 Good evening everyone. I am Caroline Bowman, director of Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and I have to say this podium Thank you always reminds me of my seventh grade flute lessons every time I come up here. So it's a nice. It's a nice memory Cooper Hewitt's purpose is to inspire Educate and empower people through design. We do this through exhibitions online content education programs and the National Design Awards Design talks Generously supported by the Adobe Foundation is a series promoting dialogue about current issues in design and a chance for us to highlight great Practitioners working in design today like the 2013 design National Design Award winners Next month we will welcome landscape architect Margie Rudick and Jeanette Saudi Khan talking about the repurposing of the urban landscape And in May we will speak with interior architecture firm Aitlin darling design about their work and philosophy Check our website for more information By the way tonight's talk is being webcast live and will be available on our website after the event as Many of you know Cooper Hewitt is undergoing the most ambitious renovation in our history Expanding gallery space by 60 percent Restoring historic features and upgrading all of our facilities. We are taking this chance to renew every millimeter of the mansion Frankly, this is the opportunity of a lifetime for the museum and also the reason for the three years that you all have to wait for the new experience and Please I encourage you to sign up online on the Cooper Hewitt website and you will be the first to know the actual opening day We are aiming for late 2014 but at this point in time. I can't be more precise But look forward to welcoming you welcoming you all back We're collaborating with eight different design teams to realize this vision Including Diller's graffiti on Renfrow and think design on our exhibitions as well as local projects on our media In order to make design stories come alive and transform the visitor all of you from an observer to a participant Tonight we are delighted to welcome two National Design Award winners design mind award winner Michael Sorkin and lifetime achievement winner James Wines Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design criticism and teaching He is the principal of Michael Sorkin studio in New York President of Terraform a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and intervention in issues of urban morphology sustainability and equity distinguished professor of architecture and the director of the graduate urban design program at the City College of New York and President of the Institute for Urban Design He is the author and editor of numerous books including variations on a theme park 20 minutes in Manhattan and all over the map James Wines is founder and president of site a New York based architectural studio studio chartered in 1970 Wines develops site specific structures that engage information about the environment He has designed over a hundred and fifty projects for private and municipal clients in eleven countries Wines is a professor of architecture at Pennsylvania State University and author of several books including D architecture and green architecture So a little bit about the format both Michael and James will speak a little bit about their projects And then I will join them both for a conversation and as usual for our design talks They are titled design talks for a reason we want to have a discussion with all of you and welcome all of your questions So, thank you very much Thank You Caroline it's it's lovely to be here So I the drill is that we're each gonna speak about 20 minutes about our projects and then we're gonna mix it up With each other and with the audience. I should say parenthetically that um, but I'm speaking for my friend James And I were we're deeply honored to receive this award and we have been nominating each other For this prize for about 20 years and finally finally it came through in the same season which which only deepens the honor So as Caroline said the principal object of my own research practice Is the city and urbanization? We're in a very serious way in in terms of the development of cities The urban population of the planet is growing at the rate of about one million people every week In China the expectation is that something like the equivalent of the entire Population of the United States is going to be urbanized in the next 10 years At the moment half the planet lives in cities 85% of people in the developed world live in that condition and the percentage is only rising on the other hand Half of the people who live in cities around the world live in slums presently And it's impossible I think to talk about cities without talking about the nature of the distribution of the global economy Maybe you read the statistic last week that the top the the richest 85 people in the world Have wealth equivalent to the bottom 3.5 billion people This is something that reproduces itself in cities and for those who were concerned with sustainability and with equity Obviously the cities are one of the primal scenes for working out the way in which we will find strategies for equality and justice I am interested in the city both because of its intrinsic fascinations because of the nature of cities as Artistic in social spaces and also because the solutions that we currently possess for enlarging our cities are not working out very well sprawl mega cities informality Despite certain virtues are not at the end of the day the solution indeed if you Consider this statistic about the addition of a million people every week That suggests to me that it isn't enough simply to enlarge our cities We really do need new cities and that's something that we are about and I'm going to show you some examples of new cities What one of the problems that I imagine this will come up in the discussion is that? The idea of building cities from scratches in many ways a forbidden topic a forbidden discourse We we all are sort of enthralled of the idea that utopia is Invariably come to a bad end that any totalizing idea about the nature of urban or social organization Has as its omega-point Auschwitz I Disagree I think that we cannot put this consideration or these fantasies on the index indeed that visions of harmonious well-functioning cities that comprehend large numbers of people on are an obligation for for urban and architectural thought and the problem for such thinking Is how to prevent these from being totalizing places? Indeed how to make cities in an era in which the pressures of the multinational culture and economy Militate for something very different how we can make cities newly that both respect and inculcate difference some examples from You would think that something with one button would not be difficult, huh? I'm not meant to see it over here Just to cheat a little bit so I I can speak to the slides Maybe we could turn down these lines. This is pretty relentless. Is there a way of dimming the lights a little bit? Okay Yeah We are recording it I Will hold the phallus in my left hand and This 1994 I I see that there is a certain grayness of hair in this audience So that many of you probably remember that 1994 was the year of the first Gulf War when we triumph when we kick the ass of Saddam Hussein And recaptured Kuwait and after the war was over My office is right over here There was a victory parade on Broadway, maybe some of you went and Oh, hi, Bill We decided we'd go see this victory. It was great. It was a great parade, you know Row after row of incredibly buff young people in those natty desert uniforms Rainbow of diversity and they were walking up Broadway until they got to Canal Street And they dispersed and our thought was ah what a waste this is it wouldn't it be great if instead of dispersing they just kept walking up Broadway until they got to Harlem or the South Bronx and put their skills and resources to some actual good use building schools remediating the environment teaching literacy providing medical care and You know these were the years when we thought at the end of the Cold War there was going to be this so-called peace benefit or peace dividend And we were casting around for a good way to spend this cash And we thought what better project for the military than to build new cities million a week We need plenty of them. They have the territory. They have the money. They have the resources. They have the kind of cultural Connections so we decided we'd design a city on a military base and we picked This site in weed our we called it weed. It's actually south of Yuma, Arizona where the U.S. Army Desert Warfare testing installation is you know, that's where they practiced for the invasion of Iraq and decided to make There we are so we decided we'd make a city This is the Jumpy, I know agility Oh artificial waterway part of the lower Colorado River where there is an existing Irrigated agriculture so this is this is the city of weed, Arizona there. You can see the site plan And here is another version of the site plan For those of you old enough to remember this is a drawing done with the zippitone So what what's going on here is that each each of the zippitone circles represents a neighborhood And there's a lot of kind of motherhood in this project each each neighborhood is Calibrated to a ten minute walk from center to radius, you know This is this is a convenient walking distance And we have a fantasy of neighborhood that reappears in all of our work Which is the neighborhood to be understood is that place in which you conduct all the business of your daily life within a walk From where you live so it contains Workplaces and culture and commercial activities and recreational activities and so on and so on and so on so weed is like all of our Cities a city without cars There's a model of weed, Arizona, and there's a there's a drawing of weed weed, Arizona One of the virtues of the good city. I have always felt is that it permits you to get lost So this is a city designed with a certain amount of inbred confusion I think that the production of accidents is one of the things that cities do brilliantly And that accidents are one of and I don't want to make this point too elaborately But accidents are one of the conduits of democracy because they keep producing new choices Of course, we want to have more happy accidents You know, it's it's it's better to meet a friend than your ex-wife or be struck by a Mack truck Nevertheless this kind of randomization of encounter is something that great cities do very well so here is a piece of weed, Arizona and These these drawings are dimensional. I mean that this is important So what one of the arguments to be made about the city in in our practice is that? It's possible to design a city without knowing exactly what uses are going to take place So this is a city that has a kind of idea of the architectural stem cell or loft so as I say you can get pretty far designing a city without knowing uses because I will get to sustainability eventually but The the the basics of sustainable design have to do with orientation and ventilation so and We know that cross ventilation requires a certain Dimension we know that the human body comes in a fairly narrow range of types And we know that the Sun pretty much follows a predictable path every day of the year So this is that this is a drawing that's about a set of differences and about a set of dimensions So for example all that green stuff. I can't tell you exactly what it is