 Welcome everyone! It's a really great pleasure to open this spring's lecture series with Bjarke Engels here to share with us the work of his practice bake. There are few architects who need less of an introduction than Bjarke today. Just look at this auditorium this evening and the long line that formed already early this afternoon, and I know that the auditorium next door is also completely filled. The sheer scale of Bjarke's reach and the impact not only of his work but of himself as a new kind of architect as public intellectual for our time is undoubtable. Whether you're a fan or a critic, no one can remain indifferent to where big has taken architecture and the discourse on cities today. You cannot deny that the practice has become one of the most influential architectural practices in the world. And so to introduce Bjarke this evening, I thought I would share some more personal notes that dive back a little in time. I first met Bjarke in 1999 when we were both recently hired as junior designers to work for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. Bjarke was part of the team for the Seattle Public Library and already then his design talents combined with his upbeat demeanor rendered him a unique figure in the office sharply standing out amongst a high concentration of young, hungry and ambitious architects from around the world. But let me expand for a moment on the word upbeat. Imagine a 7 p.m. stressed out architectural office where most project teams are gearing up for many more hours of intense work and suddenly a young Bjarke who looks very much like the Bjarke of today shows up smiling and full of energy with what looks like snowboarding pants featuring a fluorescent stripe matching the blonde stripe in his fiery hair zipping through the office on roller blades. That's upbeat. Even with this simple gesture of an optimistic willful and spectacular entry into the often overwhelming reality of the work at hand and its grinding effects, Bjarke was already declaring an architectural stance vis-à-vis the world and the question of architectural engagement. The stance combined with wicked talent and freshness has given Bjarke an innate capacity to carve opportunities for architecture and design out of almost everything he touches rendering his astonishing trajectory over the past two decades as almost no surprise. As a young office in Denmark, Bjarke's first partnership plot produced some of the most seminal housing projects of the recent past as well as a set of small yet uniquely original public buildings. Today Bjarke heads over 500% firm with offices in Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona and whose fearless commitment to bringing design and architecture to the rethinking and building of everything has led to the firm's prolific work from housing developments to resilient and public parks, Lego mountains, museums and more. Big has uniquely reshaped the relationship between design and corporate practices challenging the traditional opposition between the two and supporting a broader and more competitive environment. The result has been better architecture all around, formally, programmatically, typologically and more as well as a renewed commitment to the urban realm. There are many perspectives one can bring to examine the extensive body of work Bjarke and his practice, Big, have produced in a short time. What stands out to me as the most important contribution Big has made is to demonstrate to a very wide audience from private clients and developers to governments, institutional, cultural and others that architecture and design matter. Bjarke's consistent design position, the strength of his body of work as well as his unwavering commitment to bringing architecture at its best to every possible corner of the built environment is inspiring for the challenges it has raised for the profession and its agency today. And it is in this sense that I believe we should ourselves engage with Big's commitment as the practice continues to advance new territory for architecture in the world. Bjarke's energy, talent and relentless pursuit of design opportunities as well as his capacity to question the discipline and profession in light of our contemporary condition renders him an important figure as we grapple with architecture's capacities today and for the future. Please join me in welcoming Bjarke Engel. Thank you. What a great introduction. It's been a while since I actually spoke in a kind of academic setting so I took the opportunity to put together an almost entirely new set of slides so I apologize in advance if it's a little incoherent but what I tried to put together is maybe also to describe how incredibly a mixed bag of interests and focuses and concerns and what a sort of completely mixed bag of different scales that you can end up consuming all of your time with as an architect. And so I'll sort of try to see if I can sort of extract some meaning out of it as it advances but essentially maybe starting with the smallest project that we have created so far but maybe also one of the most complex. This is René Retzepi. He is by many seen as one of the best chefs in the world. He pioneered the kind of regionalistic cuisine with his restaurant Noma located in Copenhagen where he sort of pioneered this idea of actually in the case of Noma which is short for Nordic food, Nordic mal in Danish, Noma that he kind of rediscovered the Nordic landscapes, the flora and fauna of Nordic nature and sort of returned the attention to see how those plants and those animals could actually be seen as cuisine because cuisine has been dominated by French and Asian cuisine and also like I think the place where we really align with him was that he came up with this idea that maybe healthy could also be incredibly delicious. We have this notion we call hedonistic sustainability that sustainable can actually be more enjoyable. Sustainable cities, sustainable buildings can be more enjoyable, not just good for the environment but also great for the people living there. He's somehow done that to food and he came to us because he wanted to move his restaurant from where it was. He was going to shut it down. He went to Mexico, to Tulum for a few months and cooked on the beach there to this new place which is in the middle of Christiania, this kind of hippie commune in Copenhagen. It's part of the old fortification of Copenhagen which also makes it a historical landmark. It used to be the fortress. When Christiania came it became this kind of the hippies invaded in 1969 and they never left. You can buy mild drugs openly in Christiania. The main part of the building is an old mine, sea mine storage. This is what it looked like when we came to it. We thought the city was going to give us a medal for trying to make it nice but it turned out that the city had this attitude that as long as it was only deteriorating organically everything was fine but as soon as we started trying to repair it everything was incredibly restricted. Also there was another sort of challenge because René was going to change his restaurant. It was not only going to be regionalistic, it was also going to be seasonal. So he invented three seasons instead of four. New year to April, everything from the sea because everything else is dead in Scandinavian nature. So the sea is where you go for seaweed and seafood and anything that can be fermented or pickled. May to September, vegetable season because that's actually when the nature in Scandinavia can feed humans. And then October to January, game and forest. So basically venison, berries and roots. And his idea has been this kind of rediscovering traditional Nordic elements. This is what the context looks like. It's kind of this kind of self-built hippie commune in the old Navy arts. This is actually what sort of traditional Nordic villages look like. Somehow the Scandinavians like to dress in black. They like to paint their houses in bright colors and where the southern Europeans push them together to create urbanity in the arctics and the Nordics, they're somehow spread apart. And in the end, maybe our main inspiration came from this kind of typical Nordic farm which is essentially an accumulation of individual houses. Each house is built for its own purpose, for the main family, for the children as the family and the generations grow, for the potatoes, for the animals, for the workshop. So this was the site, the old mine storage. And then it quickly became clear that we could only place buildings in the footprints of where there had been buildings in the past. So it's kind of very limited repertoire. The entire back of house, all the labs and the kind of preparation kitchens fit perfectly inside the existing building. And then we basically created this kind of mini village of all the other programs of the restaurant. And finally, in the three last footprints, greenhouses, because this is almost like an urban farm. They actually grow a lot of the ingredients that they're serving. So you have the preparation kitchen and the final service kitchen. The service kitchen, and this is because they make sort of 20 servings. So they came up with this kind of panopticon idea that René wants to be in the middle of everything from the kind of central position he wants to overview the entire restaurant. And in return, the entire restaurant can see him and his team. So we ended up designing for each room a particular building that is made with as few materials as possible, mostly one material on the inside and the outside and connected into this kind of little square. So here you see the sort of ensemble. Actually, Pete Udolf has created this kind of incredible permaculture garden here in the front where they grow a lot of the plants. As you arrive, you are actually waiting to be seated inside the greenhouses. And then the experimental kitchen where René prepares the sort of next season's dinner is on the way. And then you find yourself to this kind of little cluster of buildings. The first building is essentially the entrance. It's one big wardrobe, a kind of wooden cabinet where you get rid of your coat. And then you sort of enter into this central square, if you like, covered by glass, like all the different buildings protected from the environment. But one of the things that René was insisted on was that when you are a seasonal chef, it's very important to be constantly aware of the weather. If it's going to be cold tomorrow, if it's going to be wet tomorrow, what kind of ingredients you