Winka Dubbeldam: Architecture and hybridity.

Buildings and the nature-architecture divide

0:00Hello. To a man on his lunch break, an orange is a palate cleanser, an amuse-bouche after the main, but to a starving man, an orange is possible salvation. Things, like words, can mean two things. The orange, however, like the dude, abides, being unto itself what it is. So it is with buildings. My primary school, for example, seemed a bit prison-y. To the better behaved, I assume it was like a funfair or something. Meanwhile, the school was what it was, entire of itself. But what if buildings could free themselves, or be freed by their architects, of the stricture of type, of discrete identity, of typology?

0:31What might happen if, for example, a school and a house, schoolness and houseness, were hybridised? What if building, and non-building even, were wedded? Might this, perhaps, offer a way to negotiate, heal even, the nature-architecture divide? This is not wild speculation, but the proposal of Winka Dubaldam in her recent edited book, Monsters and Mutants, Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, published by Park Books in 2025, and featuring essays by Winka, Justin Korhammer, Tom Main, Carlo Ratti, and Mette Ramsgaard-Thompson,

1:02and also the modus operandi of her and Justin Korhammer's New York, Los Angeles, and Hangzhou practice, Architectonics.

1:10If you like what the A is for Architecture podcast does, and have the means to do so, please consider subscribing via the links in the podcast description. A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

From the Netherlands to Columbia University

1:25Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted today to be talking to architect, theorist, teacher, scholar, writer, Winka Dubaldam. Winka, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really pleased about this. It's a real privilege. We're going to be talking about your work, and you, but mainly through the perspective of this recent book that you've published,

2:01Monsters and Mutants, which is out with Park Books this year, and includes texts by Tom Main, Mette Ramsgaard-Thompson, Carlo Ratti, and Justin Korhammer.

2:16It's a fascinating book. It's a very timely book.

2:21Hits a lot of things that I've been thinking about already, and probably I am only thinking about them because I read the book. But before we get to talking about that, who are you, Winka, and where did you come from? Good question. I came from the Netherlands, and after graduation decided I really wanted to study Columbia University, move to New York, and forgot to leave. That's a very short version of what happened. So, yeah, here's a Dutch architect in New York,

2:52and I probably left Holland because I really missed kind of the intellectual, theoretical approach to architecture and went looking for that in Columbia, found it, and then basically worked for Peter Eisenman doing the same thing, which was really inspirational, and started my office shortly after graduating. I graduated in Columbia in 92 and started my office in 94.

3:28And basically, since I had always been studying and working in the same time, also in the Netherlands, when I was working, I started missing academics and then started teaching at Columbia University and UPenn.

3:45And maybe that's also where the interest came. So when I taught design studios, I would also give the students critical theory or philosophy or architectural theory. So I combined design teaching with theoretical readings because I found personally that that is more inspirational to get closer to who you are and how you find your place in architecture than looking at other buildings.

4:18So for me, it's always been really important to read architectural theory. A Thousand Plateaus for a long time was my go-to inspiration. If I didn't know what to design, I would just read something on striated forms or the rhizome or whatever Deleuze and Guattari wrote about. Michel Serre, Paul Virilio,

4:48later Jane Bennett, Barbara Haraway. So kind of working myself through it and teaching my students about it. And I think, you know, what is the beauty of being in academics and now I'm the director of SciArc in Los Angeles.

5:02Being in academics really helps create a different view in architecture, maybe a more long-term view and something that is based between what theoretically should be happening and what is going on right now in architecture. architecture, as you know, is by nature a very slow profession. So for us as architects to be proactive rather than reactive is very important. Sorry, that was a very long answer.

5:33No, it wasn't a long answer. I want to go back right to the beginning to quite a surprising thing you said, which was that, if I heard you rightly, that the intellectual milieu of Holland, this is in what, the 1990s, was not... Early, early. I mean, late 80s when I graduated there. This is before Super Dutch. Super Dutch. That's funny. So Super Dutch was started by Michael Speaks, who worked with me at Eiderman's office, because he was working for Cynthia Davidson.

