Bjarke Ingels

welcome everyone it's a really great pleasure to open this spring's lecture series with Bianca Engels here to share with us the work of his practice bake there are few architects who need less of an introduction than BRK today just look at this auditorium this evening and the long line that formed already early this afternoon and I know that the auditorium next door is also completely filled the sheer scale of Bianchi's reach and the impact not only of his work but of himself as a new kind of architect as public intellectual for our time is undoubtable whether you're a fan or a critic no one can remain indifferent to where big has taken architecture and the discourse on cities today you cannot deny that the practice has become one of the most influential architectural practices in the world and so to introduce Bianca this evening I thought I would share some more personal notes that dive back a little in time I first met Bianca in 1999 when we were both recently hired as junior designers to work for the office for metropolitan architecture in rotterdam Aoki was part of the team for the Seattle Public Library and already in then his design talents combined with his upbeat demeanor rendered him a unique figure in the office sharply standing out amongst a high concentration of young hungry and ambitious architects from around the world but let me expand for a moment on the word a beet imagine as 7:00 p.m. stressed-out architectural office when most project teams are gearing up for many more hours of intense work and suddenly a young BRK who looks very much like the bear cave today shows up smiling and full of energy with what looks like snowboarding pants featuring a fluorescent stripe matching the blonde stripe in his fiery hair zipping through the office on rollerblades that's a beat even with this simple gesture of an optimistic willful and spectacular and into the often overwhelming reality of the work at hand and its grinding effects Bianca was already declaring an architectural stands visa vida world and the question of architectural engagement the stands combined with wicked talent and freshness has given Bianca an innate capacity to go carve opportunities for architecture and design out of almost everything he touches rendering his astonishing trajectory over the past two decades as almost no surprise as a young office in Denmark dark his first partnership plot produced some of the most seminal housing projects of the recent past as well as a set of small yet uniquely original public buildings today Bianca had over 500 percent firm with offices in Copenhagen New York London and Barcelona and who's fearless commitment to bringing design and architecture to the rethinking and building of everything has led to the firm's prolific work from housing developments to resilient and public parks Lego mountains museums and more big has uniquely reshaped the relationship between design and corporate practices challenging the traditional opposition between the two and supporting a broader and more competitive environment the result has been better architecture all around formerly programmatically topologically and more as well as a renewed commitment to the urban realm there are many perspectives one can bring to examine the extensive body of work Bianchi and his practice big have produced in a short time what stands out to me is the most important contribution big has made is to demonstrate to a very wide audience from private clients and developers to government institutional cultural and others that architecture and design matter Bjork is consistent design position the strength of his body of work as well as his unwavering commitment to bringing architecture at its best to every possible corner of the built environment is inspiring for the challenges it has raised for the profession and its agency today and it is in this sense that I believe we should ourselves engage with Biggs commitment as the practice continues to advance new territory for architecture in the world Bjork is energy talent and relentless pursuit of design opportunities as well as his capacity to question discipline and profession in light of our contemporary condition renders him an important figure as we grapple with architectures capacities today and for the future please join me in welcoming Bianca angles thank you what a great introduction it's been a while since I actually spoke in a kind of academic setting so I took the opportunity to put together an almost entirely new set of slides so I apologize in advance if it if it's a little incoherent but I'm what I tried to put together is maybe also to describe how incredibly a mixed bag of of interests and focuses and concerns and what occurs sort of completely mix back of different scales that that you can end up consuming all of your time with as an architect mmm and so I'll sort of try to see if I can if I can serve extract some meaning out of it as as it advances but I'm but essentially may be starting with them with the smallest project that we have created so far but but maybe also one of the most complex this is I needed sippy he is by many seen as one of the best chefs in the world he pioneered the kind of regional istic cuisine with his restaurant Noma in located in Copenhagen where he sort of pioneered this idea of actually in the case of no man which is short for Nordic food naughty smell in Danish Noma that he kind of rediscovered the Nordic landscapes the flora and fauna of of Nordic nature and and and so returned the attention to see how that those those plants and those animals could actually be seen as or cuisine cuisine has been dominated by by French and an Asian cuisine and and and also like I think the the place where where we really align with him was that he came up with this idea that that maybe healthy could also be incredibly delicious we have this notion we call hedonistic sustainability that sustainable can actually be more enjoyable sustainable cities sustainable buildings can be more enjoyable not just good for the environment but also great for the people living there he's somehow done that to to food and he came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant from from where was he was going to shut it down he went to Mexico to Tulum for a few months and cooked on the beach there to this new place which is in the middle of Christina this kind of a hippie commune in in Copenhagen it's it's part of the old fortification of Copenhagen which also makes it a historical landmark it's so it used to be the the fortress when Cristiano came it became this kind of that the hippies invaded in 1969 and they never left you can buy mild drugs openly in Ksenia this is what this is the main part of the building is an old mine see mine storage this is what it looked like when we when we came to it and we thought that the city was kind of you know give us a medal for for trying to make it nice but it turned out that the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically everything was fine but as soon as we started trying to repair it everything was incredibly restricted also there was another sort of challenge because I'm Renee was gonna change his restaurant he was not only gonna be regional istic it was also gonna be seasonal so he invented three seasons instead of four Mille air to April everything from the sea because everything else is dead in Scandinavian nature so the sea is where you go for seaweed and and seafood and anything that can be fermented or pickled May to September vegetable season because that's actually when the matrons and Naevia can feed humans and then October to January game and forest so basically venison berries and roots and and you know his idea has been this kind of rediscovering traditional Nordic elements this is what the context looks like it's kind of this kind of self built a hippie commune and the old navy arts this is actually what sort of traditional Nordic villages look like somehow this kind of you know Scandinavians like to dress in in black they like to paint their houses in bright colors and and and where the you know the southern Europeans push them together to create urbanity in in the Arctic's and the Nordics they're somehow spread apart and and in the end like sort of a maybe our main inspiration came from this kind of typical nordic farm which is essentially an accumulation of individual houses each house is built for its own purpose for the main family for the you know the children as yes you know the family in the generations grow for the potatoes for the animals for the workshop so this was the site the old mine storage and then it quickly became clear that we could only place buildings in the footprints of where there had been buildings in the past so it was kind of very limited repertoire the entire back of house all the labs and the kind of preparation kitchens fit perfectly inside the existing building and then we basically created this kind of mini village of all the other programs of the of the restaurant and finally in the in the three last footprints at green houses because this is it's almost like an urban farm they actually grow a lot of the ingredients that they're that they're serving so you have the preparation kitchen and the final service kitchen the service kitchen and this is because they make sort of 20 servings so they came up with this kind of pent-up chicken idea that Rene wants to be in the middle of everything from the kind of central position he wants to overview the entire restaurant and in return the entire restaurant can see him and his team so we ended up designing for each room a particular building that is made with you know as as few materials as possible mostly one material on the inside and the outside and and connected into this kind of little little square so so here you see the sort of an sampling actually Peter Dolph has created this kind of incredible permaculture garden here in the front where they grow a lot of the lot of the plants as you arrive you're actually waiting to be seated inside the greenhouses and then the experimental kitchen wherever in a prepares the sort of next season's dinner is on the way and then you find yourself to this kind of cluster of buildings the first building is essentially the entrance it's a it's one big wardrobe I kind of wouldn't cabinet where you get rid of your your coat and then you sort of enter into this central square if you like covered by glass like all the different buildings protected from from the environment but but one of the things that Renee was insisted on was that when you are a seasonal chef it's very important to be constantly aware of the weather if it's gonna be mmm cold tomorrow it's gonna be wet tomorrow what kind of ingredients you can get a lot of the menu is actually only found by forging because the ingredients have not been labeled as ingredients so there's no farmer making it you have to find it in the forests or the parks of Copenhagen so then the main building of course is the is the is the chef's kitchen the entire ceiling is it's a ventilation so that you can actually cook openly