But I can tell you that the different shades of green represent the potential of different kinds of uses, you know Garden plots arose rose gardens by remediation zones Playgrounds whatever it is. So this this is a kind of map of differences in the city that includes the dimensional I The loft is also the prototype. So I give you a little exorcist about the loft You know the lofts in Soho. He lives in one This is a kind of bow ideal for life in New York City And you know, you all know the history of the lofts were originally industrial buildings in general They have party walls on two sides You know good light on the front and a little bit of light on an air shaft in the back So they work great if everybody's sitting in the one room, you know sewing garments or making action paintings a little less so when the the painters begin to breed and you know Sibyl and Hamunculus come along and they have to divide it up into little rooms So there are two fantasies of the loft what one which is the one that was kind of regnant when I was in school Was this idea of the big? Empty space, you know awaiting the intervention of the user These places never worked. The other of course is the Soho type But we like the idea of the the malleability of the loft but the proposition in weed is that rather than being spaces of undifferentiated Potential the character of the loft is more resistant So it's an aggregation of smaller spaces rather than a subdivision of big spaces. So here's another play Here's a little round neighborhood again, you know when you're starting out on a project You have to sometimes talk a little bit primitively so forgive the childlike languages But but there's a round neighborhood and there's a soccer pitch for scale And there's some tennis courts play people are doing well in weed, Arizona Model of that place. Here's a section So, you know, I said that you can begin to dimension buildings in plan without necessarily knowing their use because you know something about The size of the body and its requirements comfortable speaking distances the nature of ventilation where the Sun is This also applies to the section of buildings or the elevation of buildings And for those of you who read my book somebody was referring to it the one about in my apartment on Waverly Place You know, I lived for 26 years and this fifth floor walk-up and I can tell you frankly that after 26 years of rigorous empirical research That's about the limit For middle-aged Americans to climb stairs on a regular basis So that a city that is body-based, which is what we're about and which is what? Sustainability sustainable culture is about will perforce tend to be low We also know that lonas, you know, the city that's five or six or seven stories high Is not necessarily a deterrent to density, which is also an important value. So weed, Arizona is a lowish Dance confusing radically mixed city, of course everything is not equal So of course there have to be places where there are special things going on. So this is the Effectively the Piazza Navona of weed, Arizona Where you can see there are a series of theaters around around this public space. This is the Broadway of weed, Arizona Here's another here's another primitive language. Here's another place in weed, Arizona Well, one of the issues for the city of the future, you know, if we arrive at the point where we get over zoning on the basis of Isolating obnoxious uses or obnoxious people from each other and anything is truly compatible Which is the promise of the Democratic post-industrial city Then I think one of the the problems we'll have to deal with I was speaking to my students about this today Is that some things are bigger than other things? So if the if the second drawing in this series We're here you'd see that these buildings would were quite long So this is this is a part of weed, Arizona where we studied, you know, bowling alleys factories Hospitals things that are perforce larger than that stem cell that incremental stem cell Here's another another public place in weed, Arizona You can see that it's organized around these spines which go from the edge of town down to the water and I think we're about to leave the town of weed, Arizona and let me say You know the the problem with utopianism is that it has a kind of pretense to universality That's the danger is that we become enmeshed in a system you know like like the low interpretation of communism or a certain substrate of American Democratic ideals in which the the the notion of society is to reproduce self-similar citizens a universal subject, you know now now we're sort of over that So now we're interested I think in cities as I said before that can do difference and one of the ways that that's going to happen is that Cities themselves will be quite quite different and so so it's my feeling among other things that that you know given the homogenizing impact of globalized culture One of the things that will distinguish cities in the future, you know You travel the world This is a bromide and you say the same buildings in the same star architects in the same Starbucks and Is that artistic differences in the design of cities become particularly important? So That is to say that Two two weed Arizonas would probably be a nightmare, but maybe one would be okay I'm gonna skip this project because I'm this this is I'm this is just to show you that you can do a You know a kind of straight project using the same principles as weed Arizona So I quickly go by this town this city of four hundred thousand that we won a competition to design in China I'm just gonna breeze through James will talk about the ecological footprint. Yes But but you know here here is the way in which we begin to apply it in cities that have a reality is that I'm We we are in you know the I'll show you one last project, which is about thinking about urban self-sufficiency So we are always asking ourselves in any project How it takes responsibility for its planetary role and in this particular city We we articulate this in terms of eight harmonies Aaron climate food building energy movement water waste and biodiversity and we set benchmarks For the autonomy of these places and try to push it to the limit. So this one is You know does much better than a conventional city Yeah, and here it is, I mean again you can see that it's it's about Density centers a gradient away from the the middle of the city to this series of beautiful lakes Hydrology is destiny. So one of the things we preach is that no water enters this these lakes that isn't cleaner than what's already there Again, these are somewhat conventional Views of a city, but it does embody the same principles Of diversity and sustainability that we hope were manifest in weed You know, of course you have to do those horrible drawings in order to impress the Chinese client, but So yeah, this is the portofino of Wuhan And I conclude by very quickly running through this project As Caroline mentioned my studio is divided in half We had this theory a few years ago that we'd have a non-profit happen a for profit half And there would be a kind of cross subsidy. Well, that didn't exactly work out But we still have both offices and the one called terraform has been doing this research project for now six years In which we are investigating the limits of self-sufficiency in New York City And we are speculating that it is possible for New York City to be entirely Self-sufficient in everything Within its political boundaries so that it's ecological footprint and its political footprint are effectively Co-terminus and we've Divided it up into those same areas as the eight harmonies and have been mainly working We've finished the first volume which is about food any charitable donors in the room We are would like to subsidize the next seven values con so You run scenarios, right? We it's it's self-evident that it's much easier to shrink the food the food print of New York City I mean if everybody becomes a vegan then if you continue to eat cows Here's here's another one of those on bromides that people take Uncritically which is food miles are not necessarily the be all and end all of sustainability calculations because in fact There's less embodied energy in an apple that comes from New Zealand in a ship like this Then one that comes from upstate in a truck like this So you know one has to be a little bit critical We inventoried all the available spaces in New York where food production might take place This is a kind of conclusion about the neighborhood basis And then we looked at all the sites where food might be grown in order to begin to do our calculation So the facades of buildings They're you know in the post-automotive city. We don't need to devote all of the streets to everything Here we can have small greenhouses and production units downtown Amsterdam Avenue, of course will be you know all rhubarb and public transportation Before long little buildings can begin to appear among little buildings one can grow You know on the rooftop on the windowsill in the hallway here is a bigger vertical five This is the kind of the cynic one on of urban agriculture the vertical farm So here is one this this building the calculation here is it's a block square 30 stories high Feeds 12,000 people 2200 calories a day But but it's crazy You know and how do you how do you organize this and how do you keep Monsanto from taking over anything this large? Yeah, we continue to speculate. You know maybe the farmers market at the bottom helps You know the the we leverage other parts of the investigations of here You can see the building the subway that runs below has been refitted for the distribution of freight That's you know part of the transportation volume and we did various experiments with vertical farms of one sort or another Here's the one that for your chickens Not in my backyard. Thank you very much And here's one over the Long Island railroad I mean there's plenty once you admit that you're gonna go this way. There's plenty of space but We did a few calculations and we realized that the space was not the issue I mean that's the point of the study is to look for the sweet spots and the the probabilities energy was the issue and that if you take into account the amount of energy required for heating for lighting embodied in the construction that in order to have enough vertical farms to feed everybody in New York what a beautiful romantic idea 25 nuclear power plants would be required to to power to power the thing up which Needless to say we decided was a little bit contrary to the spirit of the exercise So we got on to the next speculation. I'm gonna finish with this Which which was you know early on Before we knew very much we thought maybe the way to do this is a what we call they figure ground switch Right. We're getting rid of the cars. The streets are available. What if the buildings moved into the street, you know As as on the right and the blocks became available for farms, you know and other public use as well Not a bad idea, but if you could grow 2% of the food supply of New York with this this switch You'd be lucky. So we began to look for a sweet spot And we took some blocks in sunny side to to investigate them So what is held constant is the population, you know, nobody is displaced everybody who lives there so here is a Kind of pure figure ground switch here is the figure ground switch with enough vertical Agriculture to feed everybody on the site and it looks like that. So another nightmare comes down down the pike You