Rebuilding Architecture from the Ground Up: Andrew Patterson at TEDxAuckland

our next speaker is arguably New Zealand's most internationally recognized and published architects I should know we both share the identical name in fact when I was at university I received as I could teacher prize one year just to cover myself I made the university write a letter back to me to confirm they had received the cheque back as well to last year the world's most searched architectural journal london-based world architecture news named his firm Patterson associates as one of five architects worldwide quote whose work is set to shape global architecture in the 21st century in quote he is the designer of New Zealand's only new build six green star rated project geyser here in Auckland rated as an international innovator Andrew believes that if New Zealand is to sustainably succeed its built environment must equal or better its natural environment would you please welcome to TEDx Auckland the other Andrew Patterson I can better that one because I was at a conference last year and they said Andrew Patterson I'll show you to your seat and I sat down beside the Prime Minister I got the wrong seat thank you for that lovely introduction Andrew in case you're wondering after that this wasn't designed by me I'm part of a small group of Architects here in Auckland urban designers model makers care operators and we're interested in Kiwi design and this is this this is a renovation of a mountain done by some colleagues of ours in Greece I don't know if you've noticed but in New Zealand our built environment isn't quite as good as our natural environment why is this so I thought I'd used this time to to tell you what I've learnt about beauty and it starts with a story when I was a young architect like every architect I wanted to design my own house and so I saved my money and I bought this beautiful section and northland you know the Kiwi dream in the section was unusual in that it was steep and rugged it was beautiful and on the hills were these little terraces the terraces for with worth archaeological sites over 30 archaeological sites there was house sites storage sites middens and pets and a paw in fact it was a complete village so anyway the house mover the the the Arctic than me was thrilled to be finally designing my own house but the clients in me was always changing my mind finally I got the design that I wanted and building permit and and the design went out to the to the Builder and it came back twice my budget the architect was very annoyed the client was inexperienced anyway the house mover I new said to me Andrew you've I can I can I can give you a house a batch an old batch it's in my yard for free so it was an offer too good to refuse so I sacked the acting wakes we I didn't I I ended up designing the site that's all I could design and the day came and this batch Kate arrived on site this big 18-wheeler trailer and they started backing it down the steep coastal in Scotland and the pen came out of the trailer and I looked at the house mover it was as white as a sheet and it slowly rolled forward and that we both watched on us in slow motion while this thing tore down the hill and at about forty kilometres an hour the trailer jackknifed and the house rose up in the air and all we could do was lift the batch up pull out the trailer the buckle trailer and that's where it's cited to the state so I didn't get to even design my own site and my family ended up camping on the original Maori historic sites and to my surprise at the time they were beautiful I mean they were beautifully laid out the Sun and for the views and for privacy and there's more and more of our friends and family joined us over the years the original Maori village was recreated and it was a beautiful place to live so as the years have gone by - I always influenced my thinking what is beauty what makes something beautiful why is beauty important has it got something to do with style well I'll tell you right now it's got nothing to do with style any form of creativity has what's called a medium the medium of dance is the human body the medium of film is photography the medium of photography is from of well in nowadays digital film well the medium of architecture is the environment you're taking the environment in modifying it take the sydney opera house it looks completely right in its Harborside environment but it loses that beauty completely if you put it say on a dairy farm in the Waikato so good is often mistaken for the eye of the beholder nowadays it's thought of as an evolutionary device to show us the good path from the bed our TED talks about it a lot Murray gill says it's the proof of all science Darwin called Beauty the purpose of evolution I was trained in Western architecture and as you might know from engineering the the geometric form of our tripod tripod can carry great weight through three interdependent leagues and this is a is a good way of thinking about any creative venture one leg is the concept the next leg is the is the attitude that the work has and the next leg is how the worker communicates and these legs were worked out by an actor called Vitruvius about 300 BC and they're still in use today and I the Truvia tsa's legs were firmness which is permanency utility us which is fit for purpose and Vaness tiss which is interesting it's the word the latin word for the delight or beauty of the natural world what what he was telling us was that your building has got to be as good as a natural world that it's replacing this is a picture of a furry recreated by Unitec it's on on the Mary sites the whistle year the original building that was on to our way when Joseph Banks came to New Zealand he was the most cultured man on Cook's first voyage and he saw these route po Hut's at at for the first time at mercury Bay and he thought the village there was the most beautiful group of buildings he'd ever seen so the rapper buildings were hardly permanent and and they certainly were not replacing the natural world they were of the natural world so I wanted to show you some projects inspired by Joey each project is supported by an independent league in no particular order the first league we call the Ronnie and Papa attitude early New Zealanders thought of