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When we use the word "architect" or "designer,"

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what we usually mean is a professional,

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someone who gets paid,

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and we tend to assume that it's those professionals

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who are going to be the ones to help us solve

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the really big, systemic design challenges that we face

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like climate change, urbanization and social inequality.

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That's our kind of working presumption.

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And I think it's wrong, actually.

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In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school

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after several years, and go out and get a job,

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and this happened.

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The economy ran out of jobs.

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And a couple of things struck me about this.

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One, don't listen to career advisers.

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And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture,

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which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more,

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and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed.

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It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design,

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but actually there's an economics behind architecture

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that we don't talk about, and I think we need to.

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And a good place to start is your own paycheck.

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So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate,

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I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds.

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That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars.

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Now in terms of the whole world's population,

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that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people,

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which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for?

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The uncomfortable fact is that

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actually almost everything that we call architecture today

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is actually the business of designing

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for about the richest one percent of the world's population,

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and it always has been.

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The reason why we forgot that

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is because the times in history when architecture

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did the most to transform society were those times

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when, actually, the one percent would build

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on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons,

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whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century,

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communism in the early 20th,

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the welfare state, and most recently, of course,

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through this inflated real estate bubble.

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And all of those booms, in their own various ways,

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have now kicked the bucket,

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and we're back in this situation

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where the smartest designers and architects in the world

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are only really able to work for one percent of the population.

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Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy,

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though I think it probably is,

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it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually.

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I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects

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is, how are we going to turn our client

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from the one percent to the 100 percent?

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And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas

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for how it might be done.

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The first is, I think we need to question this idea

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that architecture is about making buildings.

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Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution

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you can think of to almost any given problem.

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And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested

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in solving problems and creating new conditions.

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So here's a story.

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The office was working with a school,

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and they had an old Victorian school building.

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And they said to the architects, "Look,

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our corridors are an absolute nightmare.

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They're far too small. They get congested between classes.

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There's bullying. We can't control them.

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So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building,

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and we know it's going to cost several million pounds,

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but we're reconciled to the fact."

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And the team thought about this, and they went away,

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and they said, "Actually, don't do that.

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Instead, get rid of the school bell.

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And instead of having one school bell that goes off once,

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have several smaller school bells that go off

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in different places and different times,

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distribute the traffic through the corridors."

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It solves the same problem,

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but instead of spending several million pounds,

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you spend several hundred pounds.

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Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job,

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but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful.

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Architects are actually really, really good

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at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking.

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And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions,

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we got fixated on the idea of providing

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a particular kind of consumer product,

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and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore.

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The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing

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that mass architecture is about big --

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big buildings and big finance.

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Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this

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Industrial Era mindset which says that

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the only people who can make cities are large organizations

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or corporations who build on our behalf,

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procuring whole neighborhoods

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in single, monolithic projects, and of course,

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form follows finance.

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So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods

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based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model.

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And a lot of people can't even afford them.

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But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities

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to be made not just by the few with a lot

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but also by the many with a bit?

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And when they do, they bring with them

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a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live.

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And it raises really interesting questions about,

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how will we plan cities? How will finance development?

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How will we sell design services?

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What would it mean for democratic societies

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to offer their citizens a right to build?

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And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right,

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that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens.

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And thirdly, we need to remember that,

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from a strictly economic point of view,

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design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly --

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mostly it's done by amateurs.

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And that's a good thing.

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Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy

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in what's called the social economy or the core economy,

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which is people doing it for themselves.

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And the problem is that, up until now,

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it was the monetary economy which had

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all the infrastructure and all the tools.

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So the challenge we face is, how are we going

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to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions

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for architecture's social economy?

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And that began with open-source software.

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And over the last few years, it's been moving

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into the physical world with open-source hardware,

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which are freely shared blueprints

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that anyone can download and make for themselves.

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And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting.

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Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer

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that was open-source, the parts for which

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could be made on another 3D printer.

