Wolfgang, thank you very much for that. Here, Minister Bergmeister, thank you so much. I'm very impressed how many people are here. Makes me extremely nervous to see you all. Bernd Müller this morning or yesterday said that they've been trying to get me here for more than 15 years, and I think I should have come earlier, not only to be more polite, but I think I would have found it easier 10 years ago to talk about architecture. Architects are the same as everybody else. We're all having to rethink how we react to the crisis of global warming and environment, and in the construction industry, which we are part of, the construction industry contributes nearly 42%, more than 40% of carbon emissions. So whether we like it or not, we are part of a problem. And where does that put us? So if I came 10 years ago, I probably would have just shown you some projects: 'This is my latest museum in Mexico, this is my latest opera house, this is my latest...' But I don't think this is relevant so much anymore. And what I've been thinking about for the last 10 years or seven years is how architects participate more in these difficult times, not only in terms of environment and global crisis, but also the second crisis that we have, which is social inequality. And in many places, this crisis is just as dangerous as the first one. So I've been talking a lot in the last few years and trying to think about how these conditions affect architectural practice, in what way should we consider the way that we operate. This is not to question in any way the importance of architecture itself. I've never lost the confidence that with materials, in this case concrete, and with windows and with space and with light, architects are capable of making our environment – not an environment and not buildings that we necessarily spend our time looking at, but spaces where we experience life. Architecture is a frame, and making that frame requires us to consider many things. So we can't underestimate the importance, and if we're in a castle like this we certainly can't, and a city as beautiful as this we can't underestimate how important the physical environment is, how important buildings are, and how important the collection of buildings that might go together to make a city.
So on that subject: is architecture about buildings or is it about buildings coming together to make a city? You're fortunate in this city to have both. You've got buildings of great quality and they conspire together to create something which also has a collective quality, the quality of a city. In a way, Bernd Müller took us around this morning and it's a sort of city you would draw as a fantasy. You know, it has a river and it has a castle and it has the hills and it has all these nice buildings. I mean, it's a sort of children's – if you ask people what a city should be like, I think you might draw Heidelberg. You probably wouldn't draw this. Under no pressure would anyone draw that. So why do we have it? What happened to my city? What happened to the city that was coherent at one point? Money, simple investment. Those are not buildings, they are the leveraging of land value. They are to do with the fact that each piece of that land could be exploited and translated into something else. So what we have then are buildings which are not generated because of an idea of what a city should be, but because we need investment energy. So London found itself in a very Anglo-Saxon position of wanting investment and encouraging investment, and in that sense it relaxed the idea of planning. In many ways, this is a universal problem. It's just in this case we lead the world. We managed to do this better and more forcefully than anybody else, which was to relax planning control and encourage investment. I think all mayors have to deal with this. We can't not have investment, we need investment. But speaking from a position of an architect, I would say now that we find ourselves as architects inevitably working in this way, that we are working more and more for the interests of investment and development than we are for the interests of society and community. In the Anglo-Saxon world, this is extreme because in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially England after Thatcher, the role of the public was diminished and replaced by the importance of the private. And this defines, I think, the Anglo-Saxon world separately to the European world, where there is still, in my experience in Germany, still an idea of what a city should be like. So the focus of architecture in the last 30 years has been on single buildings. I would say the profession has become very sophisticated. I would say there are more good architects now than there ever has been. There's probably more good buildings. I would say the quality of investment architecture is better than it's ever been. The investment buildings of this period are better than the investment buildings of the 1960s. But the question is: what do those buildings add up to? What type of world are we building? I don't think we worried too much about that for a long time, but now of course with the crisis of climate we are having to think again. Without the crisis, I think we probably wouldn't stop to think and we would carry on investing. But I think now we have to think again about what we build, where we build, how we build, what materials we use to build. And this is the challenge of our time. In a way, that's not just in terms of cities, that's in terms of how we deliver housing. Again, this is an Anglo-Saxon solution. We have a housing shortage. Who builds houses? They're called in England 'house builders'. And they build houses. But that's not a city, that's not a town, that's not a village. There's no school, there's no idea of community, there's no idea of society. And in fact, I'm very nervous at the moment that in England they will build more and more houses. This used to be a field and you build a house and you need a car to get there, and probably not in the right. This happens when you don't have planning and when you don't want to think about the consequences, the environmental consequences and the social consequences. So as architects, are we happy just to design a house or design a tower in this situation, especially now we're understanding that what this situation is producing is environmental and societal stress?
