Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the peopleParvin isn’t merely being rhetorical, as he shares in today’s talk. He and his London-based team have come up with a way to democratize both the design and the manufacturing of buildings. It’s called Wikihouse.

“The idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online and access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in Sketchup,” he says in today’s talk. “Almost at the click of a switch, they can generate a series of cutting files, which allow them in effect to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. The parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit.”

Sounds intriguing… so how does it really work? We got Parvin to break it down, visually:

Wikihouse is an “open source construction kit.” It enables anyone with an Internet connection to access a shared library of structural designs.

Users simply choose a design. By clicking a button marked, “Make this house,” Wikihouse generates a set of cutting files for each of the parts that goes into that particular structure.

Using a CNC machine, the parts can be “printed” from a standard sheet material such as plywood.

All of the parts in the open source construction kit are numbered, and designed to minimize confusion. “The principles of openness go right to the mundane physical details,” Parvin says. “Don’t design a piece that can’t be picked up, and don’t design a piece that could be put in the wrong way around.”

The Wikihouse system is designed so that it slots together using wedges and pegs. Here’s another radical idea: even the tools used to make the house can be crafted using the Wikihouse technology. Design and manufacture your own mallet!

“People get confused between construction work and having fun,” jokes Parvin, who points out that before the Industrial Revolution, barn-raisings were a common occurrence. Why shouldn’t family and friends be involved in the construction of a modern house?

A building’s panels are screwed into place. A small team can complete a house structure in about a day. As Parvin lyrically describes, imagine “a future where the factory is everywhere, the design team is everyone.”

Mod cons might not be included in a Wikihouse, but they can certainly be incorporated. The frame of the house can easily be adapted to include the likes of cladding, insulation and windows as well as other amenities. Maybe one day, those will be downloadable files, too.

It’s still early days for the Wikihouse project (buildings take time to make, after all.) But here’s an intriguing timelapse video, filmed at the OUI Share Fest in Paris, which shows wiki-building at work.

Read much more about Wikihouse »

Squishy, vivid, frozen, frothy – architect and artist Antonio Torres’s wildly colorful and whimsical built spaces are often created using membranes filled with gases, liquids and organic materials, inviting people to crawl in, jump, touch and play.

Here, we ask him about his incredible works and where his inspiration comes from.

Tell me about yourself and how you became an artist – because, as I understand, you were originally trained as an architect.

Actually, the first time that anyone called me an artist was the TED Fellows team! I have always considered myself an architect, but after graduate school, my work became more multidisciplinary, bringing aspects of art into architecture and playing with it. So this is new for me.

Do you object?

No, not at all. I think it’s good when somebody describes you as an artist and you don’t have to call yourself one.

But I always knew I wanted to build things. It has been part of my life for a very long time. Most of my family is in construction and landscaping, so everyone has a pretty natural grasp of materials and how to put things together. I don’t know if that’s what got me involved in architecture, but it definitely is something that plays out right now. I was always around job sites, from when I was 13. At some point I was even thinking of doing civil engineering. That road would have probably been a big mistake! Now I’m trying to explore new architectural possibilities in unifying art, sculpture, soft and living materials and hilarious forms in the hope of finding different building blocks in architecture. I think I have a pretty good grasp of how to put traditional methods together – now it’s about trying to challenge what it means to build.

I grew up in a small village in the state of Michoacan until I was 12, and then my family moved to Chicago. That’s where I did my undergrad, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In my last year, I had the chance to study at the School of Architecture in Verailles, France – a pivotal moment for me. When I came back, I ended up doing a three-year master’s degree in architecture at UCLA, where I met my partner in crime, Michael Loverich, with whom I founded The Bittertang Farm, our design studio. Now I am back in Mexico and it has been very receptive to me and my work.

“Ice caves of the Polar Regions are a rare treat to those who travel there. Created by hundreds of years of accumulation and erosion, to enter an ice cave is to be immersed in color, color that only ice can create. Our Ice Palace attempts to get close to this intense environment by creating vertical thick walls of dyed ice.” Photo: Bittertang Farm

Your work is incredibly colorful and whimsical. How did begin?

