Lunch over IP

Housing, energy, sanitation: the Curry Stone Design Prize winner

The Curry Stone Prize for humanitarian design was handed out in Louisville recently. The winners (US$ 100'000 plus recognition at the Venice Architecture Biennale) were Luyanda Mphahlwa and Mphethi Morojele, two architects from South Africa for their design of energy-efficient homes made using timber and sandbags for infill for a Cape Town family.
The other finalists were Shawn Frayne, inventor of the Windbelt, the world's first non-turbine wind-powered generator; Wes Janz, architect and associate professor at Ball State University, Indiana, whose work is inspired by the ingenuity of slum dwellers who build shelters from scavenged materials; Marjetica Potrc, an artist and architect whose "dry toilet" design, which converts human waste to fertilizer, is now used in barrios in Caracas, Venezuela; and Antonio Scarponi, an architect whose project, "Dreaming Wall," casts text messages on a wall in Milan, using technology and design to "jam" conventional social orders and illuminate the socio-political lines that unite and divide us.
Wayne Hall has a great write-up of the award ceremony, full of details.

TED2008: How do we create?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session seven.)

This is about the point in the program where all the attendees start to talk about TED as an endurance sport. We're mid-way, but it's so intense that it feels like it has been going on for weeks...

The session, on "How do we create?", which will be moderated be TED's June Cohen, opens with inventor-collector Jay Walker -- who, as I already said in previous posts, has lent several dozen objects from his personal library to TED for the creation of this year's stage -- showing a few pictures of his fabled "library of the imagination", a 3-stories-high trove designed like an Escher painting, with glass bridges connecting upper levels, walls covered with ancient manuscripts, and incredible artifacts of human creation. Here a picture, possibly never seen before:

If you've seen and enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Star Wars" (episodes I and II), a large part of your enjoyment was due to visual effects wizard John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic. Incidentally, he's also one of the co-inventors of graphic-editing software Photoshop. So John knows his way in the alleys of creativity.
Visual effects in the script are what you can't go out and shoot, sometimes because it doesn't exist, or because it's too dangerous (incredible stunts) or just not possible to do in any other way (he shows examples). There are different techniques to overcome this problem: matte paintings (an old technique for creating virtual sets where they painted landscapes on pieces of glass, superposing them on the original footage; now it's done digitally of course), miniatures, blue/greenscreen composites, and computer graphics. John compares images from 1954's "20'000 Leagues Under The Sea" with "Pirates": ships, sea battles, sea monsters scenes, simulation of water and waves.

Over the past decade San Francisco-based designer Yves Béhar and his firm Fuseproject have produced game-changing designs for cell phone headsets (Jawbone), shoes (Birkenstock), computers (OLPC's XO laptop) or table lamps (Herman Miller's "Leaf"). A while back Fast Company magazine published a great profile of Yves.
His mother is Swiss, his father Turkish, he grew up in Switzerland, and he shows some of the objects that were around the home -- furniture, carpets. "I realized that objects tell stories -- and storytelling has been a big influence on my work. Then there was another influence, from my teen passions, ski and windsurfing -- so I combined them into a contraption for surfing over frozen lakes. Then, design school, where I asked alot of questions -- do people really need the caps-lock key on a computer keyboard? -- and found this quote: "Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original". I moved to SF, created my own firm, and started working on projects -- watch, furniture, etc. The "Leaf" lamp was meant to create a new experience of light, giving a choice for the user to go from a glowing moonlight to a very bright worklight, and everything in between -- we designed both the lamp and the bulb. All of these projects have a humanistic side to them. Jawbone -- the Bluetooth headset (photo below left) -- has a humanistic side: it feels you skin and knows when you're talking and when you're talking it filters out the other surrounding noises. But it's also about taking out the techie stuff and make it beautiful -- if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face.
Design is never done -- you have to do all this other stuff, packaging etc -- and continue to touch the user. We developed a bottle for a vitamin-infused organic drink targeted at kids: the bottle is symmetrical from every side, and can have a second life as a toy using connectors. And because "why?" is one of the questions that kids ask more often, we called it Y Water (photo right):

His most recent project: NYC Condom, launched on Valentine's day. The Dept of Health in NY needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free. fuseproject worked on a dispenser, which needs to be easily seviceable etc. They're being installed all over the city. fuseproject also designed the condoms (and Béhar throws a handful of them into the audience...)
If we all work together in creating value and  keep in mind the values of the work that we do, maybe we can change the world.