6:04I was bombarding him with Dutch stuff. And it's my fault. The big orange. Oh my gosh. The soft orange or whatever. The Super Dutch, yeah. There you go. Yeah, very funny.

Theory, history, and architectural education

6:17So what was the context that you, I guess, kind of escaped from? Well, you know, I mean, it was maybe my education. I don't know. But in Holland at that point in time, there was really no discussion about Derrida, which was very big here in the US with Peter Eisman, or even Paul Verrio and Deleuze and Guattari. So I used to meet with a philosopher in Delft,

6:50Bim Nijenhuis, who was the only philosopher I could find. And I would go meet him and talk about philosophy and try and learn by myself, because our education didn't give us anything on theory. It gave architectural history, but no architectural theory. And also, it was never projective. It was never going out towards the future. It was always looking back. So I always was a future forward person. So I just didn't know.

7:22I felt there was a huge gap in my education. And so I came to Colombia and, you know, met Kipnes and Eisman and Danaren and Hani Rashid and was a happier person for it. So I feel like in that time in Colombia, I probably, you know, I always say I learned more in that time than in the Netherlands. But it's probably not true. It's probably like because I had a solid education,

7:54I could add easily to it. But yeah, it was really important for me personally to do the Colombia period. It is interesting. I've been having this argument with some of my colleagues about exactly what you're saying about history and the preferencing of quite discrete histories taught to themselves. These days, sometimes infested a little bit with how is an Elizabethan manor house sustainable, which is really weird, just to try and make it relevant, I guess.

8:25But there is, I mean, if one was to discover in any other of the professions that they spent 20% of their time, at least, learning about the history of, I don't know, in medicine, what, trepanning people, leeching people? I mean, it's very odd that it's always positioned as this thing we must do, but never reaches out into the design studio, never becomes, as you said at the beginning, something that motivates or meets the values

8:56of the practitioner themselves. Yeah, when I was chair at UPenn, I was chair there for 10 years, we reconfigured architectural history in the sense that we looked at theories of architects and how that propelled their work. So we looked at Alvar Aalto, Corbusier, Charun, whoever, and just sort of tried to understand their architectural thinking in order to understand their work

9:27rather than just looking at the work. So we started teaching architecture history through looking at the theory of the architects and how that made into, or how that became architecture. I have a hard job persuading my students that good architecture emerges from a consideration of philosophy. I just forced them to read.

9:51That's really difficult. And have them present it back to us, you know, have the students present the work to each other. You also obviously have a practice,

Mutations in nature and hopeful monsters

10:01architectonics, which, as you say, you formed. And you've mentioned Deleuze and Guattari and Thousand Plateaus and these various philosophers. How do you feel it's impacted your own design work, your own design practice? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the early books was with Princeton Press here in New York. And Mark, the editor, he looked at the work and he said, it's interesting, your work seems to move along according to fields of research you're doing. So, you know, early on, surface,

10:31surface became the second and a half dimension, you know, surface as no longer separative wall, but a connective membrane. Then it became the armature, an object within the structure. So, a build form within the build form that became generative of the other spaces. We call that the armature. So, that whole book of Princeton Press was called Indexing.

11:00It was really about the fields of research we were doing and then how that resulted into architecture. And then you could say Monsters and Mutants is really only one project and the research we did alongside of it that actually didn't start necessarily. I was doing that research already when we won the competition for it. It was an invited competition for the Asian Games, which is the Olympics in Asia. we won that in 2018. And I was doing research

11:30also with my students actually on mutations in nature. And I was really interested in that. So, I started researching it myself. Why is it happening? You know, what is the reason? How does this change nature? And I found that it was one of the most unbelievable fields to get into with incredible writers and really great research that also in biology is already interdisciplinary

12:00because it crosses a lot of different sciences like evolutionary biology is big there because it's not looking at same as what we just said in architecture. It's not looking at what biology is but evolutionary biology is looking at how evolution is changing from a fast, from a very slow, gradual change into now very, sometimes very quick changes that break the traditional lineage

12:33of evolution. So, and so I found this whole research on, for example, how plants and flowers can change and clean so they're hyper-mediators or hyper-accumulators how they can clean the soil, the water and the air and absorb pollution in rapid rates but also in huge rates. But what happens when they do that?

