Philippe Block: The Incredible Future of Sustainable Construction

Austin Tunnell

Well, Philip, it is great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Philippe Block

Yeah, thanks for the invitation.

Austin Tunnell

Well, you know, I think you were doing some of the most interesting and exciting work in the world, frankly, that I've seen around construction and engineering and, uh, you know, before we actually get into what we are doing, will you take a moment to explain why you were doing what you do and what problem are you trying to solve?

Philippe Block

All right, well, the problem is gigantic and that is the negative impact of our industry, our industry being construction and buildings in general on the climate, on our climate, on the environment in general. If you consider that globally, this industry is responsible for 40% of the human-made greenhouse global resource consumption. So that means use of virgin materials, scraping from the earth's crust. 40% of global waste production. And even when you look, for example, in Germany and Switzerland, considering that close to 70% of all the waste produced in Switzerland comes from construction, demolition, right? That these numbers are... so large and so mind-boggling even. And then lastly, by the way, also 40% of energy use goes into buildings, into making materials, into operating buildings and so on. So these are scary numbers. So one of the reasons that I do this and also I'm very vocal and give a lot of talks and lectures and try to really clarify. why I do what I do is because the impact that we have as architects deciding how to build, with what materials to build, as engineers, do we optimize our structural systems or not and so on, that has such a large impact that is even significantly larger than all of us flying all over the world and so on. People need to know about this and more importantly, we need to take our responsibility towards this. So the potential of doing so much better is tremendous, it's huge. And yeah, we have to, I mean, we have only one planet. So that's the big challenge. We have only one planet. We are consuming much more than what our planet can sustainably offer. We all know this.

Philippe Block

And our industry has probably one of the biggest responsibilities here to do better.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, most people when they, when they talk about this in relation to construction and architecture, go either the energy efficient route to try to solve things or to just straight up renewable products or something. That's why I'm so excited about your kind of different approach and even actually using concrete in a sustainable way, which we'll, we'll get to then. I'll ask specifically about concrete, but next, will you actually talk about what you are doing? You know, and, you know, from what I understand, you have three kind of tenants, you know, strength.

Philippe Block

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

through geometry, what is it, material effectiveness and circular construction. So can you talk about each one of those and what you mean?

Philippe Block

So maybe actually why specifically those three? Let's maybe zoom out quickly because, so there's two things also to consider perhaps first. That is that where do emissions come from in the built environment? So there is a category of operational emissions that has to do with literally operating our building. So heating, cooling, electricity and so on. So there is emissions associated to those. particularly when our energy comes from fossil fuels, for example. So there we could have a nice silver bullet. We could have a nice theoretical solution. If the world would commit to renewables and green energy, then we could really solve that problem. But then for the other category of emissions, the so-called embodied emissions, so the emissions that are associated to material production, construction, and so everything that happens in a building before you start using a building, those are the embodied emissions. There we don't have even a theoretical solution. There we really need to fundamentally rethink how we do things. And I always, for me, I use a framework that my colleague, Catherine DeWolf, has introduced that for me really brings it down to the key levers that we can control. So what is the first one is we should use better materials. So we should reduce the impact of the material. So going to low carbon solutions. We can talk about what that means exactly. But secondly, equally important, we want to question how much materials we really need. And so can we optimize our structural systems? Can we use materials where they want to be used? And what is the? most appropriate material to use in what context. And then the third lever is actually, instead of just doing less bad, so if you combine those two, you're doing less bad. Can we also already think of the end of life of materials and resources? And so that is where circularity comes in. So can we extend the lifetime of a resource, ideally even a structural component, a building components, or

Philippe Block

The best would be, can we extend the lifetime of a building by making it relevant past the originally intended kind of design and the first lifetime? And so these three levers is really what we have to talk about. And that's actually where these three kind of terminologies come from. We will be using what we call strength through geometry, so structural form, to significantly reduce the amount of materials that we are using. Then secondly, we are talking about material effectiveness. So that means like listening to the material and how it wants to be used. And when you get it right, for example, you were talking about concrete and concrete is an artificial stone. A stone is a material happy in compression, not intention. So if you can introduce the right geometries for a compression material, then you can actually use that material as efficient as possible, use low strength materials and so on, so that allows you to use better materials. And then circular construction is what it is. Can we already use as much reused materials as possible, reuse components even, and can we design for the next lifetimes, right? And so for me that is key and that is what we try without compromise to push for. So how can we indeed So thanks for the introduction, by the way. But I think that is maybe where we stand apart is by our rigor and our discipline to try to address the three pillars at the same time, to not go for a lightweight structure, but we use super high tech materials that have a very large embodied emissions. And so a lot of impact. So they are high carbon footprint materials. We don't get carried away by only talking about the materials and then do whatever with these materials. That is also not going to get there. And then circularity really demands a rethink from the structural logic to the constructional logic. So how things come together, the details matter really. Can we build without gluing things? Can we build with simply robust systems?

Philippe Block

And actually for most of these questions, for most of the solutions that we now develop, the answers are really in the past. So we look back to the master builders of the past, particularly the masons of Gothic cathedrals. And there is a lot to discover and a lot to learn from how they did things.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, you really do take a holistic and nuanced approach to it. And I think that's what's so interesting. Um, and that you're actually out there doing things too, and bringing things out of the ground and putting things in real buildings and not just, you know, models in a, in a warehouse somewhere. Um, I kind of two questions next to dive a little bit deeper and closer to, you know, uh, your Ritman floor system. But before we dive into kind of that floor system and how it's you know, uh, hitting all three of your characteristics. First, I want to talk about, uh, typical, um, concrete and steel floor systems in a structure and your example of the 25 story building and basically the concrete, can you explain that the mass and all that and the savings before we actually describe what you're doing?

