So good afternoon. I'm very happy to be here. It's been here a few times, but I'm sure these are all new faces since it was a two years. I guess my last lecture here and I'm very happy to see leadership of the university, the major professors who's been working with us and some of these great buildings are just finishing. So that's he's been with you a few years. In the meantime, these buildings get constructed and he can just, you know, go have a look at them, enjoy his work.
So, I'm going to talk about architecture and urbanism for the 21st century knowledge economy. So, I want to connect up what we're doing architecturally, the way we develop a new paradigm and style and sets of repertoire and values, how this connects up with socioeconomic transformations, innovation so that we are up to date, that we are moving with history, with the development of society and that's not always happening within the field. The field often times through a number of inertia partly also political inertia which don't give much room innovative building is a little bit behind I feel and you can develop buildings which might have been designed 100 years ago and nobody finds it curious. I do.
So, so what we're looking at here with our work is 21st century and could only have been created in the 20th century with fully exploiting the computational means of design but also fabrication but also you know that I'm not going to focus on this here but also testing and simulating social functionality of complex buildings etc. So that's truly 21st century in the sense that couldn't have been done 50 years ago but also I think it reflects more the complexity and dynamism of contemporary cities and what we would require.
Okay. So just a glimpse of the repertoire. So it's very diverse, rich the kind of morphologies employ the materials textures and there's a kind of diversity and richness which I would claim and argue exceeds in terms of versatility and diversity everything all the previous styles put together. But also has an internal you can recognize what belongs to newer to this kind of body of work. I call it parametricism at the latest stage I call tectonism because what you can notice is the complexity of differentiation but also the coherence and unity across differentiation and versatility.
It's the capacity to adapt the internal let's say deep spaces with intervisibility and deep layered spaces etc. That's what a lot of these buildings share the capability to fit into complex sites and nestle in that adapt to those also across different levels etc etc. So these are some of the buildings we're creating and we're going by now through all typologies all scales but also including all the other design disciplines not only urban design, architecture but also interior design, product design, furniture design, fashion design also graphic design. All the design disciplines are now encompassed within the firm. You're a large firm. You can do that and continuously develop new products.
Buildings there's a lot of them which are cultural buildings or landmarks where society wants to or city wants to the heightened sense of its place of culture communication. A lot of times these buildings set up new districts and their value and attractiveness kind of radiates out through urban field around like an incubator building. We have quite a few of those recently in one happening in Thailand one happening in close even these were all Chinese examples but we know also you know this isan so it's new research center and similarly a iconic landmark hub for communication exhibition research conferencing and then around technopololis knowledge economy district.
We often called in to design urban fields but also design these kind of let's say anchor buildings and this is just an example of you know interested to the detail of structure fabrication optimization through technological means and you can see that the diversity of morphologies patterns and materialities is further enriched than the stages of so that's what I call tectonism and there's a sense of beauty is it's really like the endless forms of nature what's particular about natural formations and inorganic and organic is that they are outcomes of processes of adaptation of forces being absorbed reacted to they're not invented but they kind of evolved into organ success here.
And that is you can perceive that and these are also all products which are hyper evolved with their optimized functionality and that's why they don't end up like boxes under grits which you don't find for good reason. You don't find such forms. So, so this is obviously to develop this capacity requires a lot of skills, a lot of insights and collaboration with experts. But there's a lot of help, a lot of whole universe of tools to anticipate and simulate some of these engineer morphologies for finding pressure. The world of grasshopper plugins that you use and then of course when it comes to realization you bring in the engineers and experts who then kind of take responsibility for that but you're on the right track hopefully with what you do.
And these are just but these are the components in the end it's really you're generating these urban fields these new technopole districts and we've done a lot of that and that was under the heading of parametric urbanism so the idea here is that you have that richness of buildings and certain order and hierarchy to the district and you have variation but you also have coherency and identity and legibility and that's different from what happens currently in the in the way of let's say a spontaneous urban development process which over the last 50 years generates only let's say disarticulated identityless seemingly random oblations which I naming garbage spill urbanization you know name me any urban accumulation even districts which are meant to be designed and planned which have any sense of coherency, elegance, beauty, legibility, their art.
You really have to go back to the 60s where you find you know Brasilia Chandigarh or modernist sort of white Tel Aviv or Art Deco Miami where you have a certain coherent urbanism it's relatively monotonous no longer fit for purpose and we can no longer or districts like this because society is way too dynamic and complex. We need to allow markets to kind of come in. That's the kind of challenge how we can how can we maintain that identity and create identity in this kind of context and that has been failing. And of course you go further back you have wonderful historic cities villages.
So I just go I want to focus on in a few steps reviewing the last few hundred years of the development of different urban formations and then architectural thinking and styles tracking socioeconomic developments. So feudalism didn't under feudalisms in the middle ages where these cities emerged they weren't planned. You can imagine that you start with a castle or with a small village and then you just build out concentrically. That's a nearly natural process that doesn't require much thinking because also kind of circular bounding is the most efficient form in terms of boundary versus you know area captured and once you start this it's a natural wood kind of bizarre particular for shape so it's going to be a kind of circular of course slightly distorted because of topography because of the river on one side and then you build concentric yard. So these are natural quasi natural formations and then they have a set of ingredients like the church the marketplace and then surrounding by more or less generic circles of buildings which are not differentiated. It's family and side of production of the handicaps.
