 I'm Ricky tried to encourage me to Be brief and make some clear statements Are you getting an image? So I'd like to Basically try to explain four Issues or attitudes that have sort of been been taking shape in our office over the last ten years and the first one is the whole sort of a You can call it the image of sustainability Which is quite well captured by this photo that was taken at the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen three years ago And as you can see on Merkel and I think especially Sako see It wasn't exactly a party. It was a complete fiasco None of the goals that were established for the summit were met and the general sort of discussion about sustainability Was drowning in this sort of typical misconception that sustainability is a question of how much of our current quality of life We're willing to sacrifice in order to afford being sustainable Which is obviously not a very sort of attractive or competitive image So when when we were asked to design the Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo where the subject was sustainable cities. We thought what if sustainability could increase quality of life? So like briefly we decided to consolidate all of the elements of a typical Danish city Into this pavilion this sort of loop Because like 40% of all the Copenhageners commute by bicycle So you could actually bicycle through the pavilion. It was complete with the blue bicycle lanes of Denmark You had the Danish city bikes that we've had for the last 20 years So you could bicycle through the pavilion It also made you it made it like the perfect museum for impatient people because you could do the whole thing in two minutes If you were working hard without missing a single exhibit Also another aspect of Copenhagen that actually makes Copenhagen that that makes Copenhagen sustainable But also more enjoyable is the fact that our port has become so clean that you can swim in it Our first project was the design of the Copenhagen harbour bath that extends public life into the water So we recreated this experience in China allowing the visitors to feel how clean if not how cold Danish harbour water is And finally sort of as a way of getting the Chinese to to actually turn up We thought we were looking for common denominators between Denmark and China and we discovered that in the Chinese public school Curriculum they actually have three fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen One of them being the story of the little mermaid the national symbol of Denmark. So we proposed to move her to China the Nationalist Party freaked out and Tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid So I had to go to parliament and actually argue her case and and we got her and then we had to get her through Chinese customs and and and and into the And into the pavilion but that was essentially the first time where we got this idea of hedonistic sustainability That sustainable cities can actually increase human enjoyment rather than being a sacrifice At the time we got invited to do the headquarters for the energy company of Shenzhen the most industrious and most energy-consuming region in the world And we thought it could be interesting to make it like the design about energy so it's essentially doing a hundred thousand square meters office building in In a humid subtropical climate actually Alejandro was on the jury for this competition And and basically there's a dilemma you want daylight and views But you don't want thermal exposure and glare and as a result we designed the facade like this sort of zigzag That opens towards the views and the daylight to the north but blocks all of the direct thermal exposure from the south as The result when you look south you see this sort of veneer wall in bamboo and when you turn north it becomes an old glass facade this is the lobby at the same phenomenon and That basically sort of can work that you can make these little openings For entrances or for the executive lobby for the for the directors Turning it into almost like a sort of easy Miyaki fabric And without any technology without any sort of mechanical moving parts This saves 30% of the thermal exposure and and air-conditioned consumption We did the project with with Arab from Shanghai, but essentially there is no technology It's purely the fact that the building looks different also makes it perform different in terms of its energy consumption So maybe there also sustainability who had like an aesthetic positive side effect and We broke ground two weeks ago Finally they put gold dust in the soil when they do groundbreaking in China Another element we've been looking at is that when you're doing urban interventions, of course This is the whole sort of public element is a major part of it And in in one case we took public participation to an extreme way beyond Like normal sort of user involvement You might have recognized that or like remember that Denmark had this could also be the London outskirts or the Paris outskirts But this is actually downtown Copenhagen when we had the Mohammed cartoon crisis a Danish newspaper commissioned 10 cartoonists in a sort of misconceived crusade for the liberty of speech to make fun of the Prophet Mohammed pissing off a billion Muslims Including these boys. This is actually our office in Copenhagen And we're located in