The playfulness I think is embedded in both of our personalities, and it probably started to translate to our work at UCLA. I think Michael and I were probably the only ones really going all out with color there. Color in architecture is, unfortunately, not used that much. You’re beginning to see it now more and more, but I think architects tend to just default to white walls. So Michael and I started looking at how to design with color — not so much as an application or a technique, but a link to the visceral.

Actually, our early conversations about coloration were almost like girls thinking about how to apply makeup: How do you achieve depth where depth doesn’t really exist? Or how does color produce new features in surfaces, essentially creating new forms? So rather than just thinking about how to apply paint to a building or to a material, we were thinking about how we might actually transform that material into something more substantial. And so color is now one of our main themes. We really try to work with color as a material in every single project.

Was there a before-and-after moment when you went from being interested in more standard architecture to your aesthetic of exploration and play?

I would say that my interest in experimentation and curiosity probably developed pretty early on. I was always curious to look for alternative solutions to even simple problems. I don’t think I was ever interested in being traditional with anything, so I couldn’t let my work as an architect be standard. I had to play.

Then I met Michael, and he was kind of similar. We learned from the great designers we had as professors, but we often shifted our understanding of design and architecture. So our ideas became more formal: the projects we designed in graduate school were about understanding more complex ways of drawing, putting things together in a physical model. UCLA definitely allowed us to focus on more complexity in forms and techniques. We did a lot of physical models and some pretty huge ones — because that was the only way we would be able to convince people that the things that we were imagining were actually being put together in a cohesive way.

That is where The Bittertang Farm inadvertently got its start – a partnership at first sight. Actually, we finished our degrees at the same time. Then Michael went out to New York that same summer, and I stayed in LA, before cutting out in March. We both ended up in New York working at two separate offices. We never decided to catch up later on and create a partnership — it sort of just happened. So we worked in New York, and at the end of 2009, I dedicated myself full-time to Bittertang. We started making a project together as The Bittertang Farm in 2008.

The descriptions that you have on the website — “Our work explores multiple themes including pleasure, frothiness, biological matter, animal posturing, babies, sculpture and coloration all unified through bel composto” — are wildly poetic and florid. But what do you say when you have to explain what you do?

The website’s language is kind of geared towards the design and architecture community, which expects a certain level of abstraction. Those texts are also meant to challenge the visitor and their expectations of what architecture is, because they are immediately confronted with a nontraditional language, definitions, interpretations and yes — our diverse interest and themes. My favorite is ‘babies!’ Michael was able to write a hilarious article on babies in art and architecture from the research we did on that topic. Ultimately florid and funny is the goal with the writing on the Bittertang website.

At the TED conference, trying to explain to people in a very short amount of time what we do at Bittertang was challenging but fun. I couldn’t be like, “Oh we work with pleasure, froth, babies, animal posturing and color all unified through bel composto,” because they probably would’ve been like “Whaaat?” Instead, I had to boil it down to how we design spaces using gases and liquids and create new building blocks in architecture with the help of pressurized membranes. That is still a little bit wild, but it proved to be more specific. The interesting part is that most people are able to pick up on our interests after the they see the images and really like the work, while others just don’t care anymore. It is also helpful to have a historical reference, like the work done with inflatables in the ’60s and ’70s, and to explain that we have added something new to the research, in that our pressurized membranes are no longer limited to air or gases but can also hold liquids, gels, soft mediums and biological matter.

In some crowds, I  talk about a couple of our projects that were designed as a critique of how serious the profession of architecture has become, mainly advocating the importance of humor in architecture.

“In Big Bird, color is seen as a viscous material, it has the ability to move fluidly over space and emanate auras of reflected colors and particulate throughout space, thickening and extending boundaries.” Photo: Bittertang Farm

Question: What do you mean by ‘frothiness?’

Frothiness is something that always comes out in our projects — like color. Sometimes it’s as simple as creating material around predefined lines where you would expect to see a seam, but then you don’t necessarily see it because the material begins to froth — it erases straight edges with accumulation of matter. Frothiness can also be another way of creating texture and creating material that begins to bubble up, or materials that create sensations of being in clouds, or being immersed in froth.