can get. A lot of the menu is actually only found by forging because the ingredients have not been labeled as ingredients. So there's no farmer making it. You can find it in the forests or the parks of Copenhagen. So then the main building, of course, is the chef's kitchen. The entire ceiling is a ventilation so that you can actually cook openly in the middle of the space. It's the only building that doesn't have any walls. All the air is sucked out. The main dining is made entirely out of oak, floor walls, and ceiling. And in this case, so almost this idea, like their cuisine, that they use very traditional ingredients, but in a slightly different way. Here we stacked the boards, almost like a USF boys. This kind of solid stack of oak boards. The entire facade can open up into the permaculture garden in the summer. Light comes in from the top, again, reminding you of the weather. This kind of solid wall. The same material both outside and inside. Oak is a hardwood so it can actually endure the outdoor weather. As you move on to the next, the private dining is pine wood. This kind of typical Scandinavian, more pale wood. Also on all surfaces, the shelving is the construction. And again, you sort of take the nature on the fortification in. Pine can't be outside untreated. Actually, René and his shifts, we were still behind on construction before opening day and they already sold the first seating. So it ended up being the shifts with the creme brulee torches treating the outside against the elements. So the torched wood makes it capable of being outdoor. The lounge, the fireplace is also the skylight. It's like this kind of traditional Danish red brick. And to make it bright on the inside, it switches to a white clay brick. Again, working with the tectonics of brick. But in this case, it's also resolved that the window sill becomes the ceiling held by the brick. And again, this idea that you can open up the entire corner and bring in the elements when the season allows. And again, it's the same brick that actually constitutes the ceiling like a ziggurat, more like a traditional roof. The grill, the barbecue is like a cross-ventilated chimney so that the shifts can stand as cold as possible with the fire. The waiter's room is almost like a cabinet with the skylight. And then finally, the old warehouse, we just installed a gigantic shelf that sort of organizes all the different aspects, the different parts of the kitchen, the social spaces for the staff. I'm just cutting a single skylight in the ceiling. But almost like this kind of trying to really take the entire sensibility and the entire philosophy of Rene and Noma and try to create a portraiture or capture the essence of what would be the architectural equivalent of what Rene has created. And of course also, I think, a kind of powerful manifestation of this kind of idea of an urban ecology that this restaurant is in the middle of Copenhagen but actually the honey is made there. Most of the ingredients that you're eating are actually made in the middle of the city. And then across it, a radically different example of hedonistic sustainability and urban ecology, a project that we spent the last nine years making. This is Noma. This is my houseboat. And this is basically the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world. Denmark has become a little bit of a pioneer in the sense that only 4% of our waste goes into a landfill. 42% is recycled and 54% is transformed into district heating and electricity. As a power source, six pounds of garbage from your kitchen turns into four hours of electricity and five hours of domestic heating. It's replacing the power plant in this photo right in the middle of Copenhagen. This is the opera. This is the Royal Theater right next to the marina. And it was clear when we did the competition nine years ago that what was mesmerizing about this and the marvel of modern engineering that it was going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world, no toxins coming out of the chimney. So we thought maybe a mountain of trash could become an actual mountain. Our nearest ski slope in Copenhagen is six hours away in Isabel in Sweden. We could put two-thirds of Isabel's main slope on the roof of the power plant. And so we did. This is what it looked like this spring before opening. As you can see, there's still a little bit of vegetation missing. This is what it looked like in the winter. So, of course, the kind of cliff face of the mountain is made out of these gigantic folded raw aluminum bricks that are actually planters. They're going to be full of green. Raw aluminum tilted so they actually reflect the surroundings so that the building changes color over the course of the day. Inside the mountain, you have the entire administration overlooking the city. And then, of course, they look the city at the one side and then they overview this marvel of modern engineering. It's also rather unusual because the entire power plant is actually daily. 50% of the facade is transparent. So you have the administration inside. And, of course, you see the underside of the mountain that is above. The elevator ride up to the top of the ski hill is looking into this amazing space. This spring, it's going to open the tallest climbing wall in the world. 300 feet. I have no idea who's going to be climbing this thing. And, of course, this kind of x-ray at night. And, of course, the fifth facade, in this case the roof, is maybe the most exciting facade. It has skiing and the skiing is for free. It's a public park. If you want to use the lift system, you have to buy a lift pass. It's designed to be able to help spread vegetation to the surrounding post-industrial area. You have hiking paths, different kind of activity zones. You have a kind of vegetation that changes over the course of the season. There's more than 400 different trees. And, in general, it's almost like Noma, that it's purely indigenous species. If Denmark had mountains, this is probably what they would look like. Also, the entire roof park has been made for a budget of around $13 million, which is absurdly inexpensive. So everything has really been done with the purpose of the least amount of maintenance and the least sort of acquisition cost. Maybe when I saw this photo, it dawned on me how insane it was that we were actually making a building with a ski lift on the roof. And maybe the most sort of important material, because Denmark or Copenhagen doesn't have enough snow to be a serious ski destination. So we searched around and we found an Italian company that makes this kind of mat that has the same friction as a groomed slope. The only problem was that it was quite ugly. Also because of the thermal expansion and contraction, it had to be split up in these, let's call it, 7 x 7 foot squares. So we actually sat down together with the company and in a course of a few months we managed to develop an entire new product for them. And it's very simple. You have the old product on the left and our proposition on the right, simply by joining every two circles in two different directions. The basic grid goes from squares to rectangles with six knots, which means that when they expand they can become hexagons and when they contract they can become these kind of bow ties, which means that you can actually have one single continuous surface. So this kind of very simple geometric invention that was then turned into the production and now it's the standard product of the company meant that we could actually have a continuous surface on the whole roof for the first time. We color coded it so that the brighter the slope is, the less likely you are to crash into the perimeter. And eventually the grass grows through because the grass is a major part of the structure that holds the mat to the roof. So eventually it's going to be like skiing on an alpine meadow. So here you see some of the first tests that we did. So you can kind of hear and see that it has the feeling of a groomed slope, which also makes it kind of perfect for freestyle skiers because you can actually do all of the grinds and the jumps and the tricks as you could on a normal slope. So I think what's amazing about this idea is that I think it kind of shows this kind of almost like world changing power of architecture that my son is one year old now so he's never going to remember that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the power plant in Copenhagen. So for him and his entire generation, that's going to be their normal and that's going to be the starting point from where they start having crazy ideas about their future. So that can almost make you angst about thinking about what kind of future they're going to come up with. So of course like some kind of, I think also kind of a landmark for this kind of idea of hedonistic sustainability that a sustainable city can also be not just better for the environment but better for the people living there. Another sort of aspect that has been following us is this kind of relationship between the pragmatic and the utopian or let's say the two utilitarian and the social. One such example is this is basically where Granville Bridge touches downtown Vancouver. We got invited to look at turning it into mostly residential and also educational development. So we just started mapping the constraints. There are setbacks from the streets, setbacks from the bridges. The city has a rule that you cannot build residences closer than 30 meters or 100 feet to the traffic on the bridge. There's a park where we're not supposed to cast any shadows and finally we were left with this tiny triangular footprint almost too small to build. So then we started thinking like if the purpose of the 100 foot setback is a minimum distance once we get 100 feet up in the air we can grow the building back. So essentially the triangular footprint turns into a rectangle. We managed to get the city to agree with this interpretation. So when you drive over Granville Bridge it's sort of as if someone is pulling a curtain aside welcoming you to Vancouver. This kind of gradual overhang. And underneath the bridge we work with a series of local artists. You have basically a university in these two triangular buildings that are wedged in between the legs of the bridge. And then Rodney Graham proposed to create turn one of his video artworks into a giant urban artwork with this gigantic chandelier that basically rolls up and then sort of twice a day it sort of drops and spins dramatically down above