Bjarke Ingels (Part 2)

Bjarke Ingels returns to continue his conversation in Part Two. Bjarke Ingels is one of the world’s leading architects as the founder and creative director of renowned architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Recognized for his innovative approach to sustainable and futuristic design, Ingels has led transformative projects worldwide, including the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in China and groundbreaking urban plans like The Dryline in New York. A partner in multiple ventures, he co-founded Nabr, a consumer-first housing company, and collaborated with Lonestar Data Holdings to create the Freedom Payload—a solar-powered, 3D-printed data center designed to store data on the Moon. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016, Ingels is renowned for pushing the boundaries of architecture to address global challenges, blending art, technology, and practicality to shape the future of urban living and sustainable development. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  We've actually, at this point, like, built, I believe, a total of seven, eight structures for Google. But started the conversation, I feel, almost a decade ago, at this point. And Google had been having a few false starts, but where they had treated their space, the new buildings, more like real estate than really thinking about it as a, as an aspirational framework for their work. And considering that Google had somehow, back in the days, with ping-pong tables and snack bars, had become a little bit like the template for the Silicon Valley startup, suddenly there was like, we should probably have great ambition.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  And Larry Page, at the time, was back in the seat of CEO, and he said, like, he wanted to really take an interest in this. So we started working and, in a way, tried to map out the organizational diagram of how Google is structured, that the Googlers are grouped into teams, that are grouped into sort of little villages of 150 people. And also, Google was, of course, pioneering in search, but they were also into quantum computing, and they were also into AI, and they were also into various kinds of hardware and cloud. So they had a hard time predicting what was going to be their future and which aspects of their future was going to grow and how much.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  So we ended up coming up with this idea of...

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Like of a two-layered structure. On one hand, let's say a series of platforms. The upper level, a series of platforms, each platform, one hundred and fifty people, roughly, which is the Dunbar number. Dunbar was a sociologist who somehow stated that the the hundred and fifty group is a tribe, and that's roughly the amount of social relationships a human being can hold. So beyond a hundred and fifty, you need other systems of hierarchy, etc. So imagine we were creating to start with the the work environment for three thousand people. So twenty platforms, each seating a hundred and fifty people.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  And those platforms are pulled apart, but colliding. So you can get from one platform to the next, to the next, to the next. But there's also spaces in between them that open to the levels below. And since they cover like a large area, each platform is raised the height of a desk from its neighbors. So that if you look at it in aggregate, it's almost like a stepping hill, so that the ones sitting in the middle are a little bit higher than their surroundings. So they're not fully entrenched or enveloped by everybody else. It's like a gentle stepping hill.

• 3:17Rick Rubin?

  What are the shapes of each of the platforms?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  So they're like squares or rectangles.

• 3:21Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  But they form a kind of checker pattern of open and closed.

• 3:25Rick Rubin?

  Is the whole outer perimeter rectangular or square, or is it more?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's more like a squircle, like somewhere between a square and a circle, but it's sort of a pixelated or faithful to the orthogonality. So it's almost like, let's say, a very gentle pixelated hill.

• 3:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  That is in a form of a checker pattern, so you always have openings to to below. And below, you get more like a Medina, where you have all the restaurants and cafes, all the meeting rooms, all the technical spaces. And that's also where people from the outside. So downstairs is like very bustling, social, living, like a like a bazaar, a public, exactly, open in all directions. And upstairs is more contemplative, focused, etc. And then the whole thing is covered. By a series of, like what we call the canopy, a series of sheets covered with photovoltaics on the outside, with little cracks in between, like we call them smiles, they look like smiles, that letting just the perfect amount of daylight everywhere. So from upstairs, you have perfect amount of daylight.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  You still have shade.

• 4:29Rick Rubin?

  So in the day, you don't really need lighting?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  You don't need lighting at all during the day. And you have an abundance of shading still because the the canopy also extends beyond the the glass facades. So you you also have shaded areas on the outside. Every photon that hits the building is turned into power because the facade, the entire facade is what we've called dragon scales, like these shingled photovoltaic. We, I think we tested every photovoltaic panel that was on the market at the time and found a beautiful one from Switzerland called SunStyle that has a kind of, it's textured glass. So from the outside, it just looks like a beautiful material. It doesn't look like traditional photovoltaics.

• 5:09Rick Rubin?

  But it's put on like shingles, like overlapping shingles.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Overlapping shingles. So so what you see looks like scales or shingles. But it turns out that they are quite large when you when you get close.

• 5:20Rick Rubin?

  Does it look like a circus tent, would you say?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  But maybe more like sort of a an infinite expanse of Bedouin tents, like the sort of, or like it has a kind of wavy, scallopy surface. It's it's a pretty elegant form, like a shallow dome.

• 5:36Rick Rubin?

  When you're in it, do you feel like you're inside or is it not clear that you're indoors?

• 5:40Speaker 00

  You have incredibly generous ceilings at certain points, although they do come down to the on the sides. But but it actually, it is a little bit more like on a day with clouds where you do see patches of of sky. But most of what's above you is white. That would be the the vibe. And essentially, it gives you an incredibly free and flexible environment for 3000 Googlers. But you they're not lost in the vastness because they're actually part of this platform of 150. And then below, you have more like this kind of urban hustle and bustle of of all the extroverted functions. So this kind of system of canopies, we ended up building four of these canopies of of various scales. And and right now, it's where

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Google is doing all of their AI. And then sort of adding on that, we designed their headquarters in London, which is the most opposite urban environment you can imagine to Silicon Valley, Mountain View. So there, we took the same principles, but had to squeeze it into like essentially a 300, 1,000-foot-long footprint. So it's almost like imagine the Google headquarters in London is almost like a skyscraper on the side. So it's as long as the skyscraper is tall, and it's as tall as the skyscraper is wide. In a way, to achieve a similar environment, we made the ceiling heights very tall, and we hung all the meeting rooms and support functions under the ceiling.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  So we have these very large urban floor plates, 60, like almost 200 feet deep, but with 40-foot ceilings where you get an abundance of light for all the Googlers. And then when they go to meetings and other support functions, they go up to the functions that are hanging under the ceiling in a way.

