Bjarke Ingels (Part 2)

30:50So somehow that there is a promise that that actually all this abundance of processing power technology can make our building even less and less technical again. I think another difference is in ancient times, the location of the building was really important. Both the positioning of the building, the direction it faced, how it interacted with wind patterns, where when they became the rectangular controlled boxes, there was less concern with the placement of the building because it didn't have to take advantage of the natural benefits of the space. Yeah, exactly. It's this idea that all of these are technically freedoms, but if the freedom just leaves you with a vacuum, you're left with boring and empty boxes.

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33:22Are there any materials that you would say you tend towards? I think each situation has a certain promise. So right now, a very simple way to lower the embodied carbon of a building is to build it out of timber. Not all climates are made up of carbon. They are very conducive to timber. Many parts of the world have termites, for instance. And then your timber building is going to be short -lived. Other places, it will produce excessive tropical humidity. It can produce fungus. But for instance, we build a building in the north of Norway that's the most environmentally friendly factory in the world, entirely sourced out of a local pine inside.

34:11And it means that this is a factory where they have machines and they produce furniture. But the walls, the ceilings, the beams, all out of timber, but not as a veneer or a finish. No, it's the bones of the building. Like a log cabin. Exactly. So the building, the raw warehouse of it already is beautiful. On the outside, that timber is charred. And that's a traditional method by burning the surface of the wood, the bugs and the bacteria can't get to the wood. And it makes it fireproof as well, I believe. And that's the funny thing, like timber in itself is actually a fire retardant, because it takes an hour to burn through an inch of wood.

34:59Where steel beam, you need to clad it in drywall or fire protection. Because otherwise it turns soft and bends and collapses. Timber, you just have a little bit of a sacrificial layer of timber. And based on that, it became such a beautiful building. We're now doing the airport of Zurich, which will be the largest timber building on earth. Wow. So when you land in Zurich some years from now, you can almost smell the pine. It's all locally sourced pine. No piece of wood comes more than two hours by truck from a sustainable forest in Switzerland. So again, it becomes like this kind of cathedral of timber, the ceilings, the beams, the floors.

35:44But again, it's not an added veneer or like a... It's not decorative. A cosmetic coating, no. It's the structure. It's the heavy gauge material that is the building, right? Sounds great. We're doing the architecture school in Kansas University is similarly everything out of timber. But that works in certain places. I think lately I've been quite fascinated by stone. Of course, in Denmark we have no stone. The tallest hill in Denmark is 500 feet. Actually, the tallest point in Denmark are the two towers of the bridge to Sweden. So we have no rock whatsoever. But in other places you actually have an abundance of stone.

36:23And if you cut the stone electrically, it's carbon neutral. And if you drive it from the quarry to the nearby construction site on an electric truck, it's also carbon neutral. Like for instance, like in our minds, brick should be a sustainable material. It's like made out of clay. But only if it's sun dried. The ovens that we use in northern Europe and in most of the industrial world are quite energy intensive. So once you get into it, the brick that you would suspect to be like a very traditional and kind of organic material, actually has a substantial carbon footprint, whereas an actual stone, if harvested electrically, is close to carbon neutral.

37:09Timbal, if it's sustainably sourced from a plantation where you replant and you don't chop down more than the replacement rate, can actually count as being carbon negative because it sequesters carbon when it grows. But if you put it in a place where you have to paint it with toxic paints to protect it from the environment, it becomes negative. So the interesting thing is that there are no universal answers. Earth has different climates, different cultures, different economies, different conditions. And each project has a unique potential, a unique set of challenges and a unique set of opportunities.

37:57The exciting part of the work is that it's not about applying this kind of one size fits all. It is in each and every case to to explore and discover what's exactly right on this case. And maybe just another material that has a very tough reputation these days is concrete. And concrete is a beautiful material. The Romans invented it. The pantheon, one of the most beautiful spaces in Rome, is a concrete dome. And it's essentially when you burn lime, it turns into cement. And in doing so, it releases CO2. And that's why it has a substantial carbon footprint. Then there was a French gardener, like I don't know, 150 years ago, who sprayed cement on chicken wire.

38:50And he realized that with the rebar, the metal inside the concrete, it became reinforced, steel reinforced concrete, and became much stronger. And that concrete could take tension as well as compression. That unleashed the revolution of reinforced concrete, which is almost every building in the world has a substantial element of this. And concrete is an amazing material. Like it's a liquid that you pour into a formwork. And it solidifies and it holds the form you gave it. We just finished our own headquarters on the tip of the pier in Copenhagen. And because it's surrounded by saltwater on three sides, we looked into timber.