the main street. And the idea is once open that the entire underside is going to turn into what we've nicknamed the Sistine's Chapel of Street Art but basically trying to turn the otherwise negative impact of the bridge into a positive. So what ends up looking like this kind of almost like surreal silhouette is actually like a very precise analysis and response to a very difficult sort of urban situation. It's going to open in May and is already now like really one of the more striking places in Vancouver. So this is an example of what we like to call social infrastructure the idea that infrastructure can have positive social and environmental side effects. Almost the opposite if a bridge can turn into an art museum upside down the opposite could also be true. A project that we did in exactly the same space of time as Vancouver is a project for a small art museum in a sculpture park in Norway and we could basically place the sculptures on either side of a river there's an old historical mill and we could place the museum anywhere we wanted and in the end our proposal was to turn it into the bridge that turns the entire complex of parks on either side into one single loop. The museum has two galleries one daily galleries with views over the water and one sort of more vertical, more enclosed gallery. The transition from one to the other becomes this kind of distortion, a 90 degree rotation. And from the starting point we had this idea that the museum could be seen as maybe one of the bigger sculptures in the sculpture park. Of course once we started getting more intimate with how to make it span it's a 250 foot span so a pretty mature column free span. The cross sections are incredibly rational like a series of rotated rectangles so here you see the kind of raw structure but the raw structure had some kind of... because it is a bit of a mission to make a building span 250 feet over a river so it had this kind of Eiffel Tower aesthetic that wasn't really what we were looking for and it looked maybe more muscular than the kind of effortlessness that we had fantasized about. So we tried to imagine how could we finish the building and in the end the idea became this kind of very simple idea of taking a lot of completely standard elements standard aluminum profiles on the outside standard wooden sticks on the inside and just basically shift them ever so slightly in a way an incredibly traditional conventional kind of structure in the joinery of the wood we also resolve all of the necessary technical installations this is the almost finished building and like very classic kind of Norwegian wood carpentry that ends up creating this kind of very precise complex geometry, sort of a hyperbolic paraboloid as the floor turns into the wall it reveals a gap that becomes also the ventilation the sprinkling, the light installations, the security everything that makes it a contemporary Atmuseum is also integrated in this kind of very regular linear logic so even though you see curves and arches everywhere, every single element in the building is completely straight so somehow like in a way trying to hack the kind of conventional traditional building techniques that are available to create something that's called extraordinary out of the ordinary and here you see how the skylight zips and turns the more vertical part of the building into completely introverted you have this kind of spectacular view over the river and the mill and on the outside again it's like this is basically this kind of extruded aluminum facade that you put outside thermal warehouses so in a way the most conventional traditional kind of barn but again put together in a way that it describes this kind of acrobatic geometry and then of course the irony is that I think we spent the same amount of time on this building as we did on the power plant and it also just shows how undiscriminating you are as an architect with what you actually devote your time to trying to make a building a small art gallery float over a river or trying to turn a power plant into a ski slope also of course on the other side it has this kind of even more abstract so sculptural quality that really makes it like one of the sculptures in the sculpture park underneath you can see the only other room apart from the main sort of Kunsthaulspace is the toilets the client was obsessed with the toilets so basically you end up below the belly of the bridge so you see the steel structure ending and the foundations this kind of glass stair that takes you down you can see the sort of where the bridge meets the foundation there's this kind of expansion gap Imken and Draak said the Danish Norwegian artist group created this kind of voyeuristic sculpture looking in to the toilets and when you look over his shoulder you look at the belly of the beast with the reflections of the water underneath it and as you continue down underneath the glass stair you actually have the actual bathrooms the glass stair has projections by Tony Osler that makes you feel that you are actually listening to conversations happening inside the toilets and when you think you're finally going to be left in peace inside the stall you actually have these classic Osler installations whispering in your ear as you're trying to complete the mission so essentially another example of let's say at least this kind of idea of social infrastructure that one thing can also be the other that something cultural can also be infrastructural and vice versa and then of course maybe speeding up a little bit so even though I believe that we come to each project with a kind of consistent attitude because so much is discovered in the process that the conditions are always so different what you have to respond to so different that it ends up creating rather different vocabularies and almost invisible building is a museum a bunker museum on the west coast of Denmark it's basically in this kind of giant nature reserve on the west coast of Denmark the only exception is this old German bunker left from the Second World War a gun turret a gun was delivered from Krupps in Germany and was supposed to be installed on September 9, 1945 for good reasons that never happened and next to it inside the dunes we were asked to make a museum telling the story and because it's an entirely listed landscape our proposal became to make these kind of very precise incisions and almost imagine the opposite of the bunker if the bunker is a heavy artifact in the dunes the museum became this kind of light absence as you slice through the sand becomes concrete and you have this square entirely transparent bringing daylight deep into this kind of underground museum you descend into this narrative of the Second World War, the occupation of Denmark using only materials that are already found in the bunker so the concrete the raw iron the raw wood solving all of the sort of technical installations for the museography in the tectonics of the concrete work so that all technique, all sprinkling, all lighting all hanging is done within the tectonics of the foamwork daylight being sucked in so even though it will be entirely underground it feels very light and airy almost the opposite of the bunker and then from here an umbilical cord takes you deep into the bunker where you can sort of explore what's left as this kind of giant artifact from the Second World War so you can say almost like the disappearing act and the discretion almost becomes the most characteristic of what makes the building stand out and also makes it disappear and then there's the thing about architects is that part of the pleasure of the profession and I think often we talk so much about the social agenda or the environmental agenda, whatever and there's also just an aspect of architecture which is the pure thrill of making something and making it as nice as you can possibly get away with and this is a site not dissimilar to the other one but in this case not depicting the story of the Second World War but this is our site it's Vallée du Choux the cradle of watchmaking in Switzerland it's where Audemars and Piquet started making watches 150 years ago and I never had much of an interest in watchmaking until I went to visit their workshop to make this proposal for a small invited competition and I met this kind of master watchmaker and he made me aware of the fact that today we're so used to the divorce between hardware and software between essentially form and content that the hardware is kind of this neutral always identical and it's the software that gives it attribute and character and use but in watchmaking architecture the hardware is actually the software it's the geometry and the interlocking of gears and materials and let's call it spaces that makes the clock work and the building work so we ended up trying to sort of create that they had this idea of a linear a chronological exhibition but that you should be able to sort of dig through and make shortcuts so we sort of coiled the chronology into this kind of double spiral that leads to a central gallery in the middle and then unwinds again the roof follows the slope of the landscape bringing daylight and views deep into the floor plate this is our first sort of architectural model this is the building almost complete so essentially this kind of resource spiral which is the element inside the watch that makes it store kinetic energy and eventually tick there's not a single column in the entire building it's as if the spiral is floating above you the glass is actually load bearing it's again one of the elements of watchmaking is to provide the maximum impact with the minimum of material skeletonization, miniaturization complication is all about reducing the amount of material and part of the museum is that you can actually look over the shoulders of some of the expert watchmakers and ask them questions while they're trying to put very small things together and of course at any time you can jump from one part of the chronology to the other so here you have this kind of almost surreal experience where the entire roof seems to be hovering over your head you enter from the existing historical building and enter into the spiral it's this kind of environmentally high performing building so we needed to provide passive sun shading and develop this this kind of undulating ribbons of brass that have the effect that from the angle of the sun they're opaque but when you look at them straight from the inside they're entirely transparent almost to the point where they