We actually have a project that deals with literal froth, like foam. It’s a giant 320-square-meter sculpture that generates colorful foam of different colors. It actually becomes like a weather formation on a strange planet. The aesthetic aspect of frothiness comes from our interest in rococo and baroque architecture and art. They were the masters of froth. We’re just trying to figure out a way to get that into the conversation and materialize it in different ways where it’s not just made of plaster or stone, as it has been historically.

Do people come to you with commissions?

Our outlet so far has been winning competitions. Our first project for a competition was an aquaculture project, a fish farm. We answered the call for entries to a publication, and we were selected. That got us started. We started to experiment. And at first, we were more just researching, experimenting and playing around, just trying to see what was out there. In a year, we realized that we had five projects, and so we decided to apply for the Architectural League prize for young architects. We got the prize, which came with the opportunity to have an exhibition in New York and showcase the work.

Ultimately, we didn’t just show our portfolio, but instead we fabricated a new project just for the exhibition — we made a Succulent Piñata. It was the first time that we got some incentive to build something that wasn’t just for us, but for an exhibition. Immediately after that, we entered another competition with our first inflatable, and it was an international competition that we won. So yeah, most of our work right now is making projects in response to calls for submissions, but we carefully select the competitions we want to enter: they have to have our interests embedded in them.

Commissions are always welcome, though. We are ready!

How does the long-distance working relationship work? Does Michael come down to Mexico a lot?

It’s good. Obviously it’s not the same as when we’re together, but through Skype we get a lot of stuff done. There are lots of ways now to share your work and always have everything accessible for people. We have been doing this for over three years, now. Last year I was going a lot to New York as well. We do have strategic meetings where we meet physically every few months, depending on what’s going on.

“Blo Puff’s bloated body and furry innards acoustically, visually and olfactorally separates the pavilion’s interior from New York’s exuberance, allowing the naturalized interior atmosphere, views to the sky and the interior space to be enjoyed without distraction. The interior, protected by a thick envelope, becomes a place of relaxation, reading and eating, where visceral and cerebral can be enjoyed with equal pleasure.” Photo: Anna Ritch

When you make an installation together, do you just meet wherever you’re going to be and then put it together there? Doesn’t that pose technical difficulties?

Let me tell you about our first winning project, titled Blo Puff, a pavilion we built at Union Square in New York. When we were notified that we had won the competition, we had something like two and a half weeks to pull everything together. Turns out two and a half weeks to do something that you’ve never done before is not enough time. I started looking into finding the person who was going to make this inflatable, and every available manufacturer that we came across in that short amount of time proposed to built our project with qualities we didn’t want: all the options pointed towards us showing up at Union Square with a pavilion that would have looked like a jumping castle — obviously not an option for us!

We were very naïve at that point about how you make a transparent, translucent inflatable. The difficult part was that we knew it had to be airtight — meaning it couldn’t have a fan that would circulate air all the time. That’s the other advantage to the work that we’re doing with inflatables: before, they always needed a fan running. We found a company in Seattle that said, “Yeah. We’ve never done it, but we could probably figure it out — we have the air valves, the transparent membrane and the sealers.” We knew immediately this was our best chance. They didn’t do inflatables, but they had the right material and technology — they seam together different types of tarp material for various applications. All we had to do was teach them how to do it — which we were teaching ourselves by making small prototypes down here in Mexico.

So the project was designed between Guadalajara and New York, and then I had to go from Guadalajara to Seattle for a week to go to the factory. They gave me a team, and we had to train them how to cut the patterns and how to seam it. And then in the process, the competition people were like, “This museum in Tel Aviv really likes your project. They want to know if you can actually make a replica in Tel Aviv.” And at that point we didn’t know if we were going to have one done! But if we were going to figure out how to fabricate one, I guessed we could get two done.

Next thing we knew, I was flying out of Seattle at 11pm, and we’re packing two inflatables at 8:30pm. I went straight to JFK, and at that point Michael met me. He took off with one bag to Tel Aviv and I stayed in Brooklyn. So we had these two installations going on simultaneously around the world, and it all happened within three weeks.

We also had to find these other materials — natural materials, like eucalyptus leaves, Spanish moss, a custom-made net that Michael’s dad ended up fabricating for us because he’s an ocean engineer. Our projects take on a life of their own and help us figure out so much along the way, because nothing is really set.