39:33But on the outside, we couldn't have it in timber because of the aggressive corrosive environment of the saltwater. We have to paint it and maintain it. On the inside, we wanted all of us to be in the same space. With timber, we would have to divide it into fire compartments. And by law, you can only have 25 % of the surfaces out of timber. And we have a timber shelf on the north side of, so that's already 25%. So the more we looked into it, the clearer it became that the timber was making the building much more expensive. It wasn't improving the life cycle analysis of the building. And we had to then add sprinklers.

40:12We couldn't make it passively ventilated. The thermal mass of timber is much lighter than that of concrete. So counter to our assumptions, the more we dug into the specifics, it became clear and clearer that this really wanted to be a concrete building. And then we started looking what we could find that we could use immediately was a form of concrete where a third of the cement has been replaced with clay. So that lowers the carbon footprint of the cement with a third. It also makes the concrete a little warmer to look at, which is actually beautiful. We know how long concrete performs for when you have a new material.

40:52How do you know if it's going to perform for 20 years, 30 years. Supposedly this has been like fully tested, but it, but of course there is always a question mark when, but it seems like it performs exactly the way concrete does. And it has been sort of substantially tested as it stands, but but I also think that each project we do we try to make it a little bit of an experiment with something. We don't have to like experiment on every single parameter in the building, but we always have to make sure that each building somehow takes the journey of architecture, one step higher up the ladder. But then there's also things like biochar is a way to let's say burn organic waste in the absence of oxygen.

41:42So that by in a way, suffocating the fire, it doesn't consume the material, but it turns it into a chart biochar. It's a very black carbon rich material. And if you take organic waste, it can even be a sewage sludge. If you turn it into biochar, it won't release that carbon into the atmosphere. And the funny thing is if you take 50 kilos, let's say a hundred pounds, a biochar for a cubic meter of concrete, it becomes like a dark gray and it neutralizes it sequesters as much carbon as the concrete. If you make it more like 8%, instead of 2%, it becomes a black, a beautiful black concrete. And now it's like really, really carbon negative because it sequesters much more.

42:33And by baking it into the building, it stays there. Finally, there's a new way of using CO2 by pumping it through salt water. It creates artificial limestone. So it sequesters. The CO2 into limestone and then you can use that line. To make concrete. So it actually becomes carbon neutral. So there's very interesting ways. And of course, these have only happened maybe in the last five or 10 years as we have gotten more and more. Alarmingly aware that we need to address this. So in that sense, again, I think it's counterproductive to stigmatize certain materials as being inherently bad. But we might not be making them in the right way right now, just like the car is not inherently bad.

43:27But if all cities only prioritize cars over pedestrians and bicycles, it becomes a nuisance. It should be a multimodal way of getting around the city. And once cars become electric and once that power then comes from from solar or or even nuclear or wind, whatever. Certainly the negative side effects of the car can become positive right. So I think the journey of the kind of evolution of society is that our predecessors were never. Like vicious. When they invented the car, the car was an incredible alternative to the horse at the turn of the 20th century, like city like New York and London were drowning in horses.

44:16And horses are relatively unsafe when there's too many of them in an urban environment. They can get scared having like piles and piles of horses. It is a health hazard. And it's not good for the environment, nor for the health of the people living in that city. So in a way, the advent of the automobile saved us from drowning in horses. But then of course, then we started the suffocating from fumes. And so each time something offers something amazing, it becomes very popular. And this new thing, it has a little bit of a byproduct. And that byproduct isn't a problem in smaller quantities. But once everybody has a car that byproduct actually starts piling up as CO2 in the atmosphere or as carbon monoxide in the breathable air.

45:07But as soon as we discovered the problems of carbon monoxide, we put these catalyst filters on all the cars and instantly the air got cleaner. Now we've discovered the side effects of CO2 and solutions are coming forth. So in that sense, it's important just to sort of keep understanding that the previous generations weren't bad, nor careless. They just knew less than we do today. It's also a bit like the advice for the human diet. And like when you go back each decade, the things they recommended 10 years ago was like the best they could do with the knowledge they had. But it keeps changing, right?

45:46So it's not like, and I think the only thing we can do is to never stop. And each time we discover new things, to take it to heart and respond swiftly.

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47:40Other than buildings, what have you designed? So we design products. We have a longstanding collaboration with Fritz Lake, Artemite, the Italian lighting company. And because the lighting industry has over the last two decades had to embrace LEDs and try to find the beauty and aesthetics. It's like a global has has warm and rich light, but it has a short lifespan and it's very energy intensive. So there's been like an incredible space in trying to find ways to make beautiful lighting with LEDs. And then sort of all the way through the different scales of buildings up to sort of urban master plans and even we've been working on a plan for the planet.

48:26Like anyway, trying to think what happens if you apply the methodology and the skills of of architects and planners and urbanists at the scale of all of the planet. We have a handful of projects where we're making experimental cities. So one experimental city that we've had a lot of joy working with is Oceanics. Is the idea of a floating city. The prototype is scheduled to be built in the port of Busan, floating city block. But it's essentially saying like if there are certain countries like the Maladis or French Polynesia that are stinky. And maybe you could start growing those cities like Miami, you could create floating islands within the Bay and then maybe the city that is Miami could become more and more park.

