hello I’m an architect and I make
sculpture and I want to share with you
today what I think I can call a vision
for making making in the environment in
tributing but I must say that some of
the things I’m gonna say I feel a bit
shy about I hope I can speak of it
personally with you when I was little I
stood and I sat on the shoulders of my
father and I was carried by my mother
and I remember the unspeakably delicious
sense of being carried as if the world
will always be with me as if this will
be my home as if I can lean and be
carried and feel that my world is
eternal as a young man I stand on the
ice scoured ground of our country and I
think I’ve had that sense two of the
world’s being certain of nature always
being strong with me as if nature would
be eternal and what of the ground that
we speak on today
trembling
unspeakably insecure as if nature is
changed forever as if we are somehow
tumbling as a planet how is it possible
as a maker as an architect to be
confident in making for this world
in contributing to this world I think
that if I were a young designer today
then I would make very tight jackets at
least I would understand if someone felt
that way I would try to limit myself and
try to make the tightest possible shells
perhaps seek a kind of No Trace camping
the clearest possible boundaries
limiting what I do and yet what possible
contribution to this world comes from
making the tightest possible closed
possible things around us I hope that we
might be able to share visions of the
world in which we build and feel the
multiple octaves the myriad of ways that
we are open and interrelated and I hope
that we might be able to build a kind of
collective sense in which we create
fertility and share I hope that I can
justify that kind of confidence by
sharing some very particular craft with
you that changes the way we make things
I used to work with bricks and mortar
and very very solidly very clear things
but the way I’ve been working now
learning from many partners are now part
of a partnership called the living
architecture systems group with about 70
people around the world over 20
countries working together and we have a
rather special way of working
we start with ordinary buildings
and inside those spaces perhaps a bit
like a petri dish has a very special
culture in it
we hang and suspend and weave
very very delicate things deliberately
fragile trying to find ways for things
to build and become fertile and renew
themselves and become literally alive
learning from those things from those
delicate dependant things we then make
jackets around buildings solar
responsive envelopes self-renewing IVs
that start to make new skins around
buildings that refresh the environment
that collect carbon that set out new
material that can grow itself and we
hope that learning from this that we can
start to build the ground as well making
self spinning geotextiles that are
renewing that our growth matrices that
will truly make things fertile and we
hope even more that we’ll be able to
address the air and the many ripples of
warmth and exchange and chemistry that
constitute there our entire world
changing architecture into a design
space that might be thought of as a kind
of a soil our fertility a renewal let me
show you some images of the kinds of
things that we’re making that I hope
will justify that kind of vision some of
the work appears like a great gentle
swamp full of multiple hyperbolic arches
and basket-like columns
deeply clothed with mechanisms that had
arrays of microprocessors that run
through them making artificial
intelligence that sends ripples of
response all the way through the
environments in some of these
installations we’ve been rather
confident such as the Venice Biennale
for architecture where we set up a kind
of a symphony of multiple layers
hyperbolic vaults above us basket like
columns hundreds of microprocessors and
sensors that set up a raise of
artificial intelligence hanging filters
that pass
stare through very gently many many
small implants of chemistry to
protocells prototype cells serving to
generate new carbon captured material
refreshing the air when we went in that
kind of environment at first things were
very still and then as you move through
it the multiple arrays of sensors start
to detect your movement and start to
offer blooms of light and tiny trickles
of vibration and sensation and tiny
whispers of sound to that start to move
and chorus following you echoing you
making conversations with you quite
literally being curious about you and
offering empathetically a kind of
conversation in which the environment
almost literally becomes alive not alive
as someone that’s trying to do your
bidding
not alive as something that makes you
feel powerful but rather the much more
delicate sense of exchange surrounded by
that environment there are many many
mechanisms that gently stir air and that
send out ripples of response all the way
through following you and tracing you
let me look a little bit closer at the
kinds of things we’ve been making I hope
that you can see in this image the kind
of quite robust interwove and scaffold
this is made by carefully digitally
addressed material thermoplastics which
are carefully drawn and then drawn out
into these hyperbolic forms and then
woven through with the cable works of
the multiple microprocessors and then