the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of Denmark. There's 60 different nationalities and all of them being Muslim So when we got invited to do an urban space, this is This sort of urban space in Copenhagen It's a kilometer long a former train tracks We thought this project had really had to deal with public participation and the sort of sense of ownership and integration In this sort of a challenge neighborhood, so we designed what we called the the red square Where everything is shades of red? I Think you're actually cropping the image a little bit Then also the the black market where everything is is black And finally the black market sort of rolls into the Green Park and then rather than sort of plastering this urban space with With Danish design we thought we could reach out to the sort of local community almost like tapping into the global vernacular experience of the local residents Asking them to nominate elements from their other home countries so Almost creating this sort of global best practice so through the local media and through a series of meetings We had people nominate Elements from their other home country and the main point is that we don't eat Chinese food to be nice to the Chinese It doesn't have anything to do with political correctness. It's because sometimes we want noodles And the same thing we don't put a Moroccan fountain in the middle of Copenhagen to be nice to Moroccans But it's because they actually have this amazing tradition for architectural water features From Jamaica we have this like outdoor sounds this system that you can plug your iPod to I know that the neighbors hate this this part of the project And then almost like in an art exhibition we put in these little signs on the ground That actually say in Danish and the local language what it is and where it's from We have this like a mussel beach that combines element from Thailand India Iraq and and Turkey Also like different cultures have different specialties there's a litter box from from England cast iron and also this sort of pedestrian signal Like this this ballad is from Ghana It's Denmark. So we need a lot of bicycle parking this rainbow is from from Finland even down to the signage This is the sign on the red square. It's the actual sign from the red square This is a bus stop from Kazakhstan, which is like way cooler than the typical Danish bus stop We we did this a Elephant from Ukraine We had to make a copy because the original from was from Chernobyl and was a radio active And even down to the manhole covers because the majority of the immigrants Islamic background from Tel Aviv we have this nice Manhole cover that we think is pretty much indestructible We even found palm trees in China that that grow in in Danish climate So it became this sort of almost like a sort of a safari into Sort of urban diversity and I think when you look at the benches It's almost like a cultural study from Mexico. You have a love seat Where the people sitting next to each other can actually look each other into the eyes from Belgium a bench where everybody looks away from each other So like you have like this sort of almost like a little display of different of different cultures Finally down to the the lighting as a way of creating these colorful lights One of the main reminders that you're in a foreign culture when you're traveling is actually the advertisement So as these sculptural colorful lamps, we have neon signs that advertise stuff. You can't buy in Denmark You even have Osborn the bull from Spain My favorite one is this it's a dentist from Qatar And of course on the Red Square you have this sort of ensemble of former Soviet and and communist ads We actually together with super flicks the artist group. We made an app that actually tells the story behind each of these these elements That brings me to the sort of the last idea that we sort of looking into right now is some The sort of notion of social infrastructure as the previous speakers mentioned the high line is a repurposed train line Tate modern is a repurposed power plant So there seems to be this law of nature or cities that the infrastructure of the industry of the past gets Reinvented as the infrastructure for culture and lecture of the present One example is in Vancouver Right where Granville Bridge hits downtown Our client had found this site that was like a wasteland shredded into pieces by the the bridge above We we wanted to sort of try to to identify it We started mappings the the simple sort of inhibitions of the side setbacks from the street setbacks from the bridges Then the city has made a rule that they don't want anybody looking straight into heavy traffic So there's a 30 meter setback from the from the highway and there's a park where we can't cast shadows So finally we're left with this sort of tiny triangle 600 square meters that that's actually too small for development But since our client owns all the land and the 30 meters have to have to do with doing minimum distance as soon as we get clear Of the highway we can sort of come back out maximize the amount of the nicest apartments So when you drive over the bridge, it's almost as if someone is pulling a curtain aside sort of a welcome to to Vancouver and Underneath the bridge we tried to see if we could actually create a lively community With sort of shops and offices and and actually exploiting the