In a way learning how to write is like trying to master a foreign language, or learning to analyse poetry, your skill improves progressively, the horizon of perceivable nuances widening with every step you take. (via Eleonora)
I don’t like throwing things away; that’s why I have too much stuff (or rather, shit, à la George Carlin) in my apartment.
But when you finally get around to parsing through all that has accumulated, it can often yield unexpected delights:
MILTON
Obeying God
the hierarchy of the universe
felix culpa
Book III – invocation of divine light
conversation
Muse – HS – syncretism contrariety – infernal + admirable (devilish engine)
Satan can’t leave Hell. Pride keeps him from submission
3 warp-speed architecture tales
Full transcript of Bjarke Ingels @TED 2009
——————————
0:12
The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, sort of the architectural object – is the latest tower in London a gherkin, a sausage or a sex tool?
0:29
So recently we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn’t have to invent it; it already existed – in the form of a comic book. So we actually copied the format of the comic book to tell the story behind-the-scenes, how our projects actually evolved through adaptation and improvisation, to the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world.
We call this comic book “Yes Is More”, which is obviously an evolution of an idea of some of our heroes – in this case it’s Mies van der Rohe (“Less Is More”); he triggered the Modernist revolution. After him followed the postmodern counter-revolution – Robert Venturi saying “Less is a Bore”. After him Philip Johnson introduced (you could say) promiscuity or at least openness to new ideas with “I’m a Whore”. Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a time of global financial crisis.
What we’d like to say with “Yes Is More” is basically: trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined as who or what we are against. The cliché of the radical architect is this angry young man rebelling against the establishment, or this idea of the misunderstood genius frustrated that the world doesn’t fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we’re much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world.
In fact, I think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process, this famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through series of generations of design meetings; at each meeting there’s way too many ideas – only the best ones can survive. Through a process of architectural selection we might choose a really beautiful model, or we might have a very functional model be made so that they have mutant offspring, and through generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and hotel in Copenhagen.
2:47
The design process was real tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved, this idea of a rational tower, that melds together with the surrounding city, expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but public on the outside as well as on the inside with the library.
3:10
But Darwin doesn’t only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a sub-species branches off, and quite often we sit in a design meeting and discover that there’s this great idea that doesn’t really work in this context, but for another client in another culture it could really be the right answer to a different question. As a result, we never throw anything out, we keep our office almost as an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it.
3:38
And what I’d like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell you the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world.
3:51
The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. We saw this guy, Haibao; he’s the mascot of the Expo and he looks strangely familiar. In fact, he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition, we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn’t exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn’t think so either so we lost.
4:21
But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman, who saw our design and said, “Wow! That’s the Chinese character for the word ‘people’.” Apparently this is how you write “people”, as in the “People’s Republic of China”. We even double-checked. At the same time we even got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai creative industry week. So we thought this was too much of an opportunity.
4:44
We hired a feng shui master, we scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and we went to China.
4:55
So the People’s Building, as we called it (these are our two interpreters reading the architecture), went on the cover of the Wen Hui Bao newspaper, which got Mr. Liang YuChen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. We had the chance to explain the project, and he said: Shanghai is the city in the world which has most skyscrapers, but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People’s Building he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China.
5:27
We obviously profoundly agreed with him. Unfortunately Mr. Chen [sic] is now in prison for corruption.
5:45
But like I said, Hai Bao looks very familiar because he is actually the Chinese character for people, and they chose this mascot because the theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” (i.e. sustainability). We thought that Sustainability has grown into being this neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good – you’re not supposed to take long warm showers, you’re not supposed to fly on holidays because it’s bad for the environment, and gradually you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life.
6:17
We thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant. It’s one of the biggest countries of the world; [Denmark] one of the smallest. China’s symbolized by the dragon; in Denmark we have the national bird – the swan. China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People’s Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Shung, or Hans Christian Andersen, as we call him. That means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Matchstick Girl, and The Little Mermaid. It’s almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture.
7:02
The biggest tourist attraction in China is The Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that could be seen from the moon; this picture taken in Denmark is of the Little Mermaid, that actually can hardly be seen from the canal tours. And it shows the difference of the two cities – Copenhagen/Shanghai, modern/European – but then we looked at recent urban development.
7:23
We noticed: this is a Shanghai street 30 years ago – all bikes, no cars; this is how it looks today – all traffic jams, bicycles have become forbidden in many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we’re actually expanding the bicycle lanes; a third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city.
7:43
So we thought: why don’t we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate a thousand bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the Expo, go straight to the Danish Pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions.