Another example is Burble Bup, the summer pavilion we built in 2011, which was much bigger — it was the biggest structure we’d done to date. It was a similar process — Mexico, New York — but then more than 200 volunteers came to Governor’s Island, over a period of three weeks, to help us built this pavilion. Even the jury who chose our project didn’t really believe it could be done. It stayed up for four months and survived a hurricane, and more than 100 thousand people that visited the island that summer.

“Built of tactile materials, the Burple Bup pavilion is a place of touch, interaction, play, and humorous social engagement. Thin membranes hold air and wood chips in bizarre and colorful volumes, attracting people to play underneath its dangling canopy and engage with their environment and neighbors in strange and interesting new ways.” Photo: Bittertang Farm

Would you want to take these pieces and then try to get them staged around the world? What is your ideal trajectory for your work now?

We want to continue exploring and discovering new things about our work and ourselves. At the moment I am very excited with the range of materials that are planning on tackling so that we can continue to create engineering marvels and more fantasy experiences and dream spaces. We would love to parade our easily transportable projects around the world. At the end of last year, we actually proposed five projects in three different continents and that is great because we learn so much from the different environments with every proposal built or not. Commissions of course are very important for us and for our work to growth and to transform our current resources so that we can more effectively tackle the permanent and scale questions of pressurized membranes. Ideally we want to continue to build at all scales so that our work remains prolific and hopefully self-sustaining and profitable — so that we can continue to bring happiness and pleasure to our built world.

What about things that are more permanent? Do you see building with pressurized membranes, with gases and liquids, as something that’s a sustainable building material that could last over time?

It is a little bit difficult to  imagine that this could become advantageous for more permanent solutions, but I think there are a lot of ways this can actually be done. Right now we’re just experimenting with the basic kit, which is plastics. We understand plastics: some plastic membranes are easily wrecked. You can puncture them. But there are other materials out there that right now we don’t have the means to get at, but they can actually hold things very well — they can make architectural elements and structures more permanent. Building architecture out of soft elements is quite difficult, but our small-scale interventions have already begun to address that issue. We have so far built walls and canopies out of transient material — such as gases, liquids and biological matter — and we have been able produce strong and resilient building blocks.

We are also interested in making things that might be applicable in space. We’re always trying to redefine physics in our projects through poetic dream spaces and so on. But we’re also interested in what happens when you have to build under difficult constraints or under different physical laws; this work is applicable in that direction as well.

How serious are you about the sustainability angle of it?

I am very serious, but I think the word sustainability is so charged nowadays with so many different ideas and issues in architecture, it has made us try to figure out a way to talk about it without attaching ourselves to the sustainable movement in a traditional way. With our projects, we’d rather address biological matter and talk about how to shape our projects as living systems. For example, we’re trying to encourage our membranes to develop growth, interact with nature and allow the natural environment to take over, such as mushrooms that ended up growing out of the organic materials stuffed into our pavilion. It was great to meet people at TED that are doing such work already — people who are growing materials. Just in the TED Fellows community, Suzanne Lee grows her own clothes. Rachel Armstrong is developing a material to restructure Venice’s docks and foundations, and so on. Designing and building with biological matter is already a step towards a more serious and exciting sustainable future.

One of the fascinating things about your work is that it is so physically intimate. People are invited to crawl into, touch, jump on your built environments. It looks irresistible.

Yeah. It has to be! For some reason, we feel responsible for encouraging pleasure through our work and allowing people to engage our spaces in a more interactive and physical way than by just looking at it. We are always bringing pleasurable elements within the reach of people. That is something that I think is not achieved or is not in the interest of some of the mainstream architects and their buildings. Our goal is to also take the intimacy of physical space to a larger scale.

The visceral experience of our work is very important for us, and sometimes it’s very literal. Every time we get a chance to get people to interact with our projects, their responses are very rewarding to us. They come up with ways to engage with our spaces that we wouldn’t thought of. And the children — definitely our favorite clients!

Could this be you on the TED stage? Photo: Michael Brands

30-y-o global ideas conference seeks hot architecture talk.

Are you an architect, architecture critic, historian of architecture or otherwise involved with architecture and design? Have you always wanted to give a TED Talk?