49:25Like the funny thing is a coral reef actually grows with the rising sea levels unless you build a city on top of it because then it dies. You can imagine in the Maladis that you would start building inside the contained body of water so that the barrier could become a park protecting the city from the rising sea levels. So that's one project where we're looking at floating cities. Would a floating city be similar to what you described in the Google campus with the pylons? No, in this case it would actually be floating on pountoons. You would anchor it or tether it to the ground and you could adjust those anchors.

50:05But it would be literally floating so that with rising levels it would just simply keep coming up. The pontoon the space to keep it floating. And we actually did a small sample we created a small neighborhood of 72 student houses in Copenhagen that is these little hexagonal two story courtyards houses that are floating on a pontoon. The pontoon contains of course enough air to lift it. It has heat pumps extracting excess heat and cool from the water to heat and cool the water and the homes. It has photovoltaics on the roof to power them. And it's only connected to the city with the fresh water and wastewater.

50:46Apart from that it's really self -sustaining. So imagine expanding that to a city block. So that let's say the city block like everything from the sidewalk and down is food production, energy production, heating and cooling, recycling, upcycling and power production. Inside the cavity that is necessary to lift the city. And then the buildings on top and the landscapes, the gardens need to grow a certain amount of food so they're like. Pulley cultural beautiful gardens that you can walk around in. And the buildings are made with timber or bamboo because you want the buildings to be as light as possible.

51:25And you don't want them much taller than six to eight floors because you don't want to raise the center of gravity to make the city block unstable. So in that sense you end up with some parameters and then you want to harvest as much energy from the sun as you can. Because that's one of the sources you have. So we're proposing to make the roofs as big as possible to to shade the environment, but also to harvest as much sun as possible. So you end up with a kind of vernacular style of architecture that is timber and bamboo based. So it's like warm and organic. It has these big roofs to harvest as much sun as possible.

52:00And then you end up interestingly because like in a city, the city grows organically and at some point you need to change certain things. So sometimes you have to expropriate and you have to tear down some buildings to make space for a wider road or whatever. But in this case with a floating city. Everything can just be moved. So you can actually reconfigure the city as it evolves. And you can say, we need to make this canal between two city blocks, a little wider. So we can have some bigger ships coming in. So in that sense, it becomes a very exciting proposition of this kind of flexibility. And if you take it down to the scale of Copenhagen again.

52:49This little neighborhood of floating student homes. It's basically six hexagonal floating buildings, a total of 72 homes. They right now are docked at a part of the city that used to be industrial port. Now it's waiting for the environmental impact studies and the new urban master plan. So there's a period almost like a pocket in time. I've won two two decades. Where not much is happening while all these things fall into place. And that means that it's perfect place for these students to live. But then in 20 years, new master plan. Then we take that little fleet of student homes and we dark it in the next place.

53:36That's waiting for its future to be decided. So imagine each city. As it evolves, always have these not just pockets of space, but pockets in time. That are under enjoyed. And rather than leaving them vacant, you could have a deployable fleet. Of maybe a couple of hundred student homes that just simply move around. And it is like to have a little fleet of houseboats. Yeah. It's good for a city. Because it allows you to create a community instead of an abandoned wasteland. You can have a little community that the briefs life into this place until the more permanent city can arrive. And it sounds really easy to add on to if you wanted to add another.

54:26Yeah, you can just expand the fleet a little bit. Yeah, exactly. That's a tricky one. But that's like one kind of experimental city we've been working on. Another one we're creating a city called the woven city currently on construction. And at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. And that's an experimental city looking at a city where you have driverless cars. We were hired by Toyota president, the Accu Toyota of the Toyota company. And he had this interesting realization that Toyota actually used to be a loom manufacturer. In the late 19th century, they were making looms for the textile industry.

55:07So then in the 1930s, when the automobile had been invented. Because they were so good at making large complex machines. They became the largest car maker in the world. And like a few years ago, Accu Toyota was realizing that it was time to pivot again. They could no longer just be a car maker. They had to be a provider of urban mobility as a service with whatever means that is. And he said, therefore, I need to be able to experiment. At the city scale, not just making nice products in the form of cars, but thinking about the systems of a city. And they were like closing down two factories because they were moving elsewhere.

55:52So he gave us that territory to try to come up with a city. And we came up with what we've called the woven city. And the basic analysis is that today we try to do everything on every street. And that just makes everything dominated by cars. So we said, what if you have three kinds of streets? One with autonomous electric vehicles and pedestrians, like a traditional street. But they're driverless. One, which is more like a promenade, half green, half paved for personal mobility, like bikes and scooters and pedestrians. And then one that is entirely a park where you can only walk. So all green with paths.