Philippe Block

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so to me, this was entirely mind blowing as a structural designer, I feel quite, I was shocked when I found this out. We looked at a series of buildings and we targeted the medium high rise construction. So let's say 20 to 40 story buildings. a typology that is increasingly relevant all over the world because our urban areas are densifying, we're going taller. Even here in Europe, Switzerland, Zurich here, very low, low rise kind of construction, but also here there is a need to densify the city areas. So this is not just a story about a developing world where we of course know that cities are booming. but this is also in our context relevant. And so if you look at these buildings, so what is totally remarkable is that if you look at the mass distribution in such a building, then you see that three quarters of the mass is in the structure. What a crazy situation, right? If you compare this, if you contrast this, for example, with the chair that we're sitting on, luckily the chair is much lighter than us, the users. And so the building is totally different. The users are only a fraction of the weight, maybe 2% of the total weight of such a, in a building are the users. So us actually using the building. And then if you look more carefully at the structural mass, then you see that more than half of that structural mass is actually in the floors. So a super banal, super boring element, right? It's that straight element that we need to walk on. But that is really a seriously material intensive and hence also polluting material. And so where does this come from, by the way? If you think of gravity, gravity is vertical comes down, right? And so columns are vertical and perfectly aligned to the force flow. We have decades of research on how to...

Philippe Block

laterally stabilize, brace our buildings that come from all the megatall. So we know perfectly well how to very efficiently brace our buildings for wind, for earthquakes and so on. But then you have this element, the floor plate, which actually if you look at physics and you look at loads that are being accumulated on the floor, then naturally the forces would want to flow to the supports like arches. like 3D kind of structure. That's the natural flow of forces. This is physics, this is nature. So they would nicely flow in an even way to the support. And then what you have in the building, you have a straight element that is super thin and so compared to the natural flow of forces and this mismatch is basically what causes this inefficiency. More specifically, what you're asking, if you look at concrete, construction. I already said that I consider, well, not just me, it is a fact that concrete is actually an artificial stone. And for stone construction, the natural geometry is the arch. That is why in times where people still build with the constraints of a material, for example, the Gothic master builders, the masons of these spectacular cathedrals all over the world. they had to follow the natural geometry of these materials. So that is actually what we're doing. We are reintroducing these natural materials. So we are basically reintroducing the arch, reintroducing curvature. And so that means that we place material exactly where it's needed. And by doing this, so instead of forcing this artificial stone to be a straight element, we give this natural stone its natural geometry. which is with this artificial stone, it's natural geometry, which is the arch. And by doing that, we reduce the amount of concrete by 70% compared to your typical floor plate and the reinforcement steel by 90%, right? So these are, and again, this is really not rocket science. This is something that it's just simple physics and it's something that we absolutely know works.

Philippe Block

because these beautiful cathedrals are still standing after 500 years, 1,000 years, when you look at the Pantheon and so on, these structures are still standing because they have the right geometry for that material. And so once you start to see this, it sounds too good to be true, right? And that is kind of why this seems to resonate and why this seems to now be able to go forward. What is then, why are we not building like this in general? And that has something to do with at the end of the day, as much as we all want to do good, or I hope so, that most of us want to do better and build better and contribute to a lesser polluting kind of construction industry. At the end of the day, it's gonna be cost that matters. And so what do we have? We have a flat floor plate that has been optimized how to construct it for the last 100 years. So we have ways to build it. We use a cheap material that we use abundantly concrete and it's very optimized. So what we now need to find is how can we introduce this non-standard structural geometry in a way that we can start to compete with this totally optimized kind of system. And that's the reason why we're still building in these polluting ways, because until now, people have not found a way to deal with what Bill Gates, for example, coined as the green premium, the extra cost that a sustainable solution has compared to a standard solution. But there I have good news, because if you look at a project holistically. this 70% less concrete and 90% less steel to achieve exactly the same structural performance that of course also results in quite a lot of weight saving. And this weight saving directly has an effect on the columns and more importantly has an effect on the foundations. And so what we now have managed to do in the projects that are now going forward with this approach is that if your building is large enough and in fact it's

Philippe Block

needs to only have 10 stories, for example, then the savings that you have on the columns and the foundations is so significant that actually you can introduce this innovation with the extra cost that it takes to make this non-standard structural geometry at the same price, at the same cost for the client as using your highly, highly cost-optimized kind of floor systems that we've been building and using for the last 100 years. And that is something that I'm kind of proud about, that we found a way to deal with green premium. Because there's many good ideas that really could offer opportunities, but I believe if you don't find a way to also make it economical and scalable, it will never work. And so this is maybe what we're doing.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, no, you're so right. But that's why I love that you're out there doing things because you do have to take that cost consideration in mind. You know, we are with what I do and what we do at building culture, we are trying to advance durable construction in numerous different ways, but you're absolutely right that cost becomes just a major issue, which is why I think. Your solution really stands out to me as something. And that's amazing to me that even today, right now, that you can, with a 10 story building, you can make it equal costs. Cause as you're saying for the past 100 years, the entire system around construction and architecture and engineering has all revolved around concrete and steel, and so everything has been optimized and efficiency towards that. So the first thing that I think of, you can do that today. You know, if this actually starts taking off in any way and you have industry pursuing it, it could bring costs down dramatically, and then you could actually save money, uh, building greener structures. And there's just so few solutions I've ever heard about there. I mean, what was the statistic that you gave the example on that, uh, building it was something like, uh, if you go to your floor system versus, uh, the other, I know you say 70% concrete, but wasn't like 1200 concrete trucks or something, is that for the whole building or per floor or something?