in the middle of the space you are it's the only building that doesn't have any walls all the air is sucked out the main dining is made entirely out of oak floor walls and ceiling and in this case so almost this idea like like like their cuisine that they use very traditional ingredients but in a slightly different way here we stacked it the the ports almost like a Joseph boys this kind of solid stack of ports the the entire facade can open up into the into the permaculture garden in the summer light comes in from from the top again reminding you of the of the weather and this kind of solid solid wall the same material both outside and inside oak is a hardwood so it can actually enjoy the outdoor weather as you as you move on to so the next the the private dining is pine wood this kind of typical Scandinavian more pale would also on all surfaces the shelving is the construction and again you sort of take the the nature on the fortification in pine can't be outside untreated so I actually Rene and his shifts we were so behind on construction before opening day and they already sold the first seating so it end up being the chef's with their creme brulee torches treating the outside against the elements so that the torched wood makes it capable of being outdoor the lounge the fireplace is also the the skylight it's like this kind of traditional Danish red brick and to make it bright on the inside it switches to a white clay brick again working with the Tektronix of of break but in this case sort of - it's also resolved that the windowsill becomes the ceiling held by the by the break and and again this idea that you can open up the entire corner and bring bringing in the elements when the season allows and game like the brick it's the same brick that actually constitutes the the ceiling like a ziggurat more like a like a traditional roof the grill the barbecue is it's like a ventilated across ventilated chimney so that the the ships can stand in as cold as possible with a with the fire the way this room is almost like a cabinet with a with the skylight and then finally the the old warehouse we just installed a gigantic shelf that sort of organizes all the different aspects the different parts of the kitchen the social spaces for the staff I'm just cutting a single skylight in the ceiling but but almost like this kind of trying to to really take the entire sensibility and the entire philosophy of Renee and Noma and try to create a portraiture or capture the essence what would be the architectural equivalent of of what what Renee has has created and and and of course also like I think M I kind of powerful manifestation of this kind of idea of an urban ecology that this this restaurant is in the middle of of Copenhagen but actually the the honey is made there most of the ingredients that you're eating are actually made in the middle of the city and then across it a radically different example of of hedonistic sustainability and an urban ecology a project that we spent the last nine years making this is this is Noma this is my houseboat and this is especially the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world Denmark has become a little bit of a pioneer in the sense that only four percent of our waste goes into a landfill 42 percent is recycled and 54 percent is transformed into district heating and electricity as a power source six pounds of garbage from your kitchens turns into four hours of electricity and five hours of domestic heating it's replacing the power plant in this photo right in the middle of the of Copenhagen this is the Opera this is the Royal Theatre right next to the marina and and it was clear when we did the competition nine years ago that what was mesmerizing about this was this kind of marvel of modern engineering that it was going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world no toxins coming out of the chimney so we thought maybe a mountain of trash could become an actual Mountain our nearest ski slope in Copenhagen is six hours away in Isabel in Sweden we could put two thirds of Isabelle's main slope on the roof of the power plant and so we did this is what it looked like this spring before before opening as you can see there's still a little bit of a vegetation missing this is what it looked like in the winter so of course the kind of cliff face of the mountain is made out of these gigantic folded raw aluminum bricks that are actually planters this spring they're going to be full of of green raw aluminum tilted so they actually reflect the surroundings so that the building changes color over the over the course of the day inside the mountain you have the entire administration overlooking the city and then of course they look the scene yet at one side and then they overview this marvel of modern engineering it's also rather unusual because the entire power plan is actually day late 50% of the facade is is transparent so you have the administration inside and of course you see the underside of the of the mountain that is above the elevator right up to the top of the ski hill is looking into this amazing space this spring it's going to open the tallest climbing wall in the world 300 feet that I have no idea who's going to be climbing this thing and of course this kind of x-ray at night and of course like the v facade in this case the roof is maybe the most exciting facade it has skiing and the skiing is for free it's a public park if you want to use the lift system you have to buy a lift pass it's a design to be able to sort of help spread vegetation to the surrounding sort of post industrial area you have hiking paths different kind of activity zones you have a kind of vegetation that changes over the course of the of the season there's more than 400 different trees and and in general it's nice it's almost like like normal that it's purely indigenous species if Denmark had mountains this is probably what what what they would look like also the entire roof park has been made for a budget of around 13 million dollars which is absurdly inexpensive so so everything has really been done with the with the purpose of the least amount of of maintenance and the least sort of a acquisition cost maybe when I saw this photo it dawned on me how insane it was that we were actually making a building with a ski lift on the roof and maybe the most sort of important material because Denmark Copenhagen doesn't have enough snow to be a serious ski destination so we searched around and we found an Italian company that makes this kind of mat that has the same friction as a groomed slope the only problem was that it was quite ugly also because because of the thermal expansion and contraction it had to be split up in these like let's call seven by seven foot squares so we actually sat down together with the company and in a course of a few months we managed to develop an entire new product for them and it's very simple you have the old product on the left and an our proposition on the right simply by joining every two circles in two different directions the sort of the basic grid goes from squares to rectangles with six knots which means that when they expand they can become hexagons and when they contract they can become these kind of bow ties which means that you can actually have one single continuous surface so like this kind of very simple it's your metric invention that was then turned into the production and now it's the standard product of the company meant that we could actually have a continuous surface on the whole on the whole roof for the for the first time we color-coded it so that the bright now the slope is the less likely you are to crash into the perimeter and and eventually the grass grows through because the grass is a major part of the structure that holds the the mat to the roof so eventually it's gonna be like skiing on on an alpine meadow so here see some of the first tests that we did so you can kind of hear and see that it has it has the feeling of a groomed slope which also makes it kind of perfect for freestyle skiers because you can actually do all of the grinds and the jumps and the tricks as you could on a on a normal slope so I think what's amazing about this idea is that them I think it kind of shows this kind of almost like world-changing power of architecture that that my son is one year old now so he's never gonna remember that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the power plant in Copenhagen so so for him and his entire generation that's gonna be their normal and that's gonna be the the the starting point from where they start having crazy ideas about their future so that it can almost make you angst about thinking about what kind of future they're gonna come come up with so of course like some kind of I think also kind of a landmark for this kind of idea of of hedonistic sustainability that a sustainable city can also be not just better for the environment but but better for the people living there another sort of aspect that there has been following us is is this kind of relationship between you know the pragmatic and the utopian or let's say the utilitarian and and the social one such example is this is basically where Granville bridge touches downtown Vancouver we got invited to to look at turning it into a mostly residential and also educational development so we just started mapping the constraints there are setbacks from the streets setbacks from the bridges the city has a rule that you cannot build residences closer than 30 meters or 100 feet to the to the traffic on the bridge there's a park where we're not supposed to cast any shadows and finally we were left with this tiny triangular footprint almost too small to build so then we start thinking like if the if the purpose of the hundred foot setback is a minimum distance once we get a hundred feet up in the air we can grow the building back so essentially the triangular footprint turns into a rectangle we managed to get the city to agree with with this interpretation so when you drive over Granville bridge it's sort of as if someone is pulling a curtain aside welcoming you to to Vancouver this kind of gradual overhang and underneath the bridge we worked with a series of local artists you have basically a university in these two triangular buildings that are wedged in between the legs of the of the bridge and then Rodney gray hem proposed to create turn one of his video ad works into a giant urban ad work with this gigantic chandelier that basically is so rows up and then sort of twice a day it's of drops and spins dramatically down above the main street and the idea is once once open that the entire on the side is going to turn into what we've nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of street art but basically trying to turn the otherwise negative impact of the bridge into into a positive so what ends up looking like this kind of almost like surreal silhouette is actually like a very precise analysis and response to a very difficult sort of urban urban situation it's going to open in May and is already now like really one of the more striking places in