 Hello everybody, I am Caroline Bowman director at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and I'm really really happy to welcome all of you on this frigid spring night for what is, of course, a sold-out evening with Moshe Safdie, winner of Cooper Hewitt's 2016 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. Yes, please. Just want to share one great picture with you. No? Hang on. There we go. Bringing us back to October and the wonderful celebration at Cooper Hewitt. The Oscars of the Design World, the National Design Awards, Honor Excellence, Innovation and Lasting Achievement, and is among our most prominent initiatives to raise awareness of design as a vital discipline in forming all aspects of contemporary culture. Moshe is nothing less than a giant in the realm of modern and contemporary architecture. A globally revered designer, theorist, educator and author who remains as influential today as when he first entered the field 50 years ago. And in fact, this year is the 50th anniversary of Habitat, Moshe's pioneer example of prefabricated housing that launched his career. Last year, I received a magnificent monograph tracing the evolution of Moshe's design and planning work, and it was so heavy that we had to weigh it because we couldn't believe it. And it weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds. I don't know if you know that. And every time I take it out to look at it, I sort of need not quite another person, but it's quite something. So you might say that it is one small measure of the greatness of Moshe's oeuvre. And tonight, you have all received surprise copies of the exhibition catalog for his recent retrospective, Global Citizen, thanks to Softy Architects, and it will be a lot easier to transport than this other term that I'm referring to. From the beginning of his remarkable trajectory, Moshe has worked within an ethical framework that places the user at the center of design and insists that architecture is above all a social act. His body of work makes evident the major role of architecture in people's lives and demonstrates how built forms can strengthen communities, facilitate understanding, and inspire empathy and optimism. Most notably with his designs for Israel's Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Projects such as the Salt Lake City Public Library, a dynamic hub of civic activity, articulate architecture's vital role in engaging and enriching communities, while Moshe's recently completed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, embraces the responsibility of the built environment to respond to the essence of its place. Since establishing his practice in 1964 in Montreal, Moshe and his firm have produced more than 75 built projects, communities, and master plans across three continents. He's also written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture, lectured internationally, as you all know, and taught at major universities, including his alma mater, McGill, where he earned his degree in architecture in 1961, and Harvard, where he led the university's urban design program from 1978 to 1984. In addition to being the recipient of the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, Moshe has received numerous other awards and honors, including, but not limited to, the companion of the Order of Canada, the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects, and the gold medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Tonight, Moshe will speak on a subject that he has considered for decades, the mega-scale building in a world of rapidly expanding urban growth. Cities now house approximately half of the world's population, and Moshe has been an important critical voice and advocate for architecture's responsibility to help manage that growth and solve problems as it reconfigures the landscape. I am absolutely delighted that he is with us this evening to share his ideas and recommendations, so please join me in welcoming Moshe Safdi. Thank you Caroline for your very warm words. It makes me feel at home coming here, and delighted to be here tonight. I was thinking towards the lecture, what should I appropriately do? Should I talk about recent work? I wanted somehow, since this was Lifetime Achievement, to kind of attempt an overview. And then I concluded that really it ought to be an attempt to summarize the principles that have guided our work over the past 50 years and look at some of our projects looking back in relationship to those principles. And so first I was thinking what is the context? The context is that we are in an age that presents new architectural problems, issues, challenges, that have not existed in the past. One is density, mega-scale. The other is globalization, the kind of evolution of a world that's becoming so much the same, you just have no idea where you are. And so both present to design as particular problems to resolve. And so I summed it up again, I know it's somewhat overlapping, but I said to myself what are the principles? The first would be that the site is the generator. Le Corbusier used to say the plan is the generator of architecture. And the plan is actually the generator in the sense that it is the first time a designer imprints his will on a design. But when I say the site is a generator, it's not the architect's will, it's the site which has its own will. It's the site and what the qualities of the site are. And that begins from the site itself and its context, its culture, its climate, the cultural and physical setting and the urban setting into which a project is placed. And so that responding to this, to the issue of context is the first principle. The second principle is that I've always thought to make buildings which are inherently buildable. And inherently buildable means that it's not just buildable because anything is buildable and in the age of our technology literally everything is buildable. But what is appropriate? And that leads us to a level of the question of responsibility. What is appropriate in the way of technology, of materials, of resources? And this forks off into the questions of energy and resources or just building materials and what today comes under the umbrella of sustainability. But inherent buildability means that you design buildings which are easy and natural to build in the nature of their materials. It's not very different from what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he said to design and build in the nature of materials. The third is that the program of a building, the British call it the brief, we call it the program, that is the set of requirements and needs of a project, the purpose of a building, should be the point of the source of