know, it's a little Cowlunish sexy, but still it's casting shadows the apartments on the lower floors are no good the tomatoes and the On the 15th floor get no sun So we went to 30% which worked out. We thought pretty well Which allowed us to then consider what the new art and what the new urban architecture would be like with a figure ground switch 30% food production and a general spirit of sustainability. So that's you know, kind of high modernist block Interior, you know with the vertical farm on the left. We'd have to build some one or two high-rise buildings And then that's what the street would be like, you know compressed Islamic medieval in flavor cars largely gone and just on the other side of those buildings would be that open So the investigation of the technology of growing food led us to this architectural invention which we think is some reasonably tasty and as the sun sets slowly over the Hudson River We see a few diagrams of the way in which neighborhoods might be organized for a high degree of autonomy And the way in which New York City might look a few years from now When that guy is in power Okay My first image where's that little clicker? Oh, and I just pointed there Okay And what anyway following Michael Sorkin It's definitely a hard act Because almost anything you say sounds hopelessly inarticulate and I will try First of all, I I want to thank the National Design Awards for this honor And one thing I thought I should probably do tonight since I got it for sort of lifetime achievement is Do a little ancient history and then kind of bring it up to the present Basically, I want to talk about because I knew that Michael would give the macrocosmic view of urban planning also the global view Site has done a few things actually we want a urban design project in Beijing a few years ago So we have had experience in looking at the larger picture But Michael is far more an expert at that so what I thought I would look at tonight is the microcosmic this is the stuff under your feet and I thought it was I'm hoping that Caroline will Maybe you know because it's hard to ram Urban design into, you know 20 minutes is the mega subject of the 21st century And virtually every city in the world is concerned with it not only the big scale But the small scale and the street scale as well I hope that maybe one of the first events at the new Cooper-Hue it will be a maybe a week or at least a weekend on the larger picture of Designing cities and their problems and issues. All right, let me plunge on because it's gonna be a marathon I have images, but I'm gonna go through it high speed As Michael did just to give you sort of a general overview, but as I said Rather than talk about the the larger things. I'll talk about the smaller things Unfortunately the way the world is going there are paradigms that just persist And this this density of high buildings and very little regard for public space Of course, everybody blames Corbou for the Bois-en-Plan these vast sweeps of concrete and little puffballs and vegetation and massive phallic towers And that seems to be part of me. There's this thing this higher and higher tower thing is getting to me It seems to be there's there's some sort of complex among architects for Higher erections or something like that. I don't know what the what the motivation is But at any rate it goes on all over the world. There's not a place on the planet that isn't using this taller and higher building and What really gets lost in the shuffle is a space on the ground and Public space I call it the old new relentlessness. This is this type of public space is model or or Archetype the slab and the box benches has been going on for almost a hundred years now It's sort of what they do with leftover space So after the building the big event is established and there's the leftover space and it goes on New York City is the same place I like this quite way Jane Jacobs the pseudo science of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success and obviously there's you know Huge successes that we can draw. I just got back from Italy and the entire country from one end to the other is You know success in the public domain, but we don't seem to do it Bloomberg during his reign had you know plans for New York but it did manifest itself mostly in sort of plop art and lollipop trees and You know slag again slabs of concrete and grass which from a you know green Perspective you know have vast acreages of grass and if you like to lie on or not the best thing for the environment Well, I went back to Karbu and back to that vision. It has prevailed and it's also prevailed in bankrupt cities like like Detroit and try and our tragic, you know site of the World Trade Center Ironically only a few years before 9-11. There was an article in New York magazine I think the trade center was on the cover is the most hated buildings and public space in New York where the trade center towers so Here it is manifested and of course they you know, here's the the plop art Situation and he look in this case it even frightened small children look at that poor kid running in terror from from art and and we seem to be You know continuing this tradition. This is the the former condition and we seem to be imitating good again again You know saying that that radio tower on top makes it one of the tallest buildings in the world So again, there's that aspiration Whereas, you know almost everything being designed these days, especially about it the Overtly sculptural architect leaves you can see at the foot of the building is always People are little ants running around on pavement and that's you know, basically the art is a big event It's architecture as sculpture has prevailed for quite a while Karbu is probably blamed for it And probably this building by the way my view is the greatest masterpiece of architecture of sculpture But formerly, you know sculpture was applied it was a it was a iconography applied to the building to enhance it and In the hands of caboose the whole building became a sculpture itself and that idea has prevailed throughout constructivism, which is of course our biggest influence today from the past and Manik Charnikov and Melnikov and all the constructivist visions really dominate architecture today You can certainly see in this panorama of star architects Now they have bothers me basically about one thing that bothers me a little bit about the star architects I came from sculpture and Basically these kinds of forms this kind of organic or or an industrial form Starting about 1910. I mean the strategies of formalism were very well worked out by sculptors a long time ago up until the 1950s so you have on one hand you have the technologically based sculpture and the other hand you have the Organic kinds of sculptures and that has prevailed as an influence at the foundations of architect who was called object thinking which is again this problem of You know what I call pedestal architecture this pedestal art which should not be outside And there's pedestal architecture which sometimes shouldn't be outside it and it was celebrated in 1979 with the cover of Time Magazine US architects doing their own thing in the AT&T building and The relationship between sculpture on a base and the ATT building are essentially the same. It's the same attitude the same sensibility prevails in this situation and Even when you have a great building like the Seagram building it's just still the concrete slab Which is then you know decorated with what I put two phrases into the language plop art and the turd in the plaza and There's always the turd in the plaza. There's it if you have absolutely no imagination whatsoever It's a Henry Moore because that was prevailing icon of sculpture And then there's the the potted tree or the lollipop tree and you see it still prevails up to the president in New York I mean our streets are still full of this kind of stuff Well, anyway, this is just an image of dull cliches and sometimes for my students, I like to do integrated projects where they're Fusing architecture with the space around it or with the environment in some way So I show them the slide that before we even start the course and say look We're gonna talk about integrative thinking and if I see anything on your drawing board Or your computer desktop that looks like anything in this picture. You're gonna fail the course Well, I mean, you know, they're their faces, you know Blood drains out of their faces and they're they live in terror because these are the only seemingly only available cliches that would populate public space Obviously historically there are a little more imaginative So here, you know, we certainly all know that typically fountains, but I mean this is our equivalent New York It always looks a little to me like kind of guilty urination of some kind or something, but at any rate Again, this is unfair. I realized the budgets were bigger and the culture was far more flamboyant But it is still masterful articulation space it for Nikola Salvi to take the Poli Palace and fuse it with a landscape or a few Actually a simulated Landscape and then to bring in this month Bring in this kind of articulation of the total space so that this is a magnet for people interaction You know, it's hundreds of things to sit on the scale of the surrounding Articulation of buildings is correct and you can see the vast difference and it's just a sensibility between What prevailed at that time and what's prevailing in California? This is the embargo Darrell Space recently designed Anyway, one thing about public space is the value of what I call consensus iconography, which we don't have anymore historically obviously the those who created Venice and and Sienna and shard and so forth Were had, you know a language a public language either civic language or religious language Through which they could communicate these big ideas So is in a way much easier now. We we don't really have this anymore the reason these spaces and the and the Interface between Horizontal and vertical work so much better is you can read them so much better the classical traditions the Roman Greco-Roman traditions all of these things that informed the Renaissance and so forth and even even to some extent Olmsted who certainly borrowed from the from the Renaissance in the 19th century and can again make successful public space Well, this is a statement I don't know somewhere on my right is lacking the benefits of Consensus iconography contemporary architects, landscape designers and planners must develop a communicative public imagery based on Understanding people's collective unconscious now. That's very difficult sounds like you're really going to the shrink here Before you can design a public space, but it is a problem because we do not have universal or consensus iconography we do have social interaction and this Capacity to answer people's need to see and be seen Clearly, there's a vast difference in being seen at that fountain in New York And I think we need a lot more of that kind of activity in our streets of New York as you can see there And I think it's Switzerland Switzerland, excuse me. Anyway context is important Response to social psychological cultural geologic and the heart of cultural elements This is all in a sense kind of under our feet So I'm going to show you some of the work of sight a little bit history and then rushed a few recent things and just kind of Speed forward to get this try to get this in 20 minutes This just gives you a little bit of a texture of