MTalks—Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten on the countryside

friends colleagues students and visitors welcome to the Melbourne School of Design and welcome to this very special presentation by REM koolhaas and David gentleman my name is Julie Willis I'm the Dean of the Faculty of architecture building and planning and the Melbourne School of Design here at the University of Melbourne I begin this evening's proceedings by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land in which this event is taking place the wandering people land and pay respects their elders and families both past and present tonight's lecture is brought about by a collaboration between M pavilion the Embassy of the kingdom of the Netherlands and the Melbourne School of Design it is always a pleasure pleasure to work with colleagues from across the broader community to bring about engaging and thought-provoking events such as this evening special presentation this lecture is streaming online live as I speak and I'd like to welcome everyone watching us from wherever you may be in the world we are thrilled to have with us here tonight Remco house and David Janardan of the Netherlands based office of metropolitan architecture or OMA as you will know it Pritzker Prize winning REM call house is the co-founder of OMA and is one of the most celebrated and influential architects working today David Janata news Managing Partner architect MA and is also one of two directors at the recently opened OMA branch office in Australia creators of modern architectural icons OMA is a prolific international practice of worldwide distinction and influence their work inspires and astonishes something we see in our students year-on-year as they encounter the work of our may in their studies remand David join us in Australia to celebrate the first ever completed architectural commissioned by OMA in Australia the 2017 M Pavilion installed in Queen Victoria Gardens in the centre of Melbourne South Bank Arts precinct in the first part of this evening's presentation REM will talk about his vision of the countryside a current preoccupation of RNAs with David G Naughton speaking to an Australian context in the second part of the lecture before we begin tonight's talk I have a few brief notes of the University and M Pavilion would like to thank the city of Melbourne the Lord Mayor Robert Doyle and all the city councillors the city of Melbourne was the very first to back M pavilion and has now made an enthusiastic commitment to extend its support through to 2019 the University and M pavilion would like to thank the city's chief planner Rob Adams who every year plays a key role the council shared naomi Milgram's dream and has added invaluable and enthusiastic support to both the free programming and the relocation of the m convenient we would also like to thank and acknowledge the Embassy of the Netherlands in Australia for their support and partnering in this evening's lecture will you please now join me in welcoming REM cool house and David Jeannot thank you very much I will start a lecture if the lights are switched off so can we have the lights which assertiveness really off is there still I given this a Victorian kind of really interesting moment for me because I think after a lot of negotiation and after a lot of collaboration we the metropolitan architecture is really a partnership and a partnership without very explicit or implicit hierarchy that is effect is affected I'm here because it hasn't been my initiative to open an office in Australia or to begin a campaign in Australia that is entirely David John Milton's influence and initiative so I'm very happy to support it but it simply is a kind of sign of how we work and that I'm one of the partners but not necessarily the leader of the office we are a proud of operating as the collective intelligence and it is important to notice that that doesn't mean that we do not act individually but in every important element I think that we are working and sharing information you probably know that we are not only an architectural office but that we also have a think-tank and perhaps I should also relativize that we the life in in the current world is so complicated that simply being an architectural office is not enough to generate the intelligence that is necessary to explore different conditions to be intelligent in situations that you don't know and in general to generate a kind of perception and newman's which is necessary to do intelligent work in different contexts I was kind of supposed to talk about our current preoccupation with the countryside but I thought it was actually even more interesting if we give the kind of cross-section through what we're doing at any one time because those of you who are architects or will be altitudes it's important to realize that in architecture you never pursue only one thing or deal with only one subject it is in essence kind of simultaneous almost simultaneous magic where you kind of deal with issues that are of critical importance issues that are purely financial issues that are purely artistic issues that are supposed to be an important issues that are frivolous and I wanted to give a kind of sense of that range because I think the range in itself is an important driver of what we do so without further ado I want to give you this kind of context and also kind of things that are currently projects that I have occurred working on but also collaborations so we or I and and in that sense you know I hate talking about I but reading in cases where it's relevant I will do it this evening so I'm kind of working on a project for display very modest project for the stealth Museum in Amsterdam and here you see they're kind of carriers and here what they wrote eventing they do to accommodate the selected art I'm also dealing with interior design this is a tower a museum tower which is part of the color powder foundation in Milan when it opened only this part was very but systematically over last two years this tower which is for the collection of mutual problem Patrice Batali is finishing and part of the tower will be restaurant you can perhaps see that this is a kind of strange