Wonderful. Great to be here, great. And this is my third talk here, and I'll let the images talk. Yesterday I was grilled for five hours by 10 philosophers on my writing, so it was pretty intense. And the day before I was at the university and was talking about parametricism and quite a few others. So today, I'll let the images just talk mostly. But I just wanted to tell you, I mean, I met Zaha and she looked like this, and she had these kind of visions. And she wanted to kind of cover the planet with a new architectural order: fluid, complex, and of its time. And so we went on and we generated a big repertoire across all scales, all building types, including urbanism, including interiors and furniture. And I think about this like the endless forms of nature in the sense that it's more versatile and rich and varied than all the previous styles put together. That's what parametricism and then tectonism delivered. But at the same time, there's a coherency. You can see what belongs into that paradigm and what is in older paradigms, as it were.
So I'll just go through some of that. We started off with the art world. In the art world, we experimented and were recognized through drawings, sketches, installations, and then went actually into art buildings and cultural buildings as our first breakthrough—the National Museum in Rome for Art and Architecture, for instance, and the Science Museum, and in smaller interventions like in Hyde Park, integrating old and new and wonderfully working into the landscape. Landscaping is a huge inspiration for the expansion of the repertoire. It becomes more landscape-like, like inorganic and organic nature. And then some other breakthrough cultural buildings with exhibition spaces, museums, national library. And I mean, the beauty of a wonderful kind of encounter event is what you project when you see these spaces, and you can imagine something is happening there. But our buildings are extremely popular. We are the most popular brand in the world for some reason, while we also try to do something different and strange, and we're landing things. Our buildings are often used for movie sets, which is quite interesting.
So this is one in Korea, and the popularity is unbelievable—the visitors. I mean, it's huge. Only the Louvre in Paris has more visitors than this building in Korea, which has multiple museums, multiple exhibition spaces, has fantastic events like Seoul Fashion Week, etc. It's one of our cultural complexes in China. China was great. China allowed us to expand when we were young. We got all sorts of opportunities and still keep doing new cultural projects in China. Sometimes, like this one, it takes a whole year from sketch to completion. I mean, that's unbelievable. But that allows you to build up a repertoire. This one just finished also recently in Shenzhen, Science Museum. Middle East, of course, Rabat and more coming up now. Cultural contexts and opera houses, etc., in China—this one in Shaoxing. It's a wonderful site across two rivers, so you have this kind of colorful water bodies. So we keep getting these wonderful opportunities, and we've developed obviously a repertoire toolkit, algorithmic design tools, optimizing it and delivering that fast with also a fantastic technology setup in China.
Okay. So, another one coming out in Beijing, a museum. So the culture and, you know, Morocco—wonderful, and I love it. We have it here in Belgrade, and we love integrating old and new, and a wonderful opportunity with the site museum here. It's already fully technically designed, and retendering now, and it will be happening very, very fast. So it's really fantastic to occupy space like that and bring it to life, and I'm sure it's one of our destinations. So let's enjoy that for a moment, the anticipation. I'm sure we will all meet again there soon enough with a great local architect called Q. It was a competition, actually, an open competition. Studio spaces, hangout territory, social spaces.
Okay. And then, I mean, we also do places of work. This is a corporate headquarters. It might not immediately feel like this in the desert. There's nothing else around. It's for a waste management firm, so they have some kind of waste mountains around, otherwise the desert. We make these tours and we go through our buildings. There's so many coming up that we happen to kind of make tours around the Middle East, tours around China. And yeah, it's a wonderful project with courtyards and beautiful concrete shells. And the next one is coming up in the region—let's say extended region. This is Tashkent. It's also a museum and research center, the exhibition center. And we have this wind tower principle to ventilate this. It's a fantastic, iconic project for us, a major flagship project of a new, dynamic country where more things are coming up. So after the Heydar Aliyev Baku project, it's another one in the region, but the region is great as well. We're just opening also the Central Bank of Kazakhstan in Astana.