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of TED, our 2014 conference will include several talks that look back on three decades of advances in a handful of fields. Until June 30, 2013, we are seeking proposals for an 18-minute, multimedia presentation that will take the TED audience through the most important developments in the past 30 years of architecture and suggest where the field is going — or needs to go — in the future.

Presentations may be developed and submitted by individuals or teams, though only one presenter will take the stage. The ideal presentation will:

• be highly visual
• be geared toward an audience of interested generalists
• help non-architects grasp the most important changes in the field, including technological advances, changing materials, and shifting ideas about the relationship between the built environment, human beings, and the natural world
• show the audience what the built world looked like in 1984, what it looks like now, how we got from there to here, and where we are (or should be) heading

We are not looking for an Architecture 101-style lecture. What we are looking for: a creative strategy for conveying, with intelligence and gusto, the recent architectural developments that matter most.

Interested parties should submit a short description (no more than 300 words) of the proposed presentation. Please include a synopsis of the architectural developments you regard as crucial, as well as your vision for how best to take an audience on a thrilling tour of recent architectural history.

Proposals should be submitted to architecture@ted.com by June 30, 2013.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

One of the things we’re interested in exploring here at TED is … what happens after a talk? Most often, a speaker is telling us a story without an ending — a tale that’s just beginning rather than coming to an end. That’s certainly the case with TED2013 speaker Alastair Parvin, whose project, Wikihouse, is really just getting started. Parvin has created an open-source construction set for a house, and I caught up with him in a break at the conference to get more details about some of the projects that are underway to build on it.

One application for this cookie-cutter build-your-own-house system is disaster relief. At least, if done responsibly. “Actually, the last thing you want to do after a disaster is build,” Parvin points out. But those caught up in the aftermath of an event such as an earthquake can find themselves stuck in grim emergency housing for long periods of time. Parvin describes a Wikihouse-enabled project in Christchurch, New Zealand, an area that experienced a huge earthquake in February 2011, and where citizens are still trying to rebuild.

Might Wikihouse help empower them? Parvin hopes so. “They’re looking at coming up with a construction model for sustainable housing rebuilding, led by communities there,” he explains. It’s that last phrase that’s crucial. “It’s an interesting flip from disaster relief housing to community-led development.”

Then there’s Wikihouse/Rio, which is using the system in a rather different way — as an “open-source maker lab in the heart of the favela.”

“There, they said not to worry about making a structure,” Parvin says. “Kids and teenagers can start experimenting, maybe creating furniture. Maybe that will lead to building, but it’s not about us defining what happens from the outset. It’s about being open. We’re giving people amazing tools and saying this could be a serious form of community development, but it’s led by them. If they get to the point where they want to build, that’s great.”

This diversity of applications is central to the promise and potential of Wikihouse. “It’s great to do a TED Talk,” says Parvin, for whom Wikihouse is a passion project he works on alongside the others he undertakes as part of the Zero Zero architecture collective in London. “But this is an open-source project. It’s not about me standing up on stage and showing everyone what we’ve done. It’s more about issuing an invitation to others. Frankly the less control we have, the happier we get.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Architect Michael Green presents an interesting riddle: why are buildings made of wood only a few stories high when trees found in nature are remarkable for their height?

Speaking in session 7 of TED2013, Green shares his deep love of wood — which he first discovered from his grandfather, a woodworker who taught him to “honor a tree’s life by making it as beautiful as you possibly can.” Now, Green designs buildings made of wood and he notices that people have an usual relationship to wooden walls, columns and ceilings.

“They hug it. They touch it,” he says. ”Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can be the same anywhere on earth. I’d like to think that wood gives mother nature fingerprints in our buildings.”

However, building codes currently limit wood buildings to four stories high. And this needs to change, says Green. He proposes that we build skyscrapers out of wood. For the last century, tall buildings have been crafted of steel and concrete — but the green house gas emissions of these materials are huge. As Green notes, 3% of world’s energy goes into the making of steel and 5% goes into the making of concrete. While most people think of transportation as the main villain when it comes to CO2 emissions, building is actually the true top offender — accounting for 47% of CO2 emissions.

Wood, on the other hand, grows by the power of sun, giving off oxygen and storing carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is released when the tree falls and decomposes. By building with wood, we could sequester carbon dioxide. Green says that building with 1 cubic meter of wood stores 1 ton of CO2.