our work in general The look of the things we do one of the earliest project was really to revolt against the turd the Plaza Which was the ghost parking lot where we asked faulted over a parking lot full of cars This there's a tactic a Tracted world attention even as it was being done It was interesting and I think simply because it was a perverse activity But it was also an inversion of situation which is a way of you know getting Public space to do something that doesn't ordinarily do For example in New York you basically have only three choices of seating you have The little cafe table with a chair you have a cement block or you have the park bench At the bottom here in Italy. There's hundreds of Imaginative choices of public space you sit on the side of a building as in Siena you can sit in the middle of the street You can sit on ledges you can sit on fountains You can sit on stairways in other words someone has applied real imagination to the seating process We really need more of this I mean this is this is the my idea that even an inversion of situation creates us Opportunity to for people to invent their own games you have to give them sort of what I call trigger elements to help them invent This is another word at this period where we're doing you know lots of things to somehow with cars This was a major public space in in Vancouver, Canada That articulated the distance between the Vancouver Harbor and they went up and broke off Under the under the highways and to link the city But it was encrusted with an entire history of 20th century transportation all monochrome So that in a sense to create a sort of ironic relationship between the future and the past and the fact that maybe all of this kind of Gas consuming stuff is obsolete But anyway, what it did do by being monochrome and forming a background It gave people the interaction and the color variety of people It gave them a presence so they could understand not only the background what's under their feet But they could also you know enjoy the experience so it really brought up this this issue of physical participation and Then it then this idea of that prosthetic approach in architecture where people interaction with body movement become a Trinsic part of the completed work similar to staging with theatrical performance And that's really part of the role of the public space designer You know you can do spectacular things with engineering as we did here But it also you can do fun things like you know have police cars go under water at high tide or or Or you know land vehicles in water where you're really and then this became a great place for for public performance So quite a number of performance artists that utilize it and then it looked good without people as well So these are the kinds of thoughts that I would like to put these subliminally accepted archetype and this is something we started with just to go back briefly in history which is you know things on highways there's a certain archetype for the for the for the bank and for the skyscraper for the Colonial house and the farmhouse and the Fast-food rest and the and the supermarket. So one of our early clients was a big art collector who owns supermarkets and was being criticized for the boxes and They're all articulated the same that the same passage of cars the same signage the same attitudes bigger signs brighter colors and You have somebody like your target You know in the 80s trying to you know use kind of pomo Decor which cost a lot of money and without very little impact actually their their their logo is the best thing that they did Well, anyway, we did a series of buildings which are totally the inversion of the big box It was really taking this idea Well three things architecture is a subject matter for art rather than a design process The building as a critique of architecture itself So your actual physical building is in fact an inversion or critique of architecture and then placing public artwork people least expect to find it And so that became the premise for all of the early works, which are very controversial if you read history You know that these were enormously controversial We get published in architecture magazines in the next issue would always have Cancel my subscription from dozens of architects So but anyway, we really worked for this was another kind of public space. This is drive by space So we're really dealing with the junk world. It's a world where no art self-respecting Harvard graduate would ever deal with it You know, you're in the junk world of America, but that's it's like Picasso said, you know about collage You know, it's the it's the you don't make art out of the Parthenon You make art out of the debris under your feet So this is definitely the debris under the feet and we did cut-throughs and cut-ups and and and this was a inside outside where Instead of just the conventional racking of objects in the store. They really went through a thermal barrier So on the outside they became ghosted objects All cast by a brilliant sculpture by the way and then the inside they were the the real objects So there was this transition between the real and the ghost world again an inversion of situation that Became this is when we really started getting more into the public domain with this It's quite different from the Pompey to a center, which is really a formalist endeavor which seems to be in fact Inside and outside and this was really just You know charging through the walls and opening up, you know, and whatever got in our got in the way That was doing an inside-out scene relationship So basically what site did was instead of doing an architecture form space and structure We got an idea attitude and context and I wanted to read this just Briefly because it's the first really well understood description of our work and it only appeared a few years ago There is an architecture invention created by James Wines of site that fascinates me it consists in designing architecture It is expected to be yet this paradigm is Paradigm is being corrupted is being frozen corrupted and dramatized in a way that cannot be ignored and therefore Questions this paradigm this technique is a perfect architectural adaptation of what the situation is we're calling detourmant a form of Knowledgement that resistance towards establishment can only be accomplished by the same establishments weapons and pictorial objects And therefore the hijacking of those weapons in order to flip them backward for the system of production It's taken a long time for this to come out but I just found it found it a few weeks ago and it does explain again as we got into the more into the environment in a Rolling parking lots over buildings Engaging things and then this response to context and some of the buildings the first buildings were you know There's a forest and so we built the building around the forest and I was engulfing the forest by the building Therefore preserving the trees well This is when we really found out all those trees and all that shade cut down the use of Energy in the summer months you know about 15 or 20 percent so obviously something was happening It also gave a nice inside outside relationship This was of the best buildings This was the one that they sold the most products of people would have lunch there Then they remember something they forgotten go back and buy more this was above ground and below ground I want to get bored with you know the landscape architects who decorate the surface this the whole geology of the hillside Came with it. This is a similar one in Florida where we would preserve the forests of the trees Put them back into the building as a rainforest and here's where we found out that water has a molecular attraction to glass You can recycle the water over and over and over again and cool the building Dramatically by just a sheet of water with no evaporation. So it's a very good from that This is where we really began to get into environmental issues then I wrote a book compared to 2000 and this really got Me into this idea that the age of industry and technology was about 1980 1885 to about 1955 and now we're really in the age of information and ecology and the iconography and everything should look There should be a response to this context This is a project in Seville, which is again engulfed in water. It was it was about a half a kilometer long Water wall it was like the aquatic of their river and completely engulfed in vegetation on the other side so it was water and vegetation going back and forth and Under the whole arcades there. It was at least 25 degrees cooler in the summer in Seville So it really really worked very very well, and you're using totally plant life and Vegetation and it also had people pockets. That's another thing we lack in New York It's when I call these people pockets where you could sit and face people integrate talk to people have fun Have conversation deal and you're dealing with the whole all the senses in our condition intellect sight sound touch and so forth So you have to have all of these things together including water, which is of course in major attraction Regional identity we did the waterfront of Chattanooga. This is what it looked when it got there It was a complete wreck. It was a it was a brownfield site It was this is it and then they put a aquarium there And then they said well it doesn't look very much like the Tennessee River to us So we got a call and say wow James coming down and let's put some vegetation there You know there's plants and trees I think we were asked but we have designed a whole project that grew completely out of the paving. It's an idea That's very prevalent now. I they've also used this idea on the high line as well where things Emerge from the paving and there was an old canal there Which we opened up and used as a river down the middle and then had bridges across as an amphitheater in the back All vegetated it makes a nice thing You know you're the paving just lifts up and makes a little bubble of a fountain Very inviting for people very interactive water walls covered the buildings to keep them cool You know and again we invented this idea of the inverted waffle grid where the edge is thin and the you can grow a lots of plants this sort of marches down to the waterfront and it was designed to to Continue the articulation of this this organic shapes and then they hired another landscape architect and they grid Gritted the whole place so they completely destroyed our concept. It was just absolute total destruction And a lack of any kind of a knowledge amount of what was intended in the first place So and they also destroyed quite a bit of our project you can see this is put the power product This is what they have now in that same place So anyway, there's parts of the park that are still left. These are some recent photographs of some of the parks part of the park That have survived and and look pretty good Then there's the critical context of culture. We designed a museum for and gardens for The museum of Islamic art. There were two mosque on the site So we wanted to integrate the mosque right into the building which is really based on the Qatar Desert So the biggest sand dunes in the world And so we wanted to get the dune like feeling a contextual feeling to this museum and then bleed it out into the gardens It was based on a kind of a 12-meter Classical Islamic grid that just de-baterialized into the gardens and made these made this interface between architecture and its own environment. This is a project