invention and architecture. That before formal invention one has to resolve how a building responds to the life intended in it. Which takes me back to a wonderful saying of Lucan, let the building be what it wants to be. And finally I think that in recognition of the world we build and live in, the world of density, of congestion, of mega scale, the last principle I want to explore is how do you humanize mega scale? It's here to stay, we're not going to wish it away. Our cities are going to continue growing, they're going to be of overwhelming size and concentration. And I see nothing on the horizon that's going to change that. Well, what are we as designers able to do about it? So interestingly enough I think some of these principles are age old. You could find the question of billability and the materiality of architecture in Alberti and Palladio, but at the same time some of the issues, the issue of responding to the particular place and location, the making of an architecture that belongs is a new set of issues. And the same is true of mega scale as I said. I don't think a 19th century architect even imagined in their wildest dream that they would have to resolve issues that we need to today. So, goodbye family. Let me start with the site. And I'm going to do this a bit chronological and a bit in terms of my own personal engagement with the subject. I had just finished Habitat. I tried a few other habitats in many other places. I mean we were commissioned in New York and Puerto Rico and none got built. And then somehow I landed in Jerusalem, which was my home country but which I had not been to for a while. And I was engaged in a whole series of projects, the first of which was a restoration of the Jewish quarter in the old city of Jerusalem and particularly building a major institution, a yeshiva, rabbinical college facing the western wall and the Temple Mount. And this is the context. By the way, that's the context of Jerusalem when I first arrived there. And you'll see the kind of beautiful stone domes and the Ottoman architecture, the context into which the yeshiva was to be built. It's very different today. It's half the buildings are covered with dishes, I mean communication dishes, antennas, water coolers. Anyhow, but that's another subject for another lecture. So I was very intimidated by the responsibility of building in this historic context. And it came, there's a site as you see facing all this fabric of Ottoman city and the palatial scale of the Temple Mount. And I remember one of the first meeting with the rabbis who were my clients. And they had just fired a New York architect who proposed for this place a glass box with stained glass. And they said to me, are you going to make a modern building for us or a traditional one? Very threatening voice. And I kind of just intuitively answered and said, if I succeed, you won't be able to answer the question. And that became a kind of a motto. And where were the clues how to resolve it? If I thought about the context of the old city of Jerusalem, it was about scale, the broken down scale of incremental architecture. It was about courtyards. It was about an architecture that kind of responded to this very bright, sunny Middle East climate. But it was also about stone because even the British who respected the city created a building ordinance where you must build with the traditional Jerusalem stone. And I thought, well, if you build in stone, it pretty well dictates the kind of architecture. Stone is load bearing, massive construction. But I thought this should be a contemporary building. And so I started thinking in terms of construction, resolving it. Build stone walls massively, almost like they did in Romanesque times, which could serve the passages and the vertical circulation and so on. And develop a precast concrete lace-like industrialized construction that could be woven together within it. And so you'd have the heavy and the light, the contemporary and the traditional. And you see here in the model we made at the time the stone walls, massive walls, and within them this lace-like making small rooms and large rooms. And here you see it as a diagram of building up. And you see that it picks up the scale of the old city, but it's a very contemporary building. Again, the model with the larger and smaller spaces and domes that open up to become solariums and others which are roofing the building. And the great synagogue in the center of the building, which is a culmination of all these elements. And here is the building. It's actually a long story. The rabbis started changing their plans. I sued them. I stopped them. I went to the Supreme Court. I won it. They revenge. They didn't finish the building. So they now occupy the building half-finished. But there was this first attempt to make an architecture that really belonged to its setting. And here is the same concept extended to Mamilla outside the city walls of David's village, which overlooks the old city, which we did in the 80s. Flash forward about a decade, having left Canada for Harvard and not having had many commissions after Habitat, we won the competition for the National Gallery of Canada. And the National Gallery is in Ottawa. It faces Parliament across the border. Trudeau had the concept, Prime Minister Trudeau, of two great museums. The Museum of Civilization, which was in Quebec, French Canada, English Canada, Ontario. Two institutions smiling to each other. And so that was the context. But for me, this was a fascinating new assignment into a city which is Neogothic, which is Nordic, which is the coldest capital in the world. And I felt, again, the same after Jerusalem, what is the essence of Ottawa should I get the sense of ceremony appropriate to a national institution and the kind of ritual and at the same time could I develop an architecture that is contemporary but speaks to the local vernacular. And I sort of jump forward to the end result. This is the Library of Parliament, Neogothic 19th century, the Cathedral of Ottawa. And here's the National Gallery with its great hall, which is a crystalline structure, a place of assembly within the museum, which is where now all the heads of state dinners take place. The last one I was excited about was Obama and Trudeau having good time there, and now I dread the future. I think they shouldn't let him in. Sorry. So the Exonomic shows you that there's kind of an entry point. There's an ascent. There's a great hall. There's galleries around courtyards. But the language of the building is a language of glass, crystal, absorbing sun and light. You see here the Library of Parliament and its glazed crystalline cousin across the water with its internal shading system. You