Thank you all very much for being here this afternoon. I know it's really short notice and lots of you have studio, but this is a real treat and a great opportunity. So we are also going to try and limit this presentation and discussion to about an hour so that we can let you all get back to the studios and other things just soon after three. It's great that Rem is here.
A lot of you saw Rem about 10 days ago via Skype. because he made the presentation for his option studio, which is going to be happening in Rotterdam during the spring semester. We already have a group of students who have been selected, and they'll be meeting with Rem and Stefan later on this afternoon to discuss some of the issues related to the studio. I think you know that Rem has been really thinking very carefully about the topic of the countryside. for some time.
You also know that we did have an event here a few weeks ago on this topic. It's an issue that relates to a number of studios, including the current one that Tohito is running on the island of Omi-Shima in Japan. So there's really an important set of topics.
REM has been very much focused on the way in which really the countryside is now. offering new kinds of opportunities and new kinds of potential, especially, for example, in the light of the incredible influx of refugees, some 800,000 coming into places like Germany. And that really completely radically transforms the nature of the disused villages and abandoned places, which could be an important part of what is actually happening, socially, economically, but really also in terms of the transformation of these places. There are lots of other issues that are important, but I won't take any more time.
So please welcome Rem Koolhaas. Hi. This is not really a lecture.
I'm just presenting a number of themes that I've been looking at and a number of themes that I hope to look at with some of you. in the coming year. And it's going to really work in progress, because at this point, there are many different directions, many possible outcomes.
We will probably have both a book and at some point, an exhibition. But this is kind of really a midway, and to some extent that is why it is also exciting for me to present it. There's a cliche, and that cliche is that we have reached a point that more than half of mankind is living in cities, and the rest is stuck in the countryside. I think that all of the kind of recent thinking in the last 100 years has been mostly about the city. I participated in that.
And now there is and has been a number of books, and other media events that basically celebrate this switch where the urban condition is the dominant condition. These are some of the entities. And at some point, there were a number There was an almost urban triumphalism.
And that made me keen to look at what happened to the countryside, what happened to all the territories that the people now living, new people living in the city, left behind. There's been precious little thinking about the countryside or arguing about the countryside. But weirdly enough, I think if you look at the current modern unconscious, the countryside.
has a large presence. This is a kind of random newsstand in the Netherlands. And if you look at the magazines dedicated in some way to the countryside, it's about more than half.
So I would say that maybe the countryside that we present currently are repressed. This is the territory of the city to. Sorry, this is 2% of the territory. Sorry, disbelieve everything you read here.
Anyway, 2% of the territory. More than half of mankind. And then this is everything which is not city and which currently, I would argue, particularly in architecture and kind of planning, leads largely uncharted on one hand, but also untheorized and uns...
of speculation-free territory, although, of course, as Moise reminds you and me, that many people are now switching to thinking about the countryside. There are a number of subjects I want will not raise, for instance, the effect of global warming on the countryside. That's a project I cannot kind of show you now, but which we have done in the recent past, which was an effort to understand what the impact of Russia would be on climate change, and how currently very fertile areas of Russia that produce a lot of food will dry out, but where other territories that are currently infertile will develop.
So in other words, there are many Zooms that are possible in this territory. And I want to mostly focus on two Zooms tonight. Basically, my interest in the countryside was produced by the fact that my partner actually had a house in Switzerland.
And that enabled me to very often, in a couple of months, a year, basically. basically walk in the countryside, which was an entirely new experience for me. And at some point, by simply being alert to the village and to the events in the village that was where her house was, I began to notice really significant changes, not only in the expected changes, such as the countryside is emptying, the farms are turned into houses. The original population is disappearing to the city, but more radical changes.
And for instance, this was the village where when I first came there, probably in the mid-'80s, and this is the village now. So there is a curious kind of situation that the countryside can be depopulating, but at the same time, the physical scale of inhabitation is increasing. And if you look around, then you see that also an authenticity like this one, which used to be, of course, the absolute essence of the countryside, is being replaced by a particular style of renovation, very discreet and minimalistic, where simply the enormous amount of cushions indicate perhaps the overheated agony that accompanies gentrification.