13:04They react, you know? So, for example, a sunflower can survive nuclear war or nuclear events like Fukushima then it can clean the soil and the water in really rapid rates. It stores the plutonium and all the heavy metals in its fatty tissues and then the interesting part is they mutate so in reaction to this environmental stress they, what they call, they call

13:35press, they call a cresting or a fasciation where the concentric core becomes like a warped elongated shape or sometimes even turns the whole flower inside out.

13:48And so evolutionary biologists call these flowers hopeful monsters. Oh, and that's where the title comes from. Hopeful monsters are really moments in evolutionary biology where there is the start of a new lineage because these flowers can never go back to being concentric but not only is this warping or cresting a sign of stress, it's also an incredible new beauty and the flower itself functions even better

14:18because it has a bigger core and it becomes bigger so it can absorb more pollution. So it's nature really dealing with what was going on and actually solving it for us. so and then we win the competition

The Hangzhou Asian Games Park competition

14:33so I am you know we are asked this very interesting question the competition asked it's 47 hectares a mile or 1.6 kilometers long site that has to become a park it also has to absorb something like 2 million square foot of buildings but the park itself has to be a sponge city and has to remain 85%

15:04park so just looking at the statistics that didn't add up and that was a really interesting moment for us because I started thinking about the research and the idea that if you have a moment where things break and change you have to add a new meaning or a new maybe taxonomy or typology to it so the first thing we did is make an interdisciplinary team because we realized this was not a

15:34question for just architects you know it's like a park of 47 hectares it's like a huge area and it takes a long time to walk it I've done it several times in construction sites and we decided to become equal partners with a landscape architect called Melk also Dutch here in the same building and structural and environmental engineers so they

16:05agreed and we made an interdisciplinary team working three offices on the competition in the same time so we developed nature buildings structures and environmental thinking at the same time which was super interesting and I think it's partially or completely why we won because we were the only ones that fully calculated structures a very complex scheme but fully worked out structures completely integrated nature architecture interweaving

16:37situation and and quite daring proposals so that's basically the long and short of this and that's why also I decided to start this book because I thought it was really interesting how it actually came from two occurrences that happened more or less at the same time and just started interweaving

Early integration of structural engineering

17:00How does the architectural designer work in this kind of space? How does their voice get heard? Because of course our training is towards authorship and you know the preferencing of the design imagination the privileging of the design review the notion of the great drawing and so on and so forth and the heroic figures of our past which we always still refer to so how do you work in this way? Has it been fruitful or has it been

17:30an uncomfortable but ultimately productive relationship?

17:35It's interesting You probably can't respond to that because they're still your professional partners but anyway I'm very I love very early on integrating engineers and everyone to begin with you know because I've been since the beginning of the 90s 3D in the computer so when you make a sketch 3D in the computer you can quickly also send a rhino file to the engineers and say no columns how do we do this you know

18:06and then so next question boom so I I really work already with that feedback from the beginning I'm not a person that would like I design a building and then when it's done I send it to the engineer and say solve it I actually always work with them early on and say I like to do this can we do that and how would we do that so that it becomes more integral to the design already because I've also learned you can save a ton of money and materials that way and

18:37time construction time so that was done with all these buildings you know there's so what we initially thought because the question was great you know like I have never heard a client say it has to be a sponsored city and 85% park so that that was why we started thinking the buildings have to be different than two we're not going to make white elephants that are empty after a two week game with a huge carbon footprint two million square foot of buildings and this

19:09should really be for the city and we'll loan it back to the Olympics so we proposed in the competition already to make these all there were two stadiums we made those hybrids the one stadium is enclosed and we made that a concert hall and we gave it back to the Olympics so it's a concert hall designed with Olympic rules and then we did a field hockey stadium that is a community center with sport fields and balls have quite daring