see here the building at night, it glows, it's extrovert. It advertises the life within it. The ceremonial ascent, which gets a red carpet when the heads of state arrive. I won't show you the galleries. Just focus on the public spaces. The great hall overlooking Parliament. The roof of the structure above the great hall, which flower-like opens up for sunlight and shades depending on the weather and the sun penetration. And so when people did walk into the National Gallery, the kind of general reaction was it just feels that it belongs in Ottawa. Some of the critics, architecture critics, I should say, said it was pastiche. And I suppose it's a reasonable criticism, or at least I think there was a sincerity about it. I'll go forward to a decade further. We were commissioned to design the National Sikh Museum in the Punjab. It followed the visit of the head of state of Punjab to Yad Vashem. He spoke about the similar path of the Sikh and Jewish people. And I arrived there. They took me to their holiest shrine, which is the Golden Temple in Amitsar. And I visited India extensively. And one of my first kind of thoughts about Sikh architecture generally, and particularly in the site where we're building, is that it's all about defense and fortresses. And this is the fortress city of Jaisalmer. It's not in Punjab, it's in Rajasthan, but it's that sense of defense and containment that there's so much part of the architecture of that region. And there was quite a bit of controversy. What is the Chief Minister doing, importing an American, Canadian, Israeli, Jewish architect? What does he know about Sikhism? And we picked the site. I actually had a site way down there, but this is right by the town, by the temples. We picked the site because I felt it should be walking distance from the shrines. And the site actually spans across the valley, and part of the complex is built as part of the town bridging across to the cliffs, sand cliffs across. And again, the assignment was a building that would really manage to, I guess the word is seduce, the Sikh community to feel it's their own. These were some of my first sketches. Jaisalmer is up there, building in stone and concrete, cliff-like above the sand dunes, crowning the buildings with stainless steel roofs that will reflect the light. This was the first model I brought that got a lot of enthusiasm, and they started excavating right away. This was the groundbreaking while we're still working on schematic design, but it gives you a measure of what this place is in terms of the significance to Sikh culture. And 10 years later, took a while, two chief ministers changing governments, et cetera, as things occur. You see the complex, the town itself, the auditorium and changing galleries and library, bridging across the restaurant, the water gardens in the valley, and then the museum where the history of the Sikh people is untold in a series of galleries that meander at two levels. And as you approach the building to its main entrance, this fortress-like feeling, as it faces towards the north and the mountains, and actually the skyline, which is just the resolution of the plan form of the museum with its roof geometry. I'll come back to that later. And one of the interior galleries, as people ascend, and finally seen in the context of the sacred buildings across the water. A totally different site, totally different issue of place was Crystal Bridges. It starts by being in Bentonville, close to downtown Bentonville, but those of you who've been there know that downtown is an overstatement. And it sits on a family estate that's basically a forest with a stream and some springs running right through its center. And the question was how do you build in a place that's actually a forest with water courses, a structure that could be on the hilltops, could be in the valley, like the old mill towns. And I struggled with this question of how to give a powerful sense of place while minimizing how many trees are cut because this had some amazing specimens. And as we walked the site, I came to the kind of feeling that, and again, I go back, the site is a generator. This building is a result of that kind of, of the site suggesting that one could build in the valley with the water. Now what do they do in the mill towns? They dam the water and they create ponds and they let the water run through and activate the whole system. And that seemed to be a clue. We had an amazing spring upstream and so I proposed a couple of dams that would create two large ponds and then around that we would build a museum in a series of pavilions. And so we surveyed the site and we avoided all the hills where the big pine trees were and oaks. And you can see here just the result of the two dams creating two ponds of slightly different shape. Here it is before we built the dams but we cleared the trees and this was an early sketch showing two structures bridging over the water. One structure being an island in the water and a series of pavilions going all around so that basically there's a whole series of loops of circulation. And you're deep in the valley so that the trees around you are really creating the canopy of what you see all around you. Translated into the final building some years later. So the two ponds, the stream coming down, the overflow, when it rains and it rains this thing gets to be ferocious, this is a waterfall that springs the water all the way to here. It's just really dramatic. So you're living with, the experience of this building is part of the climate system and I talk about the water flow. You can imagine the concerns over floods and would it be the 100 year flood? No, that's not good enough. We ended up with the 3,000 year flood which I figured is pretty close to the big flood. So we had to actually resolve the impossible flood where the building actually is raised five feet above the mean water level so that the amount of water that can flow under would not damage the building. And we've been through a couple of them. And this whole water system is part of nature. It's got turtles today, it's just flowing in there, it's not managed or filtered in any way. And that led to the opportunity to integrate art and nature in a way that very few museums accomplish. Actually with Alice Walton we visited the Louisiana Museum in Denmark near Copenhagen, which is one of the few museums where you go from one pavilion, you see the sea, you go through nature in and out. And this is all about experiencing the bridges themselves as suspension structures and the building material is concrete and all the roofs are exclusively of Arkansas pine harvested locally and built into laminated beams. Here's a overall view of the building