Philippe Block

Yes, okay. Well, yeah, so we did the calculation for a 25 story building. Indeed, not even considering the savings on the foundations and the columns is we would be saving by introducing this principle, right? We would be saving more than 1200 concrete trucks that would not have to go to this building site. And also, by the way, if you roll out all the reinforcement steel that you would be also saving on this one building, a 25-storey regular building, maybe 150 feet by 100 feet kind of in dimension in floor plan. So not a large building, but again, 1200 concrete trucks you would not need. So that is... almost 10,000 cubic yards of concrete, right? So that is a lot of savings there. And, but also if you roll out all the reinforcement, it would roll out from Boston to New York. So that's a long distance. That's a lot of steel you would be saving there, right? And so of course it is exciting when you start to kind of compare, put these numbers. But by the way, let's also not get carried away again. It's not just about. the volumes, right? Like it's not just about the materials, it's the material impact plus the volumes. And there actually may be one thing that I haven't talked about yet is that if you get the natural geometry for a system, so the one that really is aligned with the natural force flow of the material, then you don't have any accumulation of forces anywhere in the structure. And that means that you have very what is called in engineering terms, very low stresses. So you can use very low strength materials. And that is actually quite an exciting opportunity as well, because there is almost always a one-to-one relationship between how strong a material is asked to be and how much it emits. And so actually by introducing these natural geometries, we can actually also activate low strength materials. And what are low strength materials? And I'll be a bit provocative as well.

Philippe Block

We are maybe now doing it in concrete because concrete is readily available all over the world. We're also doing it in concrete because that is a material that everyone trusts, that is robust, that we understand its fire safety, we understand how to model it and so on and so on. But actually we can also use earth, we can use earthen construction, we can use waste materials. There are so many waste materials that are being developed, materials based on waste. but they typically are discarded as non-structural. You can use them as an infill wall, a non-structural infill wall. In our case, because we actually align our geometries to this natural flow of forces, we can start to activate these extremely low impact, potentially even carbon negative materials as fully structural materials. Other materials that we are exploring, and that's maybe where... we are looking on a different time scale are mycelium materials. So these are naturally grown materials that also have a similar property. They're happy in compression, not in tension. And that's just grow there. The roots of mushroom that are a natural binder instead of a cement. So we use a natural binder to make our structural components. And of course, this is not ready to go on the market today, but just We use these kind of also alternative materials to demonstrate that the principles are right and they open up opportunities for also material scientists to start looking for materials that they discarded in the past because engineers have said, no, we need high strength materials, otherwise we're not gonna be able to do it. And to me, that's the beauty of masonry structures in general that for compression dominant materials, they embodied everything. the historic construction got the geometries right, but also they got it right how to put these geometries together without glues. They were very naturally, so they come together, they have the compression that hold it together so you don't need special glues, you don't need reinforcement and so on and so on. So you could take these structures apart. So that is another circularity opportunity. You keep materials separated so that you can have easy recycling at the end of their lifespan and end and end.

Philippe Block

And but I think perhaps most importantly, what I'm learning from these old school builders is that they built with real constraints. In stone, they were not trying to do a straight element. They followed the natural logic of the stone. In timber, they went to other geometries that made sense for timber. And so I think that is something that we have to go back to. We have to. we have to design within constraints. And I believe that if you listen to the natural logic, how a material wants to be used, I mean, Louis Kahn was talking about a brick wants to be an arch or I want to be an arch being a little person, that brick, but we need much more of that. And I think then we would be already much further ahead. Another example is, can we,

Austin Tunnell

Yeah.

Philippe Block

start from a structural system, a module, a logic that makes sense, and discover exciting architecture from that, from that point, starting point. And not like too often still architecture is about space, experience, and then we think how it will be constructed. We ask an engineer not to kill anyone, we ask the contractor to build it as cheap as possible. I think we have to also rethink this sequential way how we have been constructing. I think that has caused a lot of issues. That key questions of structural questions, material questions, fabrication questions, even all the way to construction logistics come way too late in the process. I would invert the entire process. At least that's what we strongly believe how we work also.

Austin Tunnell

That is, you are speaking our language because that is exactly how we think in terms of the industry has been so fragmented and everyone just knows their tiny little narrow niche and it's really hard to solve a larger and very complex problem, which is, you know, building more durably better, all these things we're talking about, and it's you study both engineering and architecture, correct?

Philippe Block

I'm super thankful that in Belgium, so I'm from Brussels, Belgium, and in Belgium we have a unique degree. I still think rather unique after so many years, after 30 years of this program, I haven't found it in many places in the world. And you can study architecture like the rest of the world in a typical way, or you can study architecture within the polytechnical school, so within the faculty of engineering. And so that means that I was lucky to really study architecture, design studios, like proper architecture. But at the same time, we also had half of the time was spent on really core structural and building engineering. And so I am thankful that is my base foundation because that allowed me to to explore both ends, to be a designer, but also a technical innovator at the same time, right? And yeah, but it took me a while to land here because after my studies at the VUB in Brussels, I went to MIT, I was really like, I thought I was a full-blood designer. I always did well in studio and so on. And I really wanted to become a computational architect. to high tech kind of stuff and I went to MIT. And then luckily I met John Oxendorf that kind of had me study historic structures in masonry. And the more I was working on those, the more I realized like, wow, we should really learn from these and rethink. And then I ended up doing a PhD with him in structural engineering. So I navigated back and forth, but I'm so thankful that I could start with an education. that gave me both hats at the same time. And that allowed me to develop my own, I would say, rather interesting career.

Austin Tunnell

Uh, it's a fascinating and it really is a great opportunity. And I just wish it hadn't, I mean, it used to be that way where people just more often architecture and engineering was combined and then it got separated off and then it continues to just be siloed. And I think that's a source of a huge part of the problem. Um, but now I want to hear, uh, about the floor system that, that you've developed the, the Ritman, I believe you call it the Ritman floor system. Is that right?

