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JULIE WISKIRCHEN: Welcome, everyone.
I'm Julie Wiskirchen.
I'm on the Tech Talks team, here at Google, Los Angeles.
And today we're excited to welcome Jennifer Siegel.
Jennifer is known for her work in creating
the mobile home of the 20th century.
She is a founder and principal of the Los Angeles-based firm
Office of Mobile Design, which is dedicated to the design
and construction of ecologically sound dynamic structures
utilizing portable and prefabricated architecture.
She earned a master's degree from SCI-Arc in 1994.
And was a 2003 Loeb fellow at Harvard's Graduate
School of Design.
She's presently an adjunct associate professor at USC.
Her innovative design sensibilities
and expertise in futuristic concepts,
prefabricated construction, and green building technologies
were recognized by the popular media in 2003,
when Esquire named her one of the design world's
best and brightest.
And the Architectural League of New York
included her in the acclaimed Emerging Voices program.
She was honored when mayor Antonio Villaraigosa presented
her with a History Channel's 2006 Infinity Design Excellence
award, for her competition entry for the Los Angeles
City of the Future 2106.
Today, Jennifer will tell us more about her work.
And especially, the arrow mobile project, which is currently
a pop-up exhibit here at the Google courtyard.
So please join me in welcoming Jennifer Siegel.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Thank you, Julie.
And thank you, Google, for hosting this Tech Talk today.
It's a big honor to be here.
The title of today's lecture, Motopia Deployed Strategies
for the Language of Movement in the Art
of Off-Site Construction, is a series
of ideas, and a kind of historical overview,
to some degree, of mobility, not only in my work,
but in the work of others that came before me.
And also a small glimpse into the work
that Office of Mobile Design, my company,
has been doing for the last 15 years.
The first image I am showing you shows the depth and the breadth
of what mobile architecture means to our society.
Starting with a Mongolian yurt from 600
BC up until today's culture, which has become,
as we're all very much aware, more mobile than ever.
I'm the author of a series of books
on mobile architecture, both published
by Princeton Architectural Press.
This first book came out in 2002.
And on its heels, in 2008, "More Mobile."
Looking at a series of architects and artists
from around the world that have been building and creating
ideas around lightness, portability,
and transpositions.
And just a quick little diagram of the work from Office
of Mobile Design.
Where you can see a variety of different objects
that we've created over the years.
Some of them dealing with modular and prefab
construction.
Some of them more rooted in industrialization.
And some of them fully deployable and mobile,
such as the AERO-Mobile that's here
in the courtyard at Google.
This quote, I think from Benjamin Bratton,
from his article "iPhone City," in some ways
really summarizes a lot of my feeling
about living in Los Angeles, and what that means.
Where he talks about sitting in traffic on the LA freeway,
something that we're all very much aware of.
Looking at my edits for this essay,
"I am reminded of Joan Didion's revelation
that this is the most authentic Angeleno social experience.
We are not going to any place, all lined up
behind our windshields, we are already there."
So this understanding of recognition
of the circumstances in which we live in.
And the kind of growth and opportunity
of these environments is something
that I'm very interested in.
And not only am I concerned with ideas
and environmental consequences of automobility,
or dromology, a term coined by Paul Virilio,
meaning the science of travel.
But I'm equally interested in using design
to affect social mobility.
And this project is an example from MIT's Media Lab.
Their electric robot wheeled city car,
that Bill Mitchell had been working
on-- who's the former dean at MIT,
and also running the Media Lab.
You'll see a kind of genesis of this idea
as the talk continues.
You can see that my preoccupation with devising
portable structures grew out of my family's
own economic history.
My grandfather, in this image, had
a hot dog cart in New York City.
And two generations later, while putting myself
through graduate school in SCI-Arc, I did as well.
So it was not necessarily a leap, but rather
a logical move when I founded Office
of Mobile Design in 1998, as a way
to actively engage in designing non-permanently sited
structures that move across, and rest lightly upon the land.