surrounding the pond when you look from one structure to the other across and the wood structures that enclose both the galleries and the public spaces and always views to the water and to the hills around you. One of the gallery buildings with the art behind the wall and looking out to nature and art and sculpture outside in the landscaped areas and one of the galleries with the wood structure and a nice scene of moving about from one pavilion to the other. So these principles I'm talking about they apply to each building so that I could have talked about inherent buildability using crystal bridges as a case study but I've actually picked particular attributes and I want to talk about now a number of projects where this notion of buildability was central to our concerns. And the first project I want to recall is exploration place in Wichita where we were commissioned to do a science center, a science museum. The site that was made available by the city is the site you see here along the Arkansas River and this was a major highway which was carrying traffic along and I remember when we were interviewed and I was taken to the site, I lamented that once you walk to the middle of the site you don't even know that the river is there and that whole sense of a building along the river was not visible on the site. So I proposed that the highway be re-routed which got me stuck with a one-year public hearings about the re-routing of the parkway which we won, I mean they won. So that gave an opportunity to create an island in the river. We excavated part of the river to form that island and then learning that this was the edge of the river and that this was filled in as a make-job thing during the Depression. So actually we recreated what had been there before which was a channel and part of the museum is on the mainland and crosses over to the island with the galleries here and the IMAX and restaurants and other things on this end. But I want to talk about the building of this industrial and systems. The plan evolved and we concluded that we're going to build it in concrete and this was the first project in which we got interested in wood construction, laminated beams which you saw already deployed later in exploration place. And struggling with this notion of repetition and variety. You see that the plan itself has a great complexity. It's like a series of protrusions into the water but at some point we started ordering it geometrically. It sits on a fixed radius and a series of grid lines represent a torus which is the surface of a donut. And you can see here, I'll jump to that first, where we started thinking that the roof would be generated by this imaginary toroid. The island building is generated by a toroid which is facing the sky. That's a roof line. And the land side building is toroids which have their center deep in the earth. And if you take that geometry and you cross it against the plan, you get this silhouette and every beam here is the same radius, repetitive, mass-produced product. So what looks like really complex set of forms has been translated to repetitive, simpler, not simple, but simpler. Actually this building was amazingly economic. It was $150 a square foot which even then was an amazing price. And just plain concrete walls whose shape stabilizes structure because they're stiff because of the curvature and the wood beams and that's it. So then I go back, if I can, to the sketch which is all this complexity coming out of a geometry. And that kind of was a good lesson that you can get, you can marry a simplicity of construction with a complexity of plan, a purpose that comes out of the plan itself. And I just love the kind of what looks, appears to be, could have been just random composition and it's nothing but that. It's really an inevitable geometry construct that you see here. And the interior is one of the galleries kind of at night. As project, actually I thought the engineer is here, he's here, no? Oh, there you are. Structural engineer, Bureau Hapel, the firm of Bureau Hapel are working with us on this. This is in Singapore. It is the jewel project. It's called the jewel project. It's a center destined to unify the existing terminals in the airport where all the circulation comes through and this becomes a place where the public at large and passengers can mix with shopping and entertainment and a great big garden. It's under construction. And you see here there are airport facilities, four levels of shopping and then this great big garden that descends into a valley and a giant glass roof magically suspended and draining the entire rainfall into the center of a building and a great waterfall. But it's one thing to sketch it, it's another thing to build it. And I'll just share with you some of the studies that come into the process. This just shows in plan that you come in and you can circulate around and go shopping and do things or you go through the canyons to the garden and there are two worlds, one is the Bazaar and the world of the garden. But these are some of the geometries and with any toroidal geometry as you come towards the center things get crowded and so they have to be geometric transition. There also have to be some easy way of making these joints out of many thousands or tens of thousands of metal pieces and all that gets translated into a whole series of studies of various geometries, how much light they transmit, can you get a balance between the light transmission and the geometry, the glass sizes that are available and here are studies about the node of how to join these things by bolting and not by welding which is much more difficult to accomplish and some of the sexy graphics that come out of all that study. But the building is not finished yet but will have a lightness of being which I think would be compelling. Together with our landscape team of Pete Walker, we are actually bringing trees from all over the region so that there is this coming together of climatic system, the impact of the falling water on the climate, the structure, etc. all of which is part of what I would say inherent buildability. A mock-up of the roof structure from which many things were learned and finally the project under construction at the center of the airport. Finally in that same theme is USIP. I was very upset to hear that the funding for the United States Institute of Peace were wiped out this week but there is their headquarters and hopefully that won't happen. It's very strategic location on the National Mall across from the Lincoln Memorial and right by the Vietnam Memorial. The design evolved into a series of precast concrete structures in which the offices and other spaces associated with think tank building