Tower but we did is that every next floor is metre taller than the other so it is squeezed and what we are divided deliberately so that every work of art is able to be in very different conditions this row is interrupted here by restaurant so as part of interior design I'm coming simply considering whether that kind of restaurant should have occurred typical Italian kind of Assad or whether it should be a kind of reference to more kilometer Politan classical metropolitan environment so I'm deliberately doing this to give you a kind of sense that that we also do or also do kind of really regular and normal things here and this is a convenient participation of us of the recent period six years ago we became interested in preservation the reason we became interested in preservation is that I felt architects were increasingly pushed at the kind of formalist extravagance almost everywhere we operated there was an expectation if not an obligation to create icons and by taking the issue of preservation seriously it seemed that we could escape from that obligation and that explains a number of color project we recently have been doing this is a kind of renovation of the tragic of Museum in Moscow a building dating from the Soviet period but for most of you it's architectural qualities will be invisible but it happens to be located in an amazing place and amazing context for instance this is the soil this is the Kremlin this is the Cathedral that was convincingly built this is the river that intersects Moscow and here you have a kind of fantastic urban park Gorky Park which is now becoming a cultural lung of the city and this building is an enormous length of typical modernist architecture in the heart of the city its qualities are may be invisible to the contemporary architectural consumer but one thing you can can see is that like any building that was generated in the time of communism it has a brand n't and generous pedestrian and interior spaces if you look at the narrowness of a lot of the kind of current to compactness any kind of oppressive nests of currents parents's the space is generated in a communism even if there are more less than 35 years old have a kind of impressive almost luxury even if not a very Spartan of these over dimensions conditions but there is a component of this building which is that can basically every experience and every kind of space is separated from any other one so what we hope to be able to do is to work with is building bill to eliminate consumer barriers and therefore make more accessible but the quality of this architecture is and therefore may reveal the generosity inherent in the this communist work but we also going to do is to look at the current storage of the building and this is an explicit demand also of the leadership of the building so that of the museum so that we can make the content of the museum the content of the collection which in many parts is almost independent of artistic merit but simply a collection of artworks that were produced in Soviet Union and its colonies to make that can more accessible to the people so here we have one of the paintings that will become accessible which is gonna probably an Australian nautical very hot issue but under communism was namely kind of women working on prefabricated architecture with great enthusiasm and presumably refinement so this is another kind of effort that we are doing and I hope that you can realize that we are kind of moving kind of form our core base kind of Europe slowly we are making our way to the east and that is not coincidence because I firmly believe that all in spite of globalization the potential and possibilities in each culture and in each part of the world differ drastically and that therefore it is kind of possible to kind of think of architectures the kind of single system each architecture is an encounter between a local situation its potential and the tenant or interest of the architects I'm now in released in Doha we had to work on a library for a university which eventually became the national library and where the explicit mandate was to make a building that encourages the population at large to read and therefore it was very important for us to eliminate all the kind of hostility that the typical library has it is divided in floors it is divided in incomprehensible departments such as humanities bla bla bla so what we did instead we took an almost urban plane we folded the kind of urban plane so that you could can enter from beneath one of these control identities and so that you kind of entered the building in the center and that you were surrounded by books in such a way that if you entered here involved glance you could see any book that was the kind of present in this library and therefore without into the interference of catalogs or divisions you were confronted with the essence of this kind of situation is the kind of rendering and what I think is kind of not enough kind of recognised part of architecture is that of course you make a plan and of course you're trying to be as precise as possible but then an another layer or another kind of series of influences start a very important one is the contractor this was the kind of building done by an Australian contractor so although I have been not been in Australia for 40 years I've been had to deep engagement and confrontation with the current Australian culture in Doha but that can in this situation it's like I could've for cover everyone knows that kind of building is quite complicated there is a lot of contested territory and initiative and in this fog of war you have to take certain decisions that have a fundamental influence on the color result but that are for which you almost have don't have the time to work one of the kind of decisions we took here is that way to me we had a ceiling of white concrete that didn't kind of reflect and at the last moment we thought that perhaps we should make a kind of reflective ceiling so that not only do it so that the floor plate was kind of reflected in the ceiling so that you were surrounded in a really kind of interesting situation and here you see the effect of that kind of with reflexivity the real thing