to create energy from wind; a ventilation app; the lady's slipper app, which has sortof found its way back into the current wall, which collects rainwater. a window app, agrey water app which collects water, again, to be reused or recycled. a hydroponic appwhich might collect water and then be used to grow plants and so forth. blair: one of the opportunities that we sawby doing this is that if you're... there is an all-or-nothing aspect to a lot of designmoves that we make at a housing scale, and
one of the ways that we try to describe itwhen we're talking to people about the project is it's almost like - let's say you'd weara winter coat year-round, right? that you'd come up with the worst-case scenario solutionfor your house, and that's what your house does. marc: mm-hmm. blair: and one of the things that we feelthe app idea can provide - well, there are a couple of layers to it. one, what if yourhouse's performance became an issue of resolution in a wall surface? if you think of every brickas a pixel and each pixel as an opportunity to represent something, and the whole wallbecomes basically an illustration or a reflection
of what the elements are like in your area. that's an interesting idea. so, one side ofyour house might be on a windy side with a lot of rain, and the other side might havea specific performance character to it, too. and you could sort of mix and match and developyour apps and assemble them on a wall or on a series of walls to address what is goingon. and you would also be able to - say you liveat the top of the hill or at the bottom of the hill, your house might have a completelydifferent organization because of where you're situated. and the notion is that through theapplication of these ideas, we could actually tune a house to be responsive in that way.
marc: and i mean, another example which istied back into the winter coat idea, what if your house could kind of pump itself upin the wintertime to insulate itself but then thin itself back down in more moderate timeslike spring and fall when you want the air temperature outside to be basically the sameas the air temperature inside? and so can an intelligent app be designed that actuallyallows for those types of fluctuations? and then beyond that the idea that technologyis constantly changing, and it's getting cheaper, and materials are becoming more green andmore responsive and easier to reuse. so, what if you could take a section of the wall, unclipthe apps, send them back to be recycled or reused, or sell them in a used market andthen get a new set of them that are more advanced
in a particular way, or they're responsiveto a way that you live in your house differently than you did five years ago. well, then, that's something that could bebuilt into this app system, where things can be clipped on and off and they can changethe condition of the house according to not only season and temperature but also to lifestyleand family changes and changes is technology over time. blair: and they always say it's a lectureno-no to sit on a slide for a long time, but i have one more thing i want to say on thisidea before we [laughs] hit the next button, because it made me think about another collaborativeopportunity we had, and this was with a couple
of mba students at mit. and mit has a famous competition when youreach the end of your studies where it's basically a judged entrepreneurial competition whereyou put together a proposal for some big project and the winning prize is startup money forthat project. and we did not win that, but we were able to work with two mbas, one ofwhom is from india and really is interested in coming back to the project as this developsas maybe a means of helping sort of a second and a third world housing market address housingshortage problems, things like that. and one of the things we've been talking aboutbesides the tunable nature of a house is the life cycle of a house. if we could drop astructure in place really quickly using found
materials, be really opportunistic about howwe go about deploying a system, do something maybe as basic as just putting a tarp or askin over it, but as time goes by, opportunities present themselves, we kind of pump in formwork as opposed to actual built bricks, that house can sort of grow as people's opportunitiesgrow. so, it's just sort of a notion that insteadof putting stuff together sort of as a one-off and then moving out of that situation to anew home, could we put in a structure that had the flexibility built into it for a houseto evolve with a market or with people's opportunities. marc: right. so, these are some of the winnersof the competition. this is jeff montague. we picked three winners and we're giving thema stipend or an honorarium to build some of
these apps at quarter-scale. we'd like torun the competition again, and our intention is to run the competition again to build someof these at full scale. right now, the ones that we're building at full scale for theexhibition are ones that we had been working on for a long time and had the developmenttime to do it. so, the winners of the competition are beingbuilt as a supplemental part of the exhibition. they're being built at quarter scale. jeff'swas actually an interior app that he was really interested in, how this sort of laser-cutpattern in felt could allow a panel to flex open and flex close and you could store thingsin it. so... blair: it's really beautiful.
