Topic: The Art of Compromise
Speaker: Lidia Ratoi
Oganization: University of Hong Kong
The lecture will focus on the environmental, social and political implications related to the process of building large scale projects, in both high dense urban landscapes, as well as traditional or natural environments. Focusing on the intersection between state-of-the-art research and real-life necesities of both human and non-human inhabitants, the presentation questions who are all the actors involved and how to design and build in response to their tangible needs. Showcasing projects from Chinese provinces such as Xi’an and Guizhou, as well as Hong Kong, it will focus on responding on immediate realities while creating strategies for the future of the built environment.
Led by scientists of the Technical University of Darmstadt, BE-AM | Built Environment Additive Manufacturing connects researchers and users interested in 3D printing in construction. The platform spans architecture, civil engineering and manufacturing automation.
Annual highlights are the BE-AM | Exhibition and the BE-AM | Symposium at Formnext in Frankfurt/Main. This year’s exhibitors and speakers will showcase and discuss work from 9 companies in the industry, 10 universities and 2 research institutions. The event is hosted by the Formnext fair in Frankfurt, and organized by Prof. Ulrich Knaack, Prof. Oliver Tessmann, Dr.-Ing. Philipp Rosendahl, Dr. Nadja Gaudillière-Jami, Christin Gandyra, Emanuel Nowak and Malcolm Unger from the Technical University of Darmstadt.
Contact: be-am@dg.tu-darmstadt.de
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Hi hi everyone so uh I don’t speak German but I assume I can uh God help us all because two of my projects are in video format so uh today I want to talk about the art of compromise but what I mean by this is not compromise in the sense of meeting
Halfway uh to me the reality of building and of working with novel technology um is mostly about uh bridging between what you conceptually think you want and then addressing local issues within their own context and I think that’s a very important lesson especially when you build for real
Humans or nonhumans that have very specific needs uh this is a project in mainland China that I’m not going to start with it actually I’m going to end with it but is a project that uh my expectations of what I imagine it will be uh building in a village in China and
What was the reality of bringing a robot there and building were very different and I think it’s very important to always approach projects with an open mind I personally never know what a project is going to be when I start it uh rather I prefer to go there and learn
From the sites and from everything that is on the sites because I think when you don’t do that when you go in in projects with a preconceive notion uh you end up with very naive interpretations of projects uh this is a arch daily comment from someone I think is maybe my biggest
Fan but uh I think this kind of uh what people maybe think is brutal honesty is very good because it helps you understand um how far the the reality is from what uh we think that a good project is that has to take boxes I have to to use sustainable materials I have
To do this and that but actually I think a good project is about who is involved in it and how it is built and how do you con con uh how do you connect with uh everything that is on site everything that is local how your project is used after it’s
Finished and if it’s a renovation in this case how you create a connection between the past the present and the future and what’s your take on speculating what this future is and of course uh the the biggest advantage in my opinion of technology is that it
Allows us to work within a wall that is overbuilt uh without having to tear things down but working upon what we already have and I want to show a little bit I’m going to try to give a quick background on how I arrived at this conclusions so um the first project I
Want to present today is the it’s not the official title of the project but today I framed all my projects of houses because all of them house something so this is reformative perform performative Coral habitats uh but I named it the underwater house and I was lucky enough
To have this as my first ever client a client from which I learned very much and I was very humbled so this project was a collaboration between the marine biology department and Hong Kong University and the architecture Department um and it was about um it was
After 2018 when there was a very strong typhoon in Hong Kong that damaged about 80% of Local Coral habitats um so we wanted to create uh habitats in which we could place little fragments of corals and they could grow together but the habitat would have a sustainable way of Disappearing without
Damaging underwater conditions so we had to bridge together the natural component which is actually always changing nature is not something static uh even underwater the coral species there’s never the the same predominance species they always change and then we had to mix the Machining component that has its
Own behavior and then the human component because uh this project was a grant from the government but it was going to be deployed underwater by amateur divers so we had to make sure that we create a system that is um easy enough so that someone untrained to stay
Underwater in uh in large periods of time uh can take it underwater and assemble it um so this was kind of the system that we created each tile is actually identical even though with computational design and robotic fabrication you have a lot of possibility of tailoring geometries uh actually each tile had to