and then a kind of virtual can building upside down that covers the original and so maybe a condition decision taken in five minutes but with a kind of fast and considerable effect on the reality of the building I'm now moving from I to V this is a building I've been working on from the beginning with David Janata it second building in Taipei tap a is a kind of really wonderfully alive Asian culture and part of that is expressed in a convertible intense nightlife statistically topping is the population that sleeps list and goes to battle ages and almost anywhere community is a kind of quest of intense urban activity here use kind of inform a proficiency that actually inspired to a large extent the kind of nature of the building in the typical corner cultural center this you would see the auditorium with a kind of big stage a second auditorium with a smaller stage and then kind of future auditorium and basically all of these are kind of separated so that there is no communication and no additional value of the existence of each of these elements together what we decided to do and it was kind of really a direct the influence where they spend that cooks three different dishes we decided to condense all the stages in a kind of single hyper state tower so that all the Karma chemical features of the building are concentrated and are able to collaborate kind of between themselves and then to suspend the auditoriums or the car parts for the audience's away from this kind of central feature this is also kind of going into a direction about which we'll kind of talk later I have a come instinct that the 21st century will be the kind of century where we can no longer assume that any thing that everything architect does is actually for human clients but that can more and more we will have to accommodate not only the existence of human beings under interaction but also the existence of machines and their interaction with human beings and in certain cases only the kind of relationship between machines so here I could say this is a kind of pre configuration or premonition of that kind of architecture the building is largely I would say a theoretical machine in which the record pockets for human beings here you see the kind of situation the hyper stage tower with the kind of remnants of humanism in the form of the three auditoriums the at or the feature that this combination can really enables us to do is to treat each theater as an independent entity but also to combine them into a kind of single or the terrarium that could kind of combine 4,000 people and that would enable you to create theoretical spectacles almost on an industrial scale it's very noticeable that kind of artists prefer to work in industrial complexes because they don't like the limits that architecture and architects impose and here there is a kind of effort to mobilize that scale to extend the kind of possibility of theater makers in that sense I would say also that one of the essences of our office is not a kind of compulsion to be controversial but to can rethink every single component and see how it can feature and perform in more ways than one and in certain cases in more ways than the original client has anticipated so here you see the kind of thing in its urban context and as a kind of special feature it's not only a theater for the visitors but it is also a theater where the population at large can enter free and kind of move through the entire building as it performs to appropriate an independent of money here again you see kind of some of the fog of war images the building is nearing completion but nearing completion is a kind of very euphemistic terms for a kind of war zone and here you see an image of that war zone so this theater is nearing completion but it could also be kind of picture after a natural disaster [Music] here you see the kind of the theaters of course have different apologies a classical theater kind of black box and in this case is more theater as it used to be with kind of galleries balconies and lodges and and you begin to see some of the aesthetic and here you see the intention of this coupling and how that is elaborating or evolving into a really enormous interior scale almost industrial scale or a machine scale as the current essence of the building as a whole so here again a kind of omission in every building there is a kind of strong intention to relate a building to a very specific and unique context that is part of our so-called research and insatiable interest curiosity and energy in terms of understanding the capacity the potential values the interests of the vast range a spectrum of cultures in which we have the privilege to intervene and in this particular case I would say our interest was and is to become part of that culture I already can be explained how we are not only an architecture office but that we have this kind of counterpart mm oh and that kind of deals with all these kind of different domains but also by dealing with these domains of course we have a network that kind of extends way beyond the typical architecture office and I will therefore as part of that effort to create knowledge almost independent of what we can do as artists share with you kind of some of the kind of not so the reason we're interested in the countryside and some of our kind of preliminary intuitions and results basically this is a kind of tourism that kind of mode and half of mankind now lives in urban conditions it's a kind of very complex kind of subject because it means that one person's urban condition for instance Denmark or Australia is very different from an Arabic invasion such as New Yorker of Amsterdam but anyway let's accept the cliche but unfortunately the cliche has given rise to an almost exclusive focus on cities on urbanity kind of ratings between city and it has led almost systematically to neglect of whether you call it countryside or country let's simply speak about everything that is not City in spite of that enormous attention I think a crucial development has escaped attention and that is that the nature of the city kind of largely through the fact that the market economy has become the kind of global driver of urban development