I can say we have to become
more than just designers
of the two dimensional facades
or three dimensional architectural objects.
We have to become
designers of ecosystems, systems of both
ecology and economy that channel
not only the flow of people
throughout cities and buildings,
but also the flow of resources
like heat, energy, waste and water
into this sort of perpetual motion engines,
which is sort of stop seeing our presence,
the human presence, on the planet earth
as a sort of detrimental to our eco-system,
but actually tries to sort of integrate and incorporate
our consumption patterns and our leftovers
into our natural environment.
The reason for this sort of expanded role of the architect
is because of the atmosphere you capture in this image.
It was taken at the COP 15,
the United Nations Conference on Climate Change,
in Copenhagen, a year and a half ago,
and as you can see, you know, Sarkozy and Brown
and Merkel and even Obama, it wasn't exactly a party.
(Laughter)
It was like a -- it was a complete failure.
Essentially none of the goals
that had been established for the meeting were met,
and the generals of discussion about sustainability
was sort of drowning in this general misconception
that sustainability is a question of how much
of our existing quality of life are we prepared to sacrifice
in order to afford becoming sustainable.
Almost like this sort of protestant idea
that it has to hurt to do good.
But sustainability can't be like
some kind of moral sacrifice
or political dilemma or even like a philanthropical cause,
it has to be a design challenge.
So, when we were sort of recently asked to do
the Danish pavillion for the Shanghai World Expo
that was focusing on sustainable cities
we tried to ask ourselves if there was another sustainability
than this sort of sad depressing one.
We tried to ask ourselves if we could find examples
where sustainable cities and buildings
actually increased life quality.
So we decided to make the pavillion
as a sort of a condensation of how
Danish cities through their sustainable design
actually increase life quality.
We can see the pavillion as a sort of loop of a Danish street
complete with the blue bicycle lanes of Copenhagen,
because in Copenhagen 37%
of the Copenhageners commute by bike,
so people visiting could actually feel how cool it is
to ride a bike through the city instead of sitting
in a traffic jam or looking endlessly for a parking spot.
Also in Copenhagen, our harbour water
has become so clean that you can swim in it,
so that you don't have to, like, take the bus for hours
to go to the Hamptons,
you can actually jump in the port.
So at the heart of the pavillion
we allow the visitors to experience on their own body
how clean, if not how cold, the Danish harbour water is.
And in the middle of this sort of harbour bath
we decided to place the little mermaid of Denmark,
not a copy of the mermaid, we actually moved her to China.
We had to wrestle her out of the hand of the Danish
equivalent of the tea party, who was trying to
pass a law specifically against moving the mermaid,
we had to get her through Chinese customs.
(Laughter)
And there she is!
In her absence we invited the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei
to sort of install an installation.
He installed a Chinese surveillance camera.
It's the same Chinese surveillance camera
the Chinese State has installed in front of his house.
This one, however, was part of an installation
he called "The mermaid exchange".
It was transmitting a live image
to a giant flat screen
so that the Copenhagen tourists that went in vain
would sort of see that she was alright.
But sort of more importantly,
for the six months of the duration of the Expo
it became like this sort of, the only sort of
TV feed from China to the rest of the world,
trasmitting a sort of uncensored live footage,
almost turning Copenhagen
into this sort of global speakers' corner for China.
Sadly, Ai Weiwei has now been sort of silenced,
like this critical voice of China
has actually been captured by the government,
and has been missing for the last six weeks.
But sort of back in the pavillion, we can say like,
to just sum it up, what we wanted to
try to do, was to show how, essentially,
sustainable life can be more fun than normal life.
And as a sort of litmus test,
this is the first image we've pubblished
of the Danish pavillion.
You notice the red rectangle.
This is the first image or one of the first images
pubblished of Iron man 2,
showing Tony Stark's Mad Science Expo,
and if you sort of compare the two rectangles.
This is Hollywood and this Shanghai,
so first of all like this is, this is big business
it's America, the land of litigation, we should
we should sue them and get rich.