7:57
Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has actually gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the Harbor Bath in Copenhagen, continuing the public realm into the water. We thought that these Expos quite often have a lot of state-financed propaganda, images, statements – but no real experience. Just like with the bike, we don’t talk about it but you can try it.
8:21
With the water, instead of talking about it we’re going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people object that it doesn’t sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for balance, so we can actually we can hitch a ride for free.
8:51
In the middle of this harbor bath, we are going to put the actual Little Mermaid – so the real mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes – when she’s gone, we’re going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is a loop of exhibition and bikes; when you go to the exhibition you’ll see the mermaid and the pool, you’ll walk around and start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out onto the rest of the Expo.
9:17
When we actually won the competition, we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project, and to our surprise, we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese State Censorship.
9:30
The first thing – the China map missed Taiwan. It’s a very serious political issue in China; we will add on. The second thing – we had compared the swan to the dragon. The Chinese State said, “suggest change to Panda”.
9:47
When it came out in Denmark that we’re actually going to move our national monument, the National People’s Party rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid, so for the first time I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting, because in the morning from 9 to 11 they were discussing the bailout package – how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy – and then at 11 o’ clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1 they were debating whether or not to send the mermaid to China.
10:25
To conclude, if you want to see the mermaid from May to December next year, don’t come to Copenhagen because she’s going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai WeiWei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda.
10:46
The second story that I’d like to tell actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over this landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the “Leonardo Di Caprio balcony”. They formed a vertical backyard where on a nice summer day you’ll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters.
11:13
The house is a distortion of a square block, trying to zigzag it to make sure that all the apartments look at the street views instead of into each other. Until recently this was the view of my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. He said he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure.
11:34
We thought that rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don’t we actually turn all of the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars, and because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we cut up the volume, so we wouldn’t block the view from MY apartment.
12:00
Essentially, the parking is occupying the deep space beneath the apartments, and up in the sun you have a single layer of apartments, that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a metropolitan view, and a dense urban location. This is our first architectural model; this is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially the apartments cover the parking; the access through this diagonal elevator is actually a standard product from Switzerland. In Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators.
12:38
And for the facade of the parking – we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. We discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. Since we had always referred to the project as “The Mountain”, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3000 square meter artwork.
13:11
If you go back into the parking into the corridors, it’s almost like traveling into a parallel universe, from cars and colors into this south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facade. If you go even further it turns into this green garden, and all the rainwater that drops on The Mountain is actually accumulated. There’s an automated irrigation system that makes sure that this landscape of gardens in one or two years would transform into a Cambodian temple ruin completely covered in green.
13:45
The Mountain is our first built example of what we would like to refer to as “architectural alchemy” – this idea that you can actually create if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don’t have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both.
14:10
As an architect, it’s really hard to set the agenda. You can’t just say that now I’d like to do sustainable city in Central Asia because that’s not how you get the commissions. You always have to adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen in the turmoil of the world.
14:28
One last example is that last summer we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. We were really excited about this opportunity. Unfortunately it was the National Bank of Iceland.
14:52
At the same time, we had a visitor; a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see The Mountain, and he got very excited by this idea that you can actually make mountains out of architecture. Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia, so he asked us if we can imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan.
15:19
We took the commission, and we made this small movie that I’d like to show. We quite often make little movies; we always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song –
[Twin Peaks intro theme starts playing as film begins]
15:36
Baku is a crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we’re planning, almost like a diagram of their flag. Our main idea was to sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan, and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable by human life. Then we placed these mountains on the island, surrounding this central green valley, almost like a central park.
16:06
What makes it interesting is that the island right now is a piece of desert; it has no vegetation, it has no water, it has no energy, it has no resources. So we designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings, and all the excess fresh/waste water is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into a green lush landscape.
16:41
An urban development normally happens at the expense of nature; in this case, it’s actually creating nature. The buildings don’t only invoke the imagery of the mountains; they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind, they accumulate solar energy, they accumulate water – and so actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem.
17:10
We recently presented the masterplan; it has gotten approved. This summer we are starting construction documents of the first two mountains, in what’s going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia.
17:37
Just to round off, in a way you can see how The Mountain in Copenhagen evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan, and with a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in ten years it can be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you.
The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, sort of the architectural object – is the latest tower in London a gherkin, a sausage or a sex tool?
So recently we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn’t have to invent it; it already existed – in the form of a comic book. So we actually copied the format of the comic book to tell the story behind-the-scenes, how our projects actually evolved through adaptation and improvisation, to the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world.
