Tony Fadell and Rem Koolhaas on Design in the Digital Age

great thank you welcome to what I think is the only panel at this summit that brings together the brick-and-mortar physical world that we all live in and the tech and information worlds that we mainly talk about so what I hope we can do in the next few minutes is look a little bit at where they intersect or where they don't where they should connect more or whether maybe they should connect less which i think is part of the point of the provocative and remarkable exhibition REM cool house did at the Venice Biennale this year which is still on if anyone's going to Venice called the elements of architecture which looked at very very basic things in architecture to try to I think reinforce a sense of physicality again we have a very short video really that just gives you a very fast overview of it maybe we'll show it now and then we'll begin conversation we could architecture is a very ancient art each architect is God by definition is schizophrenic one leg in 5,000 year old history the other leg in the present and that means technology and that means the digital my obsession with the elements has been to focus to to assert that element such as the elevator the escalator have never really been incorporated in either the ideology or the theory and that now with the new digital kind of intersections digital hybrids digital combinations the risk is that architecture is simply incapable of thinking of its entire repertoire and and that is what I hope will be one of the outcomes of this okay we now now it's time for you to finish the sentence that basically what I was trying to do is to to address the hue but architecture but also City Planning and also the making of cars is kind of really about to change fundamentally to the kind of intersection with the digital world and that process is taking place under the influence of a lot of the thinking here but it's taking place alone and and not in combination or not in collaboration with the domains that you influence and so I wanted to really show that for instance the notion of the fireplace is deeply influenced by what tony has done in nest but the condition of the floor is changing that the ceiling is changing and I wanted to kind of really create a situation that instead of surrendering blankly to these kind of forces we can actually begin to collaborate and in the collaboration perhaps also questioned some of the directions that are being generated Tony Fadell who founded nest is I think one of the great I will say creators because I pledged not to use the word innovators one more time today one of the great creators in Silicon Valley I know you guys have talked before because you spent you actually invent us did a long a long conversation which was somewhat oppositional today REM you're talking about collaboration what what has changed other than the fact that you're in the turf of tech no no actually it was always about collaboration okay there is no there's no position I think it's interesting how basically in each profession there is a position embedded whether you want to or not right and this is what I was saying you know if you an architect you by definition have to care about legacy you have to care by definition about the past and about history and that doesn't mean you're a technophobe I think that all those things can be can happen in close collaboration but the collaboration without collaboration I think that you risk going in kind of tangent without elicited the interaction or the interface with some parts of the real world and we risk simply being left behind it's only when we look at when we look at technology today being brought in it's really retrofitted into buildings yes we're not designing buildings around it or with it it really involved you know now we do it when we brought in electricity it was always tacked on back in the late 1800 and now are integrated or even or even inside plumbing yeah we're integrated over time we're now at that next phase where we're taking these other things such as what we're building at NASA or other companies and now starting to think and collaborating to really make it part of the architecture so the computing is not in-your-face and these kinds of sense in your face to actually recede into the structure itself and make the structure better not just be this tacked on so you think the nest is really a sort of intermediate generation well I hope so I hope there's going to be a lot more evolution when I look at you know the arcane way of somehow these different systems work together they're really not modernised at all it's because no one really thought about these two worlds colliding and so what's really been for us is is now talking to architects and talking to system designers and and plumbing and equipment manufacturers and and they're learning about our world and they have lots of questions just like we had in Venice there's a lot of questions that we have to answer on both sides to be able to learn about each other to be able to make these integrations happen but it's going to take a long time if I were to take your comment about collaboration literally and say okay you know I'm building a new building and I want to Commission the firm of cool house and fidel to design it what would it look like where would we be going with it how would it be different from the buildings we know I think the beauty of what he is doing or what they are doing is that it's not necessarily defining a new look that is kind of defining a new performance and therefore it simply adds another layer of intelligence and to the extent I think that oppositional