And again, this is a place of work in the desert. Well, it's in Saudi Arabia. It's a research center with all these shaded exterior spaces and courtyards and atria away from the sun, allowing the wind to flow through. It has office spaces, conference spaces, library spaces, and either open courtyards, atria, and this field condition hexagonal relations. So you have more neighbors, and it's about interconnection, inter-visibility, inter-awareness, and thrown in a religious space as well. And yeah, so workspaces—that's where we work in Beijing. This is Galaxy SOHO, 50,000 square meters, a lot of small offices, SOHO China small home offices, and it has co-working spaces and mostly retail and food and beverage for all the office workers to come together. And we have this wonderful interior atria and exterior atria. So we're doing atria and bridges in many of our projects, expressing this communication where you have architectural events above, below, and all around. And Vince just reminded me he was in that event—you see that big crowd—and we had a PechaKucha describing the project at the beginning. And so we have now a Beijing office of 70 people in that complex.
It's a kind of three-dimensional city nugget. And the client gave us a few other projects. I'll just pick out another one here, where we used the atrium to cast through a big tower. And more headquarter buildings, bridges, and atria also here, and a mixed-use project in Dubai: bridges, atria to carve out and scoop out these deep volumes. Rem Koolhaas's 'Bigness' is a kind of inspiration for that, where you get these connections through voiding out and deep volumes. And there's a Hong Kong project in a bank tower with various terraces you can step out on, the core pulled back with huge open floor spaces. The top room, OPPO headquarters in Shenzhen. And this is again—actually, I have to show, maybe go back to this one second. What we've done here, we pulled the core out like Rogers always does, so the floor is totally continuous, and then we scoop a series of atriums through. So one of these towers is actually the core. And twin towers in Shenzhen where we have these cascading terraces and retail and public zones into the park, and then huge multi-level bridges connecting again before the tower pulls up. This is actually right opposite the OPPO building. So if you come to Shenzhen, you'll see you can look at two of our major flagship projects.
Of course, we always go ever more complex project by project to keep it interesting, to keep it challenging, and getting larger as we speak as well. This has taken a long gestation; it's the Central Bank of Iraq backed up on the Tigris. Beautiful location, structure, and shading in one, not a glass tower. And that's where it sits. It's a beautiful opportunity. And then again, different types of workspaces: a university campus, but incubator spaces in Xiong'an, connecting through these big roof conditions and making some sort of infrastructure. I mean, we have a train line pulling up into the mountains or train stations in Naples, big metro stations with multiple lines crossing at different heights, real airports like Daxing Airport. We recently also opened Sydney's second airport. We just opened Mumbai's Navi Mumbai Airport. I can't show all of them here, and we're doing others. Airports are a great topic for us. And then I'm moving on to living spaces—apartment tower top double-height social spaces and amenity spaces. And we're doing the interiors as well in this case. We love to do our own interiors, and that's why we founded our own interior architecture company, not to have that shifted to somebody else.
This is a hotel, the Morpheus Hotel in Macau: a lot of wonderful atrium spaces. You pull through that with panoramic elevators to experience that. You have different restaurants and breakfast spaces, and at the top you have a pool and double-height big suites, with pools in the suites, etc. And a small niche hotel, a boutique hotel in Rome, an old Renaissance palace. And so we've internally gone exquisitely contemporary with all the geometries, the materials, and there's also a beautiful courtyard space. I don't have a full suite of images, but the rooms are in with the old Renaissance facade and having craftiness and elegance to match this sophisticated era with our works. And then, let's say billionaires are sometimes good for something: they fund some interesting architectural research and they give us pioneer consumption of what we might aspire to. And this is a house in Moscow where we pulled the bedrooms up—it sits in the forest; we pulled up the bedroom to look across the forest canopy, and we did all the interiors, everything. Fantastic. And this is a hotel in Croatia. This is the client trying to enjoy life on a new level, let's say.
