(applause)

I just wanna say that I'm actually incredibly excited

to be here with Wired at the Skywalker Ranch.

It's like two lifelong obsessions coming together.

This is my office in Copenhagen.

We're inside a Carlsberg factory where they used to make

the least interesting part of the beer: the bottlecap.

We're also in New York, these are my American colleagues.

We're architects but we also do haircuts.

(audience laughs)

Basically the way we work is that we always

try to mine as much information out of a certain situation

before we intervene.

In a way we start looking for what could be the

greatest potential or what could be the

biggest problem and then we use that information

to inform our design decisions so they're not

arbitrary stylistic choices.

They're always informed by something specific.

I'll just give you two examples.

We did a sports hall in my old high school,

and we could either put it on the football fields

or in the middle of the courtyard.

But in Denmark football is the national sport

so it would be like political suicide to put it there.

So we had to dig it under the courtyard

and it's a handball hole and on the perimeter

you need 15 feet clearance and

in the middle you need 25 feet of clearance.

And actually we got the permission from my old math teacher

so as a sort of homage we based the architecture of the dome

on the mathematical formula for a ballistic arch.

So the sort of graceful curvature of the glulam beams

is actually shaped by the mathematics of the sport.

Everything you see here is not designed,

it's simply tracing the natural geometry

of a thrown handball.

And as a result it leaves an imprint up in the courtyard.

It becomes this informal furniture that has actually

invited people to start hanging out.

So this kind of cascade of effects,

this basic tracing of the mathematics of handball

suddenly creates this new space in the courtyard.

Another example is Hamlet's Castle Kronborg,

north of Copenhagen.

It recently become UNESCO World Heritage,

and the Danish Maritime Museum used to be inside the castle

but they had to put it somewhere else

and they suggested put it inside the dry dock

where they used to build ships.

And it was kind of a dilemma because UNESCO said that

we couldn't stick out of the ground as much as a foot,

to not block the view of the castle,

but of course the museum wanted some kind of an

architectural masterpiece to attract people

to come and check it out.

So we got this idea to use the museum as a way

of preserving the dock, turning the dock inside out.

We turn it into a giant void.

All we have to do is design a series of bridges.

One that stops the water from coming in,

one that connects over to the castle,

and then one that takes you down into the museum.

We could actually build all of the bridges

in a Chinese ship yard, and then sail them in

and click them into place.

So in a way the architecture is completely manifesting

all the aspects of ship building from the steel

of the bridges to the concrete of the dock.

You have this descent through different spaces

of intimate scale and vast scale.

You get this clash of the old and new,

the lightness of the steel and the glass

clashing with the heaviness of the concrete.

And in a way this is the grown-ups' auditorium

that extends under the stage

and becomes an auditorium for the kids.

Dock extends into the restaurant

and you have this whole coexistence

of the Shakespearian heritage on one hand

and this ultra contemporary universe below the horizon.

This inverse Titanic moment looking into...

(audience laughs)

And essentially once we've defined what

the key criteria is, like proximity to the UNESCO Heritage

we don't necessarily have the answer,

it's just the question we've formulated.

So we have to do tons of models.

We always have to make tons of models to test it,

and sometimes we make huge models

and sometimes we make the models out of LEGO.

If you just go around our office everything is

LEGO everywhere, even our signage is made out of LEGO.

So when we got approached by LEGO,

actually LEGO made one of our buildings in the LEGO store,

we're not gonna file a suit it's actually

the highest compliment you can get as an architect,

but when they approached us to look at making a LEGO house

which would be looking at all aspects of culture

through the eyes of LEGO, we were incredibly excited.

We went completely to town and we really had to get this job

It's gonna be where LEGO is from in Billund in Denmark.

And essentially what really excites me about LEGO

is LEGO empowers children and everyone playing with LEGO

to create their own world and then

to inhabit it through play.

And that's exactly what architecture is supposed to be about

is to empower people to influence their physical environment

so they can actually live the life they wanna live.

The LEGO house is under construction. This is me.

This is the foundations these concrete LEGO bricks.

This is me standing with all of the richest people

in Denmark, the LEGO family.

(audience laughs)

If you can't wait it's gonna open in two years,

but if you can't wait you can actually build it yourself.

But a way to get people involved is the idea

to crowdsource the design, in a way.

We did an urban space in Copenhagen

and it's in the most ethnically diverse neighborhood

in all of Denmark.

It consists of what we call the Red Square,

the Black Market, and the Green Park.

And you have 60 different nationalities living here,

so the importance of the project was really

to involve the local community and

create a sense of ownership.

So we got this idea that it would be strange

if the Danes had done the best bench

and the best trash bin and the best lamppost.

So we reached out to the local community

through different media and through meetings

and had people recommend elements

from their other home country

and the basic idea is we don't eat Chinese food

to be nice to the Chinese it's because we crave

Beijing Duck or noodles or dumplings.

And we didn't put a Moroccan fountain in the middle

of Copenhagen to be nice to the Moroccans

but because they have an amazing heritage of

architectural water features.

So you have a Jamaican sound system, the neighbors hate it.

A Thai boxing arena. You have Iraqi swings.