• 7:25Rick Rubin?

  Interesting. When you're in that space, what does it remind you of? Like any other spaces you've been in your life, what would be the closest experience that feel like that space? It feel like a train station?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  No, the funny thing is, because we were looking at typologies exactly. And when we started working with Larry and with Google in Mountain View, they had just acquired the two hangars at Moffett Airfield. And they were very interested in this kind of incredible freedom of the hangars. And in that sense, the canopy somehow delivers some of that freedom. In London, maybe it's like 19th century train station, like with the big vaulted ceilings. Maybe some of the beautiful spaces for manufacturing that you know. Also, our own headquarters until recently in Copenhagen was inside an old Carlsberg factory. So tall ceilings, large windows, this kind of generosity that allows for the accommodation of the unimagined.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  And I think that's the feeling you get.

• 8:25Rick Rubin?

  You don't feel like you're in a box.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  No, exactly. And because like, one of the problems with,

• 8:32Speaker 00

  like, let's say, the office environments of the seventies, eighties, nineties.

• 8:35Rick Rubin?

  Cubicles or?

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. They're so over-determined.

• 8:40Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Like, squat ceiling heights. And, you know, they have everything. They have the system floor, they have the system ceiling. Like, they have everything that on paper is flexible, but it is actually, like, claustrophobic and restricting.

• 8:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and all the same.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. So then you need signage, and then you start having, like, color coding, so you can, like, find your way around. So these spaces have this natural generosity of of a little bit of excess, not in terms of luxury.

• 9:09Rick Rubin?

  But in terms of volume.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  In terms of volume, yeah, exactly.

• 9:11Rick Rubin?

  And in the case of London, not necessarily footprint. It's more just space. You get the space above.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. I also would say, like, almost in general, in architecture, there is one true luxury, and that's ceiling height.

• 9:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Can ceilings be too high?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. But that rarely happens, right? The madness quite often stops at a certain point. But I think, like, that extra, like, let's say, three, four feet.

• 9:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Actually gives you fresher air, it gives you better acoustics, and it just gives you headroom. So even though it's sometimes a little bit difficult to argue for.

• 9:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Because in the end, the real estate agent can sell the the square footage, not the cubic.

• 9:54Rick Rubin?

  Not the volume, yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. But it is really the one thing to look for.

• 9:58Rick Rubin?

  And even in a New York office building, if you take out the drop ceiling, there's probably another three feet.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  There's another three feet, just sitting there.

• 10:06Rick Rubin?

  And it feels great if you open that up.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  No, and we've done it in all our spaces, exactly. Then you have to look a little bit at some pipes, but I would much rather look at pipes than at a sort of sixty, like a two-by-two-foot popcorn ceiling.

• 10:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Anything between the design of that first Google platforms, and then the experience of being in it, that you couldn't have known before you built it?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  One thing is, the first one we did, we made it quite snug. Like, we call them squomes, like square domes. Whereas a normal dome would be, you know, a hemisphere.

• 10:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, like half a circle.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Half a circle, exactly, half a sphere. These, they had to fit within a more snug maximum envelope due to a CD planting and CD code. And we thought maybe that was a bit tight. But it had, it has the benefit that it's still very generous for a human hide. And it does come down quite, quite low on the sides. But it means that all the clear stories between the sheets of photovoltaic canopies, the smiles.

• 11:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  They become more like windows where you look out. So even though it is a little bit more snug, it actually feels very open because the clear stories come so far down that they become windows for you.

• 11:32Rick Rubin?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Whereas the next ones, we had a little bit more wiggle room in the zoning. So we could make them taller. And we thought that would make it feel more generous and more open. But it does lift most of the clear stories out of eye height. And as a result, the space feels, it is more generous, but it feels a little bit more contained.

• 11:59Rick Rubin?

  It feels more like one space.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  It feels more like they were inside a dome. Or, all spaces have qualities, but, but now that we know.

• 12:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  The more snug one is maybe more successful.