filled again with the chemistry that
starts to be self renewing this new
fertile like turf which replaces the
bricks and mortar of a previous
architecture the material is deeply
resilient and it has sensors through it
that impart movement that allow very
very gentle movements back
rippling breathing fostering an exchange
there start to be individual movements
using very special mechanisms
shape-memory alloys that silently
contract and ripple and move large
scales of things that start to ripple
out and make great rolling waves around
you turbulent waves this delicious sense
of not being alone in a building but
rather having conversations directly
with the environment an inter woven also
in those fabrics our chemical systems
protocells prototype cells that have
small bits of chemistry woven into them
that capture carbon and send out new
veils of material that start to renew
themselves this work has acquired a
number of different scales and I’ve been
describing large environments but it is
also moved into clothing as well at a
really lovely collaboration with Iris
van Herpen we’re now ten collections
have been generated a new vision of
clothing is architecture in which
possibility shells rippling around our
bodies are enacted and rather carefully
addressed fabrics as well such as these
deeply laser-cut oscillating fabrics
that shimmer and work around your body
just to show a little bit more of these
kind of environments here’s one from
Seoul where I hope that you can see the
multiple strata of individually
thermally formed elements which weave
together into these basket like
instructions and then are interwoven
with the chemistry and the micro
processing standing back from this
environment also is tremendous darkness
projecting to the edges of our
perception the sense that rather than
for grounding the kind of certainty of
territory trying to make walls and
boundaries it’s a delicious sense of
openness working right at the very edges
of our perception flickering and I see
it did I imagine it
a kind of lovely sense of possibility a
very personal kind of detailing is a
fundamental building block for this
architecture of setting up individual
tentacles and individual elements which
are organized robotically touching and
touching back and in that environment
there are many many of these mechanisms
making a rather thick fur child textile
that ripples out and moves together and
there’s a number of very specialized
crafts that make this possible one of
them is schlieren photography I love
that word clear and you want to say it
with me clearing you didn’t say Sharon
please sling
clear and photography looks very
carefully at the differential of
thermodynamics that right that will work
around your body and it allows us to see
that instead of acting and avoid that
there are convective plumes that move
around us and that we’re deeply deeply
interwoven in the world and this
translates into a very particular way of
making things of trying to make things
as delicate as possible as trying to
make things resonant and responsive
perhaps the opposite of strength perhaps
the opposite of clarity when we made
this kind of material the kinds of
things we’re trying to do are seeking
the most possible precarious point where
it’s impossible for something to stay
stable and then we amplify and using
mechanisms we try to make things that
are deeply deeply responsive
unapologetically fragile
supporting that kind of detailing is a
geometry as well the geometry that
allows us to see how things are coupled
and interrelated in the world this is a
beautiful slide it’s a slide of quasi
geostrophic turbulence please say it
with me
geostrophic
turning the turning of the world quasi
meaning that exquisitely unstable
wavering butterfly wing kind of motion
in which something flutters and arises
this is open-source software it’s
available to any designer today and it
allows us with the same kind of
knowledge that allows us with exquisite
precision to predict the weather to
understand how we are inextricably bound
up in the continuum of so many
dimensions and this translates into
practical geometry here’s another quasi
quasi periodic geometry say it again
please
quasi periodic rather than making things
as stable and crystalline and orderly as
possible we use quasi periodic geometry
to have multiple different vectors in
which as many possible different strands
can cross each other and create a great
web of resilience taking on any vector
at all rather than the kind of
crystalline homogeneous making where
cracks can happen we’re unified failure
happens and this craft in turn is
supported by quite careful detailing
drawing things patiently harvesting the
resilience of material using snap that
technology that allows individual joints
to to join together without without
adhesives anticipating that by
addressing tiny things and then
multiplying them by hundreds of
thousands of times literally in a chain
environment it becomes possible to make
hyperbolic vaults and scaffolds and
great tech textile and environments that
are capable of handling tremendous
amounts of turbulent force these that in
turn are clothed by chemistry such as
the protocells that I’m showing you
right now and just to get a sense of the
dynamics that happen within each of
these protocells here’s an image where
you can see the individual chemicals