rather than ideology or rather than political intention has actually drastically changed the nature of cities and not only I would say the nature of cities but also the nature of our civilization and I would say that the most important kind of thing the market economy has imposed on all of us whether we know it or not or are unhappy about it or not is a global version of risk and I would say that in this picture you see it very clearly this is a person seen from behind it's night and you know that kind of basically in the coming hours he will probably experience an adventurous situation it is not clear whether his activities will be legitimate or illegitimate you really can realize that almost everything is possible and we say that the kind of condition where everything is possible has become a kind of very rare condition this is the typical man of today it's daylight and you see him entering a landscape of enforced innocence he has a suitcase with him but the most evil thing you can imagine in the suitcase is a change of underwear this is a person who is sure not to undergo something either domestic illegitimate or dangerous so for me the difference between this and this is kind of really also if you kind of project it on the scale of the city what has actually happened in our kind of recent past and this is - in almost every domain this is an artist in 1980 in New York he is clearly making an incredibly aggressive gesture he just cut a public space in two parts the the wool can interfere with the color patterns of the pedestrian it's basically a hostile thing and he's very proud of it and basically we were totally used to considering that kind of artistic gesture and so it didn't suit him at the Chester here we are now kind of 30 years later we see that art has become like a pet a very nice and cute object in which we are reflected so it's kind of part of ourselves and we can take selfies of it an almost unlimited amount nobody made selfies with this one and and everyone take selfies with that one yeah yes you laugh but I think it's kind of part over kind of really kind of very serious can a poem our addiction to appealing things and I would say that be known to us or on our own watch the kind of values of the revolution were of the analyte when freedom equality and brotherhood are calcio systematically replaced by comfort security and sustainability now neither one of these qualities is in themselves bad i partly endorse them it's just unfortunate that these are our ultimate occupy preoccupations and if they become that I would say we're in a kind of quite difficult and almost dangerous kind of situation in itself and I think what I became kind of aware of is that our concentration on the city the terminology that we were developing for urban life and they kind of shift to the market economy toward least three values are part and parcel of the kind of same issue and that therefore it becomes important to look at the countryside to look at what effect of the market economy has been on the countryside and then simply to explore new conditions one underlying effect of that is that the cities are now places of cuteness and maybe that cuteness is kind of generated at the expense of the city or expense of the countryside or only by organizing the countryside in a kind of highly structured manner and so the whimsy cavity of our urban life is maybe kind of bought by high organization the countryside so if you look at the concept art what do you see only 2% of the surface of the earth is sitting so for that reason alone we ought to look at the countryside because it's 89 percent the countryside is of course if you also include to see where global warming will have its most drastic effect the countryside together with the city is increasingly defined by a kind of invisible regime of reservation it's not only in new cities that we need to preserve but also in a country in the countryside that more and more kind of reserves are declared we calculated the overall surface of the world including the seas 12% is now protected that means that basically the world is in a constraint imbalance part of it are protected so they are declared stagnant they cannot kind of change but the rest is going through a kind of Tomo of perpetual change so what countryside is basically a kind of series of case histories distributed over the growth that are each time looking at unique situations but that in the mosaic coherence say something in general about the countryside I want to quickly take you to a few of those areas the countryside has been the culper excellence a canvas for dictators to imagine their own utopias from Nicholas reconfiguration of the country European countryside to Mouse reconfiguration of the kind of Chinese countryside and Stalin's can redesign literally of the course of rivers the countryside is projection screen for dictatorial and authoritarian imagination but also of political imagination of democracies this is kind of the redesign of Europe that was kind of a consequence of the European market and if you look at European countryside before it was like this and after the EU it is now increasingly like this it's not only dictators who can work but it's and and this is obviously all in the name of having to restructure the countryside organize it better so that our urban kind of culture can swipe if you look at the country conversion then and if you look in so in the communism in 87 this was the network of Aeroflot it kind of had over thousands of destinations so you could say globally that kind of every part of Russia was connected by air to any other part now into the market economy the the number of destinations has drastically shrunken so what it means that that or let's say great libertarian liver oil commerce system has marooned a large part of Russia and kind of condemned him to can return to the 19th century or even the 18th century maybe and you would typically think that is a disaster and we went to look at you know what that part of condemned conversion and then discover that kind of the very effect of not being able to protect in the current evolution of the world also has its benefit and also create it's a command