56:37You take one, two, three, one, two, three in both directions. Weave them together, which means that for every nine blocks, you have a perimeter of access by car. And then you have access by promenade, by bike, or walking only through a park. So you end up with the city and the center of these nine squares. We always make it either a little public park or kindergarten or like a small school. So that you end up with a city fabric where you can get from anywhere to anywhere, riding a driverless car, taking an electric scooter or walking through a park. So you have the same amount of connectivity.

57:20But you take two thirds of the right of way that is normally just completely dominated by cars. And you give it up for more exciting forms of life. Then we work with using hydrogen as a power source for fuel cells. It's do thermally powered because it's right next to volcanic activity, Manfouji. So we're trying to take every single sustainable urban experiment and condense it into this new neighborhood. And Toyota is now realizing that vision, inviting all of their collaborators to come join them in testing the principles and the technologies that might integrate. And form all our other cities in the near future.

58:01That's another kind of interesting experiment. And maybe a last experiment is we're doing a city for the kingdom of Bhutan. Called the mindfulness city. Bhutan is a small country less than a million inhabitants. It's the most sustainable country in the world. It sequestas twice as much carbon as it emits. But they're experiencing that the young generations are drawn to the 21st century in Canada and Australia primarily, but also Singapore and Mumbai. So they realize that even though they are succeeding on so many parameters and I think we. The West have a lot to learn from Bhutan. They also somehow need to create a prosperous energetic dynamic creative.

58:53Urban environment to be able to attract foreign investment and to be able to retain their talent their future. They want to create a special administrative zone on the border to India. But they don't want to become. They want to become. Dubai or Mumbai. So they invited us to say like how can we create a dynamic inviting engaging contemporary urban environment. That is rooted in the values of by. Vajrayana Buddhism and that is anchored in the strengths. And the traditions we have living in breathing in Bhutan. So another very valuable challenge and. And like a simple answer to the questions we thought like.

59:42Bhutan is covered by 72 % forests. And to the north it's the highest peaks of the Himalayas and to the south it's basically the tropical fields of India. This particular city is traversed by 34 rivers. So we decided to make the rivers the urban master plan. So each river becomes a linear central park. Between them. We create terraces almost like rice fields that cascade down the slopes at the base of the Himalayas. And every time you cross the river. That becomes a public institution. So the bridges become destinations also the universities up bridges. You know, like the public buildings the airport is a bridge.

1:00:30Because like Bhutan is incredible in the sense that all the crafts are still alive. They have like many many schools that still educate the wood carbers, the painters, the. So we are creating this contemporary vernacular architecture that can take advantage of modern manufacturing. But also take advantage of the presence of craft. To make buildings that build with bamboo and river rocks. So in some way. Trying to bring the best of both worlds and maybe show a way forward where you don't have to. Erase the nature. But you can enhance the nature with the city. You don't have to erase the culture by putting a modern city.

1:01:10You can actually imagine a modern city that is. Impregnated informed by the culture. That's great. It's incredibly fun. You know, like one example is the whole city is powered by hydro power. So the dam is 500 foot tall. Damn. But instead of a sheet of concrete, we've made it modular with the steps. Like a Bhutanese equivalent of an Indian step well. So that the entire front is a colorful. We call it the temple dam. A colorful wall of a thousand steps that takes you to a temple that is nested on the side of the dam. Like the tiger's nest, one of the most famous temples in Bhutan that is nested on the side of a mountain.

1:02:03So that you have this pilgrimage. Like anyone who has been to the Hoover Dam has been standing at the top and thought about, couldn't it be cool if we could get like climb down the face? In this case, you can. You can walk down the face of the dam along these colorful steps to a temple that somehow turns. The infrastructure for power into an infrastructure for spirituality. And of course, it turns engineering into art and it turns nature into into power. And I think with each project, we're trying to distill. The values of the mindfulness city into build form. So let's say if if the Eiffel Tower was a demonstration of French engineering.

1:02:51Engineering is actually a profession invented by the French at a time when the world was being connected with railroads and. And Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower was a railroad engineer making bridges and he used the technology of railroads and bridges to make this. Symbol of French ingenuity and engineering, I think similarly the temple dam. Could be a way to show that. The future and the past, the global and the hyper local, the spiritual and the. And the ecological and the economical can actually perfectly coexist if we try to find these. What's so interesting about it is all of the elements were already there.

1:03:38The idea of a dam is not a new idea. The idea of the temple on the side of a mountain is not a new idea. It's just the juxtaposition of them is radical. Yeah, and actually, and I think it's it may be. Almost like part of our secret source is this idea. Of the oxymoron that. Things that seem to be contradicting. I'm maybe not. And things that seem to be mutually exclusive. Maybe they're not. Yeah. And that's also like I think it almost like extends into. Culture and politics is that the world is experienced this extreme polarization. It would be strange if half of the population. Are wrong. And the other half are right.