19:40structures the enclosed space the concert hall I wanted to call them free so all the structure sits in the inner ball and it's kind of a super dome structure that is beautiful it's really fat in the middle and very skinny towards the end as cantilevers out over the lobby spaces the walls hang from it and there is a ring under the roof with automatically opening windows that release hot air so the building literally breathes so all that was done at the same time so you can see how this happens

20:11so my environmental energy is like you need to let the hot air out cool air in we only air conditioned the seats of the viewers so yeah talking about being hot which turned out to be enough for that building and then the structures were done in the same so by doing that the environmental way the building works the structure is super light the bottom is heavy of the building and the top is

20:41super light so it's almost like a tent on top of a strong base but we saved overall in the whole production 120 tons of steel and 20% construction time so by doing this kind of integral approach we not only made the field hockey stadium has a shading wing that has a span of 125 meters and it's free it doesn't touch the building at all

21:12and it shades the glass lobby the viewers and the players which is quite interesting so and that whole wing the only problem that wing had was uplift so it's being held down like crazy with huge strong concrete abutments but yeah so I mean it's super interesting to start thinking of architecture in a different way because you you kind of have to throw

21:42everything out because I didn't want the buildings then to look like stadiums because if they look like stadiums they're never going to be a concert hall so that was one of the most important things to rethink what typology is and that maybe typology is no longer an adequate term but that taxonomy which is used in plants as you know is a more appropriate term because that would be what you call a dynamic typology it's something that is in

22:13flux and that is a hybrid but for us the hybrid is not two things merged and they're still recognizable in our case the hybrid has become one thing that is now doing two things which is this different approach to what we normally call a hybrid maybe yeah

Designing stadiums, valleys, and public space

22:36and the other hybrid is a funny one it was an underground shopping mall in the program and the landscape architect and I looked at the site and we thought the site was bifurcated by a road and a river which is pretty drastic separation six lane road and a big river we proposed in the competition to put a green valley from the one stadium to the other that we made a shopping area so it's a green valley

23:06with plants and misting devices and glass pavilions with green roofs and shops and cinemas and fitness centers and whatever shopping mall needs under the edges also of the valley hence creating a social artery for the park that will always be quite busy and turns out to be very very busy there's like art galleries shops starbucks a comic comedian club fitness

23:37centers cinema complex so it's like really really intense in there it does look very beautiful set in amongst these great staggering point blocks the images on your on the architectonics website are a very good illustration of the thesis which brings us to the book which is as I read it the sort of foundational thesis is that we've developed in contemporary architecture a false

24:08dichotomy between nature and architecture that we characterize architecture as that which is not nature to a large extent and the whole program is about the exclusion of nature something that came to the fore of course during covid-19 where this whole notion of the permeability of environment became pathologized and terrified people

The anthropocene and replacing wood with bamboo

24:33but where do you in your reading where and when does this divide come from who's responsible who can we blame oh we blame ourselves totally humans the human race i mean it's not for nothing called the anthropocene right it's that the era that was caused by humans alone which means all the effects we see you being hot me being in air conditioning you know

25:06the fact that we have hardly any real wild what we call wild nature left oceans full of plastic oil whatever else we put in it antibiotics it's all caused by humans so the anthropocene itself is really us doing it to us and doing it to sadly non-humans all the plants

25:36all the animals we're destroying a lot so the thought for us would be if construction and households alone are 40% of the carbon footprint we also have the capacity to change 40% of the carbon footprint which means instead of thinking of it as a drama think of it as an opportunity

26:06proactive thinking start to think how are we going to erase 40% of the carbon footprint in order to do our part of what we have destroyed so where it used to be the romantic idea you had the wild you know the famous paintings right that you had the wild and the building over here now maybe our buildings have to do the job of producing oxygen absorbing carbon protecting what we have left of