Robert J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it's really become something much more sophisticated -- thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang -- they're all single-sheet folds:

This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:

The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".

Writer Amy Tan -- American of Chinese descent -- has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The Bonesetter's Daughter" and "The Kitchen God's Wife".  She's also written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That's an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we're born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas,  with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you've alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect -- if you try too hard what you're hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they've always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that your'e getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you've a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it's the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that's how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that's good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion".
She carried a bag on stage at the beginning of her speech. She opens it now to reveal what's in the bag: her dog, who trots out of stage .

June shows a clip from Marjane Satrapi's animated movie "Persepolis", based on her autobiographical novel of the same name about a young girl coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.

Tod Machover is the Head of the MIT Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future Group (now that's a job title). He has composed five operas and invented several musical technologies, including "hyperinstruments" -- an approach that extends virtuosity. (Yo-Yo Ma and Prince among others have adopted it).
"We all love music, but it's more powerful if you don't just listen to it but make it. Everybody in the world has the power to be part of music in a very dynamic way. At the Media Lab we've been engaged in an approach called Active Music. We started by making hyperinstruments that have all kind of sensors built in, so the instrument knows how it is been played. We asked ourselves: why can't we make instruments like those for everybody -- and that produced the Brain Opera, and Guitar Hero. Music is very transformative, can change your life, your body, your mind.
Music, even better than words, is a powerful way to explain who we are. If I was playing cello here I could share things about myself that I can't do in words. Music is a very powerful interface". Machover shows the "Chandelier", a central set piece in a new opera he's written called "Death and the Powers" which will premiere in Monaco in September 2009: it's both a sculpture and a new kind of musical instrument (picture right).
Most recently, Machover has focused on using music in therapy for the physically and mentally handicapped and on developing technologies to allow them to compose and perform music . What if I could make an instrument that adapt to I really am, to my real capacities, Machover asks, and he calls up on stage Adam Boulanger, a PhD student working with him, and Dan Ellsey, a cerebral palsy patient in a wheelchair. Dan communicates via a computer-controlled "talking box". Boulanger and Machover developed technology allowing Dan to use his limited possibilities of expression to create and perform music by using both brain waves and small movements of his face and eyes. Dan performs his composition -- and the music is great, and it gets a standing ovation. 

TED2008: A bag and its contents

(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)

The conference will be on in just a couple of hours. Attendees are lining up at the registration desk to get their badges. Then some head for the Google Café for a free latte, but most get into a new line in front of another station, to fetch their "gift bag".

In conference circles, the TED gift bag is the stuff of rumors and legends, and every year TED's partnerships director (and resident fun guy) Tom Rielly and his team manage to outdo themselves. As a result this year every TEDster is receiving what is possibly the best bag ever given away at a conference -- I should know, I've attended hundreds of them -- produced by Mark Dwight and Rickshaw Bagworks and co-sponsored by design firm IDEO. Using 32 different design fabrics from Designtex, five body colors and five binding colors, Rickshaw came up with 800 different color combinations, and produced two pieces of each for TED. So each TEDster's bag has a twin somewhere else in the audience. Mass customization at work, and of the sustainable kind: the fabrics are made from 100 percent recycled beverage bottles. And the leftover fabrics have been used to create an assorted wallet and iPhone case. The bag features a computer compartment, numerous pockets in the right places, and a very comfy shoulder strap. To top it off, IDEO added a conversation-starter tag featuring provocative questions, which exists also as a downloadable widget (get it here). These are gonna be iconic bags. Here (thx to Sam Ritchie for the pictures) is how they look:

The cute animal on the right is the first thing that jumps out of the bag when you open it. It's the TED polar bear,  from the World Wildlife Fund -- I've never seen so many grown-ups so excited about stuffed animals! And the bag is full of other items: a special edition of Microsoft's Zune media player (with a custom engraving on the back and pre-loaded with TEDtalks and music performances from TED artists); an incredibly stylish Jawbone noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset by Aliph, created by star designer (and TED speaker) Yves Béhar; a voucher for a pair of eco-friendly sneakers from Keen; CDs from TED2008 artists such as Kaki King and Rufus Cappadocia, and from African musicians interpreting U2 songs (am listening to it while I write this post) and DVDs from Sony ("Surf's Up" on Blue-Ray) and the Discovery Channel (the stunning documentaries of "Planet Earth"); the official TED black t-shirt from down under, by Remo General Store, featuring the "big questions" (this year's TED theme) on the front, and the answer on the back; a digital tire gauge from BMW; discounts vouchers on items ranging from 23andMe personal genetic testing to Sony Bravia flat screens to Steelcase chairs to Lexus hybrid cars to Lynda's software-training sites; plus crucial conference items such as peppermints, beverages, vitamin tablets, pens and USB drives. (And I'm probably forgetting something: apologies).
 

Now I just have to find out who got my bag's twin.

A designer at the intersection of physical architecture and information systems

Architecture and design, says my friend Jeffrey Huang (photo), are becoming the interface between physical and virtual lives. And that's his field of study: how can constructs (buildings, cities and landscapes) incorporate digital communication systems? What are the effects of digitization on the typologies of cities today?

Last week, professor Huang -- who among other things was instrumental in creating the Swiss House in Boston, now called Swissnex -- gave his inaugural lesson at EPFL, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, one of the two Swiss institutes of technology, where he runs the Media and Design Lab (he was previously at the Harvard School of Design). Here my running notes.

Has a strong belief that the proliferation of broadband connectivity and communication devices will very deeply transform some of the basic activities of urban daily life. This will have effects on architecture. There is a shift towards virtualization of daily life. We google instead of going to a library; we learn in virtual classrooms; we fall in love in chat rooms rather than at the bar. There is a key driver: the transaction costs are much lower when things are done over the Internet. This shift from physical to virtual is probably best epitomized by amazon.com (in the US, 5 times more books are now sold on Amazon than on physical stores)

And new typologies of architecture are emerging: mega fulfillment centers, server farms and data centers, mega-warehouses, tech hotels, virtual stores (ex: Yahoo Store NY: physical portal to Yahoo's information world)
Along with the usual physical criteria (access, public transportation, etc) maps of fiber routes in Manhattan are starting to influence the choice of potential locations for new real estate. This will affect the morphology of future cities.

In Asia, the story is different, there is the luxury not to deal with existing infrastructure, but creating entire new cities, called "ubiquitous cities" or "u-cities" because they're fully wired -- 15 in South Korea, 12 in China, 3 in Japan. Example: New Songdo City, southwest of Seoul (picture below the city currently under construction).

Construction started 2004, scheduled to open 2015, for 300'000 people. It will be the most wired city in the world, fiber optics to every home, data-sharing, automatic building and utility management, full videoconferencing, wireless access from anywhere, smart-card keys, public bicycles with GPS, and public recycling bins with RFID that will give you credit every time you toss in a bottle.

Of course, the question is: will this be the next Brasilia? What about the risk of surveillance and privacy intrusion in a totally-wired city? Many of these cities are conceived as large-scale experiments, so are citizens also seen as experimental subjects? Are they giving their consent for that?

What is the agenda for Jeffrey's and his team's research at EPFL? He will look at ways to conciliate the physical and virtual environments. So far you can imagine that people live separate lives, they have a citizen identity and a netizen identity. To what extent can architecture act as a mediator to bring these lives together?  Function as an interface between physical and virtual?

The integration of computing into built environments is helped of course by the constant drop in the cost of computing (Moore's Law). There is a gap between the advancement of technology and the human capacity to absorb it. The interest in research in this area is no longer about making tech more efficient, increase the capacity of computing: the challenge is to look at this convergence from the human angle.