And then the other image is from the brewery.
A big artist live-work colony in downtown Los Angeles,
where I had my office for many years.
And I was directly adjacent to an active train yard.
So the entire building would shake, every time
the trains coupled together, which
was a constant reminder of the work
that I was involved with at the time.
My work seeks to rethink and reestablish
methods of building that contrast
with the generic clutter that increasingly
crowds the landscape.
I'm inspired by Sant'Elia's futurist manifesto,
in that I share in his philosophy that "we no longer
believe in the monumental, the heavy, and static.
And have enriched our sensibilities
with the taste for lightness, transience, and practicality."
Shown here, in a region of instability in Israel,
between Jerusalem and Telaviv, where this gas station
can easily be retracted when necessary.
This desire for the active mobile in everywhere dynamic
that characterized the Italian futurist machine aesthetic
infuses my work at OMD.
Shown here is the rock climber whose dynamic form responds
to the static rock face.
Or the parkour's efficient and quick ability to overcome
obstacles.
Another text reference would be from Deleuze and Guattari's
"Nomadology: The War Machine" talking
about the smooth versus the striated space.
And while architecture's purpose remains constant,
providing inspiration and shelter
from the natural elements, and community
among its inhabitants.
Mobile and portable structures herald
the dawn of the age of new nomadism.
The applications and uses are limitless.
These buildings have no borders.
The diversity of material pallet, design style,
and transportation method are varied.
Here, Buckminster Fuller's dropping in one of his dymaxion
domes, and a take on Fuller's dome along with his dymaxion
car-- a three-wheeled vehicle, certainly the precursor
to the RVs that we see now on the road--
was a project called U-Town from 1996.
A rethinking of the trailer park.
So mobile architecture then can be
defined not merely in terms of movable structures,
but rather as a way of intelligently inhabiting
a specific environment, at a specific time and place,
in a way that better reacts to increasingly
frequent social and environmental shifts.
These fluvial forms are expressed best
in the extreme sports world.
Where surfers meld with the braking surfaces.
The sea becomes the form giver.
Or the intuition and innovation of the skateboarder,
working off the urban infrastructure.
The information age whets our appetite
for the exploration of the unknown.
As inquisitive social beings, and innate explorers
of the universe, we are standing at a new threshold
of curiosity and movement.
Biological and technological advancements
reveal themselves in our everyday lives.
Echoing prophecies and environmental visions
from American pulp science fiction.
Architecture today rolls, flows, inflates, breathes, expands,
multiplies, and contracts.
Finally hoisting itself up as Archigram predicted
at the end of the 1960s, to go in search of its next user.
I'm also quite interested, as my USC students
know, in ideas of manufacturing, and rethinking
the possibilities of how we build today, and in the future.
The machines and tools that are now
available to us, CNC Milling and robot arms, to some degree
really come out of the industry of aerospace and automobile
industries that have already been thinking
about off-site construction to a large degree.
And my argument is that architecture
needs to be more aware and wake up
to the possibilities of what is in store for it.
Ultimately, I feel-- and Google is probably
at the forefront of a lot of this--
is that architecture, or intelligence, will
be more embedded within our skins and our bodies,
and allow for greater diversity and versatility in the future.
The project that I'm showing here in the courtyard at Google
is from an exhibition called Truck-A-Tecture.
And Truck-A-Tecture was conceived
by another local Venetian, an architect named Mark Mack,
asking the question of when you fuse mobility
and prefabrication, what do you get.
And this was an idea that I had been thinking
about for many years, and had the opportunity
to build it this summer.
This small little vehicle becomes
the platform for invention, or pop-up possibilities.
It's made from a variety of industrial recycled materials,
including the ULD, which is the aluminum box sitting
on the top of it, which comes from the aerospace industry,
typically used to move luggage around airports,
or in the hull of aircraft.