But when I, for instance, started to slightly alert to these changes, begin to document in a daily basis what is going on, I've asked this guy how long his family had, for instance, been in the neighborhood. And he said, well, I arrived here in the 90s. And we were just talking about the fact where this affected nuclear scientist from Frankfurt, and I didn't like my job anymore. And also, if you look at who is actually husband in the countryside and working on it, it turned out that fewer and fewer people were Swiss and that there's an enormous and not very well documented migration to the countryside. When I looked in Italy, for instance...
and this was part of the Biennale effort, we discovered that certain villages in Italy and certain typical Italian produce, like Parmigiano cheese, was actually being produced increasingly by Indian farmers that are responsible for both the cows in large parts of Italy, but also the cheese. So if you want to really know what I wanted to try to understand is how the countryside could change in 100 years from this condition. And if you look at this condition, you see that in spite of the fact that it's countryside, in spite of the fact that it's poor, you still see a highly organized, almost ritualistic, very codified life. and which is now in these 100 years can be replaced by a population which is relentlessly informal, which is definitely not local, and which is in every sense the urban population and flux, which is perhaps the characteristic of our times.
So I really wanted to understand what happened in this interval. Now, if you look at the countryside, you see the countryside, the beauty of the countryside is that it cannot shrink. So therefore, whatever happens, it will be there, and the only thing that can change are the activities on the countryside or the densities in the countryside. This is a documentation where you can see that agriculture is occupying fewer and fewer people in the northern part of the world. It's still strong in Africa, of course, in India, in China, and in South America.
This is the Netherlands, where in In 150 years, the rural population went from one quarter to almost 1%. So the theory underlying the entire study is that ostensibly the city is changing a lot, but that in fact the countryside is changing a lot more and has to adapt much more kinematically. And that it is currently the territory of genetic experiment in the.
industrial, seasonal, immigration, territorial, buying spree, massive subsidy, incidental, and whatever. So I will later really also suggest what I think the effect of all of this will be on architecture. And by also presenting it perhaps as early warning as what could have.
happen in architecture, in my view. Anyway, so let's first look at agriculture. The tractor is a kind of familiar entity, still being produced, but produced of increasing not only strength, but increasing sophistication, increasingly digitized, increasingly a kind of digital apparatus. And you could almost say increasingly an office. Because this is the way in which current agriculture is being reproduced.
Each parcel digitized in small fragments in each little pixel program of how to treat it, which is partly based on past yield. In other words, highly technological work. So we still think naively of the countryside as kind of green territory. but actually that green territory and the real countryside is actually happening on the laptop, on the screen, and highly programmed as much as it clearly never was before.
And you could even say more digitized than large parts of our current urban culture because it is simply easier to digitize in its entirety. So farming is... This can also be done over the phone and increasingly uses also technologies such as drones and other entities.
It's becoming more, partly because it's so susceptible of becoming part of the Internet of Things, it is actually becoming part of the Internet of Things, Silicon Velops, it can invest in startups. These are new words. architecture, inspection farms, surveillance, all these elements that we tend to associate with the urban civilization are more rampant and maybe higher developed in the countryside.
There's also artificial countryside. We see a lot of factories and former factories and a lot of corporations that used to be in electronics actually use some of their plant to turn into a plant. to agriculture, highly artificial agriculture, such as in this case, agriculture without any ground. So the notion that ground is necessary is also being increasingly surpassed. You know all of this, and everyone knows it, but probably not the scale of it.
Here, the same thing for keeping animals, highly automated in every condition, even the cleaning, and it's really phenomenal. course, that machines can be devised that deal with this. And then in every farm, no longer a farm, one of these emblematic offices where somebody behind a laptop runs, manages, and creates, therefore, insanely efficient agriculture. The pattern of territories is really very radically changing.
This is part of Khartoum. These are farms in Bolivia, where central village-like condition is This is the middle or the center of radial developments that are then separated by sections of tree. So what you will see is that the countryside, which used to be, of course, the territory where nature had a certain presence, is becoming increasingly designed.
And you could even say increasingly geometrical. The same is true in America, as you know, if you fly. And if these are agriculture, then the kind of implementation of the scale for animals is increasing astronomically to producing landscapes such as this one.
Now so nature, you could say nature is over. It's the kind of theory that intellectuals have supported and are introducing. It, in a way, relieves us, perhaps, from the need for nostalgia. And you could maybe argue that it therefore liberates us to engage this as a project, and as a kind of exciting project, or as a source, even perhaps, of renewal of the culture.