Here a few things that are currently on the drawing table at the EPFL's Media and Design Lab:

• Home 2.0 -- Fusing physical and digital environments to simplify domestic life. A topic that in a way is over-researched, since many companies have made prototypes of smart homes, typically driven by the desire to showcase some of their gadgets, which led to tech fatigue. Yet those examples do provide learnings. Includes a fascinating topic: traditionally the home is private (vs the public city) but virtualization is bringing business meetings or shopping into the home, so how do you negotiate the new boundaries? The Lab is working on home dashboards, intrafamily bonding, digital furnace (how to cope with media overload) and proactive healthcare.
• Phototropism in architecture -- Looking at bio-inspired design. Objective is to leverage natural strategies of the plants and integrate them into a design and architecture approach. Create building skins with integrated photovoltaics, for example, that can then be optimized for energy harvesting.
• Mapping the digital world in mobile devices -- Cell phoens don't only do phone calls: they do many things. How can we use what we know from architecture -- navigation, proportions, etc -- to create maps of the virtual worlds that are developing inside cell phones and wireless networks? This could inform the design of simpler interfaces to the digital world. (Done in collaboration with Nokia.)
• Visual markers -- Extending the point-and-click metaphor to the physical world (have digital information on physical sites), using computer-readable codes like semacodes.

The virtualization of everyday life is inevitable. We have already witnessed the emergence of u-cities in Asia. Need to develop the right convergence of virtual and physical, for which we need a design approach that starts with the human rather than the tech. Larger desire to counteract the sense of disenchantment with tech. Today technology has reached a certain maturity, and taking this further will necessitate not only pushing for more performing and efficient tech, but also for an infusion of culture, of design thinking into future hardware and software.

LeWeb3 - Philippe Starck: It's all about the viewpoint

(Running notes from the LeWeb3 conference in Paris.)

-- by guest blogger Susan Kish

Quotes from star designer Philippe Starck:

At the end of his keynote, Starck took two questions from the floor, which were amongst the most captivating part of the session.  First, he was handed the new Kindle reader from Amazon by Robert Scoble (photo: Scoble at left) – and his first reaction was: that it’s nice, "in technology design, the main things are thin, simple, light, and this meets those issues". But then he went through a series of problems in the design of the device: "the designer wasn't humble enough to disappear", the Kindle has too many angles, it's almost impossible to grab it without hitting the buttons that scroll the page, etc. "What is important in this kind of products is what is on the inside. Designers should try to remove as many of the details that surround the core" -- in this case, the core being the screen. His summary: “it’s almost modern”.

The second question was why there weren’t more genius designers, outside of Starck and Steve Jobs. Starck’s first response: "Steve Jobs, a good friend, is a genius. Me, I just look like a genius because of the leather pants." After having cashed the room's laughter, he went on an angle of genuine enthusiasm. He said: "We need to do an exercise every morning as mutants. If you walk like a robot, but look at your feet, you stumble. If you look a bit ahead, you don’t trip, it just works for itself. if you look ahead then can work can speak can exchange can interact, but now your duty is to raise your angle of view so that you see farther than the horizon, you are in the territory of intelligence, the range of humanity. It's about the angle of view. The danger zone is to look straight up, to see the light of God, to surrender yourself and… become stupid again."

The architecture of parkings

Simon Henley's new book, The Architecture of Parking, casts an eye over car parks, one of the most important but most neglected building types of the modern era, and finds a strange and haunting beauty.

Above: the A seven-storey cylinder of Parc des Célestins in Lyon, France. Left: parking in Pydar Street, Truro.

(More pictures on the Guardian's website, via Swissmiss).

View8: Creating cinematic spaces

(Running notes from the View8 conference in Turin, Italy).