We call this comic book “Yes Is More”, which is obviously an evolution of an idea of some of our heroes – in this case it’s Mies van der Rohe (“Less Is More”); he triggered the Modernist revolution. After him followed the postmodern counter-revolution – Robert Venturi saying “Less is a Bore”. After him Philip Johnson introduced (you could say) promiscuity or at least openness to new ideas with “I’m a Whore”. Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a time of global financial crisis.
What we’d like to say with “Yes Is More” is basically: trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined as who or what we are against. The cliché of the radical architect is this angry young man rebelling against the establishment, or this idea of the misunderstood genius frustrated that the world doesn’t fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we’re much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world.
In fact, I think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process, this famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through series of generations of design meetings; at each meeting there’s way too many ideas – only the best ones can survive. Through a process of architectural selection we might choose a really beautiful model, or we might have a very functional model be made so that they have mutant offspring, and through generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and hotel in Copenhagen.
The design process was real tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved, this idea of a rational tower, that melds together with the surrounding city, expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but public on the outside as well as on the inside with the library.
But Darwin doesn’t only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a sub-species branches off, and quite often we sit in a design meeting and discover that there’s this great idea that doesn’t really work in this context, but for another client in another culture it could really be the right answer to a different question. As a result, we never throw anything out, we keep our office almost as an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it.
And what I’d like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell you the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world.
The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. We saw this guy, Haibao; he’s the mascot of the Expo and he looks strangely familiar. In fact, he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition, we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn’t exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn’t think so either so we lost.
But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman, who saw our design and said, “Wow! That’s the Chinese character for the word ‘people’.” Apparently this is how you write “people”, as in the “People’s Republic of China”. We even double-checked. At the same time we even got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai creative industry week. So we thought this was too much of an opportunity.
We hired a feng shui master, we scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and we went to China.
So the People’s Building, as we called it (these are our two interpreters reading the architecture), went on the cover of the Wen Hui Bao newspaper, which got Mr. Liang YuChen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. We had the chance to explain the project, and he said: Shanghai is the city in the world which has most skyscrapers, but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People’s Building he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China.
We obviously profoundly agreed with him. Unfortunately Mr. Chen [sic] is now in prison for corruption.
But like I said, Hai Bao looks very familiar because he is actually the Chinese character for people, and they chose this mascot because the theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” (i.e. sustainability). We thought that Sustainability has grown into being this neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good – you’re not supposed to take long warm showers, you’re not supposed to fly on holidays because it’s bad for the environment, and gradually you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life.
We thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant. It’s one of the biggest countries of the world; [Denmark] one of the smallest. China’s symbolized by the dragon; in Denmark we have the national bird – the swan. China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People’s Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Shung, or Hans Christian Andersen, as we call him. That means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Matchstick Girl, and The Little Mermaid. It’s almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture.
The biggest tourist attraction in China is The Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that could be seen from the moon; this picture taken in Denmark is of the Little Mermaid, that actually can hardly be seen from the canal tours. And it shows the difference of the two cities – Copenhagen/Shanghai, modern/European – but then we looked at recent urban development.
We noticed: this is a Shanghai street 30 years ago – all bikes, no cars; this is how it looks today – all traffic jams, bicycles have become forbidden in many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we’re actually expanding the bicycle lanes; a third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city.
So we thought: why don’t we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate a thousand bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the Expo, go straight to the Danish Pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions.
Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has actually gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the Harbor Bath in Copenhagen, continuing the public realm into the water. We thought that these Expos quite often have a lot of state-financed propaganda, images, statements – but no real experience. Just like with the bike, we don’t talk about it but you can try it.
With the water, instead of talking about it we’re going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people object that it doesn’t sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for balance, so we can actually we can hitch a ride for free.
In the middle of this harbor bath, we are going to put the actual Little Mermaid – so the real mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes – when she’s gone, we’re going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is a loop of exhibition and bikes; when you go to the exhibition you’ll see the mermaid and the pool, you’ll walk around and start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out onto the rest of the Expo.
When we actually won the competition, we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project, and to our surprise, we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese State Censorship.
The first thing – the China map missed Taiwan. It’s a very serious political issue in China; we will add on. The second thing – we had compared the swan to the dragon. The Chinese State said, “suggest change to Panda”.
When it came out in Denmark that we’re actually going to move our national monument, the National People’s Party rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid, so for the first time I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting, because in the morning from 9 to 11 they were discussing the bailout package – how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy – and then at 11 o’ clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1 they were debating whether or not to send the mermaid to China.
