Beyond Sustainable Architecture | Davis Richardson | TEDxUTAustin

[Music] architecture I believe should be hyper objective a response to problems of a mid scale through an aesthetic approach of immense scale it is through this lens that we can transform our understanding of sustainability now whether you realize it or not you've all been in LEED certified buildings lead platinum LEED Gold this building that we're all in right now is actually a wonderful LEED Silver Building this is the standard by which most people in America measure whether a building is sustainable or not now we've all seen a lot of these in recent years as well tiny houses on wheels and this has been an attempt at a more sustainable lifestyle I actually built this tiny house after completing my bachelor's degree in interior design and I've lived in it here in Austin ever since the following fall now while it's been incredibly rewarding getting to live in a space that I designed at an early stage in my career that's a privilege that not a lot of young architects and designers get I've learned it as much from the shortcomings and the failures of it as I have anything I did particularly well now certainly there are things that I would've designed differently in this house but I've learned a lot about tiny houses in general of minimalism and of micro living as a lifestyle you see less isn't more as a lot of modernists in the mid twentieth century had led us to believe for me I believe that more is more we can move beyond the the modernist idea of less is more and redefine our sustainability if we're not creating more energy than we use we will forever be behind the 8-ball all the tiny houses in the world all the micro apartments in New York and San Francisco at 200 square feet these are good steps in the right direction but we still may be behind the 8-ball Timothy Morton and ecological philosopher who studied climate change in great detail has coined the term hyper objects to describe things like global warming which are of such great time and vast scale that humans can't really begin to wrap our brains around them for many of us when we think about global warming we about the way that it will affect our kids or our grandkids but it's really tough to internalize or sympathize with much beyond that even though this problem of global warming very well could last several hundreds of years if not longer for Morten hyper objects while they may be hundreds or thousands of years in scale they are also things which are ever-present and imminent in your day to day life a great example of this is bottled water I was just drinking bottled water in the green room before this speech I need water to survive and sometimes it comes out of plastic bottles now as someone who cares about sustainability we all know we should feel guilty about that we shouldn't be drinking water out of plastic bottles so in order to feel better better about myself and not feel guilty about this when I get done with it I make sure it at least goes in the green recycling bin instead of the trash now this is a silly example but it is global warming in its thousands of years of scale sticking its nose in the face of the minutiae of your day-to-day life and disrupting the way that you interface with the world hyper objects like global warming are inhuman they're going to be around a lot longer than we are and until we truly graphs their scale and their weight we'll never be able to fully and holistically tackle the problems that they present us in order to combat these hyper objective crises everything including architecture has to operate at that same level buildings can today go beyond addressing the in the environmental impact of their energy usage while simultaneously shifting our perspective allowing us to envision far-off futures and inviting us to question our place within the world in order to come to a greater understanding of it the inhuman immensity of these hyper objects is actually a means of making spaces which are more human that is by contrast by experiencing something which is totally foreign we can actually come to a greater understanding of what it means to be in the world mark foster gage an architect and an associate dean at Yale has said that architecture should serve as an ethical reminder of the things which are greater than us and by doing so make our differences seem much smaller now it may not be that architecture should give us an answer that we all agree upon but instead can instill within us a desire to look deeper to ask questions of our surroundings in the world around us and come to conclusions and answers and the truth on our own terms if we want to move the needle on climate change the discipline as a whole has an opportunity to reassess our values the hyper object of global warming asked that we move beyond the status quo of sustainability and what that provides us an opportunity to do is also reassess the way the sustainability appears and what it quite literally stands for can we go beyond designing for a given program or tenant brief that may only last the first 20 years or so up a building's life form I would argue doesn't follow function anymore as an inhuman future demands that we have to think beyond the first life of the building instead creating an architecture which is valid and meaningful and challenges us aesthetically a hundred years or more from now the project that you're beginning to see is simply one attempt that I've begun to make at understanding what this future of in human beyond sustainable hyper objective architecture could possibly look like the original project was for a new headquarters for Austin Energy Green Building at the Muller development on a site across from Alamo Drafthouse the original program was to create new office space to create techlabs a small auditorium and gallery space for public exhibitions the project that you're seeing here however while meeting those space and square footage requirements is much more speculative it's not meant to be built tomorrow it's asking the question how can the future of architecture be made and what can it feel like how can buildings present themselves to us not only did I determine that for an entity like energy yes the building needs to be sustainable it has to create more energy than it uses but it could also be dynamic and vast and perhaps even a little bit confusing I mean what do you do with this you're built your brain may not recognize that this is even a building and if that's the case that's actually exactly the point how do buildings present themselves to us we get an idea that there's some kind of complex structure happening inside it's covered with this sort of amorphous bubble which is being pushed and pulled while simultaneously obscuring the structure it's really weird it's supposed to be and the the building is seemingly at odds with its context at Mueller not as any kind of a critical statement of the buildings around it but simply to ask the question what can the future be and how could it look and feel we get a sense though that even though this thing is very complex it's actually not a pipe dream this is actually a very realistic structure which is based on standard discrete readily available dimensional lumber that we have right now as we move to the interior and see a detail of the structure we get a sense now of maybe a better sense of what is happening the interior structure of this building is made of of composite timber products and the structure while it seemed to be shooting out at random it's actually defined by four angles you see the horizontals and the verticals and then everything else is defined by two distinct diagonals now that lends lateral stability to the structure as a whole which is important for the building to stand but it also standardizes the angles of joinery and for an intricate complex highly differentiated system like this that actually makes the construction of this building feasible we've seen in the last five years or so a lot of adoption of mass timber products Larry was talking about the the vast history of timber and architecture which has always been a wonderful material to build with we've seen some awesome advances in recent years on things like glulam and cross laminated timber and without getting too technical basically what these materials are if you're if you're not familiar with the terminology is they're basically large-scale building proud which are made of wood scraps and smaller pieces which allow us to recycle old old material and to harvest timber from shorter growth trees younger trees which encourages more sustainable forestry practices Wood is also an inherent carbon sink that is over its lifecycle trees obviously absorb carbon dioxide and they hold that carbon dioxide within themselves and they don't release that back into the atmosphere until eventually they decay thereby they neutralize when they're used in building applications they neutralize their carbon footprint now we in the building industry should absolutely be advocating for their adoption in more projects as we move forward they operate one of the their advantages is that they operate in similar fashion to concrete and steel construction which has made the building industry able to easily adopt and adapt to them but what it hasn't truly answered is a changing aesthetic that could be associated with timber construction and a new wave of environmentalism and sustainability and while I've been using this term aesthetic which may sound a little bit superficial and sort of Instagram bloggers to you aesthetic is actually a philosophical concept it dates all the way back to Plato think of aesthetics as more than just our understanding of beauty but as the buffer or the zone through which you and I interpret the world and interpret reality around us in that sense my view of you the audience right now your view of me is an aesthetic phenomenon aesthetics is what is telling me that there is in fact a group of people sitting here in front of me right now and I'm not otherwise at home in the shower and shouldn't st. Jonas Brothers at the top of my lungs and be very embarrassing it would be embarrassing for all of us the future this is the realm through which architecture always and most powerfully works it is aesthetic and it is indirect as opposed to a more direct educational or didactic version architecture and all of our disciplines have an opportunity to take steps now to fight global warming and do can but what our aesthetics have to say matters significantly the future is inviting us into something and and what the future looks like is still a question and for you this may not be yet and that's totally okay that's not the problem that the question is what is the future inviting us into and what will our response be to it thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,775

Rating: 4.7142859 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Design, Environment, Materials, Sustainability

Id: 3UgRue8UjAE

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019