Philippe Block

That's correct, yes.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, can you describe what that is and-

Philippe Block

Yeah, so basically the concepts that I talked about earlier, so introducing a vaulted geometry, right, looking at it as a masonry system, meaning that it's discretized, that it comes together naturally with simple connections that are held together because of the overall structural geometry, separating the pure So, because what I didn't say earlier is that, okay, the natural form would be that arch, but now we actually, okay, an arch is pushing on its neighbors. And of course we don't want to build these gigantic buttresses or flying buttresses like in cathedrals. So we want to make that element self-contained. And so for this, we want to take these horizontal thrusts and for that we just add a simple tension tie. So that means that, that's, We have pure compression in the middle, and then we have a simple tension tie that absorbs this distrusting, this arching of the floor in between. Then, as I said, what we do as well, we discretize this floor, because of course you cannot, ah, because I forgot to say one thing, because we want to introduce also prefabrication. The reason that we have been developing this in the direction of prefabrication is because we can be, We can be much more precise about the geometries that we introduce. We can place material indeed exactly where needed. But also, we can take the messy and time consuming and error prone kind of steps and logistics away from the building site. And so that is why we also go to prefabrication, so that we can deliver our floors. very fast on site and really also start to think of different ways of also waiting times and logistics on site. So basically all the things are coming together. Because we get the geometry right, we can use low strength, super low carbon concretes. Because we get the geometry right, we place material only where needed.

Philippe Block

So from a structural point of view, that would reduce, that would mean a savings of 70% of concrete. But there's other things that are important in buildings like thermal mass, like acoustical kind of comfort, like contact noises and things like that. So we reintroduced a little bit more materials. So at the end, our total savings are maybe more on the order of 60% reduction instead of 70. But... From a pure structural point of view, you could go down all the way to 70%. Then we assemble our floors. They click in place because our joints are designed such. Also learning from traditional masonry interfaces and so on, our joints are such that our elements naturally come together. So it's actually simple on site. The geometry is, again, the key here and brings our elements. And what's nice about this is that the way we can also take it apart again. And so that means that we could actually, after the end of the life of a building, we take the building apart instead of having a messy demolition where we have to try to separate all the materials that we glue together, all the messy reinforcement bars that are within the concrete. So instead of having a messy demolition, we have an easy, clean deconstruction. We hope that in the future you will be able to just reuse our elements in a new project. And if that is not the case, because all the materials were kept separate, you can just directly crush the elements and use it 100% circular, use it for new components in the future. So, yeah, all these different aspects that I argued could contribute to really, I would say, a disruption. We are now combining and putting together in this RIPMAN floor system.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah. The pictures I've seen, which, uh, it was a square building and you had five pieces. You kind of had four pieces that go in each corner and then the center piece that gets dropped in and you're just booming these in. I think you said you could do a floor in two hours or something. If everything's kind of set up, people know what they're doing. And that means a lot for me as a, as a builder, you know, I understand just the value of that, of the prefab, having that offsite, um, having that kind of quality control.

Philippe Block

That's my turn.

Austin Tunnell

And then just showing up, we've got the shell ready and then boom, drop the floor in, keep going. I mean, that's, that's really incredible. And the other thing that I love is that, you know, that tension tie is really external from the concrete so you can, you can, you can service it versus all that steel in the concrete and floor systems that yes, it's protected. Um, it's not in the elements, but that can still rust over time given enough time. Um, so I, I love that element of it. And can you talk about the thinness of your floor system at different points and then talk about, but first contrast, what is kind of a, what is it replacing? What's kind of the thickness and all that of a normal, and then what is yours?

Philippe Block

Yeah.

Philippe Block

Yeah. Yeah, so one of the projects that we've done, I mean, this was still a demonstrator project. It's called Hilo. It's a unit on an experimental building. And we built, this was very early on, this was the first real-life demonstrator. We built two floors of roughly five by five meter span. And so for this five by five meter span, you would need a, I mean, It depends on how strict you want to follow the building code. You would need 16 to probably 20 centimeters of structural depth, like a floor plate of that kind of thickness. And instead, we introduced our vaulted kind of geometry. And there, the final structural geometry of low strength, fully unreinforced concrete was only 3 centimeters. So that is just over an inch in thickness. Of course, again, doubly curved like a shell. And also on top, we had stiffeners to locally increase the structural depth to take the live loads, so the users to also provide load paths to the support. But the actual shell is only three centimeters. And it's, I like to... I like to kind of make this comment or to tell these details after, of course, when I visit the building after they've been walking around everywhere, and then I tell them that they were just standing on a fully unreinforced concrete floor with a structure. Exactly. Yes.

Austin Tunnell

That's three centimeters thick, you know, like that's less than a that's an in inches. That's I believe that's about an inch and an eighth for listeners, which is just why that's a countertop. That is your countertop in your kitchen, to be clear.

Philippe Block

Yes, exactly. Yes, yes. Yes. And this is, I mean, also to be clear, this is a real building. People are working there. This is, of course, it was done in a bit of a bubble with special conditions and so on. But this is no longer a prototype. This really works. And now when we are building, and in fact, Austin compared to last time that we saw each other, this building that I got to... got to present that we won a competition with the architects Gégon Gouillard, a building in Souk of 10 stories indeed, almost 7000 square meters of floor area, just got fully approved to go into the next phase and so this is really going to happen. Things take a long time here, so construction is planned to start in June 2025.

Austin Tunnell

exciting.

Philippe Block

But of course for us, that is a super exciting news that from these few floors that we built in this little demonstrator project, now we're talking about delivering 7,000 square meters of these floors. And so it's really starting to happen, super exciting. I got entirely carried away by something else I wanted to say, but I guess we'll come back to it. This is news from last week. So this is very, very fresh of the...

Austin Tunnell

That's extremely exciting.

Austin Tunnell

Okay.

Austin Tunnell

Wow. That's awesome. Cause I was just listening to a video a little bit earlier this week of you and you were talking about that building, but it was pre being approved and I think you had mentioned it in Spain too, when we met, so that's pretty awesome. Yeah. I can, I can only imagine how exciting that is.