in Vancouver so this is an example of what we like to call social infrastructure the idea that infrastructure can have positive social and environmental side effects almost the opposite if a bridge can turn into an art museum upside down the opposite could also be true a project that we did in exactly the same space of time as as Vancouver is a project for a small art museum in a sculpture park in Norway and we could basically place the sculptures and I have a side of a river there's an old historical mill and we could place the museum anywhere we wanted and in the end our proposal was to turn it into the bridge that turns the entire complex of parks on either side into one single loop the museum has two galleries one day lead galleries with views over the water and one sort of more vertical more enclosed gallery the transition from one to the other becomes this kind of distortion a 90-degree rotation and and from this from the starting point we had this idea that that the museum could be seen as maybe one of the biggest sculptures in the sculpture park of course once we started getting more intimate with how to make it span it's a 250 foot span so pretty mature column-free span the the cross-sections are incredibly rational like a series of rotated rectangles so here you see the the kind of roll structure but the row structure had some kind of because it is a bit of a mission to make a building as span a 250 feet over a river so it had this kind of Eiffel Tower aesthetic that wasn't really what we were looking for and it looked maybe more sort of muscular than than the kind of effortlessness that we had fantasized about so we tried to imagine how could we finish the building and and in the end the idea became this kind of very simple idea of taking a lot of completely standard elements standard aluminum profiles on the outside standard wooden sticks on the inside and this basically shifts them ever so slightly so it's in a way an incredibly traditional conventional kind of structure in in the joinery of the of the wood we also resolve all of the necessary technical installations this is the almost finished building and and like very classic kind of Norwegian Wood carpentry that ends up creating this kind of very very precise complex geometries of a hyperbolic paraboloid as the as the as the floor turns into the to the wall it reveals a gap that becomes also the the ventilation the sprinkling the the light installations the security everything that makes it a contemporary Museum is also integrated in this kind of very key linear logic so even though you see curves and arches everywhere every single element in the building is it's completely straight so somehow like in a way trying to hack the kind of conventional traditional building techniques that are available to create something that's called an extraordinary out of the ordinary and you see how the the skylight zips and and turns the more vertical part of the building into completely introverted and here you have this kind of spectacular view over the river and the mill and on the outside again it's like this is basically this kind of extruded aluminum facade that you put outside thermal warehouses so anyway the most conventional traditional kind of barn but again put together in a way that it describes this cutter acrobatic geometry and then of course the irony is that I think we spent the same amount of time on on this building as we did on on the power plant and also just shows how how how undiscriminating you are as an architect with with what you actually devote your time to trying to make a building a small art gallery float over river or trying to turn a power plant into a ski slope also of course from the other side it has this kind of even more abstract so sculptural quality that really makes it like one of the sculptures in the in the sculpture park underneath you can see the only other room apart from the mains of queenstown space is the toilets the client was obsessed with the toilets so so basically you you ends up below the belly of the bridge so it's you see the steel structure ending and the Foundation's this kind of glass there that takes you down you can see the sort of where the bridge meets the foundation there's this kind of expansion gap you can interact said the the Danish Norwegian artists group created this kind of voyeuristic sculpture looking in to the toilets and when you look over his shoulder you actually look at the belly of the of the beast with the reflections of the water underneath it and as you continue down underneath the glass there you actually have the the actual bathrooms the glass there it has a projections by Tony Ursula that makes you feel that you're actually listening to conversations happening inside the toilets and when you think you're finally going to be left in peace inside the stall you actually have these classic oslo installations whispering in your ear as you're trying to complete the mission so yes so essentially them let's say another example of like let's say at least this kind of idea of social infrastructure that that one thing can also be the other that's something cultural can also be infrastructure and and vice versa and then of course like maybe speeding up a little bit like so so even though I believe that we we come to each project with a kind of consistent attitude because so much is discovered in the process that the the conditions are always so different what you have to respond to is so different that it ends up creating rather different vocabularies an almost invisible building is a museum a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark it's basically in this kind of giant Nature Reserve on the west coast of Denmark the only exception is this old German bunker left from the Second World War a gun turret a gun was delivered from coops in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9 1945 for good reasons that never happened and next to it inside the dunes we were asked to make a museum telling the story and because it's an entirely listed landscape our proposal became to make these kind of various precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker if the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes the museum became this kind of light absence as you slice through the sand the sand becomes concrete and you have this square entirely transparent bringing daylight deep into this kind of underground museum you descend into this narrative of the Second World War the occupation of Denmark using only materials that are already found in the bunker so the concrete the raw iron the raw wood solving all of the sort of technical installations for the museum fee in the in the tectonics of the of the concrete work so that all technique all sprinkling all lighting all hanging is done within the tectonics of the formwork they light being sucked in so even will be entirely underground it feels very light and airy almost the opposite of the bunker and then from here an umbilical cord takes you deep into the bunker where you can sort of explore what's what's left as this kind of giant artifact from from the Second World War so you can say almost like the disappearing act and the discretion almost becomes the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out in a way is what also makes it disappear and then there's the thing that about architects is that part of the the pleasure of the profession and I think often we talk so much about the social agenda or the environmental agenda whatever and there's also just an aspect of architecture which is the pure thrill of making something and making it as nice as you can possibly get away with and this is a site not dissimilar to the other one but in this case not depicting the story of the Second World War but the this is our site it's valid issue the cradle of watchmaking in Switzerland it's where oedema and PK started making watches 150 years ago and and I never had much of an interest in watchmaking until I went to visit the workshop invited to make this proposal for a small invited competition and I met this kind of master watch maker and he made me aware of the fact that today we're so used to the divorce between hardware and software between essentially form and content that the hardware is kind of this neutral always identical and it's the software that gives it attribute and character and and use but in watchmaking and in architecture the hardware is actually the software it's the geometry and the interlocking of gears and materials and it's call it spaces that makes the clockwork work and the building work so we ended up trying to sort of create that they they had this idea of a linear a chronological exhibition but that you should be able to sort of dig through and make shortcuts so we sort of coiled the chronology into this kind of double spiral that leads to a central gallery in the middle and then unwinds again the roof follows the the slope of the landscape bringing daylight and imbues deep into into the floor plate this is our first sort of architectural model this is the the building almost complete so essentially this kind of resource panel which is that the element inside the the watch that makes it that makes it store kinetic energy and eventually tick there's not a single column in the in the entire building it's as if the the spiral is floating above you the the glass is actually load-bearing it's again one of the elements of watchmaking is to provide the maximum impact with the minimum of a material skeletonization miniaturization complication is all about reducing the amount of material and part of the museum is that you can actually look over the shoulders of some of the expert watchmakers and ask them questions while they're trying to put very small things together and of course at anytime you can jump from one part of the chronology to the other so here you have this kind of almost surreal experience where the entire roof seems to be hovering over your head you enter from the existing historical building and enter into the into the spiral it's a it's this kind of energy environmentally high-performing building so we needed to provide passive sun shading and develop this it's kind of undulating ribbons of of brass but have the effect that from the angle of the Sun they're opaque but when you look at them straight from the inside they're entirely transparent almost to the point where they really disappear and then I just say like for any architect who dreams about potentially doing something that is close to a perfectly built building working in Switzerland where practically everybody is a watchmaker at heart for watchmakers is it's close to as good as it gets so I we've never seen concrete or metal work or glass work like this so anyway like stomachs and a building so for the pure thrill of celebrating the craftsmanship of of watchmaking and of of architecture and then maybe a last smaller building before we escalate is a culture institution we just opened in in Bordeaux in France bringing three different cultural institutions together in a new building a library immediate eck