really disappear and then I just say like for any architect who dreams about potentially doing something that is close to a perfectly built building working in Switzerland where practically everybody is a watchmaker at heart, four watchmakers is close to as good as it gets so we've never seen concrete or metalwork or glasswork like this so anyway like to some extent a building for the pure thrill of celebrating the craftsmanship of watchmaking and of architecture and then maybe a last smaller building before we escalate is a culture institution we just opened in Bordeaux in France bringing three different cultural institutions together in a new building a library, a media tech performance space and a contemporary art center the art galleries on the top to have access to skylights and connected by a shared lobby on the waterfront of the Le Garonne in Bordeaux and basically the library and the theater creating the two pillars the art museum, the bridge to enclose a big public room the entire building finished in prefabricated concrete you can really see that the French invented steel reinforced concrete because they are so incredibly good at it also the sand in the south of France is so insanely beautiful that's why unitibitation in Marseille is maybe the only truly beautiful of the unities that Corbe did because of the quality of the sand so essentially the three institutions enclosing this giant outdoor urban room where the three institutions but also the city itself can invade on the inside it's basically a 150,000 square foot building with a 40 million dollar budget which sounds completely ridiculous by New York standards but it's still pretty ridiculous by European standards so we had this kind of positive side effect that all the finishes inside are so insanely raw it's basically concrete in different shades for the opening, Benoit Meir a local Bordeaux artist made this head of Hermes that is sliced so exactly where the void of the building is pushed out to create a big public room the sculpture is also absent so in a way the most exciting part of the sculpture, the most exciting part of the building is what's not there and then inside there's almost like Le Corbusier level of raw finish even the furniture is cast out of concrete some of it tiled there's a periscope from the lobby that looks up so here you're actually standing at the bottom looking up at the people so you can kind of see it's a giant sloping mirror you can see what's happening on the square above you the ballerinas can look out over the square and vice versa actually at the opening there was the first demonstration where they said congratulations with the cultural building but what about the two and a half thousand homeless in Bordeaux so it was clear that I think in the first 24 hours I saw a couple making out the first skaters of course arriving and the first demonstration the theatre again this kind of mosaic of tart wood hot rolled steel and black concrete to create the perfect sort of acoustic mix and finally this kind of art barn at the top and a sculptural park looking over the city but essentially in this kind of very sort of simple building the main gesture being the sort of providing this kind of new shaded outdoor space for the cultural life of the city so then sort of I'd like to finish by like escalating a little bit in scale and maybe impact one project that we've spent the last a year and a half on is for a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A's and Stadia this is their current stadium and this is typical for Stadia it's like these kind of massive venues in a giant sea of parking that are only active a few days a year baseball arguably much more than any other sport because there's so many games or roughly a hundred in a year but we thought what if this new stadium could really be the the kind of foundation for the cultural life of the city what if we could bring the ballpark back into the park and essentially baseball started in parks and then at some point a guy got the idea to build a fence around the park and charge tickets so we thought what if we could somehow bring the park back so instead of this kind of enclosed stadium what if the main concourse was actually main street and because baseball is an asymmetrical sport with the outfield what if the entire stadium could open up to the city and the water and the views so we are located in the port of Portland of Oakland the stadium somehow becomes this kind of extension of the city street the circular stadium kind of distorts the streets creates a series of squares the main concourse is actually this kind of main public promenade called athletics way and then basically imagine as the roof dips down it almost becomes the kind of Oakland equivalent of the highline a public park that is part of the the experience of the game but 250 days a year it's actually a park for the citizens of Oakland we also we can comfortably refer to the highline because we are working with field ops in the landscape but essentially imagine that 365 days a year this is part of the enjoyable space of this new neighborhood also normally the seats that are the furthest away from the game would be the lousiest here they have this kind of amazing experience of actually being part of the park experience so that basically 100 days a year they shut down access to the park and it becomes part of the spectator experience all the restaurants and cafes open up to the park but that also means that the other days they open up to the park so you can actually go there and have a coffee even if you're just living or working in the neighborhood so you have this kind of connection from the inside to the out above of course the running track on the game day of the circulation and on a non-game day it's part of the experience of living in Oakland the same for the picnic lawn both for game days and outside game days so suddenly the stadium doesn't become this kind of massive massive sort of empty wide elephant in a kind of void in the city it actually becomes a kind of bringer of life and energy into a new neighborhood because of the kind of asymmetry in the extreme you have this kind of incredible view out over the port towards San Francisco that is part of the experience for the facade we wanted to spend as little money on the enclosure as possible so we need to provide some shelter from the wind so we came up with this idea of this kind of louvert structure that is facing the predominant direction of the wind and then basically where we have the concessions, where we have the circulation we need to provide wind protection so it almost becomes like this kind of series of scarfs wrapped around the building just providing only the necessary protection and even if we were trying to make this kind of almost skeletal non-building it actually ends up having a rather sort of elegant expression and also means that when you arrive you literally walk over the edge of the stadium and onto the field to provide access and to minimize the parking of course because it's part of an urban neighborhood we can share the parking but also we have the BART the Bay Area Rapid Transit only like a mile away but you have to cross a 12 lane highway and a freight train so the simplest way of connecting is by putting a single mast we can actually put a gondola that takes you straight from the BART across both highway and train tracks lands you on Jack London Square and from here you just walk straight on to across the perimeter park and into the game so I think like in many ways taking this kind of idea of social infrastructure and the utilitarian and the social we can get together into a kind of new a new hybrid and then for the poster I thought I had to at least mention this project we're doing with Toyota because I think what we've seen over I think like 10 years ago I was so keen on getting some buildings built that I didn't care about master plans because they took forever and they resulted in nothing at least in the horizon of review now that I am older and more patient and I realize that two decades go quickly I have more appetite for for master plans and especially because of course like there's a lot of things that can only be dealt with on a kind of holistic level at a certain scale and we had a fortunate encounter with Akio Toyota who is the grandchild of the founder of Toyota and he had this idea of turning the side of two former factories at the base of Mount Fuji into an experimental city where we would look at studying the potential impact on cities from advances in personal mobility mobility as a service, autonomy robotics, smart homes sort of connectivity through AI multi-generation assisted living, hydrogen powered infrastructure, academic research and incubation and basically what we started to do was to look at the typical city of today and we say today the street has basically everything bikes, cars pedestrians we thought maybe instead to tailor different kinds of experiences one street only for autonomous vehicles and pedestrians one for mixed personal mobility that's more like a promenade and finally a park only for pedestrians and then every third street varies and weaves in both directions so you can actually walk through this entire city as a pedestrian moving only through a park or only along a promenade so the roofs are powering the city with affordable takes and then basically all these different intersections between the few different kinds of streets allows Toyota and collaborating companies to test the Toyota connected city traffic management system there's a mat on it for the delivery of goods Toyota is one of the world pioneers in fuel cell technology using hydrogen which is one of the most efficient ways of storing energy goods can be delivered directly into the homes assisted living also for the elderly of course the demographics of Japan is the oldest in the world so in many ways they are experiencing right now what we will soon and then a lot of the labs and the research of Toyota and their related companies is happening in the work environments and one of the things we also found is that maybe with companies like Amazon delivering a lot of the goods to people's homes the sort of social and cultural spaces of retail are diminishing and maybe there was a way to reinvent the marketplace or the fairground at the heart of the city so of course this is a very kind of high level introduction but the basic thinking is by purpose building this kind of first woven city around this kind of module