To conclude, if you want to see the mermaid from May to December next year, don’t come to Copenhagen because she’s going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai WeiWei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda.
The second story that I’d like to tell actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over this landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the “Leonardo Di Caprio balcony”. They formed a vertical backyard where on a nice summer day you’ll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters.
The house is a distortion of a square block, trying to zigzag it to make sure that all the apartments look at the street views instead of into each other. Until recently this was the view of my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. He said he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure.
We thought that rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don’t we actually turn all of the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars, and because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we cut up the volume, so we wouldn’t block the view from MY apartment.
Essentially, the parking is occupying the deep space beneath the apartments, and up in the sun you have a single layer of apartments, that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a metropolitan view, and a dense urban location. This is our first architectural model; this is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially the apartments cover the parking; the access through this diagonal elevator is actually a standard product from Switzerland. In Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators.
And for the facade of the parking – we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. We discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. Since we had always referred to the project as “The Mountain”, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3000 square meter artwork.
If you go back into the parking into the corridors, it’s almost like traveling into a parallel universe, from cars and colors into this south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facade. If you go even further it turns into this green garden, and all the rainwater that drops on The Mountain is actually accumulated. There’s an automated irrigation system that makes sure that this landscape of gardens in one or two years would transform into a Cambodian temple ruin completely covered in green.
The Mountain is our first built example of what we would like to refer to as “architectural alchemy” – this idea that you can actually create if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don’t have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both.
As an architect, it’s really hard to set the agenda. You can’t just say that now I’d like to do sustainable city in Central Asia because that’s not how you get the commissions. You always have to adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen in the turmoil of the world.
One last example is that last summer we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. We were really excited about this opportunity. Unfortunately it was the National Bank of Iceland.
At the same time, we had a visitor; a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see The Mountain, and he got very excited by this idea that you can actually make mountains out of architecture. Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia, so he asked us if we can imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan.
We took the commission, and we made this small movie that I’d like to show. We quite often make little movies; we always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song –
[Twin Peaks intro theme starts playing as film begins]
Baku is a crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we’re planning, almost like a diagram of their flag. Our main idea was to sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan, and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable by human life. Then we placed these mountains on the island, surrounding this central green valley, almost like a central park.
What makes it interesting is that the island right now is a piece of desert; it has no vegetation, it has no water, it has no energy, it has no resources. So we designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings, and all the excess fresh/waste water is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into a green lush landscape.
An urban development normally happens at the expense of nature; in this case, it’s actually creating nature. The buildings don’t only invoke the imagery of the mountains; they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind, they accumulate solar energy, they accumulate water – and so actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem.
We recently presented the masterplan; it has gotten approved. This summer we are starting construction documents of the first two mountains, in what’s going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia.
Just to round off, in a way you can see how The Mountain in Copenhagen evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan, and with a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in ten years it can be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you.
What is Christmas. Macy’s would have us believe it’s all about the Christmas presents. Pine trees adorned with colorful glass balls. The big fat dude with the big white beard ridiculously dressed in red and white, somehow lifted in the air by eight reindeer? The quintessence of Christmas indeed.
This annual ritual is honored, for the most part, worldwide. Yet the myth of Santa Claus, whether or not you saw Mommy kissing him last night, is, as most of us know past elementary school, simply fabricated to bribe children into being good throughout the year.
I never cared for this annual gift-giving ritual; I’ve always ignored the other, more personal one (birthdays) anyways. I understand that presents are often considered markers of compassion, that they embody a lot more than is represented by the price tag.
Yet as we go through the walks of life, the more people we are acquainted with, the more days of the year birthdays as a group occupy. It grows to become such a Herculean labor: religiously trudging onto Facebook walls to leave some words of wishes, and to think that someone would regard the Catholic tradition of exchanging a greeting of peace (after the Lord’s Prayer) as strange. The Mad Hatter’s un-birthday party seems quite sensible in comparison with our birthday rituals.
By this point most people will reject the allegation that they ever subscribed to a consumerist view of the holiday. A common defense will be one based on family reunion, but why do it only once a year if that is what matters?
The truth is: Christmas is a religious holiday. Everyone knows that – half of the carols are about Christ and his birth. But the secular arm of society had to go make up songs about winter, snow, reindeer, snowman, bells and ascribe to it a vernacular aspect. They even succeeded in rebranding it as X’mas (or .mas).