performance space and a and a Contemporary Art Center the art galleries on the top to have access to skylights and connected by a shared Lobby on the waterfront of the llegaron in in Porto and basically the library and and the theater creating the two pillars the Art Museum the bridge to enclose a big public room the entire building finished in a prefabricated concrete you can really see that the French invented steel reinforced concrete because they are so incredibly good at it also the sand in the South of France is so insanely beautiful that's why you need to be that's shown and it must say it's maybe the only truly beautiful of the unities that Korb did because of the of the quality of the sand so essentially the three institutions enclosing this giant outdoor urban room where the three institutions but also the city itself can can invade on the inside it's basically 150,000 square foot building with a 40 million dollar budget which sounds completely ridiculous by New York standards but it's still pretty ridiculous by European standards so we had this kind of positive side effect that all the finishes inside are so insanely raw it's basically here especially concrete in different shades for the opening Benoit Mayer a local Bordeaux artist made this head of Hammes that is sliced so exactly where the void of the building is pushed out to create a big public room the sculptures also absent so in a way them the most exciting part of the sculpture the most exciting part of the building is what's not there and then inside there's almost like the cozy level of raw finish even the furniture has cast out of the concrete some of it tiled there's a periscope from the lobby that looks up so here you're actually standing at the bottom looking up at the people so you can kind of see it's a it's a giant sloping mirror that allows you to see what's happening on the square above you the ballerinas can look out over the square and vice versa actually at the opening there was the first demonstration where they said congratulations with the cultural building but what about the two and a half thousand homeless in Bordeaux so it was clear that I think in the first 24 hours I saw you know a couple making out the first skaters of course arriving and the first demonstration the theater again this kind of mosaic of TOD would hot rolled steel and black concrete to create the perfect sort of acoustic mix and finally this kind of art barn at the top and a sculptural part looking over the city but essentially in this kind of very sort of simple building that the main gesture being the sort of the providing this kind of new shaded and covered outdoor space for for the cultural life of the city um so then I'd like to finish by like escalating a little bit in in scale and maybe impact one project that we've spent the last again half on is for a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's and stadia this is their current stadium and this is typical for stadia it's like these kind of massive venues in a giant sea of parking that are only active a few days a year baseball arguably much more than any any other sport because there are so many games roughly a hundred in a year but we thought what if what if this new stadium could really be the the kind of foundation for the cultural life of the city what if we could bring the ballpark back into into the park and essentially baseball started in packs and then at some point a guy got the idea to build a fence around the park and and charge tickets so we thought what if we could somehow bring the park back so instead of this kind of enclosed stadium one of the main concourse was actually Main Street and because baseball is an asymmetrical sport with the outfield what if the entire stadium could open up to the to the city and the water and the views so we are located in the Port of Portland of Oakland the stadium somehow becomes this kind of extension of the city the the circular stadium kind of distorts the the the streets creates a series of squares the main concourse is actually this kind of main public promenade called athletics way and then basically imagine as the as the roof dips down it almost becomes the kind of Oakland equivalent of the of the High Line a public park that is part of the the experience of the game but 250 days a year it's actually a part for the the citizens of Auckland we also we can comfortably refer to the High Line because we're working with field ops on the landscape but essentially imagine that 365 days a year this is part of the enjoyable space of this new neighbourhood also the normally the the this the seats that are the furthest away from the game would be the loudest here they have this kind of amazing experience of actually being part of the of the park experience so that basically a hundred days a year they shut down access to the park like if you have a concert in Central Park and it becomes part of the of the spectator experience all the the the restaurants and cafes open up to the park but that also means that the other days they open up to the park so you can actually go there and have a coffee even if you're just living on working in in the neighbourhood so you have this kind of connection from here from the inside to the out above of course the running track on the game day is part of the of the circulation and on an on game day it's part of the experience of living in Auckland the same for the picnic lon both for game days and an outside game days so suddenly them the stadium doesn't become this kind of massive massive sort of empty white elephant and it kind of void in the city it actually becomes kind of bringer of life and energy into into a new a new neighborhood and of course also because of the the kind of asymmetry in the extreme you have this kind of incredible view out over the port towards San Francisco that is part of the the experience for the facade we wanted to spend as little money on monkey enclosure as possible so we need to provide some shelter from the from the wind so we came up this idea of of these kind of louvered structure that is facing the predominant direction of the wind and then base where we have the concessions where we have the circulation we need to provide wind protection so it almost becomes like this kind of series of scarfs wrapped around the building just providing only the necessary protection and and and even if we were trying to make this kind of almost skeletal non building and actually ends up having a rather sort of elegant expression and also means that when you arrive you literally walk over the edge of the stadium and and onto the arms of the field to provide access and to minimize the the parking of course because it's part of an urban neighborhood we can share the parking but also we have the BART the Bay Area Rapid Transit only like a mile away but you have to cross a 12 lane highway and a freight train so the simplest way of connecting is by putting a single mast we can actually put a gondola that takes you straight from the BART across both highway and and train tracks lands you on Jack London Square and from here you just walk straight onto across the perimeter Park and into into the game so I think like I'm in in many ways taking this can idea of social infrastructure and the utilitarian and the social and bringing it together into a kind of new a new hybrid and then for the poster I thought I had to at least mention this project we're doing with with Toyota because I think what we've seen over them I think like ten years ago I was so keen on getting some buildings built that I didn't care about master plans because they took forever and they resulted in nothing at least in there in the horizon that I could overview now that I am older and more patient and I realized that two decades go quickly I have more appetite for for for master plans and them and especially yeah because of course like there's a lot of things that can only be dealt with at on a kind of holistic level at a certain scale and and we had the unfortunate encounter with Akio Toyoda who's the grandchild of the founder of Toyota and the namesake and he had this idea of turning the side of two former factories at the base of Mount Fuji into an experimental city where we would look at studying the potential impact on on cities from advances in personal mobility mobility as a service autonomy robotics smart homes so the creativity through AI multi-generation know assisted living hydrogen powered infrastructure academic research and incubation and basic what we started to do was to look at the typical city of today and we say today the street has basically everything bikes cars pedestrians we thought maybe instead of to tailor different kinds of experiences one Street only for autonomous vehicles and pedestrians one for mixed personal mobility that's more like a promenade and finally a pack only for pedestrians and then every third Street berries and leaves in both directions you can actually walk through this entire city as a pedestrian moving only through a park or only along a promenade so the roofs powering the city with building integrated photovoltaics and then basically all these different intersections between the three different kinds of streets allows Toyota and collaborating companies to test the Toyota connected city traffic management system there's a matter net for the delivery of goods Toyota is one of the world pioneers in fuel cell technology using hydrogen which is one of the most efficient ways of storing energy goods can be delivered directly into the homes there's like assisted living also for the for the elderly of course like the demographics of Japan is is the oldest in the world so in many ways they are experiencing right now what we will soon and then a lot of the labs and and the research of Toyota and their related companies is happening in in the work environments and one of the things we also found is that maybe with with companies like Amazon delivering a lot of the goods directly to people's homes the sort of social and cultural spaces of retail are diminishing and maybe there was a way to to reinvent the marketplace or the fairground at the heart of the this of the city so of course this is a it's very kind of high-level introduction but but the basic thinking is by purpose building this kind of first Roman city around this kind of module of the three different kinds of ways of moving that are interwoven that means that the street gets very different social and cultural qualities depending on what kind of sweet it is having this kind of modular system of every nine block being an open sort of public program and then with the possibility of scaling some of the public programs to become larger elements not only can we actually conduct this research in a purpose-built environment but you can also apply the same pattern onto in this case Barcelona New York or Tokyo so it has a lot of sort of general applicability that means that what the kind of experience we can harvest at the base of Mount Fuji could potentially be taking their taking elsewhere so maybe SM as a kind of last endeavor of