of the three different kinds of ways of moving that are interwoven that means that the street gets very different social and cultural qualities depending on what kind of street it is having this kind of modular system of every nine block being an open sort of public program and then with the possibility of scaling some of the public programs to become larger elements not only can we actually conduct this research in a purpose built environment but you can also apply the same pattern on to in this case Barcelona, New York or Tokyo so it has a lot of sort of general applicability that means that the kind of experience we can harvest at the base of Mount Fuji could potentially be taken elsewhere so maybe as a kind of last endeavor of course all of these projects are terrestrial and over the last two and a half years we have been increasingly interested in looking a little bit beyond to the point and I think it's maybe also maybe a part of advice because we started saying this to each other I think three years ago that we felt that it would be amazing if we could build on another planet than Earth and then by saying it to each other and being more and more serious about it this December we got selected to build a space port for the Norwegian government on the Arctic Circle so if you tell each other the story long enough eventually someone bites but we actually started by working for the we were working with Hyperloop One the kind of Elon Musk founded supersonic vacuum tube magnetic levitation train and got introduced to the Ministry of the Future in Dubai and they asked us to look at creating a human colony on Mars every two years Mars with the orbits aligned so you can actually get to Mars according to Elon Musk in three months that's the same time it took 500 years ago to get from from Spain to South America so and it didn't stop the Europeans from going to the Americas so also one of the things about Mars is that it's a relatively temperate planet on a nice summer day on equator on Mars you have 80 degrees Fahrenheit which is like a Danish summer gravity is 38% so a 100 pound person would weigh 38 pounds on Mars it's a three month diet that's more powerful than anything and then the miracle is that Mars and Earth has the same seasonal tilt so you have the same seasons they're only four times twice as long because the years twice as long and then the miracle for instance if you would move to Mercury a day lasts 175 days so when the sun sets it's almost 90 days before it rises again that's a long night on Mars it's the same only you can snooze 40 minutes longer every morning on Mars because the day is 40 minutes longer which means that the kind of life you have and every living organism has is very adjusted to Mars there's no magnetic field protecting from radiation it's half the diameter but the same amount of real estate because they have no liquid oceans and we've been going to Mars so we know a lot about Mars we've looked at the craters, we've seen dried out archipelagos, landslides, dust devils so we have good knowledge about Mars and actually one of the miracles the blue planet and the red planet but because of small particulates in the air where our sunrises turn red the sunrises on the red planet actually turn blue which is something I hope many in this room will one day experience personally there is if you remove the biosphere from Earth like in the Atacama desert in Chile it looks very much like Mars because it has very much the same minerals and we started just like looking a little bit at Earth this is in Tunisia what looks like a lifeless desert is actually a dense, lively community where this kind of chocolate-eyed houses carved out of the rock create a more sort of stable environment protected from the rays of the sun and the fluctuation of temperature and of course another example is Kangaluswak in Greenland in the Arctic the igloos using the insulating aspect of ice and the sort of efficiency of the spherical form to protect from the environments so there's a lot of great things there's a few problems remaining there's too much radiation for humans very low pressure cold temperatures, no breathable air and no ready to use water and also we can't bring too much I think by the most optimistic estimates it's going to cost $6,600 to bring two pounds of goods to Mars this is what we need so basically we need to somehow combine the ecosystem to sustain human life with the ecosystem to sustain plant life into one integrated ecosystem so we just started looking at what we have we have regolith that you can sort into ice that gives you water basalt stones, fine sands you can make bricks ceramics, concrete you can sort the fine sands into silicea, aluminum and iron oxide among other things you can make aluminum, glass you can make technology photovoltaics you can make power you can run electrolysis on the water you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen together with the CO2 of the martian atmosphere it's like 93% CO2 you can make with a sabotage reactor, you can make methane that together with oxygen is a great rocket propellant as a byproduct you get carbon monoxide and more water the carbon monoxide with the iron oxide you can make steel together with the water you can use chemical reactions to create different kinds of plastics soft plastics, hard plastics with the soft plastic of course everything needs to be recycled because everything is so incredibly valuable on Mars with the soft plastics we can make inflatable membranes that we can make biodomes for growing plants for root zone gardens for leisure for aquaponics, hydroponics for agriculture and finally we can sustain human life using only what's actually available on Mars if you look at the different kinds of structures, inflatables are great for keeping a pressurized environment but not for keeping meteors or radiation out 3D printed structures provide more protection not enough and finally excavated structures with 7 meters or 20 feet of regolith is enough to protect you from the radiation so none of them work on their own combined, they actually tick all the boxes so imagine creating inflatable membranes digging, excavating material used to 3D print and then you just have to regulate how much time you spend in the different degrees of exposure but we found that a typical American only spends 8% of the day outdoor so that should be okay and then of course they can combine and grow until you have a city as part of the experiment is to begin in an environment in the desert outside Dubai that looks like Mars but is a little warmer but the idea is to use the same techniques the 3D printed structures using the local available as sand the high efficiency agriculture to create this kind of environment where you can experience how enjoyable the kind of Martian vernacular could actually be like not like living in a tin can but in this kind of charming 3D printed CASVA like structure actually water is a seven times better shield against radiation so it wouldn't be unlikely to have these underground structures with three feet of aquarium above that provides daylight but protects you from the radiation so some of the things that would be nuts on earth could actually make a lot of sense on Mars and why is this interesting and one of the things the more we started thinking about when you're starting on a new planet from scratch you have to somehow really understand ecosystems and if you look at the 17 sustainable developer goals of the United Nations eight of them deal directly with the built environment and just a few data points on earth we have let's call it one and a half billion cubic meters of water on Mars only five million cubic meters of ice so you have to be so it's so precious the water on Mars we have outdoor agriculture we have to do it in structure at least ten times more efficient on Mars and one of the main sources of global warming and the climate crisis we're experiencing is fossil fuels you have no fossil fuels on Mars because you have no fossils so in a way many of the things that allow us to be capable of surviving on Mars are the same things that would allow us to be great custodians of planet earth and if you sort of gradually imagine over 200 years getting breathable air getting liquid water you can see that Mars doesn't look so different than than earth and that basically brought us to the last thing that I'd like to end with is that one of the things we've been thinking lately is that we seem to be so incredibly incapable of dealing with the climate crisis and we were thinking why because humans have actually shown to be incredibly capable of taking very resource demanding multi-generational efforts like building cathedrals the great cathedral in Cologne took 632 years to complete and they still completed it we laugh at the because they're still building Sagrada Familia but they've only been building for 137 years so they're not supposed to be done yet and the Romans were capable of building the Roman aqueduct system for more than 500 years bringing fresh water to all of their urban settlements so to do it, it's because there was a master plan when the first architect of the Cologne Cathedral died the next architect worked on those same drawings and I think you probably went through 20 different architects in 600 years or more so I think one of the problems of climate change and climate action is that it's the realm of scientists that are mostly academics which means that they're very good at science and academic accuracy but not so much at entrepreneurship and action and then you have politicians that are maybe not so good at something that requires a 50 year or 100 year commitment because they have election cycles of 4 or 8 years so even a short architectural project takes longer than that but what if we because architects are maybe we make master plans for buildings for city blocks for neighborhoods, for cities for regions, even for countries why not make a master plan for the planet so normally we get hired to do things but in this case there was no obvious client except maybe Greta Thunberg herself and I'm just going to reveal a few of the things we started looking at it's going to be another 8 minutes first of course climate change has been going on catastrophically since the dawn of planet earth from a kind of ball of lava to the kind of heavy bombardment of metal or as 4 billion years ago to the snowball 2.5 billion years ago the Cambrian explosion was so much more like current earth and present day