center for regimental nation in terms of how to survive that it's very much more complicated in the net because exactly that part of versus also where grammar first is through a global warming beginning to melt and therefore literally they're kind of foundations of that part are melting so it's a kind of situation which is not only in time traveling backwards but also literally meltdown so that is a very important thing or picture to understand which is clearly totally invisible on our current kind of urban radar if we look at African this is just a kind of very short example we saw in the 60s a number of mostly female but it's a second footnote scientists getting observing populations of monkeys gorillas and chimpanzees and making kind of very stunning discoveries in terms of their behavior that kind of 30 years later we're in this situation that comes with the observation of Governors has become a kind of tourist industry of course also the kind of market economy and we see a kind of overwhelming kind of presence of human beings interfering with the life of the gorillas again in the countryside typically we would say that is kind of bad and can really sad and we looked we are looking now at the kind of shrinking natural habitat and all the actions that NGOs and governments are imagining to deal with that shrinkage one important way in which to do that is to introduce buffer zones so that kind of the the two are kind of separated but what I don't didn't anticipate is that the buffer zones are now the preferred habitat of the kind of monkeys before because for them it's nicer to live in a buffer zone encounter the human beings that occur the regular basis then to be in a real jungle with all its life and death kind of threats and issues so again what is very noticeable in the countryside is that less and less over typical nor moral impulses and kind of alternatives are viable there of course we live in the digital age and the digital digital age is can perhaps having a larger effect on the country's item on our cities and that is because the ubiquity of observation and the increasing sophistication of observation where they get a resolution of the kind of digital picture that satellites produce and the analytical value of the picture is increasing the sharpness of that picture is increasing kind of almost daily that means that kind of for instance agriculture has become increasingly always become increasingly you can do digital field literally to the sense that every square inch of the world is now knowable but not only from the outside as you can picture but also can be analyzed what grows what is needed what is the problem etc that knowledge is kind of basically transmitted to laptops and from the laptops to to computerized or automated tractors that are becoming increasingly canned robotic entities that execute the observation of the satellite comes through the medium of the laptop and translate that in urban or in rural life the machinery to do that is getting so sophisticated that that can no longer be conned by individual farmers it's also so expensive that it can only be viable if the activity of harvesting and seeding becomes a 24-hour activity so here you see and this is a maybe another fog of war emit the incredible intensity were disco of this process going to do through digitalization and the amazing effect of simply erasing features that is the direct consequence of this so now I talked about kind of simply the effect of the digital agriculture on agriculture in largely in America so far I will also talk about the this is a picture of Nevada this is Lake Tahoe so the company is kind of to the lower left of the picture Nevada has a kind of different tax system than California and therefore it is cheaper to establish the infrastructure of Silicon Valley in Nevada supposedly nothingness of Nevada kind of rather than in expensive California so we have this is the chronicity of Reno known for in the 50s divorce and and Casino City all the other entities occur Lake Tao we know in the school district an area of business kind of establishments bigger than the city itself in which we see you can a proliferation of can big boxes it's dedicated to different so for again American companies established in this territory basically you see the second enormous scale of this can buildings that again is escalating every day where the longest buildings are clearly on their way to kind of maybe two or three kilometer by three kilometer footprints colossal scales almost unimaginable before the interesting thing is that if you look at this map which kind of shows flatness and curvature or flatness and relief in the current world because of this explosion of scale flatness in itself is becoming a kind of more and more important feature in the attractiveness or not of different territories and countries I am proud to talk about the flattest country remain member the flattest country in the world but unfortunate Sall most full but anyway it used to be that kind of settlements were on the encounter of land and sea I think that settlements increasingly global gravitate toward areas of flatness and if flatness is not natural it will be kind of fabricated such as this one simply by again erasing all the kind of features and I think that this raising features is perhaps one of the key qualities of the 21st century and and in my view also of the can do digital here we have the cooperation for what will be the largest kind of Factory in the history of mankind Tesla battery factory in Reno already one of the biggest buildings but this is only a small part of its eventual scale and also really announcing that in my view we are kind of seeing a kind of really important point of in the kind of history of architecture which is what is the relationship between the architecture and the human being we still operate as if we're kind of working in the name of humans as if we are kind of promoting human interaction but actually what we need to kind of face and for which we have to find perhaps a new language is a totally different kind of system where the human being is not some kind of banal benevolent person in in search of encounters an interaction