1:04:32Like half the population is dumb. And the other public half of the population is smart. I don't think that's how it is. Because when you look at any normal distribution of any population. It typically draws a bell curve. Where you have most in the middle and fewer and fewer in the extremes. And to get away from this kind of polarized world view. Of one or the other. And really to. As almost. A value driven ideological agenda. To commit yourself. To try to see if there's ways to. To find new and interesting ways forward that. Incorporate. Some of the wisdom or concerns of. Of two things that seem to be.

1:05:22To be opposite. Well, we'll start with the signs understanding each other. Which seems to be a difficult bridge to gap. Yeah, no, like I would say like a cancel culture in whatever form. Has eliminated the possibility of conversation. And I think once you stop listening to someone who has. A different point of view. That's when you stop growing and you stop learning. Yeah. Why do you think Danish furniture is so celebrated all over the world. And how did it come to be that way? I'm not an expert in in Danish furniture, by the way. But I think what happened was with Danish modern furniture. It was kind of a time.

1:06:00Like where. Industrialization. Had happened. And that meant that there was like like with the Bauhaus movement. Let's say the Bauhaus movement was trying to use. The methods of modern manufacturing. And the new materials to address. Living housing at scale for the masses, right? So they trying to find new aesthetics. But using steel and like modern materials. In Denmark, we don't have any mountains. So we also don't have any resources. So. I think that the Danish designers. They they similarly tried to make. Mass produced furniture. To the masses, but using. Wood and you know a hemp. And maybe a little bit of cow hide.

1:06:50But in this kind of. Danish. Protestant mindset of. Of simplicity. The kind of Danish aesthetics are similar to the those of Japanese. Traditional architecture or. Or the Quakers are kind of austerity. That boils things down to the essentials. That means you can still put effort into. To making sure that. That the arm rest is really soft to the touch. And it really is exactly what you need to to rest your your elbows. Like one of my favorite pieces of furniture. The PK 22 pole car homes. Feesies project from from the furniture academy. In this case, it's a single piece of steel that has been. Cut with a water beam.

1:07:40And pull the part. And as you pull that single piece of steel apart, It becomes the form of the chair. And then you just have a little bit of flag line. Flag rope. To create a seat. It's very elegant. It's like just a single material or let's say two materials. Manipulated with a single process. And it's incredibly comfortable. And in any incredibly elegant. So so I think in that sense. This kind of. Rejection of ornament and decoration. Combined in favor of of the thoughtful careful. Effort into exactly what's necessary. And then secondly, this kind of embrace of some of the more traditional materials.

1:08:25The organic materials like timber. Cow hide rope. Give us it a kind of timeless. Quality. So. By embracing the traditional materials, it has an organic quality. And by rejecting. Decor. Yeah. You boil it down to something that is still beautiful and elegant, but it's more essential anyway. Yeah. And when you take the ornament away. It fits everywhere. Because it's not so. Style specific. That it only fits. In the one place where that style. So you say the decor would often come with a certain. Style, exactly. So then you can only fit with other things that have that decor. Yeah. Is it you take a broke piece.

1:09:11You can't put it anywhere. And I would say maybe boilers down to a sensibility that we definitely also have is that. I think when you when you look at our buildings. They will have personality and character, even its strong expression. But. Again, it's like this idea. It's the energies. Injected into the performance. Of the building. Not in the. Decoration of the building.

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1:11:13You talked about having to break ground. What is your experience with this project? Is there a tendency? I can imagine this. You have a project and you see in 10 years, the materials are going to be better to build this project than the materials available now. Do we wait 10 years? Exactly. For instance, with concrete. I know that when we're in the next five years, there will be a carbon neutral concrete. They're also working on carbon neutral steel. Therefore, the easy hack right now is if you can, if you make the building out of timber, it lowers the embodied carbon and it puts pressure on the steel and concrete industry because they see it happening.

1:12:02If I was a steel manufacturer and I saw a Zurich airport, I would see, okay, the beginning to make a big airport out of timber now, that used to be our domain, large spans, we should probably move the needle on this. Is carbon the only metric or are there other things that are maybe just as important that don't get as much conversation? I mean, I think we have to remember there is actually a strange stigmatization of the building environment, right? And there's a strange stigmatization of energy use. 200 years ago, we would only burn wood as our source of energy. That's not very sustainable. And then we discovered coal oil and gas.

1:12:49And you just see that a dramatic increase in access to energy. And you see perfectly parallel to this increase in access to energy. You see an increase in quality of life on every single continent. And if you measure it as something simple as life expectancy, every single continent on earth. As soon as we started having access to more energy, we started living better and longer. So energy is good. And we should also remember the only things in the world that don't spend energy are dead things. All living things have us the energy from the environment and they use that energy to resist entropy.