• 12:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, so if you were to build another one, you might build it.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  I would definitely, exactly. And also, like, to be fair, and I think to the testament of Google, because also the bars were constantly set very high. We decided to, let's, let's use the need to accommodate Googlers to experiment with technical solutions. Let's, let's do all the work. And basically, we ordered samples and mounted samples of every photovoltaic panel that was on the market. We also looked at, you know, we visited Corning, the masters of glass that do the glass for the smartphones. Found what they had. We found like undulating glass, sheets of glass. We were looking at maybe making the entire canopy out of glass. We were beginning to realize that.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  And also because Larry really thinks like an engineer, like physics, first principles. And he kept saying like, it shouldn't be a problem to have everything out of glass. Glass is essentially just melted sand. It's an abundant material. And if we get excess heat, heat is something we can use. So we can, we can store it, extract it. We can also have deployable shades. We were looking at these origami satellite PV panels that NASA has been developed for deployment of satellites. For these kind of, almost like handkerchiefs that could become sun shading and then could disappear. So we were testing these wild things. But at the end of the day, we also realized, we, you know, we need to break ground on this.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  We can't research until, until we die while Google is growing and growing and has no place to be. So then we were sitting under a canopy in Sicily midday. And for the love of God, we could not see anything on the screen, even though we were sitting technically in the shade. And we had to sort of withdraw deep into, to inside. And it became quite clear for this conversation that we should probably look at only letting in just the amount of light that we really want and need. Because things might work in first principles, but practicality. And therefore, we created almost this idea that for the first building, these things are available to be deployed right away.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  For the second and third buildings, new technologies or materials that we've identified, but that are not yet fully ready at scale. So we decided sort of making this kind of tiered level of ambition. And then actually for the last buildings, they wanted like a sort of a more modest budget. We ended up with these kind of very large regangular warehouses, but where the roofs are like parks, so that all of the Googlers sit on these kind of tiered layers that are open to each other and open to the outside. So you can actually walk and bicycle to every level. And then all the support functions are tucked underneath. We knew how we wanted the building to perform.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  We knew the parameters of unpredictability and flexibility and relationships, connectivity.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  But that didn't necessarily dictate one form. So let's say the building in London, the two latest buildings with the roof park in Mountain View and the canopies are radically different architectures. But they are all a physical way to accommodate a certain set of values or a certain set of parameters. So the same philosophy or the same performance does not dictate the same form.

• 15:57Rick Rubin?

  In terms of power usage, waste, how much of a building today can be totally self-sustainable?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Like at the end of the day, like the canopies themselves, they basically cover the entire building. So they produce as much power that it is possible to extract from the from the sun. It's in the megawatts. The entire building is founded on energy piles because it's sitting on the edge of San Francisco Bay. So you need to pile down to carry the building.

• 16:35Rick Rubin?

  I don't know what an energy pile is.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  So basically, when you're building in a muddy swampy area,

• 16:40Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  you need to drive piles into the ground to sustain it. In the absence of bedrock, a certain length of pile will give you enough friction along the pile to hold the building. And in this case, you needed a lot of piles. Energy piles is that you take the same pile, but it comes with the infrastructure, like essentially the tubes for a heat pump.

• 17:06Rick Rubin?

  So it's like a geothermal?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  It's like geothermal. So it is the largest geothermal installation in North America, to my knowledge, or at least it was at its time. And the beautiful thing of a heat pump is that you take A little bit of energy to run the pump. And then it multiplies that energy up to a factor five. So you essentially take excess heat in the summer and you store it in the ground. And you bring it back up in the winter.

• 17:35Rick Rubin?

  That energy differential could either be used for heating or cooling.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 17:40Rick Rubin?

  As needed.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  As needed, exactly. And, and in this case, the smart thing about the energy piles is that the infrastructure you need to carry the building becomes also the infrastructure to heat and cool the building.

• 17:51Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  It's simple and elegant.

• 17:53Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And then finally, the beautiful landscapes around the, the various canopies. They strike your eye as beautiful parks. But then you realize that there's like little wetlands and like little running water and et cetera. And all of it is actually a root zone garden. So let's say all of the rainwater that drops off the building is harvested from the roofs. And all of the black and gray wastewater from the building is let out through these root zone gardens. So with the right selection of plants and the right sort of mixture of gravel and rubble, et cetera. It is all cleaned first underground and then finally it starts running. It's, it's now so clean. And then it's led fully clean into the bay.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  So anyway, what, what, what looks beautiful as a landscape also performs beautifully as, as the cleaning plant for the whole building.

• 18:47Rick Rubin?

  So it's a complete waste management system, the gardens.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:52Rick Rubin?

  And then the power is all coming from geothermal and the roof.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:58Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing. At one point in your career, was there a project turning greenhouses into living houses?

• 19:04Speaker 00

  We did it 20 years ago and at, back in the days, we got the second prize in this competition. But we have actually dug it out of the archives and are working on it right now.

• 19:14Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  With, with a series of co-op housing groups in Denmark. And, and the idea, it's a very simple idea.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Because of the industry. The, let's say, the Danish and Dutch greenhouse manufacturers, they have developed a highly optimized way to create square acres of glass houses to grow tomatoes and tulips. They can do them very efficiently and very inexpensively.

• 19:46Rick Rubin?

  Mass-produced?

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Mass-produced, and again, because they've optimized it for like square acres and square acres of tulip fields. They minimize the material use. They have the most efficient sun shading system. They have the most efficient automated ventilation by just like a single servo engine crank that lifts all of the glass roofs. So very inexpensively, you can get a quite sophisticated glass house. And because we're looking at Denmark in this case, Denmark is pretty rainy, it's pretty cold in the winter. It doesn't get like crazy hot in the summer. So what you end up getting is dry construction. So inside this greenhouse, you have the climate of Spain.

• 20:30Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So then you can build-

• 20:32Rick Rubin?

  Always, all year round?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. So then you can build with the timber, like stick-built-like construction. The workers are in dry air, under roof. They can walk around in t-shirts and build the homes. And the homes don't have to withstand the harsh climate of Denmark. They only have to withstand the gentle, dry, warm climate of Spain.

• 20:54Rick Rubin?

  So it's like a bubble community? Is that what you're describing?