course all of these projects are terrestrial and over the last two and a half years we have been increasingly interested in in looking a little bit beyond and to the point and I think it's maybe also maybe a word of advice like because we started saying this to each other I think three three years ago that we felt that it would be amazing if we could build on another planet than earth and then by saying it to each other and being more and more serious about it this this December we got selected to build a spaceport for the Norwegian government on the Arctic Circle so if you tell each other and everybody else the story long enough eventually someone bites but we but we actually started by working for them we were working with Hyperloop one the kind of Elon Musk founded a supersonic vacuum tube magnetic levitation train and and got introduced to the Ministry of the future in Dubai and they asked us to look at creating a human colony on Mars every two years Mars and Earth are the orbits are aligned so you can actually get to to Mars according to their masks in three months that's the same time it took five hundred years ago to get from from from Spain to South America so and it didn't stop the Europeans from going through the Americas so also one of the things about Mars is that it's it's a relatively temperate planet on a nice summer day on equator on Mars you have 82 degrees Fahrenheit which is like a Danish summer gravity is 30 percent so a hundred pound person would weigh 38 pounds on Mars it's a three month diet that's more powerful than anything and then the miracle is that Mars and Earth has the same seasonal tilts so you have the same seasons they're only for twice as long on Mars because the years twice as long and then the miracle for instance if you would move to mercury a day lasts a hundred and seventy five days so when the Sun sets it's almost 90 days before it rises again that's a long night on Mars it's the same only you can snooze 40 minutes longer every morning on Mars because the day is 40 minutes longer which means that the kind of bio clock we have and every living organism has its very adjusted to Mars there's no magnetic field to take in from radiation it's half the diameter but the same amount of real estate because they have no liquid oceans and we've been going to mass so we know a lot about Mars we've looked at the craters we've seen dried-out archipelagos landslides dust devils so we have good knowledge about Mars and actually one of the miracles that the the blue planet and the Red Planet but because of small particulates in the air where our sunrises turn red the Sun rises on the red planet actually turned blue which is something I hope many in this room will one day experience personally there is if you remove the biosphere from Earth like in the Atacama Desert in China it looks very much like Mars because it has very much the same minerals and we started just like looking a little bit at Earth this is in Tunisia what looks like a lifeless desert is actually a dense lively community where this kind of chocolate light house is carved out of the rock create a more stable environment protected from the Rays of the Sun and the fluctuation of temperature and of course another example is kind of loose work in Greenland and the Arctic the igloos using the insulating aspect of ice and the sort of efficiency of the spherical form to protect from from the environments so there's a lot of great things there's a few problems remaining there's too much radiation for humans very low pressure cold temperatures no breathable air and no ready to use water and also we can't bring too much I think by the most optimistic estimates it's going to cost six thousand six hundred dollars to bring two pounds of goods to Mars this is what we need so basically we need to somehow combine the ecosystems to sustain human life or the ecosystem to sustain plant life into one integrated ecosystem so we just started looking at what we have we have regolith that you can sort into ice that gives you water basalt stones fine sands you can make bricks ceramics concrete you can sort the fine sands into Silesia aluminium and iron oxide among other things you can make aluminium glass you can make technology photovoltaics with photovoltaics you can make power with power you can run electrolysis on the water you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen together with the co2 of the Martian atmosphere it's like 93 percent co2 you can make with a 70 reactor you can make methane that together with oxygen is a great rocket propellant as a by-product you get carbon monoxide and more water the carbon monoxide with the iron oxide you can make steel together with the water you can use chemical reactions to create different kinds of plastics soft plastics hard plastics with the software of course everything needs to be recycled because everything is so incredibly valuable on Mars with the soft plastics we can make inflatable membranes that we can make by odomes for growing plants for root zone gardens for leisure for aquaponics hydroponics for agriculture and finally we can sustain human life using only what's actually available on Mars if you look at the different kinds of enclosures inflatables are great for keeping a pressurized environment but not for keeping metal ores or radiation out 3d printed structures provide more protection not enough and finally excavated structures with seven meters or 20 feet of regolith is enough to protect you from the radiation so none of them work on their own combined they actually tick all the boxes so imagine creating inflatable membranes digging excavating material used to 3d print and then you just have to regulate how much time you spend in the different degrees of exposure but we found that the typical American only spends 8 percent of the day outdoor so that should be OK and then of course they can combine and grow until you have a CD as part of the experiment is to begin in an environment in the desert outside Dubai that looks like Mars but it's a little warmer but the idea is to use the same techniques the 3d printed structures using the local available as sand the the high efficiency agriculture to create this kind of environment where you can experience how enjoyable the kind of Martian vernacular could actually be like not like living in a tin can but it is kind of charming clay esque 3d printed Cassville like structure actually water is a better is 7 times better shield against radiation so it wouldn't be unlikely to have these underground structures with three feet of aquarium above that provides daylight but protects you from from the radiation so some of the things that would be nuts on earth could actually make a lot of sense on Mars so and why is this interesting and one of the things the more we started thinking about when you're starting on a new planet from scratch you have to somehow really understand ecosystems and if you look at the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations eight of them deal directly with the built environment just a few data points on earth we have let's let's call it one and a half billion cubic meters of water on Mars only five million cubic meters of ice so you have to be so it's so precious the water on on Mars we have outdoor agriculture we have to do it in structure at least ten times more efficient on on Mars and one of the main sources of global warming and the climate crisis we're experiencing is fossil fuels you have no fossil fuels on Mars because you have no fossils so in a way many of the things that would allow us to be capable of surviving on Mars are the same things that would allow us to be great custodians of planet Earth and if you sort of gradually rat imagine over 200 years getting breathable air getting a liquid water you see that Mars doesn't look so different than than Earth and that basically brought us to the last thing that I'd like to to end with is that one of the things we've been thinking lately is that we seem to be so incredibly incapable of dealing with the climate crisis and we were thinking why because humans have actually shown to be incredibly capable of taking very resource demanding multi-generational efforts like building cathedrals the great Cathedral in Curlin took 632 years to complete and they still completed it we laugh at the the Catalans because they're still building sagrada familia but they've only been building for a hundred and thirty seven years so they're not supposed to be done yet and the Romans were capable of building the the Roman aqueduct system for more than five hundred years bringing a fresh water to all of their urban settlements so how come that we could do it it's because there was a master plan you know when the first architect of the Kirlian cathedral died the next architect worked on on those same drawings and the next one and the next one and I think you probably went through 20 different architects in in 600 years or more so I think one of the problems of climate change and climate action is that it's the realm of scientists climate scientists that are mostly academics which means that they're very good at science and academic accuracy but not so much a Tantra preneur shape and action and then you have politicians that are maybe not so good at something that requires a 50 year or 100 year commitment because they have election cycles of four or eight years so even a short architectural project takes longer than that so what we thought what if we because architects are maybe we make master plans for buildings for city blocks for neighborhoods for cities for regions even for countries why not make a master plan for the planet so normally we we get hired to do things from this case there was no obvious client except maybe a it's a toon burg so we said okay so we started it ourselves and I'm just going to reveal a few of the things we started looking at it's gonna be another eight minutes first of course climate change has been going on catastrophic ly since the dawn of planet Earth from in a kind of a ball of lava to the kind of heavy bombardment of meteors four billion years ago to the snowball two and a half billion years ago the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago much more like current Earth and and present-day and when you look this is 500 million years back you can see there's always been sort of fluctuations in co2 related to fluctuations in temperature the blue line is temperature and the kind of shaded graph is co2 so there's a clear relationship if you look at the last five hundred thousand years you can see them the ice ages are always valleys in the co2 levels are separated by that also corresponds to rising temperatures and vice versa and if you look at the last 500 years you see relatively stable and then sort of let's say 150 years ago it really starts escalating and and on this graph it doesn't look so so bad but it's 407 particles per million and we have to go back 20 to 30 million years before we find the same levels of co2 that we have currently none of these animals existed back then including of course humans