Germany's Tino Schaedler is an authority in progressive film design. After working for architects such as Daniel Libeskind, he moved into digital set design and has been since involved in feature films such as (among others) "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "V for Vendetta", the recent "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and the upcoming "His Dark Materials".
The creative vision behind cinematic spaces has a strong influence on our collective cultural memory and doubtlessly has been (and is) changing the way we perceive the world. In the last decade or so, the fast pace of hardware and software evolution has opened up a wider field for artistic expression and led to a significant increase in both quantity and quality of digitally generated sets. Tino focuses his speech, called "Remixing reality", on how computers are used in the creation of digital sets.
He describes the complex workflow involved in designing sets -- which are most of the time a mix-up of different kind of sets: miniatures, built sets, digital sets, matte paintings, and characters. "Generally, several of these things are combined together to create the illusion".
10-15 years ago, digital effects were limited to a single effect, which were mostly done in post-production (he shows a clip from "Terminator"). Now the film is designed around digital effects, and often digital pre-visualizations (quick-and-dirty edited animations) are used already before building a single set and shooting a single frame.
He shows pre-visualizations of the digital sets of "Charlie and..." and it's amazing how almost identical they look to the final movie. He also shows how digital design is used to imagine physical spaces, such as the glaring white TV studio in "Charlie and...", by modeling them in detail before getting them fabricated. "The whole process of film-making today is infused by digital tech".

Conceptual designer James Clyne (credits include "Transformers", "Minority report" and others) picks up from there. "Concept artist" is a difficult kind to explain, but (s)he's one of the first people hired when a movie production gets the green light: they're in charge of taking the script and imagine how it can be visualized, try to figure out (together with the director) the film's mood. "Most of the time we're not creating something out of nothing": He runs through images from Piranesi to Bosch, from "Star Wars" to classical illustrations of the Dante's "Divine Comedy", from an Iron Maiden album cover to photographs of everything from a boarded-up facade to a tropical fish, etc. "One of the first things is to gather big folders of references, we spend some time building up a huge database of images -- Google Image Search is my best friend now". "Really, often there isn't much that's described in the script; you just discuss with the director and then he tells you to go out and figure out something that's cool".
He uses Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" as an example (I blogged last year a talk by John Underkoffler, who also worked on that movie). They had to create a coherent Washington DC set in the 2040s, and the last five words in the next quote, he says, were the only reference to city-building in the script: "Overhead, the precrime Hovership roars past. In the distance we see familiar Washington buildings, along with some new ones". They started with pictures of today's DC, and created a fantasy city that "would look like it was designed by many architects over time, with different approaches, shapes, materials, etc". They also used some "eco-friendly" approaches: gardens on roofs etc. They developed a transportation system and vehicles that could go from horizontal to vertical traveling, with streets wrapping around buildings etc. He shows how they turned a banal US mall into a futuristic one. All things that weren't detailed in the script. He discusses how they created the futuristic-looking police ships in the movie, from first sketches to detailed drawings to storyboarding to physical construction to the final thing. Here a couple of steps in creating the images of the police's oddly shaped flying vehicle:

Grant Major is from New Zealand and is one of the leading film designers in the world -- he has worked on Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (and won an Oscar for "The Return of the King"), on "King Kong", and many other films. He talks about his experiences and like Clyne discusses the key initial role of the designer in starting the production of a movie, "a time to kick around any idea you have". He explains how "we tend to work around key art, key frames" that allow to create a library of images that are then used across the whole film. There is of course alot of historical/visual reference research (in the case of "King Kong": what was going on in NY in the 1930s? etc) that helps conjuring up the color palette of what the film will be. "Concept art is becoming more than just a tool to start off the design process: it's an ongoing process that can be constantly updated, allowing more freedom and flexibility to the director". "Pre-visualizing of action sequences often leads the way in terms of the geography of a film".
"Peter Jackson storyboarded the whole three episodes of "LOTR", he sort of pre-made all the three films in cartoon form" ("Three phonebook-size cartoons", says Major) and then in digital pre-visualization, which is a novel way to pre-tell the story, to pre-direct it in some ways. As the film is then getting made, "slices of the pre-vis are replaced with the actual footage, so the director is able to see his whole film at any moment while it's being shot".
He shows a long series of images from "King Kong" demonstrating how built sets and CGI sets come together to create the film. Example from his slide show: the first picture is of the set of a New York street: they built only the lower level of the houses, and notice the green screens at the back, where digital images can then be superimposed; the second is the exact same scene as it ended up in the movie, with all the computer-generated stuff added:

My turn to go on stage. I give a talk based on a "best-of" of TED talks and some amazing visual stuff that we've shown in Monterey over the last couple of years.