But then we thought
that sort of Coco Chanel said that copying
is the highest form of compliment, and you know,
if Hollywood starts using our sustainable architecture
to portrait science fiction, it could be a sign
that we are moving towards hedonistic sustainability.
So another idea we've been working on
to try to build this idea of how
artificial design can actually be most of,
be environmentally aware but also increase life quality.
We started a project we called "The Mountain", in Copenhagen
It's essentially a combination
of a big parking building and an apartment building,
but the parking creates a man-made mountain
that lifts all the apartments up in the sun and the view,
creating this sort of houses with gardens,
but in the middle of the Danish city.
We called this idea architectural alchemy,
because it's this idea that by mixing
traditional ingredients, like parkings and apartments,
you can actually create if not gold,
then at least added value.
We took this idea one step further
in a project in Copenhagen,
where sort of by mixing shops and offices,
town houses and apartments, putting them in a
stak where they occupy their favourite position
distorting the block to sort of maximise
views for the apartments and access to sunlight,
we created this building we call "The 8 House",
named after its shape.
And this sort of approach
doesn't only allow us to optimize the individual position
of the different parts of the program,
like leaving shops and offices on the street,
lifting the town houses with gardens
up into the sunshine, but it also sort of allows
public life, which is traditionally
restricted to occurring on street level,
to actually invade the three dimensional space
of the urban block, so that the 8 House in Copenhagen
is not, you know, a two dimensional facade design
or even a three dimensional
architectural object, it's a sort of three dimensional
urban condition that allows, public life
the possibility for spontaneous social encounters,
to actually invade the normally private space
of the urban block and reach
the penthouse of the city.
So this building is at the edge
of Copenhagen, basically at the city limits,
so you have this clash of life forms.
The last idea in the 8 House, it is essentially
like a private developer project,
built for private apartments and town houses,
but somehow it has this sort of generosity
towards the city that it invites public life into it.
This sort of idea of public participation,
we took one step further in a project
we did for the new city hall in Tallin.
We thought that instead of having
this sort of traditional dicotomy of the
politicians inside and the public outside,
we would harbour the city hall above the ground
allowing the public to invade the ground floor
in what we called the public service market place,
where they can interact with the public servants
and even sort of see the politicians at work.
We called it the public village,
because it is essentially like an accumulation of all
of the different departments that have their own building.
They sort of merge to form a
a sort of a single consolidated village.
In one place we invited the people of Tallin
to access the roof and enjoy the panorama
of the surrounding city.
And finally in the masterplan they wanted
a tower, because like in Europe
it's hard to imagine a city hall without a tower.
So we thought, what are we going to do with the tower?
We thought, why don't we place
the city council inside the tower?
So we created this incredibly generous space for political reflection.
The ceiling is made as a giant mirror,
so that when politicians have to make difficult decisions,
all they have to do is to look up,
and they get this sort of periscopic overview
of the city that they are actually messing with.
(Applause)
But as a sort of a side effect,
when the angry citizens gather to demonstrate,
they get this perfect insight,
they can see, you know,
if politicians are missing, if they are sleeping,
if they are playing Angry Birds.
So we called it
the democratic periscope
that combines political overview with public insight.
And to our extreme luck the City council
liked the idea and we are now building
this sort of architectural relaxation
of radical political transparency.
So these three ideas we tried to bring together in
what is, until now, our biggest
project, it combines
this idea of hedonistic sustainability
with this sort of architectural alchemy and this
notion of public participation.
It's located within a masterplan
we were commissioned by the 10 municipalities
of Metropolitan Copenhagen, to do a plan
according to, like along the new train line
that would connect all the municipalities.
What we proposed in return to saying
why just focus on Copenhagen, or even Denmark,
right on the other side of the Oresund waters
we have Sweden, southern Sweden.
It is sort of the most densely populated
and most economically active region
in Scandinavia, and by adding a simple 3 mile bridge
we could actually connect it all
into a sort of a single bi-national
metropolitan region where no area
is further away than fourty minutes
by public transportation.