So so when it comes to the so called let's say called the Renaissance the beginning of modernity where you have a certain consciousness and reflectiveness you have theory emerging and treatises emerging and a kind of design of cities emerging and architecture emerging for the first time doing this also up to then it was just tradition bound building it was just done what would always done it was naturally evolving growing without much thought And it was just a craft not a discipline. The Renaissance you had obviously architects Victor in terms of urbanism who innovated who kind of authored buildings cities brand new complete designs which also didn't exist in the period complete designs on whole sets of drawings plans sections elevations perspective to simulate and treatises explaining the innovations arguing for what they're doing and claiming individual authorship that's what we recognize These are architects who didn't exist as an architect before that.
But what is interesting when they came to first design the ideal city and they were building it so way accelerated urbanization. They were just rationalizing geometrically and postrationalizing also organizationally what had evolved previously. So it's basically the same thing. It's just rationalized and optimized and but then they had maybe a few more prominent buildings. This is early capitalism. This is kind of started northern Italy city states. It's a new social economic era beginning of capitalism.
But then the next step on stage of all this when you had what is interesting to notice in the Renaissance you have the simple closed form of the city. In terms of architecture you had relatively small buildings and they were themselves self-enclosed. They had each symmetry and you would only operate additive to make a larger complex. these they didn't think in terms of overarching complexes. So you can if you had to build a larger complex of buildings and here it was the kind of the palace of the Nichi was this was one building and that was the kind of government there was a church so these are relatively small units now I'm explaining now why the baroque looks so different and why that makes sense.
And now you have open cityscapes reaching out encompassing and running the axis through the horizon. This is you know because you have new entities. You don't have small city states you have a whole integrated national economy absolutism mercantilism. It's a next stage of capitalism with a lot of royal administration and so the you have much larger It's like a VI. Imagine you trying to build Versailles out of in this Renaissance fashion. It wouldn't integrate it. It would disintegrated fall apart and you wouldn't have an entity you could navigate and recognize.
So, so this kind of and then as one of these other absolutist cities you needed a number and I don't have the detail here but you have a global overarching symmetry where the asymmetric parts amplify the overall symmetry. You have curvature to tie things together. You have deep relief light and shadow for distance viewing instead of columns piling up small columns. You have colossal orders over three four levels. All of that is allowing to articulate something much larger. So is one example. The other example is the Vatican. St. Peter's I mean the Roman Catholic Church in that era is nearly you know was ruling over whole of Europe in terms of all the church administration colossal organizations there were a kind of follow on ruling organization of the Roman Empire if you like and look at the architecture of St. Peters I mean they're complex layered but integrated compositions with all these features of colossal order very deep relief and so on so forth so that is the explanation of the baroque I mean you've never heard that it's quite original thinking but I once you hear ah that makes sense because in Renaissance could not have articulated that kind of large scale entity now so that was absolutism.
This was the regime of France, the Roman Catholic kind of and that was basically the 17th and 18th century and now we hitting the 19th century. Well, first of all, did we what did we see? We see the French Revolution. And actually before that, a little bit before that, the glorious revolution in the United Kingdom. You have, you know, you had the Dutch Republic. So we actually have the period of bourgeois capitalist laissez-faire capitalist. So no longer absolutism controlling everything meaning handing over monopolies by royal privilege to all parts of industry. You had a free competitive process laissez-faire a huge dynamic.
The productivity advances only kick off at that point in 1800. absolutism did a little bit better than free but it's basically in terms of prosperity it was all flatlining and then there's a hockey stick diagram where things shoot up dramatically in this period and but that meant you couldn't you don't have this kind of central plan no new baroque city plan no new cultural new this but you had a free letting rip proliferation of industrial states and countryside energy and new agglomeration, new cities. Raw, you know, a kind of tumultuous roaring agglomeration like some of these images.
And it's interesting in terms of the architectural and aesthetic response. It was on the one hand historicism. You had many more types of buildings and more diverse that weren't coordinated. And you had suddenly proliferation of different styles. all the historical styles were brought to bear. The church into Gothic style, a courthouse in Doric style, a new kind of city council in the neo renaissance, some administrative building in neo baroque, universities, railway stations, etc., etc., and you had competitions, you know, they started right after the French Revolution. They had a system of competitions we're very familiar with for all public buildings, and there were so many of them. And you needed the diversity of styles which the 19th century is known for to distinguish and express and articulate all these.
But also the aesthetic. It's interesting if you read Loos the theorist of that era in his three essays on architecture he was celebrating this kind of tumultuous unpredictable uncontrolled agglomeration as that's the vital the picturesque is that aesthetic where you suddenly don't want these full order you like the unpredictable this the glo And that's what he's saying kind of in the detail order but in the overall he wanted that disorder. So again I'm tracking style and theory to what the requirements were of that era to flourish. And the confirmation that this was the right thing was of course in these incredible prosperity gains, per capita income gains which of course it took a century at the end of the century that was widespread in Western Europe.
Anyway, so so how about this one? It's a dramatic shift now. Again, it's a socioeconomic transformation. So we're moving from the era of laissez-faire capitalism to an era of socially managed capitalism on the one hand, but also a process of capital concentration took place. So let's say in 1850 you had 5,000 steel works. in 1900 down to three in a country of five. You had literally, you know, 10,000 banks condensed into five and then, you know, two and after the socialist revolutions into one state organized.
The thing is with this, you know, and this era you had, of course, first world war, the social revolutions, not only in Russia, in Russia, it went all the way to communism or socialism, but you had socialist revolutions in Germany, in France, the social democratic parties, the labor movement was to some extent in charge. the president of the new Weimar Republic, was a former worker, he was a social democrat, etc., etc. And you had all these social housing programs and you had planned city development and the big companies. They had they built whole factory towns, massive plants, but also they captured the consumer products for everybody. Cars for instance rolling out to everybody. Even in the before the first world war, you had started that. you had the electric general electrics in Germany developing you know electric products for it like etc. So that's the era of Fordism and you basically have mechanical mass production.