Chris Luebkeman: Change is constant, context is always very variable

(I just realized that I'd left these running notes -- from a session at the Women's Forum in Deauville last month -- as an unpublished draft. They contain some quite powerful messages, so it's time to publish them.)

The idea of "sustainable cities" is a tremendous incentive to innovate in both economic, social, and "green", says Françoise Crouigneau, foreign editor of French newspaper Les Echos. She's moderating a session on the topic with Portuguese architect Livia Tirone; Chris Luebkeman, director of global foresight at engineering firm Arup; and Noni Allwood, who's leading Cisco System's projects on biodiversity.

Luebkeman leads with introductory remarks. "When it comes to the issue of energy, we have to share one planet. The context is very fascinating: change is constant, but the context is always very variable". If we go back in time, say 100 years, and look at the context: In 1907 for instance you were supposed to fix the engine of your automobile, today a car has a plastic shield basically telling you not to touch it. So the context is constantly changing. Studebaker in 1905 was building hybrid cars, with electric engines for city travel and gasoline for longer haul. He shows this slide:

"So, 100 years ago they were already using the most efficient systems!".
There are two issues as far as context goes: energy and people. Energy: it is clear to anyone that without energy there would be no economy. Like water for people, energy is vital for the economy. North America has used up 80% of their oil, and they had a great economy for the last 100 years. We still have lots of oil, but "Peak Oil" (the point at which the highest oil production is reached, after which there will be decline) is going to come very soon. In the world 600 million people are moving from the countryside to cities -- that's more than the US, Canada, Mexico and Australia together. We're confronted with the need to rebuild the livelihoods of all of them. Unsustainable urbanization is a threat to all of us and to global security.

Luebkeman talks about the Dongtan project, to build a new sustainable eco-city on an island outside of Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, for (once completed) 500'000 people on an area of 8400 hectares (that's three-quarters the size of Manhattan -- current population: about 1.6 million). Arup is doing the engineering. How will it be developed? "We can't do the LA model; we need to marry density with quality of life. Instead of looking at formal urbanism (promenades etc), we are trying to look at performance first". Will create a compact mixed-use city, "it's actually a city of villages: a size of community people can relate to". That doesn't mean that Dongtan will be a utopian thing: it will be practical, economically vibrant, but "we will redistribute rather than centralize, which goes so against the embedded value structure of the whole industry today". In terms of ecological footprint, the European capital density is the most sustainable. A conventional city has a footprint of 5.8 gh/p (global hectares per person); Dongtan will get to 2.6 gh/p. "But in order to be sustainable, it has to go down to 2.2. Even though we're putting our best minds, technology, ideas, ingenuity, it's still not sustainable, we're still 15% off the mark".

Here an Arup artist rendering of the city:

 
Livia Tirone, who specializes in sustainable buildings: Cities are our primary challenge. Over 50% of the world's population now lives in cities. Cities are where the big impacts are. We spend 90% of our time in buildings, which is also (historically) a pretty new reality. Every 7 to 20 years the cost of a building doubles -- because of its operation's costs. (which means that there is a potential for spectacular savings in doing buildings that don't consume much). There are alot of barriers along the way to changing this habit of energy-consuming buildings, starting with inconsequential policies: very low value-added taxes on water and energy consumption, vs very high on solar panels: "There are too many confusing messages from politics".
There is a clear trend towards the compact city, also in the sense of multifunctionality, where working, shopping and living can be done all within a short distance -- that you can do most things on foot (the European model). And when it comes to the car, really in most cases accessibility is the issue, not mobility; public transportation that's efficient and attractive satisfies this need of accessibility. We probably will have to integrate new values, right to clean air, right to sun, right to green, not only square meters per person. One of the biggest challenges: decentralization of energy production and distribution.

