 I was born in a very small village near by Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which actually I hated because we lived in this incredibly hard, raw concrete houses, which I never really felt at home. So I always went outside to the landscape like this, to nature, where we could explore in a way, building tree huts, swimming in the water, having a sort of interaction with the animals which were there, building secret tunnels, etc. We were so used to customise and personalise the world around us. And this is where we had our playground in a way. But also on a much, much wider scale, the Netherlands, as you may know, is a place which is below sea level. So there's this whole complex system of the windmills, of dykes, of rivers, of canals and things like that, to keep us not drowning, so to speak. So this may seem natural, but in a way, this is a manufactured landscape. This is a perfect example of how technology and nature can have a very poetic and intrinsic relationship with each other. And so for me, this was very important to be in a place like this, to realise that the landscape you and I live in is not just a fact sheet, it's not just sort of a consequence of a mayor who decides something. But it's a place to experiment, it's a place to explore. It's in a way an extension of who we are, of our identity, of our culture. What does that mean for the cities that we're going to live in, for technology which is more or less invading us human beings? And I started to think about that as an artist, as an architect. Making these kind of foils, this is Lotus, I'm jumping 25 years later, where we sort of, as a studio, wanted to make things which felt natural, but then in a hard urban environment. Based on the 37 degrees of your body, the heat, it folds open the material and closes again when it cools down. And high and polymer, laminated. So how can we implement nature in the city of tomorrow? So we spent, I think, eight or ten months on trying to make this happen. This was the result. But of course, started to implement it. Here you see Saint-Marie-Madeleine, a beautiful old Renaissance church in Lille, a city nearby Paris. And although the city and the mayor spent a lot of time, money and energy on this kind of cultural heritage, they really appreciate it. There's only one big problem with this kind of Renaissance churches. Nobody goes there. It's really sad. So the mayor sort of called me and asked, can you make something so that people start to appreciate again where we come from? So we made the first Lotus dome based on the material you just saw. This is inside the church. So based on the heat of your hand and the light, it folds open. And it starts to sort of, while the light follows you, to scan, actually, to reveal the history. Closing when you go away again. Showing places which were too dark, which were unseen before. And that was very interesting somehow. So by placing something of the future, you start to reconnect in a way. It is too easy to say, oh, future is good and past is bad. And let's start all over. That's impossible in the world we live in today. It's all about finding connections between the new and the old, between history and future, between pragmatism and poetry, between the fantasy and the Excel sheet. Also one day sitting in a car on a highway somewhere in Europe and thinking about mobility and thinking about that landscape. And suddenly I was looking at these roads. Roads are really weird things. Because when we talk about mobility and when we talk about innovation, everyone always focuses on the car. Yes? That can be billions of R&D. It can be glamorous, sexy, every year a new model. Perfectly fine. But the roads, actually the thing that you're seeing while you're driving, they're being pushed aside in a corner. They should be cheap, maintenance free. Nobody cares. And that's weird because the roads, the infrastructure, that's the thing we leave behind for our next generation. Hey, even if you're in New York, like your city, I don't see the buildings, I see the grids. Can we make roads which are more connected to energy neutralness or poetry? Teaming up with an infrastructure company, Heimans, you see here the director listening to me. And you know that look, he's a bit sceptic here. After we presented the idea and realized the first, now we have a deal for the coming five years. My team of designers and engineers, and theirs working together to think about the future of roads. We've realized in the last year, sort of 20 ideas which we're dragging from pro to to product. Glowing lines, where we think about street lighting to make roads more safe, more beautiful. So we developed coatings, which are based on the glow in the dark that you and I know as seeing on the ceiling, yes, the little stars. Going back to the lab, making sure the radiation, the glow is much more intense because the normal stuff which is out there now works for 30 minutes, has poisonous radion. You do not wanna put that in your public space. This is the first road we just encountered. Can you put out the sound? So if you're ever in the Netherlands, this is in Eindhoven two hours away from Amsterdam, and you can see that every night. So the road was unlit before, and here you see, it's sort of like a body. It sort of helps you to navigate. In a way, sort of continuing the land art of James Terrell, Walter de Maria, the hacking, the updating of the landscape. Animal friendly, also important. Pains which charge a daytime and glow at night, and make landscapes which are energy neutral. And on the other hand, just incredibly beautiful. That is something I like. So here the landscape becomes energy neutral. Here the landscape becomes more than purely functional. And we launched it, I think, three months ago live on Dutch television. Two hours later, there was a traffic jam. So people really started to go there. And it's interesting how this hard, raw, completely conservative road industry suddenly opens up out of love for new things, out of sheer desperation because their old economy is crashing. So I think the role of the artist is to be this happy infiltrator and connect with dreams, connect with craftsmanship to make new things happen. Also here, a special one, Van Gogh, lived in the Netherlands in 8083, 8085. This year it's the International Van Gogh year, 125 years. A lot of tourists and people from all around the world come to visit in the Netherlands and experience this cultural heritage. But the problem with him and the problem with history is that you don't really feel it. A lot of it are like paintings in the museum with a sign, please do not