I've got to read this. So yes, we have to enjoy architecture. Architecture is important, but it's not important on its own. It's got to be part of a bigger idea. In my work, if I was giving this talk 10 years ago, I would just show you projects like this. But again, I can explain some of these projects not just because of their formalism, not just of the material or the cleverness of the design, but I would hope to think that most of our projects, or as many projects as possible, have some sort of social idea. This is the headquarters for the BBC in Scotland, and I changed the program in such a way that we moved the program around to create a working environment that was not just in terms of offices but also in terms of the central spaces to create a sort of communal space. This was nearly 20 years ago, so this is a common discussion now: the workplace, the quality workplace is not just a desk but where we meet. But 20 years ago, this was quite a difficult argument. It was mentioned before the building we did in Valencia. The city wanted a symbol to create a new development towards the sea. Valencia was never, although it depended on the sea, it was never physically well connected, and the port wanted, the city wanted to develop the port into a leisure area, and the America's Cup was part of that. We were asked to do a symbolic building for the America's Cup. It was, and I argued that a box for privileged people couldn't really be a great symbol for the idea that the city came to the city. So we made a building that was in a way not a building, it was about platforms and balconies and where people could come and watch the races, a bit like a sort of grandstand. So we changed the building from a sort of exclusive place to an open place, and that forced us then to think about how we would make the architecture to support that. I suppose the other thing that I should talk about a little bit at this point in my career is that I think there's a sort of sense that architecture is the work of brilliant single architects. And of course it's not. Architecture is probably the most collective of all activities one can do, beyond being a politician, I suppose. Insofar as we have to develop our own team, we have to work with clients, we have to work with planners, we have to work with contractors. It's a totally collaborative activity. And therefore I think it's even more important that our work is demonstrated to have relevance. But when you start your practice, this was the first studio, and when you start your practice you have to develop your ideas, and part of that development of ideas is theoretical and part of it is practical. And I think this is something we all deal with: realities and ideals. And in architecture, those two things feed each other. One without the other is sort of pointless. And this is how I began my practice, working with projects. And at this point, one wasn't necessarily so – I mean, you wanted to build, but at the same time you were trying to think about for what reason and what were the theoretical basis of your work. And maybe also I was in a situation in England in the early '80s, middle '80s, we had a recession, there was not much construction, so we had a lot of time to think. So we did a lot of – I did a lot of writing and I had small projects, I worked in Japan and I did things there and I developed practice. The reason I'm saying this now is because I think that we have to understand that practice is a sort of empirical process, and we learn through practice. Ideas are not brought from nowhere, and in architecture those ideas have to be based in practice. How you build a building, it requires technique. How you persuade and discuss with a client is also a practical engagement.
The thing that also I want to address is that architecture in the last 30 years has been something very visual. And in our very mediated environment with social media and everything else, we are living more and more in a sort of virtual world where we are more and more influenced by image. And I would say that architecture has not been immune to that. So a lot of architecture has responded to this appetite of spectacle. When we propose architecture, when we compete for projects, we're not competing with realities. It's not like being a painter, you can't paint the painting and then see if someone likes the painting. We have to talk about what the building may be like, so we can only speculate and we can only describe things. We can't prove that a building will be good. We have to somehow promise. And the visual dimensions are easier to communicate than the physical ones. It's very difficult to say, 'Relax, it's going to be very nice, it's going to be a beautiful building, it's going to have a very nice physical quality, the atmosphere is going to be nice.' And every client says, 'Yeah, but what's it going to look like? What material, what color, how does it look?' We inevitably judge things by what they look like. In reality, architecture is experienced. This thing is slipping off my head. In reality, architecture is experienced, it's physical. It's finally judged not by pictures and things but how it feels. It's an experiential thing. And this has become a very difficult thing for us to communicate, and it's very difficult for clients to choose work based on a sort of promise that it will be a nice building. They want to see what it will look like. And therefore we have, I think, gravitated towards a sort of visually rewarding architecture in the last 30 years instead of a physically rewarding architecture. And that's something which I think has had an enormous influence. It's something that we have tried to work with a lot in our practice. And of course there are sometimes when the context – you know, if you see Max Doodler's nice building here, he's a strong modern architect, but he took the opportunity of the physical context of the castle to inspire his building. So there's a clue. There are opportunities to find material – an intelligent idea to build in sandstone in a place of sandstone. So we can look for these physical contexts. But this is Alaska in the middle of Anchorage. There are no materials which are – every material has been – so you don't always have easy ideas about what the physical qualities of a building might be. In this case, it's a museum in Anchorage. We were interested, given that the building could not rely on its strong physical materialization, we were interested in the questions of light and how the light would play, because the light in Alaska is extraordinary. This is a house in Berlin, one of our very first projects in Germany, and there we used brick. This was a social housing project in Madrid where there was no budget and we used a very light concrete panel to try – so these projects are about the physical qualities of architecture. Another housing project in London, and a museum in the