marc: and it's just a really beautiful patternthat we are taken by, and he has really done an amazing job of building this one. it'sactually working and it's got all the mechanism figured out and it's really quite nice. this is john stein graver. a really simpleidea, but we loved it. he has a background in woodworking, and so his idea was just totake the shape of the app, and if you could flat-pack the apps, which they nest together,and send the out to the site, you could get - depending on the location where the housewas being built, you could just collect, basically, wood shavings from a local cabinet maker,wood shop. and john was talking about how at his cabinetshop where he worked they would just throw
away bags and bags and bags of this stuff,and some people would come and take it and use it for things, but there was just tonsand tons of it. and so what if you could take that, stuff it in the panel, and the woodshavings actually have a lot of air space and they form a really good insulator. andyou could stuff the whole panel with these wood shavings and it would act as the insulationfor the panels. blair: he's also starting to goof around withbinding agents and glues to see if he could actually mold bricks out of those types ofmaterials, too. marc: and then a third winner, this is lauriemcginley along with a whole team of people who she worked with.
blair: non-architects, which is kind of interesting. marc: right, yeah. they developed a systemfor taking plastic grocery bags and using a simple drill to kind of spin it into a longthread, and then they made these apps by weaving that plastic into a really tight surface,and they got close here in the black area to actually making a watertight surface. and the precedent for this project was theyactually looked at basket weaving in some indigenous basket weaving traditions wherethey actually weave baskets that can hold water, so they're woven so tight that theybecome impervious to water. and their idea is to use different levels of weave as youmove down so the wall apps could actually
start to filter water and then when it getsto the bottom it actually holds and contains the water. so, the wall itself becomes a filtrationsystem for collecting and cleaning rain water. blair: and then because of the conversationthat john had about flat-packing an app, we turned to marcus martinez, who is somebodywho works with us enough that we didn't give him a stipend to do this, and asked him totry to figure out if there was a way to cut a flat piece of material and through a seriesof cuts and scores come up with the actual form that we have for the app. and there'ssomething wrong with marcus: he did this in a night, figured out how to do it, sent itback. and we're really excited about the potentialof this because the connectors already have
a flat aspect to them that you'll see in aminute, and if we could figure out a way to ship the majority of the materials that youwould need or producing a house in, say, an eighth of the space or half the space thatit would take to ship traditional building materials, that's a pretty big deal. so, webecame interested... marc: hold on a sec. the amazing thing aboutthis, and i mean it's just so incredible - i mean, the shape itself isn't that complex,but that he was able to actually get this real subtle pleat that goes across the surfacethat gives it rigidity and to get that worked into a flat panel was really remarkable. so this was the... we did a half-scale prototypefor the houston exhibition, and this is the
kind of construction sequence of buildingthis half-scale prototype down there. blair: we were pretty excited. the materialsarrived in an afternoon. i grabbed three rice students who were sitting around not doinganything and we were able to assemble the entire wall in about a four- or five-hourperiod, which is not going to happen at pratt, but we were really happy that it did happenhere. and it really became an interesting test forus, as well, in that if you can really cut the amount of speed, the time that's necessaryon a job site, one of the things that's always a cost-cutting strategy is to pull tradesoff of the site and to take time out of the site. the idea that we could do this thatquickly and put it together was really exciting
to us, and it's incredibly stout, structural,this is so far overstructured for what it's trying to do. that's actually a good thingas well. there's marcus. marc: and jeff. blair: and jeff. so, a really simple - again,we do this little pavilion houses not because we're - not that there's anything wrong witha pavilion house, it's just a way to sort of test the wall idea and show what it wouldbe doing in 3d. marc: so, for the current applications onthe wall that's going up next week, we looked at a whole host of different precedents. we'reinterested in how the wall surface itself could act to channel and guide rain water,both rain water that hits it directly and
rain water coming off the roof, and put itinto a kind of collecting cistern at the bottom. and so we looked at the... it's kind of championin biology of channeling rain water is a plant called the desert rhubarb, and it has thesereally deep channels that reach about 18 inches in each direction that can collect reallyminiscule amounts of dew and water and bring it into a central root that then is verticaldown into the ground. and that's essentially the same idea that we're using for the wall. and then the shaping of the panel itself - we found this concept car by hyundai called the blue will, and it has this really beautifulkind of x-patterning in the sheet metal that acts to strengthen the metal itself and allowsthem to make the metal even thinner and just
to maximize the lightness of the car to increasefuel efficiency. and we wanted to also use a really light and thin material in the developmentof our app. so, if we could similarly pleat it, we could use a thin material but stillhave it be really strong. for the cistern at the bottom of the wallthat collects all the rain water, we researched the whale, the belly of a whale, specificallythe humpback whale, that has these pleats in it called ventral pleats which kind ofexpand open as the whale takes in rain water and - not rain water, water. blair: it sits. it sits with its mouth open. marc: and fish and stuff. and so the cisternat the bottom of the wall actually would be