but on the contrary kind of grim supervisor of process and in that grimness you can also himself suspected as an inhabitant of these complexes because human beings might can be disturb the kind of perfection that this the machines require this is kind of a transition of one part of a factory not just well into another Factory and architecture is can reduce two kind of chambers for human beings that like this one kind of mixed of Cambodian Norwegian and some kind of hippie sense which will be a kind of hope probably the last of typically architectural space but I think what we also see and and this is what why I'm kind of fascinated in the countryside and where I think we need to embrace or we need to brace for but also embrace new opportunities that this shift would give one of them is that kind of because of our obsession with comfort we have been kind of increasingly looking for avoiding kind of extreme emotions extreme aesthetics extreme we have become addicted to banished here there is no reason for badge we can completely reimbursed contrast or harsh opposition's or extreme conditions and such as this one which is kind of green house in the Netherlands were only part of the spectrum that part which promotes growth of plants is kind of mobilized totally new conditions of the sublime in which we as human beings are almost redundant of it [Applause] so after this introduction of the research around the countryside I can do a very first exploration of an Australian desert and I'm going to try to put this a little bit in perspective because you probably saw the map that REM shot and there is no Australia on that in the region of exploration until of course we were asked to do it and look at it so what I'm going to show is a very first look and I will try to put that in the perspective of my lecture from the summer that was actually looking at the city and now I will try to look at the countryside obviously this is what most of us know about Australian cities beautiful pictures with amazing rankings in the summer I said six years today I can say seven years because in that transition there was another year edit but there is no urban design and architecture and there's also no economic performance in that criteria it's purely based on and as RAM already said risk adverse things as a safety sanitation at and social dynamism is not there but if you look at the city itself and this is the other picture of what Melbourne actually is and then you have a total different perspective and here you see already that the blur between the city and the country around it let's call it that a year in Australia becomes very blur in an enormous vast territory that is somewhere in between so it's the are these rankings actually representative and can they actually be used for public policy or policy on how to develop a city or how to the city relates to the countryside or the country in the summer I compared things between Australia and the Netherlands just because of course that's very familiar terrain for us and if you want to do a first exploration referring back to something that you know very well makes it much easier at that point I was talking about transport and dependency on transport which becomes increasingly more important in cities and in movement of people and I will just simply continue this comparison between Australia and the Netherlands in that first exploration a little bit so that comparison needs a perspective and your country is about 185 times bigger than our country and that's of course an enormous difference yet if you look at the inhabitants of the countries that is not about 185 times actually it is only about one and a half times so the vastness of your country is enormous you have about three hundred and thousand square metres per person we have to do it with 2400 and if you look at the population densities maybe they are very similar at very small spots but in the biggest part of the country that is not the case and as RAM already said unfortunately our end is full and and that is not only in the city part as you can see that is also in the countryside the case if you look at our footprints they very comparable so the footprint of Australia and and and the Netherlands are so somewhere we need about if we would keep living like we do you need about four and a half Earth's to sustain and and we need about three and a half which which is actually similar that means we were actually very well off all together and have way too much money there's another interesting comparison that is related to the countryside and that's about fifty percent of our land and on itok percentage-wise is related to agriculture or something that is related to agriculture and that's actually extremely similar although the scale of the countries are very different you see the agriculture percentage is pretty similar of course everybody thinks that this is the Netherlands and this is our countryside you have to search for this nowadays actually there are only two or three perceived spots in the whole country that still look like this and that's where the tourists go the so this is the cliche of the Dutch countryside there's already no cow anymore we should have added that but that that was the situation if you look at kind of what the country really is you see that most of it is a kind of systematic divide of emphasis and where things need to happen just to maintain that society that is so dense and clear and this is the reality and especially if you look at the countryside it's a vast array of glass where things grow and they grow also in a very technical environment there are other fast areas that need to kind of conquer our now let's say urge but also need for energy and everything that is related to it and make it more sustainable as well Ram already said that kind of course not happen in our cities alone what we need is also in the outside and then also part of that reality is simply that that countryside in our country is already way too small to fulfill this three and a half earths that we need so we're also occupying every little hole in the city with similar technologies and therefore our fish don't come out of the sea in the Netherlands