And Le Corbusier is kind of expressing this in his vision from 1922 and then reiterated in the late 20s this kind of form of modernism where you have separating out you know business district residential district or logistics I mean retail distribution district and a factory district separated out each very different from the other but each separate and internally fully repetitive. But this was working extremely well. It was another leap in productivity. Let's say if that was a 19th century was this, the 20th early 20th century was this growth rapidly. And in the 60s a whole nation like German nation of 60 million everybody had a car you know a prefabricated house with flowing water electricity packaged holidays you name it a television with only one or two channels etc etc every but everybody had the same more or less everybody was doing this 9 to 5 and and it you could separate things out there was not much communication necessary not much innovation potentials because you had these massive assembly lines, fixed machinery. Great to produce one product for the next 25 years unencumbered with slight variations and maybe add a second product.
And then everybody had more or less the same. So it also meant socially, materially, it was egalitarian because everybody will have the same car, everybody has the same house, everybody has the same washing machine, every has the same TV station that everybody chooses the same one or two channels. What's the point of having five cars, eating, you know, 10 times as much industrialized food. So there was everybody had to have this more or less the same physically and a function of the physical production systems state everything as well state plant and so on so forth. Of course, there was some wealthy people. They can then have these handtailored things which costs a thousand times. There's a very very few but you don't have everything in between which we come to now.
Now the but this paradigm was based on this mechanical mass production was starting in the early 1900s. The socialist revolution established this. So from the 20s to the 1970s and what happened and socialism was a development model. So the Soviet Union was after Stalin's crazy excesses under Khrushchev and on they were developing quite well. It was a modernization model. Similarly, I mean they had problems because it was so authoritarian which is but you know but England was more or less socialist nationalized industries everything. So it was very was it was very similar. But why did the Soviet Union collapse the whole Eastern block disappear and why did kind of Labor Party nationalized everything England transformed into kind of turbo capitalism?
It's technological revolution. It's a micro electronic and telecommunication revolution, right? Because suddenly you could you no longer have to physically tie into this everybody the same and very very slow innovation etc etc you could unleash see if there's an image you know from this endless muscle production which will still require a lot of people being plugged into the assembly line into something here where you a all these people are no longer required. What are they doing now?
And you can do much more variety of product. You can reprogram the robots models not for T for everybody but so you can differentiate the product and you therefore you get social differentiation, income differentiation and you also have a kind of how you contribute this all these people which are no longer there where in the various service sectors there but also there a lot of them are in research development in marketing finance etc. Thinking about new products all the time, every product, every work part of a project and not just plugged into you know lifetime assembly position. That dynamism is called post Fordism. These big hierarchies and huge companies break down to outsourcing everything into networks, realtime networks distributed across the globe.
A lot of independence for the departments. They kind of you know freewheeling and also no longer rolled out in suburbia green field factories, green field office complexes 9 to 5 doing the same thing whether it's insurance policy kind of administration or etc. But everybody moving back to the city center because they have to close each other because you have to communicate to the new product. How about marketing? What how about financing this? All the different discipline which need to and join technologically because we're not just redoing what we've been done for the last 20 years. Want to do something new every year. That means a massive intensification of communication because it pays now to innovate. Every day you can upload now a new service software service app and spread around to billions of people. So we all should be working on innovation continuously or you reprogram the robots or 3D print products and solutions etc.
That is a massive transformation and that's why we need a revolution also in urban development in architecture and the urban renaissance is part of it. So the first expression in architecture was what we call postmodernism. And as you might know it meant back to the historic city joining in and you know the whole from 1920 to 1980 or so these cities were all emptying out into the suburbs including work spaces. London was shrinking all through the 20th century until about the and then everybody moving back in. You find it everywhere. Chicago, New York, London, redensification. London is the fastest growing city of Europe. It was kind of shrinking city of Europe before that. So the transformation is massive. Of course, we can't quite architectures and urban planning is not allowing that to happen to the fullest.
We're not supplying this density and space. Everybody wants to come in to develop their career. They know they have to be in London or else you're stunted and left behind. But supplies are there. So housing prices skyrocket and you have to make hard choices. Very very bad for society. Anyway, so but so you get you know this is the look and feel of Fordism Brasilia endless repetition or in this department but then there's another this is you know the administrative headquarters there's another one residential they're different but then internally and this is a kind of image of the post Fordist agglomeration it's kind of diversity and this is Moscow city but It's the same in the city of London.
It's the only place in London. It's the square mile, the financial district where the fetters are off through a historic accident of the constitution that you don't have that nimism that political control where residents have the right to prevent anything which goes on. That's that's why the city of London is you know is so dynamic. I mean this is an old image new buildings popping up all the time you can hardly keep up with it and that is because it's the business themselves who run the council there there's no council it's very good for the economic and the you know economic potency is amazing I mean the part of GGP which is generated there so so this is a kind of lovely I mean but it's garbage spill after all that's the problem with You know, anything can be thrown in everywhere to some extent. Of course, it's all high value and there's some merit in the individual building, but in the urban agglomeration, it's just a menacing visual chaos.
But underneath this visual chaos at least where you have the degrees of freedom, you have an intricate but in this visible because not articulated programmatic order where things when you rent the space you very look where you fit in making these networks and which building close to which other companies close to the stock exchanges close to you know or you more kind of in the law kind of circles etc. So, so that is there's a hidden programmatic order. You can have a synergy cluster formation. The whole reason why you come there is because you want to network up with these. That's not articulated. That's a failing of our discipline. The problem is in other parts of London or the UK that's not allowed because there's some kind of bureaucrats prescribing land use patterns which are old not to be touched.