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, yes. So you end up having this strange climate zone and back to the luxury of generosity and ceiling height and space. The homes inside the timber buildings become what would normally be the home. But then you have this winter garden around it that is the extension of the home, where, you know, it's not heated. So in the winter, you might have to put on a sweater, but on a sunny day, it can get quite nice. And in the summer, of course, it'll get quite warm, but because of the shading and ventilation, you can keep it cool. So in that sense, you end up- Making cheaper housing that I think we're very close to carbon neutral,

• 21:41Speaker 00

  both on embodied carbon and operational carbon. And that's the goal, that's where we want to be. But you also create more generous homes. So it's the perfect example of hedonistic sustainability, that the homes perform better for the environment. They have less embodied carbon, they lose less energy. But they also increase the enjoyment and quality of life because you get these massive extra spaces in the form of the winter gardens, the kind of buffer zone between what's inside and what's a cold November day outside. And then because it's so inexpensive, we did a benchmark. So we tried to tender the same glass house for a normal housing contractor

• 22:25Speaker 00

  and then to an agricultural systems delivery. And it was a factor three.

• 22:31Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Three times more expensive if it was like for normal housing, even though it was the same specs. So in that sense, it's trying to somehow hack the fact that agriculture has provided an optimized solution that is ready to use. And of course, they end up having a very different aesthetic, these buildings, but they're kind of elegant and beautiful.

• 22:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  And provide like an amazing living space.

• 22:56Rick Rubin?

  What's an active building?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  I'm not quite sure what precise terms, but maybe as the opposite, there's a term called the passive house, which is a house that doesn't use any active means to heat or cool it. One way is to have thermal mass in the building so that when you have thick walls and thick slabs, they have thermal mass. So then they can absorb excess heat during the day and they can let it out during the night, for instance. So then passively, without any moving parts or any energy consumption, the building contributes to heating and cooling the building.

• 23:38Rick Rubin?

  And that was probably how many buildings were built prior to electricity?

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Exactly, in the good old days. And it's funny, like, little story here, like, because I think the situation we are in right now, where our built environment is spending incredible amounts of energy to heat and cool it, to make it comfortable, to light it, etc. Came from from this moment when modernism happened.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  It happened at the same time as the advent of all of these new technologies. So you had mechanical ventilation. So you were independent of your proximity to the window. You didn't have to open the window, you could pump fresh air deep into the building and pump it deep, deep into the building. So you didn't have to be close to the windows, you could make the floor plans deeper and deeper. You also got electric lights, so you didn't have to be close to a window to see. So you could make the floor plans even deeper. And then you had air conditioning and central heating. So you didn't have to have a thick wall to protect from the heat outside or an insulated wall to protect from the cold outside.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  You could have floor-to-ceiling glass and you could just crank up the AC.

• 24:56Rick Rubin?

  And the windows didn't have to be operable because you're controlling the temperature inside.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Exactly. So in that sense, you can say each technology represented a freedom, essentially a good thing.

• 25:08Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  But it meant that the architecture.

• 25:11Rick Rubin?

  We went too far.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  It said the architecture didn't have to do anything anymore because the machines could do it instead. So then the buildings became just a more and more neutral container of space. And as a result, you got the international style of modernism with angular boxes extruded to whatever height. You also got the, you know, the elevator. So you didn't have to walk the stairs to the fourth floor, you could take the elevator to the fortieth floor. So somehow each technology was a freedom, but the freedom meant that the architecture didn't have to perform the way it used to. And as a result, the architecture got more and more neutral.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  A neutral container covered in glass extruded to whatever height with a basement full of gas-gasling machinery that was essentially tube-feeding the building to keep it inhabitable and alive. So you can say what we call building services.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Is a mechanical compensation for the fact that the building is bad at what it is designed for, namely accommodation of human life. So in that sense, as a result, architects were beginning to notice that the international style of modernism, as the name suggests, meant that buildings were starting to look the same everywhere. So you would go to, you know, downtown Milan and there would be a Regangula Tower. You would go to Tangier in Morocco, Regangula Tower. You would go to Chicago, Regangula Tower. So, and it used to be that when you traveled around, the buildings would look radically different. And there was a guy called Bernard Rudowski,

• 26:49Speaker 00

  who in the sixties made a very impactful show at the MoMA called Architecture Without Architects. And he coined the term vernacular architecture. So, Architecture Without Architects, he was, he was traveling around the Mediterranean, North Africa, China, and he was visiting all these beautiful, you know, the, the white villages of Santorini, houses in southern Spain that are dug into the hills or in Tunisia, like you know them from Star Wars, that are dug into the ground. So the thermal mass of the ground keeps them cool. So, he was describing vernacular architecture as an architecture that was not aesthetic, nor academic, but empirical, that it had evolved

• 27:32Speaker 00

  over decades or centuries by the local population, using the locally available materials to respond to the local climate to optimize living. And he was, of course, reminding us of the aesthetics of this kind of local adaptation and diversity. But we've sort of taken that as a building on that, because it also responds to climate, right? We call it engineering without engines, instead of architecture without architects, that in a way, try to use sophisticated technology that we have today to simulate and calculate and model the performance of a building. And then use that technology, that knowledge.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  To engineer the building, the machines out of the building. So the more, in its extreme case, becomes a passive building, that you're essentially putting a lot of effort into the design, into the choice of the materials, into the thickness of the walls, into the thermal mass, into the orientation of the windows, so that you become less and less dependent on active machinery to make the building inhabitable.

• 28:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  It is a way to use the fact that we have incredible processing power and intelligence available to us now, that we can actually engineer the engines out of the building and get back to something that is more similar to what we find when we find a Tuscan villa with, where the thickness of the walls is so thick that the thermal mass keeps it cool on a hot summer day and where you have no more window than exactly what you need to illuminate the space, but not so much that you get cooked during the day. So somehow that there is a promise that, that actually all this abundance of processing power and technology can, can make our building vibe and less and less technical again.

• 29:25Rick Rubin?

  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, whereas 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.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:09Rick Rubin?