So what has become really staggering to me is that the more I looked at it, the more that the more the countryside is considered, or almost treated as a kind of enormous canvas, on which almost any form of organized activity, which would be extremely hard to make compatible with urban life and with the city, is now spreading over the countryside simply both. positive and negatives, such as nuclear reactions, nuclear waste. If you see how complex some of the nuclear waste stations are also inscribed on this canvas, and that their complexity... is not only limited to two-dimensional organization of the ground, but actually deeply kind of three-dimensional configurations that go really deep, 600, about 2,000 feet deep.
It's kind of really incredible how complex and artificial all of this is. becoming. And then if you look at kind of silver farms, so we've now talked about the natural things, but then the unnatural things that are also forced into the countryside, you could say, or choosing to be in the countryside is phenomenal, such as this. Now I want to do a kind of parenthesis, because what I can see happening is that perhaps the only The only way in which to look at these phenomenon of high organization in the countryside is to look at the history of land art. And that is maybe a weird leap of my imagination.
But if I look at the plants, there's a strong resonance with, for instance, the Spiral Jetty of Smithson in the 70s, or the the lightning field of Volta de Maria. Of course, you don't see any traces, but it also had a kind of similar desire for establishing order in the seemingly natural James Turrell And maybe most architecturally, Michael Heiser in Nevada, who has been really trying to find analogs of urban conditions that have really phenomenal scale. And both in terms of scale and even in terms of aesthetics, it's striking to me how similar these are to what are currently emerging realities.
I was recently on the border of California and Nevada. As you know, in California you pay taxes and in Nevada you don't. So that many of the infrastructural needs for Silicon Valley are, apart from office space and human interaction, are now kind of organized. in this neighborhood as a kind of invisible complement.
And I would say that there is a new aesthetic emerging there that I would like to introduce to you as perhaps significant. This is the kind of situation in 94. This is the situation in 2015, so 20 years later. And what you see is the proliferation of of rectangles that have a tendency to become increasingly large.
And what I would say is perhaps the most important quality of this urbanization is that it is becoming an urbanization almost without people. And I think that has never before been possible to really think about that urbanization actually. seem to be the essence of the human endeavor, but that what we are witnessing here is perhaps more robotic or more machine-like existence that doesn't need us, but that we need very intensely, and that we depend on, even though it doesn't depend on us.
So these are warehouses, but also silver farms. The scale is almost unimaginable. This is 1,500 feet. And I would here say, if this is the history of land art, in terms of scale, this is the history of these kind of boxes with the currently largest building ever attempted by men being prepared.
And And as I hinted, I think there is a kind of implication for architecture of this. And perhaps, Frank Gehry's Facebook is the first one, to his credit, to explore that condition. And I want to show you, for instance, this is Tesla, a colossal factory, of course, covered in solar panels.
And surrounded by wind farms. But again, an incredibly intense piece of architecture, but without almost any need for. I wanted to show you SuperNet construction site in Nevada.
And sorry for the speed. And obviously, this is not a very intellectual, well-argued presentation. But this is in the transformation of of architecture that this kind of building announces is what I would like to explore in the Harvard studio that we will organize now, is this kind of building.
What is this kind of building? What are its properties? How does it work?
And how do we relate to it? This is the interior. And when I saw this, this is an architecture that nobody is prepared for. I I think that none of us have thought that a building could be this radical, perhaps, first, this extremely abstract, this codified, this uninflected by human need, this distant from us, and nevertheless produced by us and needed for us.
So what I find very interesting how Do your course Life in this building, do you call it life, or do you call it process, or do you call it? And so what are we as a profession kind of doing with this kind of environment? So here you see color.
some other images, all highly regimented and organized, and with very few and occasional signs of human skill, such as this one. Obviously not intended to. facilitate communication, and with occasional architectural articulation of the main ingredients.
Here, you see the grimness, weird combination of grimness and a kind of 60s frivolities in the color. I'm trying. I'm deeply ignorant of this kind of thing, and I'm trying to hope that by the end of the year, of our activity, we will understand why this column is red, the floor is red, and not green.
Because presumably there is a reason to hear some kind of human work in it, and therefore inside the kind of new Cambodian casual that is there. kind of human counterpart of those environments. So what I think this announces, and you can see not only in America, not only here, but also in Singapore, for instance, in the industrial part of Singapore, the emergence of an urbanism which is basically really based on these containers that presume some kind of urban public space. Because it's not all building, but there is space between the buildings. And that somehow has to be either maintained or is there for the convenience, I guess.
of a barely existent population. So how do you conceive that kind of space? How do you conceive buildings that are extremely demanding and kind of highly technological but barely inhabited and still based on human control to some extent and still needing some percentage of your... human presence.