north of England. I think this is – yeah. So in a way, I want to use this one to move on. So the point I'm trying to get to is that the way we judge architecture before it happens, and therefore the way it gets commissioned and considered, is often highly visual. But in reality, architecture is an experiential thing. It's how do you feel in the building? On the other hand, buildings have to look like something. They can't just be brick or concrete. They do have to have shape, they do have to have form. And while that might not be about novelty, and it might not only be about innovation, it can't only be about tradition. So we have to think in a genuine way about what gives shape to buildings. This is a museum we did which was a building which had a great responsibility. It was in a very poor city, Wakefield. It's the birthplace of Barbara Hepworth, and it was to be a museum for Barbara Hepworth for her early works and then a sort of city museum. It was in an industrial place, so the building had to have some strong presence. So what I was interested in doing was creating a room structure inside. The rooms are all slightly different shapes, and that structure, the spatial structure which will be experiential as well, would convey itself as the formal structure. Just to repeat this: if we're not careful, we substitute the rewards of the physical and experiential qualities of architecture by image. And I would say that this is also a problem of technology, that we can no longer rely on the construction of a project to deliver quality. What do I mean? I would say that the construction industry becomes more and more efficient, more and more effective, and less and less to do with making. It's about assembly. And this is logical. The qualities that we used to have from architecture, which was stone upon stone, someone making things, a window created, and those qualities of being handmade and being assembled and having what we might call craftsmanship, are no longer there. So we can't rely on that. Therefore, unless we try to compensate for that somehow, the construction industry will give us a very synthetic building if we don't play with that, if we don't think about that. So you have to work quite hard within the constraints, the real constraints of the efficiency and the directness of construction and the relatively economic pressures that are put on buildings. Often we are building – this is a studio for the sculptor Antony Gormley. He had very little money for this project, so you have to think about where might you get those qualities. And I think the other thing is that we have to find ways by which buildings fit in, by which their materiality may have some contribution. This is in Innsbruck, the Kunsthaus T, and Maria-Theresien-Strasse in the center of a historical city. The James Simon Gallery in Berlin again – these projects come out of a lot of work related to the context and to the program. In this case, the Museum Island didn't have certain facilities. It had no lecture hall, it didn't have any very decent shops, it had no centralized café, and it had an issue about how it managed large-scale tour groups. So this building became part of that. So it had a program, but at the same time you have to find reasons by which the building form is justified. In this case, of course, we were trying to link into the whole colonnade idea of the Museum Island. There are moments of course when buildings have to be more dynamic and more expressive. This is in the center of Mexico City. This is a private collector who wanted to give his – I'm just looking at my time, see how we're going – wanted to give his collection, well not give the collection but present the collection into the center of the city. In a way, he was trying to make a private collection into a sort of public building. And so we created a building where there is no real front door, because Mexico has a problem with monitoring public space. We created this plaza, and then at the same time we made these rooms which have a strong connection between inside and outside. So we are always looking for reasons by which the form of the building may respond to a social or a purposeful idea. In this case, the question that we posed for ourselves is: how do you make, in a city where the public space is unreliable and where there's no real experience of museums, how do you make a museum accessible? This is a cemetery in Japan we completed not so long ago. Again, the reason I'm showing these projects – sorry, but very quickly, because I don't want to go into too much detail – but in a way, the idea that buildings can contribute in some sense to the place, to the activity, and to intensifying, in this case, the experience of visiting the graves of your ancestors. So how do we push, or how do we make sure that the role of the architect is not just a commercial one, not just a business, which of course it has to be as well in order to run an office – you have to be a business – at the same time, how do we try to give that business some sort of social responsibility? The generation before me, I think, were very clearly ingrained in that responsibility. The public system was much more purposeful. And I would say to some degree, I think Germany, Switzerland, Austria, there is much more – there's still a sense that architects are working a lot for community and for public projects. So over these years, we've tried to work as much as possible for public projects. This is Zurich, the Tonhalle. It's sort of much easier when you work on a public building because clearly the public buildings contribute something. It's much more difficult when you work for a private company. This is in South Korea. I don't think I have a – do I have this point? Yes, it does. This is the building we did. We were asked to build a tower like one of these, and I argued with the client in the competition that because the client wanted a real headquarters – it was a sort of third generation of a company, extremely nice man, extremely nice company – and he wanted to create a building for his staff. And I said that a tower, you know, what he was really trying to build was a home for his staff, and a tower would never allow that because in a tower you have a lobby and then you have lots of floors. So we persuaded him to do a lower building, and by that then the building has social space and it becomes a place where people can work in a much more comfortable way. So this was an idea even within a private building, even in a commercial building, how to create a sense of community and how to improve the working environment for them. And this became a very important project in my career. It changed the expectation of the workspace, I would say, which were very low before we did this building. And it was all down to the client, willing to push the offer that the building could give not just as an image but as a place to be.