  Are there any materials that you would say you tend towards?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  I think

• 30:18Speaker 00

  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 very conducive to timber. Like, many parts of the world have termites, for instance, and then your timber building is gonna be short-lived. Other places, it will produce excessive tropical humidity. It can produce, you know, fungus. But, for instance, we built a building in the north of Norway that's the most environmentally friendly factory in the world, entirely sourced out of local pine. Inside, and it means that this is a factory where they have machines and they produce furniture.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:12Rick Rubin?

  Like a log cabin.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. So the building, the raw warehouse of it already is beautiful.

• 31:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  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, so it's a way to preserve it.

• 31:33Rick Rubin?

  And it makes it fireproof as well, I believe.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And exactly. That's the funny thing, another thing like, timber in itself is actually a fire retardant because it takes an hour to burn through an inch of wood. Where a steel beam, you need to clad it in drywall or for 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.

• 32:09Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  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 sustainable forests in Switzerland. So again, it's it becomes like this kind of cathedral of timber. The ceilings, the beams, the floors. But again, it's not a it's not an added veneer or like a.

• 32:35Rick Rubin?

  It's not decadence.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Cosmetic coating, no.

• 32:37Rick Rubin?

  It's the structure.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  It's the heavy gauge material that is the building, right?

• 32:42Rick Rubin?

  Sounds great.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  We're doing the the architecture school in Kansas University. Similarly, everything out of timber. But that works in certain places. I think lately I've been quite fascinated by by stone. Because of course, in Denmark, we have no stone. The tallest hill in Denmark is five hundred 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. And 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,

• 33:24Speaker 00

  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 a natural stone, if harvested electrically, is close to carbon neutral. Timber, if it's sustainably sourced from a plantation where you replant and and you don't chop down more than the replacement rate, can actually count as being carbon negative

• 34:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  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. The 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 explore and discover what's exactly right answer in this case. And maybe just another material that has a very tough reputation these days is concrete.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  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. And he realized that with the rebar, the metal inside the concrete, it became reinforced, steel-reinforced concrete, and became much stronger, it could take tension as well as compression. That unleashed the revolution of reinforced concrete, which is

• 35:54Speaker 00

  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 foam work, and it solidifies, and it holds the form you gave it. We just finished our own headquarters on the tip of a pier in Copenhagen. And because it's surrounded by saltwater on three sides, we looked into timber. But on the outside, we couldn't have it in timber because of the aggressive corrosive environment of the saltwater. We would 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.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  And we have a A timber shelf on the north side of, so that's already twenty five percent. 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. We couldn't make it passively ventilated. The thermal mass of timber is much lighter than that of of concrete. So counter to our assumptions, the more we dug into the specifics, it became clearer and clearer that this really wanted to be a concrete building.

• 37:17Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:35Rick Rubin?

  We know how long concrete performs for when you have a new material. How do you know if it's going to perform for twenty years, thirty years?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 37:51Rick Rubin?

  Concrete does.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  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 with something. We don't 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 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. So that by in a way suffocating the fire, it doesn't consume the material, but it turns it into a char, biochar.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  It's a very black, carbon-rich material. And if you take organic waste, it can even be sewage sludge.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  And you turn it into biochar, it won't release that carbon into the atmosphere. And the funny thing is, if you take fifty kilos, let's say a hundred pounds, of biochar for a cubic meter of concrete, it becomes like a dark gray and it neutralizes, it sequesters as much carbon as the concrete emits. If you make it more like eight percent instead of two percent, it becomes a black, a beautiful black concrete. And now it's like really, really carbon negative because it sequesters much more. And by baking it into the building, it stays there. Finally, there is a, a new way of using CO2 by pumping it through saltwater. It creates artificial limestone.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  So it sequesters the CO2 into limestone and then you can use that lime 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,

• 40:00Speaker 00

  I think it's counterproductive to stigmatize certain materials as, 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. But if all cities only prioritize cars over pedestrians and, and bicycles, it, 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, suddenly the, the negative side effects of the car can become positive, right? So I think the journey of,

• 40:43Speaker 00

  of, of the kind of evolution of society is that our predecessors were never

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Like vicious. When they invented the car, the car was an incredible alternative to the horse. At the turn of the 20th century, like cities like New York and London were drowning in horse shit. And 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 horse shit is a is a health hazard. And and it's not good for the for the environment, nor for the for the health of the people living in that city. So in a way, the advent of the automobile saved us from drowning in horse shit. But then, of course, then we started suffocating from fumes. And so each time something offers something amazing, it becomes very popular.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  And this new thing, it has a little bit of a byproduct.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  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. But as soon as we discovered the problems of carbon monoxide, we put these catalyst filters on on all the cars and instantly the air got cleaner. Now we've discovered the 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.

• 42:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  It's also a bit like the the advice for for the human diet. And like when you go back each 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? So it's it's not like, and I think the only thing we can do is to

• 42:40Speaker 00

  to never stop. And each time we discover new things, to take it to heart and respond swiftly.

• 42:52Rick Rubin?

  Other than buildings, what have you designed?

• 42:54Speaker 00

  So we designed products. We have a longstanding collaboration with Artemida, 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. Because a glow bulb has warm and rich light, but it has a short lifespan and it's very energy intensive. So there's been an incredible space in trying to find ways to make beautiful lighting with LEDs. And then all the way through the different scales of buildings, up to urban master plans. And even we've been working on a plan for the planet.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Like in a way, trying to think what happens if you apply the methodology and the skills 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 Oceanix. It's the idea of a floating city. The prototype is scheduled to be built in the port of Busan, a floating city block. But it's essentially saying like if there are certain countries like the Maldives or French Polynesia that are sinking,

• 44:21Speaker 00

  and maybe you could start growing those cities. Like in Miami, you could create floating islands within the bay. And then maybe the city that is Miami could become more and more park. 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 could imagine in the Maldives 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.