And this little truck then allows
for a start-up company, possibly or an incubator company,
in the tech world, to have instant meetings in variety
of different locations.
Or test out new ideas to consumers on the street.
I'm going to show you a lot of examples
right now, some of them theoretical.
Some of them built of the work that I've
been doing since 1998, and even before that.
This project was a kind of rethinking of the Bambi
Airstream, and what the possibilities
are for a KCRW Sonic Trace recording studio,
so that this little vehicle could
come into your town, your city, or a plaza.
And from the outside, you would actually
see the movement of the skin, based
on the voices that were being recorded on the inside.
Globetrotter was done for the National Building
Museum in Washington as an homage to Shakespeare's Globe
Theater, 100 years later.
Thinking again about community, public space,
and how to bring the builder to the people, where
this truck would unfold, creating a venue for theater.
And the back of it, the pneumatic bubbles,
become the place for change, or ticket encounters,
or where the backstage happens.
It's fully powered by the sun as well,
which is an idea that I've been thinking about for a long time.
The storehouse came about for a group, Haagen Dazs,
that was thinking about a pop-up ice cream stand.
And also for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New,
York, when they had asked me to be
part of their tri-annual exhibition.
And you can start to see that I'm
looking a lot at outside industries-- in this case,
windsurfing-- to give me some inspiration for the idea
of movements without being too explicit
in the building or the construction.
And this small project was done for the Monterey Design Museum.
And thinking, again, about mobile pop-up
experiences, where the museum wanted
to show some their ideas, or their maritime equipment.
But they wanted to allow people to interact
with it in a new way.
So you weren't just looking at the model of a boat,
but you were actually seeing something that was moving.
And this allowed you to capture space, and be a part of it
at the same time, feel like you were
in a more sheltered environment.
And then finally, this project, Helispot,
was designed for the Walker Museum,
thinking, again, about the way in which we, as human beings,
will interact with a digital environment.
So I'm always looking for ways to move beyond just the screen,
to allow the material to be responsive to the user.
So, again, in this case, these cloud-like structures
that hover over this bed shows the imagery
of what's on the screen in front of the person who's using it,
so that someone from a distance is always
kind of seeing the way that clouds pass
the interaction of the particular user.
So there's always a connection outside
of just the one-on-one with the screen.
Or whether it's on the floor, trying to take you away
from the flat-on screen in front of you.
This question that Fuller raises-- "Madam,
do you know the weight of your house?"--
was never a question that was posed to me while I was
a student in architecture.
But it has become a question I always ask my students.
But it's also something that becomes a daily encounter
with the work that I do.
This is my house in Venice, and I am craning in a truck
into the backyard as an addition to the house.
As a early morning experiment, before the neighbors
are aware of what's happening.
And then it becomes a very simple and easy prefabricated
addition, which has now become the art room for my daughter.
And I took on the idea of trucks because I liked the fact
that they were contained and already build.
And you could dismantle them, or cut into them in certain ways,
and transform them.
And yet, they still maintained their truckness.
And this project, ECO-LAB, was done
for a group of people in Hollywood,
with students of mine at the time, at Woodbury University.
Teaching children about the life of a tree,
as this mobile classroom comes to the children.
And they move in and out of this truck,
sort of understanding space in a very different way.
But ultimately, understanding that there
is nature outside of the urban condition that we live in.
And on the heels of that, another project
that was built here in Los Angeles for the Venice
Community Housing Corporation, with a friend
of mine, Larry Scarpa, who teaches also
at USC-- Trains, People, and Construction.
So this portable construction training center
is an old manufactured home, as you can see.
By removing two of the walls and replacing it with steel,
we were able to de-laminate it, de-skin it,
and then allow for the whole building
to open up to the outside.
And people could practice different forms
of construction, rip it out, and build it back in.
So it's a very active and transformable construction
experience.