1:13:30So it's the definition of life. We need energy to live and we convert that energy into life and buildings. Of course, they say that buildings are responsible for 40 % of our carbon footprint. But it's also because we live, we die, we work, we go to the hospital, we go shopping, we go to the hospital, we go shopping. We go listen to music, you know, in buildings. So no wonder that we're spending a lot of our energy on like building and operating our buildings. And that's where we live. That's where we live. And you know, try spending a winter in Denmark without a house. It's going to be a tough winter.

1:14:14So, you know, we can't really live outside East Africa without without buildings. So we build buildings to accommodate life. But of course, we have to do it in the most thoughtful way because we don't want to do that the expense of the climate. I would say there are so many metrics like that over the last couple of decades, we become more and more aware of the gasification that comes from various materials. So in the past, we built with materials that were unhealthy. That's measurable and there's a lot of effort in asbestos, for example, asbestos, exactly like the fibers from the asbestos panels would sort of nest inside your lung tissue and give you as best doses.

1:15:01So, so there's all kinds of examples of efforts where we're constantly trying to make our environments more healthy, higher performing, more enjoyable. I just think right now there's a lot of focus on carbon because at a kind of global scale. That is the one challenge that affects us all. And also because climate change and temperature change doesn't really care who emitted the carbon. Everybody gets to suffer it, right? And so I think in that sense, there's a huge effort to be placed there. But we just have to remember like to stigmatize construction would be stupid. But of course to be smart and smart about avoiding wastefulness.

1:15:50And you can say like we worked with Raniera Tseppi, one of the greatest chefs in the world, the chef of Noma, who designed his restaurant. But one of the things they do is that for the meals, when they serve meat or seafood, they cook the whole animal, not just the tenderloin. So the the the cheeks, the nose, the brain, whatever, like every single part of the animal ends up on your plate. And you realize that's also amazing. And I think similarly, I've been traveling around the quarries of travertine and Tivoli and the Karara marble quarries. And of course you have the incredible stone, but you also realize that all of earth is essentially rock.

1:16:40Right? So there's a bit of it. But when you extract it, you know, maybe in the past, they only took like the nicest piece of a statue marble and the rest was just left by the side of the road. But increasingly everything, like even when there's only like rubble left, that rubble is grinded down to a beautiful dust that you can use in and Maulina building materials. But you can also use it for toothpaste, calcium carbonate as a as a supplement for for cereals, you know, like in a refined ecosystem in nature, there is no waste. Everything gets used. The perfect example is that the poop of one life form becomes the nutrient of another life form.

1:17:25So you can say each time you have a byproduct, it is potentially the product for something else. So each time you have a dead end, that dead end will pile up until it becomes a problem, but it's also a renewable resource of something you just have to find out what that something is. I remember seeing a presentation you gave for a community with single family dwellings on its space of land. And part of the sustainability of each of these houses was every house had a cow. Exactly. So what we try to do is we take all of earth and by 2050 we will be 10 billion people and we said we should all have the same quality of life as Denmark.

1:18:12It's a relatively high use of energy and a good quality of life. So we said, okay, 10 billion people and then we took all of earth. And we said, if we have all of earth to sustain 10 billion people, what do we have per earthling? And the answer is you have 750 by 750 feet of area. And two thirds of that a bit more is ocean. Almost a tenth of that is uninhabitable, glaciers and mountains, etc. And then roughly one hectare, two acres is habitable. Most people don't get to live on two acres. This is already a bonus. And then half is nature, untouched nature. The other half is roughly one acre per person is mostly agriculture with a tiny bit of city.

1:19:07And then we started looking at, and this is just taking all of the agriculture of all of earth and dividing it by 10 billion. That should be enough to sustain this one earth thing. We started seeing, like, so what happens? And we started by looking at the agriculture. You have emissions of methane from rice fields. You have, when we burn crop residue, we emit CO2. When we fertilize, we emit nitrous oxide, which is also greenhouse gas. So we started looking at all those things and we tried to see if we could do differently. Also, we found a relatively large portion of agriculture, mostly palm and corn, is energy crops.

1:19:47So things we grow in order to burn them to produce energy. You can just replace that with photovoltaics, much more efficiently. And then we reached the cow. And of course, there's a lot of discussion about a vegan diet, being the only sustainable thing, because cows, they burp the equivalent of 102 tons of CO2 per year in the form of methane. And to sequester that CO2 equivalent, you need roughly one grown tree per ton per year. And a cow needs two hectares of grassland to sustain them. And you can comfortably fit 108 trees on this land, which gives you what's called silvo pasteur, the combination of animal, husbandry and forestry.