26:38nature rather than counting on the trees that we seem to be chopping down left and right because we think we need toilet paper which is kind of a shocking thought or newspaper I personally am heavy on the bamboo I think bamboo we have to replace all the wood construction all of it with bamboo because bamboo grows way faster it's much stronger it also

27:08produces in seven years bamboo comparative in size to a tree produces in seven years what takes a tree 40 but we need trees because a tree alone is not that important it's the forest that is the biome of the forest that is the reason why we live which is the biggest carbon sink we have together with the oceans so our oceans and our forests we need to protect all this wood construction cannot happen

27:38we need to stop that we need to start thinking of bamboo or hybrid materials or recycle or use old construction materials we don't have the luxury of being this careless with our forest and just tear it down because we think we need toilet paper there's bamboo toilet paper we can all use we can make newspapers or read them online or make it out of bamboo we can make clothes out of bamboo cellulose is very easy to make

28:09forests however are very hard to make because it's the compilation of the mosses the fungi the plants the trees everything together is what is the carbon sink and if we cannot replace a tree with 2000 bird trees because it doesn't have a biome so one of the most important things also for us in the park was to restore the biomes of Hangzhou and the landscape architect chose all the native plants we replanted

28:40basically 47 hectares or 116 acres the buildings that you see are just the two stadiums and a valley that is the reset valley all the other buildings are under the ground and by having another really good biome thing in a zero earth policy which means that the earth you excavate for wetlands for the valley we put back on parking garages

29:10and exhibition center and fitness center other four buildings which means that they are not buildings with green roofs they're actually earth buildings they literally have only a sliver coming out of the earth so the earth tilts up a little bit and there's a sliver of glass that will give daylight and the park itself has skylights everywhere where you can look down because every building has natural ventilation and natural daylighting to reduce

29:41energy costs and that was

Zero earth policy and construction timelines

29:45really fun so it's really a synthetic nature it's the local earth reuse so hence we have huge hills this was a flat site that now has huge hills because the other benefit of doing the zero earth policy was instead of going a garage three floors down we only went one floor down two floors up and put earth on top of it which means now there's a forest growing on top of it but it's a 20 meter high hill which makes the park really quiet and really calm because it absorbs all the city sound so a lot

30:15of these sustainable things where we're like oh it's so difficult it saves a ton of money it saved a ton of time we didn't have to dig this far the garages were built in no time the earth was shuffled on top in no time and so actually by just thinking through it as a team with the client a lot of it came also from the client we were able to build all this in four years so we started we won in May 2018 it was done

30:45May 2022 because the games originally were supposed to play in September 2022 and they needed the other time for the interiors so then we had COVID it was postponed for a year which was actually for the nature part really beautiful because you could imagine in 22 all the trees had crutches because they planted they kept all the this place was originally a green area so they kept a nursery with all the trees the birds

31:16nests were moved during construction to the other area the trees were moved into nursery they had gardeners working there and they had 40 greenhouses ready with plants because I said to them how because I didn't believe them I was afraid there would be another stadium on a parking lot you know I was like yeah yeah yeah they're gonna do a park they're like no we have 40 greenhouses full of plants waiting according to your specifications we have four years to grow

31:47we have grown up trees that we have and we bring and they literally rolled out the landscape in two three months which was unbelievable and then the landscape had time to grow for a year thanks to the pandemic and was by 23 when they finally played the game so the whole idea of us was it's a park for the city the buildings are for the city we loaned it back for two weeks to the Olympics

32:17thanks to the pandemic the whole all the buildings and the park were completely taken over by the city in 22 and for a year everyone happily used it and then it literally went the other way around it had to be restored and brought back to Olympic cleanse the park cleanse the buildings and then the Olympics played for two weeks and then went back to the city again so it was very beautiful this non-linear

32:48use where we thought we designed it for the city first Olympics then back to the city it actually weirdly enough was first for the city then got back to the Olympics and went back to the city so the people in Hangzhou completely use that park for fishing kayaking tai chi yoga camping all over the place they maintain it the elderly people in the neighborhood they were