is the wrong way but word but yes I'm critical of certain aspects I'm critical of the kind of relentless profit motive that come seems to invade or characterize almost every one of the new inventions and therefore constantly introducing an architecture a domain or a question that never was there before and and that is really the the one area where I'm critical also critical in the sense of the arguments I think more may be the two are connected maybe it is because they create the profit motive is so important more and more inventions are sold because they support security increased security they increase comfort and they increase sustainability and that was your new Trinity is that a new Trinity Road yes and I was basically saying you know my generation was interested in the notion of a glitter fertility and the French Revolution and now we are stuck with comfort sustainability and security and I'm not necessarily finding that a kind of great change well is that really less an architectural change than a change in the the social mores of the time that we learn from a sense of the common good to a sense of the private good cleanly and architecture inevitably reflects a society's values more than it actually shapes them for better or for worse it seems to Tony well I I think that you know if we look at what's going on in homes today obviously it's about the home first but if you can actually get people engaged with some of these new systems getting engaged and learn about their homes to the until today a lot of people come to us and say well yeah I feel like I have to always take care of my home why do I always have to take care of it there's a leak here this is needs to get fixed why can't the the system tell me before things fail so that I can be proactive about it as opposed to it's broken and now we don't have hot water at 2:00 in the morning or something like that so we're looking at also bringing freedom back into the home for homeowners so I think there's a there's a gentle balance here but it does start really selfishly by the homeowner and the people who live in it but hopefully with information in these kinds of systems they can learn about the community around them and be able to do have the larger impact through the the information we can provide to these systems so it really is about the physical systems within a structure they would I mean nest certainly is that why our goal is really to take the things that are already around us that have been unloved for years and and literally reinvent them so they give you that information and make you part of the community so we have a rolling total of all the energy that was saved by all of our customers and spend two and a half billion kilowatt hours already in just less than three years and so people start to see and they can see why they've used more use less and then they can start to make conscious choices we're not trying to not trying to be judgmental saying you have to turn it down we're just giving them the information just like the quantified self we're doing the quantified home in a way to allow people to make better choices if they so choose I like my nest just because it looks so beautiful and there's another reason I don't really I mean it's great if it saves energy although that's not why I have it I have it because the the that old Honeywell thermostat was one of the ugliest things I'd ever seen actually so if let's talk about technology in a different part of the building process why is the process of actually making buildings so slow you know that you can have what we can envision the most wired house the house with nests up the wazoo the house that with every other tech thing we're capable of creating today it still probably took two years to build why has technology not made inroads into the way in which the thing itself the architecture itself is made well from what I've experienced by building homes yeah I was really yeah you can hear you can hear the client now if you know I want to I wanted to do a prefab house I want to do a prefab I want to do it exactly we wanted it it was going to come off of a manufacturing line but then what happened was we wanted to make a few changes it wasn't going to be the exact house we wanted and the reason why we couldn't make the changes was because the building codes in every single jurisdiction around the u.s. are different and we fight that every day with nest there's all these little arcane rules for us to be able to sell our product into you think that that whole governmental you know legislation goes around and stifles the innovation for architects for manufacturers to do prefab homes or even the systems inside of homes and then you have the whole contractor organization who wants to just do what they've always been doing because they don't want to learn about new a lot of them don't want to learn about new things so all of these things come together to really stifle innovation at least I've seen it from a customer perspective my mindset would be different I think that the architecture is both ancient and slightly absurd because what we do we design prototypes we design prototypes for things that will never go into production and we therefore design a chain or sequence of completely unique buildings completely unique definitions that are addressing unique context unique programs unique people so we are in the business of creating uniqueness and that is of course very beautiful because almost everything else seems to be kind of on the way to be normative repetitive etc but basically if you do a prototype you have to be careful you have to test things and that's why it