And there's another one, a forest house which doesn't pull up and uses these interior-exterior relations and sculpting of furniture. We love it. And then we had the opportunity to do a number of villas in Costa Rica on these hills overlooking the waterfront, working with these shells and terraces and pools and dream houses. So today I thought the lecture should allow an experiential approach, a dream approach, but bringing, of course, all the new technology to bear to make these spaces happen. It's a lovely project. And then similarly in Saudi Arabia, they're going wild with experiencing the landscape, the raw landscape in and around Neom, with these interventions: an observatory, and you see on the top right the tower. These are crazy projects just to put there for the hell of it, to have a feeling you're alive in the landscape and in the universe. But of course, most of our work is more down-to-earth, working in urban fabrics.
We do quite a few urban projects for the knowledge economy, so the idea of having an urban landscape, not flattening this and having a soft grid and skyline flow through. And then this is not for us to all complete, but we did the first series of 10 blocks and the curves running through in plan and in elevation, again bridging to connect. And that's what happened 25 years later. So we started in 2000, the build-up where other architects picked up and did the soft grid with the soft furniture. It's an intense knowledge economy hub with an ITC hub, finance hub, a biomed hub, but a lot of residences, hotels. It's a real city, not an industrial park fenced in with car parks surrounding it, which these projects used to be. I'm quite proud of this as an urban master planner, to set something up for other architects to come in. And some of the other things where we're looking for strong urban form and identity, where you have orientation and differentiation, where you can follow vectors of transformation with an axis and a semi-concentric field, and then the skyline emphasizes this. So there is a deep correlation between large form all the way to massing and detail.
And in this one, we designed every single building. So we've built up the power to generate a variety of functions. These are a lot of office spaces, cultural spaces, residential spaces, a huge plate covering a highway, and this is about 25 buildings or more. Every single building we've designed to deliver one unified vision of that, and it's nearly finished now. Some fun things: I'm letting all of these volumes bridge and hover and cantilever. The exhibition cultural space was the first one to be built. So this is Chengdu Unicorn Island, an incubator startup culture. I mean, they're doing a lot of these in China, knowledge economy startup hubs outside the major cities. And we did a similar concept for Miami, a private university for Brazilian investors on Miami Beach. In a project like this, we'd like to let a building radiate out and structure a whole district, if you like. And so we have many of these urban forms where you can see there's differentiation, there's variation, there's a strong formal identity, and it's not a garbage spill or an isotropic grid. Both would be equally disorienting. You can naturally flow and navigate a space; you can see quite different fabrics for different zones.
And then working with landscape as well, these are all these incubator knowledge economy expansions in China and Singapore, integrating urban form, landscape form, public spaces, terraces, outdoor spaces, an Expo site, etc. So we're running with this a lot. You see how you tie together across multiple blocks something which integrates and has a center and periphery, and some order and directionality. There's plenty of these, so it's a big part of our work. And we're winning a lot because you want identity, you want strong form which structures an area instead of things disintegrating and becoming illegible and unnavigable. And so this was a big project for Tencent Campus and also harbor redevelopments. And then reinventing urban fabrics—not megablocks always and huge towers, but something which is more intricate and more close to the ground, but also a lot of exterior spaces, terraces, etc. So we developed these fabrics. And again, the big playing fields are China and Saudi. It's just fun to try to invent and find these satellite cities, like resort cities, let's say, where people are meant to live also in Neom, and find something which fits the region, fits the climate, fits the materiality, and if the dust and sand blows over it, it doesn't dirty the place.