made out of a similar kind of flexible materialthat would be pleated and could expand out as it gets more and more filled with water. blair: it's also an interesting pattern becauseit sort of does double duty. it doesn't run counter to the whale's ability to move forward. blair: it's channelized just parallel to theflow. and so you'll see the surface in the next couple of slides that also is designedto channel water towards a central point where it can be collected. and the last image up there is of a surinametoad, and if you haven't eaten recently you should google that online. what it does - and this is a strategy that we became interested
in with the storage wall, that we could havea flexible system that could store a variety of things in the surface of the wall. whatthe toad does is its young live in its back, in the skin, and when it gives birth, thepores open up and the toads crawl out of its back, which is an amazing video to watch. [laughter] blair: again, be careful when you watch it,but an interesting strategy for protecting young but then allowing the flexibility forthem to access the outside world at the right time. so, just really quickly, in case we're draggingon, we have some images of the wall as it
stands currently in the central space at thearchitecture school. the first is we're going to look at some parts, how the connector hasdeveloped. marc and a lot of the crew up here reallyspent a lot of time looking at and modeling the connector, first as a solid object thatwas able to be a universal joint that would allow for an array, of 2x4s in this instance,that would create a space frame. that evolved into a strategy that i would guess dave developedto take tube stock that was scaled to the actual wood that we were using and begin toweld up both a left-hand and a right-hand connector. so one is a left, one is a right,and with two connectors we could basically build a wall forever with 2x4s.
the exterior surface, there's an example ofthe impact of the whale tale on that outside face. you can kind of jump through this, we'llgo back to connectors. marc: so, you can see here, the surface isshaped so that as water hit, either from the roof or directly from rain, it's pulled intothese tiny channels and pulled towards a central - kind of glorified gutter that goes downthe middle. and then it pours onto an aluminum surface down here that's perforated to filterout any junk that's in the water, and then the water fills into this rubber bladder atthe bottom which was, again, influenced by looking at the ventral pleats. and then thatwater can be used to water your lawn or as gray water. that's collected. the idea isthat it can be filtered as well and used in
interior. so, this is the installation we had. we didn'twant to get to manhattan and find out that something wasn't working right, so we builtit here over the last week or so, and this is how it stands currently in our courtyard.there are still pieces that are coming from portland that susanna is working on that aregoing to arrive directly in new york that fill in the back. there are a series of fabricpieces that blair can talk to. blair: tomorrow, we're going to take aboutthree rolls of masking tape and some markers and label every piece on this, disassembleit, and load it in a car. the interior wall - and you can see the direct impact of thetoad there on the wall - as it stands now
is a series of panels, in this case plywood,that have a pattern that we developed sort of milled out of the surface of it. and what we have done is we were playing withdifferent opportunities within that system. so, over here, we have a series of padded - what susanna calls blurps - that push out that you can lean against. it makes the wallsoft in that instance. we have a series of holes where you could begin to insert storagecomponents that you could pull back out and run with. and then a curtain area - and yousaw it, probably, on the other side. and in this image, we have one transparentapp that we made as well that allows us to have an open-closed scenario for what wouldact as a lighting condition - in this case,
it acts as a window. but, we're interested in the idea - thereis somebody that we're trying to get to work with us that deals with bioluminescence, forexample - and could we do something where the windows become the light sources regardlessof what time of day it is? so, if you could open them up, collect energy, and when youclose them they emit light from the same point, we see that as an interesting opportunity.so, this is sort of predicting that. that's where the piece goes, and we hope it comes.it would be nice to see. some conversation about the evolution of theconnector. we went from basically a built-up component to a flat stamped or cut piece ofmetal that is then broken to the right angle
and acts like a hanger joist. the biggestcompliment that we have received in the last two days is several people have asked us whichmenard's we got this piece at, right? blair: which is great because it implies,one, that somebody would be interested in buying it, which architects never figure out,so that's a good thing. and two, it's sort of entering the realm of plausibility thatboth of us are interested in. can we take a really smart system and bring somethingback to the point where - i won't say the intelligence is masked, but it's so plausiblethat it doesn't look like it fell off the moon. marc: yeah, it's been streamlined down tothe point where it's really simple and it
just works on the principle of pressure, whereyou're just taking these two stamped pieces of steel and pushing them together and you'reholding the whole system together. and the whole wall is made out of 10-foot 2x4s and8-foot 2x4s. the 8-foot 2x4s are simply cut in half so there's no waste anywhere in thewall. and the idea is that these brackets can beshipped out to the site actually packed flat, so a stack of them about this big could buildthis whole 16-foot section of wall, and dave has developed a foot crank so that you setit down, you register it on the holes, you push down on a foot pedal, and the whole thinggets crimped into shape, and then you throw it up on the wall.