takes a long the architecture is in its very essence sort of bespoke we could say yeah we change it from the technical rule but we say it's always in beta yeah it will always be it's always a bit it never finally shares it's a live live piece but if it remains that way how will we ever solve any of the problems that we we would like architecture to solve even as it also creates extraordinary aesthetic experiences and profound spaces for us we also want to house more people we want to make day-to-day life more pleasurable for more people with better roofs over their heads or even some roof over their heads how is this compatible with that I think that you're you're confusing political issues or economic issues with architectural issues I think that parts of the world for architecture really provides an amazing surface through blink of human beings ironically maybe you don't live in one of those parts of the world neither do i and that is why of course major and important of attitude initiatives are taking place now in Asia in the countries that that we are remote from and that is why I personally have been making every effort to be involved in those countries whatever ideological kind of issue one might have with it but I think it's unfair to say that architecture is so slowly that cannot accommodate speed because for instance in China it is accommodating amazing speed you were one of the very first people to become engaged with the question of the megacity as I recall him and its implications around the world which you did ten or more years ago okay 2050 now I came I came to New York in the 70s to to understand kind of really really what a mega city was and to understand how different the mega city was from what we collectively were still cherishing as the model of the city ie something Bell composed coherent with beautiful dimensions and proportions and an overview I think that have any merit it is that I was able to describe something much wilder much more chaotic much more convenient an arbitrary still as a kind of defensible and interesting organism and an interesting support for culture well delirious New York what you're referring to I think which was your book that is really now a classic then was 40 years ago I think but I was joking no one was it was pretty tough but it was it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't it the late seventies yeah I think so it was almost 40 years ago were you in effect saying that the New York was the first medicine make you know no eiga City not really but I simply took New York and because it was convenient its limited its defined and and used it as a kind of prototype of a condition that I was anticipating would work would be more and more ubiquitous mm-hmm because the the scale of the mega cities around the world now makes New York look like San Francisco yeah I can agree absolutely would seem actually remedy do you see any real differences in your projects when they're in China versus India or some of the other things we do interactions with the government I think the my final conclusion and it's going to really surprise me myself is that the most important kind of difference in architecture today is the age of people that decide basically in in China the decision maker is 35 in Europe the decision maker is kind of 55 in America the decision maker in many cases is the trustee and therefore kind of even even older and I think that H is kind of Li a clearly correlation between age and appetite for risk and so for me the ultimate differences what adventure what amount of adventure what about amount which amount of change our particular society is willing to engage with so do you think the old city that we were talking about that you wrote about in delirious New York with the the coherent well the coherent city that you referred to before is is merely a sentimental male traction at this point no no okay I think that I'm a European and therefore I of course I love European cities but I became aware really that there is a kind of implied considerable shift going on and we've seen it whether you call it globalization or mobilization or the wakening of China or the kind of shift of economic activity in the world and that we had never adjusted our paradigms and that therefore we were still looking at what was being produced in those other territories by those other cultures in all those different circumstances and still we were cherishing this kind of one model that nobody else could could ever achieve so we had a kind of very bizarre relationship with the world because we could all only say well it's not like us and it's not as beautiful as we were and therefore I try to simply do to kind of readjust with that kind of situation so by one model you mean the traditional Western wisdom 3 oriented City that that the sort of Jane Jacobs model we might almost say as an American you could say Jane Jacobs or you could also say Houseman or write really okay and in Venice one of the things that was for me very very important is to look at the elements also of other cultures and and therefore we have a kind of analysis for instance how the Chinese designed to roofs in the 11th century according to which formula and initially we thought that meant Chinese are not kind of original but as we translated the color literature more more we discovered that actually they were dealing with incredibly modern phenomena like corruption kind of value engineering etcetera and that can basically embed it in that kind of thinking about how elements should be constructed there was a vast intelligence very often even if it's thousand years still of important relevance