“We have an ethic that the earth grows our food,” says Green. “We should move toward an ethic that the earth should grow our homes.”

Green is not talking about building 20- and 30-story buildings with 2x4s. He explains the technology that has been created to form rapid growth trees into mass timber panels. There is a flexible system to build with these huge panels.

Now, on to the obvious question: what about fires?

Green points out that mass timber panels are extremely dense and, thus, don’t catch fire easily — it’s the same principle that makes a log hard to burn. And when a fire does catch, it moves slowly and behaves predictably, allowing for uniform fire safety measures to be put in place.

Another question that people often ask of his system: what about deforestation?

Green introduces us to sustainable forestry, and shares that enough wood grown in North America every 13 minutes for a 20 story building.

“This is the first new way to build a skyscraper in 100 years or more,” says Green. He notes that people were terrified to walk under the first skyscraper, but that the perception of these buildings as unsafe began to change with the building of the Eiffel Tower.

“I’m looking for an Eiffel Tower moment,” says Green. ”The engineering of this is the easy part. It’s about changing the scale of imagination … Mother nature holds the patent.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

An overhead sculpture of cut paper that looks like an intricately woven cloud. An undulating shopping mall designed like a wave. An apartment complex that emulates the beauty of the local peach blossom trees. These are the kind of things that architect, interior designer and artist Yu “Jordy” Fu creates.

Fu, now of the firm Marques and Jordy, begins her talk at TED2013 by showing an extraordinarily well-drawn pagoda that she drew when she was just 5 years old. After all, Fu had her first exhibit in Beijing at age 6.

“I love to capture this world through colors, light, movement. I capture this would through my eyes and through my heart,” says Fu. ”Art is something that lights up our world.”

Fu has taken the traditional Chinese art of paper cutting and used it to create 3D, cloud-like sculptures and lamps, like the one above, that have been installed all over the world. Much of her work, in fact, comes in the form of objects.

“Art is not always sitting in galleries. It could be a martini glass or a bed, a wardrobe, or a mirror that’s graceful and sexy,” says Fu. “A chair doesn’t have to be boring.”

As an interior designer, Fu has worked for clients as varied as Bloomberg London — for whom she remixed her cloud sculpture, creating it out of discarded computer wires — and a 2-year-old, whose bedroom she made magical.

“When we presented her home, she smiled,” recalls Fu. “That is all that matters to me as a designer.”

Fu looks to emotions and nature — even fashion — for her work. She created a diamond cafe called the Love F Cafe in Abu Dhabi, where even the displays are shaped like diamonds. It’s a motif she picked up in these prefab resort units for FashionTV that can be moved to remote locations — in a field or floating in the sea.

She’s even emulated this diamond motif in an apartment building.

“We spend a lot of time at our home; I think our home should also be art,” said Fu. ”How many people in this world actually love their house? Why can’t a house be romantic and beautiful? Why can’t a house be very sensual … A home can be so extraordinary, like diamonds in the sky.”

 Waves, water, flowers, Chinese tea — these have all informed designs of Fu’s. She sums up her talk saying, “I think there are no boundaries between art, design,and architecture. Nothing is impossible with love.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Designer Alastair Parvin begins this Session 4 of TED2013 with the theme “Disrupt!”

When we use the word architect or designer, Parvin suggests, we mean a professional, a person paid to design. And we believe it’s only these people who can solve the world’s biggest design problems. But he says firmly: That’s wrong.

When Parvin was about to graduate from architecture school, he immediately slammed into the 2008 crash and was met with insanely high unemployment rates for architects. Indeed, “As a society we have never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed,” he says. Faced with bleak prospects, new questions started arising in Parvin’s mind. It’s one thing that his peers couldn’t get jobs, but just who were they trying to get these jobs for? Why were they all scrambling to design for the top 1 percent? Why was architecture only about making buildings?

Parvin offers some solutions:
1. Don’t build. Building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to any problem. Very simply, if a building has lost its use, don’t tear it down and start again. Transform the building, don’t destroy it.
2. Go small. Everyone says we have to build to scale, but why is bigger better? Increase the number of people working on a building, and make it small. As Parvin says, “It’s possible to build cities not just by the few with a lot but the many with a bit.”
3. Go amateur. Why are only corporations building our buildings? It’s clear that everyday citizens will have to be part of developing their cities. This may be Parvin’s most innovative idea yet, and forms the basis of his talk.