I think that if you would, for instance, look at a portion of the Cambodian in this kind of environment, it's going to probably less than 100% of the total surface that would then be dedicated to human happiness or human intercourse or human comfort. And for me, I find it really important, but also exciting. to begin to explore what kind of new conditions and what kind of new possibilities that offers for us, not only in kind of choosing colors, but also in conceptualizing the new.
Because I think that one of the kind of problems of the 20th century has been a desire to shape the new that exceeded the need to shape the new. And therefore, the new became the new. became a kind of symbolic enterprise than a kind of real enterprise in many cases. But I think we are now confronted genuinely with an entirely new situation, and therefore the need to invent or think about a new repertoire. So my underlying thesis is that we are facing a kind of situation where To be happy and to be human, we are kind of whimsical in cities and increasingly unconcerned with need and increasingly preoccupied with fun or pleasure or interaction.
And that we can only do that at the expense of or as a kind of counterweight to an enormous hyper-Cartesian organization of the rest of the world. And so I think we are clearly all kind of stuck here. But I kind of think or have an intuition that It might be actually deeply exciting and probably also deeply worrying and kind of highly agonizing to begin to think about this. I think that this is a kind of typical graph that we see.
OK, the rural population is decreasing and the urban population is increasing. But I might be wrong. predicted actually this kind of red territory will offer much more kind of surprising conditions than this blatant one increases and the other decreases because in in order to maintain this declining countryside, I think some of this population will share, perhaps, both urban and rural presence.
And if you look, for instance, at the world population, you see that basically 50% is urban employees. Very few are left as farmers. But there is this whole wide category that is currently quite hard to to define or hard to know.
And that's where I think that architecture has to connect itself seriously with anthropology and sociology to begin to understand what is happening here in the zone. I already showed. So this ambiguity of population, I think you can already begin to see it. This house of the can of agonized hedonist in Switzerland.
And this apartment in this view of Dubai can probably have something in common, that they look both abandoned, or at least that large part of the year they are abandoned, that they're only occasionally inhabited. And I think that one of the effects of this of the countryside is that the state of semi-abandonment will begin to characterize much of the countryside, as it already does, but also much of the city. Because there's a kind of shuttling.
And if you look at New York, you can see very similar phenomena already happening, buildings that are incredibly intense, but the largest part of the year empty. Of course, there are many. I actually could stop here.
I will only kind of show. No, I stop here. Didn't you want to say something about the immigrants and migration? Do you have something about that?
The only thing is that. Or I can ask you about that. Yeah, I'll show it in a minute.
Or maybe here. Yeah, yeah. OK. So one of the things we will do in the next term, so in the next term, I would like, roughly speaking, to pursue two things. This new artificiality of building and the new scale.
And on the other hand, with my partner in this enterprise, Niklas Mach, a German writer, we want to look at the future. the effect of the new immigration in Europe. That is enormous. And of course, that causes many problems. The numbers are breathtaking.
Here you see also how, in terms of cycles, the intensity of this has barely been seen in the post-war period. So we're really talking about a million people, the whole of Europe is trying to, in a fairly chaotic, but also understandably chaotic situation, respond to it. But what I think could be one of the more exciting things is how such a flow of immigrants could intersect with fundamental political and economic issues in a country like Germany, which apparently is for most of the immigrants the preferred destination.
Here you see how in the whole of Germany, In Germany, the density of immigrants is kind of orchestrated. And here you see how in the former East Germany, vacancy and emptiness and depopulation are really rife. And how a very important political and economic issue for Germany is how in a single organism or a single state... deal with this extreme imbalance of affluence and density on one side and emptiness on the other side. So there is a kind of very intense discussion whether those new immigrants should actually be, I can only use the word used, or should begin to inhabit or conceptualize as the future inhabitants of almost abandoned rural countryside in the heart of Europe as kind of here.
So this is now a very crucial discussion that is happening around Angela Merkel. And this is also something that we want to document and actually see with our own eyes and witness. Sorry for the German, but this is some of the arguments.
What's the future? speaks for it and what speaks against it. I don't know why one typeface is bigger than the other.
But anyway, so a lot of things for it and a lot of things. And here you see how this kind of issue, and therefore the issue of the countryside, is of course also highly catapolitical issue. with incidents related to refugee crisis, predominantly in the eastern part.
Anyway, so this is the dual things I would like to present today. One, how the countryside actually is constantly subjected to new populations, and therefore new cultures. And how on the other side, the countryside is becoming the territory of an unprecedented scale that will need new kinds of architectural imagination to think how that could be accommodated.