So if you have a site, you can't bring it to the fullest productivity of uses because you're not free to program it. And that's tragic. So you things are not aggregating. people therefore have to commute or waste time and take a taxi to their consultants instead of walking across the road and so anyway but the on the architectural side let's say if assuming it is a programmatically intricate order then we should sense that we should articulate and express these things belong together these work more closely together then these they all form an identity because they have something they share they're part of this knowledge economy hub and anyway so we wanted to generate create models which are adaptive which are internally varied.
For instance you know 200 different block size instead of equals then you can self sort and nest into this medium companies into medium sized blocks small companies into smaller blocks larger companies into large blocks or groups of blocks connected with bridges you can integrate with a lot of the surrounding networks. Maybe these are models of something which has coherency open-endedness also but identity urban identities.
Okay so this is just the sort of summary of these alignment of styles and socioeconomic epochs and we but we're focusing now here on the parameters in the global post-Fordist network society which has which shouldn't look the same like you know as wants to look very different from the modernist city and parametricism is something which evolved in parallel it evolved the first round of responsive architecture to this let's say post Fordism was postmodernism. It used it wanted diversity and expression of difference instead of monotony of sameness and it was didn't have repertoire at hand. So it grabbed on similarly to the 19th century where they just grabbed on everything which was available and used everything. So they redid this but now with a bit more creativity it turned kind of motif juggling eclecticism which is also the final phase of postmodernism.
They were able to and they used pop transformation made it more creative than the historicism and they were embedding into the historic center. So they wanted to also match up and embed. So that was very progressive. There also had new ideas of you know intersecting spaces already and it was called before it was called postmodernism they called it ad hocism which is idea of collage embedded in the you know Charles Jencks who is a theorist of what he then called in 76 the language of postmodernity when this was in full blow when it was just beginning he had a book called ad hocism he dropped that and switched to postmodernism maybe adhocism wasn't was not so bad but what It was interesting.
So the next stage was deconstructivism. What is deconstructivism? It's the same idea of layering of collaging of going into historic centers with new stuff you know Coop Himmelb(l)au placing buildings right on top of existing buildings and layering different kind of substructures. And it was leaving behind the restrictions of using the historical motifs. It was more open-ended and out of deconstructivism which I of course remember when you know Zaha Hadid architects one of the you know seven firms of so-called deconstructivism and along many others we evolved out of this into parametricism and there's huge advantages of parametricism because the deconstructivism was just collaging and layering disparate things without connecting without resonating without gradients and it became very quickly visual chaos.
The worst kind of visual chaos you can imagine where you draw something and you go to the toilet, you come back to your drawing and you can't find the spot where you were working on because it's can't find your own way in your own drawing. So how can you imagine this? I mean anybody kind of and one deconstruct drawing looks, you know, after layering it all in it's just a piece of garbage spill. one looks the same as everybody else. So why do you generate how can you generate identity and create and let's say legibility in this? No, but you have complexity and you have contingency and you have open-endedness but it collapses in this kind of garbage.
So this is something where we developed you know complexity, adaptability but also coherency variation and a lot of these fantastic spaces where you see the things below above all around deep vistas atria and so on. These are things instead of having the Fordism of segmenting everything to cells or separate floors, separate buildings where everything is kind of blind to each other because they can you just constant in Fordism you just concentrate what you're doing because it's centrally controlled. Everybody's told what to do. No lateral communication required. No many updates required here. You need to now in the contemporary world you need to continuously worry about. You can't concentrate for three weeks. You have to kind of checking whether you're still on the right track, whether there's a new tool, a new AI thing you should be using. You're wasting your time if you don't continuously update yourself.
If you don't stay in the office and here on the lunch or at the pub or go to the lecture or go to the exhibition opening in the you have to live in the center and be updated because if you're not, you're just totally wasting your time using old tools, you know, not catching you know a new regulation a new kind of paper you which gives you some new insights. So anyway, so that's I mean isn't it true Tokyo we it was you know celebrated in the 80s because it was so dynamic. We said don't we love the chaos of Tokyo? Yes, we love it compared to that kind of sterile monotony of a Moscow Fordist socialist suburb. Fair enough. But it's also menacing and disorienting and dysfunctional at the same time.
So we we need to basically reject both the monotony let's say of the first half of the century 20th century and we need to reject this visual chaos which you still have. This is still going on today. There's nothing on the horizon which has ever been built which overcomes that. the chaos, visual chaos, which is better than the monotony, don't get me wrong, but we can do better than that. What is going on in the last 60 years? So, we have this strange paradox. You have homogenization via too much difference. What does it mean? All these cityscapes look the same in the end because this proliferation of difference in a garbage spill makes all garbage spills are the same. Even though the actual ingredients, if you select them out, are not the same. They're quite unique, but we can't comprehend it. This is nearly a perceptual barrier for us.
And what I noticed all these cities are spills. The only thing which gives shape, form, recognizability, orientation are these natural forms like the river. If you had a valley or hill, this is something you can hold on to. And that also forces a bit of adaptation, a bit of structure particular in traditional cities for sure. So this is where you you know where you are instead of being kind of lost in a spill. And so this because a river has a direction, it has some pulse, it has some logic.
And so these natural formation you get complexity and variation but you also get coherency and legibility some law of transformation some vectors of transformation which are differentiating. So we started to use these tools to generate an alternative to the endless grid. The worst is a square grid because there is totally disorienting. You don't know which direction is what. I mean if you go home into these kind of suburban row houses, you can't find your own home even after 20 years living there. You have to concentrate to find your own house. You know at the same time if you're in a garbage spill you have no clue whatsoever because you can't comprehend a thousand things and remember amorphous.