are accommodated with a couple of atria which are public rooms for events and for the staff in the center with roofs which hover over these atria that somehow are white and light and bird-like because I thought the building is the symbol of peace on the Mall and somehow it has to have this sense of whiteness and lightness that I saw not the lightness but the whiteness of the Jefferson which you see here but in a much, in a light version as if taking off in flight. This is the model. The entire facade and structure of the building is again a repetitive precast system. Actually this one was fabricated in Toronto shipped over and assembled and you see this beginning of a roof which is hovering over and a couple of months later this is organized into a series of spheres because spheres are repetitive by nature with the structural members following the great circle route and then glass panels about four by four white glass panels spanning between them and further studies showing how the geometry is made with storids and spheres nationalized and mocked up in Munich by the glass manufacturer that also shows the transparency and the details and the building under construction and the film of translucency and glass being installed to the final building and at the opposite end in the sort of mass of the architecture not the roofs you see here the system of repetitive precast elements which get assembled to form the walls these are shipped in large sections and again a repetitive system gives you a rather lively facade which you see here with a high level of finish this is as fine and elegant as limestone Caroline mentioned Saltek Library and I've included the library as a project which attempted to respond to the program and is all organized around the notion of what a contemporary library can be should be it is in Salt Lake downtown it's faces the library excuse me the city hall across the space it's surrounded by the Wabash Mountains from the outset it was clear that public library in Salt Lake has to deal with complex issues some people used to call it during the design process the counter to the Mormon temple meaning that was a secular temple in town the ambitions of the city and the library in the city was to create a strong place that would attract people from the region not just the downtown as a public library and they produced a master plan where the library was to create within the block these Salt Lake blocks are 600 feet across they're enormous and the roads are very wide so that the carriage can make a new turn horse carriage but this type of place we felt would just die in any climate just pushed away from the streets and all that but there were some very powerful concepts in the program that we received it said that they wanted to have an urban room which would be open 24 hours a day which would serve the community at large which could accommodate dinners, exhibitions have shops in it as a kind of anti-room of the library proper with its conventional reading rooms and stacks etc and so this diagram proposes the piazza the space that they had proposed sort of in the heart being part of a sequence of the urban room which is year-round air conditioned space coming from the city streets and the transit and flowing into the center of the block with a crescent wall that contains it and leads the public all the way up to a reading garden on the roof which would be open to the public at all times so that's the diagram that was born from that notion of outdoor and indoor public life and we added to that our own contribution a reading garden on the roof and a way of connecting them and everything sort of fell into place after that so the plan shows you this crescent wall auditoria, cinemas, shops, restaurants etc the library block with its stacks reading room in the galleries above within that wall and all around and I won't go into further detail but there is a finished building and there was this question who's going to climb up this crescent wall give us a precedent for something of that scale so we can have a level of comfort about it so I had this from we don't quite get that energy but we get people climbing up and here is the reading garden above lots of weddings up here it turns out to be and that's the urban room which is really a new thing for a library you don't have to go into the control zone of the library you don't have to borrow a book to be in here and this place is just used all the time it has receptions it's got exhibitions it's got dinners it is constantly in use day and night the children's library below the amphitheater in the landscape the kind of inviting transparency of the building towards the plaza and the plaza itself constantly used you can see here people watching events and performances it's a very, very active place so we made it into Archie I think it says something about the world famous South City public library it's awesome wow, double wow throw a triple wow for me what else do you want in life? so in conclusion and last but not least I want to talk about our own journey to coping with mega scale this is a photograph of public housing many of which I visited during a housing study as a student at McGill just before I did my thesis that led to Habitat and we also visited endless suburbs and the conclusion at least my conclusion at the time was we got to make a building typology, create a building typology that achieves density as an apartment building but is so livable so that people won't have the desire to go to the suburbs simplifying it so the motor was for everyone a garden and then there were other concepts prefabrication, industrialization but Habitat which as Carol I mentioned is 50 this year aging quite nicely actually is really about breaking up the mass of an apartment building and fractalizing it into units, house scale units which are identifiable and visible at the scale of a village but achieving the densities that one needs to in the city and so for everyone a garden open streets rather than corridors and here you see the prefabrication of lifting these pre-finished boxes and one thing that certainly Habitat proved I think without any dispute is that it's a desirable place to live and the people who lived there loved it and those who visited would like to live in it and if we built this in New York we would have bigger higher values in Montreal that's for sure but the underlying question was is it reproducible, is it reproducible not just for the few luxury housing but for the mass of medley income housing and is it reproducible in the context of densities that are now ten times what we imagined in 1967 and so we initiated a study a few years ago not project specific at all in the office in