As architects, we have to learn how to take the privilege that we have doing projects and think about how every building might contribute. And I think that's true of clients as well. We are continuously pushing our clients and saying, 'We know this building is necessary from a commercial or practical point of view, but at the same time, can we question what does it give back to the city? It takes something away from the city, but what can it give back to the city? What can it give back socially? What can it give back environmentally?' The biggest lesson I had in architecture, and in a way the formative experience, was working on the Neues Museum in Berlin. And why? First of all, because it was of course a philosophical question, rather like the discussion that has happened around this castle for many years: what do you do with a ruin? And in this case, it was clear that the ruin had to be put back as a museum. But the reconstruction was out of chronological sequence. In other words, the ruination which happened during the war was by this time 50 years behind. So you weren't addressing the tragedy of ruination after the event; you were doing it after a great interval, and an interval which had been occupied by other histories: the history of the GDR, the separation, the verification of Berlin, etc., and even the history of the ruin itself, which had become a sort of thing of great beauty. Buildings can become beautiful ruins, and this became one. The reason the project was challenging was in a way my own fault, because I wasn't comfortable with the idea that reconstruction should be as it could easily have been: a rebuilding and a literal reconstruction of what was lost. That was one of the options, and in a way the popular option. And why not? If you've lost a building through a tragedy like that, we have the drawings, we have the photographs, it would be possible, like it has been in so many other buildings after the war, to recreate a copy. And we insisted that this shouldn't be the case. It should be more carefully considered. It should be treated nearly as an archaeological object. And with an archaeological object, you keep everything that's survived and you take care about how you complete it. Typical reconstruction projects tend to destroy that which has survived in the completion, and we tried not to. It meant that the project was highly debated, highly discussed, and highly polemic. But it also meant that I had to explain the project continuously. It was six years planning and six years construction, so it was 12 to 13 years project. And through that process, it was my responsibility – I saw it as my responsibility – to explain the project, because in a way, as a foreigner, I had to be extremely respectful for the fact that this was not my history. This is the history of Berlin. And therefore my role was not to say how something should happen. My role was to make sense of the issues, to understand the conflicting concerns. And I have to tell you, there were a lot of conflicting concerns. And the Berliners are not shy about expressing their opinions. They're extremely blunt in these matters. And for a shy, modest Englishman, I found this quite difficult at times. But it was an extraordinary process to bring people together. And you can imagine: curators had one idea, the DMM had another idea, the engineers had another idea. It was like they were all fighting. The success of this project from my perspective was not the physical one but the human one: the fact that we brought an enormous group of people together in common purpose. Because to do this project was not something that could be done by an architect slamming his fist on the table saying, 'I want it done this way.' I had to take the energy and the intelligence and the different perspectives into the project. And there are many people involved in this process, from the general director to the president of the Stiftung, to the head of the Egyptian Museum, to the head of the DMM, who can take you around this building and explain it with as much pride as I can. They were involved. So for me, it was a lesson of dialogue, participation, of the idea of trying to accept the responsibility to define a common idea. And that common idea should really be a common idea. It should collect ideas together. This is just a sample of the enormous number of articles that were written at the time, or during the time. During the 12 years, we had I think 400 articles written about it. But the Berliners queued – there were 10,000 people standing up, I think they queued for six or seven hours to come in. And we were extremely nervous about what the result, their reaction, would be. The guards were prepared and trained in case there was any trouble, because there had been so much negative press about the project. And we of course were with turning stomachs, wondering what would happen. But in reality, it was well accepted. And so I can talk about it as a formalistic solution, I can talk about it as a philosophical idea about history and memory, but I can also talk about it as a sort of human idea, as a project which forced us to make collective decisions. And it trained us, because a decision isn't made by just having a meeting and saying, 'So what should we do?' We had to give shape to those decisions. We had to somehow lead the discussion, show the implications of decisions: that it's possible to do this, it's possible to do that, but let's realize that's what happens and what does that mean if we do this and this. And this was highly – I mean, we were lucky because the people we were talking with were of course highly articulate, highly intelligent, and highly engaged in the process. But we made the project important, and through that importance, I think the project came out in the way it did. And you can imagine the decisions that we had to make throughout this project. I mean, every – you know, this is an original piece, this is fake, this is a stripped-down version of that, this is half original and half copy, this is original but this is not. So each piece of this had to be a discussion. It also had to be priced and had to be approved by the Ministry of Finance. So the bureaucratic process was extraordinarily complex. But that meant that the architect couldn't make these decisions themselves. We had to create an environment of trust. The environment of trust is one that we rarely have as architects. No one trusts us. We say we're going to build a new building instead of the old one, and they say, 'Oh no, please don't.' You say, 'Why not?' 