33:18gardening away in the park together with the official gardeners yeah it's beautiful that is a very lovely way of describing that I am

Typology versus taxonomy and dynamic transformation

33:28interested in this thing you said earlier about the difference between typology and taxonomy I wonder if you could describe that a little bit more this idea of hybridity that you've talked about and you've explained in Hangzhou and in your Asian Games Park which seems to me and I think you write about this a sort of use of Latourian thinking actor network theory thinking in built form has that kind of thesis been part of your intellectual journey engagement

33:58Latour talks about the Acton network not necessarily as a network as in switch or as in highways but he talks about it as two ecosystems collaborating in a way that creates another situation or another new situation so for me that when I was thinking how do I how do I think about a building

34:29that I don't want to look like a stadium but has new futures new opportunities new uses is part of the city rather than of the Olympics what does the building look like how do I work on that and the original thought was actually not the flowers it was I was looking at a stone jade artifact from China that no one really knows

34:59what it means it's an intersection of a cylinder and a cube and it's found in graves it's some symbolic thing that is interesting I started I like the fact that no one knew what it was so it's called the chong and I thought if no one knows what that is maybe that's the idea that you take the stadium which is an inner arena and an outer shell in our case two ellipses maybe what we

35:29do is we intersect them and we start to create other spaces because of these intersections make slippages slippages from the inside to the outside from the inside to the inside and things start to move and are no longer symmetrical but are dynamic and that's where taxonomy comes in because taxonomy in nature is always about change its typology is about describing a type but taxonomy is

35:59about changing type if that makes sense it's about growth and evolution because I was changing the type and really messing it up essentially if you want to be honest I came in on a Saturday and I said to everyone we've made a perfect stadium and they're like looking excited and they're like no no that's wrong we can't make a perfect stadium we don't want to have a stadium we want to have a concert hall and you know my office they don't like it when I have these epiphanies because this is

36:31trouble so I sat down with one of the people and I was like okay let's do a few things let's start to see what this let's look at this intersection idea and what does that mean you know how does that change the typology of the stadium so it literally also meant intersecting the surfaces we had an opaque surface which we needed and something more glassy you know like and that was as far as we were because we were sketching at that point and so the opaque surfaces started to

37:02intersect with the glassy surfaces and we got this really strange bulgy shapes and there was suddenly a kind of a terrace that existed halfway the building string of windows started to do this so by changing it things started to occur we found things we found transparencies at points where we didn't know we had them we found like opaqueness where we had no opaqueness so suddenly the

37:33building looked super cool one of the people in my office got almost a heart attack over it and I think literally quit because he said you're making a mess of this thing and I'm like it's what it needs to be this is what it needs to be it cannot be recognizable and so we literally didn't resolve it for the competition we just rendered it and we made the opaque surfaces

38:03I was thinking double curved surface let's do shingles so we found this recycled aluminum that had some brass on it we used those brass shingles because you know on a double curved surface that slides we did a curved curved for the glass with big shards of glass in it and we rendered it and called it a day and thought if we win this we'll resolve it and then we won it so we had to resolve it which was funny but it

38:34actually did solve all those things because people don't see it as a stadium they see it as this weird thing that they constantly film and circle around and study and they're like what is this it's it's a very strange building I love I love it I mean it's very weird every side is different because it's not symmetrical it looks symmetrical it looks like because we did glide it through in one direction

39:04but then you know it reacts different on two sides so yeah it's an interesting building it's a very weird little hybrid that could be anything really the nice thing is the landscape reacts to it it gets part of its cooling from the wetlands next to it that our landscape architect installed that balcony thing halfway that terrace looks out over the wetlands and is now the area where you have a drink during the break in the concerts

39:35so it's interesting how that went but I think the hybridity and the taxonomy is literally about dynamic transformation that doesn't necessarily stop once it's built because it allows for other use yeah and it sort of speaks to that point that you made at the beginning that biological concept of when a system is under profound pressure it will iterate in new ways but for architecture we have to