blair: so, we really - especially with therecent activities and events in haiti, the conversation of how could we do somethingthat's actually useful came back pretty quickly, and dave was actually the one that sort ofspurred that on, and we thought it would be appropriate to listen, and we're sort of workingtowards that end. some quick fabrication shots. things as deadtech as taking industrial felt, wetting it, clamping it between two pieces of wood andsticking it in an industrial oven so it will dry. the mold for the vacuum-formed app - that app being vacuum-formed in stacks and stacks of connectors. it's part of crew outin portland making bags that plug into the holes directly, so we have a series of thesethings that can be pulled out, walk around
with them, stick them back in a storage capacity.the felt pieces that are being formed, cut. industrial rubber that's being used for theactual curtain component. we thought it would be inappropriate not to show susanna and dave,who... marc: in non-caricature form. blair: in non-caricature form, right. so,there's susanna goofing around with some felt. i think that was last night. and there's davepainting up some things. which moves kind of towards the end of thetalk here. marc: yeah, the last thing we wanted to touchon, which is kind of projecting the project forward, is a possibility for a patent thatcould emerge out of this project. this is
something we're in current discussions withthe patent office at the university. what we're interested in is a way of vacuumforming something that doesn't need a throw-away mold, or a throw away material, and only producesone shape. so, the problem with the current way that we're using vacuum forming is youhave to laminate all these pieces of mdf. mdf is not a very sustainable material tobegin with. you have to mill it out. there's tons of waste. you make some molds out ofit, and then basically the mold is no longer useable, and it gets thrown away. we're really interested in the idea of a dynamicvacuum molding table, basically. the technology for doing this is something that the highperformance sail manufacturing industry uses
currently. they have these big tables, thesebig, actuated tables that are cnc controlled that lift up and down, and the bed of thetable actually changes shape. then, a computerized sewing machine, basically, goes over the topof this table and forms a sail that is laminated with layers of plastic that are heated andmelted. and so, when you pop the sail off of the table, it's pre-formed into the shapethat it needs to be in for whatever type of wind they're going to be encountering on thesailboat. the idea that this one table makes dozensand dozens of different sail shapes without having to have a throw-away mold is reallyinteresting. blair: it's a nice idea that the means ofoutput is almost analogous to the sophistication
of the software that develops the form inthe first place, which is something that mold technology hasn't allowed us to do. it hasn'tcaught up to this... in maya, you can loft things, make things as complex as you want,and invariably, the answer to what material is, at least in school, is concrete, becausethat's what we think, and loft can do whatever we want. so, trying to make a tool, developing a toolthat matches the sophistication of the idea is part of what we're interested in. marc: we can't really reveal too much aboutwhere this is. it's kind of in the process of... in the patent office now, but essentially,the idea is that you have a series of actuated
pixels that can move up and down in threedimensional space, and that by controlling those pixels, you could vacuum form over thetop of that. those pixels could be moved up and down to make any shape that you wanted.they form, basically, a topography, and when married to a certain set of material decisionsand age old technology of vacuum forming, the results could be pretty exciting. we've actually secured a non-disclosure agreementwith a vacuum forming company that's interested in developing this with us, so we're reallyexcited about this line of research. blair: so, coming to conclude, all of thatsounds like we're really pushing outside of traditional techniques, and that's not reallythe case. one of the things that i think really
reflects how we work, and how we think aboutwork is be inclusive about a variety of techniques, and never turning our back on what we're buildingour ideas on. i think the first drawings that marc showedof us doing hand drawing, and we're at that age when we went into school with pencilsand came out with computers. that's something that we've brought along. and i think this series of images talks aboutdifferent means of accomplishing one goal, which is the fabrication of a component ora system. images ranging from the last version of high tech sail construction, which is asewing machine called the beast that's in houston, that used to be used for making solarsails. has a throat from about here, about
three quarters of the way across the stage,can really handle huge pieces of material, all the way down to the image at the lowerright. this is one that marc and i talk about quitea bit. we had the opportunity to do a collaboration with my mom before she passed away, whichwas great. what we did, my mom... a quarter of my family's mennonite. amish. both. i watchtv. they don't. one of the... [laughs] i watch a lot of tv. i'm making up for them. one of the techniques that mom used that wasreally fascinating to us is a cinnamon sugar technique for laying a pattern onto a pieceof fabric. and so, what we did that really drove the notion home is that we came up witha computer... let me go back before you see
my punchline there. using the computer, we came up with a patternthat we wanted to use for the stitching on this piece of fabric. we went to a sign makerand had them laser cut a template for mom. she took it, used cinnamon sugar and moisture,water spray, which is a technique my grandma used, and her grandma. basically, get thefabric wet. you use the cinnamon sugar. it sticks enough so that you can see the pattern.when the water dries, the sugar falls off, and you're left with what you've made. she used - i can never say it - a pfaff sewingmachine, a really high tech sewing machine that's also c and c driven if you want itto be, and free motion stitched this pad.
