Transcripts For ALJAZ Studio 20240706

Drivers make up artists, and many more trades economists estimate the strike will cost the economy up to 30000000. 00 per day. Rob reynolds al jazeera los angeles, ah, without his era, these are all top stories. Russia says and stopped an assassination attempt targeting president vladimir preaching, and says to drains were used in the attack on the president ial residence in the kremlin. Ukraine denies allegations that it was behind it. Journalist to eli shapiro vall ever has more from moscow. President peyton was not in the kremlin at the time of the incident. Russian officials immediately blamed ukraine for that time and called it a plum act of terror and an assassination attempt on presentation. We understand. There are 2 video clips so that talk dad now circulating the media. One of them shows the moment of shooting down the drone and how with falling on the, one of the crumbling buildings on the other, we can see how the dumb is burning. At least 8 people have been killed and 5 wounded in rational talary strikes on the ukrainian city of costs on the strikes. Had one of the few working hypermarkets in the city, partially destroying it. The Un Humanitarian Affairs on the sex tree. Martin griffith has arrived in to dawn, as we move on as in the capital costume, despite effect cease fire, and sir beer. A 13 year old boy has been accused of opening fire in school, killing 8 children, and a security guard. He was arrested at the scene, but hes not expected to be charged because hes below the legal age to face trial. Police in brazil, a rated the home of former president , jab old scenario. Federal police us suspects are coded, 900. 00 vaccination records are full supplied. So we could travel to the us of, nor denies the accusation. And hes 109 people have been killed in flooding tre. Goodbye. Heavy rains in western rwanda. West goods have been deployed to affected areas. Those are your headlines to stay tuned to be unscripted is next. Ah, the United Kingdom will crown a new monarch on may the same. King charles, the 3rd is planning a ceremony. The owners historic traditions. While embracing a new modern world followed the pageantry from Westminster Abbey on al jazeera. Mm mm. The cannon and the curriculum that we were taught was handed down from elsewhere. It was an inherited curriculum. That is the image of architecture in the west. If youre given all the budget in the world for doing a building, you still would like to make a building that has taken out the superfluous the unnecessary in social housing. Your forster is not a choice. Oh i am. Im hungry on a rena. Im an architect from seattle to me. Ah, architecture in the end is nothing but giving form to the places where people live. Its not more complicated than that, but also not easier than that. Ah. Im samantha lee, im an architect from johannesburg. South africa. Ah, i think the role of architecture is that it is a vest. So for our identities and a manifestation for who we are in the world and it allows us to see ourselves reflected at my practice element done. We see the city of the shortcut towards the quality with, if you identify strategically, projects of public space, infrastructure, housing, or transportation, you can improve peoples quality of life in the short period of time in my practice. Counter space was formed by both the challenges, ambiance, variations that exist in my city, a place with deep segregation, but also a place which is incredibly vibrant and full of creativity. I would like to use floor and a dialogue with some maya. How can we as architects, face inequalities into built environment through our practice . And what does the future of architecture looked like from voices of different who have been left out of the architectural cannon for most of history . Ah thing. Why dont we start . By addressing one of the elephants in the room, all women in architecture, i think theres been criticism about this issue ah, recently, and im interested not so much in the a b, i book a c or lets say the activism. But i wanted to know about the Tipping Points that brought you to be where you are today. Um, so the elephant in the room, woman in architecture. I think that for me, ive always seen all of the facets of my identity being a woman being of color, being south african of Indian Heritage as fuel for my practice. And ive never seen it as a challenge, but as a power, really, i think that these are important things to bring to the architectural conversation. Because architecture has always been created in the image of a very particular entity that of the metro, normative white male. And so any thing that we can bring to trouble or challenge or compliment and supplement that we should. And if i think about the Tipping Points, im when i graduated and i volunteered for a friends and g o called one to one agency of engagement. Its run by john bennett, and john o was looking at a project that had to do with informal settlement upgrading. And something that came into the conversation was the idea of a 2 story walk up for this community to testify. And, you know, to think about how we limit sprawl and so on. And one of the Community Leaders stood up and said in their particular belief system, they dont want to have to story walk ups because the, everything above the 1st floor or the ground floor is the realm of the ancestors. And when the soul leaves the body, it needs to have a clear passage for the ancestors. And this was the 1st time i heard an indigenous belief system described specialty like that. And it was an