So these are the kind of projects we love to do. And also difficult sites where you have to create something which crosses a huge highway cut-through. How do you do that? How do you make a strong form which overcomes these kinds of cuts? Integrating a number of towers into this big dish that is Moscow. We have so many fantastic projects in Moscow; I hope we get back to it soon. It's a fantastic market for us as well. So this is what we're doing a little bit in ZHA, but how we're managing to do that and keep rejuvenating is because I've been teaching at the AA DRL for 30 years. I'm teaching with ex-students, and of course can't stop building up teams. So this is New London. We did three projects, three teams working together for a year and developing this kind of activation east of Tower Bridge with all these topology-optimized exoskeleton spaces and new dense urban environment. London is so conservative; it's only the Square Mile which is intense. Currently, I'm working on a megabuilding where we'll be putting 500 by 500 by 500, inspired by The Line, let's say. I don't have the results, but here you get a handful of students in teams of three or four generating a whole cluster, modeling everything, rendering everything. It's potent. That's where you can learn, and then they come into the office and help us more.
And that's what you can do. This is quite detailed. There's another version of this differentiated further east, another satellite city new town extension. East London has a lot of that. You see integration of deep relief and shading elements, bridges, atria—typical—or something like this, very strong urban form connecting the two sides of the river in the Docklands area and making something which is highly differentiated and intense and articulate, and everything belongs together, yet being quite different. And then we do sketches like this for new city foundations in the libertarian space called Trex in Sicily, high-density low-rise fabrics for the startup city. And in rural towns, another libertarian foundation in Honduras, where we do these waterfront clusters. But there's a specific story about these: they are very small units and it's very communicative. People can share terraces, there's co-working and social spaces. So this is the idea of using parametric modules and using a platform which is like a dating site where future buyers can meet each other, communicate, select voxels. Everybody sees who is selecting what, and then saying, 'This wants to be a residence. I'd like these four, five, three, or one into a residence; this will be an office space; this will be a cafe.' And then it agglomerates in a gamified participatory process of under three months. The first round has happened. Unfortunately, politically this project was under attack. Politics paralyzes everything in Europe, and then you find these moments of escape and then politics catches up and wants to clamp down on that as well. But this idea we're also running with in the Middle East now in Sharjah.
It is incredibly proliferous and fast to design complex arrangements or allow people to design, because with these modules—and they're fully detailed—you can generate these detailed solutions and many different variations of this. At the same time, the subtext is: who wants to share a terrace? Who wants to share a gym? Who wants to be next to me? And so you get these synergy clusters and friendship networks. You can actually generate community, because in reality, if you talk about residential communities, they don't exist with a random selection of people. You usually see each other as a disturbance. But this one is where you find each other in the process of that. So these are the outcomes out of that, and we have different versions of this. This is the idea I wanted to show: we are now doing this as a multi-user computer game, or let's say metaverse, where you can experience and communicate and meet people and go through the project. We did this with Epic Games, where we said, 'Reimagine London.' We have a waterfront close to Millennium Bridge or close to opposite Tate Modern theoretically, and we've detailed this fully. We developed this game—we have an in-house game developing team, but we worked with Epic. And this is hugely successful: there are hundreds and thousands of people playing with us. As an archive of results, we deliver the modules.
It's something where you also can explore this area, and you can go in and meet people and play together and build this waterfront city and drop these modules. And then they get AI rendered afterwards, and you can photograph them. At the moment you can't use them, but I'll tell you more later: we have a metaverse where we invite competitors to then stay with their projects and use them. So for me, the metaverse is a huge thing, not only in this sense of facilitating actual development, but also anticipating development. Some of our clients want that: they maybe use the conference center already or use the exhibitions. All our exhibitions are digital twins. For instance, because we started having them during COVID in Shanghai and Beijing, now we have a huge one in Shenzhen, and we're doubling up everything and bringing it out. And we also did during COVID—we started, you know, Liberland, which is bordering on Serbia on the Danube. The founder is a friend of mine, and we developed this master plan for him, and we instantiated it first as a metaverse. There's a community of Liberlanders, and they're usually a lot of libertarians and crypto companies wanting to be a crypto ecosystem, crypto tech hub there. So we have DeFi Plaza, NFT Plaza, an incubator building, and the Liberland City Hall in there. We built this first, and now it's incorporated into our bigger metaverse.