We have open-source software — why not open-source hardware? Parvin introduces WikiHouse, an open-source constructive system where anyone can go online and access a free shared library of 3D models of houses. It’s simple: You can download plans to Sketchup, and print out parts for a house using a CNC machine, with standard material like plywood. The parts are numbered. No bolts are required. Essentially it’s a really, really big IKEA set … to build a house. Without traditional construction skills, an amateur can build a small house in one day.

This is a true industrial revolution.

As Linus Torvalds said, “Be lazy like a fox. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time.” Copying is fine, what’s more important is to take what already works and adapt it to your own needs. The world’s fastest-growing cities aren’t skyscraper cities, Parvin says, it’s self-made cities. If design’s great project in the twentieth century was the democratization of consumption, with companies like Coca Cola and IKEA, in the twenty-first century it’s the democratization of production.

Welcome to the world’s biggest design team.

The Klong Toey Community Lantern — a community space in the oldest and largest of Bangkok’s slums — was built very quickly. Not quite as quickly as shown in this three-minute timelapse video, but construction for the project took just three weeks thanks to the help of the community.

But while construction went fast, Norwegian architects Yashar Hanstad and Andreas Gjertsen — of the firm TYIN tegnestue Architects – took six months to design the space. They conducted interviews with Klong Toey residents and held public workshops to find out exactly what the 140,000 person community — which struggles with rampant unemployment, drug use and substandard housing — needed. The goal was to create a safe oasis for community members of all ages to play and congregate.

The centerpiece of the Community Lantern is a soccer field, with bright lighting, that can double as a basketball area. Around it is an open structure with informal rooms for groups to hang out in and hold their own events. The walls are climbable and include hanging swings, for easy game watching.

“The area struggles with drugs and crime amongst other challenges, and we hope this project can be a little contribution that can lead to something positive,” says Hanstad.

Hanstad and Gjertsen have been named the latest winner of The City 2.0 award for the Community Lantern, and for similar projects they’ve launched in underdeveloped areas of Uganda, Sumatra and Norway.

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health, public space and food. Hanstad and Gjertsen have been given the ninth of the grants.

To suggest a project for the final City 2.0 awards nominate it through The City 2.0 website.

Air conditioning used to be a luxury — but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant.

This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings — especially skyscrapers — are built with floor-to-ceiling windows, which means that the spaces inside are constantly heated by the greenhouse effect and that the windows cannot be opened to let in a breeze. But could there be a smarter material that is better able to regulate inside temperature?

Sung — who studied biology before she became an architect — has given herself the challenge of creating a metal that acts like human skin, in which pores and sweat glands work together to provide cooling.  She has created a thermo-bimetal that bends and flexes depending on outside temperature, without using any energy at all. Crafted into interlocking strips, these thermo-bimetals warp in the sun to form a canopy that shades an area, while leaving openings for ventilation. Having tested the strips in installations (check out her sculpture “Bloom”), Sung now imagines using them in the creation of new buildings, as well as in replacement windows that could be fitted into existing ones. Thermo-bimetals could potentially replace curtains and shutters, providing privacy while also lowering air-conditioner reliance.

“When you’re tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you’re on vacation and there’s no one on the weekends to turn off the controls, or when there’s a power outage and there’s no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly,” says Sung.

To see exactly how these thermo-bimetals work and to hear about how Sung is also taking inspiration from eyelashes and grasshoppers for new materials, watch her talk. Below, a few other TED speakers who also have creative ideas for how to keep us cool.

Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces
In June of 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup. Wolfgang Kessling has been tasked with creating an open-air stadium for the event that will keep both fans and players comfortable in the 106F/41C heat. In this talk from the TEDxSummit in Doha, Kessler explains that the plan isn’t to blast air conditioning, but to use innovative shading as well as chilled water piped through the stadium’s floor. (Read the TED Blog’s roundup of five public spaces with surprising cooling systems.)

Kamal Meattle: How to grow fresh air
As activist Kamal Meattle shared at TED2009, it is possible to grow your own air indoors. He explains how three common household plants — Areca palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue and the Money plant — can be placed in specific spots in a home or office to dramatically improve the air quality.