incredibly profound moment for me to be able to reckon with that idea that architecture can hold Belief Systems and ideologies like that. But until that time, all of the ideologies that i saw held in architecture didnt come from my own city or my own context and our own conditions. So that was an incredibly formative moment or so that time of being immersed in the city of johannesburg. And in being able to study and learn from its conditions, made me fall in love with the idea of architecture again. So thats a Tipping Point for my practice. Yes. What about you . What were the Tipping Points in your trajectory . Before going into that, the things he just said, im at a very telling because you could have chosen not to have listened to that need to have the 2nd floor free. The fact that bad matters, which is a symbolic thing, as is of course smaller g as a way to look at the world that not necessarily falls in what we have been trained as architect, which is measurable, budget time frame. And i think it tell us a lot about the nature of the questions that we have to deal today in this world. Some of them are very concrete, very urgent. Some of them are in tangible, symbolic, and talk about the mysterious nature of the human condition. And its both and in this synthetic condition of architecture, i would say its very telling from your, your own Tipping Points. But about my own room. Oh, im a went to try to make it as less boring as possible. Maybe 3rd year student ah, having to do a house it private house. And then many of our am our friends chose an artist, a philosopher, a filmmaker on the assumption that the better the client, the better the architecture. And of course, ah, i chose to go the other way around. Maybe its question of age, question of t lay in the middle of the dictatorship. You just want to provoke and i want, i made the house for a taxi driver because i want them in big words being discussing the university heidegger, the void, the space. And this guy was a friend of my father. I wanted to have the refrigerator in the living room because it was a sign of status. It could have gone honorably wrong. Ah, but it, it went well. So you then, of course, accumulate some courage to keep on provoking. Maybe then the other thing a Tipping Point would be your 1st building, so im always grateful of this particular professor of mine. Ah, that proposed me to be the architect of this building in the university. Ah, once you get an opportunity, you grab it with teeth and nail and i was almost leaving on the, on the Construction Side or was so nervous because you were doing some lines on paper. And this lines become a couple of months later, some tons of matter and hundreds of workers there. And that building lead to be invited to harvard. I asked myself one are arriving to her, but what can i say here that matters. So i thought about social housing coming from a country like chiller worse car cities of means are all around you. Which i thought worked. I said, great filter, an antidote against arbitrariness. You cant do things just because you want to or because you can amend that. But these are so tight, and if you make a mistake, families get a subsidy only once in their lifetime. You cant fail and on, i would stop there and maybe building on that a little bit. I think theres something very interesting in your practice about naming 1st the name of the practice itself. And then id also like to hear how that ethos is embedded. Also in this idea of the half house. Yeah, the name matters. And actually when we started with this initiative of at harvard, i met a person there, a transport engineer under his yakobelli. So he asked if to learn architecture recently has drawn so much International Attention and supposed to be so good. Why social housing so bad . Ah, i think he had a point and they said, why dont we do something . What the say in my are good x mine was do something meant a book, an exhibition. Ah, in my wildest dreams, a want to one prototype in his engineers mind. Lets make a company that can compete in the market and prove the market wrong. We wanted, among other things, the name element fall in spanish is something that can not be farther decomposed. So we wanted to turn a negative aspect of social housing into something positive because if youre given all the bad in the world for doing a building, you still would like to make a building that has taken out the superfluous. Theyre unnecessary. What everything that is not strictly the case in housing and social housing, youre forced to, theres not a choice. And the question of the have house i thing its important to be clarified because who on earth would like to receive half of a house as a solution in socio housing. But point was when you study informally settlements and social housing in, in developing countries, which is the reality for 2000000000. 