So there's something which we developed. So and we can have tools. This is the way you can develop maybe the alternative to a grid which is a lot of variation but you order the variations from small to medium to large, from dense to less dense, from open to closed etc. And they have something and you can you have tools to measure network connectivity values from red very densely connected in the field to yellow to blue disconnected which might be okay for suburb living areas. So we have a lot of tools and we should think about all the network logics which are alternatives.
If you had a grid of points and you wanted to connect them, you can do that. I mean, this is nearly not possible from every point to every other point in a straight shot that just consumes too much area. But you can make this kind of network gridlike or you can have a ring, you can have a star, you can have a branching system, a spine, a linear meander and they're very differently. They all connect everything to everything else but with different detouring positions but also with different ordering. a central point strong hierarchy or multi-level hierarchy or non-hierarchical etc. So these are let's have a kind of sociological or social political ordering import. They're not neutral only technical issues.
And you can have kind of mechanisms of simulating or optimizing a network where the there's a kind of sweet spot between the total length of network and the minimization of detour system. this optimize detour system for instance for auto developer which we can often use it's quite fascinating and if you if you can compare all the different network types relative to two parameters the total length of course a cost in terms of construction but also a cost in terms of consuming land and then the amount of detour you have relative to a direct shot. There are two parameters and there's a sweet spot where you get most for bang for your buck in terms of most connectivity per additional road. That's curiously these kind of networks which look very similar to medieval street patterns sometimes or where you have a settlement which starts with destinations and it there's an emergent finding of network forms. It's quite interesting stuff.
And basically we're just using different tools to respond to have centers subcenters respond to topography with networks with fabric distributions to search for patterns and try to measure qualities out of this but also see how much of these patterns can be evolved through rigging closing opening new pass and so on. So you get something quite of intricate and organic and legible. And so we've done this kind of technohub condition. I mean let's say the typical industrial cluster let's say how do you call it industry park. What is it like? somewhere on the highway somewhere a zone fence around car parks around bunch of building we want to do a city.
So these are these the and we want to have you know different hubs a biomedical hub an IT hub a finance hub and we want to integrate residential and we want to make adaptive topography and use that and then connect everything. So we laid out the first kind of blocks so you have continuous curves continuous elevational curves things compress expand there's some degree of legibility you can use a topography every second street is pedestrian every second street is vehicular a lot of bridging and these curves run through so you have some kind of identity and coherency of a fabric of this district yet leaving a lot of degrees of freedom for each architect to come in.
So we've done the first 10 blocks the master plan and in the last 20 years it's been built out like this and you can go quite high but every building has participates in that flow of curves. It's and has this kind of deep big buildings with atria this kind of topology I think is right for this and has passages going through and so I think I'm very satisfied with this result. This is in Singapore. It's called One North. And we have a 20-year buildout with enormous amount degrees of freedom for the architects, but still some sense of coherency. It's not collapsed into total garbage.
So these are the kind of models where you start with a typology and even instead of having these five different topologies you could have everything in between from tower to courtyard via atrium tower etc from you where you fragment a thing where three fragments come together to make a courtyard to make an entity where the height is varying. So we have kind of a vast range of variability in a field like this very small very large empty clearance fry auto network picking up all the streets every second third and bundling them and feeding them through. You have cross tower and courtyard condition and everything in between and you get density where things get tight etc.
So these are old projects. This project the first the Singapore was you know roughly 20 years ago 20 even 24 years ago. This one was maybe 15 years ago. And you can see here you can on the one hand you adapt to the historic fabric, pick up the streets, pick up the grain and then rapidly transform into something else. But there's continuity connection. You can predict where the big buildings are, where the small buildings are, etc. And instead of current architecture would not be able to do that. They would just create a dramatic shift to something different. In modernism, they would suddenly have a grid with big buildings starkly next to disconnected from the fabric. That's the modernist version. The postmodernist, let's say, or contemporary version, but what we're doing would be stark difference from here and garbage spill in the middle.
So that's what we're up against and what we want to do. And we have typological differences and we're looking for affiliations. How the different types become part of a system and you have massive variation and you can see here different districts.
They follow kind of water line. They're different yet similar. They align, they respond. There's radiating and resonances through and it makes more sense than it's not a garbage spill but it's also not monotony. And you can have, you know, a primary station, you have an axis, you have both an axis and let's say semi-radial system and you can have a skyline building up where things concentrate, etc. So we have many of these and even if you had a train station or geometric center value map. This would be land value maps. That is an underlying rationality. The land value represents desirability and, you know, productivity potential. So the city should recognize that. I want, I expect, I would let the market follow this value map and this becomes a density and height map rather than some bureaucrat say everything stops at 22 meters. I mean there can't be any argument except I like it. Isn't it lovely that it is similar to the historic center? Aren't we kind of in love with the old days? Not if the cost is paralysis of development and in Europe we have been zero per capita growth for the last 15 years. I mean it's a crime and tragedy given robotics, giving algorithmic everything, giving AI. So it's just wasted away and architecture is only a part of it.