Philippe Block

It's happening, it's really happening. It's really happening and I'm very. Yeah, well, I must say I'm extremely thankful, not only of the vision of the architects of Mike Gouillard, but also of the client to also want to take that leap because of course it comes at a risk, even though I not only argue it's a fact that we reintroduce systems that we know have stood time. I mean, these vaulted geometries are robust, are the right geometries for the floors. for these kind of materials. But compared to how we have been building for the last hundred years and how it has evolved in optimizing that reinforced concrete kind of floor plates, this is so alien that it's... Yeah, I mean, it's not how we build typically. So of course there's questions, there's questions about cost, there's questions about indeed acoustical performance and so on. And so what was exciting about this opportunity is that we built a one-to-one mock-up, not a prototype, but really a mock-up with all the finishes and all the solutions as they would be. And then we did an extensive kind of testing campaign on that. And to have found actually a client willing to do all of these extra steps that also come at an extra cost. uh for the sake of really uh introducing a system that really could make a big difference i mean yeah i feel i feel extremely fortunate and uh but we have delivered at every single step and when that is also why we're now going forward and i hope this is only the start and that we can that i can not only inspire people by

Austin Tunnell

Mm-hmm.

Philippe Block

how we approach problems. And I talked about these three main levers and this is more general than how we do it with our specific solution. But I hope that also our specific solution can be a solution for many. And so let's see, let's see if there is a snowball forming or not. So yeah.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

Well, we're watching and listening and it's only a matter of time till I try something here. We're probably still a few years out, whether it's, we might try to start with thin clay tiles or something like that, some Gloss Divina tiling, and then moving on. But yeah, we really want to start incorporating, you know, that's what I love about building. We're out there building stuff. And then it's pretty easy to take one building, you know, cause we're building smaller buildings, you know, two, three story buildings and to, to test things out. Um, but it's, it's talking, it's interesting when you were talking about the, uh,

Philippe Block

That sounds great.

Austin Tunnell

the thinness of that floor system you tell people afterwards. So, you know, I've been building with masonry for, for about eight years, and I understand it more than most people in the U S frankly, just cause I, I work with my hands at structural masonry. We respect the geometry in terms of, we understand arches, I understand thrust and that you have to have enough buttressing and you know, Oh, cracks are really just relieving tension. You know, I understand things that way, but what I was so I'm so thrilled I went to Spain, one to meet you and the other brilliant professors. But it was really this, starting to understand the strength through geometry. And I used to think of arches as different levels of strength, that like one arch was stronger than another, that a segmental was, you know, whatever, stronger than a half round and helping to understand, no, it's about the shape and the efficiency of that arch and how the forces are flowing through that and saying, okay, a segmental arch, you know, like an eyebrow arch. isn't stronger than a half round or a Roman arch, but it more closely matches a catenary there, or, you know, you can make it thinner because it's more efficient with the material being used. And that really just pulled the veil out over my eyes, uh, off my eyes, where I'm going like, I understand things in a whole new and profound kind of way where the implications are pretty big, um, and because masonry is usually associated with big. robustness, you know, two foot, three foot thick walls. And when I was in Spain, and this was very one of those experiential things, right, I'm hearing about it. And then we went up on a cathedral, like walking up all the way inside up a spiral staircase up to the top. So if you're standing in the cathedral looking up, you know, that, that vaulted ceiling is what 30, 40, 50 feet. I don't really know. So we're standing up there 30, 40, 50 feet on this kind of curved surface, lightly curved surface. And, uh, we walk over to one end and there's this little hole. And the professor was like, yeah, you can see the bottom. You look through the hole and I put my finger in there and my finger reaches to the underside of the vault as in what I'm standing on 50 feet up is about an inch and a half thick. And it was like, holy moly. That is, and there's a group of like 30 people up there. And like you're saying that experience of like, this works. And of course this is a cathedral that's been standing there a thousand years with no steel. You know, and

Philippe Block

the

Philippe Block

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

And you've mentioned multiple times that looking back to the past for inspiration, it's not that what I love about it too, is you're not copying the past, just going, Hey, what did they do before? Let's do that again. Exactly. Cause we've got new technologies, we've got new knowledge. So it's about blending the best of old and new, but really it's also continuing that kind of the older way of thinking and what, how do we continue that into the future? Um, you know, what do you think? Uh, Like so many people today that I interact with and just out there, I think we're at the height of human achievement. And we just know so much that we are so smart today, whether it's about physical health and doctors and or construction architecture. And you're looking and you're going, man, I don't know. I mean, do you experience that in your industry where people think we're just at the height of human achievement and they look at you and go, how do people perceive you? You know,

Philippe Block

No.

Austin Tunnell

There's obviously people that really like you that are doing it, but other engineers, architects, government people out there. Yeah. What's the response?

Philippe Block

Yeah, no, isn't it weird to compare it? I mean, it's kind of spot on to compare it with medicine, right? Where we always progressed and progressed and there we're surely at the pinnacle of understanding. But in engineering, we somehow lost our ways. And the notion of discovering good structural form of also ingenuity and so on has been... has been pushed away for all kinds of reasons, for optimizing costs, for reducing liability or risk. I mean, one specific, I mean, there's many reasons that we have forgotten how to discover structural form and even understand why masonry buildings still stand and so on. Modern engineers have a hard time understanding or explaining. why a Gothic cathedral and how a Gothic cathedral is standing, and that is because it's just no longer part of the education. And there's a specific moment in time when French mathematicians introduced the beautiful theory of elasticity that suddenly allowed you to describe materials and materials in systems, and then you could describe them all with equations. And if you solve that equation, then you could say, yes, it stands. No, it doesn't stand. And then it goes further. Then you build up structures become more complex. And then these kinds of simple equations became, were embedded in computational tools like finite element analysis. And that allowed you to kind of say, yes, it will stand or no, it will not stand. And so all these richness of structural design. So engineering is also designing. is not just saying yes or no, it will stand or not. And so this creativity, this ingenuity literally, so where the term engineering comes from has been forgotten. And so that is something that we really are trying to bring back. And for this, you need other engineering methods than the one that also frankly I was taught. And maybe there's perhaps a little funny anecdote about this. When I...