And then this house was done for a client who
owns the brewery, my former landlord.
It's about a 10,000 square foot lot.
It's directly opposite the brewery site,
which on the bottom half of your screen.
And the house was built from a series of recycled
and found objects that he already had on the site.
We chose to position the house at the back of the lot,
because like all good Angelenos, he
drives to work across the street.
So we thought it would be a good idea to get him out of the car,
to walk his garden every day, and then
get into the car and drive.
It's made from four shipping containers
and two green trailers.
It's a simple construction, and yet it becomes very elaborate
once the pieces are assembled.
And on your right, you can see the boneyard, essentially,
of all of the materials that were gathered
to make the house on the left-hand side.
There's something quite magical about the site,
because as we started to remove tarmac, and remove
age-old concrete on the ground, and introduce
a natural planting scheme, it I woke up
the entire neighborhood.
And butterflies were coming, and hummingbirds,
and all of these birds that hadn't
had a place to land before on their path
then returned to their native environment.
The grain trailers, the two of them-- one
is on the inside of the house, one
is on the outside of the house-- he fills them with koi fish.
So there's a constant feeling of movement,
and a slight dank smell from the fish.
I was also really interested in this project with the shipping
containers, of leaving them as they were,
not covering them up.
So there are two steel containers and two aluminum
containers, just simply painted.
And the rest of the materials are left exposed.
Over the years, I get approached by a variety
of different publications, and magazines, and publishers
to propose ideas for buildings.
And this particular building came
about when Dwell Magazine, who had just started out
at the time-- I think it was 2000,
or 2001-- had asked me if I had a design for a prefab house.
And I was starting to look a lot at the trailer
industry, or the manufactured housing industry,
but mostly at the portable classroom industry.
And I realized that the structure
that the portable classrooms were made out of
could easily be transformed into residential units.
So this was an idea that was before its time,
before I was even ready to really digest it.
It was published, and then that's
when my phone, in many ways, started ringing.
When I started to go into these factories,
and look at these simple steel structures,
I thought it was going to be a very easy transformation
between educational and commercial use,
to residential use.
As it turned out, it probably took me about half a dozen
years to really master the transition,
and really understand what the possibilities were.
But this was my first prototype.
And I was thinking about it in terms of multiples, or modules.
And how I could create courtyards, or green spaces,
and a kind of ease of construction--
off-site construction.
Whether these ideas would exist in very arid lands,
or in more urban, dense conditions.
This one being downtown Los Angeles, creating an artist
community on a piece of land that hadn't been developed
and a client came to me asking what I could do with this area.
When I finally figured out how to build it,
that prototype came here to Venice, to Abbot Kinney,
and became the showhouse for my office.
Where I was able to bring people into my world,
and give them a better understanding of what
a new prefabricated mobile home could look like.
I changed materials, I used things like polycarbonate
on the walls, Plyboo on the floor, higher ceilings.
So this otherwise very narrow space--
it's only 12 feet wide-- gives you
a whole new sense of volume and movement.
That project was then bought by a client who moved it over
to Joshua Tree, where it sits on about 80 acres right now.
And it's a self-sufficient contained house.
And then one other project, just to give you
an idea of what the flexibility of these systems allow.
This is a four module, prefabricated house
that is in Santa Monica, right of the border between Venice
and Santa Monica.
It's a very narrow lot.
And the modules, at their greatest width,
are 16 feet wide.
So this house fit perfectly on this lot,
given the setbacks that we were faced with.
And you can see that there's a public space on the ground
floor, and a more private space on the second floor.
The biggest challenge, in some ways, for these buildings
is transportation, and moving them on to site.
Sometimes orchestrating cranes, sometimes
jumping over electrical wires.
It's probably, for me, one of the most harrowing moments
in the entire process, is when the cranes pick up
the buildings and are positioning them
very gently on their location.
