Forget sustainable, productive architecture is the next big thing: Dong-Ping Wong at TEDxDumbo

we're actually working on a pool project just down the street and I wanted to actually use this project to talk about why right now I actually think we're in probably the most exciting time in the last 50 years to be an architect and I'll kind of get into that but to do that we have to sort of back up to 2007 right before the recession and right before everything crashed architecture was sort of at this high because the market was at a high all of the work that was being done was incredibly iconic work but that was really the point of the work was to be taller was to be bigger was to be sort of more audacious was to be iconic and you know this all started about ten years prior with the Guggenheim Bilbao and sort of established a trend that this is what architecture should be now there were two inherent flaws with this kind of work that I think were exposed because of the crash one was that this wasn't so much an obsession with buildings it was really an obsession with objects and it was a session with objects where basically again meant to just simply be bigger and taller and more luxurious than their neighbors and the second was that all of this work was completely dependent and built for the market which meant when the market fell apart and the market crashed the point of this architecture fell apart there the architecture sort of lost its role about what it should be doing and in some ways I mean obviously there were plenty of bad reasons or bad results of the crash but one of the good things is that like anytime after a recession we actually get a chance now to actually build back up what architecture is and possibly more exciting we actually get to build back what architecture can do and when I say do I mean very literally what the architecture can do for a city what the architecture can do for you in terms of productivity it's basically what is a productive architecture look like what is Antarctica can we make architecture that actually makes good things and when I say good things I mean things that are very essential clean water can it make clean air can it make food and so and also what does this architecture look like what does a productive architecture look like so one of the very first projects that we we did which is really just a study was a housing tower la and so all we really did was step this tower out and arrange five of them into a self-supporting basically solar array that what we kind of consider is basically an urban battery for a power-hungry city it was the first time we ever thought about pictured literally making stuff that could be beneficial for its neighbors for the streetlights for itself of course for all the people that lived in the city and in the building's themselves another project we did was a master plan in Copenhagen and this is a peninsula off the north eastern side of Copenhagen and for us the thing that this was producing was food it was how can we take the kind of productive qualities of a farmland or of a kind of agrarian area and combine it with all the efficiencies of a sea and urban density into what we were calling a kind of urban quilt of productivity so what we did was we started with a kind of typical Copenhagen courtyard block blew it up tenfold so that the middle could actually support these kind of programs so in this example there's a farmland in the middle there's a market to sell the produce on the Left there's a fruit origin to the south this is actually a water quality treatment plant in the middle a kind of fake four side of the South the the architecture protected all of these central productive areas meaning it protected from wind it protected from noise so it actually allowed these areas or it allows these areas to produce as much as they can it also at least I like that it produces this very weird juxtaposition of kind of these pastoral landscapes and another wise very metropolitan way of living and then a project it's a 600 unit housing block just south of downtown Dallas and one of the elements of Dallas is it actually has a lot of wind and the engineers we were working with pointed out a phenomenon where as wind passes over and around the corner of a building that wind speed accelerates so what we did was we took the typical kind of fad housing block and just cut him in half so we were able to take a point of production and expand that into a surface of energy production and so what we calculated was that not only could these Peaks produce 100 percent of the energy needed by this 600 unit housing block but it actually produced more than it needed which meant we could actually sell the energy back to the city grid to help finance the construction and operation of the project and this was I think the first time we actually took this idea very seriously because not only that was there an environmental impact of course but there was actually economic impact that we could answer all the questions that sustainability or that use of using environment as your driver was actually environment environmentally beneficial and financially beneficial so this takes me back to the pool project it's called plus pool it's initiative by our office and the office of play lab which is two guys Jeff and Archie Archie is here actually and we started this project two years ago and really to me this is representative of this whole notion of a productive architecture but beyond that it's also seeing for us a new way of actually working there's actually a history of swimming in the rivers in floating pools from over a hundred years ago that obviously because of Revelations in the water quality of the river has slowly been I was going to say filter it out but slowly been taken out of the river but we wanted to bring that back but of course given that we're actually a there's so much coastline it's very odd to us that you can't actually swim in the rivers and it was also a fairly selfish motivation to do this project simply that I'm from San Diego so I go to beach a lot obviously in San Diego and here I'm actually