We had a lot of events there where we had conferences with 25 speakers from all over the world. Different crypto projects and libertarian projects had booths, and you can roam around, look at the video, pull away, talk. It really works like a conference. It works really well; you meet people. I met a future investor from Israel, for instance, to do this, and I gave my own talks. We had our own separate space where you can see about the project. This really works, and it is the future as far as I'm concerned. We can use everything. Parametricism is flourishing in the metaverse. I think most metaverse projects are parametric work. The other thing is through AI: you mentioned AI, just Google 'AI architecture'—I would say 80% is parametricism. And that is fantastic, I think, which shows the desire, shows what people want. It's tough to do it, but AI helps. So I think it will roll out eventually and take over because it is the most rational, sophisticated, and versatile paradigm of developing solutions. So there will be these metaverse spaces and institutions. Every corporation, every design office, every charity, anybody—a museum, a university—once they have all their virtual spaces on top of their website and their buildings, or in substitution of all purposes, they will aggregate in virtual cities. That's what I believe. So we're talking about also meta-urbanism.
And so 'Metatopia' came up after Liberland. Liberland is now fully integrated into Metatopia as one of the hubs. Metatopia is actually dedicated mostly to the design ecosystem, to all design disciplines, to all architectural brands, design brands—I mean firms, schools, conferences like we had at the virtual Venice Biennale, virtual Chicago Architecture Biennial. We have top architects displaying in there. There are these different parts: Liberland, ZHA City, and the main incubator district, if you like. And we had many displays already there. There's going to be automotive, there's going to be fashion, there already is interior design. And we have auditoriums: you gather, you have events, you make presentations. We have various tutorials with various schools of architecture in there, and you can roam around and see the city beyond. But also, it's good to concentrate in a single building there. Sou Fujimoto is in there, Coop Himmelb(l)au is in there, MAD Architects is in there, Philip Yuan has a project in here, so is OMA, etc. And this is our own interior architecture gallery which you can—the detail of photorealistic rendering with pieces and surfaces and architectures is fully satisfying. You can have all this geometry in one map and roam around in it at will, talk to people, show them around, get close, and expose. We have a photography exhibition there. We now have an AI and architecture swarm exhibition, etc. We have fully replicated some of our bathroom designs, or actually a full museum for three levels replicated inside here with all its detail, with all its content. It's wonderful to display, but also discuss, bring clients around, show it.
We had a fantastic fashion designer here from Beijing, Central Academy of Fine Arts, head of fashion, here in Metatopia, where we brought in her intricate dresses. There's also, of course, a need for fashion for metaverse avatar skins. It's a huge topic, but the same designers will do both real-world and digital-world, and these identities cross over. I think corporate identities and spaces will cross over. I don't have that here, but I have lots of spaces where inside physical buildings we design huge screens and windows into virtual worlds. The continuity of both virtual and physical designs is a big topic. So usually gathering here, there's some professors debating and discussing, presenting the project, Q&A, then moving up to look at the designs, look at the videos, and discuss it. And we have an ex-student of mine from the GSD doing fractal architecture, and you can swap that stuff out and you can roam around, fly around from drone perspective, speed around, but you can also teleport to different places. There's a drone flying converted car project—other industries launched here and at the Dubai Airshow at the same time. They're fully photorealistically rendered. They don't yet exist in full scale; they have a half-scale flying thing in reality. You can see another project in the background. Cut this short. So that's what we're seeing. We're talking to Audi, we're talking to Porsche, we're talking to everybody, and we don't have enough time, and we're looking for investors.