the combination of dead tech or old technologiesand new technologies to come up with a really beautiful thing, i think is kind of part andparcel of what we're about and how we work. and also, the notion that we could go to somebodylike mom, draw her into something that then seen at some gallery somewhere was also aninteresting idea. that expertise is not necessarily where you think it is, and that being opento working with people of various backgrounds and ideas and how things can be accomplished,really will get you further faster. and now, the punchline. this is a fortune cookie thing that i got,no kidding, two weeks ago. it freaked me out. usually, you say "in bed" at the end of this,right? and we all have a good laugh. this
fortune cookie says, "digital circuits aremade from analog parts," which if we had a tag line or a t-shirt would probably be onthat shirt. i think it's a great closing idea for thetalk, that this is true, and the way that idea comes to you might be in something assilly or something as simple as a fortune cookie. so, thank you. blair: we were told we're fielding questions,so... audience member: we have some... marc: i think you're supposed to... the waythis goes down is you're supposed to wait
for a microphone, and... audience member: one of the last techniquesthat you showed was the vacuum topography pixel technique. what's the major applicationof that? marc: the idea, and i probably should havebeen more clear about it. the idea behind doing something like that would that if, let'ssay we had app ideas that were not only dependent on material and circuitry, but also were dependenton shape, and that across the span of a wall you had twelve different shapes of app asopposed to maybe different materials for the apps. well, with a table that could change its configurationor change the shape of the mold on the fly
without having to spent 20 hours to cnc millout a piece of mdf, we could much more inexpensive... blair: for each brick. marc: what's that? blair: instead of milling out a piece foreach brick, you could use one mold repeatedly in... marc: right. so, it's a dynamic mold thatcan produce any number of different app shapes out of the same mold, and it can do so veryquickly and economically, and also not waste material. blair: and then if either of us want to liveon the ocean, every sign maker in america
needs one of these things... so they can churnout plastic signs across the country. but, that kind of tongue-in-cheek way of sayingthat part of it is we don't know, hopefully that takes on a life of its own and peoplefigure out ways to deal with that tool. audience member: all of these ideas you haveseem pretty new and different, but have you given any thought to implementing them intoexisting structures, which makes up the majority of our built environment? marc: i think that's a good question. blair: that's a great question. marc: yeah, and that's something that wouldreally excite us, actually, to take a shell
of a building and, rather than tearing itdown, to be able to reskin it or reskin part of it or to make it perform for a new functionor a new program. i think a system like this could be made so... a system like some ofthe ones we've shown could be made so that they're adaptable to an existing condition. the kind of product scale and size of a lotof the things we do - and, hopefully, the way that they perform - lend them to adaptingto multiple floor-to-floor heights and base sizes and things like that. blair: and kind of on a personal note as well,we've sort of made a secret pact with one another. a lot of narratives we're familiarwith happen in three parts, right? three pigs,
three bears, three stooges, three walls. hopefully,this will be the last one that we actually take through a testing phase. but, what i mean by telling you that is thatthis thing, hopefully, will get a life where we start to plug it into different systems,but also we begin to jump scale either up or down and look at how a lot of the ideasthat we're developing here can push into other projects, whether they're landscape-scale - i have a long background, professionally, doing park design. we've talked about how we could look at waterflow on a surface using a mold that could pop things up and down as a way to predicthow the performance of the landscape works
versus the performance of a wall that's vertical.there are a lot of ideas that we have that we're trying to get to and implement - a wayto leverage these things. audience member: i've got two questions. thefirst is, on the oswall, what are your thoughts about the detailing between the apps? marc: i thought it would keep water from goingthrough it. blair: well, i mean, water, air, and filtration,ease of construction, those kinds of issues. i noticed you had them bolted together onthe frame. blair: right. blair: and then the second question has todo with how does the wall idea work with where