closer to water than I am I've ever been in my entire life but my vision or my understanding of that water is very very different and it also has everybody knows it gets incredibly grossly hot here in the summer so we thought it'd actually be amazing if you could swim in the river that you cross over and look at and live next to every day the problem of course is the way the the rivers are not particularly clean I don't need to explain that but this is a map of what is allowed by the state in terms of uses of the river Green is okay to swimming we're in a sort of orange zone which means it's not okay to swimming so we actually thought it'd be great if if you could literally just kind of carve out this very small piece of the river that is real river water to swim in and as a way to start getting people to understand that the water is there but it's also this amazing resource that the city has it's literally a resource that defines the city I mean it surrounds the city it is the profile of the city but of course how do you do that how do you clean the water to the point where people can swim in it where families feel comfortable bringing their kids to it so we're working with these amazing engineers at Arup to basically develop a filtration system and the filtration system is basically a layered filtration system which means as water moves through the pool it's literally being brought into the walls of the pool smaller and smaller contaminants are being taken out of the pool sorry out of the water so by the time it gets to the pool all you're left with is water that meets and possibly even exceeds the state standards for swim ability and for us it's really I think the easiest way to think about it is a giant strainer that you can simply drop into the river or it's a pool made up of Brita filters basically I've never been on a project where I had to explain the project less to someone and the idea got across and that's been amazing for the project so what we did last summer was we ran a Kickstarter campaign raised 41 thousand dollars to do the first series of tests of real river water of real filtration materials this is right here in Brooklyn Bridge Park where all we were really doing was sucking up river water putting it into this tank and the there's layers of material in this tank and it's the first layer of filtration material that we need to use in the pool and even just this first layer Oh so we worked with Columbia University and Bluemont Doherty Earth Observatory and they basically taught us how to test river water quality we tested 19 different parameters we set up a mini science lab in a trailer out on the park for six weeks we hired an intern named Wes who was unfortunately tasked with he came to us to learn to be a design intern and we stuck him in a trailer to do science but he was actually amazing at it and even this first layer what was incredible it has a substantial impact on the quality of the water we're already taking out so many contaminants this is fecal coliform which is literally it's rat bird human and so even just this first layer which is really a very simple material in itself is doing so much of the job that we need to do to get into the pool to Swimmer it literally into the river to swim and so I mean for us I was this the idea that you could actually swim in the river and it was such a simple idea but it was it was such a powerful idea so the design of the pool is very kind of basic one of the design can see suppose we wanted the pool to be for everybody so it's it's literally just four pools stuck together into the shape of a plus it can be opened up for lap swimming it can be opened up completely for a sort of glorious free-for-all of swimming but also you can break it up so that kids can use it loungers can use it sports people can use it and in terms of productivity what's so exciting is that this has the capacity to literally make five hundred thousand gallons of clean water every day just simply by swimming in it by using it and obviously given the size of the river it's a small amount but for us it's incredible that it's actually a measurable amount we're actually making an architecture that gives back to the city and on a kind of personal architectural level to me what's equally as exciting is that how this project is being brought about basically that the making of the project is just as important as the project itself so like I said it's an initiative we're basically making this entire timeline which you can view which which notes every step that we've taken up till now and every step that we need to take to make this project happen and what's what's been really nice is that we've found it has an amazing resonance to all sorts of different interests not only in the city but worldwide obviously architecture and design but environmental athletic business even and this is obviously really exciting I think that the attention and the desire for it is great but what's even more exciting is this so the slide of 1,500 names basically everybody that has not only wanted this project to happen but is put money from their pocket into our campaign to actively help us build this project and getting back to the that idea that we're in this period now that we actually have an opportunity I think because of the market crash we actually have this opportunity where architecture and design and exemplified by today is focusing back on all of the things that are very important to making a better city and not only that it's actually there's this window now where everybody can actually engage in how to make a better city and I I feel like this is I'm basically I'm just really incredibly happy to be working right now thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 192,165

Rating: 4.878736 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxCity2.0, environment, public, urban planing, ted talk, tedx talk, city, ted, TEDxDumbo, United States, ted x, sustainable, tedx, USA, green, architecture, tedx talks, urban, ted talks, public space

Id: ZVsZQ9at1Ww

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 29 2013