we just did a few years ago that has got finished. This is a Art foundation in Italy near Lake Como near the lake the Alps a All done with the walls of the property. We invented these column t-shaped columns So we built everything sculpture bases that Walls and columns and the entire place is articulated by this and then we just lifted the landscape up And I saw recent photographs. You can't even see the building anymore. So it's almost invisible architecture it's getting increasingly invisible as the years go by and This is looking out over the property and you can see in the columns just sort of fall where they may There some of them are support columns and some of them. They're just part leading out into the sculpture garden They become platforms. They become bases So you can see the Swiss Alps and the property everything inside is glass though. This is very Environmental because everything in the building came from within a 10 mile radius So all of the materials brick stone glass everything came from the site area itself and You can see how the wall system works some of it's the actual wall system some of it's our addition So in a sense we blend it in so wherever you go in this site these t-shaped columns articulate the space and Recently we went back to the strip. This is the first time in 25 years. We went back You did a Denny's which is a lot of fun really Because you know it's the last place in the world You never expect to find art, but anyway, we had a lot of fun because we had we had to do a Diner for the 21st century and this is again using modern technology The Zainter who did this said that they had to invent the technology to make this floating building So it's very ephemeral. It's very fluid as you can see and inside there's a wedding chapel There's been 55 weddings at this wedding chapel with without with an Elvis with an attended Elvis and So you can see this how this works. It really is nice because it really floats in space It's a building within a building and then when you're sitting there in the party You know the building kind of floats around your head and it's really supposed to be kind of like they say that the original social network So this is in a sense architecture is a kind of network and then the Shake Shack you all know in New York It was you know built around the idea of something to do with the the qualities of the surface of the flat iron the the Highway architecture in the park and we blended them all together in the building as its own own Renew the building is the menu and of course, it's been a very very successful in that in that context This is the last thing I show because it's a bigger project But it's an interesting did didn't get built We got kind of got screwed on this one because it got built by somebody else who sort of ripped off some of the ideas But not all of none of the better ones unfortunately But it was a very small site and the idea was to build public parks almost like a central park Rising up out of this at different levels and and and reaching also all these vast two principles and octeters There's this layering going upward so I made lots of drawings, you know going through this process and It called a vert escape. Well the idea was we were gonna since it's very costly to build tall buildings. We put the structural system a big structural system at the top and the and the core and then drop cables Build the floors on the ground and then hoist them up into place and touch them in place But it also worked very well for that kind of that kind of spiritualism a Hindu Hindu gardens Really this had lots of green technology in it awful lot all kinds of shade systems and Deflected light and so forth. Well, anyway, what I'm saying tonight is basically if you're going to design the Microcosmic the work world around your feet It should have you know regional identity people interaction psychologist situation and also I think now since we're in the age of The digital age things should have that feeling I don't think we should use digital tools to design Henry Moore sculptures I really think there's something wrong with that It's so much of that use of this incredible advanced technology to convert into things that look like they'll have been done 50 or 60 years ago as sculpture and then the other side is that the other network is of course nature and that's a network system and I don't think we should really be designing, you know constructivism anymore in an ecological age Well, anyway, this is just to sum up the thing that I really Don't think that this should prevail forever and so persistently at the bases of buildings public spaces Should shouldn't be slabs of concrete and so in that site. We've tried to make a case for Things that are invitations for response what I call Response mechanisms elements that help people activate and that's it. Thank you Thank you both so much. Yes, you're right on time And I have to say something at the start to make you chuckle because these two are so funny And that is when we were talking a few days ago about this discussion tonight I asked how the two of them met each other and they said in a private room of studio 54 Which I don't think was a joke actually Now Michael I've been on a few stages over the years together. I must say In all kinds of crisis situations to you know, technology doesn't work but but I mean We have had a lot of fun and we do have a lot of ideas in common But I do think that it's fun. It's interesting because I noticed that he was you know going for this larger Overview and getting more and more detail as they go So I felt it was a perfect for me to sort of go right down to the paving So in a way, we're like an integrated system in ourselves. We keep on doing this Well to start with a real basic question there are a lot of students in the audience just but despite your comment about the many gray-haired people and I would like to start with talking about your definitions of sustainability and green You know, this is perfusion of definitions. What is the definition that really is in your mind as you're thinking about different projects and different ideas? me well Does anybody not have an answer for this question? I mean the standard definition for sustainability is simply the idea that We must take care that there are sufficient resources left for the next generation to survive But the the vector that I would like to introduce is the question of equity, you know when I when I So we we didn't speak explicitly about the ecological footprint. Everybody knows this concept ecological footprint anybody not You know, it is in effect a kind of series of algorithms that a couple of Canadian academics invented many years ago Which convert all values into a single value, which is to say area so you discover very intriguing things by using this and you can find all sorts of Appliances on the web to calculate. Do you know your food footprint or your carbon footprint or your? Ecological footprint, you know, how much of the planet's surface you actually require in order to sustain your life and the telling statistic to me is the simply the one that suggests that Were everybody presently on the planet to consume at the rate that we do in in the United States or the West more generally? Three or four additional planets would be required immediately in order to sustain this possibility So to me this suggests that you cannot talk about the issues of sustainability without some idea of economic distribution without notions of equity Without a politics. So I guess I would like to pitch to you that the technology is not rocket science The politics is almost impossible The very good point of view Yeah Again, I feel sort of hesitant to talk about when you write a book as I did post in 2000 People that were always asking me questions and I always had the answers because you know, you're when you write a book You're very aware you've done it. You're the research researches on the tip of your tongue that this point It's harder. I mean I agree completely with what Michael said it it does become public policy and Politics really more than technology because the technology is relatively simple and most of it's worked out The amount of resistance of the right wing is just staggering You know, you feel like almost everything is impossible We had the privilege of going to the White House and being with Michelle Obama for a while and and in my kind of Cripple state that I was standing next to her and I started to fall She grabbed me tried to catch me and then she comments as well You know if I fail to catch you the New York Post the next morning would say first lady fails to catch helpless cripple You know, and she said that's the way everything is, you know Every single time they talk about the environment everything they have anything having to do with public policy or the environment It's it's shot down or you know, it's considered Anti-American or whatever so there is a lot to do and just the sensibility of the society One thing I did mention in my book is that you know, unless buildings are reasonably attractive There's an awful lot of lead-approved buildings and green buildings They're incredibly ugly and you can't wait to get rid of them So they're not very sustainable just by definition Whereas when I lived in Italy, I I lived in a 600 year old building My studio was in a 300 year old building and that seemed to represent some modicum of sense of Sustainability we might learn from There are just a lot of things that are that are I think really grassroots Elements, but also having to do a tremendous amount with international politics I I have abs because I'm not politically oriented very much It's very hard for me to grasp how this is ever going to change Because I do think the expertise is there Certainly urbanism is one of the keys to sustainability and the reform of our urban pattern in order to conduce Conservation and green practices and habits is absolutely critical. So it's counterintuitive, but New York City is the second most energy efficient city in the United States And there's only one reason anybody care to speculate Walking and density well public transportation. Yeah, so Again, you know, you cannot have efficient public transportation without a certain level of density Without a certain intensity of public transportation without the possibility of walking between your house and the station, but that accounts for it and that's not a complicated matter in terms of the way we design our cities, you know Since since the Second World War, you know, it was national policy to subsidize the least environmentally sustainable pattern of settlement available which was suburbanization, you know, which we subsidized with, you know, cheap FHA loans by paying for highways by accelerated depreciation for commercial sites You know and and on and on and on and we got exactly the environment that we paid for And you know, it's only common sense as has been pointed out that low-density development is much more infrastructure intensive Depends on cars, you know in many more miles of sewer pipes in order to serve a suburban neighborhood than a block in Manhattan And these are these are simply common sense conclusions Much much as cross ventilation and insulation are and insulation are common sense solutions that go most of the way So just to remind people or let you know the National Design Award winners are chosen by a jury with one exception And that is the design patron award and that award is awarded by Cooper Hewitt and this year