1:20:42And that's the natural habitat for a large herbivore. So if you convert consistently to a silvo pasteur, you get happier cows. You increase biodiversity because the trees form habitat for all kinds of animals. And you increase the productivity because the cows are happier. And the trees sequester the carbon to offset the methane of the burps of the cows. So in that sense, using only what we already have, we can actually make beef, healthier and more sustainable. Also what you're describing is, before man intervened, probably about how it worked on the plains. And also if you go to sort of a Marfa Texas, you see the cattle walking around in the fields, if you go to Argentina, you see the cattle roaming around in the Pampas.

1:21:41So there are many places where this happens. There's just also many places where it doesn't. So what we were essentially trying to do was just to see, because one thing that I was tired of, and the reason we started doing the plant for plant is that COVID had happened. We went to remote, except our model workshop. So all the architects were sitting at home, but we have a few volunteers volunteer to come into the model workshop, because we're using our 3D printers and the Plexi sheets that we use for our oxygen models. We could make face shields and ventilator tubes. Someone had open sourced some files that we could use, and we kind of kept refining them to make it more and more effective and fast.

1:22:21And we ended up manufacturing 25 ,000 of these items in the first six weeks until the supply chain could catch up. And it felt good that we just so happened to have the skills, and in this case the machines and the materials, to address one of the greatest challenges on earth at the time, access to emergency medical equipment. So we thought, is there another thing we can do? And we thought, why don't we look at the planet? I was so tired that whenever you discuss about the environment and sustainability, what aboutism can derail any conversation, because someone would say, yeah, but what about Nana?

1:23:00And what you always hear is this idea that you need like 6 or 7 or 8 or 20 earths to sustain humanity if we all had the same quality of life as let's say Denmark. And I was just curious, is this really true? And it's not true. And it's not true. But if it was true, then we should like really face that, and then we should really consider. The second thing you always hear is that we have to wait for new technologies to get invented, because we can't power humanity sustainably without fusion energy or other cool things that aren't just available yet. So should we just sit and wait? And again, we found that some of the highest yielding forms of renewable energy is sun and wind, if combined with the energy storage in the form of hydrogen or batteries.

1:23:53So just in a way, like from a very first principle's point of view, we started looking at the big numbers, and then we started realizing that it remains quite abstract. But if we would boil it down to a single earthling, everything becomes super tangible. And let's say the beautiful thing that we discovered is that using only existing available techniques, using only the area we have, we can actually reduce the footprint necessary to sustain an earthling. And quality of life could go up. And quality of life could go up. And we started seeing like, so what would it take to sustain all the gains?

1:24:29There's five and a half million others. What about all the Americans? And we compared that to the territory of the Americas or of the United States of America. And I think there is a reason why in architecture and planning, we have a methodology of a mixture of plans that indicate the different processes, a mixture of illustrations that show how desirable or not this future development is. And then there's some text that is the description of the project. There's importantly an area table that shows this and this much, you know, if it's an urban mass, and so on, so much housing, so on, so much.

1:25:13So an area table. And there's also a budget that shows this is what it costs to build all of these things. And also there's a return on investment or not. But if there isn't a return on investment, then the party probably won't happen. And then finally, there is a phasing. There's a how to do it. There's an implementation plan that if we want to be here by 2050. And like some of the master plans we're looking at, the urban mass plans, they have time horizons that go to 2050. And we're already working hard on them now. But somehow because earth has never had a planning jurisdiction or. It's a hypothetical.

1:25:54And the good news is what you found was with just using what we know now, the quality of life for everyone on earth can go up. It could be sustainable, not even taking into account fusion, fission, whatever might come. Exactly. And of course, like by having a plan that already works now that you've been so implementing. As soon as you can plug fusion into the grid. Of course, like, but you should just get going right away because it's very clear if we want to get there by 2050. You have to start now. Certain countries and I mean, there's a lot to be said about China and it's not only good, but.

1:26:33My God, have they been good? They've completely overshot. They've already reached now that the goals they had for solar energy capacity in 2030. So to get there, we just need. We need to have a plan. We need to know that this is what we want and we need to start working on it.

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1:28:07Tetragramatin .com Tell me about, yes, is more. I mean, very specifically, it's our first book that we published in 2009. It came out right after the subprime economic collapse of September 2008, and it was an exhibition we were opening in January 2009. And I wanted to make, the world was so pessimistic, and I wanted to create a positive injection. Secondly, yes, is more, is of course like a mutation of lessons more, which is a statement often attributed to a Mies Fenderhull, the German grandfather of modernism. When I started studying architecture, I said, you know, I'm studying to come and architect, and people said, ah, actor, I know architect, and then some, ah, okay, okay.