themselves as the children of a sensuous sky father raggy and with mother papa and when you think about it this way of thinking is much closer to what we know is the evolutionary truth then the Western spiritual model it's a different way of thinking in a land culture there's no distinction between the man-made in the natural we are part of the environment and the environment is part of us so this building is called geyser it's not like a regular office building it's it's like it's been sliced into six parts and those parts separated to get light and air into every part of the interior it's kind of like a forest of trees with clearings in the middle and you walk through the parts to discover the courtyards within and it's a mixture of light and dark and views through and the light bounces around the interior and everything seems silhouetted against the sky each individual part of this building is also like a tree declared in a twin wall glass facade and this facade is operated by electronic actuators connected to a meteorological station on the roof so in summer the the facade forms a thermal chimney which which sucks the cooler air from the south side of the building up and ventilates of space and in winter of course it reverses this is another project it's called cumulus this is made out of a matrix of concrete panels or bolted together it what it means is the weight of the building is effectively halved what's made lightweight and it's very economical to construct now cumulus is is patterned based on a tapa cloth from Tonga here's a picture of the outside and in the middle there's a sky courtyard where all you can see as a clouds so we call us we are part of the environment and the environment was part of us the rapper Hut's at 2:00 hour we were faced with these timber boards carved timber boards you see the the the face up there at the apex and the arms were outstretched in the backbone was the ridge which been behind the building was conceived as the body of the founder of the tribe supported by the members of the Harper who the building was for this buildings actually designed for the people who inhabit the building I can tell you this is a quite an alien concept in Western architecture Western architecture is all about space and light so we call us form follows far now let me show you a project to illustrate this this is a house it's for a couple he was a warrior kind of kind of guy and and and she was a beautiful woman very different people so as well as the house being fit for purpose designed for them it was about them as well the designers intended to create a sense of belonging for them both that's fronted by this big carved screen to the street and at night feathers are projected on the screen it tells a story of about the people who the building was for there's this glass sitting room overlooking Auckland City as she calls it her perch and he calls at his vantage point there's another project it's a golf club house in the South Island now most of you might know that the game of golf is a frustrating connection with the landscape through this little dimpled ball so the building's underground to get well out of the way of that it's laid out anthropomorphic Li the card store is the at the weather leagues are the the bar is at the mouth and the ovaries are in the middle and it's made out of the materials found on the site it's it's kind of sensuous like the surrounding landscape so we call us form follows far now the third league we call thinking in pens the communication League now it's madness morally and economically in New Zealand to be replacing our natural landscape with something unless it's better and you can look at say guys with Western eyes and say it's an attempt to replace the land with something as good or better if not better but through looking through the to our eyes it's different you see in earth culture didn't have a written language they thought in patterns this is the original natural way of human thought and we still do this today in New Zealand this is a silver fern it's a simple aibee aibee pattern and this pattern talks to any New Zealand eye so when people visit our geyser building they don't remark on the concept but they remark on the pattern of the light inside of the building summons the intuition rather than the intellect and of course the tripods our pattern itself so our environment is part of us so you know feel welcome to get involved if you're if you're school or local developer or council it's planning a project find out about the architect selection are there buildings beautiful this is a project with the opening in Frankfurt in on Tuesday it's a New Zealand country of Honor pavilion it's a it's a nice massive hall in the Frankfurt Book Fair and we've flooded the floor with about three inches of water right through and in the middle we've put an island linked by causeways to the rest of the fear and on the island these is this pattern of triangular sub pavilions and each subdivision is a library full of books on New Zealand backed by by huge projection screens and the books appear to talk to each other across a kind of central space so this projects a pattern of New Zealand it's an island in an ocean under a starry sky and it's a pattern of our oral storytelling tradition so I still haven't designed my own house but we love designing projects big and small and I want you to know what we've learnt that we are part of our environment and our environment is part of us so if you if you want to live a beautiful life then live in a beautiful place and it doesn't matter whether it's in the city or the country it's not so much what you do or where you do it it's about how it's done so we need buildings in New Zealand there talk to us we need buildings that belong to us in our environment because if they belong we'll feel the sense of beauty and we'll belong there as well thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 64,117

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Keywords: ted talk, TEDxAuckland 2012, TEDxTalks, ted x, tedx, TEDx, sustainable architecture, Andrew Patterson, architecture, New Zealand, tedx talk, tedx talks, NZ, Pattersons, ted, English, TEDxAuckland, TED Talks, ted talks

Id: Mu5xYDkw9ys

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2012