 Architecture, urbanism and the language of sustainability. For those of you who aren't familiar with the creative process, you may not realize the degree to which it's actually, well, it's a structural and conventional language, right? But it's true. It's what makes a piece of classical architecture so recognizable, or a Buddhist temple stand out so much in a crowd for that matter. It's what makes that one little crumpled napkin by Frank Gehry fits so neatly into a much larger body of crumpled napkins. Unfortunately, though, not everyone is the poet that Frank Gehry is. And interestingly, even if they were, it wouldn't matter, because the prevailing language of our day has not been defined by our leading practitioners, but rather by capital interests. You know, our skyscrapers are monuments to capital, right? Our suburbs are a sea of nondescript zeros, and as a result, designers have been forced to speak a language that is neither native nor particularly exciting. To this end, John Elkington gave us this really great diagram here that describes the essence of good design, right? And it's a balancing act between people, planet, and profits. Unfortunately, though, pressure to maintain the status quo has done little to make this diagram a reality. We see this when we layer more sustainable vocabularies onto intrinsically unsustainable architectures, unsustainable languages. For example, we'll put solar panels on mansions, or green roofs on strip malls, or density in the desert. And all of these things, they're good things by themselves, but what they fail to address are the more cultural issues of forming sustainability. That was the focus of a project I took on about a year ago. It's called Reclaiming Nature's Metropolis. And we imagine what the city of Chicago might look like, where our values to evolve in sync with our technology. There's not enough time to get into the specifics of this, but what I can show you is with a few simple shifts, a few simple shifts in our values, our cities might very easily morph from this into this, and this into this. So how do we do this? How do we create an equality between people, planet, and profits? And in the process, create a more intelligent design language. Well, the answer might surprise you. His name is, exactly, his name is Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk. And essentially what people like him have been doing to the music industry is pretty revolutionary. He's created a new genre, a new language of sorts. And first, they lay down a framework. In their case, it's a beat. And then on top of this, they lay the work of other artists down. And so what you end up with is an entirely different listening experience altogether, the musical equivalent of adaptive reuse. Tiffany Farrant and Fast Company actually did this graphic right here. It's an interesting example of how all these different samples get put into one track by Girl Talk. But what Gillis is doing is important for a few reasons. Number one, he's not asking for permission. In his own words, his work is illegal art, which not coincidentally yields a result that's much more provocative than where his mashups vetted by a team of lawyers. And number two, it's not about innovation. It's about reformatting and combining existing elements. What already has grave meaning to you into something entirely different and therefore new. You know, just imagine the number of ways in which we might adapt and reuse our vehicular infrastructure as newly minted public space. That's what you're seeing behind me right here. This is part of the presentation that I did for Chicago that was devoted to that exercise. But think of the multitude of ways in which we could improve the energy efficiency of our buildings if we just mustered up the courage to violate them in concept. And this is what inspires me so much about how we can apply these ideas to design. Because it's about architects and planners relinquishing their role as poets and purveyors of taste and beauty in the world and instead embracing the role of its facilitator. In other words, it's not about designing the city 2.0. It's about providing the beat for it. Kind of a semi-curated framework in which individuals can contribute with as much freedom as they like so long as they do it with an equal amount of personal responsibility. I want to leave you with a final image here and it's my favorite from the project. Arundhati Roy wrote in Confronting Empire, another world is not only possible, she's on her way. And on a quiet day I can hear her breathing. And that's what this image is. It's kind of the warm breath of another day. In the sense the language of sustainability is kind of a leftist libertarian mash-up where we adapt and reuse the urban and architectural frameworks already in place to be the beat for a new kind of instrumental but with age old vocals.