• 45:00Rick Rubin?

  Would a floating city be similar to what you described in the Google campus with the pylons?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  No, no, in this case, it would actually be floating on pontoons. You would anchor it or tether it to the ground and you could adjust those anchors. But 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 seventy-two student houses in Copenhagen. That is, these little hexagonal, two-story courtyard 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.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  And it's only connected to the city with fresh water and wastewater. Apart 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 wood, so they're like polycultural, 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.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  And 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, right? 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 were proposing to make the roofs as big as possible 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. And then you end up, interestingly, because like in a city, the city grows organically and at some point you need to change certain things.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  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...

• 47:34Speaker 00

  Everything can just be moved. So you can actually reconfigure the city as it evolves. And you can say, ah, 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.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  This little neighborhood of floating student homes. It's basically six hexagonal floating buildings, a total of seventy two 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.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Of one to two decades.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Where not much is happening while all these things fall into place. And that means that it's a perfect place for these students to live. But then in twenty years, new master plan. Then we take that little fleet of student homes and we dock it in the next place. That'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.

• 49:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  It's good for a city.

• 49:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Because it allows you to. Create a community instead of an abandoned wasteland. You can have a little community that breathes life into this place. Until the more permanent city can arrive.

• 49:33Rick Rubin?

  And it sounds really easy to add on to if you wanted to add another.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can just expand the fleet a little bit. Exactly, exactly. That's a tricky one, but that's like one kind of experimental city we've been working on. And another one, we're creating a city called the Woven City. Currently on construction 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 Akio 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.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  So then in the 1930s, when the automobile had been invented, because they were so good at making large, complex machines, they became the largest carmaker in the world. And like a few years ago, Akio Toyota was realizing that it was time to pivot again. They could no longer just be a carmaker. 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.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  So 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?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  One with autonomous electric vehicles and pedestrians, like a traditional street,

• 51:30Speaker 00

  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. You take 123, 123, 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 a city in the center of these nine squares. We always make it either a little public park

• 52:13Speaker 00

  or a 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, but 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 geothermally powered because it's right next to volcanic activity, Mount Fuji. So we're trying to take every single sustainable urban experiment and condense it into this new neighborhood.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  And Toyota is now realizing that vision, inviting all of their collaborators to come join them in

• 53:05Speaker 00

  testing the principles and the technologies that might inform all our other cities in the near future. That's another kind of interesting experiment. And maybe a last experiment is we're doing a city for the Kingdom of Bhutan

• 53:21Speaker 00

  called the mindfulness city.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Bhutan is a small country, less than a million inhabitants. It's the most sustainable country in the world. It sequesters 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.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  The West have a lot to learn from Bhutan. They also somehow need to create a prosperous, energetic, dynamic, creative urban 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 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 Vajrayana Buddhism

• 54:36Speaker 00

  and that is anchored in the strengths and the traditions we have living and breathing in Bhutan? So another very valuable challenge and like a simple answer to the questions we thought like, Bhutan 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,

• 55:19Speaker 00

  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 are bridges. You know, like the public buildings, the airport is a bridge. Because Bhutan is incredible in the sense that all the crafts are still alive. They have like many, many schools that still educate the woodcarvers, the painters. So we are creating this contemporary vernacular architecture that can take advantage of modern manufacturing, but also take advantage of the presence of craft

• 56:02Speaker 00

  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. You can actually imagine a modern city that is impregnated, informed by the culture.

• 56:28Rick Rubin?

  Sounds great.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  You know, it's incredibly fun. You know, like one example is the whole city is powered by hydropower. So the dam is 500 foot tall dam. But instead of a sheet of concrete, we've made it modular with the steps, like a Bhutanese equivalent of an Indian stepwell. 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.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  So that you have this pilgrimage, like anyone who's 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 power. And I think with each project, we are trying to distill

• 57:50Speaker 00

  the values of the mindfulness city into built form. So let's say if the Eiffel Tower was a demonstration of French engineering. Engineering is actually a profession invented by the French. At a time when the world was being connected with railroads 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.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  The future and the past, the global and the hyperlocal, the spiritual and the ecological and the economical can actually perfectly coexist if we try to find these.

• 58:44Rick Rubin?

  What's so interesting about it is all of the elements were already there. The 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.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, and I think it's, it may be

• 59:04Speaker 00

  almost like part of our secret sauce is this idea

• 59:09Speaker 00

  of the oxymoron, that

• 59:13Speaker 00

  things that seem to be contradicting are maybe not. And things that seem to be mutually exclusive, maybe they're not.

• 59:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  And that's also like, I think it almost like extends into

• 59:29Speaker 00

  culture and politics, is that the world has experienced this extreme polarization. It would be strange if half of the population are wrong and the other half are right. Or like half the population is dumb and the other 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 worldview of one or the other, and really to as almost

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Some of the wisdom or concerns of of two things that seem to be to be opposite.

• 1:00:34Rick Rubin?

  Well, we'd start with the size of understanding each other, which seems to be a difficult bridge to gap.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  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 you stop growing and you stop learning.

• 1:00:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Why do you think Danish furniture is so celebrated all over the world? And how did it come to be that way?