We chose to award Jeanette Sadiq Khan who will be our next speaker as part of this series But we were awarding her great improvements to the city and your phrase of people pockets made me think of Jeanette again Are we going in the right direction with this? How do you feel about these new people pockets under the last administration and how do you feel about the current administration? Continuing in that vein Well, again, I think the question always is a degree of imagination. It's invested in these things, you know, it's a basically It's very difficult. It's it's not fair to complain or to compare Italy to you know a modern city, but They did apply an enormous amount of attention To what's under your feet and what you're sitting on, you know, and the city is in fact by being this cluster of adventures as clusters of things that bring people together and activate conversation activate whatever and You know, you can see how many I mean the World Trade Center site is you know, the new Freedom Tower is up there But you know, it's basically that that old-fashioned paradigm just being done once more and They'll still have the same problem. So they just keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again with it's so incredibly little imagination I Think I think examples have to be set. I think there could be more examples set, you know Where well for example, I mean sites and interesting to say other than the Shake Shack We've never done anything in New York. All of our work is done in other countries So that's significant. I think that whatever it is that New York Doesn't want I guess we we we produce it so It's it's an interesting phenomenon. It really is. So is it even possible to think about a greener Amsterdam Avenue or a greener 147th Street for example, or those just utopian ideas How how much can we introduce change when there's less and less space and less and less resources? Well, it's possible to think about it and you know, we're both thinking about it and I think one of them we To speak for you James, but I certainly think we both Identify part of our duty as the public intellectuals as Propagandists, so you know what when I when I talked about this kind of index that forbids Imagining cities in too comprehensive a form The reason to imagine them thus and the reason to imagine all these civic Improvements is exactly the propaganda of the image and I think we both believe in that we I think we both believe that Elaborating possibilities is something very important. You know Jeanette Jeanette definitely Made progress, you know, I'm writing that city bike, you know, it's it's got its problems But that's a great, you know, I just came back from the Netherlands You know, so they're streets ahead of us in terms of the way in which they have the so-called Wooner You know these shared streets The way in which they're advancing in terms of eliminating all the kind of barriers and traffic signals So around the world very productive experimentation is going on. Jeanette did a little bit of it I mean, but but there were certain obstacles, you know as to de Blasio You know, I I'm I'm hopeful You know, I'm now writing a column in the nation, you know But I just just was thinking about the the deal that was cut for for the Domino sugar Development and this somehow is very characteristic of the way we do business In New York City, which I think gets more and more pernicious Which is the idea that we have to in effect the public realm has to offer bribes to the private realm in order to Persuade them to behave in the public interest. So At one level, you know de Blasio pushed back and said well We need more affordable housing in order to cut the deal for the Domino and and he got it You know, he got a you know another for whatever it is 40 more units He got them in perpetuity and he got bigger units, you know more suitable to families on the other hand He totally gave away the store, you know It's these buildings are now 20 or 25 stories taller than they were under the last terrible scheme So this idea that in order to get public benefit You're always involved in this game of swapping one public good Which is access to light and air for another public good, which is either, you know in the old days of some stupid plaza or now a somewhat more more palpable public good, which is You know nominally is so-called affordable housing But this is this is a bad system and the idea that the the the public realm is relinquishing its primary responsibility for providing for the public good And only able to produce it by cutting a deal with the development community seems to me to be a formula for Disaster Well, again designers contribute to all this problem all these problems as well. I mean Yeah, when developers build buildings Their egos are on the line the buildings are are tend to be either Incredibly rigorous formalism or bombastic formalism one or the other and And with very little What I would call a selfie facing quality. In fact, I was interested I think I was I was putting this together with a little history today I was thinking back to the early days and you know how much the architecture scene hated sites work at that point and and then Yet with the public I think because they realized that this company was Doing buildings with humor and with irony and with self criticism That they were were not in any way. Bambastic. They were in fact You know selfie facing and people like that and I remember, you know, one of the first buildings that one in Houston with the What they call a crumbling building I remember we were an opening day And it's a big crowd obviously and and this Texan was coming towards me and if you look pretty I wasn't sure he's gonna beat the shit out of me or he's gonna congratulate me But he came already slightly on the forest. He you know see that feelings is that's what I've always wanted to kick the shit out of one of those buildings and so I knew we were home-free because You you do that's what I'm talking about invention You have to kind of get under the skin of society you have to I mean artists are able to do it much more easily because you know It says they're they're contained by a protective layer whereas architecture and public space and And in parks and garden they're in the public domain. So there's more pretense in that area This is this kind of pompous works that we all see every day And so it really just impressed me both Michael and I kind of wrote and protested profusely about the future of the World Trade Center site and what how non-eleven should be commemorated and clearly It should have been a like a central park and that's it. I mean You know, I've often noted it, you know a terrorist so far has never attacked a tree and it's so again making a magnificent park out of that whole territory and It would have revitalized it. Yes, it wouldn't be as commercial and maybe it could be flanked on The river side by lower-cost housing or something like that There were a lot of plans in the works then but obviously the one that prevailed was the you know the commercial And the power structure in and the fact it goes back to Michael's statement, you know about wealth in the world I get a 65% of the world's wealth is in 10% of the people's hands and as long as that prevails It's very difficult to fight back. You can do examples of What could be better or is better, but you'll need a lot bigger and more aggressive examples With the decaying architecture projects you mentioned criticism and people up in arms about some of these projects Were any of them did you have to remove any of them because of that and are some of them still in this beautiful state? Well, they're they're just they were part of the, you know, shoppings that are world So they just mow those down right here. So but Yeah, they're a little like crystal projects, you know, they're they were done to see what you can get away with and then They mow them down but Again, I would say that the attitude and and the and the fact that you Don't have to you know to ram a Pretentious message down somebody's throat is probably a good idea when you're designing seating or I mean, why does everything have to be a cement block? There really is no reason for that whatsoever And why is everything like I'm those are all those waterfronts that Perfection I showed you from our fairly new 2004 forward. So that's fairly new So we're still going back to that same that we're a lent with slab I just don't understand it and it's also it says not ecological as an understatement, but you know, it's like whatever So you've both lived here for decades And I I do love the description in 20 minutes in a city of your your walk-up since I lived in a walk-up for many years as well So I had to chuckle when I read that but how do you feel about the soul of New York City? And and what is something that you're hopeful about rather than then more gloomy about a project or a space Well You want to answer that one you think of that with a little bit. I have to ponder that I think the loss of Detail or the loss of the mom and pop shop or the I mean so ho is now just this kind of They can't touch the buildings like God, but the commercial enterprise is It is my wife often says you can go downstairs and buy a $500 purse for a thousand dollar pair of shoes, but you can't buy a bottle of milk And that's prevailing everywhere now apparently all the bookstores are leaving I mean I understand these the St. Mark's bookstores threaten. Yeah, I mean it's terrifying It is a terrifying omen for a city to lose that that detail that there's the idiosyncratic detail that makes a city right and the more the Upper Park Avenue sensibility and who would be caught dead on Upper Park? And and Detroit is a good example of a city that built itself as a place where once the industry left or once the economy Fluctuated or collapsed. No would be caught dead going to Detroit Who in the world would ever go there if you didn't have a job? You see so that's a sad That's a sad situation. So it's mixed use nostalgic No, not at all. I mean, you know, we we're talking this dispiriting line, but we live here because we love it Yeah, I guess it's the so I mean getting getting back to inclusionary zoning You know, I think this is a you know, if the if de Blasio carries through On the idea that inclusionary zoning becomes mandatory That's a giant stride, you know the the we've been through a couple of cycles and you know, we are all of course encouraged You know post-pen station by a kind of sensibility about the physical fabric of the city and the need to preserve it so the rent laws and inclusionary zoning are a kind of Late blooming effort to begin to think in a more rigorous and systematic way about preserving the human fabric of the city You know, well this this in this in this, you know, I I've had this strange experience I wrote this book about the the tenement we lived in for 26 years and then we prospered a little bit and moved into the condo and One one of the the curious things that we noticed on moving into the condo is that you know, everybody in the tenement were soulmates and Lesbian activists and senior citizens this and but this was a building in which there were no children And because everybody there was a kind of superannuated Rent law tenant as as we're we moved into the condo and suddenly it abounded with kids So somehow, you know Finding the formula the economic formula and the social formula and the formulas of desire to harmonize the possibility of tenure With the possibility of renewal. I