and when you look this is 500 million years back you can see there's always been fluctuations in CO2 related to fluctuations in temperature the blue line is temperature and the shaded graph is CO2 so there's a clear relationship if you look at the last 500,000 years you can see the ice ages are always in the CO2 levels separated by peaks that also correspond to rising temperatures and vice versa and if you look at the last 500 years you see relatively stable and then sort of let's say 150 years ago it really starts escalating and on this graph it doesn't look so so bad but it's 407 particles per million and we have to go back 20 to 30 million years before we find the same levels of CO2 that we have currently none of these animals existed back then including of course humans so it's a very unprecedented situation and just to give you another level like regardless of global warming at a thousand particles per million the sort of ventilation in any room kicks in becomes unhealthy for humans to breathe those levels of CO2 so we're definitely not just warming the planet we're also making it less habitable for for human life so you have different kinds of greenhouse gases four of them are affected by by human activity and of the four of course carbon dioxide and methane maybe are the ones we talk about this also nitrous oxide loop and so called F gases I'm going to focus on carbon dioxide so you have a lot of sort of stored carbon and you can see if you have 610 gigatons of carbon in our vegetation you have a million times more in the sediments and that's essentially what we're releasing by burning fossil fuels two carbon dioxide loops one takes millions of years is volcanic activity that then becomes sequestered in rocks and sand and is then sort of sedimented on the ocean floors and is pushed back through tectonic movement into magma and then you have a more annual loop which is essentially living beings absorbing CO2 and then sort of releasing it through respiration, decomposition and currently we are increasing our CO2 emissions with 4 billion tons per year methane, a kind of similar loop methane only stays in the atmosphere for 9 years but because every year we're releasing another 10 million tons primarily because of rice fields and ruminant animals it's also adding to the equation and you look 75% of the greenhouse effect is attributed to CO2 it's the biggest problem 14% methane and the rest to nitrous oxide and F gases if you look at the CO2 equivalent the F gases are really the the worst sinners they are 3,000 times more impactful than CO2 there's just a lot less of it and if you want to look at how much carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere every year it would be a 2 by 2 kilometer cube this is downtown London by comparison of solid coal that is going into the atmosphere or 35,000 oil tankers there's another aspect which is the shine effect so Vantablack the Anish Kapoor patented black the least reflective material on earth has a shine effect of zero and perfect white of one and just to give you an idea the more parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat so the more open ocean the more heat is absorbed the more parking lots, the more heat is absorbed whereas fresh snow has a really good shine effect and to give you an idea how impactful this is if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27 degrees Celsius today it's 15 degrees so twice as warm as now if a third of the planet was glacial it would be frozen so one percent of change in the shine effect of earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere so it's also an important factor that right now works against us so what are our energy sources we have four sources the sun that provides photovoltaic, solar heating fossil fuels, wind power is all stored solar energy earth, geothermal energy the gravity compression the moon, tidal, turbine energy mainly because of gravity and then nuclear energy from atoms so basically all the different forms of energy are related so basically let's say gravity creates pressure that creates nuclear activity that provides through fusion provides sunlight through photosynthesis sunlight is translated into chemical energy that can then be burned to provide heat with an engine translated into kinetic movement that can then be turned into electricity and over the years we've been sort of mastering more and more of these kinds of translations and any kind of energy source is translated from one source to the other so a water mill or hydropower is gravity turned into kinetic movement and from there into electricity nuclear fission this nuclear energy translated into heat and from there into mechanical and electrical batteries from chemical to electrical and if you look at the energy storage for these batteries which is a great thing, it's not very efficient half a ton of batteries has the same stored energy as five kilos or ten pounds of hydrogen which is why it's a very interesting energy source today we spent 3,000 terawatt hours per year that's our energy bill a third roughly from electricity then transportation and agriculture on an equal then construction and industry and if you look at the energy sources even though we have a lot of different renewable energy sources the vast amount like 85% of our energy comes from non-renewable so you can see 200 years ago we only had traditional biofuel burning wood basically coal, then came oil then came gas and then you have then came nuclear and then of course you have the renewables but of all the 15% of renewable two thirds of it is actually just burning wood so not at the end also actually leading to CO2 emissions even though you can argue that you can replant it so then we started looking at how efficient are the different sources we also looked at who's the biggest culprit today this is China the biggest culprit Asia but if you look at historically the last 200 years the US and the EU have definitely contributed our share and then we said okay so what's the job we have to solve don't worry I'm not going to like solve the whole thing in the next two minutes but just to sort of illustrate the kind of architectural thinking behind it it's not enough to provide 153,000 terawatts because we're going to be 10 billion people and everybody will eventually have the quality of life of Singapore which is currently the highest living standard so that means that we need to have 750,000 terawatts if solar would be an current technology for solar we could provide all of that energy with this amount of PDs or with this amount of windmill parks or this amount of nuclear because actually you only need this amount of real estate for nuclear but because of the plume exposure pathway emergency planning zone and anyone who watched Chernobyl on HBO knows what I'm talking about it would actually be relatively inefficient in terms of space hydroelectricity we don't have enough hydroelectricity or biomass also there's the idea of planting forest to sequester carbon but we would have to plant the entire land mass of earth every third year to sequester enough carbon so it can only be part of a solution if you look at the different renewables they've all gone down especially solar massively over the last half decade except hydro which has gone up maybe because of preservation and construction hydro power currently provides only 3% of our power it's believed that there's a bigger potential but not enough to provide the entire earth but 71 of the countries on earth could actually be delivering European living standard with the amount of hydroelectricity they have available but just to give you an idea the biggest hydro station in the world Churchill Falls in Canada provides you could provide the same amount of energy with solar with a much smaller area wind power only is 0.6% of the power on earth and you have a very large untapped potential mostly closer you get to the poles the more wind power potential especially offshore and of course solar power again the the brighter the more potential and if you look at since the 70s the price has gone drastically down so solar is really of all the different sources wind and solar seems to be the best ones and then you have this thing called the intermittency intermittency problem this is looking at the UK in January a lot of wind power somewhat irregular and not so much solar power and only in a very small time space in the same in UK in June you see much bigger solar potential and much lower wind speeds so that becomes a problem you look at it over the year you have this kind of almost inverse graph and you basically have two cycles the kind of seasonal cycle and the 24-hour cycle and the 24-hour cycle also varies over the year winter and summer so if you cut it where you say you have minimum 6 hours of peak solar in the winter that gives you roughly 99% of earth's population lives within this zone because of the radius of earth from more than 10,000 km to the nearest sunlight so if each 6 of the planet could provide if each 24-hour zone could provide a 6 of the power of the planet the site that has light could actually power the other side and how could you do this so basically because where you have the short of the radius the short of the distance from night to day and with current high voltage connections you lose 3% of the power per thousand km this means that at the maximum loss you lose roughly a third of the power if you're going all the way to the other side so one of the things we started looking at you already have regional grids this is one grid Europe is one grid and there's plans to connect North Africa and the Middle East there's plans to connect the east and the west coast and Mexico so you have all of these partial plans so what if you could actually create an entire worldwide grid the sunny side could power the dark side or the windy side could power the less windy side and just to give you an idea the yearly solar output from London over the year and within the same sort of a longitude you have Cape Town that has the exact opposite pattern obviously over the year so if you can connect them they can even each other out solving part of the intermissions problem and if you look across you can also provide presence of power if you look at wind within the same slice one hour slice of earth we just looked at a different series of locations across Europe and Africa and you end up evening out because the wind is always blowing somewhere so you end up actually having close to peak generation