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  I'm not an expert in Danish furniture, by the way. But I think what what happened was with Danish modern furniture. It was kind of a time

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  like where industrialization

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  had happened. And that meant that there was like, like with the Bauhaus movement. But let's say the Bauhaus movement was trying to use the methods of of modern manufacturing and the new materials to address living housing at scale for the masses, right? So they tried to find new aesthetics, but using steel and like modern materials. In Denmark, we 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

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  mass-produced furniture to the masses, but using wood and, you know, a hemp and maybe a little bit of cowhide. But in this kind of Danish

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Protestant mindset of of simplicity,

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  the kind of Danish aesthetics are similar to the those of Japanese traditional architecture or or the Quakers, a kind of austerity.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  That boils things down to the essentials. That means you can still put effort into making sure that the armrest is really soft to the touch and it really is exactly what you need to rest your elbows. Like, one of my favorite pieces of furniture is the PK22, Paul Kerham's thesis project from the Furniture Academy. In this case, it's a single piece of steel that has been cut with a water beam and pulled apart. And as you pull that single piece of steel apart, it becomes the form of the chair. And then you have a little bit of flag line, flag rope, to create a seat. It's very elegant.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  It's like just a single material, or let's say two materials, manipulated with a single process. And it's incredibly comfortable and incredibly elegant. So I think in that sense, this kind of rejection of ornament and decoration, combined in favor of a thoughtful, careful effort into exactly what's necessary. And then, secondly, this kind of embrace of some of the more traditional materials, the organic materials like timber, cowhide, rope, gives it a kind of timeless quality. So by embracing the traditional materials,

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  it has an organic quality. And by rejecting decor, you boil it down to something that is still beautiful and elegant, but it's more essential in a way.

• 1:03:59Rick Rubin?

  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's specific.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  So you say the decor would often come with a certain style, exactly. So then, it can only fit with other things that have that decor.

• 1:04:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It's like if you take a Baroque piece, you can't put it anywhere.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  And I would say maybe it boils down to a sensibility that we definitely also have is that, I think when you look at our buildings, they will have personality and character, even in strong expression, but...

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Again, it's like this idea, it's the energies injected into the performance of the building, not in the decoration of the building.

• 1:04:56Rick Rubin?

  You talked about having to break ground. Is there a tendency, I can imagine this, where you have a project and you see, well, in 10 years, the materials are going to be better to build this project than the materials available now. Do we wait 10 years?

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Exactly, like, like, for instance, with with with concrete. I know that within the next five years, there will be a carbon neutral concrete. They're also working on like carbon neutral steel, like there's like.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  So therefore, like, the easy hack right now is if you can, if you make the building out of timber,

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  it lowers the embodied carbon and it puts pressure on the steel and concrete industry because they they see it happening that if I was a a steel manufacturer and I saw Zurich Airport, I would I would see, okay, they're beginning to make big airports out of out of timber now, that that used to be our domain, like large spans. We should probably move the needle on this, right?

• 1:06:03Rick Rubin?

  Is carbon the only metric? Or are there other things that are maybe just as important that don't get as much conversation?

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  I mean, I think we have to remember, there is actually a strange stigmatization of the built 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. And 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

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  energy is good. And we should also remember the only things in the world that don't spend energy.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  Are dead things. All living things harvest energy from the environment and they use that energy to resist entropy. So 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 forty percent 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 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.

• 1:07:46Rick Rubin?

  And That's where we live.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  That's where we live. And, you know, try spending a winter in Denmark without a house. It's gonna be a tough winter, right? So, you know, we can't really live outside East Africa without the 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 it at the expense of of the climate. I would say there are so many metrics like the over the last couple of decades, we've 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

• 1:08:33Rick Rubin?

  Asbestos, for example.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Then asbestos, exactly, like the fibers from the asbestos panels would sort of nest inside your lung tissue and give you asbestos. So so there's all kinds of examples of efforts where we are constantly trying to make our environments more healthy, higher performing, more enjoyable. I just think right now, there's a lot of focus on on carbon because at a 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?

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  And so I think in that sense, there is 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.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  And you can say like, we worked with René Retssepi, one of the greatest chefs in the world, the chef of Noma. We designed his restaurant. 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 tender loin. So the cheeks, the nose, the brain, the 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 Travatine and Tivoli and the Carara marble quarries. And of course, you have the incredible stone,

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  but you also realize that, you know, all of Earth is essentially rock, right? 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 the 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 mamalina building materials. But you can also use it for toothpaste, calcium carbonate as a supplement for cereals. You know, like in a refined ecosystem in nature, there is no waste.

• 1:11:01Rick Rubin?

  Everything gets used.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  The perfect example is that the poop of one life form becomes the nutrient of another life form. So you can say each time you have a byproduct, it is potentially the product for something else.

• 1:11:15Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:30Rick Rubin?

  I remember seeing a presentation you gave for a community. It was single-family dwellings on a space of land. And part of the sustainability of each of these houses was every house had a cow.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. So what we tried to do is we say 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. It'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, et cetera.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  And then roughly one hectare, two acres, is habitable.

• 1:12:32Rick Rubin?

  Most people don't get to live on two acres. So this is already a bonus.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  No, I know, exactly, exactly. And then half is nature, untouched nature. The other half is like roughly one acre per person, is mostly agriculture with a tiny bit of city. And then we started looking at, and this is like just taking all of the agriculture of all of Earth and dividing it by 10 billion, right? That should be enough to sustain this one-earthing. 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 a cleanhouse gas.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  So we started looking at all those things and we tried to see if we could do it differently. Also, we found out a relatively large portion of agriculture, mostly palm and corn, is energy crops. So 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.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  That's CO2 equivalent. You need roughly one grown tree per ton, per year. And a cow and a calf 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 pasture, the combination of animal husbandry and forestry. And that's the natural habitat for large herbivores. So if you convert consistently to silvo pasture, you get happier cows. You increase biodiversity because the trees form habitat for all kinds of other animals.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  And you increase the productivity because the cows are happier. And the trees sequester the carbon to offset the methane of the burbs of the cows. So in that sense, using only what we already have, we can actually make beef healthier and more sustainable.