And it wouldn't just be like an infrastructure
for public transportation, it would also be
an infrastructure for waste management,
for water management, for energy,
combining a smart grid that combines
hydro electricity from Sweden
with wind power from Denmark.
It connects all of the most prosperous businesses
in the entire region and by merging it
and making it sort of a bi-national masterplan.
We also introduced
pink in the flag for the first time. (Laughter)
It has exactly the same size
as the San Francisco Bay area.
So it is actually quite likely
sort of a regional planning size,
just because of the national boundaries,
this sort of holistic perspective has never been applied.
And our idea was to instead of focusing
on the individual infrastructure,
to actually merge it all, so that the train line is also
the first faced densification of the downtown areas.
The train really stops
at the heart of the different neighbourhoods.
And finally, since we are combining
industry, commerce and residential
we are proposing that perhaps
the excess energy from the power production
of the industry could become
like a human programme, like thermal baths.
So this could sound like sort of science fiction
or the Jetsons, but to take it to
something really tangible, this is going to be the first
building that we're completing within the Loop city.
It's a waste-to-energy plant.
In Copenhagen we only landfill 4% of our waste --
as an example in Chicago it is 85% --
42% gets recycled,
and 54% is essentially used as fuel to create heat and electricity.
97% of the homes in Copenhagen have district heating,
so they don't spend any energy on heating
in a very cold country, they get it all as excess heat
from the power production.
And essentially they form this loop
that people give their trash to the incineration plant
and they get it back as power.
So as a thumb rule, three kilos of
household trash turn into four hours of electricity
and five hours of heating. And just to give you an idea of
this resource, one tonne of waste is almost
two barrels of oil. But essentially
this is a power plant like any other,
it's a big, ugly, boxy factory
that casts shadow on the neighbours
and blocks the view, so the city wanted,
since it is located in downtown Copenhagen,
to somehow try to make it beautiful.
It should be a gift to the city,
said the CEO of the plant.
So this is not only going to be the biggest building
in Copenhagen, it is also going to be the tallest,
it is going to be more than 350 feet tall.
It's located right in the middle of the historical city,
you can see just the opera, the royal theatre,
downtown, and that's where it is going.
It is right next to the Copenhagen marina.
And right in front of it there is something called
the Copenhagen cable track,
which is a track that pools wakeboarders,
and water skiers around in this sort of
perpetual loop of water fun.
And speaking of skiing, Copenhagen has loved skiing,
but unfortunately Copenhagen is flat as a pancake,
we have the snow but we don't have the hills
so we heavily go for hours on buses
to the south of Sweden, so we thought,
you know, if Copenhagen doesn't have mountains,
at least we have mountains of trash, so why don't we
transplant one of the Swedish ski slopes
and put it on the roof of the factory?
So essentially we know the size of the machines,
so we created this sort of minimum envelope.
They wanted to make a visitor centre,
which essentially is a place
where school teachers drag the children
to force them to listen to how trash turns into energy.
Instead we proposed to install
an elevator that takes you to the roof,
where you can choose between
a green, a blue and black ski slope.
And because it is man-made, we can make sure
that it ends up at the foot of the elevator,
to create this sort of perpetual loop of skiing.
Miraculously we actually won the competition
based on this idea.
(Applause)
The roof material is a form of artificial carpet
that all the rainwater that drops on the mountain
is collected and can be blown out
in these humidifiers, that in the summer
can actually create so little friction that,
with normal skiing equipment you can actually ski,
creating this sort of nice brasilian
hybrid of bikini skiing.
But in the winter we do have
three to four months of frost and snow.
So from 2015
you are going to have to look out
for the Danish competitors in Alpine skiing!
You know, originally the competition was
to make the factory look good,
so we also had to do a facade.
We proposed to make it out of these giant planters
made out of recycled plastics. The excess water
runs through the facade watering the plants,
so in the summer we create this sort of
natural shade that turns the working space
of the factory into this sort of nice, naturally illuminated
and naturally ventilated work space.