so it's a very unprecedented situation and just to give you another level like regardless of global warming at a thousand particles per million the sort of ventilation in in in any room kicks in because it becomes unhealthy for humans to breathe those levels of co2 so so we're definitely not just warming the planet we're also making it less habitable for for human life so you have different kinds of greenhouse gases four of them affected by by human activity and of the four of course carbon dioxide and methane maybe are the ones we talked about this also nitrous oxide loop and and so-called F gases I'm gonna focus on carbon dioxide so you have a lot of sort of stored carbon and you can see if you have 610 do you get tons of carbon in our vegetation you have a million times more in in the sediments and that's the same she would be releasing by burning fossil fuels so you have to to carbon dioxide loops one it takes millions of years it's volcanic activity that then becomes sequestered in in rocks and sand and it's tense of sediments on the ocean floors and and it's pushed back through tectonic movement into magma and then you have a more annual loop which is essentially living beings absorbing co2 and thence of releasing it through respiration decomposition and of course human emissions and currently we are increasing our co2 emissions with four billion tonnes per year methane a kind of similar loop meeting only stays in the atmosphere for nine years but because every year we're releasing another 10 million tonnes primarily because of rice fields and ruminant animals it's also adding to the equation and you look 75 percent of the greenhouse effect is tributed to co2 this baby's problem 14 percent methane and the rest to nitrous oxide and F gases if you look at the co2 equivalent the F gases are really the the worst sinners they are three thousand times more impactful than co2 there's just a lot less of it and if you want to look at how much carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere every year it's it would be a two by two by two kilometer cube this is downtown London by by comparison but like of solid coal as going into the into the atmosphere or 35,000 oil tankers there's another aspect which is the shine effect so vantablack then is Kapua patented black the least reflective material on earth has a shine effect of zero and perfect white of one and just to give you an idea an ocean or a parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat so the more open ocean the more heat is absorbed the more parking lots the more he does absorb whereas fresh snow has a really good shine effect and to give you an idea how impactful this is if if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27 degrees Celsius today it's 15 degrees so twice as warm as now if a third of the planet was glacial it would be frozen so 1% of change in the shine effect of Earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of co2 in the atmosphere so it's also an important factor that right now works against us so what are our energy sources we have four sources the Sun that provides photovoltaic solar heating fossil fuels wind power is all stored solar energy earth to your thermal energy most because of gravity compression the moon tidal turbine energy mainly because of gravity and then nuclear energy from atoms so and basically all the different forms of energy are related so basically let's say gravity creates pressure the page nuclear activity that provides through fusion provides sunlight through photosynthesis sunlight is translating into chemical energy that can then be burned to provide heat that can with an engine be translated into kinetic movement that can then be turned into electricity and over the years we've been sort of mastering more and more of these kinds of translations and any kind of energy source is translation from one source to the other so a water mill or hydropower is gravity turned into kinetic movement and from there into electricity nuclear fission is nuclear energy translated into heat and from there into mechanical and electrical batteries from chemical to electrical and if you look at the energy storage versus batteries which is a great thing it's it's not very efficient half a ton of batteries has the same stored energy as five kilos or 10 pounds of hydrogen which is why it's it's a very interesting energy source today we spend a hundred and fifty three thousand terawatt hours per year that's our energy bill 1/3 roughly from a new treaty then transportation and agriculture on an equal and then construction and an industry and if you look at the energy sources even though we have a lot of different renewable energy sources the vast amount like 85% of our energy comes from non-renewable so you can see 200 years ago we only had traditional bio fuel burning words basically then King coal then came oil then came gas and then you have then came nuclear and then of course you have the renewables but of all the 15% of renewable two-thirds of it is actually just burning wood so not again also acting leading to co2 emissions even though you can argue that you can replant it so then we started looking at how efficient are the different sources we also looked at who's the biggest culprit today this is basically China the biggest culprit Asia but if you look at it historically the last 200 years the US and the EU have definitely contributed our share and then we said ok so what what's the job we have to solve don't worry I'm not gonna like solve the whole thing in the next two minutes but just to sort of illustrate the kind of architectural thinking behind it it's not enough to provide 153,000 terawatts because we're gonna be 10 billion people and everybody will eventually have the quality of life of singapore which is currently the highest living standard so that means that we need to have 750,000 terawatts if solar would be an current technology for solar we could provide all of that energy with this amount of PDS or with this amount of windmill parks or this amount of nuclear because actually you only need this amount of real estate for nuclear but because of the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone and anyone who watched Chernobyl on HBO knows what I'm talking about it would actually be relatively inefficient in terms of space hydroelectricity we don't have enough hydroelectricity or biomass also there's the idea of planting forests to sequester carbon but we would have to plant the entire land mass of earth every third year to sequester enough carbon so it can only be part of a solution if you look at the different renewables they've all gone down especially solar massive over the last half decade except hydro which has gone up maybe because of preservation and construction hydropower currently provides only three percent of our power it's believed that there's a bigger potential but not more like not enough to provide the entire earth but seventy one of the countries on earth could actually be delivering European living standard with the amount of hydroelectricity they have available but just give you an idea the biggest hydro station in the world Churchill Falls in Canada provides you could provide the same amount of energy with solar with a much smaller area when to power only is 0.6 percent of the power on earth and you have a very large untapped potential mostly closer you get to the poles the more wind power potential especially offshore and I've called solar power again the the the brighter the more potential and if you look at since the 70s the price has gone drastically down so Solar is really of all the different sources wind and solar seems to be the best ones and then you have this thing called the intermittency intermittent problem this is looking at the UK in January a lot of wind power somewhat irregular and not so much solar power and only in a very small time space in the same in UK in June you see much bigger solar potential and much lower wind speeds so that that becomes a problem you look at over the year you have this kind of almost inverse graph and you basically have two cycles the kind of seasonal cycle and the 24-hour cycle and the 24-hour cycle also varies over over the year winter and summer so if you cut it at where you say you have minimum six hours of peak solar in in the winter that gives you roughly 99 percent of Earth's population lives within this zone because of the the radius of Earth you never have more than 10,000 kilometers to the nearest sunlight so if if say if each sixth of the planet could provide if each 24-hour zone could provide a sixth of the power of the planet the site that has light could actually power the other side and how could you do this so basic because like where you have you know the the shorter the radius the shorter the distance to from night today and with current high voltage connections you lose three percent of the power per thousand kilometers this means that at the maximum lost you you lose roughly a third of the power if you're going all the way to the other side so one of the things we started looking at you already have regional grids this is one grid this is another great Europe is one grid and there's plans to connect Europe Northern Europe and North Africa and the Middle East there's plans to connect the east and the west coast and and and Mexico so you have all of these partial plans so what if you could actually create an entire worldwide grid the Sunnyside could power the the dark side or the windy side could power the the less windy side and just to give you an idea this is London the yearly solar output from London over the year and within the same sort of a longitude you have Cape Town that has the exact opposite pattern obviously over the year so if you can connect them they can even each other out solving part of the intermittence problem and if you look across you can also provide this kind of even presence of power if you look at wind within the same slice the same sort of one-hour slice of Earth we just like look at a different kind of series of locations across Europe and Africa and you end up evening out because the wind is always blowing somewhere so you end up actually having close to peak generation speed always somewhere within the zone so maybe this kind of seasonal cycle and 24-hour cycle this kind of grid could unite us all energy wise and then of course that's the Pacific that we haven't solved yet and maybe just like a few data points and then and then I'll let you go of course we have to look at everything so we started looking just at water this is how much water we have on earth it would if it was like a ball because the oceans are very shallow and if you look at all that water very little of it it's freshwater two and half percent and of the freshwater very little is surface freshwater 30% is groundwater and sipped like 2/3 is glaciers and of the surface freshwater 3% in the atmosphere a quarter of it is in all living things humans included half a percent in rivers six percent in soil moisture and swamps 20 percent in lakes and again two-thirds in ground