'Yeah, but you architects, you always say the building is going to be so nice, and then you build it and it's horrible.' We've lost our trust. So how do we get back this idea of trust? How do we show that responsibility? Because I think this is a big challenge for us. And I think that's partly because we're so often in the situation where we are not able as architects to give real question to the task. We have to fulfill tasks sometimes which we're not even sure are good questions. This was a very good question. This was restore Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery. I think we won the competition because of the trust that we had created in the Neues Museum. And I have to say, I think we were the right people to do such a task. And I'm not normally so immodest, but by this time my team had really become incredibly sophisticated about how to do restoration. The interesting question here was to treat a building from the 1960s as if it was a building from the 1860s. So all of a sudden, we transferred our care and concern about repairing a modern building in the way that we would have restored the Neues Museum, for instance. And those of you architects know that it's very easy in the repair of modern buildings to ruin them in the process. It's so easy because Mies van der Rohe designed window frames here that didn't work. I mean, there was no insulation. In most buildings, you could just replace those window frames with new ones. But it meant that the window frame that was about this big would be this big under contemporary environmental concerns. So you could solve the thermal problems of this building, but you destroy Mies in the process. So this wasn't a technical question only, this was a sort of philosophical question. And we negotiated this position between – what does repair mean? What does repairing Mies van der Rohe's building mean? Does it mean making it perfect, perform in the way that it should be performing, or what role does Mies play? How sacred is Mies, and how much should we protect him? And we became the protectors of Mies. And I said from the beginning that if it's possible to see that we've done anything at the end, then we failed. So it's a strange role for an architect to play. And a lot of my colleagues said, 'Well, why would you do this? Because there's nothing for you.'
Sometimes not letting something be ruined can be more powerful than building another building. I think the work we did on this building was a good contribution. Is it important that my name is everywhere? No, of course not. It's important that we looked after this building of high quality. The way we treated it was... we repaired even broken stones. It would have been easy to throw these away, but we repaired them and replaced them. We took 30,000 pieces of the building away, cleaned them, and brought them back. This is something you might do with an 18th-century building, but not normally with a 1960s building. That was why the building process was interesting and why we got the building back. The reason we did these things on the Neues Museum National Gallery was not because of sustainability only. Neues Museum was about memory. Berlin was still dealing with its own sense of itself, and especially Neues Museum was a post-war project where the city is reflecting on its history. So this was about the importance of buildings and the importance of history. We did many projects in Friedrichstraße, developing a new building out of an old building. It's a publishing house, previously our office. A lot of these projects in Berlin were very much to do with building within a strong historical context. They touched on the issue of reusing buildings, being more considerate with material. Those two stories come together: the story of memory, meaning, significance, and at the same time of resources, continuity.
We've done a lot of projects working on historical interventions. This is the Royal Academy, a new connection between two parts of the building, bringing a new wing into the building. There's a slide missing. This was a space that was a service space before, full of pipes. These projects have to do with making small interventions. There's no big vision. They are working with fabric, with the history of the building, trying to improve the workings and experience. This is in Paderborn, a building we were asked to look at, a rather ugly reconstruction after the war from bomb damage. Underneath there was a monastery, a cloister. In this project, we took it back to its ruined state, took off all the things that had been changed after the war, and built out of it again, finding a stronger quality. This tendency of reusing buildings in German projects tended to be about memory and history. We are moving more and more towards another topic: the importance of reusing buildings. We are not quite sure where we are in architecture in terms of sustainability. We don't have rules; it's an empirical process. It would be much easier if someone told us use this type of material, but those rules don't exist. There is only one rule we know absolutely clear: if you knock a building down, it's worse than using a building. The best way of being sustainable is not building, and the second is to reuse a building that's there.
Of course, we are used to the idea of improving buildings, we're used to the idea that we don't like buildings and let's take them down, especially buildings of the 1960s. This is a government building in Paris. Mayor Hidalgo had a program to say that every time they were to sell public buildings, the investor must demonstrate a responsible environmental and social use for the building. So the program that the investor had to inherit was a kindergarten, a youth hostel, a market, as well as commercial things with hotel. This is the project we did. Everyone hated the building beforehand. You can see that it's quite an ugly pad. We filled in this square so that the building came to the street, and we did nothing to the facades except upgrade them. You can see the same facades, and everyone said, 'Oh, I love what you did to the facades,' and we said, 'Well, we didn't do anything to the facades.' But the context of upgrading is important. This is another project of reuse of a 1960s building. This was the Ministry of Interior in Doha, a building that everybody hated because there were lots of stories about what happened in this building. We were commissioned to turn it into a hotel. It's now one of the best hotels there, and it's very strange that Doha has very little history, and all of a sudden they're quite proud that this respected an existing building and we didn't destroy it in the change. I would say there's a big shift now that everyone's starting to appreciate that to make a new building out of an old building is no longer a compromise but actually could be seen as a better solution.