00 people in the world, would you get in the best of the cases is around 40 square meters. Well then reality shows is that beneath, for making it grow, because a middle class family cant leave in such a tight space. They double the in is the size. Would markets on government do with tight budgets . Is that they take the middle class house and make it a small one and called architects to make it look nice. But its still a tiny small house. So the only thing we did was why dont we look at those 40 square meters, which is a fact we can not afford more than that, not as a small house, but as a half of that middle class good one that we would have liked to deliver but we dont have enough funds, but more than you reframe the question as half of the good house instead of a small one. The key question is, which have to do. And the definition of a Public Policy is that you do the half that families cant do on the role and weird and to find a set of design conditions that allows families over time. If you cant deliver everything on day one, then over time incrementally, you achieve that standard that you cannot afford in developing countries. So the name limit value is about that. What about Counter Space . So Counter Space was started when i was still a student and it was started with the group of friends at the time. We were very much engaged and in love with johannesburg. I also was very aware that when i was studying the cannon and the curriculum that we were taught was handed down from elsewhere, it was an inherited curriculum. That is the image of architecture in the west. And it was not an architecture that was made of and for the same credible city that we were living and studying. And, and so Counter Space was born a to be able to imagine other spaces. So johannesburg, its incredibly segregated. Of course, we know we still live with the histories and the ongoing legacies of a party. But despite these challenges and segregation, its also incredibly vibrant. Its incredibly rich and we see that peoples Belief Systems have, in some instances, been resilient enough to surface. So we have many, for example, economies that have developed in the cracks of the city. These incredible conditions that exist in johannesburg. I really wanted to be able to see architecture thats made from these conditions and also architecture. Thats not just about this idea of a lack of infrastructure or you know, only purely service delivery. And then i also really like the idea of the Counter Space as a surface across which to share and come together and defer the Counter Space conjures spaces to be together to come together to interact over it brings to bear economies. And all of these definitions i think are interesting because architecture is really how we convene in space. So its a shirt practice. I mean, the question of working with communities, not just what would it be and uses all the clients also your own Creative Process . I guess its, its collective, isnt it . Yes, Counter Space has evolved over the years. But the way that we work is such that we collaborate on every single project with different design disciplines, with communities and voices from various fields on every project. So when we worked on the serpentine pavilion, there were several neighborhoods and several Community Arts institutions that became part of the project as well. For example, the same on the islamic arts, b and i lay there were several different institutions from all across the world, as well as many different facets in the design team. So i think, collaborating and bringing different voices to the design discourses. I hope something thats inherent to the practice, and i really hope well continue to talking about listening to communities. Should we open the filter to the audience . My question for you. Some are you, you mentioned um that you felt that the curriculum you had was an inherited curriculum handed from the west. How did you keep yourself from being corrupted for want of a better word being corrupted by that m. By that curriculum and still have your voice and still have um your, your unique identity to bring to your work. Oh, i had to for better or worse, learn to listen to my intuition. And that something that a, i still am stubbornly kind of focused on. And i also lined not to trust the system too much because i didnt do particularly well in design school. And that really taught me to just focus on what i was interested in. And in the purpose of that, so ive never looked for validation outside. Ive always judged my project by a kind of inner guiding intuition. I am, but i cant say that i am not corrupt because i think that all of us have and, and maybe its not necessarily a corruption. We all have pieces of each other inside of ourselves. We exist in the world and we interact with others, which is a beautiful thing. And so i think we all have pieces of east west, north and south inside of us, the conditions and the cultures that we live in our hybrid, my own identity is so hyphenated that it combines so much just in who i am. And i think that that is a strength and power because what type realty does is it allows us to resonate with many different contexts. And many other people were able to empathize and see humanity in, in everyone else. And, and it also theres less of a risk of either ring when we acknowledge and embrace so hybridity a 100, a question for you in the ongoing context of housing shortages and crisis all over the world. What have been your take away from the current who projects and what you feel is most critical in housing design right now. First is the wood, apparently is perceived as something to be corrected or are replaced, meaning informal settlements are part of the solution, not part of the problem. The reason for that is that the migration towards cities, it happens or the scale speed and cause with you means of 1000000. 00 people per week with which we have to respond with 210000. 