The Importance of Sustainable Urban Design | Gerard Evenden, Foster + Partners

If hopefully you can all hear me, that's very slightly odd with the microphone down anyway. Sustainable design. I thought I'd talk about something a bit different today, and it would be very easy for me to come and talk to you about buildings, but I thought I'd start with cars and vehicles. This is a Bugatti carriage from 1930, a horse-drawn Bugatti carriage. What I think is interesting about this is that by 1935, Bugatti had created one of the first electric vehicles, and you'll see up there 28 kilometers an hour. So they moved from the horse in 1930 to 1935 up to 28 km/h. By 1938, Bugatti had moved to the Atlantic, and the Atlantic was then doing 120 kilometers an hour. So within the space of eight years, Bugatti had mastered going from zero to 120. And today we have the Bugatti Veyron, which is doing 267 kilometers now. So you might ask why I am interested in this. The answer is that what you can see is the speed of development, the speed of change has been enormous in the car industry and has been enormous in terms of transportation. However, the speed of change in the building industry has been appalling. This was a very important part of it because the advent of oil, the combustion engine, and the desire for performance is what has pushed forward the car industry. Unfortunately, what it's done to our urban environment is it's moved us from an environment where we were in touch with nature, where we moved around the world in touch with nature, to one where we started to pollute and eventually created urban environments like this. So the destructive nature of the development and the speed of that development on the urban environment has been huge. My feeling is that where we've ended up, the balance between life and nature is something that we've now lost, and that's something that we need to think about how we're going to deal with in the future. If we don't change that balance, all cities are going to end up looking the same. What we've managed to do with cities is we've managed to engineer them to a point where we can control everything, we can control the environment you live in, but are they nice places to live and are you getting that balance? Interestingly, if we go back several hundred years, the other dilemma we have is that when you look at the fabric of the buildings and the construction techniques, when we look around us today, the construction techniques that we're using are still in the dark ages. We haven't progressed at all compared to the vehicle. We've got stuck in the historic world. Interestingly, it was Masdar 10 years ago that we really started to look at construction and started to challenge some of the issues. I think we're at a very interesting position today because some of the issues that started to be challenged at Masdar are now becoming a reality and they're becoming much more of the moment than they were 10 years ago. Masdar did look at the balance between the land you took and the urban environment that you created. So with a 100,000 population on the 7 square kilometer site, the balance was how much could you build relative to the site and still support what you were building on the site. That was the basis of the first thesis of the master plan. You can see that in other cities, for example Venice, where Venice is supported by its rivers, by the canal, and how that relates to the people and the population that lives there. That's something that we've been doing a lot of work on recently, and that is of course supported now by new technology. Lots of people are focused on the new technology, whether it be the photovoltaic cells, the smart metering, the PRT systems that are available. But again, the PRT system in Masdar when we did this was the first autonomous car, 13 autonomous cars running around Masdar 10 years ago. Nothing existed. Now it's all absolutely in the media every day. If we can solve these things, if we can begin to think about how people interact with the environment and how the environment interacts with people, we get better environments and we get better places for people to live. The technology then enhances how they're living. What we've shown at Masdar, and these are tests that we carried out looking at radiant temperatures in Masdar, what you can see is on the same day in Abu Dhabi versus Masdar, the radiant temperatures are massively lower because of the urban environment in which we've generated from the planning of the city. But what has happened in the last few years is that we've seen a growing number of developments, and we've been approached for a number of developments across the world where developments are getting larger and larger. The question that we had was really what size of development do you need until the infrastructure begins to meet the requirements of the development? When does it become economically balanced? Because it's the economics of a development that is critical for it to be a successful model. What we believe and where we've come to and concluded is that the developments are still too small. What we now believe is probably you need a development of around 200,000 in terms of population in order to begin to kick in the invested level of infrastructure that's needed to start to generate and make economic sense of these developments. Interestingly, we looked at the London Borough of Islington because we thought if you took a borough in Islington and you said how does a borough sustain itself, what numbers of population? When you start to look at the London boroughs, what you find is this magic number of around 200 to 250,000 population. When you start to look at job generation, residents, the number of schools, the number of doctors, the infrastructure that links all those things together, you begin to get something which economically is viable for a borough to run. What that does is it means that when you start to look at those numbers of people in relation to some of the systems that you can then implement, once you get to the 200,000 you begin to get economic advantages from the waste to energy, from the renewable energy, from systems which then make sense from a financial point of view, which then sustained the developments. So the conclusion of this was really you need to be over 200,000 population if you're going to make something which is sustainable. Nearly on our next subject, the fabric of the buildings. Again, going back to Masdar, my host started something which was to say the buildings were not generated from a point of view of an aesthetic architecture. The fabric of the buildings, the way in which the building elevations were generated, were really from the function within. So they have different functions within, different elevations are generated because of the way in which they're working thermally. That is going to be very important. That is the thing which is generating