Philippe Block

went to MIT with my unique background, right? Hybrid architect engineer. My, at the time, not yet advisor, but John Oxendorf, was looking for a teaching assistant for basic structural design, teaching the very first semester architecture students structures. I was like, well, me with my structural background, for sure I'm the best person to do that. And then I discovered how he was teaching structural design to the architects using graphic statics, a technique that uses geometry and diagrams that describe the equilibrium of those geometries. It's a fully graphical technique. And so what he was teaching these architecture students was how to discover good structural form, how to not just analyze a geometry, a truss for example, and say, yes, this truss. needs to be so thick and yes, it works under these conditions and so on and so on. No, they were actually being taught how to find the right geometry of the truss, how to optimize its geometry to do better, to use 20% less steel, for example, and so on and so on. So, oh my God, how embarrassed was I as a trained engineer, a bachelor and a master's in architectural engineering. And I did not know anything about this, right? So my world just opened up. And since then I've been pushing, pushing in this direction, both in research, but also in teaching to teach as many people the strength, the beauty of structural geometry. And the best tool to discover those is actually graphic statics. Is this drafting technique that allows you to discover form. And... The more you look at it, then you discover that all the master builders that we admire, like Maillard, the bridge builder in Switzerland, Heinz Isler, the shell builder, Gaudí in Barcelona, Gustav Eiffel, who built the Eiffel Tower and some beautifully efficient kind of other buildings.

Philippe Block

They were all masters. Oh, the Quastavinos, the Thai vaulting, they discovered the right geometries because they were masters in graphic statics. So all of them knew graphic statics. And we stopped teaching graphic statics in the early 20th century. We stopped teaching graphic statics because engineers, it was tedious to have to draft and draw and so on. And instead they were offered these equations that they could just solve and say, yes, it stands and not.

Austin Tunnell

Hmm.

Philippe Block

But these kind of small things have caused that we no longer were teaching or we're no longer aware of the right tools to actually discover good form. We were pushed more and more and more as engineers in a role of a service provider and making something stand. But we have so much more, again, ingenuity in us to do more than just stand. And we have also that responsibility. And... Yeah, what an embarrassment was that, that figuring out that first semester architecture students at MIT knew more about structural form than I did with a proper engineering education of five years, right? And so that sure shook my world. And I'm still on a mission to share this with as many people as possible. Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

Wow.

Austin Tunnell

That's awesome. You know, one of the things you just said that I really love is you said, um, graphic statics allows you to discover form. And what I think's so cool about that is there's this mindset, what you're even talking about here with just, um, you've been, you're humbled by discovering this and I've found as I kind of do things, the more, the more I learn, the more humble I get, cause I'm just going, wow, I don't, there's so much to. learn and we talk about this in building and I use this in relation to building something beautiful, but I say, Hey, we actually don't want to come in and impose this thing on the world and just, you know, have everything figured out two years in advance, every selection may boom, and then we're going to go build it exactly like we planned it two years ago. We like to let the story unfold a little bit and the building in the house to start telling is what it wants to be. And that comes from a design perspective, but you're literally saying that in the same exact way from an engineering perspective of Let's discover what the form should be where there's this relation where it's your, you're influencing it and it's influencing back, you know, and it's this interplay. And I think that's, that's just super cool. I hope any engineering or anyone thinking about engineering is, is excited about this as I am and inspired, but it actually curious. I was going to ask this at the end, but I just want to go ahead and ask, um, while it's on my mind for anyone listening that did want to learn more, you know, you actually pointed me to the book. uh, form and forces, um, which I've actually got on my desk. It is a thick book and I'm not actually an engineer. So it's, you know, it's, I struggled at the, uh, historic masonry structures in Segovia, cause I, I have a lot of practical experience and design experience, but, uh, you know, formulas and calculus are not my, uh, forte now, but can, can people come and study is MIT and where you at? Like, are those the only places to study graphic statics and learn? And is that even possible to go to go work for, you know, your university for someone to go study abroad over there for Americans?

Philippe Block

Yes, but I think we are convincing more and more people and it surely helps that some of the modern master builders like for example Bill Baker at SOM who was the structural designer of the Burj Khalifa and many other by far tallest building in the world and many other really engineering marvels. He is probably one of the biggest fans of graphic statics and he uses it in his projects to make significant costs and material savings on the projects just by the tricks that you learn when you master graphic statics. So that surely helps for more people being curious about it and more programs starting to integrate it actively in their programs. What I would say is actually, yeah, Form and Forces, a good book to start, but actually also all my teaching material is available online. You can download it. You can kind of browse through the lectures. You can do the exercises and so on. There is a platform that is called Equilibrium, where you can learn about these things. So there's also ways that you can educate yourself somehow. So you don't. have to be at these places. Of course, I'd be happy to welcome anyone and perhaps it's not official yet, but our group is going to offer a new Master of Advanced Studies in what we call Structural Computation, where all these different concepts, how we approach projects will really come together in an advanced master that will start in Fall 2025. Sorry to very blatantly make an announcement here, but I must say, after being now 15 years of a professor here at ETH, 15 years of being able to do a lot of research, a lot of PhD students graduated from our group and so on, Tom and I, Tom with whom I co-lead the group, we are now thinking of a period of another way of having impact and focusing on outreach.

Austin Tunnell

That's great.