Be identical in order to be able to trace the results so if the tile would have been different we wouldn’t have known if some of them perform better or some of them perform worse if that’s coming from the geometry or from the corals themselves and we had to do a lot
Of tests of course when you print with Clay which is a material that has its own behavior that shrinks uh there’s a lot of calibration to be done and we had to do a lot of calibration in terms of the the the the tiles are formed out of
Two layers uh the bottom layers which are uh which uh cannot be solid because um Hong Kong uh has um urbanized Reef so there’s a lot of sedimentation so you need to make sure the corals don’t get suffocated so the sediment needs to be
Able to pass by and then we had to test different geometries in order to make sure that the corals can grow within the geometry that we created and this is the corals the coral fragments when we originally deployed them uh this is a little bit afterwards uh this is after
About 6 to8 months and this is after a couple of years and right now uh most of the the coral fragments have become a coral habitat by themselves and they don’t need the tiles anymore to survive so the tiles because they’re Clay they’re going to slowly decompose within
3 four years and they’re not going to damage water condition actually they can be digested by various species that live in the specific water and happy client happy designer and the next project is Oyster House which actually is not a finalized project um and it’s a project combining
Two materials and two sides uh these two materials are and each material has its own form of fabrication so there’s clay printing um and we’ve created specific tiles that we use as planters and we have a two two layer wall system and then we’re using casting uh using oyster
Shells and the reason is uh as I mentioned we’re working with two sites the first site is the chuncha island in Hong Kong uh it’s one of the outskirt islands of um Hong Kong and uh in Hong Kong something that I discovered is that actually nature and the built
Environments don’t need to compete there’s various ways in which they can coexist and sometimes nature overtakes the built one and sometimes humans adapt to nature but there’s always this this uh meeting of two walls that’s done somewhat peacefully to say so and even though we think about Hong Kong as a
Metropolis full of skyscrapers um actually more than 60% of the city is a natural park and then it’s bringing together another posture of Hong Kong which is the city is a city uh revolving around the dinner table uh the the dinner table is the most important thing
It’s a city of eating but that uh of course comes with its own implication more than 30% of the waste in Hong Kong is actually coming from food waste and uh there’s very little strategies of dealing with this so initially when I discovered this I was starting to do a
Lot of tests with my students and seeing if you can use uh various uh food waste as a material for 3D printing I’m not going to get into that part of the work right now now but then I discovered uh laan territories so laan is a Urban
Village to say so so it’s neither rural nor Urban entirely but it’s a fisherman Village in Hong Kong right at the most northern point of Hong Kong uh there’s hundreds if not thousands of fishermen who uh Harvest o s every day and the problem is that the oysters get sold
Only the eatable oyster gets sold and then all the shells are just simply discarded in the village and they become trash so even though the oyster shell itself is not an unsustainable material the fact that it’s not discarded properly attracts a lot of issues such as pests and odor and um attracts even
More garbage basically um this is laan and people have kind of naive interpretations of what they could do with the oyster shells but actually there used to be a lot of intelligence in working with this natural material so in canese architecture for about 6 700 years oyster shells have been used for
Their compressive strength and for for their insulating properties and there’s a lot of um examples of oyster architecture in South China uh basically in canones speaking areas of China and when I went to site another reality that I had to deal with was that to get a building permit in Hong Kong is
Near to Impossible because there’s a lot of impossible um regul one of which the strongest one is uh typhoon proofing so anything that you need to that you want to build you need to get a special permit uh to have a licensed engineer to um attest that your project will sustain
Even the strongest typhoon and that actually sometimes can take years to build so I thought about how I can uh sneak around this and what’s how I can make my own reality in order to build something on the S and I I discovered this abandoned sheds and the regulation
Actually says that as long as you don’t go out of the footprint of an original building you can alter it as much as you want and you don’t change it structurally so I decided to to create a system uh to keep the original structure of the building intact and then only
Work with the envelope of it and and the inside of it and to combine these two techniques the oyster casting and the frey print Inc um I would like to play a video to um give us permission to view because it’s on my account okay I think have to check your phone my