I've also been working, to some degree,
with a SIP panel construction-- structurally insulated
panels-- which came out of an invited competition
by Dwell Magazine to rethink the prefabricated home.
I was interested in coming up with a system that was somehow
flexible enough to give you a variety of outcomes.
But with a consistent structural and skin package
that could be put together.
So you can see here, in this image,
using that same kind of S-shape, you
can create three different types of modular conditions.
This was the outcome that I proposed for the competition
in Dwell.
And it was then purchased by a client about a block from here.
And constructed in the wall system,
the whole panel system went up in about three days.
He is a recording artist genius.
And he works a lot with some pretty big names.
So he has a recording studio on this property.
He was very interested in the control of sound waves.
So what I found out, with working with this whole SIP
system, is that you can really tune your building.
And then another project that's a sort of hybrid
between the modular and the SIP panel system
was one that I worked on with a group of students
at Taliesin, in Arizona.
Which was the first project, I believe,
that was built with the blessing of the Taliesin community
since the death of Frank Lloyd Wright.
So it was a challenge.
But you can see the project being built in the desert,
by student labor.
They already had a lot of the skills.
But they hadn't built something at this scale before,
and probably were not sure what they're doing now.
This is the outcome of that project.
It sits over a ravine.
It's a steel modular base and chassis
with a SIP panel skin that's applied to it.
And it also has a solar array, so it generates its own energy,
and is off the grid, which surprisingly enough is not
a common sight in a city like Phoenix.
So modular construction, and mobile construction,
is far greater and wider, and has much more
profound implications than any of us are even aware of.
Ideas that have been generated for many years--
this was Claude Prouve's building
that was designed in the early '70s-- '72, '74.
He was the son of Jean Prouve, one of my great heroes.
And this is in France, and it wasn't
meant to be a 60-unit or an eight-story modular
construction, which was never fully realized.
And this one was.
This is the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kurokawa.
This was also built in 1972.
The early '70s and late '60s were a very important time
when you look at metabolists, and you
look at groups like Archigram.
So all around the world, there were
pockets of people that were thinking about mobility,
and prefabrication, and transportation ideas.
And a couple of these ideas were built.
This project, unfortunately, was destroyed a few years ago.
But you can see, again, this idea of off-site construction.
Building things with a lot more control in a factory,
and then introducing them onto a site.
And just quickly assembling them.
And then this is a project that my firm
is doing in Seoul, Korea, right now, which takes its clue
from some of that history.
Thinking also about a tower, but working
with industrial up-cycled materials--
in this case, shipping containers, or jetways,
and then small vehicles.
So this company is a retail company,
and they sell high-end sports equipment.
And they wanted a way to not only display
their goods for shopping.
But the idea that I brought to them
was that they could pull pieces of the building off,
and those building pieces could move around
the city creating pop-up instant retail experiences, which
they liked.
And with that, of course, comes an app.
And you can locate your pop-up environment as needed.
So this is the beginning of the app,
and what the opportunities are for displacement,
or relocation.
And then elements of the building from ETFE skins, which
are pneumatic skins, to hydraulic car lifts, where
things expand and contract at will.
And the section here shows you that the public space
and the private space are certainly
separated from each other.
And yet, are able to be blurred depending
on the use, or the time of the day.
And here it is in downtown Seoul,
as we've conceived of it.
So finally, I'm just going to show you
a video from an award-winning entry for a project called
the City of the Future that was put on and presented at LACMA.
A variety of designers and architects
were selected to contribute to this.
And my thinking about it, even though this
was a few years ago, I still feel that this holds true,
that water, our most precious resource,
will essentially become the new oil in terms of what our needs
and desires are in this city.
Let me just pull up my film.
Possibly.
Let's see.
This shows the idea that our buildings
will start to mimic a biomorphic condition.
That as they grow, and they are more responsive,
more like a plant, they will be able to be controlled in terms
of their energy use, or what kind of program exists in them.