speed always somewhere within the zone so maybe this kind of seasonal cycle and 24 hour cycle this kind of grid could unite us all energy wise and then of course there's the Pacific that we haven't solved yet and maybe just like a few data points and then I'll let you go of course we have to look at everything so we started looking just at water this is how much water we have on earth if it was like a ball because the oceans are very shallow and if you look at all that water very little of it is fresh water 2.5% and of the fresh water very little is surface fresh water 30% is groundwater and 2 thirds is glaciers and of the surface fresh water 3% in the atmosphere a quarter of it is in all living things humans included half a percent in rivers 6% in soil moisture and swamps 20% in lakes and again 2 thirds in ground ice so basically water is salt water and fresh water is ice in the last 100 years we 6 times doubled our consumption of water 4 trillion cubic meters of water every year most of it goes to agriculture and of the agriculture most goes into meat and we are getting increasingly dry zones and the bad news is that it's expensive energy wise to desalinate for instance if we would have to desalinate the increase of water consumption to reach 10 billion people it would be 20% of our current electricity supply and then of course looking at pollution just to give some some vulgar facts every hour we produce a scale of 38 meters this is Burj Khalifa and this is the cone of plastic bottles every day and every month we can bury the tallest tower on planet earth in a cone of plastic bottles and when you look at the flow of plastic the vast majority is discarded after a single use a good part of it is still in use in different components the stuff that gets recycled quickly gets discarded again and then a small fraction becomes put to sort of more constant use or incinerated for for the energy value if you look at the sources of energy the vast majority of the mismanaged plastic is in Asia Pacific the global river plastic input to the oceans massively Asia look at the 20 biggest rivers it's basically Asia and a little bit of Nigeria and Brazil but really Asia and massively packaging so these are the sort of mismanaged pollution hub spots and these are the outlets into the global oceans creating this kind of distribution because of the currents of plastic where the biggest patch is the great pacific garbage patch which is becoming a massive issue so essentially what we're trying to do as you can see is try to apply the kind of tangible practical thinking we almost took the kind of way we would normally approach an architectural project and a master plan so this is the kind of index as we're making it for the master plan of the planet and going through it with this kind of pragmatic utopian approach hoping that we can develop insights and ideally a master plan for the planet that could be in a way handed over to corporations and governments with a much more tangible and much more promising concrete plan of action than the reports or the sort of political agendas that exist today. Thank you Bjarke for making things very easy for me to respond I'll keep it short and I'm sure there are many many questions but I just wanted to maybe retrace a little bit the lecture and really open it up pretty fast where you left us you opened with beautifully designed small restaurant where you showed the details in every corner there was a notion of vernacular and I was like okay taking on bigness and starting with scale and then the projects are fantastic but it also really feels and I think that's been sort of your signature as a kind of strategic thinker as an architect there's a kind of repertoire of strategies the vernacular, the twist I think that's trademark landform whether it's the bridge or then you have the wedge and it's clear that the sort of complexity that one very architectural complexity and pleasure that you find in the restaurant with the materials and the kind of aggregation you sort of get rid of slightly as you scale up I mean it this is a kind of singularity to the gesture and I'm thinking there's a simplicity also that sort of enables a new form of complexity and in a way what you're conquering is not so much architectural form or sort of narrative about architecture but the excitement is in bringing architecture to new programs to finding new typologies to write this sort of territorial expansion of architecture's capacity and and almost and this is where the kind of urban realm comes in where you almost sacrifice architecture as architecture for what it does to the urban realm for what it you know what you call social infrastructure what it enables and I was thinking about the last utopia in this country which is new urbanism which sort of declared that in order for us to address questions of you know walking and livability and density etc. we had to sacrifice architecture as an object of focus and you know doesn't matter what style it is or whatever you know it's okay and I think for me and I mean this very positively there's a sense of if we need to leave architecture behind you know we should and then this is kind of cut with the you almost get excited yourself okay I can do all these strategies I can provide architecture I can provide solutions I can do it now let's right so it's kind of like okay now is there a real challenge and then okay there's a Toyota smart city and I'm thinking pragmatic utopian or utopian pragmatism and you're like okay this is getting into utopian dystopic dystopic proposition I mean you're thinking about the smart city is also a city that is about control and surveillance and all these happy people are you know I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to live in that city just wait and see we're already in it and it's very scary and and so for me that's the kind of parenthesis but then I think I think the assertion of the reassertion and the faith of the master plan you know I mean we are here in an academic setting where the master plan has been murdered and murdered over and over again for all the dystopic condition that it produced the exclusions, the conflicts, the sort of segregation the power structures I mean this is always a result of the master plan and that you reassert the master plan and I I think that it's kind of very interesting I guess where I'm getting at is and this has been also part of your power as an architect is kind of to dust off to say okay well we can't you know just stay in that space of criticism and maybe we do need you know a master planet and I think the passion and you know as you sort of deployed this blueprint for the planet you know towards the end it almost becomes believable where so where are you taking this I mean where are you taking this and throughout your work you suspend the kind of political you present yourself as a kind of a context your apolitical kind of architect and obviously climate change is not we're not addressing it not because we don't have the technology we've had it for a long time we've known this is coming for a long time we're not addressing it because of because we don't have the political will because of power structure because of politics because of governance because of the west you know so what do you do with the master plan who's your audience and I think it's so as it thickens I think it's very interesting I just and I'm not what is what is your hope it's a question and I also like it's very early days but maybe you found your calling is what I'm saying like you're like I think that's the realm where I see your passion and I definitely think that it came from the fact that as architects we're so used to waiting for someone else to ask us to do something to the point where we're almost unable to do anything out of our own energy right so and we just because of we did a kind of very significant study for Mars I just showed the tip of the iceberg we did an even more in-depth study for a potential lunar base so we did a study for floating cities with the United Nations so we've looked into a lot of this kind of more and more complex thinking and we began to feel a little bit that why why does the discourse around climate change remain so you know like even the people that are supposed to be the activists all they do is in a way complain about the inaction and there's a limit to how much you can march yourself out of the problem like you can demonstrate you can make a lot of billboards and you can walk all the way to the White House and back again but what we really need is like you know a kind of blueprint or a kind of project schedule or something like so we were just beginning to think because we do I do feel in a way what I tried to show by starting with Noma and ending with the whole planet is that of course the level of detail diminishes except there's the level of complexity but one does not rule out the other so the idea is that just like in nature at the macro level and the micro level there's almost an equal amount of complexity the system of rivers and the nervous system and the distribution of water and the branches of leaf you can see like so but the ability to apply yourself at either scale and I think like you're saying master plan has been this forbidden thing because there's a lot of examples because often it becomes this kind of unifying aesthetic that has been applied at the wrong scale so it's not really understanding systems or complexities of relationships or flows but superimposing a kind of universal aesthetic and that's that's not at all we're trying to really understand the ecosystem that we've inherited and try to see if we can in a way deal with it like because you can apply architectural thinking at the scale of a piece of furniture, a restaurant a city block, a city why not a planet no I think you're making that clear and I think you're making a clear case for architectural thinking both it's pros and it's cons I think what it puts forth and what it leaves behind and what it can handle and it's also interesting to note that today the level of urbanization that is occurring in places like China and the Middle East etc are part of the problem with climate change the rapid urbanization that many of the master plans are enabling is also so I don't really I guess my only question or my only concern let's say would be that I'd be curious what Greta Thunberg would think about your master planet you know or in terms of I think I find it very difficult today to be engaged as