This is the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Again, we were commissioned. You can see we added a floor, well two floors in fact, but we did it by imitating the... this is by Saarinen. We sort of stretched the facade. There's a strong tradition within modernism that whenever you add to a building, you should make something that looks different. In many of the projects we're doing, we're trying to find some sort of continuity. Anyway, this is being finished. This is for the London School of Economics, a very interesting case where the competition was to knock this building down. Everyone hates this building. It's an ugly building from 1958. It's ugly from the outside and ugly from the inside. I said that if this is for the London School of Economics, this is meant to be a center of dialogue and debate, a political center. I said, 'I think you can't knock it down. It would be very strange in five or six years time to have knocked a building down that is ugly but that you could have used.' So what we did was to show how we could transform it by keeping it and adding things. This is the section. You can see how impossible the interior was, different floor levels. There was every reason to knock it down, but we managed to convince them to reuse it. We're recycling it. It's being built now and it's going to look like that. Interestingly, the difficulty was aesthetic because the planners found it very difficult to enjoy the result. Their feeling was that they were nearly encouraging us to knock the building down and build a new one because they were saying you could build a better building, and we were saying, 'Yeah, but ethically we can't. Ethically we can't build a better building.' We're convinced that the result in the end is not to do with visual but to do with the reality, and we're reusing all the material.
This is something, 1014. This is a project that people in this room are involved with. It used to be the German ambassador's residence, then it became the Goethe Institute for 50 years, a very important piece of German real estate in the way opposite the Metropolitan Museum. Obviously, we're going to reuse the building. We are reusing the building. The work has started, and this will be hosting the program of 1014, which, as the minister said earlier, is a very opportune program at this particular point of promoting American-German relationships. The lower levels are public spaces for lectures and things like that. The top floors are to do with students and researchers. We created this idea of a sort of middle territory, a meeting ground between public and researchers where the two different users could come together. Images of how public space, this is the common room, common space, literally common between the different types of users. This is for the residents at the top floor. This is the building at the back. We've expanded the building a bit, but again, it's not appropriate even to think about not reusing buildings like this. I know I'm running late, but these are thoughts about conventional practice.
A conventional architectural practice is like a very big boat. You want to turn the wheel, but it takes a very long time to steer. But within our conventional practices in London, Berlin, and especially Milan, we are trying to work with clients who are shifting their perspective. I have to say I'm very optimistic about this. We're really getting a lot of clients who are taking on board the issue of reuse, sustainability, etc., especially the idea of reuse. But we've also started to think about how we might think practice itself in a more structural way. I have for a long time been promoting this discussion. In 2012, I was director of the Architecture Biennale, and my Biennale was called Common Ground. Common Ground was a challenge to my colleagues to say that the Biennale should no longer be a show-off ground, a place where each architect proves that they're better than the other one. 'This is my opera house and this is his theater.' I insisted that every project in Common Ground had to demonstrate what the architects were doing between colleagues or with community. Of course, it was quite difficult to get some of them to leave their egos behind, but generally they did. This is the plan of the exhibition. There were 120 different architects. I had to negotiate with 120 egos, but they were very... I must say it was an interesting dialogue. I had to talk with each team all the time. This was Herzog & de Meuron, and they were interested in talking about the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg at the time it was still stuck. On the back wall are all the articles fighting against the project, and these are models of the project itself. So their contribution was not just to say 'look how beautiful our Elbphilharmonie is,' it was to say 'let's discuss the issue of making a major public building in a sort of consensual way.' Actually, this was quite an important exhibition for the dialogue that then pursued and made the project happen. Then in 2020, I was editor of Domus, and again I tried to promote the discussion about how the profession works together. I did a lot of interviews with other architects called 'Good Practice.' I asked architects about what they think practice should be about.
How do we shift practice? How do we shift towards process more than results? If we are going to look at sustainability, process becomes critical. We've looked at in all businesses in the past, supply chain was critical. Supply chain was about reliability. Then in certain businesses, especially in fashion, the supply chain came with morality. You know, did these pair of trainers get made by child labor in Pakistan? Now it's also to do with material. Where did this material come from? So we're now looking at in all things, and I would say in architecture as well, where do these materials come from? We're examining that a lot. I think we're now shifting from a result-based attitude that we became in the last 30 years rather obsessed with how things look. We have to shift. We have to relax about how things look, and we have to think more and more about how do we get there, how do we deliver that, how do these things come about. As was said before, we accidentally, my wife and I and our children, have been spending our summers in one of the most peculiar parts of Europe, the northwest corner of Spain, Galicia, above Portugal. Finisterre is there. It's a semi-autonomous community, one of the autonomies of Spain, two and a half million people. It's slightly forgotten. The Spanish generally think the Galicians are strange people. There's a certain disrespect to them, I would say, except when it comes to food. Anything which has come from this region would be advertised. If you have a menu in Madrid, the eggs are from Galicia, it will say 'Galician eggs.' If the potatoes are from Galicia, 'Galician potatoes.' If they're shellfish, Galician. Galicia is a mark. Why it's a mark is because it never industrialized its food production, which contributes slightly to its poor economic performance. It's a community strangely, and coming from an Anglo-Saxon environment, I think that's why we were so attracted to it 30 years ago and still are. In the Anglo-Saxon world, we've been taught that you only have happiness through money. We were quite surprised to be in this community where the per capita GDP is about 23,000 euros. It's an extremely flat society. Everyone operates within very similar financial differences, and yet there's a sort of 84% happiness factor. So it's a super happy community that doesn't have much money. How does that work? As an Englishman, I didn't understand that, but I do now. It's blessed with an extraordinary nature, and it's a productive nature, but as I say, the production is small scale. It's actually being quite respectful of its natural environment. Thank God, it's 70% forest, and there is a crisis of forest because it's a lot of eucalyptus, etc. Where it hasn't been careful is in its urban development. It's been built in horrible ways without planning.