that working together this is a copper
sulphate crystal with potassium
ferrocyanide a very simple inorganic
solution around it and those two things
interact blooming osmotically pumping to
make these kind of self renewing skins
it’s a lucky thing that they’re inside
glass chambers right now because they
make sticky messes but with more
development we’re very hopeful that this
kind of process this protocell process
embedded as a metabolism inside
buildings might work a bit like the self
renewing ivy of seasonal change in
clothing buildings underlying this
process also is a kind of artificial
intelligence and curiosity that
continually searches out the human
occupant and engenders conversations
feeling curiously trying on
empathetically responding and if we take
these kinds of details then I think that
I can say that there are some
fundamental ways of making design that
underlie them as a young person I was
taught that things start with order and
then they fall apart Shakespeare told me
that
my destiny is dust I wonder if that’s
something that we share I’m quoting that
the second law of thermodynamics perhaps
the idea that entropy increases and then
entropy means disorder what a terrible
thing to say about the world
the sense that somehow the further and
further we go the more and more
disappointed we would become new physics
tells us something very different about
entropy rather than disorder we get an
extraordinary sense the standing in
between order and disorder things last
the world of dissipative forms the kind
of ripples at the edge of a beach
perhaps or the barred cumulus clouds
that make up fundamentally the world of
natural things under the drive of the
Sun and the turning of the planet this
sense that instead of things decaying
that things can last and in fact that
life can make the maximum possible
entropy invites us to have a fundamental
kind of change about how we feel about
the world entropy needs to be changed as
well because it needs to be understood
not as decay and disorder but rather
maximum potential the maximum degrees of
freedom and what that allows is a sense
that the greatest possible interaction
with the world and the greatest possible
involvement becomes something that we
can contribute there’s a form language
that goes with this kind of design and
it’s a form language that is very
different than the one that I’ve
personally been taught as a young person
I think I was taught that something like
a sphere was the perfect form the ideal
kind of thing that it was good to make
clear boundaries to make things as rigid
and clear and crisp as possible
I wonder if you can look at this kind of
form and see as I think I do now
something ugly are you with me can you
hate this raindrop I think I do hate
this raindrop I hate it because in the
equations of this form language is an
inexorable sense that the maximum
possible enclosed territory and the
minimum possible surroundings is
absolutely inevitable that it’s good to
exclude that it’s good to have as much
inside you that it’s good to have the
rigidus possible boundary it treats the
outside is somehow an emptiness it’s an
architecture of death I wonder you
didn’t laugh at all when I said the
architecture of death but I mean it this
is an ugly raindrop why would it not be
possible for the same material to
exfoliate and have the maximum possible
reticulation and the greatest possible
vulnerability why do we have itchy think
that such a form as a snowflake is
somehow freely excessive good only for
peacetime why indeed might we not think
of foreign languages much like this
little creature in amoeba in which
multiple granular forms are all together
and the boundaries are as much pulled
into their surroundings
as pushing in foraging would it not be
possible then to think of boundaries as
being open and have many many delicate
things to be an extraordinarily
effective way to make our world
this relates fundamentally to a way of
making architecture and the older world
the world of the solid ground
is still with us perhaps it’s embodied
in the term dear Metis the Vitruvian
writer who spoke of this 2,000 years ago
and said that permanence and closure and
clarity are the fundaments of
architecture but what I want to share is
that a new set of paradigms might be
possible to paradigms that are founded
on the making of life on compartments
and resilient organizations and
information and metabolism architecture
that might be designed in very much the
same way that we make living things I
want to share a question then in closing
if it is possible to understand that the
world is something in which we are
inexorably coupled and in which making
delicate things unapologetically fragile
things can serve life and create
fertility can be effective then why if I
encounter the kind of opening of
boundaries that I see in this kind of
world of this little creature emptying
itself dying
if it’s true that it’s coupled with its
environment then why if that is what’s
happened to me would I not feel joy
is it possible to be confident standing
on this trembling surface of the world
today in making substantial things and
creating fertility and building
responsibly
it’s not possible to be confident
but I do hope that by sharing these
kinds of strategies that a kind of hope
can be justified and I hope that’s a
contribution thank you
[Applause]