40:05make that decision ourselves and recognize the pressure and so now we have to place that pressure onto our buildings to move beyond the typological the business as usual yeah I mean you know in the 70s it was done by making buildings super neutral you know you made a big factory and everything was possible in the factory in this case I didn't want a neutral building that was a factory I wanted a building that was particular for what it had to do but it just had to do two things complicated a different approach but it's

40:36not a new idea I mean in a way you know to me and and Remcolla has very much thought of this in the 70s and 80s where they were looking at other typologies and you could say that the thinking started there it's just this one is like a step further because it transforms more drastically it's more natureless building you've you've mentioned this idea of buildings as being instruments of planetary repair rather than the proposal general proposal at the moment which is we

41:06can sort of soften the edges we can reduce carbon a little bit and you talk about this idea of mutations productive mutation which I really like I mean in your text you refer to again quite a few theorists around this like to speak to this idea of this hopeful mutation yeah I think by creating something that is essentially a forest but occupied I think

41:36there is a beautiful symbiotic relationship between humans and non-humans there's a ton of people working in that park using the park but and actually there's thousands of people in the park every day but

Symbiosis between humans and non-humans

41:58the park itself creates huge amounts of oxygen and absorbs huge amounts of carbon in the same time while still being occupied but the other beautiful thing was that the most delicate one of the most delicate insects is the dragonfly and when I was there I came just before the Olympics so it had been used by the city for a year I just came three weeks before the Olympics to photograph

42:28it with my photographers which were very fun because it's still occupied by people but we found big swarms of dragonflies and insects and birds nests and birds and rabbits because it's large you know it's a large park but because nature is so prolific we also the river that goes through it the landscape architect created islands in the river to speed the water up so the water would clean there's wetland

42:58vegetation along the edges again to clean the water so everything we did was not just we also made a productive nature we didn't just make pretty it's pretty but it's mostly productive so everything we we did there we did to clean it and to make sure that nature itself started to clean the mess that we made and that is actually working very very well right now I saw my contractor sends me these little

43:28movies bill what is it now 23 three years later he sent me two movies this morning actually on people dancing in the park and kayaking and but also all the animals living there and I think the fact that you know Barbara Haraway talks about this very much you know like the idea that humans and non-humans have to start to collaborate in different ways in more symbiotic

43:58ways is really important I think we cannot think that we are so important we're not you know and we keep throwing insecticides on cities which means that there's no more birds because the birds eat either polluted insects or there's no insects so there's no birds and we keep doing this because we want no insect bites it's just pathetic you know what we're doing it's so far reaching it's so much more far reaching than we think that it's

44:29really important to kind of allow these things to happen to have insects in the park and to have dragonflies and birds and in this park it's actually the opposite there's little signs against people saying do not disturb the animals do not you know do not pick the flowers they're for the bees things like that and it's very nice that the park is talking to its inhabitants saying you

45:00need to take care of these animals you need to make sure you don't destroy nature because nature you know the other side of nature needs it and I think that is an incredible effect of being like that when we did the field hockey stadium we made it reset in the park so that the wing is really low and shading so that also the people around it and when you walk through the park you can use that shading and actively have picnics

45:31under it and sort of use it as a part of what the park gives to the neighborhood and I think that's and it was a weird project we did eight bridges a viaduct an aqueduct you know it's it's a strange because we had to come to this river it's not a straight river as rivers are not but the river comes in from the top on the left and then crosses over next to the road and then goes down and then comes around the stadium and goes out the

46:02other end so the river still does what it naturally does and of course in very human ways we originally asked can we straighten the river because it comes there and it goes there and instead of doing this we can just go there and they're like no this is what the river does we're like okay and they were so right because it's beautiful to have that river crawling through the site and having to pass under it you know and they build the aqueduct and they build