Thom Mayne on architecture as connection
Architecture is about the world of ideas bumping up with the limitations of reality, says architect Thom Mayne. At TED2005, he takes us on a tour of some of the buildings he’s created, including an office in San Francisco whose tower has no air conditioning at all. Instead, it uses a skin that moves on hydraulics, forcing air through it.

Architects design with their eyes rather than their ears — which means that spaces generally look great and sound terrible. At TEDGlobal 2012 University, sound consultant Julian Treasure warned that — even though we’re rarely conscious of sound — terrible acoustics can have very negative effects on our well-being.

“We’re designing environments that make us crazy,” says Treasure in this talk, which is a treat for the eardrums. “It’s not just our quality of life that suffers. It’s our health, our social behavior and our productivity as well.”

For example, Treasure notes that sound levels in hospitals have doubled in recent years. Sleep is absolutely crucial for patient recovery, and yet with the constant beeps, tones and shuffling, the body feels that it is under threat. Not to mention that staff errors increase the greater the level of distracting noise.

Classrooms generally have terrible soundscapes too. As Treasure explains, for a student sitting in the fourth row of a traditional classroom, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent, meaning that they only hear half of what their teacher says. And that doesn’t even count students with impaired hearing, or who are listening to a second language in the classroom.

To get a true picture of how disorienting poorly designed spaces can sound, watch Treasure’s talk. Below, check out tips from Treasure himself on improving sound in classrooms, hospitals, restaurants, offices and more.

Four steps to heavenly hearing…

1. Acoustics. Get these right in the first place and life is so much easier. Involve an acoustician at the planning stage: it costs far more to fix problems once the plan is a building. Even then, there are many solutions that can look great and massively help sound – for example absorbing panels that can now be printed with graphics or pictures.

2. Noise. Remove or damp down as many noise sources as possible, from chillier cabinets and air handling machinery to noisy floors and moving surfaces that clash, like steel chair legs on stone floors. Train your staff to listen for them all the time.

3. Sound system. Don’t value engineer this down to the cheapest components. If you are going to play sound, make sure its quality matches the quality of experience you want people to have in your space. Use a top pro-audio partner and listen to their advice.

4. Soundscape. Your soundscape should be ACE: appropriate for the function of the space, congruent with your values or brand, and effective in supporting the people in what they are doing, whether it’s eating, working or sleeping. Don’t play mindless music for the sake of it. Explore more creative, designed soundscapes. The best route is to start with silence and then decorate it, only adding sound where it adds value.

A great exercise is to tour your space with your eyes closed to feel what the sound is doing.

Now, some tips for specific environments…

For classrooms. Reverberation time (RT) is crucial: the Essex study in the UK that I mentioned in my talk has shown that reducing RT, especially at low frequencies, can improve speech intelligibility (SI) dramatically, benefiting both academic results and class behaviour. Use acousticians to model your planned or existing spaces and get RT down to under half a second across all frequencies. Measure and monitor your SI.

For hospitals. Make sure that needless noise is monitored and eliminated — no squeaks, banging doors etc. Issue soft-soled footwear if you can’t damp corridors in other ways. Train the staff in quiet working. Install relaxing soundscapes in waiting spaces. Check that there is privacy in areas where confidential conversations are taking place. Offer masking sounds for patients to help with sleep.

For restaurants. Don’t fall into the trap of accepting a design with all hard surfaces. If you must have a hard floor, make sure your chairs and tables (and waiters) have soft feet. Design zones with different RTs to vary liveness, and offer people options when seating them. Be careful of open plan kitchens: they pollute the space with a lot of noise. A glass wall can give the same visual effect without deadening the customers. Take the coffee and smoothie machines out of the customer space! Measure and monitor your sound pressure level when busy: anything over 75 dB is getting very uncomfortable.

For offices. Don’t fall into the trap of one size fits all. People need to do different things in offices, so create different soundscapes for them – from quiet working space, to open plan team working space, to social space and anything else you may need. Use natural masking sound rather than, or on top of, pink noise if your office is too quiet. Plan your setting so that noisy teams are away from quiet ones, with suitable dividers in between.