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Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine,

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which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood.

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What these technologies are doing is radically

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lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill.

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They're challenging the idea that

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if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all.

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And they're distributing massively

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really complex manufacturing capabilities.

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We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere,

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and increasingly that means

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that the design team is everyone.

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That really is an industrial revolution.

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And when we think that the major ideological conflicts

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that we inherited were all based around this question

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of who should control the means of production,

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and these technologies are coming back with a solution:

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actually, maybe no one. All of us.

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And we were fascinated by

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what that might mean for architecture.

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So about a year and a half ago,

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we started working on a project called WikiHouse,

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and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system.

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And the idea is to make it possible for anyone

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to go online, access a freely shared library

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of 3D models which they can download and adapt in,

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at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use,

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and almost at the click of a switch

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they can generate a set of cutting files

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which allow them, in effect,

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to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine

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and a standard sheet material like plywood.

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And the parts are all numbered,

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and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit.

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(Laughter)

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And it goes together without any bolts.

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It uses wedge and peg connections.

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And even the mallets to make it

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can be provided on the cutting sheets as well.

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And a team of about two or three people,

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working together, can build this.

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They don't need any traditional construction skills.

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They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that,

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and they can build a small house of about this size

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in about a day.

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(Applause)

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And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house

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onto which you can then apply systems like windows

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and cladding and insulation and services

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based on what's cheap and what's available.

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Of course, the house is never finished.

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We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product.

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With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it

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over its life or even use it to make the house next door.

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So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source,

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citizen-led urban development model, potentially.

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And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now,

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and some really interesting lessons here.

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One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable.

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People get confused between construction work and having fun.

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But the principles of openness go right down

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into the really mundane, physical details.

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Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up.

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Or, when you're designing a piece,

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make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round,

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or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical.

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Probably the principal which runs deepest with us

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is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds,

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the open-source pioneer,

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which was that idea of, "Be lazy like a fox."

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Don't reinvent the wheel every time.

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Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs.

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Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught

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at an architecture school, copying is good.

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Which is appropriate, because actually,

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this approach is not innovative.

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It's actually how we built buildings

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for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution

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in these sorts of community barn-raisings.

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The only difference between traditional

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vernacular architecture and open-source architecture

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might be a web connection,

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but it's a really, really big difference.

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We shared the whole of WikiHouse

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under a Creative Commons license,

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and now what's just beginning to happen

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is that groups around the world are beginning to take it

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and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing.

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There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand

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looking at post-earthquake development housing,

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and thanks to the TED city Prize,

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we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas

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to set up a kind of community factory

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and micro-university.

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These are very, very small beginnings,

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and actually there's more people in the last week

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who have got in touch and they're not even on this map.

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I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map.

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We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer,

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but it's a small answer to a really, really big question,

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which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities

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are not skyscraper cities.

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They're self-made cities in one form or another.

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If we're talking about the 21st-century city,

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these are the guys who are going to be making it.

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You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team.

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So if we're serious about problems

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like climate change, urbanization and health,

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actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it.

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As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank

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or a corporation or a government or an NGO

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who's going to be able to do it

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if we treat citizens only as consumers.

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How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively

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we were to develop solutions not just to the problem

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of structure that we've been working on,

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but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning,

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off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation --

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low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions

256
00:11:53,379 --> 00:11:55,319
that anyone can very, very easily make,

257
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and to put them all into a commons

258
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where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone?

259
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A kind of Wikipedia for stuff?

260
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And once something's in the commons,

261
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it will always be there.

262
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How much would that change the rules?

263
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And I think the technology's on our side.

264
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If design's great project in the 20th century

265
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was the democratization of consumption --

266
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that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA —

267
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I think design's great project in the 21st century

268
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is the democratization of production.

269
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And when it comes to architecture in cities,

270
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that really matters.

271
00:12:41,192 --> 00:12:42,946
Thank you very much.

272
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(Applause)