our research fellowship to sort of go back to first principle how would we do it differently today this is Mandelbrot's fractals and that's just want to touch on the mathematics of fractals which is to take something and break it down into almost a maximum perimeter or maximum surface so that in the case of architecture that means more surfaces, more transparency more roofs, more break up in other words it's a way of breaking down scale and habitats about scale it's about light as you build up dense housing higher and higher how do you arrange things so that light systematically comes through that's something that happens for plant life almost through evolution but how do you in architecture achieve that kind of light penetration so a year later we had all these models of studies we had done and I'm going to show you a couple these are some of the responses this was trying to make habitat more economical traditional prefabricated structure vertically stacked this is creating housing membranes of quite great density with open spaces and maybe more suitable to tropical climates and so on and so forth but one study centered on New York as a case and we took several blocks in midtown Manhattan and we measured the densities of housing and offices etc which you see here and then we developed a model which had the same density but with a premise that we can mix uses build offices on top of which we can do apartments and see to what extent the quality of life of habitat could be achieved you see the model an early model it shows streets in the air with shops and community facilities along the this was a site on the across the East River promenade along the water office buildings housing going all the way up great big urban windows so that it doesn't form a wall that those who live in the areas inland are not cut off and looking down you see that not all but the high proportion of the people living here still have their garden and the streets and community gardens and swimming pools etc so this led to a number of projects mostly in Asia all of which spun off the studies but they got built in this particular one called Sky Habitat in Singapore is middle income housing so this is a private sector middle upper middle income housing and here is a series of terraced units some units with their balconies three levels I think that's clear here three levels of community bridges that meander through the building with just public spaces for recreation parks etc recognizing this building with 600 units probably have at least a thousand kids in it and here we see the community spaces the terraces for some units open to the sky and balconies to others so what this is indicating to us and this is one of several projects that there is today we've come full cycle the concepts of habitat as open living green terraces public and private they're in the air I mean you see it in students work you see it in my colleagues work and we somehow reached a point where there's enough demand for this at the public and developer level that these ideas have come now full circle to be able to be realized much greater densities in the context of Asian cities but possibly well beyond that so at the same time I want to say something about the public realm because these pure housing projects don't quite deal with the public realm you're creating a lot of private open space but what about our ability to create the public realm in very great densities the standard model I'd call it or the prevailing model in Asia is the developer get a big chunk of land we have one dramatic example in New York right now it's a Hudson's Yard big chunk of land half a dozen, two dozen towers podium under the podium shops and shopping and malls and parking and towers rise out of that and it's all introvert and it all turns its back to the city and it's a private world and so it starts from the little private world of 15 or 20 years ago of the Trump Towers and then to these much larger projects and so I want to refer to Marina Bay Sands in one particular aspect of it which is working with the URA Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore and being supported by them in terms of working with our client who was a private developer how to create a complex of great density and truly public realm meaning that it is accessible, open and feels part of the city and not part of a project that's the site which is all landfill and the master plan of the URA filled the land and proposed that there should be a whole series of continuous linked promenades all this is grass in this picture is now filled with high rise buildings and all of that would plug into this great promenade, waterfront promenade forming one cohesive urban experience and we would build our project into that set of objectives some view corridors here this is our site and we were to place on it six million square feet of convention centers, theaters shopping hotels, etc so one of the reasons I took on the project was that here was really an opportunity to show that you could create something that was truly public that's not your traditional mall it was an alternative to the traditional mall and the clue was to think about it as a part of as a microcosm of the city not as a project this is a plan of Jerusalem in Byzantine times with its Roman corridor running right through and all the public buildings plugging and we realized we need a corridor and the corridor went from a gate to a gate to the element that oriented the city and in Marina Bay we took that promenade which was mandated in our own so-called commercial mall and we married them into one experience which is in part outdoor in part indoor in part air conditioned in part open to the elements and plugged in are the public buildings that contribute to public life with conventions and theaters and museums and set the towers back to complement but not to dominate and even within the and so here you see in cross-section several levels of shop expanding to the outdoors and indoors with sheltered structures this being air conditioned this being outdoors weaving in and out outdoors, outdoors promenade along the water and then moving indoors and into the depth of the project and the place connects to transportation subways and other projects in a seamless way and in the same way to extend the whole notion of open spaces to the roofs and a new element there the sky park which became a park on the 59th floor in part open to the public at large so you're taking the ground plane and creating new opportunities landscape, parks and gardens in the higher levels of the building and the swimming pools and parks and the public observatory and the restaurants that kind of command the city but also