an architect as if we are operating in a kind of political void in this moment and so that's what I find interesting actually we've been having some conversations about this I rarely declare any kind of political affinity but I find that I am often much more in the middle than many of my friends and definitely much more in the middle than the political landscape right now which is so you know fragmented and one of the things that I I'm not asking for your your personal politics I'm saying I'm actually going to do it because you're looking at a lot of the plans that you're looking at a lot of the large scale infrastructural plans that you're looking at were the result of a certain political there's certain scale I think the interesting thing is you can't fantasize about that level of architectural empowerment without you know at least acknowledging that they are the result of a certain political context what you find is that on the political spectrum when you go towards the extreme hello hello yes hello are you interrupting who is that testing God is testing one two no I just want to say like the more you go on the political extremes on the extreme left or the extreme right or not extreme but like the further the more you are deliberately not including the other viewpoint and I think one of the things climate change cannot be solved with governments only and it cannot be solved with companies only and I think if I would declare myself anything it would be social liberal because you cannot have the collective at the expense of the individual but you can also not have the individual at the expense of the collective you somehow have to find the greatest possible freedom but also the greatest possible care and I think what we are finding is that this kind of space in the middle the pragmatic utopian where sometimes you agree with one wing sometimes you agree with the other wing but eventually that's so you can call it like that's sort of the radical middle because I think that's what the world needs is a lot of different skill sets a lot of different capacities for action coming together and I think by having by having a master plan by having blueprints you can get masons and carpenters and craftsmen to build a cathedral but if you don't have the master plan how are they how are we and the slaves you also need the slaves I don't think cathedrals were built by slaves I don't think they had the level of standard of living that Singapore has I'm not asking for your all I'm saying is that I think it would make I think that it would be without John Lennon as a slide the master plan doesn't work you need it to insert John Lennon that I think as architects we can project and I think we can project more than form we can also situate our architectural desires we're imagining also societies you of all people and I think that I miss that dimension which I know you have and you bring in your project so the kind of narrative that you brought to the restaurant the relationship to the chef the relationship to the food the kind of subject of your architecture I think could inhabit your larger work and that would make it stronger that's all I miss that scale of humanity that we find in your restaurant again it's like you can't talk about the planet you can't get lost in the journey of the bricks all you need is John Lennon all you need is to show the slide of John Lennon that's all you need there you go we can open it up great lecture I have two questions the first one is for the Mars project are you guys actually looking at science fictions like martial chronicles for inspirations the second question is I can't help but notice that the way you set up your project is really similar to reminds me a lot of SML Excel and my question is do you think and the smaller project the more architectural projects like the skills that they require is quite different from the more master planet projects where there's more imaginations or there's more that's involved and I was wondering if you think architects and design thinkers eventually are going to be two different professions and how are they joined together and what's your thoughts just in general on that topic I think in a way that I have this kind of when I was younger I had a kind of arrogance about how you could that I believe that you could think your way to everything and I think one of the things I learned when I went to intern at OMA in the beginning it kind of annoyed me that there was so much work going on without a lot of thought I felt because I had somehow imagined that OMA would be all these kind of very coherent very intellectual people that would be sort of discussing and then once the idea had fully formed they would make it and instead I remember I was almost shocked that one person came from Eisenmann's office and one person came from Foster's office and I was like what the fuck are you doing at OMA I wanted to work for Frank Gehry actually so you know it was not at all what I had expected because I had expected everybody to maybe be like me I don't know and then the work started happening and there was no discourse there was all kinds of random this and that and blah blah and through the kind of sheer massive production of material the possibility of discovering something more and more meaningful and gradually a kind of discourse could mature out of it and I think in that sense you need both halves of the brain the analytical and the kind of experimental the kind of action and the reaction but therefore I also think that you can empower because it's a constant feedback loop so you can really empower the kind of tactile, sensual sensitive refineries with clear thinking and you can empower scientific analysis with kind of tactile, sensual, experimental kind of longings so I think that the pragmatic and the creative and the analytical comes together and I think maybe that's what we can offer so in that sense I don't think that it's necessarily different fields of course at the end of the day you need to have a certain amount of knowledge and I think one of the luxuries that I think is true in a lot of our projects is that we've been capable of working with arguably the best or some of the best chefs in the world to imagine a restaurant to some of the best watchmakers in the world to imagine Museum of Watchmaking some of the best sort of energy engineers some of the best sort of automotive manufacturers so I think the fact that we have access to people with very high degrees of knowledge and I think we've developed a kind of way to interview them and extract some of their knowledge and make it concrete in ways that we can use it I think that works at all scales so in that sense there is a kind of inquisitive part of being an architect is to translate this kind of highly specific knowledge into something that can be put into action in the physical world just to go back kind of to this idea of utopia and dystopia thank you for a very inspiring lecture and you presented a series of projects, a very successful project all realized in cities of the global north and then you move on to this like master of the planet ideal that assumes kind of a best case scenario in every aspect of the project as are we assuming it right? well I mean in order for it to be successful all of the elements of the puzzle need to fall into place a certain way and I'm just curious if in doing this research and developing these projects you think and also analyze the worst case scenario and whether you take into account the realities of as Dean Amal was saying of maybe other systems of governance and other cities and other countries of the global south that maybe do things differently and how do you see those two meeting to produce this master planet? Yes maybe I start here and then I get back I mean thank you for almost blaming me for working so much in the global north because I learned recently from a trip in South America that you're not supposed to work in South America or specifically Brazil which I of course disagree with severely and and of course it is true that most of the build work we have done has been in the global north it's also where I'm from and it's where our offices are located the most southern is Barcelona but I have to say that after having traveled in South America the last three weeks I'm incredibly eager to get to work in the global south and and and I think I think we have to find ways and I think maybe this ties a little bit into what you were saying over there like I think the kind of possibility and responsibility that comes with the kind of creative platform we have now and I think the capacities we have is that we can maybe begin to engage in situations that would be difficult if not impossible for us to navigate previously and I think we are slowly taking taking that on and I think I really believe in Gandhi's kind of statement that you should be the change you want to see in the world because of course you can't but because you're not the president of the United States or the general secretary of the United Nations but you can make sure that what you do makes that little difference and that's how Rome was built, a break by break and of course I think one of the things that we have found as we've evolved as a practice is that I think somehow we have accumulated insights and experiences and knowledge and of course a lot of our projects have failed monumentally recently it has been announced that Larry Silverstein that wants to build the original foster design not our two world trade center so but that's like it's so business as usual in a way for an architect and of course that project kind of died in my mind probably four years ago when James Murdoch's dad and brother decided not to build his brain child the same James Murdoch openly criticizing the family and the Fox network for denying climate change but so in that sense the good news is that all of those failed attempts and stranded projects have accumulated a lot of insight and a lot of knowledge that I think makes us increasingly capable of taking more and more complex challenges that would have been unimaginable a decade ago and that's also why we have the mildly megalomaniac idea of at least attempting to start this kind of research saying what if we apply architectural thinking at the scale of the planet looking at the kind of human because like if anyone can do it you can do it so you should do it you should just take it on and you built the the ski you did it so you can do it you can do it okay thank you