So we're doing these kind of sketches. Sorry, we had this before. And you can use new tools. And this is old. This is an ARL kind of 15 years ago, 20 years ago. You can run different functions into each other. So they have internal coherency, but they also have a lot of friction and surface interaction between each other, like these different colors for instance. And then you can script different geometries to the vector field picking up on density of velocity and directionality of the vector and generate these dense fields, varied fields in context, etc. And my analogy for this is the multi-species ecology. I wish, and this is not garbage spill, right? But of course, if you throw something at this, this will stick out like a piece of garbage because it's not woven in. It's not in it. It doesn't follow any laws and rules. But the natural environment, they have a topography. Then you have the south-facing vegetation, the north-facing. As you climb up, it becomes thinner and sparser and then just rock, then snow, etc. The river, you can know where the water is flowing. So these things are all scripted by nature because laws of nature, rules of dependency and that's why these are relatively ordered environments with a lot of degrees of freedom. That's why even dumb creatures like animals can find their way in this landscape because they just have to follow the topography. They have to follow the temperature. Then they find a certain fauna and flora and their habitat because this is lawful. And our environments don't have these lawfulness. So that's why even the most intelligent person cannot find their way in it because there's no inference potential. That's why they're degenerate environments.
And so we said, okay, can we do a cultural district where we have multiple authors? And that's the thing here. So these species, they are independent. There's no, I'm an atheist so there's no creator plan of creation which tells. They're self-coordinating through their reproduction dependencies on each other in an ecosystem. No central plan but it evolves that order because there is a kind of evolutionary selection process and pressure. It could be very inventive but eventually you have to find one way of surviving in this. And so instead of, so could it be in the city that you get this kind of order without central plan? Certainly you have it in nature. Yes, you could. How? Well, first of all, you need to have, you know, each sub-layer, each new entrepreneurial intervention would be like a species which has to have all the degrees of freedom to well adapt, fit in and optimize for its purposes. And there are similar members of the species trying to do something similar. There are other species which are symbiotic and settled with and so on. You can evolve that and you can simulate this in a studio of 12 students or so where they all do different projects and they also, they play from a more open-ended playbook, a paradigm which they all share and you get a lot of variety and richness and these are different projects, internal variety in each project. They all kind of have structural form-finding logics, they're not invented forms and then you have different, quite but still quite different versions of these kind of shell logics, conic curved folding logics, tensile logics and there's a sense of coherency, of sense of connection, etc. So that's what we're looking for. It's not perfect but as in the beginning of something which has variety, coherency, legibility within an urban formation and I wish the whole, you know, but if the whole discipline would be converging, would leave these retro styles behind and converge towards parameters and its later stage tectonism of course is more ambitious. It's much more rationalized. It means it takes into account many more valid criteria of optimization and therefore these optimization criteria cohere. Everybody has to deal with the similar climate and sun exposure, so they all share something which makes them similar and you can see the sun direction on an overcast day in a field. There's many other things which they share. So that's the attempt which we're trying to do.
Look, there's nothing perfect. These are different urban schemes and development schemes we're doing. You also embed into local climate. You embed into, even, you know, if you can learn from the vernacular of this world, you know, there is kind of biomimetic research when you're trying to learn from all these species because they have had millions of years to adapt. They have hyper-efficient and effective solutions. But similarly there's a kind of learning from the vernacular, some kind of vernacular mimetics because you had thousands of years of various civilizations adapting to local conditions, resource materialities, environmental adaptations, passive systems. They had to be very intelligent and clever, you know, exposure to rain, wind, sun, harsh weathers. They found ways to, they didn't have machines. They didn't have a glass box and burn the fuel. But they had to, you know, be sophisticated to this. And this intelligence we can retrieve of course not one-to-one because we need larger structures, bigger cities, etc. But anyway, so there's this kind of sense of learning from the vernaculars, etc. and developing differentiated urban fields and, you know, adapting to landscapes and, you know, using the opportunities. This kind of valley, all the residences because on the steep curve they're small units, they're on the hill sharing the water and then on the plateaus you have the industrial buildings, the labs, the deeper and larger buildings and that's an ordering capacity instead of saying flatten everything, grid on and then, you know, off you go. So this is a paradigm, a paradigm of cherishing adaptiveness to local conditions, very site-specific but also regional-specific, culture-specific. You know, in China we use a lot of courtyards, in the Middle East we use a lot of courtyard typologies, that makes cultural sense. We have all these kind of urban development, you know, revitalization of a harbor into knowledge economy hub and certain kind of bordering, converging all the lines onto the harbor and still having a lot of these kind of block topologies, etc. Also, some of these settlements are, you know, harsh climates and in beautiful landscapes, building something which doesn't look like garbage despoiling the landscape. You know, grow them like a species which fits into the region, into the landscape, into the climate.
And you could also be quite extraordinary, you know, exploiting a kind of topographical condition and, you know, using tools to explore, you know, and these are the dependency networks. Parametric models are inherently basically they're kind of laws of nature. You script every action has a reaction. What are the dependencies? I mean that's all, that's what you find in nature. You can invent them just also just to articulate to show dependencies, the sole connection, what belongs together is also functional but also is legible and to make strong urban form, to let people participate and not be blind to what's where. And if there's a hierarchy, if there's a kind of central place which everything should relate to and you can express it across highways, across distance. And we do this and how do you generate unity across this huge cut of the highway? And this animation here is got running against the grain of the highway, you know. So, this is strong form, legible form, generating an identity which yet embeds into the condition. I mean, it's difficult if you embed into garbage still. It's hard. But we have these kind of attempts to generate a legible form where the skyline tells you how to move, where you're not in a city, you're desperately looking at the blue dot on your iPhone GPS and therefore you don't perceive anything. You just panically that you find the spot and then you only go to the spot you know you wanted to go to. You're not browsing with a sense of continuous, easy, intuitive orientation and focus on what you, subliminally you know where you are. You keep kind of understanding you're moving down the gradients like a bacteria moves down the nutrition gradient. And these are kind of models we have, you know, blocks but open blocks, penetrable blocks. The crescendo of building up height, bridges, atria, courtyards, etc.