and what I'm actually interested in seeing is whether there is a combination of combining digital intelligence with all those other forms of intelligence or whether it means that you basically swirl out kind of everything as integrated or more ancient yeah I I felt that elements could be read almost both ways and as both a valedictory of farewell to traditional architectural elements and also at the same time a Pleader somehow connected to much of this world well if you looked at elements there were different strands along the way that died off right there were certain things that continued and other things that died off it was just it was interesting to watch the evolution or things turned into other elements and so for me you know we're at one one point in time what is it going to look like in 20 or 30 years I'm fascinated to see what the collaboration looks like and you know the history of architecture has really always been a history of aesthetics being enabled by technology right I mean from the flying buttress of the Gothic cathedral and then when it's superseded it's gone I mean nobody does flying buttresses anymore right so all the way through our contextual history it's been technology the latest technology enabling some new aesthetic direction exactly risk you know risk takers we're taking clients and architects working together with the technologists putting things together something stick right the CCTV building right that's an absolutely gorgeous CCTV in Beijing which I'm sorry I wish we had an image of could not have been built 20 years ago is that right or could it have been no but but the reason it's not technology per se but it's defected the construction and the details of the construction could only be calculated in time by current computers right simply the computers only ten twelve years ago would have been too slow to in time calculate all the effects all the kind of moments all the conditions inserted moving well even before that I mean it was in the 90s that Frank Gehry said that without that computer digital software Bilbao could never have been built this is you're saying one generation almost later the same issue applies but that confirms that at least sometimes architecture is at the cutting edge of technology even if it takes forever to build a conventional house but we put more and more technology and you know I look at it from when we design a product there's still a 12-month kind of window when we start a project to finish and we'll put more and more technology in it every year but it's still really that that that human design process that needs to happen to have a great outcome and I think that's just what it takes because you have to iterate even though we say it's a beta product you know in terms of argument you still must either eight and iterate to get to that point to keep it within the two-year kind of thing and work with all the governmental bodies and all the new energy renewable policies and those kinds of things so it's it's just what tell me more for a minute about and we're almost a time for questions so if anyone has any this is the moment to head toward the mics but while we wait for that let me go back to the whole question of the ultimate digital house you guys collaborating on a new kind of architecture how different with the rooms be how different would what what would be different in my living room if I had this house well when we design our products ok I you know people come to me why'd you even put a screen up why'd you even put why do you even have a device in the home I didn't just do everything from the phone and I'm like wait a second you have guests in your house you have children in your house you have you know elderly in your house they're not always going to have a phone with them at all times and maybe it's not even charged you still need physical elements in the home they could look slightly different there's got to be a standard interface for these things you just don't throw everything out so you have to be able to blend you know that's what I've been part of every my career is blending the old with the new and to allow people to move forward with it nothing it's not feeling trepidation that they're going to a whole new world and throwing everything out don't understand anything longer so I think there's going to be a blend in this collaboration and I hope it's going to hide the technology not to show it the way it is today you know in many ways but you'll still have interface physical interface will you have a whole different system of transmitting electrical power say well we know that there are much better ways of doing electricity than 110 volts or 240 volts 50 Hertz 60 Hertz they're much better ways high voltage ways for high current for low current that you know you can't get shocked on you can have better energy efficiency DC powers really great there's many technologies but because we have so much infrastructure built around the appliances the the wiring systems the contractors everything that it's hard to be able to adopt these things unless you go to an island or a to a yacht or some new city that someone's willing to invest and bring all that technology and that happening anywhere I know in labs it's happening I don't know if it's happening in the real world I think that the in one of the rooms in Venice is interesting because on one wall you see 200 Victorian windows that are willingly intricate beautiful delicate decorated intelligent and enabling a vast amount of different manipulations and on the the other part of the room you see a typical contemporary aluminum window being tested to conform to the