1:29:09And then, and then the second question would typically be, okay, so maybe you can tell me why are all modern buildings so boring. And I think this, this idea of lessons more, of course, it means to do more with less, to make things simpler, more elegant, and Mies Fenderhull wasn't, wasn't incredible architect. But you could also say that a lot of his buildings, he ended up doing a lot of very similar towers all over North America, what started as this kind of freedom from ornamentation. I talked a little bit about the Barcelona Pavilion, the Fansworth House is another incredible house, like very simple, very elegant transparency inside outside continuity, a kind of dissolution of the traditional confines of a kind of wall space into something more.

1:29:53Open and abstract, but then he ended up doing the C -Gram Tower on Park Avenue, and the Lakeshore Drive Towers in Chicago, and eventually he ended up doing a lot of towers that look very, very similar, like beautifully detailed boxes that are essentially the same. So some of our lessons more has become sort of people's negative expectation of the architect as being some kind of a design Nazi that discriminates, and it's very exclusive, and it's all about no. And then came like Robert Venturi, who said, less is a bore, and he was saying, why does modern buildings have to be so boring, why don't we rediscover some of the cool things from the traditional city, the pitch roofs, the ornaments, and brought back in the form of post modernism.

1:30:41But it was of course just a style or decor, and then Philip Johnson, American architect said, I'm a whore, he said, I'm a whore, but I'm a well paid one that makes skyscrapers for companies for hire, you know, and he was somehow emphasizing this idea that, of course, that you're always working for someone, but secondly, he was very eclectic, and he made eclecticism into almost like a driving force. You could say he was maybe always a little bit too inspired by someone else. So what's the work really original, did he really have a core as an artist, but at least he had the freedom to pursue almost any language, any vocabulary, without worrying if it fit with his identity.

1:31:26And then because Obama had just been elected, we included in this sequence evolution of ideas, yes, we can, because when Obama came with this, we can, it was somehow this, yes, we can change this energy that whole nation can come together around a unifying agenda. And then we sort of listed in this completely pretentious, we inserted ourselves as the culmination of this kind of string of thoughts with yes is more as a manifesto for inclusion that you typically associate the avant -garde with being against something. The revolutionary is always dependent on someone that they are rebelling against.

1:32:14If your agenda is negatively defined by who or what you are against, then you are fundamentally a follower in reverse. So therefore, rather than being against something, what if there was a way forward, where you instead of saying no to everything and by being radical by saying no, what if you said yes to even conflicting and contradicting demands. And then Mark is the culture of consensus, it is the least unequal country in the world, like disagreement is almost embarrassing, like no concern is too little to be overheard. And how can you do anything interesting in such an environment, we thought like what if we turn inclusion and saying yes into a radical agenda.

1:33:08And I think the best way to describe it architecturally is like a game of twister. If you know the game of twister, you have a mat on the floor. And when you begin the game, you have to put your foot here and your other foot there and you're just standing in a standout normal position. But then as the game escalates, you get more and more demands and you suddenly find yourself in back bending configurations with your face rubbing up against body parts of family members and the game becomes more and more fun. And in a way, by making the game more difficult, you force the standout posture into some kind of acrobatic form.

1:33:46Similarly, and it's important to understand it in architecture, the standout solution. Nothing becomes the standout by being bad. The standout solution is actually very good at delivering a certain thing. And the typical example is this kind of modernist housing project and then you end up this cookie cutter rubber stamp. There's so many other things that that you're building when you're building a neighborhood, not just apartments. So in that sense, by saying yes to all the other demands and requirements, even though you make the problem more difficult to solve, you also ensure that the standout solution, which is the hardest thing to escape because it's so good at doing this one thing.

1:34:36The standout solution no longer works because that only satisfies some of the requirements, but all the other requirements that you have now piled on and committed to are not being served so you escape the tyranny of the standout solution. And you find yourself in a new territory where you have to discover new solutions to problems that are all based on new needs, additional needs, new needs, new requirements, new challenges. And in that sense, we turned this idea of yes, an inclusion, not into compromise or just the opposite or like the yes man, but actually using it as a radical agenda to free ourselves from the standard solutions and find new and more exciting possibilities.

1:35:30So you can say yes is more is a manifesto for inclusion is a radical agenda in architecture. That's great. If we say that the revolutionary is defined by who or what it's against the opposite would be the evolutionary where instead of throwing out the past, like instead of decapitating. It's like building on the past. It's actually it's evolving stepping from the past and discovering something new. It's not it's not rejecting anything. And yet it's actually it's just building upon it and trying to do more trying to actually continue the journey that that's also why I keep saying it's so important that when we sometimes you need to be critical of where you're coming from, but it's not because anyone was.

1:36:20It was mean or careless. We just came further and we now have the benefit of the perspective we have from from one step higher looking back, like Kiergegaard said, life is going forward, but it's still looking backwards. We have that benefit. So so that's since evolution is is a much more productive attitude where you can inherit everything it works and just continue where your ancestors to let off.