Thanks. So we have about 20 minutes left and would really like to open this up as quickly as possible. Maybe while you are thinking I can just put a couple of ideas on the on the table, get Rem to react to those and then... please raise your hand and there are mics that can come to you very quickly.
I think these are very interesting thoughts, and I think a lot of them haven't really been quite. resolved because they've been up in the air, many of the thoughts for a long time. I think when we had some of our own internal conversations, and I was thinking about books like Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, which is a book from the 1970s that we discussed.
It's very clear that even at that time, there is this idea of, on the one hand, a kind of nostalgia, a sort of romanticism of the countryside, which you depicted very well with your advertising for the Deuter backpack and the Switzerland scene. I mean, on one level, the countryside is a refuge. And at the same time, you are now presenting really this idea of the hyper-artificiality and the rationalization or the rationality.
of the countryside. I think those two conditions seem to exist simultaneously. That even when you see the big landscape, there's the space between those interventions that presumably is still a kind of landscape of refuge, because it takes time to get into that. So I'm just wondering on one level, how you're beginning to think about the reconciliation of this idea of the countryside as a kind of refuge, something that everybody loves to maybe participate in. And then the kind of of association that you are now observing with the highly objective tagged onto that.
There is a little bit of, you know, we also have the experiments of ArchiZoom and Super Studio and Andrea Branzi with the kind of agricultural turned into a certain set of artistic practices. So I'm wondering how you see that evolving in a way in its sort of reincarnation as you start seeing the red of the interior, the incredible kind of intensity of some of these sorts of spaces. Perhaps we can talk about.
the immigration, if nobody else asks a question. But how do you see these two sides of the countryside? Well, I think that the nostalgic kind of situation Although we all feel it's kind of pull and it's constantly kind of irresistible, I think it's becoming harder and harder to sustain.
And in the sense that, for instance, if you look at in Europe or in America, how the whole kind of cultural wellness is subverting larger and larger parts of the countryside. How, for instance, preservation, and particularly the new form of UNESCO preservation, which is not preservation of physical objects, but preservation of cultural practices, such as a particular kind of bread in France, or a particular kind of flute playing in China. That is also creating this kind of pressure of artificiality, maintenance, and bringing with it tourism, and therefore bringing with it accommodation, and basically all the things that kind of really kill authenticity. So I think our only, and that is why I try to introduce the whole notion of land art, perhaps.
And I think your references to Archizoom or Andrea Branzi are also highly relevant in there, because they were able to at least articulate a nostalgic kind of presence in the countryside. and to articulate and look for maybe a new kind of sublime, simply a sublime of scale or a sublime of contrast. But what appeals to me is, of course, the non-nostalgic kind of dimension of these entities. You can find them abhorrent, but I think that at the same time they offer the hope of a abandoning nostalgia in the relationship with the countryside. So here, I think, is the dilemma.
Because I don't want you to give away anything from the studio. But in a way, I think there's a correlation between part one and part two. Because when we then start looking at the numbers of 800,000 people, for example, entering, the massive scale of this enterprise also now requires a kind of piece of highly orchestrated rationalization. So now we also have to face this idea of how do you actually accommodate 800,000 people in the countryside?
And the way of doing that that doesn't turn it into a sort of absolute hell in some way is also a really scary prospect. So the sublime of the rationale versus the accommodation of simply that kind of scale of people, I think is an incredible challenge. But it also seems like one really needs to come up with sort of strategies that have the capacity to kind of respond to just the scale of this kind of crisis. This is also why, for the first time, in a part of the so-called project on the city, we are considering also opening it up for design. Because we think that the city is But in this particular case, simply staying on the level of a researcher is not enough.
So any thoughts, questions? There's a hand back up there. There's a hand here.
Could we get a mic there? Maybe we can have at least two or three questions at the same time. Anybody else? This is the opportunity. So please, you go ahead and then here first, please.
Yes. We're going to organize a study. I'm wondering why don't you organize it in Friesland?
Frisland or Groningen. I don't think we can hear you very well. You're going to organize the studio in Rotterdam in spring. Why don't you organize it in the countryside of the Netherlands, in Frisland, for example?
Oh, OK. Well, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I have a question or a query about your characterization of this as new, because it really seems to me much more of a continuity. A lot of the projects that you described in terms of of their scale and technology are actually kind of a replication of the kind of high modernist schemes we've seen across a rural or a natural landscape, whether dams, hydroelectric schemes. We've seen this in the US since the 1920s.