These buildings might feed off of the existing aqueduct, which
is what we consider to be the LA River.
And that they will be able to be positioned
in parts of the city that haven't necessarily
had the opportunity for growth.
So in between crevices, over the rooftops, or underground.
I realize that this has a long way to go.
But I also believe that this idea
of mobile, portable, deployable architecture
depends on the resources.
It depends on the environment that we want for our future.
And it also looks to the future for a better way of living.
That's it, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Julie, anything?
JULIE WISKIRCHEN: Anyone have questions?
AUDIENCE: I liked, for using thinking
of mobile architecture's terms as repurposing trucks.
I think it's very effective in Los Angeles.
But I was wondering if you had any thoughts about other areas
of the world, like Venice, or Amsterdam,
or even up in Seattle, where there's a lot of water.
And thinking about mobile architecture's
terms as nautical, instead of just something
that you drive on the highway.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Mhm.
So absolutely.
There are actually projects that I just didn't bring today,
that think quite a bit about life on the ocean,
and inhabiting some of the largest, most vastly
unoccupied spaces on the planet.
I think that all of these ideas and terms
can be applied to those environments.
Whether it's space, or whether it's as I said, on the ocean.
Not necessarily the ocean floor, but floating architecture--
there's a project called Hydra House
that I've been developing for 10 years.
That, again, thinks about self-sufficient housing,
but then how those small hydras can mass together
to create different forms of community.
For me, this is just the beginning
of a lot of these ideas.
And I think that it's something that I
offer to you, as students.
And ways of developing it further
will come from your generation.
AUDIENCE: I don't know if I heard you correctly, but did
you say architecture embedded under the skin, in the future?
And if you did, what do you mean by that?
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Well, I've been really interested
in wearable architecture for quite some time.
And I think we're starting to see it.
I mean, didn't Apple just put out
their new watch, that's about to be released.
So that's on the surface of our skin.
But I would look to someone like Michael Webb,
from Archigram, from the early '70s and late '60s.
We're thinking about smaller, contained environments that
could then open up and enfold.
But really, we could wear them on our bodies.
So when I start to think about, truly,
what the future will bring us, I imagine it
as being a much more compressed, wearable environment
that, as needed, it inflates, it expands, it contracts,
and it's light, and it's adaptable.
And possibly it's within, under, embedded within our skin.
AUDIENCE: Almost robotic?
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Almost robotic.
AUDIENCE: Like some robotic extension
that came out from under our skin.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: And I think we're seeing it already.
I really think that it exists.
Certainly, Hollywood has a fantasy about it.
It's typically dystopic, but I am a lot more optimistic
than Hollywood.
And I feel like what is getting produced,
even in the world of fashion, and the way
in which a lot of designers now are
working with the kind of machined, crafted use
of materials, and cutting fabrics.
That information will eventually trickle down to us.
I often look outside of my industry,
or outside of architecture, to get inspiration.
And I see all of these other industries starting
to work in different ways.
And I'm trying to find ways for us
to successfully pull that information towards us.
AUDIENCE: When you were speaking,
it made me think of Alexander McQueen, one of his runway
shows, with the robotic arms that painted.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Right.
AUDIENCE: As she walked the runway.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Through the paint balls.
Yeah, I was just looking at that.
So hopefully it's not just something
that's a fashion experience.
But it's really a--
AUDIENCE: Actually, GM picked that up,
and they have it on a commercial.
Where they have these robotic arms that are, as the cars
on the runway.
And the robotic arms are dancing.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Well, I happen to think that the automobile
industry is light years ahead of architecture.
Cars-- they can heat your body, they cool your body.
They give lots of different sound environments.
They're super kinetic.
The doors open five to 50 times per day.
And our buildings remain heavily static, and inoperable.
And we have these large spaces, and these large rooms
that we heat and cool, as opposed to thinking
about the personal user and the body in space.