Christmas is someone’s birthday – Jesus – and it’s His party. But He’s not demanding any gifts. He is God’s gift to us; He died for us and granted us the biggest present of all – forgiveness. Our sins are forgiven, regardless. His grace extends from when He was born until and beyond when He returns. Christmas is the occasion to refresh our understanding of that. We commemorate Him: His birthday, His sacrifice, His grace. We reaffirm our faith; we restate our need for the Spirit.
Christmas is the season to be jolly, yes, because we celebrate Christ’s birth. But no matter when we ask Him, “please Sir, can I have some more?” the reply will forever and always be, “Yes, certainly. Help yourself!”
I have recently been exposed to the wisdom of several notable figures: John Maeda, Jenny Holzer, and Stefan Sagmeister. They made a considerable impact on me…
Below you can find their excerpted erudition—
Laws of Simplicity…John Maeda
After spending years obsessed with the question of siMplIciTy and coMplexITy at the MIT, Maeda compiled his findings into 10 Laws (that can be further simplified into the 10th and final one).
Holzer enacts Maeda’s Law 1: Reduce to condense controversial but insightful ideas into compelling one-liners; the impact of the message is further heightened when displayed in public places, in both the familiar and the unfamiliar—billboards, theater signs and t-shirts, or light projections on empty brick walls—for our daily stumbling pleasure.
The intriguing aspect of the truisms is that the statements are not fact — they sit unsteadily on the fence between truth and our perceptions of truth. When we encounter them, they hammer us as propagandistic fact; in that fleeting moment, we could accept it unquestioningly, ponder thoughtfully, or cry foul to no one in particular.
IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER and SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON
MONEY CREATES TASTE
The newest public place claimed by Holzer (or someone in her name) is on the virtual real estate of Twitter — @jennyholzer. It produces quite a different effect from public light projects of the same text; when my Growl notification pops up on the screen, it inspires and kindles a sentiment unlike anything else. Though it has that “Quote of the Day” flavor, the all-caps yet anonymous nature grants it undeserved authority…
Things I have learned in my life so far…Stefan Sagmeister
Sagmeister’s wisdom is imparted similarly—public displays of one-liners—yet with a crucial difference: his maxims are deeply personal. The maxims are also segmented with each manifestation being deeply creative in its own right.
Over Time I Get Used To Everything And Start Taking It For Granted
Keeping A Diary Supports Personal Development
Some other things Sagmeister learned in his life (so far)
Life is a complicated place to live in, where most of us search for something to live by. Maybe it’s money, a cause, or happiness. Yet most of the time, it doesn’t really matter. We simply live.
I have pondered in the past about life’s purpose. Yet to date I have not approached a concrete answer—or have I? I think, therefore I am? Older, wiser men have said that it is not the answers we find, but the questions we form that define life.
So…question life.
I spend too much time thinking, but not doing. A good friend claims that she spends too much time doing, but doing the wrong thing. Just think Nike, she says. I do, therefore I am? Should I not question then? Course not, silly. It’s just a curious balance to master.
But questions lead to more questions—well then, question, plan, and act. Isn’t that more of a cop out? Instead of earnestly seeking out the answer, we keep ourselves busy and planning and acting so that we don’t have to answer our questions?
Probably not making much sense, but I do know now—
Doubt your doubts. Ask, seek, and knock. You are the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Some time ago I resolved to begin keeping a diary. Turns out it’s very difficult to form the daily habit of reflective writing, what with TV, IMs, RSS, Hulu, Email (who writes it with a hyphen anyway?)…
Yet, I am now onto my second Moleskine sketchbook — I find it much easier to doodle, sketch, or draw my thoughts rather than to formulate coherent sentences. Perhaps my thoughts are intrinsically fragmented, better represented as a fluid typographical experiment than as a structured literary record.
These days, I’ve taken up Twitter-ing. A foreign concept to most, I find it immensely satisfying to compress a thought into 140 characters and micro-blog during those in-between times: waiting, “loading”, don’t-know-what-to-do-next-ing. Being still too broke to own an iPhone and too frugal to have unlimited SMS, I only update Twitter at my computer. If it weren’t for a pseudo-ubiquitous WiFi access, the notion of Tweets would not make sense. I find myself being increasingly connected with the hourly thoughts of people around the country (and the world).