Philippe Block

focusing on education, focusing on new kind of models of bringing our approaches to as many people as possible. And the MAS fits in that. But what also fits in that is our open source computational framework, Compass, fully open source, everything how we do things, how we discover our form, how we optimize our geometries, how we also introduce our innovations in real projects is available through that platform. And more and more people are jumping on it. Because another thing that we didn't talk about is a sad situation that everyone seems to also be reinventing the wheel somehow. In our own bubbles, we're trying to kind of.

Philippe Block

get better, have more specialties, more opportunities. But the challenge for our industry, that's how we started, right? I mean, 40% of all the emissions on this planet comes from our industry. So this, we cannot afford to all doing our small things and we need to work together. And that's maybe one thing that I wanted to add to all of this is the idea of open sourceness, is the idea of... of jointly trying to solve all the bigger challenges. And many of the things that I presented in words today in this podcast, they sound simple, they are simple, but in order to really make them effective, we use computation. So we develop algorithms, we develop ways to really... introduce an innovation within an existing project pipeline by having new BIM integrators and things like that. And so that's maybe also something that one needs to acknowledge and needs to look at. But at least we are not keeping all this knowledge for ourselves. We are sharing it all through our platform compass and more and more researchers are doing so. And so I hope that we can also change things like that. It's also an attitude change that we need to foster.

Austin Tunnell

Hmm.

Austin Tunnell

I love that the just being open sharing and because the goal for you really is to do something better, you know, not to hold something close to yourself and, you know, be the only one doing it. It's to actually like, Hey, let's have this as a solution. That's how we think too. Um, we don't have anything quite as brilliant to share as, as you do yet, but, um, we, we do try and plan to, uh, share a lot more as we go. Um,

Philippe Block

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

I've got one follow-up question on more, just a little bit of a technical issue where I still have just a little bit of not understanding. Um, graphic statics is, you know, an, an analytical tool for discovering, helping find the form. How do you, can you prove that a structure works with graphic statics? Or is that where the computational stuff comes in?

Philippe Block

Yes. No, no, no. Well, OK.

Philippe Block

So just to clarify, right, and that is also maybe a misconception, graphic statics is just a graphical way of doing physics, of doing equations, it's of doing engineering. So it is 100% compatible with other engineering methods. It's just you start from the other side. And so you start from discovering the geometry instead of starting from a geom... So you start from a logic of forces and you discover a geometry. instead of starting from a geometry and understanding the forces and the stresses and the reflections in it. What you are now asking of course is that the first use of graphic statics is to discover form but then at a certain point you also need to do the engineering, meaning that you need to check it against all kinds of other loading cases, differential settlements of support and And of course, for that, there is methods in graphic statics that you can use to do that. But you can also, in a clever way, use more standard engineering tools to then look at the other loading cases. That is a bit of a more technical kind of question. And that is also where, yeah, I'm somehow happy that you ask it, because that is also something where I see sometimes a little bit of, opportunistic kind of behavior is that yes, when you get the geometry right, you're 85, 90% where you need to be, but you still need to do the engineering, right? It's not just about the form finding. And for that, indeed, you need more advanced tools, be it more typical finite element analysis, be it tools that are more specific for masonry, like discrete element modeling. or more advanced constrained graphic statics techniques. I mean, we have a lot of papers about that, but the thing is that, isn't it crazy for these type of structures that have been standing, being around for centuries, if not millennia, that the tools to actually understand them are in their infancy. And that, for example, my PhD with John Oxendorf was one of the first works

Philippe Block

that actually use graphic statics in 3D to start to understand these kind of systems. One of the first, and we're talking about only, I wrapped it up 15 years ago. So it's actually a rather recent field on how to engineer these arch structures. And so I have to, I mean, I know how to do it, but I have to admit that I'm not surprised that step for you is still a little bit confusing because... These tools are not fully mature, like the tools that we use for steel structures and reinforced concrete structures. Again, they have the advantage that they have been around for 100, 120 years.

Austin Tunnell

Right.

Austin Tunnell

Right. Okay. That, that makes sense. Cause I've talked to some other engineers and they're like, yeah, graphic statics, like they kind of know what it is, but then, you know, because I don't think they are being taught or learning like, you know, you did at MIT, for example. And so there's just general misunderstanding about it. So that is, um, helpful. And I really understand what you mean too, about that. We're kind of in our infancy, you know, in terms of being able to figure out how to engineer all this effectively.

Philippe Block

Yeah.