create another plane of activity which in its nature truly public so if I'm to conclude I would say for 100 years we've had we've had the dominant in biology being the high rise building in cities in American cities this is concentrated in certain areas and then you can have cities which are you know expanses of suburban sprawl but in most in South America in Asia it is a predominant building type you basically have cities that go on for miles with high rise buildings there can be 20 stories there can be 10 stories there can be 100 stories but that's the typology and we have not learned how to use the high rise tower as a building block of creating public space we I mean through the history of urbanism lower buildings formed piazza streets soaps whatever and each building was a building block that contributed to the making of the public realm but towers don't do that towers are very hard to cluster and create places for people and so the first and then that gets more difficult by the dispersal caused by the automobile and so the first response was to simply siphon it off the street and off the what used to be the public realm and recreated in air conditioning bliss but since all of this is being done by developers whose main objective is retail and consumption and shopping we're getting these islands of internalized primarily retail commercial places that make up the city as the kind of response while the towers hover over and I think that new inventions of how to deploy towers in a way that permits us to aggregate them in a positive manner and to reinvent the public realm that we have been losing is what's going to be the most interesting thing ahead of us in the decades to come thank you very much so we have time for a few questions so if you want to raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question I'll come with the mic to you one of the things that's happening at least in New York City a lot of retail is kind of disappearing kids much younger than me are shopping over the internet so when they want to have fun in the city they don't go shopping anymore I recently moved from 2 Fifth Avenue and 8th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue was always filled with empty stores for the last 20 years there's still maybe 75 stores along that street probably 25 of them are empty so a third of them are empty and have been and I don't expect that they'll fill up either so I think that's given what there's no question here it's just given what you were talking about in terms of how people relate to it used to be the shopping mall the building you know to integrate with the building in a way that is more of a physical experience maybe some sort of recreational not shopping I think you're touching on two issues one is actually why sure a lot of shopping is going internet but what's left is going mall so between the mall and the internet the streets are in bad shape but your question reminds me of something that we as teaching architecture and doing studios on urban projects you get the syndrome that projects are drawn streets are marked places and then the universal thing that the student does automatically oh retail retail cafe cafe so by the time you're done and you if you add up all the retail and the cafes that all the students are being proposed it's enough for a city of 10 million it's just like out of control but that is a gut reaction because that's the only way that animation of the street is familiar to them and I think that it's a problem because we're doing a studio now redesigning Hudson's Yard with a class the question is how much retail will fly and which street should not and if they're not retail what should be along those streets there are ways of landscaping streets and having the buildings come down in a friendly way and with views into the buildings etc even if they're not retail that are friendly and would make for beautiful boulevards I mean one of the most beautiful streets in Boston is Commonwealth Avenue there's not one shop along Commonwealth Avenue but it's exquisite and then you cross over and this is Newbury Street and it's all about shops and it's exciting in a different way so this notion of shops and cafes are the answer to everything is over simplification that really needs to be and we need to invent these recreational boulevards and other places which are not consumption driven or retail driven without putting a value judgment on it walking is such an important thing and in cities like Boston and New Orleans and I have a friend in New Orleans who is dealing with this very thing they're starting to build big buildings there and scale is so important and then are they just buildings with retail shops and it's happening all over the and nothing is sadder than empty shops exactly thank you hello in your analysis of Habitat 50 years later and also you mentioned building and the coldest capital in the world what things are you doing now or you look at for energy efficiency we know that we no longer have climate change but if we did how would we address those things or what have you learned from your experience with building a glass building I know you had shades and other things but buildings that were more energy efficient in a time that we are about to have a crisis part of the answer is an easy one technology is helping us in terms of insulating buildings and waterproofing them and placing glass in responsible ways and high performance glass on sunny sides of the building et cetera but that's really part of the answer I think the question actually points to a paradox conceptually when you fractalize a building and you break it up you create more surface a high-rise building that's very compact has relatively less surface so when you break it up and you make it more like houses you need more surface you need to insulate more you might lose more energy so the question is though what comes first the configuration of your desirable environment and then resolving it in the most efficient way I remember a conversation about schools when there was a brief period when it was fashionable to do schools without windows conserves energy and doesn't distract the students I mean you know what the hell with conserving energy and let's distract the students because you've got to balance sustainability and efficiency with the desirable environment having said that it drives me crazy to drive through Dubai and see one glass tower after the other no shading whatsoever the glass is almost as dark as sunglasses and it's 50 degrees centigrade or you know 140 degrees Fahrenheit and it's sitting there like a radiator I mean there is this goes back to the what's appropriate to a place what's appropriate to a climate