underside of the canopy as a as a good thing Almost like the sort of the high line in reverse because the cars still drive on top And one of the things we discovered is that there's a lot of like a nice photo artists in Vancouver And Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham started actually using light boxes for their photos So we proposed to turn the underside of the of the bridge into this upside-down art gallery almost like the 16th Chapel But of contemporary art underneath a highway bridge So as a way of starting to sort of reinvade these sort of leftovers of infrastructure And that leads me to the last project that somehow maybe takes this idea of rather than just Reappropriating the infrastructure of the past maybe you can make new hybrids where sort of public and private investment Utility and culture can actually be sort of coinciding proactively We got invited by the 10 municipalities of Metropolitan Copenhagen to look at a master plan for the future looking at a new Train line Connecting them around the outskirts of Copenhagen and we thought if we want to look at the future of Copenhagen We can't just look at the outskirts or even just at Denmark on the other side We have Sweden connected by the bridge between a man memory and Copenhagen. It's the most prosperous and and and And most of a densely populated part of Scandinavia and by adding a small Five kilometer bridge to the north we can turn it into a single metropolitan loop Where no area is further away than a 40 minutes by public transport It also connects all of the best businesses in the region And by making a binational urban master plan, we can also introduce pink in a flag for the first time But but more importantly It's exactly the same size as the San Francisco Bay area and the general philosophy is that it's not just an infrastructure for transport It's also a smart grid that combines the hydroelectricity of Sweden with the wind power of Denmark Waste management water management and and the general idea is that infrastructure is always combined with programs for culture commerce or education and As the first sort of a specific building we're doing within the loop city as we call it We got invited to do a project on the waterfront of Copenhagen. It's not going to be an opera house It's going to be a power plant that makes Energy and district heating out of trash Essentially a ton of trash is almost the same as to boy barrels of oil But it's a big ugly box. It has to be close to the city for the sanitation and for the district heating grid It's going to be the tallest and biggest building in all of Copenhagen It's going to be right next to the marina and right next to where the local boys go water skiing And speaking of skiing in Denmark. We have snow, but we have no mountains, but we do have mountains of trash So people actually go six hours by car to Branes in the south of Sweden because of the sheer magnitude of this power plant We can do two-thirds of Branes on top of this this building So we designed the roof as this sort of continuous roof scape Where you actually get a green a black and a blue ski slope on the roof of it So miraculously we won the competition based on this idea So from 2016 you have to watch out for Danish skiers and alpine competitions because now we can actually practice So and you know we started doing this sort of very modular facade that filters daylight into the building So the building almost becomes like this man-made ecosystem that harvests harvest the local resources Turning it into a single sort of man-made ecosystem of heat flow of of trash water electricity District heating and as a last element and maybe to wrap up This is going to be the cleanest waste energy power plant in the world But it still has co2 emissions very little But it still has a certain amount and together with realities united from Berlin We designed the mouth of the chimney as this chamber that compresses co2 And when there's 200 kilos of co2 The chimney puffs a gigantic smoke ring and essentially And on one hand we like it that it's sort of the ultimate artistic Expression of hedonistic sustainability that something that used to be a problem turns something pay playful But I think more importantly one of the main drivers of Behavioral change is knowledge that if people don't know they can't act And nobody really understands what a ton of co2 is it's this abstract untangible ungraspable thing In 2016 if you come to Copenhagen all you have to do is count The smoke rings and when you counted five of them we have just emitted one ton of co2 So it's this sort of a almost like exercise in extreme sort of transparency So just to sort of sum up the the four ideas like this idea that to focus on Sustainable ideas that can actually increase live quality to make it desirable and not just mandatory To so find ways of engaging the public to actually contribute to the aesthetics of the city This idea of exploring new hybrids between public and private investment utility and culture and finally to quote Little finger from Game of Thrones and knowledge is power that if you can actually sort of make These like abstract elements very concrete You also provide information to make a sort of informed decisions about the future That was immensely fun and entertaining and interesting But I have to ask you about the the park which which