46:33the viaduct under a six lane highway which is amazing there's a sense of sort of ambiguity in the project that you've described which I really like hybridity ambiguity in a way a certain seems to me certain ambivalence about being capital A architecture doing what architecture has historically done which is to a great degree can be read as very impositional very totalizing and impositional in the epilogue you talk about your hopeful monsters

47:03but it's more than sort of spatial ambiguity and it's more than boundary crossing it's sort of more more at a more profound level about recognizing the the holism of not just humans and non-humans and environments and ecologies and values and and stuff but also about the intercommunication of these things this perpetual negotiation the outcome of that seems to me to be an acceptance of the incompleteness of architecture that good

47:34architecture is always incomplete it's an emergent property of social technical material flows political economic flows which I think is really good

Neighborhood integration and future urban practice

47:46but how would you feel if the Olympic Park was changed if you've invited ambiguity and if you've invited in the notion of flow and 10 years from now someone's like kind of want our tower block in here now I mean I don't think they'll build a tower block inside of the park because it's their favorite park and it's the strategy of the government right it's not and it's totalitarian so but the

48:16other thing is that the real estate around the park has gone up 300% and that was right after the game so maybe now more it's also attracted different buildings they're bigger they're more beautiful they're like further spread apart so it's changed the neighborhood also and you know the idea of daycares and schools are now growing around it because I kept talking to them about the idea of the hutong the old hutong that used

48:46to have everything integrated living working the houses were on top of work right over these kind of little townhouses you lived on top and you had your shop on the bottom they had daycare they had organized group daycare group healthcare group whatever and I said you come from a culture that was very integral and you have separated into these skyscraper fields that have no social space that have no healthcare no education

49:17you have to travel really far to go to a shop why don't you use this park for all those things and they are so I am actually for that part changing into more functional things for the neighborhood like daycare and that they have we the landscape architect and we as a team decided from the beginning we were building skate parks playgrounds children playgrounds sport fields outdoor

49:47arenas we build that in the park we build change in the park we want it to be for the people they can do whatever they want with it as long as they don't build your skyscraper in it and keep it green but the idea that it was occupied and for the people and there's bicycle lanes through it all the pavement is porous which is what we need to do in general all cities need to become porous but yeah it is built for change so I'm not that worried about them you know

50:18one of the people here saw they were camping everywhere and so we have this beautiful outdoor arena with a little stage that has a bedland behind it and it's very pretty and one of the guys here in my office was like oh god they're camping on my stage you know I mean people take over it's what they do but at the same time they're maintaining it you know they're gardening they're taking

50:49ownership of it which I really love so you have endless amounts of people gardening in that thing and I think that's amazing so yeah it will change they put lighting you know I always felt like LED could not be all the colors and the only thing of course I see now is that they change happily blue light red light whatever it was the Olympics at least they listened to me and only did white light but yeah they're gonna use it and they're gonna make it alive and working for them and good

51:20for them is this a model for the future of practice I hope so yeah that would be that would be good if we could build more of these you know there's a lot to learn from China I mean I learned a lot from China their attitude of having sponge cities and really changing they have changed their carbon footprint drastically they have changed so many things already they have sponge cities in 25

51:50or 30 of their cities you know they're making that every urban design has to be like that so not just the parks but also the neighborhoods everything has to be porous everything has to have bioswales so it's it's yeah we should all learn from them at the moment it's it's very impressive what they're doing so I think hopefully in the future all our streets are porous

52:21we build way more porous areas in the streets with trees and we need to green our cities and not just say we are greening our cities and make sure that we protect nature because we have so little left of it whatever was wild exactly it's a wonderful point to finish on thank you very much Winka it's been lovely to hear you talk thank you thank you for the great questions it is true we shall be monsters cut off from all the world but on that account we

52:52shall be more attached to one another so said Mary Shelley's creature of bits in 1818 hopefully hybrid architectures won't meet the same awful fate of course thank you to Winka for the conversation and to Diego and Nikki at Architectonics and to Dominica Schultz at Park Books for the groundwork please see the podcast description for links to the book to Winka at work and at university and to ways you might want to support the money and thanks for listening