European norm basically what you see is in kind of just over a hundred years and unbelievable loss in terms of ingenuity variation beauty presumably but I hope will be one of the effects of digital technology is not that it kind of reduces Kompas ability but to actually come expand space ability and and that we can find a way to increase choice again in in certain ways I mean that's that should be a compact absolutely the idea of greater choice now not a greater choice in the obvious way but greater investment in in creativity and in alternatives by the time I mean in your introduction to the elements adventists you wrote I thought very movingly actually about we're calling architectural elements from your childhood from the apartment you grew up in the balcony the image of the balcony I remember particularly strongly is it possible that if we begin to forfeit certain kinds of physical elements in favor of digital ones we could lose that sort of resonance in your memory that degree of profound influence that that architecture can have on your psyche hmm i you you make it sound to kind of slightly more conservative than I meant it and I think I was simply inventing all my first memories of this moment and I think that kids whatever happens they've always have first memories whether it is over TV over TV or a toaster of so I don't think net will fundamentally change it's not that I'm kind of worried that kind of somehow what people are doing here will can flatten the world I'm kind of simply world worried that there is focus on issues that in the end will can reduce our options reduce our appetite for adventure reduce our appetite for I mentioned it in Venice transgression right right right I mean in other words is it possible that your house would know too much we've talked a lot today in the last couple days about other yeah every other panel REM said this in Venice is like literally all these systems are going to be talking to you telling you what to do every day and so you're going to conform to what the house is telling you to do because it was programmed from some Big Brother somewhere and I hope that's definitely not the case what we want to do is get people much more freedom much more choice but give them the information to make those choices but it's good heaven of course yeah it could have yeah absolutely right but just because inevitably even if there's not a Big Brother situation you you do respond to what the device allows you to do encourage you to do it very subtle way but you have today those devices they might be dumb but they're very limited as well you can only do certain things with them sure what we're seeing is much more creativity much more flexible use of these things from wherever it is the question is is what is the feedback to you and what is it asking you to do yeah but let's take a very to Patek sample there are cars now that basically project speed to to drive rates in front of you unfortunately I have to admit that I behave better with that can machine and without it but that's why I hate both the machine and myself for being such a conformist and so I think that there are embedded in a lot of our stuff is the same you know Latvia to conform and I think that is for me cumulatively a very oppressive situation and you told me earlier today that you just driven a BMW i8 what did you think of it as a piece of design no I was part of a jewelry that had to define the best car of the year for Germany and it was in a way eye-opening because clearly the car industry is also engaging with the Internet and and therefore also going through the same vertical transformation and and being on the cusp you know are we producing guided robots or are we improving the the machine that that we are familiar with and and so it's got a very tragic because on one hand you have the most unbelievable fantastic incredible sense of adventure behind some of the steering wheels of sport cars that I cannot mention here but that really are deeply thrilling every second you drive them and they're also a blend of Technology and and your world and bringing efficiency into that and on the other hand Croatia robotic hideous capsules that that that that probably will deliver on their promise to deliver you to the destination safely and so my heart is clearly you know on one side but I say I hope that as we move on in this confrontation over in this kind of intersection of the two worlds we don't have to face these dilemmas between kind of danger and harmlessness but that we can kind of define more profound terms right for our existential demands and actually the car industry is a very good example because at its best it is not sacrifice the things that that make your heart race faster sure absolutely but there's a lot of times when you're sitting in traffic in your house racing very fast and you just wish them I could just do something else you know I think we all love you know we all love that feeling of freedom when you're driving a car but ninety seven percent of the time you really just know like I gotta get there and I would rather be doing something else than saying like I trying at home in your house playing with you you're techno something something good good okay please join me in thanking Tony Fadell and REM cool house thank you thank you

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: Vanity Fair Summit, VFSummit, New Establishment Summit, Vanity Fair New Establishment, New Establishment, new, news, style, culture, celebrity, hollywood, Vanity Fair, Tony Fadell, Rem Koolhaas

Id: YiSl0gVfLrw

Length: 33min 17sec (1997 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 22 2014