it meets a horizontal surface - either theground or a floor of a building or some other element - and what do you do about where aroof might go? what are the extensions of this idea to make a whole envelope? marc: yeah. no, those are great questions.they're questions we're asking ourselves as well. i think in terms of just keeping thething water- and air-tight, one of the things that's not built into the prototype is a blanketinsulation surface that would actually go over the frame and would act as both the vaporbarrier, the water barrier, and the insulation. and then the apps would go over that, andthey would have to go over a spacer that would be a non-thermal bridge. and the dumb wayof clipping them on their right now was simply
a threaded connection with a bolt, but clearlythat wouldn't work in reality. so, it's something we've thought through a little bit, but youget to a point where your exhibition opens next week in new york. marc: and so a bolt works for now. blair: we've also had conversations abouta wall that could actually breathe, and one of the things that we - we being we - do quitea bit of is hermetically sealing ourselves into things, which isn't necessarily the healthiestthing to do. it might be in houston, depending on which way the wind is blowing, if it'scoming from petroleum side or not. but, we're interested in notions - marc sortof in passing mentioned the idea of the puffer
fish. could we come up with a gasket systemor an envelope system that, when it was warmer and maybe the weather permitting, allowedair to move through the side of a wall, but then would sort of shrink up or close, orwe could actually have that surface change. responsive materials might allow us to dothat if we could predictively engage them. so, in a highfalutin way, that would be agood way to use the vernacular. that would be a good way to do it. i'm scrolling throughall this stuff for a reason. marc: the frame. blair: the frame. part of the way the frameworks [taping sound] - this is going to drive me up the wall. part of the way the frameworks is it actually does turn the corner
up and down. and i guess the model from theu of h show is the best thing to do that, actually. marc: so, the diagonals on the frame are 21degrees in elevation and 21 degrees in plan, so that the whole system actually can makea right angle, and it forms a roof truss, a wall truss, and a floor truss. blair: so you do see it. you see it at thebase of this sketch here, the way it folds up and down. and the notion is that with adiaphragm of some sort, in this case a floor that you would stand on, you not only wouldhave a really structurally sound spanning bridge, but you'd also have areas to run ductworkand things through the underside of it.
so, we're painfully aware that this is a wall,and it's a wall, and we're kind of the crazy wall guys when we show this, but we're stilltrying to get it to engage other systems so that we can bring it forward and actuallyhave it do what you're asking about. audience member: [off-mic] could i have themicrophone? thank you. [on-mic] i was wondering if you had thoughtabout incorporating traditional windows. i know myself, i like to look out a real window.so, i know you have those plastic things. i guess it's a two-fold question. one, isthere a traditional window that you can look out, and two, what do you do about all thatmaterial in the middle when you want to put a window in?
marc: right. those are great questions. thehouse as it stands - and we're doing drawings as we speak that are going to be part of theexhibition, that aren't quite finished yet, of the system propagated into a whole house.and as it stands right now, it's basically a kind of fat tube, and on the ends it hasbig... blair: not unlike this. marc: yeah, big glass windows. and the waythe floor plan works is one is in the bedroom, one is in the... blair: living space. marc: one is in the living space. so, that'skind of the simple answer. i think in terms
of putting a window into the frame itself,it's something that we toyed around with, actually framing out a window like you wouldin a traditional residential wall construction. but, we felt like for the prototype, the 16feet of it, we wanted to keep it relatively simple and clean. blair: so, we haven't quite solved the problem.i think it's an interesting question that you bring up, and i think that - well, one,we can give you a postcard. you can work on that project for us. [laughs] two, it reallyspeaks to market force pushing back in. a project that i'm involved with in houston,and marc is, too, is hometa.com. and maybe some of you have seen that online, which islooking at an open source model for delivering
house plans to people. taking famous architects,renowned architects, and some architects like us who aren't so much, and giving them theopportunity to hit the marketplace where they can push back. and i tell you that, one, because it's a cheapway to advertise my site, but two, because it talks about what you're doing right now,which is kind of pushing back on the conversation, saying, "hey, great, but i want a window ican open." right? and i think that that's a really important aspect of the way the projectis developing, that - how can i say it? we need to respond to that question as well. marc: yeah, absolutely.
blair: and we're not really there. [pause] andrew: great. thank you. marc: thanks.