Many people use Twitter to follow their friends’ daily musings; I started using Twitter to eavesdrop on the aphorisms of Jenny Holzer (@jennyholzer), the introspections of John Maeda (@johnmaeda) and witty insights of John Gruber (@gruber). I managed to convince two friends so far to register for a Twitter account, only one of which actually uses it, albeit intermittently. Only 4 out of the 63 people I’m following do I actually know in real life, yet I sometimes have interesting exchanges with the other “Tweeple”. After using this alternative blogging platform for several months, I’ve garnered a humble rally of 25 “followers”, half of which are spam accounts. But the beauty of Twitter’s “following” system—akin to RSS subscription—is that no spammer can flood you with unsolicited communiqué.
I started following notables such as @BarackObama and Macworld Editor @jsnell, people whose writings I find myself reading regularly on the Internet. I rarely scour the “Everyone” page for interesting new people whose hourly rants I’d like to read, yet other people find me—a curiouser phenomenon.
But whenever I receive one of those “Barack Obama is now following you on Twitter!” emails (which I did), I become ecstatic. I feel like I’m heard; I feel like I’m part of the elite—as if I were speaking from a pedestal, rising above the people who grow steadily silent and patiently listen. And then I tell them what I had for breakfast.
Last night, I learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Today, I took a nap on the Frist South Lawn. Two seemingly unrelated experiences: one full of intrigue, algorithms, yet ultimately a single destination; the other, deceptively mundane, yet is the springboard of a sensorial overload. One organizing chaos into order, the other seeking serenity within the storm.
As two heavy eyelids sealed off my visual sensors, I felt the warm summer breeze brushing up against my skin and the fresh scent of newly-cut grass nosing its way into my receptors. This form of relaxation is rare considering I spent four academic years on this campus. Weather is a factor, of course, but perhaps more so the busy schedule that so many of us inflict upon ourselves is the cause.
My secondary senses heightened. And as the insects and birds and whatnot go about their business, acting as my personal lullaby, even the sudden whirring sound of a lawn mower seemed a welcome intrusion into my casual slumber. There is nothing more refreshing than a Power Nap, as us seasoned college students (grads) know. There is also nothing more thought-provoking than a public self-incision of one’s life, as us half-hearted bloggers (should) know.
Keeping a diary supports personal development.
— Stefan Sagmeister
I received an early birthday present today; a very thoughtful and timely gift (much thanks). Timely because, when is there a more appropriate time than shortly after graduation, to think long and hard about the question “What have you learned in your life so far?”
Well, for starters, I learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube (kudos to Srdjan) and now have a record of 2:14. I learned how to play Cranium (though my acting skills are pitiful). More importantly, I learned how to relax in times of stress and distress. Perhaps I learned it a little “too” well. The note in my gift reminded me that discipline really isn’t everything.
In some ways, some fragments of life are similar to a Rubik’s Cube. It’s an interesting puzzle with a known solution, and I honestly find it extremely fulfilling when completed, yet paradoxically its formulaic nature causes the feeling of success to dampen quite quickly. As a result, the puzzle is reduced to a 1-dimensional race of speed. Repetition in order to achieve maximum efficiency.
There is of course inherent excitement in deducing the most effective solution to a problem, but a marginally better solution only generates a marginal sense of achievement. Other facets of life, however, are experiences akin to napping on the Frist South Lawn. Familiar places can supply uncommon sentiments. Re-examining the ordinary can yield fascinating insights. Relaxing breaks foster creativity (and energy).
“We spend so much of our time pursuing stuff that turns out not to matter, or worrying about stuff that turns out to be irrelevant. And when we have good ideas about how to be happy, they come to us through means very different from instinct—through long, difficult learning; through studying; through reflection; through spirituality; and through art.”
— Daniel Nettle, from Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I have learned in my life so far
Discipline isn’t everything. Life is snoozing under a tree on Frist South Lawn on a breezy summer afternoon, a leisurely-solved Rubik’s Cube in hand.
The fruitless struggle between the Croats and the Turks seems to be an analog of my post-college slumber. Capable but sluggish, driven yet reserved. They seem to be trapped in a deadlock, as am I. It looks like they’re not trying, as am I.
Today I delivered a design, realized I left school in a haze, and read enough commencement speeches to last me for a year.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. – Seneca
My life so far has been splotched with vicissitudes. I never thought I would miss the safe haven that is now known as my alma mater. Having been accustomed to the creature comforts and conveniences of that tiny town in New Jersey, the big city is intimidating. Worrying about quarters for laundry is more taxing than exams and papers, but perhaps I’d rather be doing the former.
I would be returning tomorrow to store some luggage temporarily. I feel like a nomadic squirrel, hiding acorns all over the place just to play it safe. I’ll also be dealing with mail, banks, and other errands, but perhaps they’re just excuses to quench my eager nostalgia.