anymore but they are kind of red on top of your office building and then you can eat them in the canteen and that's of course an unbelievable efficient system also kind of means that there's a lot of knowledge acquired and we're very proud to transport that all over the world but of course that means our economy is only increasing which means our footprint will increase significantly now then we compare it to Australia in a first expression this is the cliche or at least outside of the country that's the cliche for your countryside or country but then if you look at the similar way as in the Netherlands you can also divide Australia into very clear territories with very clear functionalities that need to perform in a certain way of course you're here on the knowledge and Finance side I already said we have way too much together but the big part of your country is about very different things and actually supplying out of the countryside let's say the livability of a big part of the eastern side of the world so it's the question here is the cliche maybe also the reality in contradiction to what I showed about the Netherlands of course there is this very romantic idea of the back or your country and but what you see is that it also increasingly starts to generate technology an interesting part when you look simply at kind of for this is farms you see that the farms tend to kind of also look at your cities or be around your cities so it's maybe urbanity and and countryside here closely related and big parts of the country are are ignored because in defining the outback there is a kind of a vast area that is still available for maybe that switch Ram said already flatness becomes more and more important and it's very interesting for us can we invent it our own country so we're very flat and below sea level but if you think about Australia you may not think about vast areas of flatness other than the desert but if you look at the world map you can see that the areas that are unused and our flat are pretty scarce and Australia actually has an enormous amount of them if you zoom in that is this amount of area over the country that's more than 50% of it then climate of course also is a very important point there we are totally not comparable and maybe Melbourne and its surroundings is a little bit comparable on the high-end side to the Netherlands but the rest is totally not and there is of course especially in the outside world the idea that your climate is changing so rapidly and it's very harsh but that's not a reality and that was maybe in the 80s and 90s a little bit on that also in discussion but that is kind of just completely not there anymore if you zoom in actually the areas of climate change and that is kind of portrayed here on this world map go in total different directions and actually in areas where you would not expect them from a climate perspective if you zoom in to Australia actually large parts of your country are not so much affected by climate change and actually some are kind of becoming better accessible than where they were before and then what for me was a very interesting thing when we did this first exploration research when we looked at the clean air of course a very hot topic in big parts of the world and if you kind of look at the areas that have clean air you see also here that your country is actually extremely well off there's a lot of clean air available even in areas where density occurs if you overlay these three things you can maybe imagine what the possibilities could be in Australia and the first explorations of these ideas are also getting there there's a huge farm that is completely self sustainable and creates an unbelievable amount of tomatoes you know we are pretty happy and or jealous on it and if you see that here it's completely maintained in its own world you see how flat it is and kind of how much space there is still around it another thing I already set it energy is of course an important thing if we keep depending on kind of coal and that kind of stuff which of course for your mining industry is very interesting but for the idea of where you're moving towards it's not you can also see that kind of your outback or country can really be used for amount of energy demand and again this is a very first exploration about things that are already happening but just on a scale that we done maybe 185 times when even here in Victoria you start seeing this in this use of the country or countryside for the catering of the use of the city this is the kind of first observation as I already said obviously we would love to explore this further and with the pavilion and we also agree that we start looking at country not through our eyes and not based on our explorations but actually by people here in Australia trying to add to these first explorations and we obviously hope to do that with also the MP villian and I want to close with that because also it was started like that why we are here we had our first event this afternoon in it it was relatively crowded not as crowded as here but of course the space is also much smaller but we hope that the engagement of the pavilion the debate can really steer also kind of more of these explorations in the coming months for the city and for the country tomorrow at one o'clock there's the next event and I hope that you will also come in these big numbers then so that we can keep exploring together this was my little dessert thank you [Applause] thank you so much women David it's been an absolutely fascinating insight into some of the work that they firm has been doing but also some of the ways you were thinking about things as you go forward thank you also to the EM pavilion and the Embassy of the kingdom of the Netherlands for making tonight's special presentation possible thank you all for attending this evening and for those who have tuned in to our livestream let's keep our guests another warm round of applause you

Channel: MPavilion

Views: 7,178

Rating: 4.9101124 out of 5

Keywords: Rem Koolhaas, OMA, David Gianotten, MSD, MPavilion, Architecture, Melbourne

Id: sQS9Wil1dc4

Length: 59min 57sec (3597 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017