Seven years ago, the president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, asked me, 'You're an architect, can't you tell us how we can stop doing these stupid things?' He imagined that we would come with a... I made a little team and we did some research. He imagined that we would come back and say, 'Well, you have to paint all the houses one color, you have to use this roof tile.' Instead, we actually went to the basic issues. It is a dispersed community, a village structure, but you have a lot of empty buildings and a lot of places where the empty buildings and the urban condition conspire. You have parking everywhere, you have cars which destroy the towns. So instead of going back and telling him that he needed more rules about architecture, we said you need more rules about planning, you need more rules about traffic, you need more rules about the larger conditions. For seven years, we've been working increasingly on this program. We started with two or three people, now we have 17, and we have an enormous number of commissions to do with not architecture but about environment. This is a typical historical condition, and this is how it looks now, just a travesty of lack of planning. We did a huge amount of work in researching why these things happened and how we might deal with them. We're working on a territorial plan because we realized that like all of these things, and this is I guess the principle of what I'm saying, is that we need planning more than we need architecture. We need planning that considers public space, the common good, environment, sustainability, and social welfare. We need to think about those things in a round way. We've managed to engage with the government. We work with sometimes we challenge the local administration. We work with the mayors, we work with the community, and we very much work on the front line. We work with the people at the front, we work with mayors and with the communities because without their integration you can't get anything. So it's in a way a continuation of Neues Museum in some sense, in that it is about physical environment, but at the same time you need participation and you need everybody to have a common understanding.
This is a typical small town close to where we live. These towns had before a very beautiful relationship with the sea, and then the roads came along. For instance, this village is very isolated with this horrible concrete wall, parking, all sorts of decisions which were badly done. We're doing two projects: one is to reduce traffic, and the other is to create a better relationship between the town and the water. The road is so bad it's nearly impossible to cross. But as soon as we proposed that we would slow traffic down, all the people in the village complained because why should they not be able to drive fast? So then you have to have meetings on a Tuesday night to explain to everybody why we want to stop the road from 50 km/h to 30 km/h, why we want to move the parking from there to there. At this point, everyone starts to agree, and then we get by. This is one of my team on a... you can see the type. We do hundreds of community meetings, then we do the planning, and then this is the result. We opened last year. We created a new relationship between the wall and the village and the water. It's a tiny project. In a way, it's not architecture, but it needs the skills of architects to do this. The collaborative idea: we had to work with the regional government, with the local mayor, with the ports authorities, with the fishermen, with the bar and restaurant owners, etc. It's an issue of common collaboration. Streets in these towns look like this, and now they look like this. We're arguing that this is destroying... it's the same village. To get from this side to that side, we are doing analysis, we are doing the planning. We bring the planning to a certain level because the public administration doesn't have the money to do it, so we do it, and then we bring that to the planners. Now that project is underway. As a continuation of this, we're doing research into transportation systems. We're looking at how can we invent a more complex public bus system that will take pressure off of the road system. There is no proper bus system at the moment. There's one bus that goes from here to there, and there's no distributing system. These are projects that architects find ourselves doing. It's a sort of peculiar thing to do at this point of one's career. However, it seems to me that these are projects which start to use the talents of architects in a more purposeful way. Interestingly, the team I have, they're all architects, and I have been apologizing to them for six or seven years that they're architects, skilled architects, talented architects, but they're not building. They are helping things happen. They have to be convinced that they're doing more by protecting, by making things happen, than by doing themselves. The extreme version of that is that we also monitor competitions for other architects. The architectural competition system is so poor. I'm saying things politically I'm not allowed to say when I'm there, but the Chamber of Architects has not made competitions properly. So what we do now is whenever we're asked to be involved in something, we refuse to be architects but instead we design the competition.