And again, this is a new London scheme. We had three, AADL, we had three schemes between City of London, I mean square mile, the financial district and Canary Wharf which is kind of unutilized wasteland frozen in time, whopping low-grade utilization because we don't touch this kind of, these are two-story row houses, they're sacrosanct. Some people have gifted these places and they can prevent anything and kind of, you know, kill the GDP development of the whole nation because they want to be cozy. No, we shouldn't do that. You know, you need to let rip and let everybody from whole of Europe come to this great metropolis and become hyper-productive instead of kind of shriveling and wasting away in some suburb or provincial town. So this is what, you know, what a team of three, four can generate in each, you know, these schemes and go all the way to the, you know, structural optimization, bridges, atria, architectural development, knowledge economy design. That's what you can learn and what you can achieve after 12 months of AADL. I mean there's the first six months of workshops and tooling up and then there is a project which we're running for a year which is roughly you can be proud of and show that and you're actually surpassing many of the firms' promise. You don't get the degrees of freedom in England to do this but these are the kind of projects. There's another one, Lee Valley, as well as there's one right close to Dartford I can show you. So you have diversity, richness, you have multiple layers, you have deep relief with respect to sun exposure. I'm not showing the details here. And this is one you can recognize where it is crossing the water and having, it's tough. It's a difficult site. These two sides, they're thin. How do you hold tension? How do you radiate order? How do you feel parts of belonging yet adapting to local conditions? Etc., etc. So, and this whole project, three people modeling everything into the interior again within a one year and then we do this stuff in the office. Always feeds off, after they've done this they come join and do that in the office.
And we do these kind of knowledge hub, knowledge economy hubs in China. They don't like to, you know, they don't yet attacking the revitalization of their kind of cities so they're going a bit greenfield campus and so on. I think it's, but still it's important to get something dense and integral and open and communicative. This is a unicorn city, so-called, in Chongqing. So unicorn meaning, you know, a startup city. Find the next unicorn. And look, you only need to find one out of a thousand. And the profit for society and the world is massive. Imagine the amount of prosperity gain Google delivered to the globe. Whatever they're earning as a profit is only a fraction of that huge boost of everybody's wellbeing and productivity. So this is, and we've done this. This is unicorn tech city. We have a highway cutting right mid. So, we said no, we're generating a whole plate of connection. This is unusual because we have roughly 25 buildings, the whole urbanism, beautiful waterfront. And we designed the master plan. We said we can do all of the buildings. We have the power. We have the team. We have the parametric modeling. We generate variety. There's residences, offices, retail areas, public buildings, exhibition buildings. So, we've done the whole bloody thing. And there's some wonderful massive, you know, the whole building lifted up, cantilevering towers, atrium, residential, and there's unity and variety. And there's this kind of big plate connecting it across the highway. We did some kind of navigation AI studies. We trained some avatars to learn from, you know, quick navigation and what would recognizability of features which guide you through this. And it's super but quite dense yet garden city kind of sense feeling as well. And it's been kind of delivered by relatively small team in breakneck time.
You can see it's always render-built. I mean these are close matches. This is the first building we put out. They had, we had a conference recently. I was speaking there. This is a showroom, lecture hall, exhibition spaces, etc. It's already finished. I just let you see. I mean it's, that's the kind of productivity we can deliver and the kind of variety and diversity of ideas, of function, volume, facade to have unity and variety and some degree of legibility where's the offices, where's the residences, mixed use, etc. So we're quite proud of it. It's the biggest project so far. It's over a million square meters. And we believe in urbanism and architecture coming together so that architectural features do urban work in terms of orientation and semiotic indication, etc.
Sorry, now the latest iteration for us is using AI and it's particularly potent when it comes to urban developments. So every project now we're training up a new network. We have stable diffusion running in the background which is open source. We're running our networks for each building, but also particularly for urban. If you, you know, if you have some color-coded map that's not going to convince decision makers and even you don't know yourself what you're actually proposing. So we have this whole kind of repertoire of building types, of urban plans and we can train up a model and then we can bring it in and you can have a, you know, you can color code, okay, where's the water, where's the green, where's the roads, where's what kind of building type and then it feeds in and generates the variations and that's very good for generating, you know, exploring the search space and then judging where to go next, how to hone in and how to kind of then run subsidiary models, etc. And in the end of course parametric modeling and detailing and so on so forth. So I think that's quite potent and you can run several models and you can calibrate the degree percentage by which they are impacting or to which extent is the general stable diffusion model impacting so you generate more unexpected, anything goes or you constrain it more. I think it's potent. We realized about two years ago that this is happening so we have a whole team continuously monitoring, building tools. We're connecting with different AI companies. I'm in the board of some of them and so you can calibrate the degree to which a generic cityscape or various other models dominate and it's very kind of important. It's fast-moving and something which makes us of course very productive and competitive because the demand of getting even into competition now in China for instance to get on the shortlist you have to get a whole photorealistically rendered sketch, inverted commas. So there's a competitive pressure is getting, without this forget it.