• 1:15:03Rick Rubin?

  Also, what you're describing is, before man intervened, probably about how it worked on the plains.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  And also, if you go to sort of 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. So there are many places where this happens. There are 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 Plan for Planet, is that COVID had happened. We went remote, except our model workshop. So all the architects were sitting at home, but a few volunteers volunteered to come into the model workshop because we, using our 3D printers and the Plexi sheets that we use for our Axial models, we could make face shields and ventilator tubes.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  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. And 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 the, 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? Because like, I was so tired that you always, whenever you discuss about the environment and sustainability, what aboutism can can derail any conversation?

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Because someone will say, yeah, but what about, no, no. And what you always hear is this idea that you need like six or seven or eight 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?

• 1:16:57Rick Rubin?

  And it's not true.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  And it's not true.

• 1:16:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  But if it was true, then 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 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 the sun and wind, if combined with energy storage in the form of hydrogen or batteries, right?

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  So just in a way, like from a very first principles 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.

• 1:18:05Rick Rubin?

  And quality of life could go up.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  And quality of life could go up. And we started seeing like, so what would it take to sustain all the Danes? There's five and a half million of us. What about the 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 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,

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  you know, if it's an urban mastermind, so and so much housing, so and so much. So an area table, and there's also a budget that 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 project probably won't happen. And then finally, there is a phasing.

• 1:19:11Rick Rubin?

  Of how to do it.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  There's an implementation plan that if we want to be here by 2050, and like some of the master plans we are looking at, the urban master plans, they have time horizons that go to 2050. And and we're already working hard on them now. But somehow, because Earth has never had a planning jurisdiction or at the scale of Earth.

• 1:19:35Rick Rubin?

  It's a hypothetical. And 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.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. And and of course, like by having a plan that already works now that you can start 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, you know, there's a lot to be said about China, and it's not only good, but my God, have they been good. They've they've completely overshot. They've already reached now the the goals they had for solar energy capacity in 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 we need to start working on it.

• 1:20:34Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Yes Is More.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  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 sort of a positive injection. Secondly, Yes Is More is of course like a mutation of Less Is More, which is a statement often attributed to Mies van der Rohe, the German grandfather of modernism.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  When I started studying architecture, I said, you know, I'm starting to become an architect. And people said, ah, actor. I said, I know, architect. And then some, ah, okay, okay. Then, then, and 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 less is more, of course, it means to do more with less, to make things simpler, more elegant. And, and Mies van der Rohe was an 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, as this kind of freedom from ornamentation, I talked a little bit about the Barcelona Pavilion. The Farnsworth House is another incredible house, like very simple, very elegant,

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  transparency, inside-outside continuity, a kind of dissolution of the traditional confines of a, of a kind of wall space into something more open and abstract. But then he ended up doing the Seagram Tower on Park Avenue and the Lake Shore 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, like. So somehow Less Is 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.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  And he was saying, why does modernism have to be so boring? Why don't we rediscover some of the the cool things from the traditional city? The pitched roofs, the ornaments and brought back in the form of postmodernism. But it was, of course, just a style or decor. And then Philip Johnson, an American architect, said, I am 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.

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  So was 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. And then because Obama had just been elected, we included in this sequence evolution of ideas. Yes, we can. Because when Obama came, but yes, we can. It was somehow this, yes, we can change. This energy that a whole nation can come together around a unifying agenda. And then we sort of listed in this like completely pretentious. We inserted ourselves as the culmination of this kind of string of thoughts with yeses more

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  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. If your agenda is negatively defined by who or what you are against, then you are fundamentally a follower in reverse.

• 1:24:42Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  So therefore, rather than being against something.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  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 you know, Denmark 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? And I think the best way to describe it architecturally is like a game of Twister.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  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 backbending 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. Similarly, and it's important to understand in architecture, the standout solution, nothing becomes the standout by being bad.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  The standout solution is actually very good at delivering a certain thing. And the typical example is this kind of a modernist housing project. And then you end up this cookie cutter, rubber stamp. There's so many other things 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.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  You also ensure that the standout solution, which is the hardest thing to escape, because it's so good at doing this one thing. The 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...

• 1:27:16Rick Rubin?

  But all based on new needs, additional needs.

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  New needs, new requirements, new challenges. And in that sense, we turned this idea of yes and inclusion not into compromise or...

• 1:27:35Rick Rubin?

  Just the opposite.

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  Or like the yes man.

• 1:27:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  But actually using it as a radical agenda to free ourselves from the standout solutions and find new and more exciting possibilities. So you can say yes is more is a manifesto for inclusionism as a radical agenda in architecture.

• 1:27:55Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  If we say that the revolutionary is defined by who or what

• 1:28:01Rick Rubin?

  It's against.

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  he or she is against.

• 1:28:02Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  The opposite would be the evolutionary, where instead of throwing out the past, like instead of decapitating...

• 1:28:11Rick Rubin?

  It's like building on the past.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  It's actually, it's evolving, stepping from the past and discovering something new.

• 1:28:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not rejecting anything.

• 1:28:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's just building upon it and trying to do more, trying to actually continue the journey. 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 was mean or careless. We just came further and we now have the benefit of the perspective we have from one step higher, looking back. Like Kierkegaard said, "Life is lived going forward, but it's understood looking backwards." We have that benefit. So in that sense, evolution is a much more...

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  Productive attitude, where you can inherit everything that works and just continue where your ancestors left off.