Noni Allwood discusses a partnership between Cisco and the cities of San Francisco, Amsterdam and Seoul to find out how ICT can be applied to the problem of climate change. "We have found that cities are eager to define a broader extent to sustainability, not only related to environment". There are perhaps three things that a sustainable city must deliver: quality of life; respect for the ecosystem that supports it; equitable distribution of benefits across society. The interests of business, individuals and governments have to be aligned.
What can ICT do? Technology, including  ICT, has always been seen as a culprit, generating impact and waste, consuming huge amounts of energy, creating waste problems. So the first approach was to minimize the chemicals used for manufacturing and decreasing energy consumption. But ICT can do much more:

• tech enabling many new forms of work, not only going to the workplace
• transportation (bus and trams of the future, beyond fuel efficiency, will also be about the services delivered to the passengers so that they are more inclined to use them)
• traffic congestion management
• social inclusion
• greater transparency in government

For instance, Amsterdam has 1000 municipal buildings spread around town, they wanted to explore how to use them more efficiently: distributing city services throughout the whole city of Amsterdam, bringing them closer to the citizen. Technology and infrastructure enable all that. It comes down to how cities are organized.

To a question from the audience about how to push these concepts into the US, Luebkeman replies: The European model of urbanism is more sustainable than that of the US, although even in the US there are various degrees of awareness. Portland, Oregon, has strict zoning; Phoenix, you can barely see the end of the huge houses. But as fuel prices go up, we're starting to see is a fascinating behavioral change: Wal-Mart 2 years ago saw that there is a 1:1 reverse relationship between their revenues and the cost of fuel, because their stores are out there, you have to drive to them. There is a slow awakening of the regions of America that have been in denial, and a beginning of looking at "what can we do?".
Added Allwood: In the US, most of the action has started from the bottom up, from cities.

Final word from Luebkeman: "Context is different, always."

Architectural Monday in Paris

On my way back from a conference in Deauville, last Monday I spent a few hours in Paris to go see the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, a new museum of architecture and heritage housed in a wing of the Palais de Chaillot, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

Among the museum's many sections -- which include galleries devoted to frescoes and to modern architecture, as well as a rebuilt unit from Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse -- I was particularly struck by the "Galerie des Moulages", a collection of life-size and scale copies of fragments of French architectural masterpieces form the 12th to the 18th centuries. The "moulages" (casts) have been realized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, originally for the benefit of students who could then analyse them without travelling. These include monumental church portals as well as column details, sculptures as well as gargoyles, roomfuls of them:

What's the interest in looking at copies? Fair question. First, since the casts were made, many of the originals have been destroyed or damaged. Second, when was the last time that you could look up-close at the grins of a cathedral gargoyle or at the intricate populations of angels and demons, of humans and mythical creatures that ornate church portals, for example? (And if the cast is not enough, you can even turn to a computer screen and zoom in on high-res pictures.)

On the way to the Palais de Chaillot, just off the Champs-Elysées, we bumped into this building:

No, it's not a building hit by global warming. It's a construction site: an international group is renovating its headquarters. Instead of covering it with gigantic advertising billboards, the owners have asked an artist to "design" the tarpaulin. Surprising, funny, and it doesn't deface the neighborhood.

Bill McDonough, Reel to Reel

The information spread a few months ago: director Steven Spielberg is planning a movie (a theatrical documentary) about pioneering green architect William (Bill) McDonough (photo), his work, and his "Cradle to Cradle" vision of absolute sustainability -- which Bill detailed in a 2002 book (written with Michael Braungart) and explained at TED2005 (watch his speech) and is now trying to apply everywhere, from the Googleplex to new Chinese cities.

But while Spielberg is still thinking, actor Leo Di Caprio sped past, presumably in his Prius: inspired (like Spielberg) by Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", Di Caprio has produced "The 11th Hour", an eco-doc about humans creating the conditions for their own demise by destroying nature. The movie debuted at the last Cannes Film Festival; premiered in New York and Los Angeles a few days ago (read the NY Times review); and it's released across the US and Canada today (Europe and the rest of the world will have to wait). Among the academics, designers, entrepreneurs and other experts that appear in the film, narrated by Di Caprio, is Bill McDonough.