At night you see the machines working inside the factory.
So you can say, the initial vision,
you know of trying to design our cities and buildings
as ecosystems, is quite close to materializing
in this project, because not only locally
there is this reuse of the water, the daylight,
the natural ventilation,
but also in a more regional perspective,
together with Copenhagen and the rest of the loop city
the plant actually forms an ecosystem.
As a last thing, they were imagining,
they wanted some kind of
building integrated art project,
and traditionally what you do,
you hire some light artist to blow coloured lights
at the building at night. We thought,
why don't we play with the resources we have?
This is going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy plant
in the world, the smoke coming out
of the chimney is completely non toxic,
but it still does contain some CO2.
A lot less than the current plant, but it does contain
some of it. So we thought,
why don't we design the mouth of the chimney
in such a way that it fills gradually with CO2
and when it contains 100 kilos, it compresses
and puffs a giant smoke ring?
So that we can play with it at night!
But of course, on one end we like it, cause it's
almost like the ultimate artistic expression
of hedonistic sustainability,
you take the symbol of the problem,
the pollution, the chimney,
and turn it into something playful.
But one of the main drivers of behavioural change
is knowledge, but if people don't know they can't act.
And when my nephews ask me, you know,
what's a ton of CO2, I have to say, I don't have a clue!
In 2015 I can tell them to count 10 smoke rings
and when they have counted 10 of them,
we have just emitted one ton of CO2.
So, we can say the waste-to-energy plant
in Copenhagen is not only sort of
economically and ecologically sustainable,
by turning waste into energy, it's also
socially sustainable because it turns a power plant
into a park, and it turns a flat land
into a man-made mountain for skiing.
So, as a last thing, you might object that
this is something that can only happen
in sunny, semi-socialist, sentimental Scandinavia.
But just to wrap it up,
recently we got approached by Durst Fetner Residential,
of Manhattan, to look at this side
on the west side water front.
It's quite far away from the nearby parks,
it's right next to the Helena, a building
owned by our client, named after his daughter.
And normally residential in the area
looks like this, sort of sturdy boxes, we thought:
why don't we, you know, having spent 10 years of
my career as an architect trying to escape
the tiranny of the Copenhagen courtyard
as a typology, we thought that maybe, in Manhattan
this idea of creating an urban oasis
at the heart of the block could be interesting,
If you like, the Copenhagen courtyard
is at the architectural scale
what Central Park is at an urban scale,
a human habitat surrounded by
a dense wall of people.
So we asked ourselves,
what happens when you combine a skyscraper
with a courtyard? Essentially, what would a
courtscraper look like?
So we first we placed the courtyard next to the Helena,
we tried to preserve all of its views
to be a good neighbour, but also because it is
our client's building.
And then in the north east corner, to create
density and views, we lifted it up to 450 feet,
creating this sort of walked perimeter block
that has views and sunshine from the west side.
And what happens is that you can say, traditionally
perimeter blocks or courtyards
are secrets kept for the tenants.
In this case, it really becomes
the main facade of the building towards the highway,
almost showing how the rejuvination of the waterfront
moves into the city fabric itself.
And the warped geometry also brings daylight
to the streetscape, and finally
all of the apartments are rotated towards the view,
creating this sort of pattern of balconies,
but also allowing the residents
to recognise their own apartment,
almost as a building within the building.
And of course, people living next to the roof
have this nice view of the Hudson.
So, because of the incredible asimmetry,
the courtyard really goes from 42 inches
to 400 feet and back down again.
So this has been sort of passed forward,
this has been well received,
and according to plan, and sometimes,
even in architecture, things happen according to plan.
We should be breaking ground
the 1st of September this year.
(Applause)
So you are gonna see some of the
sort of architectural evolution
we have been conducting in Scandinavia
is now starting to cross-breed
with the New York typologies.
To finish off, this is what it could look like
driving down the west side highway in four years.
(Aplause)