Phone was the best message okay okay should yeah can you log in yeah sry I hope hope I remember my Gmail passwords to ask the reality of technology is that it’s not always convenient we have to select it here again I hope I have nothing too embarrassing this point I’m fully exposed
I know what everyone’s thinking it better be a pretty good film I hope I won’t disappoint no so since there’s no sounds I will be an improptu narrator I think this is my karmic punishment for trying to be lazy and just show you guys film that were beautifully narrated and had beautiful
Music so there’s always a price to pay when you’re trying to to get short cuts so this is the site uh in Hong Kong the site where we are building it’s a natural park as I mentioned in the out skirting islands of Hong Kong and this is in lafas Shan territories where
There’s the the fisherman um village these are my lovely students since the sound is not working I think it’s a bit over underwhelming to just watch watch it so I’m going to try to scroll a little bit faster through it and the whole laan territories basically it’s a whole village where you
Can find oysters anywhere there’s oysters trash uh in people’s Gardens uh on the streets uh next to the water everywhere so we were going with students there uh taking the oysters uh and then bringing them back to University campus and doing the oyster casting while simultaneously Al Al 3D
Printing uh using Sixaxis Printing and uh ceramic clay and we had to use a lot of different ways of transporting this so we had to be very creative in in how we thought about the building process we couldn’t just do everything pack it and send it on sides uh because we have to
Pass through free Islands in order to reach the site we we harvest the oysters in the northern island of Hong Kong then we go on campus uh which is the main island H in Hong Kong and then we had to go to another little island and we and
For the little island we also had to take two different fairies the big Ferry uh and then a smaller uh sang boats in order to reach our sight so we had to always be very creative in how we transport things how we manage to break
Things down and uh take a lot of people with us so each of us can take a little part of the project project with them uh finding materials locally in this little island um where the site is so we had to find basically uh Seafoods which are um
Kind of old school type of Masters who are working with their crafts and we had to buy material from them and we um we had to kind of involve them in the process as well and this is the the project is not finished but we’re in one
To one scale uh prototyping right now um but we did want to test the oyster C testing and um 2 m tall wall and then the 3D printing system and I think I will just go quickly through the video and maybe I can um yeah and basically then um the plants
Were from also from the same Village we tried to buy um the succulent plants that nobody is buying uh that they seem like they’re dying because the the site is a natural park and it’s all about ecological building um harvesting and growing their own food uh taking care of
Uh stray animals so we really had to be very respectful of the EOS of of the product projects and uh something that I maybe forgot to mention is that each project that I’m showing today has a different funding scheme so I think also part of the reality is building is to be
Creative with the ways in which you find funding for your projects and how you make sure that uh you still have enough agency um even though you maybe have a financial um Dominator over you and um the third Transportation mode was of course biking um for the
Students once we didn’t have to carry anything heavy anymore of course and this uh brings me to the project that I started with today traditional House of the future so this project was a collaboration between me and another colleague in Hong Kong University or also in the architecture
Department but we came from seemingly very different world so my world was about um digital fabrication uh robotic fabrication onsite and offsite fabrication um very little to do with the with humans actually and more related to the environment and uh my colleague John Lynn’s work revolves around um investigations in rural China
Um of course building himself but also um by the time when we collaborated on this project he had just finished uh wrri WR in a book called asan houses which uh followed and investigated how uh spontaneous builders on trade or trade untrained or trained in China are um reimagining traditional Chinese
Houses and one of the particular interest was in the traditional wooden house which is actually very easy to take apart and and build back together so there’s a lot of these weird they they almost seem like collages between the old and the new and the way in which
People use their their own houses uh in this truck there’s actually that’s actually a house that someone is taking with a truck to another Village um and you can see there’s always this tension between the old and the new and even though it’s very clear
Which is which they still find a way to coexist and this is an example from shanga where there’s a lot of um Earth architecture and then a lot of these new additions working with steel and glass um this is the house of local uh businessman AKA um a mob man uh he
Starts his morning in this room which is uh the Contemporary part of the house and then by the by lunch he moves to this space which is half traditional half modern and he ends his days um at his nights in the most traditional part of the house where he lives with his