Litter boxes from Great Britain.

Bollards from Ghana. Bicycle racks from Finland.

The sign on the Red Square is actually a sign

from the Red Square.

You have an amazing Khazak bus stop.

Way cooler than a typical Danish one.

We found palm trees in China that actually grow

in a Danish climate.

This octopus really reveals the diversity

of the neighborhood and the impact of play.

When you look at the benches,

this S-curve loveseat from Mexico where you can

look the person you're sitting next to into the eyes.

There's a Belgian bench where everybody

looks away from each other.

(audience laughs)

Even down to the lighting we have these neon signs

that advertise stuff you can't buy in Denmark.

This is a Qatari dentist,

like something from the socialist countries.

We even made an app so people can get the stories

of the different objects.

It really reminds us how amazing it becomes

when you outsource the creativity to the community

to actually have a massive impact on their own environment.

So we took this idea with us when, you probably remember,

a bit more than two years ago Sandy hit New York

and caused a lot of devastation.

It wiped out all of Lower Manhattan,

creating a new neighborhood in Manhattan: SouPow.

That's South of Power.

Sandy happened because the Atlantic hurricane belt

is expanding because of rising temperatures

and because of the geometry of the New York bite

you have this 90 degree funnel shape.

All of this storm surge is channeled

into the most densely populated region in all of America,

putting 50% of New York at risk.

And if you look at this map of Lower Manhattan

you can see since the 17th century we've been

expanding Manhattan through landfill.

And this landfill is exactly the area

that is now flood-prone so you can say

the areas that we have been responsible for creating

are also the ones where we need

to take greater responsibility in protecting them.

So the question is how can you protect Lower Manhattan

without creating a sea wall that segregates

the life of the City from the water around it.

And we thought maybe we could learn

a little bit from the High Line.

The High Line is a piece of decommissioned infrastructure

that has now turned into one of the most popular

promenades in New York City.

We were thinking what if instead of waiting

for infrastructure to get decommissioned

before you add the program,

what if you could think of the resilience infrastructure

from Manhattan as the dry line

to imagine that it comes from day one with a lot

of extra positive social and environmental side-effects.

So when you look the flood map you have these

natural pinch points where the flooding doesn't get

very far into the island because of the topography.

So we used these as a way to create compartments

just like you have compartments in a ship.

Each compartment can be solved on its own.

And then you look at the urban development of New York,

it's characterized by this David and Goliath encounter

between Robert Moses, AKA the Power Broker, and Jane Jacobs.

Robert Moses did a lot of the necessary

infrastructure investments in Manhattan

like a lot of the highways on the waterfront,

a lot of the social housing projects.

But they were very very top down,

and they were rarely very instantly successful.

They often cut the people off from different neighborhoods

got cut off from each other, you couldn't reach the water.

And one day he tried to cut a highway through

Greenwich Village and he met Jane Jacobs,

who mounted this grassroots opposition

and eventually she defeated the plan

and Greenwich Village is still there.

But we thought in this case it could be interesting

to think of this resilience infrastructure

as the love child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

Because to provide eight contiguous miles

of waterfront protections you need

holistic, big-picture perspective,

but it needs to happen rooted in the local communities.

And essentially the main challenge is to resist

a certain amount of storm surge you need a certain geometry

but this geometry could be made in so many different ways

so that when you go there you won't notice that

this is actually part of a dam.

It could be like a piece of landscape that also

becomes what protects the city from flooding.

It could be various art works, or furniture, or landscaping.

You could imagine the median of the West Side highway

could become this art piece that also

protects the city from flooding.

And as a way to do this we went a step further.

We went to the Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side was massively hit by Sandy.

These are the areas that got flooded

and when you look at the 100 year flood

and the 500 year flood actually 2/3 of this neighborhood

is flood-threatened.

It's a primarily residential neighborhood

and this is a map of all of the public housing

or the affordable housing on Lower Manhattan.

It's all inside this neighborhood.

It's also the most ethnically diverse neighborhood.

It's the most socially challenged neighborhood.

Rather under serviced by public transportation,

but in return it has a highway cutting it

off from the waterfront.

And even though it appears green,

it actually has a lot less park than any other

neighborhood in Manhattan.

95% of the surface is impervious,

which also makes it more flood-prone.

And when you walk down the waterfront

you can see that it's tortured by this

relationship to the infrastructure.

So we created this process where we reached

out to the local community.

We had a series of workshops with the people

from the Lower East Side trying to test different ideas.

We made this smorgasbord of different solutions,

and together we formulated a series of strategies.

One idea was in the East River Park simply to create

raise the ground of the park to protect the park

from the noise of the highway

and also protect the city from flooding.

It could be a Phase One of a Phase Two to eventually

submerge the park and integrate a new subway line

underneath it. Submerge the highway.

Moving the bicycle lanes into the park side.

The existing bridges are these caged highway bridges

become like high lines extending

we integrate ADA accessibility into the natural topography.

You arrive in this sloping park

that takes you out into the water.

We also creating a 10th street harbor bath

'cause the Hudson is actually,

or the East Street River is so clean you can swim in it.