Each one of you should have your own personal heating or cooling
unit, and not this whole room.
AUDIENCE: Along with our personal brands.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: And our brand.
AUDIENCE: So, another question.
Have you ever taken a semi truck and driven it on the site,
and built around not just the truck itself,
but the entire unit.
The semi truck.
So you could actually kind of live in the front of it,
as well as the back.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: I haven't--
AUDIENCE: I was just curious.
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Done that.
But the project that I'm showing here at Google, the AERO-Mobile
is a very small version of that.
This is possibly a dwelling unit.
It's only 12 feet long.
It's an electric truck.
It's meant to not be an 80 foot long semi.
It's really meant to think about the ease of mobility.
While I love trucks-- and I probably entertain myself
constantly driving down the freeway by looking
at all the different varieties of trucks, and the skins,
and what they can do-- I haven't had the opportunity
to work on that scale, yet.
AUDIENCE: I had one question regarding the possibility,
or have you already worked on structures for disaster relief?
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Yeah, I think that's a great question,
Daniel, that comes up a lot for me.
And I get asked quite a bit to address that.
It's a really broad topic.
And it's really hard, I mean, no one has really cracked it.
I think one of the challenges has
to do with weight, and deployability,
and the long-term use of a disaster relief environment.
So whether you're introducing a blue tarp, as we often see,
that then takes on a variety of different shapes and forms
over time.
It's a huge challenge.
And I have seen some interesting designs,
but I've never seen anybody successfully create
the perfect environment for it.
And maybe there is no particular one answer.
I love to use the analogy from the film, "The Gods Must Be
Crazy" because there's a scene-- if you haven't seen it.
There's a scene where this Coke bottle
is dropped into the middle of this African tribe.
And they pick it up, and they see it as a kind of answer,
or as a token from God.
That it has these mystical powers.
But it really creates all kinds of animosity
within this group of people.
So the point is, if you introduce a foreign material
into a particular region, or environment,
you have to be prepared for what its meaning will have.
Or how do you take care of it over time.
So a lot of the technology that we think of as commonplace,
it's hard to get that bolt.
It's hard to get that piece of wire
to replace a piece when it's broken.
I've traveled a lot in Southeast Asia,
and I see these incredible inventions, that always
have to do with mobile businesses, and enterprises.
In China, where you see all of these-- this huge variety
of pop-up, wheeled businesses.
And it's made from found objects.
And it's just anything that's within reach,
you can fold into the project.
When it comes to disaster relief,
I think there is this overall sensibility, or feeling
within the NGO environment, that it
has to be something that's clean.
And something that's perfectly fit
into that particular condition.
And I just don't think that exists across the board.
But it's something that, maybe you will figure out.
AUDIENCE: I had one more question.
I really liked the idea of how you are approaching housing.
And especially with the growing of cities coming up,
the statistics are just of the population growth.
And I feel that these might actually be the future.
And I'm just thinking in terms of multiple functions for one
specific type of-- different programs
into one type of architecture.
Have you thought about converting, merging
different functions into--
JENNIFER SIEGEL: Yeah, maybe you heard the story on NPR
this morning, but they were talking about dead malls.
And the rethinking of what the mall-- America has more malls
than any other country in the world.
And so many of them are now obsolete,
because we don't shop in the same way.
Retail is changing.
So these malls are becoming office spaces,
or residential units.
But the primary success behind the revitalization
of dead malls is in the multifunctional approach.
So I definitely think that the idea of program in architecture
is shifting radically.
That building a building that's only about an office function
is a waste of time.
It has to serve multiple purposes in multiple ways,
and be a lot more accommodating to the user.
Otherwise, it'll be a dead mall.
OK, that was great.
Thank you for the questions.
Thanks for coming.
And if you'd like to join us, we'll
take a tour of the AERO-Mobile.
Thank you.
JULIE WISKIRCHEN: Thank you, Jennifer.
[APPLAUSE]