Family so this was something that was very important to us to take into consideration how people live and how they use these houses and to create a mix between the old and the new um I’m going to show another video but I’m prepared to talk on top of
This one so it won’t be slos have the sound from the mobile in the microphone uh this one is okay without sounds yeah okay so the the project is located in guo province which is in South West mainland China and it’s a government initiative so the story of the village is actually
That slowly the village is getting um abandoned um it’s a village with traditional wooden houses um and they’re getting slowly and slowly abandoned uh for the neighboring Village in which um it’s all generic concrete buildings but people are moving there because they don’t have Financial incentives to stay
In their own village and because the traditional house doesn’t reply respond to their needs anymore so um we were actually uh me and my colleague we were teaching together at the time in a year two and Hong Kong University Anor graduates and we did a series of interviews and surveys with our students
Um with the local villagers trying to put together a design brief with the local people and when you’re working with villagers uh it’s not this kind of hippie romantic uh idea that we can have of the Village People are very aware of what they need and um we created a
Design brief together with them and the most important thing for them was to have uh modern amenities um and to have an incentive to stay in the village so the way that the government responded to that was to create this house that they contacted asked for um there would
Create a focal point in the village a tourist attraction um and what we actually managed to do was through the building process to create a financial incentive for the village because we had almost all participants from the village involved it we have the government then we had uh trained Craftsman traditional
Woodw workers and untrained CRA um untrained villagers so um the villagers um were already um um self financing themselves so this is not an official Tau Village tau is a platform similar to Amazon but there is there are people who are working for tauo in it and they were
Basically trying to fund themselves to stay in the village um as I mentioned uh traditional Chinese wooden houses are it’s possible to tear them apart and build them back within one day they use no screws no um additional everything is done through the way that the the
Joinery is done so we decided to uh scan the original house and then um adapt the 3D printing part to the original house that meant that we could um completely reuse everything that was original We simply reconditioned it and um some parts of it had to be chopped off but
The house was put together using only the original words um and there’s something very similar in the way that traditional Woodworkers and robots work which is not something that you would expect but um we both um let’s say both wordss do not really require the use of drawings so uh the
Traditional wood Craftsman um they are working based on models so we had to make small mockup models and send it to them and discuss with them and and the robot of course operates based on code so even though you may need a geometry you don’t need a drawing so that was
Something very interesting to see how to create um a pro a oneto one scale project a real house without having any construction drawings and it also required a lot of adaptation from both sides so there was always this continuous loop between us working with the robots and the Craftsmen because the
Way that traditionally these wooden houses are done is that you create a structure Flats on the ground and then you simply erect it but because we scanned it and then we 3D printed everything in order to account for every little imperfection in the columns and create all these little nooks in the
Walls in which you can um in basically insert the original column uh they couldn’t do that so they also had to adapt their way of working and create ways of redoing the frames reworking within the walls that we have created so there was never an end or a beginning or
An end to the construction process it was always this Loop between us as I mentioned even untrained villagers were uh involved in the construction process not only the ones that helped us um assembly the roof and do the roof tiling but but also the ones who are cooking
Who are cleaning who are doing the waterproofing um because um of course nothing ever works perfectly according to schedule so we didn’t manage to finish building uh during the dry season so part of the house was actually built during the wet season and we needed a
Lot of help from the local villagers to waterproof everything um the the new addition to the house made it possible to go from a one-story house to a two-story house the original House was quite tall but the the ground level was only for animals but people don’t grow animals anymore in
The village so we decided to transform ground floor and also let’s say human space so we added um all these modern amenities that people were mentioning that they need that they don’t have and that’s especially for people with children it’s a very reason it’s a very big reason why they live leave the
Village so we created a bathroom um a modern kitchen a courtyard a living room Gathering space also we try to take into consideration how PE how all generations live and it’s quite common in this area that uh houses are multigenerational so you would need at least two free bedrooms because there’s usually two