We really see this around the world. The Gazeera scheme, which is an irrigation scheme, that's also 30 years old. So why are you talking about this as new is a question. And why are you characterizing this as architecture? Because what I see is infrastructure, an infrastructure that's within certain kinds of enclosure that are physical and spatial enclosures.
And they're also more privatized than the earlier kind of mega infrastructural projects. So I think if you talked about those continuities, there would be a lot more to say. And it might be a more provocative inquiry.
So maybe you should have answered the first question. No, well, let me deal with the second question first. I entirely agree, and if you are familiar with what we typically do, we don't have a kind of naive beginning from scratch and assumption that something that we observe has never happened before. On the contrary.
you could accuse a work from an overdose of historical consciousness and too much of retrospective consideration. So, of course, it's very close to infrastructural, but I think that... It's a bit, and I also kind of explained it as such, that there is the kind of thinking in Silicon Valley and the kind of interaction and the kind of informality of the kind of workplace of Silicon Valley. And yes, these are, let's say, infrastructural kind of results of some of their kind of thinking.
But I think that to call it infrastructural is... still not eliminating it from the architectural agenda. I think that at this scale and in this configuration, and I think that some of the kind of pictures or images I showed you are really compelling in the sense that the degree of simultaneous inhabitation and emptiness, which turns out to be completely Charged?
I've never seen before, so I present it modestly in that way. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that basically we're going to travel in Europe as a whole. So I think that whether it is Rotterdam or Friesland, which is only one hour apart, is not really relevant. I mean, once you're in Europe, the two conditions will be completely accessible, as they are almost everywhere there.
One hand here, one hand there. You go ahead with the police. OK. So my question.
Can you stand so we can see? Yes. Please. Thank you. So my question responds to the autonomy of technology introduced to the farms and reminded me of a visit I had to a Scandinavian organic farm, dairy farm, outside of Malmo.
And the count who ran the farm explained that he very purposely has a couple that tend to the cows because he said that they make more milk. and the milk is sweeter. And so as we anticipate the robot future and look at the impact of or the residual or the resistance of the human, I'm wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts or intuitions about how the human is going to play out as the robots come. Well, I just think I would like to kind of really answer. I think that's a kind of very good and very important issue, whether the organic in the end will be able to deliver.
the needs commensurate to the needs that are obviously emerging and increasing every kind of moment. But that is also something I really would like to welcome as a kind of subject for the studio as a whole, to really think that all these different narratives, all these different rhetorics, are all as necessary or inevitable as they claim to be. And that would be both for the technological side as for the organic side, which as you look into the organic, et cetera.
Anybody else? We have somebody here. Can we also get a mic here?
So please,. My question has to do with the issue of scale that you brought up earlier. It seems that there's a link between the global aspect of cities and then the regional or local aspects of the countryside and the link of scale between those two, seeing as that the large data centers and the projects you were showing in Reno, Nevada, have this kind of global scale.
And they're just these links to the cities versus this tiny scale of the super regional appropriation of the house in Switzerland. And so it seems that the population influx is going to have to somehow mediate between those two. And that those now exist in this categorization of either hyper-regional or hyper-generic or global.
global, how do you see the kind of space between those? Well, in the descending curve of the countryside and the upward curve of the urban, I created a kind of red area in between, because I think that the narrative of these two opposing trends is completely inaccurate. And so therefore, we can really try to, we will try to explore that inaccuracy and hopefully have a more accurate model of the interdependencies and interactions.
And in a certain way, I think that when I went to Africa in the last, in kind of just before the year 2000, I was really struck by the fact that It seemed as if very few Africans live either in the city or in the countryside and that there was a kind of constant kind of interaction and traffic between the two. And I have a feeling that at a different scale or in a different method that we are actually engaging in that kind of situation. I was curious about the kind of responsibility that you see about your work, considering the global crisis that's at play right now, and how you see the theoretical conditions that you're working with, and if you feel like this is... is how you intend to deploy it in terms of being practically applied. Well, I think that the word deploy and the word work are not really appropriate in this case, because I think that the huge freedom that Harvard has offered me is to have a life separate from my life as an acting architect.
And that sounds kind of maybe like an excuse, but I really kind of reject the way in which what we are hoping to implement investigate and to discover would be pulled into an operational dimension yet. I really want to guard very much against that for the time being. Thank you very much for being here.