And they have some more interesting ideas for urban development. So this is a project we're very proud of and we have written papers on it and we have various explorations. This is what I call the participatory urban development platform and I'll explain you what it is. This is basically the first attempt. It's in Roatan, Honduras where there's a relatively free city where the land owners can develop their own planning rules totally unencumbered. Why? Because the government said, central government said our bureaucracy is so corrupt, bribery, exorbitant. We need to disempower our own bureaucracies including the courts and give freedom to the developers and their own responsibility. So here we have a situation where we are with our clients, we are crafting the urbanism and rules of urbanization and we say maximal freedom and participation of end users in the development process. So basically what this is, so we have a site and this is for a residential unit but there's also a bit of co-working, a bit of kind of, we have voxels and people can go online, it's a 3D model, they can place reservations and can say I want this voxel, my unit, I'm aggregating it of a number of voxels so I can determine how big my unit is, how many levels, this way is an L-shape, is what shape and I wanted to have these or that program in it, these rooms. And I can drop in modules and claim modules and then anybody else coming in can see who's claimed what and say hey I like this guy what he's doing. I want to be next to it. Let me place this and that next to it. They can share space. So it's about synergy clusters and about degrees of freedom. So that the product now in the current world you have to, a developer has to invent the product mix. Actually it's totally prescribed by the planners because they tell you how much residential, how many four-bedroom, how many three-bedroom, how many two-bedroom, size of each room, need a balcony, etc. Not allowed a second entrance. So in the end it's all some kind of rule system by planners and then you have to sell that. Good luck. I mean it's only happening because there's so much pressure and lack of product in London that anything will be sold and if you have to kind of subsidize half of the product by taking from some and giving to others very unfairly then so be it. Anyway, so this is something where you should take out the kind of product market risk of product market fit where the potential buyers or tenants configure their entity and also configure it where they want it, with whom they want it and how much they want it and also then interior fit-out and public space, etc.
You can say okay they can make a, it's also meant to be, it's like a dating site. There's a kind of underlying network of messaging, who wants to share tennis court with me, who wants to share terrace with me, who wants to share a gym with me. So instead of having it a one gym where nobody goes to or, you know, whatever. And so then downstream all these modules are parametric, there's a kind of fabrication downstream integrated. So these modules are all easy to build and then we have a kind of, we ship a container with a little micro-factory, robotics to the place and then they're off they go and this is the kind of things you end up with. I mean they're relatively small units, etc. but again you can have double-height spaces or not and you can have a very small single floor or what have you and you get this whole range and you don't have to, I mean the worst thing is of course the planner telling you what you have to deliver. It takes all the fun out of the developer and of the architect. The developer can only, basically the developers here they are only competing on gaming the system, on knowing the councilors, on negotiating down this or that. They can't compete on product because it's all fixed. But it's incredibly boring for architects and developers. So anyway, the final thing here is this kind of spin-off of this to expand and bring to London at least fictionally because in London you couldn't do that. Problem is this couldn't be in London because you have to, it's all fixed already but in most other jurisdictions you have to put in a planning application where everything is fixed. What do you mean it's going to be determined by XYZ and so on so forth? You know, but here we've put this out. You can look that up. This is, you know, Epic Games Fortnite creative reimagine London. So this is the same game but directly coming in multiplayer. I mean it's not, and this is obviously not really to be built unfortunately. And placing modules and within minutes generating a whole kind of waterfront development, mixed use. And this has had enormous uptake and there's a whole archive of solutions out there and we're going to develop this further and we have another client somewhere in the Middle East who is willing to apply some of that and go with some of this. But, you know, you need degrees of freedom which we should all have here, but we don't. So, and you can also, this depicts that whole part of London kind of photorealistically at scale. You can roam around it, find the spot where you want to place your ideas. And off we go. That's kind of user participation.
What the next step for us wanted to be was saying, okay, this people come in and we negotiate with Epic. It's still there. You can, people can go back to this and share with their friends and visit what they've done. These are all there to let them use it, which motivates them further. You know, do their virtual showroom, do their virtual office, do their so and so forth. I mean that's the idea and that's another lecture but we're having a whole metaverse which we're developing by the way for virtual spaces. This is simulating real spaces but they could also be used as virtual spaces without being built. They can, you know, use them. So, but if you kind of constrain it and you have some kind of rule systems and the repertoire which fits, you get a degree of coherency and legibility in these creations. And this is already for the next project. And the fun thing is you're straight in roaming and speaking and showing around and exploring and inhabiting, being inside the thing. If you wanted to real-time instead of leaving text messages, seeing what's going on, navigating the space real-time instead of looking up things and typing up things, etc. And finally we have developed this kind of Zaha metaverse city for clients to show but we can also start using it. We composed about, you know, 30 of our buildings into 3D environment with landscape with some of our kind of more remote buildings looking in. And this is digital twinning or anticipating or simulating. And the fun thing is the power of these kind of tools. You got all of this geometry and you can real-time go in and the level of detail, the photorealism will satisfy any architect's heart. You know what you're presenting, what you've done. I mean these are mostly built, some were unbuilt but these are the potentials for the contemporary, for the 21st century. And what I find fascinating that if you look at metaverse but also any AI, while in the real world and even any awards like the AIA, parametricism is 0.0% of contributions. Google AI architecture, 80% is parametricism, not yet tectonism but we're teaching tectonism. And metaverse, it's also parametricism. So parametricism, if you look at the desire, if it's made easy and you have the young generation playing, that's what everybody wants, that's what everybody loves, everybody senses intuitively that's the architecture we want and that gives me enormous amount of hope because I thought I was kind of getting frustrated that parametricism seems to be kind of not taking off. I think AI and metaverse together will make this take off in the next 10 years. You know, jump on the train or be left behind. I mean this is what we can do. These are, you know, every building has the interiors, has the reflection, has the materiality, and you can roam around and explore and enjoy. And this is part of our, we have this metaverse. Look it up. Mettopia. This is one district of Mettopia. Liberal Land is another one. The incubator building with many kind of participants. We had virtual Venice Biennale. We have many events for the design discipline in Mettopia and I think this delivers, I think, an engine of progress, development, acceleration for architecture which I hope will bring on parametricism and tectonism as it deserves to be taken on. Thank you.
Can you take any questions? Yeah.