sculpture and I want to share with you
today what I think I can call a vision
for making making in the environment in
tributing but I must say that some of
the things I’m gonna say I feel a bit
shy about I hope I can speak of it
personally with you when I was little I
stood and I sat on the shoulders of my
father and I was carried by my mother
and I remember the unspeakably delicious
sense of being carried as if the world
will always be with me as if this will
be my home as if I can lean and be
carried and feel that my world is
eternal as a young man I stand on the
ice scoured ground of our country and I
think I’ve had that sense two of the
world’s being certain of nature always
being strong with me as if nature would
be eternal and what of the ground that
we speak on today
trembling
unspeakably insecure as if nature is
changed forever as if we are somehow
tumbling as a planet how is it possible
as a maker as an architect to be
confident in making for this world
in contributing to this world I think
that if I were a young designer today
then I would make very tight jackets at
least I would understand if someone felt
that way I would try to limit myself and
try to make the tightest possible shells
perhaps seek a kind of No Trace camping
the clearest possible boundaries
limiting what I do and yet what possible
contribution to this world comes from
making the tightest possible closed
possible things around us I hope that we
might be able to share visions of the
world in which we build and feel the
multiple octaves the myriad of ways that
we are open and interrelated and I hope
that we might be able to build a kind of
collective sense in which we create
fertility and share I hope that I can
justify that kind of confidence by
sharing some very particular craft with
you that changes the way we make things
I used to work with bricks and mortar
and very very solidly very clear things
but the way I’ve been working now
learning from many partners are now part
of a partnership called the living
architecture systems group with about 70
people around the world over 20
countries working together and we have a
rather special way of working
we start with ordinary buildings
and inside those spaces perhaps a bit
like a petri dish has a very special
culture in it
we hang and suspend and weave
very very delicate things deliberately
fragile trying to find ways for things
to build and become fertile and renew
themselves and become literally alive
learning from those things from those
delicate dependant things we then make
jackets around buildings solar
responsive envelopes self-renewing IVs
that start to make new skins around
buildings that refresh the environment
that collect carbon that set out new
material that can grow itself and we
hope that learning from this that we can
start to build the ground as well making
self spinning geotextiles that are
renewing that our growth matrices that
will truly make things fertile and we
hope even more that we’ll be able to
address the air and the many ripples of
warmth and exchange and chemistry that
constitute there our entire world
changing architecture into a design
space that might be thought of as a kind
of a soil our fertility a renewal let me
show you some images of the kinds of
things that we’re making that I hope
will justify that kind of vision some of
the work appears like a great gentle
swamp full of multiple hyperbolic arches
and basket-like columns
deeply clothed with mechanisms that had
arrays of microprocessors that run
through them making artificial
intelligence that sends ripples of
response all the way through the
environments in some of these
installations we’ve been rather
confident such as the Venice Biennale
for architecture where we set up a kind
of a symphony of multiple layers
hyperbolic vaults above us basket like
columns hundreds of microprocessors and
sensors that set up a raise of
artificial intelligence hanging filters
that pass
stare through very gently many many
small implants of chemistry to
protocells prototype cells serving to
generate new carbon captured material
refreshing the air when we went in that
kind of environment at first things were
very still and then as you move through
it the multiple arrays of sensors start
to detect your movement and start to
offer blooms of light and tiny trickles
of vibration and sensation and tiny
whispers of sound to that start to move
and chorus following you echoing you
making conversations with you quite
literally being curious about you and
offering empathetically a kind of
conversation in which the environment
almost literally becomes alive not alive
as someone that’s trying to do your
bidding
not alive as something that makes you
feel powerful but rather the much more
delicate sense of exchange surrounded by
that environment there are many many
mechanisms that gently stir air and that
send out ripples of response all the way
through following you and tracing you
let me look a little bit closer at the
kinds of things we’ve been making I hope
that you can see in this image the kind
of quite robust interwove and scaffold
this is made by carefully digitally
addressed material thermoplastics which
are carefully drawn and then drawn out
into these hyperbolic forms and then
woven through with the cable works of
the multiple microprocessors and then
filled again with the chemistry that