touch. Yeah, I'm sorry, but it's great. But still, maybe I don't, you know, it's not part of my daily life. So the Van Gogh Foundation and the mayor and the province there asked me, can you make something to make him somehow feel more alive, more connected? So we took the glowing lines that you just saw chopped them up in little pieces. Inspired by the starry night paintings he made later on in France. Also Van Gogh had his obsession with the landscape and this is what we've realized right now. The first kilometer bicycle path through the area where he worked and lived in the interpretation of the swirls Allah, Allah of him. So it's taking something of the past, hacking it, updating it, building it, that we sometimes forget it. Like we plug a 3D printer on our brains and that's it. No, no, no, this is labor. This is people working. Here you see the design department at work. So it's like craftsmanship 2.0, at least that's what we hope. And the end result is something like this. It's just like we're laying on a stove. It's a combination of smart coatings which chart a daytime glow at night, up to eight or nine hours. When it's super, super cloudy, which sometimes happens in the Netherlands, we can sort of, how do you say it? Pep it a bit with UV LEDs. We can connect to a solar panel. So in a way it's about bringing culture back alive. Nobody expected to have a bicycle path become world news, but it did, which is a weird experience. And I heard it's sort of a hotspot. So first you go to cinema in downtown with your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband. And then after that you go here and you take your walk of light. That's why I showed you the first movie of the landscape with the dykes. Maybe this looks, compared to that, this looks for me natural or maybe the supernatural or logical at least. All these projects and was telling a bit about it, it's not that easy. Sometimes you're lucky and you have a mayor who has the guts to invest in new ideas of like a minister or a government. But I noticed that a lot of people say they want creativity or innovation. But the moment you present that idea to your boss, to your wife, to your girlfriend, et cetera, there's this weird tendency in us human beings that we limit ourselves, that we reply every good new idea starting with two words. Yes, but exactly, exactly. It's too expensive, it's too cheap, it's too beautiful, it's too ugly. I mean, I have heard everything already in my lifetime. And I started to hate that so much because yes, there are 5,000 reasons to not do something, but there are also 5 reasons to do it. So it's a person of identity, it's a person of choice. We decided to make the first yes, but chair and to use this negativity and do something new. So this is the first chair we have ever designed and the last one because I'm not interested in that but in the landscapes. So it looks like a normal chair, actually designed by Darcey 50 years ago. But the thing with this chair, it has a little voice recognition element in it. And the moment you sit on that chair and you say those two horrible little words, you get a short but pretty intense little shock on the backside of your body to move away from the yes, but and like what you said in the beginning, to have the guts to explore and invest in new dreams is a way to go. Sometimes we work from our own obsessions, sometimes I follow my intuition, sometimes I look at the world around me and I'm amazed. Here you see progress, technology, advancement, air pollution, smog. This is Monday on a good day from my room. This is on a Tuesday and a Wednesday when I cannot see the world around me anymore. So here you see our desire to explore has its side effects, so to speak. And of course, Beijing government is aware of the problems and investing millions in reduction of cars, clean energy, et cetera, et cetera, but it takes too much time. And I started to look at this and said, can we not sort of make a bridge towards the final solution? And remembering when I was at this horrible, boring children parties when I was eight or nine years old, you have this plastic balloon and when you polish it, yes, it becomes static, exactly. It starts to suck things up in a way. Can we not use that principle and literally making the largest electronic vacuum cleaner in the world? So we teamed up with air purifying experts, creating an ionic field, which is safe, energy-friendly and literally sort of sucking up the smog locally, creating a park in the city, which is the cleanest spot in the city itself. New world, old world. And that's very interesting. We're realizing it right now, building the first one in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which is also an industrial city, and then it's moving to Beijing. So it's sort of a tower, dirty air comes in, clean air comes out, and it creates a bubble like Bak Munis de Fuller once did, but then open where people can experience the future, smell the future, feel the future. And it's a place where people can meet and exchange ideas. This is Beijing smog. This is the stuff we were sucking up from the sky, and this is like, ha, we are actually breathing this. Also in Europe, in Paris, same problem. And we had buckets of this stuff. We should not throw this away because in the new world, waste does not exist, yes? Waste for the one should be food for the other. You have to think like a circle, not linear. We started to look again at this incredibly filthy bag of stuff and realized that 42, 48% of this material exists out of carbon. Being a son of a math teacher, realized that if you put carbon under a lot of pressure, you get diamonds. After some testing, that takes a lot of energy. But what we're doing is we're putting it under pressure for 30 minutes by hand, or even shorter, and it gets crystallized. So we're making smog jewelry, rings out of it. And by sharing a ring, you donate a thousand cubic meter of clean air to the city itself. And that was quite interesting because suddenly the waste became the enabler. So you see in a way when you think circular, the ability to make these kind of things actually are happening. I believe in a new world we should never stop. You should be this voluntary prisoner of your own imagination, I think. So right now we're making a whole series. The landscape is our collective conscious. And I believe that if we connect the worlds of innovation, new technologies, the role of creativity and arts is super important. And there's a whole new world to be explored. And I'm looking forward to work with all of you to see how we can push that to the next level. All right, thank you.