ice so basically water is saltwater and freshwater is ice in the last 100 years we six times doubled our consumption of water four trillion cubic meters of water every year most of it goes to agriculture and of the agriculture most goes into meat and we are getting increasingly dry zones and the bad news is that it's expensive energy wise to desalinate for instance if we would have to desalinate the increase of water consumption to reach 10 billion people it would be 20% of our current electricity supply and then of course looking at pollution just to give some some vulgar facts every hour we produce a pile of 38 meters Burj Khalifa and this is the cone of plastic bottles every day and every month we can bury the tallest tower on planet earth in a cone of plastic bottles and when you look at the flow of plastic the vast majority is discarded after a single use a good part of it is still in use in different components the stuff that gets recycled quickly gets discarded again and then a small fraction becomes put to sort of more constant use or incinerated for for the energy value if you look at the sources of energy the vast majority of the mismanaged plastic is in Asia Pacific the global River plastic input to the oceans massively Asia if you look at the 20 biggest river rivers it's basically Asia and a little bit of Nigeria and Brazil but really Asia and massively packaging so these are the sort of mismanaged pollution hub spots and these are the outlets into the global oceans creating this kind of distribution because of the currents of plastic where the biggest patch is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is becoming a massive issue so essentially what we're trying to do as you can see is try to apply the kind of tangible practical thinking we almost took the kind of way we would normally approach an architectural project and a master plan so this is the the kind of index as we're making it for the master plan of the planet and going through it with this kind of pragmatic utopian approach hoping that we can develop insights and ideally a master plan for the planet that could be anyway handed over to corporations and governments with a much more tangible and much more promising concrete plan of action than than the reports or the sort of political agendas that the that exists today Thank You Rocky for making things very easy for me to respond I'll keep it short and I'm sure there are many many questions but I you know I just wanted to maybe retrace a little bit the lecture and and really open it up pretty fast where where you left us you know you opened with you know beautifully designed small restaurants where you showed the details in every corner and there was a notion of vernacular and I was like okay taking on bigness and starting the scale and and then and then you know the projects are you know fantastic but it also really feels and I think that's been sort of your signature as a kind of strategic thinking thinker as an architect there's a kind of repertoire of strategies right the vernacular the twist you know I think that's trademark landform you know whether it's it's it's it's the bridge or the then you have the wedge and and and and it's it's clear that the sort of complexity that one very architectural complexity and pleasure that you find in the restaurant with the materials and the kind of aggregation and you know you you sort of get rid of slightly as you scale up I mean it it you know if there's a kind of singularity to the to the gesture and and I'm thinking okay there's a simplicity also that sort of Allah unable a new form of complexity and and in a way what you're conquering is not so much architectural form or a sort of narrative about architecture but the excitement is in bringing architecture to new programs to finding new topologies to write as a sort of territorial expansion of architectures capacity and and and almost and this is where that kind of urban realm comes in you know you where you're almost sacrifice architecture as architecture for what it does to the urban realm for what did you know what you call social infrastructure for what is what it not what it enables and I was thinking about the last utopia in this country which is new urbanism which sort of declared that in order for us to address questions of you know walking and livability and density etc we have to sacrifice architecture as and as an object of focus and and you know doesn't matter what style it is or whatever you know it's okay and and I and I think for me and I mean this very positively there's a sense of if we need to leave architecture behind you know we should and and then and then this is kind of cut with the and you you you almost get excited yourself okay I can do all these strategies I can provide architecture I could provide solutions I can do it like okay now let's you actually use the term let's take off right so it's kind of like okay now is there a challenge and then okay there's a Toyota smart city and I'm thinking pragmatic utopian or utopian pragmatism and you're like okay this is getting into you talking to stoke dystopic proposition I mean you're thinking about the smart city is also a city that is about control and surveillance and and all these happy people are you know I wouldn't want to just wait and see scary and and so on for me that's the kind of parentheses but but then I think I think the assertion of the with the the reassertion and the faith and of the master plan you know I mean we are here in a academic setting with where the master plan has been murdered and murdered who over and over again for all the dystopic condition that it produced the exclusions the conflicts the the sort of segregation the power structures I mean this is always a result of the master plan and that you reassert the master plan and I I think that it's kind of very interesting I guess where I'm getting at is is and and this has been also part of your power as an architect it's kind of to dust off to say okay well we can't you know just stay in that space of criticism and and and and maybe we do need you know a master planet and I think the passion and you know as you as you sort of deployed this is blueprint for the planet you know Georgie and it almost becomes a believable where we're so where are you taking this I mean I where are you taking this and and throughout your work you suspend the kind of political you you present yourself as a kind of a you know a context you're a political kind of architect and and and you know obviously climate change is not we're not addressing it not because we don't have the technology and not because we don't we've had it for a long time we've known this is coming for a long time we're not addressing it because of because we don't have the political will because of power structure because of politics because of governance because because of the West you know so so what do you do with the master plan who's your audience and and you know I think it's it you know it's it's so I mean as it thickens I think it's very interesting I just I just and I'm not what is what is your hope don't tell you it's a question and I was so like it's it's very early days but but it was like maybe you found your calling is what I'm saying like you're like I think that's the realm where I see your passion and I don't think that it came from the fact that as architects we're so used to waiting for someone else to ask us to do something and to the point where we almost unable to do anything out of our own energy right so so and and we just because of them we did a kind of very significant study for Mars I just showed that kind of like the tip of the iceberg we did an even more in-depth study for a potential lunar base so we did a study for floating cities with the United Nations so we've looked into a lot of this kind of more and more complex what is he thinking and and we began to feel a little bit that well why why does the discourse around climate change remains so you know like even the people that are supposed to be the activists all they do is in a way complain about the inaction and there's a limit to how much you can match yourself out of the problem like you can demonstrate you can make a lot of billboards and you can you can you can walk all the way to the White House and back again but what we really need is like you know a kind of a kind of blueprint or kind of you know a kind of project schedule or something like so we were just beginning to think because because we do I do feel in an and are in a way that what I try to show by starting with with Noma and ending with the whole planet is that of course the level of detail diminishes except news but one does not rule out the other so the idea is that just like in nature at the macro level and the micro level there's a there's almost an equal amount of complexity the system of rivers and the nervous system and the distribution of water and the branches of leaf you can see like so but but the ability to apply yourself at either scale and I think that you're saying master plan has been this forbidden thing because there's a lot of examples of also because often it becomes this kind of unifying aesthetic that has been applied at the wrong scale so it's not really understanding systems or complexities of relationships or flows but a superimposing a kind of universal aesthetic and and that's that's that's not at all we're trying to really understand the the ecosystem that we've inherited and try to see if we can in a way deal with it like because because you can apply architectural thinking at the scale of a piece of furniture a restaurant a city block a city why not a planet no I think you're making that clear and I and I think you're making a clear case for architectural thinking both its pros and it's cons I think you know what it what it puts forth and what it what it leaves behind and what it can handle and but it's also interesting to note that today the level of urbanization that is occurring in places like China and the Middle East etc are part of the problem with with climate change right the rapid urbanization you know that that many of your the master plans are enabling is also so anyway I don't I don't really I guess my only question would or my only concern let's say it would be that I'd be curious with Greta Attenberg would think about your master planet you know or in terms of I think it I find it very difficult today to be engaged as an architect as if we are operating in a kind of political void in this moment and so that's what I find interesting yeah actually we've been having some conversations about this on you know I've I really declare any kind of political affinity but I find that I am often much more in the middle than many of my friends and definitely much more in the middle then the political landscape right now which is so you know fragmented and and and one of the things that I I'm not asking for your your personal politics I'm saying I'm actually gonna do it because looking at a lot of the plans that you're looking at a lot of the large-scale infrastructure plans that you're looking