think that's that's our project and not simply as architects, but as citizens and I have high hopes for the for for bill de Blasio, you know that that you know that that was one of the most meritorious things that Bloomberg ever said was you know, we want all the billionaires we can get well I don't think we want all the billionaires we can get particularly the Not the the billionaires who don't even live here, you know, we're not even paying real estate taxes Well on the optimistic side, I agree that we're all here and we obviously love it And I wouldn't be any place else, but you do you know regret seeing things Cintiq right to things that are really part of the power of attraction. I mean clear One of the biggest is the internalized elements of New York where you don't have the art world you have the literary world Yep, you have intellectual activity. You have this, you know Mental ferment going on all the time. This is incredibly powerful But they also have that in Paris and in London too and they can also you know step into the streets They're much more protected you can you can be a great in fact the avant-garde is very interesting. I think of Soho When all Green Street was the I guess it's all the environmental artists live there We were all in dialogue with each other and we're all living in factories and these were abandoned buildings really You know in fact, you had to have these blackout curtains at night because the police would arrest you for living in these spaces You weren't supposed to be living there so Yeah, again having affordable Rants having affordable spaces, you know, I look at my daughter's generation. She had none of those advantages that I had I mean incredibly large spaces, you know, I tell my wife she hates to hear me say this But I had a incredible apartment with an apartment Terrace that overlooked all of Rome. I had a huge studio in trust David a with you know Old sculptures to about 40 to 50 feet high with skylights and everything then I had a Studio on green on broom Street in New York and I lived at Washington Square Village And my entire rent was less than a thousand dollars a month So don't say that I mean that that is that is an opportunity that is an unbelievable opportunity For getting started you're getting a foothold in the world I'm personally horrified by the lack of encouragement by the city to Be sustainable and think sustainably and and make the city more self-sufficient and you know the Swiss Alps of black Garbage bags, which is your quote that I also love, you know along the street I live on West 74th and there are often just these mountains of garbage, you know, this is 2014, you know We shouldn't be running our our Garbage like that. How can we encourage improvement in that realm and bring efficiency to the next level? Is that possible? Of course, it's possible and you know, I'm no fan of Michael Bloomberg, but You know many advances were made and many strong declarations of intention if not fulfillment Came through you know, I think that consciousness is rising in this city As far as the garbage issue is concerned You know, I see the tragic appearance of the double trash cans on my corner You know you're meant to vaguely recycle something But you know one of the propositions in that steady state was you know I what why don't we appropriate one lane of every street? Rather than giving it over to the storage of private automobiles If we had a lane we could solve the garbage problem in thematic receptacles, you know And if we had the you know the way you solve the garbage problem is by eliminating waste You know, there's there's you know, I see we're about to ban plastic plastic bags You know these are all these incremental changes are all terribly important, and you know, it's I you know I am we're in a pickle but New York if if anything is is not unconscious of the problem Small changes are taking place not fast enough. Yeah, I think I think also the the issue is very often I mean again, if you're kind of brought up in the New York avant-garde world You always think everything has to be progressive at all costs. That is, you know, anything, you know Six weeks old is already old hat and you're getting into that mentality but the fact is that all of the elements of the detail and the humanitarian elements and the Texture and so far are perfectly Capable of the reinterpreted in a very progressive way There's nothing about the village street. They can't be reinterpreted and be just as exciting just as it is They just fail to do it. They just don't know why they give you a you know, like a praises Pictures Street and Greenwich Village. Oh, wow, you know, that's that 19th century stuff We wouldn't be quite dead doing that, you know and and So it but rather than look at it and you know get a trip to Rome recently just you know Just looking at Borromeanie again. He's got is a spectacular Architect you look at what he just did with light and shadow. Just look what he could do with sunlight And we don't do that anymore You know architectures of these big other big curved surfaces or big flat surfaces. I mean that's it's it's a kind of Something that hasn't really been considered in depth So, I mean one of one of the things about New York is that all sorts of perplexing the anomalous Situations develop and one wants to think about how to how to institutionalize and conserve them. For example That there have been studies that show You know what one of the the big problems we have in in lower income and poor neighborhoods is the so-called nutritional deserts, you know in which fresh fresh fruit and veggies is simply not available and In the local store. So it's one of the anomalies of gentrification that you know at the borderlands between gentrifying neighborhoods and resisting neighborhoods suddenly Nutrition is getting better. So I mean how how one deals with that in an equitable way Rather than having nutrition as a kind of harbinger of Displacement That's a big problem, but I you know we need a an imagination about justice not just about form Which is Another big struggle, I think I Want to open it up soon, but I have a question about public transportation and I was disappointed when the Taxi share didn't work It sort of fell on its face and what are your thoughts about how public transportation might work in an eco zone? Is it possible a zip car share? Ped bikes, etc. Well those things just driving up the wall because again, I'm like Michael I think we've both been at least 50 countries in our life and you go to Turkey for example and take the dough there's almost you know things Everybody jumps in the cab and you get to know new people and you jump out of the can you get another and you say works So well, you know they go the avenue some goes the avenue some will go crosstown and not only do you save a lot of money But but it's just a terrific idea for my presence state It would be perfect the fact that I have to have the single cab and be the single, you know Person in it is is absurd But I mean we waste a chloratable amount of energy I mean just the vast amount of energy is consumed when you could have a lot more people moving The argument as a culture we tend to fixate on Supply side solutions to problems and one of the arguments of the study We're doing is that you should begin on the demand side Which is to say if you live in a neighborhood where you can walk everywhere then the need for The technologies of transportation are dramatically reduced I think that's the key to the system is not to think about what the next technology is or to find a new way of Harmonizing a kind of lamination of technologies, but to eliminate the need for them in the in the first place Yeah, again, I mean what one one one has learned Historically that the more space you provide for automobiles the more automobiles you will find in your neighborhood and the less space you provide You know, this is an old Jane Jacobs You know trick from Washington Square, you know you take away the space and the cars stop to come So I you know I that's that that we have to give Jeanette a little credit for is is you know I mean not not to widespread, but you know she she proved with the numbers that you know Traffic moves faster in Times Square when there's less space for it. So we need to repeat this We've mentioned before I people walk in New York. They really do Walking city and it's also a congregational city people are allowed to do it. I mean, you know Shake Shack has contributed a lot to the social life of the Madison Square Park, but I remember only You know a dozen years ago. That was the drug center of New York Space by interaction It doesn't seem to be a hard argument to sell but it's true You can absolutely create Compotals civic change by just human interaction. Well, you'll be pleased to know that with the reopening of Cooper Hewitt We are allowing everybody into the garden. So you don't have to be a member or the holder of a ticket We're welcoming everybody so that way Very social space and we hope to open early in the morning So you can have your coffee at Cooper Hewitt and then continue your day so on that note I would love to open up to all of you. I'm sure you have many questions I already see several so starting with you. Can you please just use the mic? Thank you The lights are so bright. Yeah, we can't see it's so bright. Yeah, can we Little so we are pointed down So I really want to go to Denny's Denny's after seeing the work that James did on it But but I do have mixed feelings about what you're saying on one hand I agree with everything you said on the other hand I brought up two kids on an aging Brooklyn waterfront with actually no access to the water 700 linear miles or Curve linear miles of waterfront in this town with virtually no access We do have access to the waterfront now We had Department of Transportation commissioners who only cared about moving vehicles quickly through neighborhoods We now have the OT transportation people who were care about Pedestrian Pedestrianization we brought in people like young gal from from Copenhagen Who is designing? Pedestrian spaces and really is one of the advocates for you know use of bicycles So my question is a small question, but it has to do with the larger question of the ability to create Good neighborhoods with good public space We we see now that the possibilities of the spike share program may be failing It's there's a problem with money and all I hear about is the issue of money Not in the issue of the good Public bicycles are doing for the city so Is this a harbinger of some things to come that may actually be negative for the city? Or do you think that this bicycle program will be saved if you can comment on that Hard to say. I mean, I'm a cyclist. I was for all my Time in New York 50 years. I've been a cyclist and I went everywhere on a bicycle until recently my leg problems, but It I mean there are Elements again opening up In larger areas of the waterfront I mean we do these things but it doesn't ever seem to be aggressive enough for me again I guess my Idealism I hope I mean yeah, you you open it up. You say okay now you can go to the waterfront They put down a concrete slab of some kind and and a few lollipop trees and that's it And they you know you go to the send in Paris or you go to I mean it's an experience a total engulfing Engaging experience and we don't think experientially. We really don't we think of oh well. Let's give them the waterfront You know a ferry. Yeah, it's like okay, you know the masses needs some