starts to be self renewing this new
fertile like turf which replaces the
bricks and mortar of a previous
architecture the material is deeply
resilient and it has sensors through it
that impart movement that allow very
very gentle movements back
rippling breathing fostering an exchange
there start to be individual movements
using very special mechanisms
shape-memory alloys that silently
contract and ripple and move large
scales of things that start to ripple
out and make great rolling waves around
you turbulent waves this delicious sense
of not being alone in a building but
rather having conversations directly
with the environment an inter woven also
in those fabrics our chemical systems
protocells prototype cells that have
small bits of chemistry woven into them
that capture carbon and send out new
veils of material that start to renew
themselves this work has acquired a
number of different scales and I’ve been
describing large environments but it is
also moved into clothing as well at a
really lovely collaboration with Iris
van Herpen we’re now ten collections
have been generated a new vision of
clothing is architecture in which
possibility shells rippling around our
bodies are enacted and rather carefully
addressed fabrics as well such as these
deeply laser-cut oscillating fabrics
that shimmer and work around your body
just to show a little bit more of these
kind of environments here’s one from
Seoul where I hope that you can see the
multiple strata of individually
thermally formed elements which weave
together into these basket like
instructions and then are interwoven
with the chemistry and the micro
processing standing back from this
environment also is tremendous darkness
projecting to the edges of our
perception the sense that rather than
for grounding the kind of certainty of
territory trying to make walls and
boundaries it’s a delicious sense of
openness working right at the very edges
of our perception flickering and I see
it did I imagine it
a kind of lovely sense of possibility a
very personal kind of detailing is a
fundamental building block for this
architecture of setting up individual
tentacles and individual elements which
are organized robotically touching and
touching back and in that environment
there are many many of these mechanisms
making a rather thick fur child textile
that ripples out and moves together and
there’s a number of very specialized
crafts that make this possible one of
them is schlieren photography I love
that word clear and you want to say it
with me clearing you didn’t say Sharon
please sling
clear and photography looks very
carefully at the differential of
thermodynamics that right that will work
around your body and it allows us to see
that instead of acting and avoid that
there are convective plumes that move
around us and that we’re deeply deeply
interwoven in the world and this
translates into a very particular way of
making things of trying to make things
as delicate as possible as trying to
make things resonant and responsive
perhaps the opposite of strength perhaps
the opposite of clarity when we made
this kind of material the kinds of
things we’re trying to do are seeking
the most possible precarious point where
it’s impossible for something to stay
stable and then we amplify and using
mechanisms we try to make things that
are deeply deeply responsive
unapologetically fragile
supporting that kind of detailing is a
geometry as well the geometry that
allows us to see how things are coupled
and interrelated in the world this is a
beautiful slide it’s a slide of quasi
geostrophic turbulence please say it
with me
geostrophic
turning the turning of the world quasi
meaning that exquisitely unstable
wavering butterfly wing kind of motion
in which something flutters and arises
this is open-source software it’s
available to any designer today and it
allows us with the same kind of
knowledge that allows us with exquisite
precision to predict the weather to
understand how we are inextricably bound
up in the continuum of so many
dimensions and this translates into
practical geometry here’s another quasi
quasi periodic geometry say it again
please
quasi periodic rather than making things
as stable and crystalline and orderly as
possible we use quasi periodic geometry
to have multiple different vectors in
which as many possible different strands
can cross each other and create a great
web of resilience taking on any vector
at all rather than the kind of
crystalline homogeneous making where
cracks can happen we’re unified failure
happens and this craft in turn is
supported by quite careful detailing
drawing things patiently harvesting the
resilience of material using snap that
technology that allows individual joints
to to join together without without
adhesives anticipating that by
addressing tiny things and then
multiplying them by hundreds of
thousands of times literally in a chain
environment it becomes possible to make
hyperbolic vaults and scaffolds and
great tech textile and environments that
are capable of handling tremendous
amounts of turbulent force these that in
turn are clothed by chemistry such as
the protocells that I’m showing you
right now and just to get a sense of the
dynamics that happen within each of
these protocells here’s an image where
you can see the individual chemicals
that working together this is a copper