I think we need to use glass and windows and transparency judiciously and more cleverly you can make windows light and view and don't allow sun in and heat up the place so sustainability is about the mindset I think that still has a long way to go in terms of how architects think about it great are there any more questions one here with all the advances in robotics and what have you in manufacturing all types of things and this modular construction that you did 50 years ago that seems to keep coming on and off over the decades are there any great changes in actual construction that makes it less expensive more efficient to what have you coming along thank you for the question it's an important one in 1967 we thought that making houses like cars in a factory and then we realized that they're a little heavier than cars the boxes at Habitat were 70 tons we had to build our own crane and so on and so forth but also we realized that if you're going to industrialize housing at a big scale you're going to have to transport these because you can't build a factory on the site every time but you can't transport over the highway something wider than 12 feet so the only leftover of modular three-dimensional prefabrication is basically would low-rise houses not high-rise multiple housing which can be shipped in two sections and then they combine it to 24 and then you can get them off you can buy them on the internet they do exist and some of them are cleverly designed but the problem with doing this is it's got to be fireproof and so you can't have lightweight because there isn't and that's a partial answer to your question nothing has happened in the construction industry to radically change your limits on concrete as fireproof material that can enclose and be structure if you do steel you have to fireproof it so you can't have a steel module and the plastics are still either unaffordable in building like what they do make airplanes with or or they are not safe in terms of their fire retardation so I think the problem right now is that we are yet to have the breakthrough that would allow going that way so where is construction going is industrializing and making more sophisticated smaller components bathrooms parts of the kitchens, assemblies window systems and the question is how can these be coordinated to be assembled easily on the site and that's where there's very little coordinated research they're taking the products of 50 manufacturers and having them dimensionally coordinated to come as an assembly is something that's possible because that's how cars are made today cars are assembled by parts that are made all over the world but you should see the set of drawings that the car manufacturers make to coordinate all of that before the individual manufacturers do their part and my dream is that one day we'll make drawings for buildings like that so carefully considered and then we can do that you mentioned how we in America haven't figured out the skyscraper the whole skyscraper ideology and I'm in a class called architecture in the free market with Nikolai Orasov at Columbia who was the New York Times art critic for many years and he says how many the more interesting the more interesting architecture that's happening in South Asia that engages meaningfully with like social context and it can experiment with that kind of thing it's not possible or not as possible for it to happen in America just because a lot of the times architects here are building more for like private organizations private companies and the more interesting stuff that will happen in the future will be happening in Asia and I was wondering what your take on that was well it is happening in Asia that we can see I think that there is one big difference that these countries are in a state of very rapid growth very rapid growth we are not in a state of rapid growth and if we stop immigration we'll even have less rapid growth we can't help it tonight can we so that's one factor I think there is also a factor of audacity and ambition it's not that there is no money here but much of development seeks rapid returns and much of development I'm talking about the development industry is quite content at smaller scale and investment in Asia both the public sector which is in those countries that have a public sector that is actively investing and the private sector I'm very ambitious ambitious in a business way I don't just mean in terms of ego to create monuments but they've recognized that by doing audacious projects that aim high there is an income stream associated with it I think this is not appreciated here is hard to tell but I guess it's the market doesn't know best and we're coming out of decades of the market knows best for example the market wants assembled real estate into reasonable parcels when you're doing urban redevelopment you've got to assemble the land because the market can't assemble it you need some intervention and the market is not very good you need to create one adjacent project to the other done by two different developers but it's not something to which there's an easy answer so I think we have time for one more question if there's one in the audience I just want to thank you for the National Gallery in Ottawa it's a wonderful building it's great traffic flow great lighting in it was one of the buildings you looked at when you were doing that oh we visited DC there was a wonderful client in the National Gallery Jean Sutherland Boggs and she had been the director of the National Gallery in its old building then she became director of the Philadelphia Museum and when Trudeau brought her back to had the design effort and select the architects she had a methodology we visited most of the important old and new museums of Europe and the National Gallery in Washington we looked at we looked at daylighting in different galleries in the world it was like an intense learning process and it was my first museum which made it even more meaningful I'll give you one example we proposed the ramp that I showed that leads you from the entrance to the great hall it's 80 meters long and it is a 5% slope and Jean Boggs was was a heavy lady who didn't walk easily and she said I have to find a place that's that long and that steep and feel comfortable going up and down this place before I can approve this so we started breaking our head where is there an 80 meter long ramp 5% and we did find one it's Bernini's Scala Regia the ramp leading to the Scala Regia and the Scala Regia and the Vatican and off we went traveling to Rome and had some good pasta and went to the ramp and up and down and I mean it was just that got approved you could say it's a replica of the Scala Regia thank you