the architecture. That is the thing that we think we should focus on as we go forward. It also raised the dilemma about do you put your renewable energy on your buildings or do you take the renewable energy off your buildings? The conclusion between phases 1A and 1B of the Masdar Institute was actually to take the PV off the roof and do the 10 megawatt solar plant because it was easier to maintain, easier to clean, easier to run, and it's better to run as a separate utility than combining them with buildings. Once again, if you get bigger projects, you get the ability to separate your utilities out and you begin to get efficient utilities. That's been shown with the development here of Shams 1, the 100 megawatt solar field that's followed on. So going back to the car industry, I think the other interesting thing is of course how we build and how we manufacture our buildings. You can see from the coachbuilders through to the assembly plants of Toyota back in 2016 and today. This is a plant we've done for McLaren. The way in which vehicles are being constructed is becoming almost like a surgery, almost like a medical environment for the creation of these vehicles. However, we're still creating buildings in the Stone Age, completely ignoring the ability to mass-produce and the ability to manufacture off site and bring to site. However, what's very interesting is that the vehicle industry is also promoting products which are sustainable. You take the Toyota Prius, a sustainable vehicle, electric vehicle. However, then you have to ask yourself the question how long is that surviving in comparison to the old coachbuilt Rolls Royce? What you find is the old coachbuilt Rolls Royce, which was built of quality construction, 90% of Rolls Royces are still in existence and 90% of them are still on the road. The average Prius life is something between 3 and 5 years before it goes back into a recycled mode. So how can we deal with that in the built environment? We've started to try to do that. It was in Shanghai going back now nine years. In Shanghai, we built the UAE Expo Pavilion in the World Expo in Shanghai. Probably some of you have seen that we've actually moved that building. That building was deconstructed, moved back to Abu Dhabi, and is now sitting in Abu Dhabi as an exhibition venue. Again, two years ago now in Milan, the UAE's Pavilion we really focused more on how to move the building, how to deconstruct the building and move it back here. So the building in Milan, the building under deconstruction, it's difficult to know whether it's a building under construction or deconstruction at the time, but under deconstruction and now back today in Abu Dhabi at Masdar, and within the next few months we'll be back up as the new visitors center for Masdar. So how we keep our buildings and give our buildings longevity, whether they're in one country or another, it's all possible. In Dubai, we've started to look at another project. This is the new Design District, the current creative community in Dubai. What we've been looking at is a componentized system in which people can begin to create the environment that they live in. So we create a framework environment which creates a basic modular system, and that modular system then can be adapted and changed as the inhabitants move in and as the creative environment changes and builds. Of course, all of this is also designed for deconstruction, so all prefabricated, all off-site, and all assembled on-site. With pre-construction eight years ago in Abu Dhabi, we tried another experimental project. This is a project that Foster and Partners led ourselves, and this was really to say could you build a home that would last, could we build a home that was manufactured, and could we build a thousand homes in a year with higher performance and high ratings? So we looked at off-site construction, prefabrication, and we assembled this home which is just outside of Abu Dhabi in the desert sitting there. This was the home when it was completed. It took 56 days to build, and this was completed eight years ago. That's what it looks like today, and it's had zero maintenance pretty well over the last eight years. You can see from the images if you build in the right way and if you build off-site and you build in factories, you can get a better finish, you can get a better building, and you can also get longevity. That building can also be taken apart, it can be totally recycled, everything can be separated out and it can go back into the grid of materials. Is it sustainable? Yes, it's high performance, it's a super high performance building from all of the technical systems on it. In Abu Dhabi, we believe a 5 pearl building. What we did was we also looked at the building, we took the principles of that process, and this is using exactly the same components, same thinking, but this is now in Panama where we explored it more with starting with villas, low-cost villas, moving up to terrace housing, and then into multi-use buildings, offices, and residential apartments. In Wales, low-cost housing in Wales, this is a terrace scheme in Wales in Ever Vale. The message from all of that is that we mustn't forget the past though. The past and the present are very important to bring through. The passive systems need to be put back into the buildings because yes, we can engineer the buildings, yes we can produce the buildings with a perfect environment inside, but if we don't remember the past and we don't remember the passive systems, we lose this balance between nature and architecture. So what's the future? The future needs a new... On the moon, we're working with the European Space Agency looking at laser sintering. On Mars, we're looking with NASA taking laser sintering another step forward in terms of habitation of the outer planets. 3D printing we believe is something that needs to be explored, and we're exploring it in more detail. Robotic creation and fabrication of elements for construction. And finally, this is a film that we've just produced with Nissan, this is the Nissan Leaf. What we were exploring here was how the vehicle may interact with buildings in the future. With the advent of autonomous vehicles, you can park your car and your car can move itself during the night to a new charging point, so cars can switch around themselves and charge the cars. Then how the car may actually begin to plug in and how we may share energy with the buildings and share within the existing fabric of our streets. A study being done in London, connecting up to in-house systems and then recharging and using the recharging in the office space, tying the vehicle and the car together with the idea of creating a city which is totally integrated in terms of its design and engineering. So what's the future? I think the future is that we've got a new audience. The children are the new audience, and these are all questions that we should move on. Thank you.