This is a project for the refurbishment of a forestry research center. The government came to us and said, 'Would you help us do the project?' and we said no because you haven't thought about the question properly. We will think about the question, so we will design the question. So this is the call for competition, this is the concours, what it's for, what the prizes are, and we supervise this process. This is the building. The administration was going to surrender the program of this, which is a very serious research center. There isn't enough money, so they wanted to make it into a hotel. We said no, you can't do that. You've got to revive the whole timber research thing, which is the most important thing to do. That competition's been won now and it's about to happen. This is another competition we organized. A lot of abandoned villages. We're working on two abandoned villages. I'm going to flip through these very quickly. Another competition we organized which is now happening, Marine Research Center in Vigo. Again, these are the architects. They sit for all their time in these types of meetings negotiating. This was the competition winner of that one. We then organized public exhibitions of the competitions because in a way our initiative depends on the success. We have been luckily supported now by Inditex, the company that owns Zara, and Marta Ortega, who is the new CEO, is supporting us. She's sponsoring four competitions. We're now announcing this is one of them in a rural area. This is another competition we're about to announce which is the reorganization. Look, I talked to you about traffic. This is how do you make a nice city when this happens? So we're doing a competition now. We have stepped back from being architects, but we're trying to make the conditions for which planning and projects can be done instead. Why am I showing you another competition? This is a really nice one. They want to do an industrial center, and typically they would just build sheds, but the mayor has agreed that they will build small buildings. So we are influencing the question. The answers people give are always dependent on the quality of the question. Competitions often the question isn't considered. So we are affecting the question that the communities ask, the politicians ask, which hopefully gives us better answers. These are some of the other abandoned villages we're working on. Again, we do all of the analysis, we work on the physical issues of the place. This was a small thing that was done, a little social building for the village. From this, we strangely find ourselves more and more involved in the rural areas because as architects in the last 30 years we've concentrated on cities, but we've neglected the other bit which is the rural. We're working with the University of Santiago on a lot of programs. We have fire issues which come from uncontrolled forest. We do a lot of... Banco Santander has supported us in doing some research with the local communities about how they lived in the forest and how that might work. This is a publication we did from that lesson.
When we were sustainable, of course we're learning that our concept of progress is changing. We're starting to see that so many things, especially in the productive landscape, so many things were done better before. They knew how to enrich the soil, they knew how to rotate crops, they knew how to look after things. We are organizing applications for European grants. We just got this community 1.2 million. We applied for grants for improving their agriculture, rural small-scale agricultural systems. A community like this is incapable of applying the paperwork. The paperwork is so complex that they can't do it. So we spent one year applying for the paperwork, getting them the grant. Oh yes, thank you. We managed to get them one. I'm going to finish. So we applied for the money for them. It represents a sort of 20% increase on their total annual budget. This was celebrating that fact. These are the different things we're doing. After we got them the money, they then refused to do it because they couldn't administer the money. So now we're administering these grants for them. So you realize that there is a requirement for agencies to work in these communities. These are the things that we're starting to do as architects. Just finally, this is our new headquarters. We realize that the activities we're doing in these projects had limitations. We're being asked to do too many things. We became like a sort of doctor. People just call us and say, 'We have a problem in our village, what do we do?' We can't manage it all. So now we have a building, it's this one here. In that building, we have a public floor, exhibition, canteen, conference spaces, offices, and a residential program for students. This is the garden side. We're running project programs, research. We're bringing students. At the moment, we've got a team of students from MIT. We give them real projects because we have all of these real projects. So they actually meet the mayors, they meet the community, and they deal with the issues here. They're meeting fishermen. Then we have an exhibition space. This is an exhibition where we're talking about the whole issue of circular economy. Then we have events. At the moment, we've got a series of events related to the importance of the food market. The Galician food market: there are 97 food markets in Galicia. Of course, the buying of fresh food is becoming more complicated in our contemporary life, and we're trying to make sure that this sustains itself. We're running programs, urban programs. This is our conference space. We bring people together on very different topics, and the topics are connected about the environment. Every house needs a kitchen, and our kitchen is really important for us. It's part of the reason that people come to the building. We feed all of our stuff. Also, we are increasingly doing... because the food is all local food, it's all come within 20 kilometers. There's a sort of... we have come... this is Carolyn Steel who came the other week. She talks a lot about importance of food. These are young people who are producing yogurts and things. So we've become part of a discussion about not just the built environment but in a sense the economies which relate to maintaining that community. This is an event which is going on. Then just finally, of course, I didn't want to finish only on our foundation because of course that's taking up a lot of my time, but at the same time we are doing many other projects. This is the Archaeological Museum in Athens. Going back to my first story, I don't think we can abandon nor should we abandon the importance of architecture itself, but we have to find ways by which the profession and our skills are applied more thoughtfully to what we build, where we build, and how we build it. Thank you very much. I'm sorry.