at were the result right of a certain political will either certain scale interesting thing is you can't fantasize about that level of architectural empowerment without you know at least acknowledging that they are the result of a certain political context yeah but I but I think that what you find is that when on the political spectrum when you go to watch the extreme hello hello yes hello [Music] are you interrupting who is that [Music] yesterday God is test worse okay when - it's working no I just want to say like the the more you go and the political extremes on the extreme left or the extreme right or not extreme but like the further the more you are deliberately not including the other viewpoint and I think one of the things climate change cannot be solved with governments only and it can not be solved with companies only and I think so so like if I would declare myself anything it would be social liberal because you cannot have the collective at the expense of the individual but you can also not have the individual at the expense of the collective you somehow have to find the greatest possible freedom but also the greatest possible care and and I think the what would be finding is that this kind of space in the middle the pragmatic utopian where where sometimes you agree with with one wing sometimes you agree with the other wing but eventually that's so you can call it like that sort of the radical middle because I think I think that's that's what the world needs is a lot of different skill sets a lot of different capacities for action coming together and and I think by having by having a master plan by having blueprints you can get masons and carpenters and craftsmen to build a cathedral but if you don't have the master plan how are they how are we and this layers sorry you also need the slaves I don't think the was built by slaves no but I mean I I don't think they had the level of standard of living that Singapore has all I'm saying I'm not asking for your all I'm saying is that I think it would make uh you know I think that it's it would be look the most without John Lennon as a slide the masterplan knit doesn't work you needed to insert John Lennon so I'm just saying that I think as architects we can project and I think we can project more than form we can also situate our architectural desires with you know we're imagining also societies you of our people and I think that I missed that dimension which I know you have and you bring in your project so the kind of narrative that you brought to the restaurant where you have this relationship to the chef where the relationship to the food who has you know the kind of subject of your architecture I think could inhabit your larger work and that would make it stronger it's all I mean I just I miss I missed that scale of humanity that we find in your restaurant it's not you but it's it's again it's like you can't talk about the planet and then get lost in the joinery of the bricks all you need is John Lennon all you need is to show this later John that's all you need there you go you can open it up great lecture I have two questions the first one is for the Mars project are you guys actually looking at like science fiction Zack Marshall chronicles to in for inspirations my second question is I can't help but notice that the way you start up your project it's really similar to reminds me a lot of SML XL and my question is do you think and and the smaller project the more architectural projects up like the skills the skills that they require is quite different from the more master panel projects where there's more imaginations or there's more research that's involved and I was wondering if you think architects and design thinkers eventually are gonna be two different professions and how are they joined together and what's your thoughts just in general on that topic yes I think I think in a way that I have this kind of when I was um when I was younger I had a kind of arrogance about how you could that I believed that you could think your way to with everything and I think one of the things I learned when I went to intern at the other may in the beginning it kind of annoyed me that there was so much work going on without a lot of thought I felt because I had somehow imagined that or may would be all these kind of very coherent very intellectual people that would be sort of discussing and then once the idea had fully formed they would make it and instead there was and I remember I was almost shocked that that one person came from the skins office one person came from Iceman's office and one person came from Foster's office and I was like what the are you doing it all make like and I wanted to go work for friend Gary actually so you know it was like I could like it was not at all what I had expected because I'd expected everybody to maybe be like me I know and and then the work started happening and there was no discourse there was all kinds of random you know this met blah blah and and through the kind of sheer massive production of material the possibility of discovering something more and more meaningful and garage kind of discourse could mature out of it and I think in that sense you need both halves of the brain the analytical and the kind of experimental the kind of action and the reaction and but therefore I also think that you can you can empower because it's a it's a constant feedback loop so you can really empower the kind of tactile sensual sensitive refineries with clear thinking and you can empower scientific analysis with Kenna tactile sensual experimental kind of longings so I think that the pragmatic and is open the creative and the analytical comes together and I think maybe that's what we can offer so that's in that sense I don't think that it's necessarily different fields of course at the end of the day you need to have a certain amount of knowledge and I think one of the luxuries that I think is chuh in a lot of our projects is that we've been capable of working with arguably the best or some of the best chefs in the world to imagine a restaurant to some of the best watchmakers in the world to imagine Museum of watchmaking some of the best sort of energy engineers some of the best sort of automotive manufacturers like so I think the fact that we have access to people with very high degrees of knowledge and I think we've developed a kind of way to interview them and extract some of their knowledge and and make it concrete in ways that we can use it I think that works at at all scales so in that sense there is a kind of inquisitive part of being an architect is to translate this kind of highly specific knowledge into something that can be put into action in the physical world just to go back kind of to this idea of utopia and dystopia thank you for a very inspiring lecture and you presented a series of projects of very successful projects all realized in cities of the global north and I'm wondering and all and then you move on to this like master planet ideal that assumes kind of a best-case scenario in every aspect of the project and I guess I'll be assuming it right well I mean in order for it to be successful all of the elements of the puzzle need to fall into place a certain way and I'm just curious if in doing this research and developing these projects you think and also analyze the worst case scenario and whether you take into account like the realities of as Jean and I was saying of maybe other systems of governance and other cities and other countries of the global South that maybe do things differently and how how do you see those two meeting to produce this like master planet yes maybe I start here and then I get back I mean thank you for almost blaming me for working so much in the global North because I learned recently from a trip in South America that you're not supposed to work in South America or specifically Brazil which I have of course disagree with severely and and and of course it is true that most of the build work we have done has been in the global North it's also where I'm from and it's where where our offices are located the most southern is Barcelona but I have to say that after having traveled in in South America the last three weeks I am incredibly eager to to get to work global South and and and I think I think we have to find ways and I think maybe this ties a little bit into what you were saying over there and I think the kind of possibility and responsibility that comes with the with the kind of creative platform we have now and I think the capacities we have is that we can maybe begin to engage in situations that would be difficult if not impossible for us to navigate previously and I think we are slowly taking taking taking that on and I think I really believe in like in Gandhi's kind of statement of that you have you should be the change you want to see in the world because of course you can't you know but because because you're not the President of the United States or the general secretary of the United Nations but you can make sure that what you do makes that little difference and that's that's how Rome was built you know a brick by brick and and of course I think one of the things that we have found as we've evolved as a practice is that we have I think somehow we have accumulated insights and experiences and knowledge and of course a lot of our projects have failed monumentally recently it has been announced that the layer silver steam that wants to build the original foster design and not our two World Trade Center so but that's like it's it's so business as usual in a way for an architect and of course that project kind of died in my mind probably four years ago when James Murdoch's dad and brother decided not to build his his is his brainchild the same James Murdoch who is now openly criticizing the family and the Fox Network for denying climate change but but um so in that sense the good thing the good news is that all of those failed attempts and stranded projects have accumulated a lot of insight and a lot of knowledge that that I think makes us increasingly capable of of taking on more and more complex challenges that would have been unimaginable a decade ago and that's also why we have the kind of mildly megalomaniac idea of at least attempting to start this kind of research is saying that what if we apply architectural thinking at the scale of a planet looking at at the kind of human because like anyone can do it you can do it you should do it you should just just take it on I mean you built the the disky you did it so you can do it okay [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

Views: 129,606

Rating: 4.9314375 out of 5

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Id: 4Z82m-PxDO0

Length: 114min 25sec (6865 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020

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[u/Andremtl123]

EPIC ARCHITECTURE> Lecture on Urban Ecology and Architecture..Concept of Hedonistic Sustainability..review of some great projects from Copenhagen to New York to Japan

Bjarke Ingels https://youtu.be/4Z82m-PxDO0 via @YouTube