This is Ross Lovegrove, the world champion of industrial and furniture designs, and he designed his own museum. We brought many of his pieces in there—wonderful stacks, etc.—into his museum which is floating above, but also a miniature is inside our incubator building. You can see the amount of rendering; everything is reflected, and it is a lovely experience. You can visit them, you can discuss things there, have little talks inside. It's stunning, and it keeps expanding the amount you can bring in. You just open this on your laptop; this is all pixel streamed, you don't have to ingest the whole model. You can animate things, section through it, exploded axonometric, information overlay. So for design, it's absolutely the thing to communicate. And of course, then this metaverse itself becomes the design condition. So this is Liberland. We originally only had the incubator building; now we have the whole Liberland city. You can roam around, and they're using the parliament in world commerce. And this is Zaha Hadid City. It's just a snapshot. In the meantime, you have double the amount of buildings. We have many of our buildings in there, and you can roam around them and look at them. It's just wonderful, it's just fun. This is our Messner Mountain Museum, Corones, and you can overlook the city. And then you can jump into some of our SOHO China projects. This is the Shanghai project. Of course, it's a collage. This is a bit of a China segment with the exhibition bridge we've done and towers—Beijing towers, Shenzhen towers. They all come together in some kind of CBD simulation. This is the Costa Rica villa pulled into the landscape, and you can explore. It's great, of course, to show your portfolio to clients and let them sneak into that. But it's also great to use them to meet, have events, lectures, throw up screens, and for the clients to use it as the office building.
And that's the way you get—I mean, we're using Unreal now as a rendering machine, and so is AI. So it's very potent. We have all these models here because these are built projects, so we can have the nth degree of detail if you wanted to. Of course, there are limits in the total: there's engineering in the sense of polygon counts and refresh rates in metaverse design. But we're just showing here our portfolio. The next stage, you'll see this is also just virtual architectures. And what's the next stage? That's what we're thinking about, and that's why we use again the school, the AA, where we have done a number of metaverse projects, metaverse urbanism, where you can say, 'Okay, what if this is only there for the metaverse, not anticipating physical construction, or maybe it connects up with physical space?' Of course, we still want to see ourselves, and we have some anchoring of gravity for orientation so we're not flipping around. That would be disorienting. You have to use the competencies from understanding urban spaces and buildings to find each other, to find the situation, etc. But eventually this will also liberate itself from some of the tropes and typologies which we have.
So this is, for instance, and you can now LiDAR scan all the fabrics. This is hovering over Bedford Square, the AA. This is meant to be a virtual AA design school. You can locate it virtually. You can zoom in and there's a whole world inside of the design school itself: different departments—there's a fashion department, industrial design, and architecture design department. You can show your models, show your virtual dresses, roam around as avatars, meet, discuss. And we have built tools in the world where you can start sketching onto these. You can throw up a new screen and drop in models. We have tools—we have both an Unreal Engine team and a Unity team—where we also have this Gaga virtual office which we use to meet and sketch on 3D models. So this is student work, and of course it's all parametric. What else would it be? Because that's where you can maintain legibility in the face of complexity, where you have gradients and variation and gradual transformation and complexity and density without collapsing into visual chaos, if you like. There's lecture theaters, seminar rooms, different parts of the school.
Okay, and then of course I've now been instantiated as an avatar: facial scanning, my voice, all my writings uploaded into a large language model. I won't show you that here. We've done that with the whole class, and we kind of all replicated into the virtual AA Museum. The director, Theodore Spyropoulos, was himself a student and worked in class, and so we all exist. You can scan spaces like Covent Garden and place things into it, overlay things—AR, VR. One of the projects has a pavilion in Bedford Square. The whole Bedford Square has been scanned; you see the school hovering above. This was a project of Emergent Technologies in the square, which we just scanned one-to-one, tried with a lot of fidelity. You can go into the AA and you can see what's possible. This is a lecture, and we place a model just scanning and ingesting it and working on top of it. You'll see later our DRL studio is so dense with models, but it comes through. This is our DRL studio with a palimpsest of models of the last over 25 years. Theodore has been scanned and instantiated as the director.