sulphate crystal with potassium
ferrocyanide a very simple inorganic
solution around it and those two things
interact blooming osmotically pumping to
make these kind of self renewing skins
it’s a lucky thing that they’re inside
glass chambers right now because they
make sticky messes but with more
development we’re very hopeful that this
kind of process this protocell process
embedded as a metabolism inside
buildings might work a bit like the self
renewing ivy of seasonal change in
clothing buildings underlying this
process also is a kind of artificial
intelligence and curiosity that
continually searches out the human
occupant and engenders conversations
feeling curiously trying on
empathetically responding and if we take
these kinds of details then I think that
I can say that there are some
fundamental ways of making design that
underlie them as a young person I was
taught that things start with order and
then they fall apart Shakespeare told me
that
my destiny is dust I wonder if that’s
something that we share I’m quoting that
the second law of thermodynamics perhaps
the idea that entropy increases and then
entropy means disorder what a terrible
thing to say about the world
the sense that somehow the further and
further we go the more and more
disappointed we would become new physics
tells us something very different about
entropy rather than disorder we get an
extraordinary sense the standing in
between order and disorder things last
the world of dissipative forms the kind
of ripples at the edge of a beach
perhaps or the barred cumulus clouds
that make up fundamentally the world of
natural things under the drive of the
Sun and the turning of the planet this
sense that instead of things decaying
that things can last and in fact that
life can make the maximum possible
entropy invites us to have a fundamental
kind of change about how we feel about
the world entropy needs to be changed as
well because it needs to be understood
not as decay and disorder but rather
maximum potential the maximum degrees of
freedom and what that allows is a sense
that the greatest possible interaction
with the world and the greatest possible
involvement becomes something that we
can contribute there’s a form language
that goes with this kind of design and
it’s a form language that is very
different than the one that I’ve
personally been taught as a young person
I think I was taught that something like
a sphere was the perfect form the ideal
kind of thing that it was good to make
clear boundaries to make things as rigid
and clear and crisp as possible
I wonder if you can look at this kind of
form and see as I think I do now
something ugly are you with me can you
hate this raindrop I think I do hate
this raindrop I hate it because in the
equations of this form language is an
inexorable sense that the maximum
possible enclosed territory and the
minimum possible surroundings is
absolutely inevitable that it’s good to
exclude that it’s good to have as much
inside you that it’s good to have the
rigidus possible boundary it treats the
outside is somehow an emptiness it’s an
architecture of death I wonder you
didn’t laugh at all when I said the
architecture of death but I mean it this
is an ugly raindrop why would it not be
possible for the same material to
exfoliate and have the maximum possible
reticulation and the greatest possible
vulnerability why do we have itchy think
that such a form as a snowflake is
somehow freely excessive good only for
peacetime why indeed might we not think
of foreign languages much like this
little creature in amoeba in which
multiple granular forms are all together
and the boundaries are as much pulled
into their surroundings
as pushing in foraging would it not be
possible then to think of boundaries as
being open and have many many delicate
things to be an extraordinarily
effective way to make our world
this relates fundamentally to a way of
making architecture and the older world
the world of the solid ground
is still with us perhaps it’s embodied
in the term dear Metis the Vitruvian
writer who spoke of this 2,000 years ago
and said that permanence and closure and
clarity are the fundaments of
architecture but what I want to share is
that a new set of paradigms might be
possible to paradigms that are founded
on the making of life on compartments
and resilient organizations and
information and metabolism architecture
that might be designed in very much the
same way that we make living things I
want to share a question then in closing
if it is possible to understand that the
world is something in which we are
inexorably coupled and in which making
delicate things unapologetically fragile
things can serve life and create
fertility can be effective then why if I
encounter the kind of opening of
boundaries that I see in this kind of
world of this little creature emptying
itself dying
if it’s true that it’s coupled with its
environment then why if that is what’s
happened to me would I not feel joy
is it possible to be confident standing
on this trembling surface of the world
today in making substantial things and
creating fertility and building
responsibly
it’s not possible to be confident
but I do hope that by sharing these
kinds of strategies that a kind of hope
can be justified and I hope that’s a
contribution thank you
[Applause]
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