looks I'm sorry. I haven't seen So I'm gonna ask this in an aggressive way What's the difference between it and and Epcot or Disneyland a small ironic version of it in other words what actual Social change does it enact? Yeah, I think it's a question of authenticity the fact that These are actual everyday objects from the from the citizens that actually live there other Other element of every day. So for them. It's actually sort of this sort of recognition That in a way this urban space becomes a much more truthful portrait of contemporary Copenhagen rather than sort of sort of petrifying some kind of a Old-fashioned perception of Danishness it actually truly reveals the sort of cultural diversity of Contemporary Copenhagen and and and that's also what in the end. There is no irony. There's maybe a little bit of humor. There's maybe a Surprise and almost surreal just a position but also surprisingly when you go there it became much more Tasteful in a way that we had imagined like we thought okay We're gonna like resign any kind of authorship and just like let the dogs lose but in a way It has it has Authenticity and also when you go there you see that it's actually being used and and the the burqa ladies look as As you know integrated as as the skate skateboard kids and as the senior citizens. So I Mean do you but therefore did you conceive it as a kind of space that would? You showed first signs of protest after the cartoons I mean did you see it as a space that actually would be politicized in some way or just simply as you say a form of acknowledgment of multicultural reality in Denmark. I mean, I think it's a it's almost like sort of an extreme exercise in inclusion that I think one of the the core fundamental aspects of of Urbanity is that it's an exercise in having a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds a lot of different cultures languages age groups gender whatever Co in cohabiting a limited amount of space and and rather than subjecting it to some kind of a uniform regime This became an exercise and okay What does it actually look like if there is space within this master plan for everybody to realize their Desires in a way and also as a collaboration. It was a collaboration between us Turbo take a landscape Arctic office and an artist group super fix and also for us It became quite easy to collaborate. Normally you would have like everybody fighting over the crayon But here there was actually space for everybody to fulfill part of their desire on the condition that they would also leave space for everybody else to have their Fantasies come true. Can I just ask you a final question about? How do you get these projects accepted? I mean there's something about the presentations at this table today where the notion of energy Electricity comes down to the individual. I mean we've seen it right in the way you talk about things I mean that last project How the hell do you convince people to put quite a lot of money into that? How much are you therefore in an interesting way to us? Leveraging this discussion that this conference is having about the electric city about the Potential the digital age in such a way that you're sort of buying into a sort of sense of guilt Which I think is a very northern European notion. Okay, let's spend more money, but we're blowing Five things up in the air and everyone is informed, but literally tell it. How do you convince them? I think I mean specifically The the smoke rings there was like a small element of an art budget But I think they had foreseen not not just the whole thing. Yeah, but I think it's it's actually because We have over the last maybe decade or a bit more in very sort of Active in the public debate about architecture in Denmark because all of our projects have arrived with a Journalistic angle if you like where the project is not just some kind of fair fair complete We've been very open about what are the criteria that this project addresses? What are the concerns and demands of sort of everyday? Danes that this project actually manifests and in that sense. I think we have slightly Twisted The realm of possible or possibility in Denmark So I think ten years ago we could not have submitted a power plant with a ski slope on the roof and expected to be taken Serious specifically the first project we did in Copenhagen I was a proposal with a major Danish theater group to make the Royal Danish theater on a barge that would make it Capable to tour In the summer and visit the provincial cities because you always have this provincial debate that they complain about spending all the money in Copenhagen That was like discarded in round one in the competition. They would never even look at it because it was like a silly It was a sailing theater But I think had we put it out now it would have been met with more With more careful consideration that maybe these guys actually did the homework turn away the and you're helping shift that paradigm Also decision-making we need to move on to the next session But I'm just thinking if there's one word which sums up each of your present I mean is yours about assemblage. What's the one word? What's the one word? No, because it was very powerful. You're saying assemblage or Legibility I don't let legibility yours not hedonism. It's obvious I don't know Concreteness Can you please thank these wonderful speakers?