Austin Tunnell

I feel like that and what we do sometimes because we do do, we're doing new things. Well, it's old things that we're doing. We're building these old brick buildings, but it's new today because for the past hundred years we haven't been doing it. And just everything's hard. Everything's hard. Everything's trying to figure it out. Everything's trying to prove to someone else, you know, because doing new things I found is just very difficult, but it's also exciting, you know, gives it, gives it meaning too. Philippe Block (01:00:09.752) section. Philippe Block (01:00:20.618) No, no, it's, look, it's, I am excited where we are, but it's a long trajectory and I am pretty sure we still have a really long trajectory to go. We put a heck of a lot of effort into this. A lot of financing went into this, a lot of persistence, a lot of kind of, not necessarily stubbornness, but I mean, how many people have dismissed the things that we have been saying, certainly as a young professor coming with ideas like, ah, we will do it like the old masters and you're being laughed away. You do prototypes, you stand on prototypes, you test prototypes, and then they find other reasons to dismiss it. You say factually that, for example, the beautiful Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, so the main train station in New York. Is this beautiful Guastavino vaults, if you then say like, well, they're not just built without centering, without formwork in stable sections, but they're also carrying part of the Vanderbilt hall on top where millions of New Yorkers unknowingly walk over an equally thin shell every single day commuting in and out of New York. how much more proof could you have for that this approach really makes sense, is robust, has stood time and so on, the test of time. Austin Tunnell (01:01:52.198) It's like, we don't want to be what I've noticed about today. There's this thing where, because just culturally, it seems like we think we know so much, we're so focused on what we know and not reality as in like, rather than look at reality, say the spiral helical staircase of Guastavino at Carnegie Mellon, rather than look at that and be like, wow, what do we not know? How do we, how does that stand up? How do we figure out it's that doesn't work because our, because our formula says it doesn't work. Philippe Block (01:02:01.832) Exactly. Austin Tunnell (01:02:22.398) You know, or we can't prove it with our formulas, therefore it doesn't work. And you're going, it's been there for a hundred years, or it's been there for a thousand years, like a cathedral. So why don't we say, how is it working? Not that my formulas say it doesn't work. It's a very different mindset. It really is crazy. It actually is crazy. And I mean, I find myself doing stuff like that too. I mean, it's a human nature, I think. Philippe Block (01:02:22.562) Exactly. Yes. Philippe Block (01:02:35.274) Isn't that crazy? Philippe Block (01:02:39.694) So that's, and that is the first thing we need to find a way to overcome is, I think at the end of the day, it boils a lot down to risk. Okay, there's different risks. There's engineering liability. If you are unsure or you have to use alternative methods to kind of explain how something works, that causes, I mean, yeah. That's a risk, right? You are engineered and better knows what he or she is saying there, right? And then another risk is that every and anytime you do something new, there will be a cost risk as well because you haven't done this a hundred times before. So there will be unknowns that pop up, guaranteed there will be things that are not going as you imagined, guaranteed. And so there's also the cost risk. So as much as I... I somehow perhaps come over a little bit preachy or kind of I, but it's only because I believe in what I do, but I also know why it is hard to introduce something new in an industry where there is not really big margins, where there is not money to pump towards R&D and so on and so on. So it's, I'm also very appreciative. And that's why I explicitly made a comment earlier that I'm so thankful of the architects and the clients. of these rather large projects to want to take that risk, work with us to innovate. I don't take this for granted. That is really, but yeah, we still have a bit of work to convince the rest of the world, don't we? Austin Tunnell (01:04:22.526) Right. We do that all kind of end with, uh, one of your, why it isn't, even though we're in our infancy, why is it worth pursuing? And, you know, you use this, uh, example that just to, to accommodate the global population, we're going to have to build one New York city every month for the next 40 years. And I'm assuming that's probably not taken, taking into account. buildings that exist today that are going to not last for more than 100 years, which is the vast majority of the United States, for example, is going to have to be rebuilt. Like I would probably say 80% of the U S will have to be rebuilt in 100 to 125 years because we build so cheaply and literally 60, 75 years, it ends up in a landfill. You can't even, you know, reclaim it because it's cheap plywood and OSB with glue and paper wrap and stuff. Philippe Block (01:05:14.838) Well, let's by the way, take this estimation or this calculation. Let's not now take it as something that discourages us, but more as something that kicks our behinds and tells us that we have to get on it. We have to do our best, we have to innovate and we have to really consider those three levers, those three pillars that I talked about. And we have to do. We have to do it now, if not yesterday. And so that's, to me, that is motivating. Of course, it's scary. It's kind of, it blows your mind. It is scary to what we will have to face, but for me, it motivates us. And I hope we can motivate many of us to follow suit, yes. Austin Tunnell (01:05:45.076) Yeah. Yeah. Austin Tunnell (01:06:07.146) Uh, no, I totally agree there. Like you're right, because it does sound dire. And I think, but I find it incredibly exciting in a lot of ways and motivating because when, when you just kind of exist in the, you know, before you went to MIT and discovered a graphic statics, I don't know if that sounds pretty world shifting for you, you know, but when you grow up in a world as amazing as the world is, you know, in the 21st century, you kind of go, I mean, everything's figured out. You know, I'll go get a job and just kind of contribute by keeping doing things because everything's invented, right? Everything's done. It's like, no, no. We have so much left to discover. We have so much left to learn. And for me, that's like just life-giving, enriching, fun, exciting. And it gives people meaning. It's not just about we need to survive, which we do need to survive. Right. But it's also in the act of doing in the act of discovery. I'm sure you enjoy your work very much. I enjoy my work very much. And we're. Philippe Block (01:06:44.535) Yeah, and. Austin Tunnell (01:07:04.222) we're solving problems that contribute to society. And I think there's a great meaning in that, in addition to the things that actually get built, you know, but the relationships that we create along the way and the things that we do and the people we inspire. And so, no, I think it really is a positive message. It's just, especially when I just see what you're doing and doing it out there, I'm incredibly inspired by it. So, where can people keep along? Yeah, where can people... Philippe Block (01:07:28.32) Thanks a lot. Austin Tunnell (01:07:32.138) keep up with you in any way. And I know you're on your website and I know there's the vault website. That's really cool. I'm gonna point people to that because you can actually see the floor systems kind of being dropped in. But is there a good place for people to follow you where you're putting workout? Philippe Block (01:07:47.682) Oh, not really. I appear sometimes on LinkedIn. I appear sometimes on Instagram. We are wanting to update our website for the longest time to give you the best portal to our work. So I would say kind of get in touch on LinkedIn, follow us on Instagram, go to our website now and then. That's where you should, it's, yeah, with so many hats on and trying to push things. We don't always get to sharing the latest. But yes, that's right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Austin Tunnell (01:08:18.634) I understand. And this is Block Research Group, right? That you would be looking for. Okay. Block Research Group. And I'll put the links in the show notes for anyone listening. Well, Phillip, man, it was so good to have you on. Really fun to talk to you. I love what you're doing and I'm going to be following along and hopefully maybe in a year or two, maybe we could get back on and talk again and hopefully all we'll be ready at building culture to. Philippe Block (01:08:28.171) Yeah, sounds good. Austin Tunnell (01:08:45.682) put a floor system in one of our buildings. Philippe Block (01:08:49.41) That sounds awesome. Thanks again for the invitation, Austin, and I very much enjoyed the talk. Austin Tunnell (01:08:54.758) All right, bye Philip.