Free Generations living in in the house and you need a generous Gathering space because that’s part of the way in which people live um and also we try to incorporate within the 3D printing um well there’s no plans yet because the project was just finished when we did it
But the the curly wall is basically a planting space for them to plant everything that they might need in a little vertical garden and then to incorporate a stove and all these um these appliances that they might need within the 3D printed geometry so that
Helped us also a lot to to maximize the space in the house for and something that we also wanted to do from the beginning was not to try to fully integrate the Two Worlds but to have it very clear uh which one is which because uh one of the requirements from
The government was that they want um for someone coming from the outside in the village to really think about this Village as a place of innovation that was something that the village head was uh very adamant about and they were very open about us using um Cutting Edge
Technology um so they were very welcoming to the fact that we brought all these robots on site and doing the scanning and the Drone filming uh we received actually a lot of support not only from um the the local government but from the people themselves people are very curious about technology and
There’s always this interesting mix um we’re very all very affected by technology but how often do we actually benefit from it and we think we benefit benefit from it but when you actually think about these areas and where basically technology is produced it’s uh it’s an interesting way to rethink your
Own relationship and your own expectations out of Technology uh we can claim it’s unsustainable and we can wait for it to fix everything but I think it’s more up to us to mediate this relationship and with this robot leaving I will um simply add a few more slides
And then I’m done I’m not sure if I’m over time I’m sorry if I am uh following this project um the next project oh and the project is nominated for the disine awards and the world architecture Awards so please uh send us some good f um and the next project we are working
On and this project is literally just being started it’s the underground house of the future in which we’re working with another uh traditional Chinese topology the underground groundh house um theground houses are in northern China and right now they’re going through something that was not um possible to be accounted for which is
Climate change so a lot of the houses are being damaged because um the it didn’t used to be an area with a lot of flooding and now we’re they are experiencing a lot of flooding because of climate change but people still use these houses in the modern ways um but
Also the houses that seem like they’re being abandoned they’re still occupied uh this is a house that the inhabitant has been his generation has owned this house for the last 500 years and he is still living there and this is his current uh bedroom SL living room/kitchen um and we are working now
On a project um which will com which will create new rooms and new openings towards these rooms perimetral and a completely new Courtyard system in which to transform the space into something that is is called red and white which is basically dedicated to funerals and Weddings But it’s not a public space
It’s still owned by the family they just do everything within the house that they own sorry for the bad pictures they’ve been sent by The Constructor and we’re creating again the mix of traditional techniques using uh traditional brick vaulting techniques and robotic fabrication on site thank you
Thank you are there questions from the audience thank you for such wonderful presentation very exciting um I have a question regarding your oyer project uh because it wasn’t fully clear like the oers that you gathered you used to just for molding or also mixed it somehow with clay for the printing no it’s
Simply for casting the oyster it’s it’s two separate systems we did try oyster printing uh the problem is that since it’s a project for an actual beneficiary we cannot really risk that much so uh we didn’t really manage to get on time a good oyster mix that could both both be
Printed and be durable enough we did get some prints um quite good ones but in the Hong Kong climate that is very very humid and that about six months per year it’s uh the the the wet Seasons um we couldn’t risk using them on site thank
You well I will ask a question um in all your project I think the material formulation is probably quite sensitive you’ve told us about how the clay in the reefs dissolves in the end I’m guessing printing in that kind of context with potential humidity and yeah the whole environment changing could also affect
The the printing I was wondering how you work with the formulation what part of placees work and how you tackle it so for the onsite projects first of all it’s concrete it’s not clay so to begin with the material is much more durable and there is a special uh way of
Treating concrete uh we had in the team that was printing um so part of the story of the project is that this project was done during covid when we could not go to China um so we had another team from uh Professor shuo uh from Shenzhen that was printing
For us and within their team they have a material science department that made sure that the the house would be able to survive the climates in southern China Southwest China