00 per family. But thats a fact with all the resources of governments in marcus were not even close to answer that question. And people had put a roof on top of their head despite having no help from outside. The thing is not to romanticize that the way that has been happening because individual actions, even if well intention cannot guarantee common good. And thats what happened in informal settlements. So the question is to identify what your role as an architect is there. And i would say framing and channeling the, those forces instead of her replacing them is the attitude. So the role of design there is slightly different from controlling in a lecture. Not long ago, a member in the panel was referring to architecture or splaying against. Raphael nodded. I mean, your, he tells you that he will serve in that corner. Exactly. Youre waiting for the ball he serves. And nevertheless, the ball is behind you, behind you before you realize thats the case of housing. And i my reaction to that comment, which i think it was very brilliant, is that more than tennis is a mix between rugby and surf because its brutal, its surfing a wave that is so much bigger than yourself. This other big, big forces and those forces can not be air repressed. You have to channel them. There was room for something that social housing cannot provide, which is personal expression fright. There was a drawing in the window, one of the housing projects we did or not, maybe not long ago. And the drawing was from a kid that was saying that this part of the house that was an arrow pointing at the void will be done my mind, that, that seeming of pride of all, youre not given everything that youre still wait to go over that completion of the enterprise, its thanks to people. So that was something that was not theirs. And we have been asked by some communities that it went with the money. Dont finish everything alone room for this things to our lead. The diversity enter the system and as i with i would say that the richness of the urban environment that we are sometimes missing in cities. So im, our architect seemed to agree. 3rd, architecture communicates through form, through scale, through material, through air, through light. If the architecture can communicate in that kind of implicit way, is it possible, do you think fritz, who communicate in more explicit way about particular stories . For example, stories of hybrid african and islamic identity. I think form embedded in form is everything ah, politics, economies ideologies a Belief Systems about a color, about patton, if we think about a ways of being that are oral and oral and atmospheric things that are grounded in ritual practice, those also can lend themselves to form making, but those forms might not necessarily look like the forms that we have all around us in most traditional cities. The project of architecture is to be able to absorb those rituals in those ways of life and ways of being and then translate them into form. And i think that all of those things they happen, people make them happen despite architects and despite architecture. And we havent had discourse that thinks about how we continue or evolve those ways of form making in the present. Earlier we talked about the serpentine pavilion being fagged mentored, and having piece is located in different neighborhoods for me that logic came from thinking about diasporas and thinking about things that route themselves or approved themselves from one place and travel to another place and then take on the conditions of that other place. So with the pavilion in particular, i looked at spaces that were important for migrant communities when they 1st moved to london. And i thought about some of the 1st mosques, churches, synagogues, but then also market places where people would be able to find traditional ingredients for recipes or some of the 1st van years to play black music in london. But then i also wanted to be able to take the pavilion back out into london and wrote the pavilion in neighborhoods in london. So in some of those same Community Art institutions, we embedded pieces of the pavilion that then posted programs over time and beyond the form. What that did is it created collaborations between the serpentine gallery in Kensington Gardens in london and Community Arts institutions across london. So the building became a kind of communication device between places and the method for me of that way of working really came from thinking about dias barrick logics and thinking about how people have moved across places. I started to think what if architecture did that as well . There are material dimensions there i aesthetic dimensions, but they are also methods of practice and ways of working that are waiting to inform architectural practice. Hm. In the same society that was burning, subway stations and barricades Looting Stores decided that the way to do without conflicts was discussing and have a political dialogue. I was born in 1990, just a few days after mandela was released from prison. And i hope i hold in my practice that theres always hope that we can live together. Oh ah ah, gee, thats my main amino laugh at us with a pushing rushing with one or 2 global perspectives. Freight Companies Make passports, International Banks and the proceeds of organized crime. That was his baggy p, a lay valenzuela warden from the both of yoga female fiction was organ is like in a remarkable 3 part. People empower investigation into a complex, secretive world. 2 journalists go in search of Italian Mafia dirty money. The longer part 3, on a jesse it up, a weekly look at the worlds top business stores, thousands of people go on strike and pay the high cost of living from Global Markets and economies. And Small Businesses of the export restrictions really impacted chinas economy to understand how it affects our data. Counting the cost oh, now jazeera ah. Ready russia says it has intercepted tre