ways to assemble. Let's just give them a slap I'm with you. These these are non-trivial considerations. So the problem with the bike program is Not enough bikes not not well enough distributed But the real problem is that we're not thinking rigorously enough about the infrastructure that we require to support Safe bike riding and just came back from the Netherlands, you know, they have bike lanes and they thought about it It's not just a white stripe paint on painted on the road Yeah, it's a miracle that people are more people haven't been killed on those those bikes But but it but it's it's pure accident because we haven't pursued You know with with sufficient vigor the kind of city-wide infrastructure that makes bike riding safe convenient and a logical default for going a Reasonable difference this the same thing is true true of the waterfront is that it's great we're getting back in touch with the waterfront and without doubt in from a planning perspective those 600 and whatever miles of waterfront are a tremendous opportunity and it's certainly a Transportation slam dunk to begin to have a intricate network of waterborne transportation on the other hand on the the Imagination, you know the idea that the only two paradigms for developing the waterfront are either a kind of Neal Olmsteady and Park or battery Park City not enough, you know, you think about Istanbul or Venice or other places that have a great really, you know, we're not there yet But the opportunity presents itself, you know, I my favorite instance of a fast paradigm shift is you know 60s guy and you know those were the days when suddenly there was Icelandic air and everybody was going for Europe and one year I never heard of yogurt and the next year every kid I knew was eating yogurt So I you know, I am I am imagining that the same kind of cultural transformation can take place Vis-a-vis biking and the pleasures of the waterfront because you know, we're there We're an adaptable and shape-shifting culture. Well, I hope I hope what you're saying is true Again having been in bike. Oh, well is a bike program. Well, obviously work in Europe. It's actually Paris. I mean, you can't even find a bike That's the other problem there. There's just not enough they put more out every week and they're never enough So it not only works because it's inexpensive. It's really an expensive, but it's also everywhere and They did one wise thing they angled the bike so they don't take up the whole street They don't it didn't prove particular to this to the curb So there's a lot of just design details. It could could improve it But again, I agree with Michael you you get something going and eventually it kind of ingratiates itself to the system And then you become more and more and more, but you do need examples I always hesitate to start speaking out on science and politics and everything because it's not my profession I mean, I basically an architect designer and So I think the best we can do is set examples You know, you build or construct or design an example. It's small It's it's again a kind of microcosm of something that might continue Yeah, I've always been amazed, you know, we have all kinds of ivies here Well kinds of trees and the and the poverty of you know, street Selection here is just weird. It always has that lollipop feel and it doesn't have to I mean Yeah, this is cities in Canada. I mean first of all biking in Canada I mean, I was in Toronto for six months and I mean, I couldn't believe in the dead of winter It's you know, subzero toucher temperatures thousands of people are biking to work And I was among them I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it But it was phenomenal. It was traffic jams of bicycles and one thing they did is obviously they made those avenues That's where the cars go speeding by and you and if you drive into a neighborhood, you can't go there more than five miles an hour It's a brilliant scheme and that was done with a you know, they have a little edge on us They they arrived to the city level later than New York, but still they made that commitment Other questions Hi Michael. My name is rune and My question is how architecture could help us move past consumerism You know My grandmother had the farm in Norway, you know, they were pretty much self-sufficient Since then we know that it in after the war it took about one calorie of Carbon fuels to produce four calories of food now nowadays it takes about ten Petrol fuel calories to produce one calorie of food And you know, we are heavily indebted. We hardly think about putting aside during good times for bad times So how would you? help consider moving past this petroleum subsidy that we're living with and and back to the days when You live stringently during good times to prepare for bad times Well, you know, that's that that's the premise of the proposition we're working on is that you know in an era of domination of Transnational corporations and wimpy nation states it does seem to me that cities are the most logical increment of organization and resistance So we are looking at how self-sufficient cities can be because at the end of the day what you're talking about is taking responsibility for your presence on the planet and you know that needs to be organized at a level at which it is legible to people and A level at which governance can actually have an effect and if we simply leave it to the agribusiness and the big government Able has human nature to respond by positive reinforcement or does it take a massive stick? That's a very good question. I mean, it's a big mega question That's why we have to have this conference. We need you to come to this conference as she's going to sponsor Because it really you can take all of these questions as a matter of fact, I had a friend of one So they're very wise things, you know America should have a think things through day how the national day and what you do Is you take some idiotic idea that you've had your whole life's prejudice or whatever you start in the morning And you just think the whole day You think that one idea through and by the end of the day you will have changed your mind So it's really true in all of these issues. It's it's why do we keep doing the same message? That's why I had this quote from Jane shapers. Why do we? Make these mistakes and then do them all over again over and over and over again because there's obviously some Economic structure into which they seemingly and comfortably fit that Even though it's a bankrupt. It doesn't make any difference. It really they'll they'll just continue doing it And I really personally don't yeah, again because of my you know position in society I don't know what to do about it. I guess you you're gonna have your one vote when you vote for something But you need a collective group of people who you know Aggregate and protest and come forward or something think things through day I think that might need to be a Cooper Hewitt program when we reopened Like that In the garden a national holiday Right, right any other questions If you can really speak up The bikes that we have a city city Where the will of Bloomberg Plus the support of city bike and now their answer is where else can we find money? I work with a lot of developers They borrow the money At all the concern about the things that determine the decision they make is can I sell it? Will somebody buy it so I can get out of return the money I owe and make a profit out of it There's a little ego in it, of course and each one is individual. They don't think about the block They think about each building and how that's very important to the project Is there any way? You know when the people who were disabled somehow got together We suddenly got all of our sidewalks Dented at the corners one day they weren't and the next day they were I'm not sure exactly But there has to be some kind of you're doing a lot of thinking you have a lot of reactions to the structure Isn't there some way to bring the private money the developers Yeah Again It's not for lack of trying. I mean we definitely have over the years with all kinds of programs you know Made had all kinds of incentives and spearheads and everything to try to accomplish it It's very very difficult because it's you know, they're also Economists are talking you have to change the paradigm You know capitalism, you know works in some respects, but there are others. It's enormously destructive And it certainly consumes an unbelievable amounts of fossil fuel and energy, you know The level of waste is just staggering so You really don't know what to do because you you you there is a kind of denial going on that We may Another thing I always listen to these national geographic things and they're always apocalyptic like we maybe the shortest-lived species That's ever occupied the earth by our own petard. We were just Suicide we are headed for like environmental suicide, you know, they're dinosaurs who's considered rather cumbersome You know went on for 250 300 million years, so they they obviously somehow dealt with their environments in a relatively effective way Yeah, this turtle Well, that's another thing just look at how again you look at nature's how magnificent a tortoise is I mean, you know something comes down and starts pecking on a tortoise the whole thing closes up. It's the most Incredible piece of design you can imagine everything tucks in and there's not you can't slip a knife blade in a tortoise It's closed up. That's brilliant But and that's why it survives and it's you know, there's There's a rhythm to all of that which you know, unfortunately your big developers don't deny or don't even consider Well, you'd have to create a new paradigm The questions get broader and broader as the evening wears on How how we are going to Carolyn can hardly avoid having this conference Very to and and I think I need to add a water element in the garden The the the prospect is not fantastical, and you know that we can make a more constructive civic culture You know because I write for the nation. I get it every week And I'm just just just reading about Bernie Sanders thinking about running for president Right on and you know, he's he's not exactly a fire-throwing Radical but he is pointing to certain cultures that have negotiated the Private and the public realm a little more successfully than we looking at Scandinavian countries and other Yes, they're absolutely You know, there's there's much higher rates of taxation And much higher rates of public welfare and public involvement, you know, I I taught for many years in Vienna and You know, not a Austrian culture is not one that I have a great tooth for but You know 60% of the residents of Vienna Mainly middle-class live in public housing, you know in the 19 in the late 1920s and early 1930s Magnificent how you know working-class housing was built for a quarter of a million million people in a city that was then You know between one and two million So, you know, there there are plenty of models out there if we wish To follow them Yeah, there's discourage, you know, it really is because the investment in in Public space in the public domain in the arts and everything is unbelievably minimal in this country I mean, we don't have a minister of culture in this country really and in fact, I was just to stick that the Entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is less than what Vienna spends on opera. I mean, it's like We spent on one tank Well James and Michael, thank you so much for a wonderful discussion. Thank you