Underneath the FDR we got this idea to turn

the underside of the FDR into an asset.

You have a lot of spaces in New York that are

actually beautiful when you look up.

So we got this idea of creating these art pieces

hanging underneath the bridge.

So normally you just look up and you have local artists

and it illuminates and makes the underside more friendly.

And then, you know, some of them can flip down

and create temporary enclosures for a Christmas market

or they can become what saves the city.

Some places all you needs is actually four feet of height

to resist the 50-year flood plane.

So they can be undulating benches,

serving different activities,

and then they also become what saves the city.

And they can serve as sockets for bigger flood barriers

when you have a hundred year or

five hundred year flood coming.

Further down we proposing to create these little pavilions

that animate the space underneath the canopy of the highway

so that galleries and markets that make

the underside more friendly and lively,

but also protects the city from flooding.

They're placed so that we never block the view

from the side streets coming down to the water,

so you always look uninterrupted down to the water.

But then you have these sliding walls that can come out

and actually stop a flood from coming in.

And finally when you reach the south tip of Manhattan

we're working with Battery Park to create a series

of little events in the park

that creates a natural topography.

We're sort of integrating a new harbor school

and what we imagine to be a museum of cities underwater

Where the big auditorium could actually be

this inverse aquarium giving you a view

into the different flood lines of different storms.

So essentially the thinking is to take all

the hard infrastructure that is necessary

to protect Manhattan from flooding,

but then to always design it in close dialogue

with the different residents of the different communities

so that as you move around you won't sense that

we've sort of incarcerated Manhattan in a flood wall

but we've reanimated Manhattan so that when

the next Sandy comes it's gonna remain a lively city.

This project has just been granted $335 million

from the government so we're gonna start Phase One,

but I often get the objection that

this is a little bit too much like science fiction.

Just to give you an example of what we call

Social Infrastructure that is happening right now,

this is downtown Copenhagen.

We're doing a waste-to-energy power plant that basically

turns trash into electricity and district heating.

When you look at it as a resource,

one ton of trash equals one and 2/3 of an oil barrel

in terms of energy, so it's a really valuable resource.

But they operate on an economy of scale

so they're ugly boxes that cast shadows

on the neighbors and block the views.

This is gonna be the biggest

and tallest building in Copenhagen.

It's gonna be right next to the marina,

and it's gonna be right where the local boys go waterskiing

so we thought, in Denmark we love skiing,

we have snow but we have absolutely no mountains.

But we do have mountains of trash,

so we thought we have to go

to Sweden for four hours to Isabel.

But because of the sheer magnitude of this power plant

we can put 2/3 of Isabel on top of the power plant.

We know how big the machines are

so we designed this sloping roof that has

an elevator takes you to the top

of a green, a blue, and a black ski slope.

We plant trees on top of the columns

so the view becomes like an man-made mountain.

Insanely, we won the competition based on this idea,

so suddenly we had to figure it out.

Just to give you a sense of scale

you can see this is an Olympic half pipe,

so some of you might have noticed that

Denmark got zero medals in Sochi.

We hope to change that because now

we can actually practice at home.

Also for the people not skiing, there's a hiking path.

You can do picnics. You can enjoy the view

of your otherwise completely flat city.

We including the tallest climbing wall in the world,

at 300 feet for those who have the balls.

And basically the reason we could win the competition

based on this idea is essentially turning the

whole power plant into this man-made ecosystem

where not only do we locally exploit the resources

also together with the City of Copenhagen

it becomes an urban metabolism.

But the reason we could win it is because

this is gonna be the cleanest waste-to-energy

power plant in the world.

The smoke coming out of the chimney is completely non-toxic.

It only contains a little bit of C-O-two and some steam.

So that's why you have fresh mountain air

on top of this power plant.

Normally you want to be as far away from a power plant

as you can, here it's actually completely clean.

But finally, as a way to completely reconfigure

the perception of a power plant we've worked

with Realities United and Copenhagen Suborbitals

to design the chimney in a special way

so that it accumulates steam and when at regular intervals

it puffs a gigantic smoke ring.

(audience laughs)

So essentially something that used to be

a symbol of pollution becomes something playful.

Of course we couldn't find a smoke ring contractor

so we've been struggling quite a bit

with figuring out how to do this.

And just to finish off we recently did a test

at the end of August trying to figure out how to do this

and this is how it went:

(piano music)

[Voice On Video] Yes, fuckin' A!

(audience laughs)

(cheering in foreign language)

So I think the

(applause)

I think the smoke ring is a good symbol of what

architecture is really all about.

Because it is somehow this idea,

it has this element of world changing,

that you take something that is a wild idea,

like pure fiction, and then you suddenly

turn it into hard fact.

And I really like this idea that when we came with this idea

everybody thought that's insane.

But then in 2017 that's just how it is.

You know, people who say in Venice people sail

in gondolas through streets of water

and in New York people inhabit the resilience infrastructure

like pavilions or parks, and in Denmark people ski

on their power plants and they puff giant rings of steam.

So in a way architecture at its best is really

the power to turn, to make the world a little bit

more like our dreams. Thanks.

(applause)

(electronic music)