English Script Request

(Introduction, interview question)

Well, um, you know, the architect is an intellectual, and thinks of buildings as communicating ideas. And we tend to think of each building being associated with one architect, and we attach one name to it, and it's funny, because architecture is the single most collaborative of art forms. You know, you get to the end of a movie, and it takes about 3 songs for all the names of the collaborators to go by. But in architecture, we cling to just one name. So, it's strange, because, of course, to produce a building requires more people, more involvement. Even a simple building has about a thousand different people involved.

So architecture is a form of collaborative intelligence. And it's not just limited to one architect in his studio. Each studio is connected to all the other architecture studios. We might even argue that the entire architectural community is one single studio, thinking in parallel about the possible future of our world.

And so if you're running a school of architecture, you have one highly dense part of this kind of global intelligence. Now, if you're laboratory's cool, like our one, you're looking for the leading edge. You're looking to inspire the rest of this ecology. And we would say, let's say, um, over the last 10 years, cities have accelerated past research universities. That is to say cities are evolving more quickly than universities. So if universities are stupidity-reduction machines, that means an architecture school is trying to reduce the level of stupidity about cities by doing the most experimental work. But what happens when cities themselves are more experimental than universities?

So, in order to incubate the ev... an evolution and architectural intelligence, we actually have to completely redesign the mechanism, the ecology of our ideas within architectural education. So this has been my primary mission, which is to redesign the machine with which architects think about the world design.

(Interview question)

Yeah, I mean the school of architecture at Colombia is unique in the world in the sense that we don't know what architecture is. So if you're... if you become a student at our school, then you're of course a crazy person, because you've decided for... to go to a school of architecture that doesn't know what architecture is. In other words, for us, architecture is a big question. And we want the students to work on the question, not on the solution. We leave it to other schools to kind of, um, you know, provide answers to questions.

I think the best architecture, the architecture that really matters in our societies, the architecture that asks questions, are buildings that make us think about our position in the world and so on.

And clearly our position in the world is changing enormously. The speed of evolution of the global society, the kind of new technologies of sharing. We live in an age in which your strength is not what you have, not what you keep, not what you hold, but what you share. We live in a parallel-processing, open-source environment. So in that environment, what would be a building that asks questions? What would be a city that challenges us?

At the very least, we have to think of an architectural community, or an architectural culture which is based on sharing, the incubation at an open source level, and so on.

So, essentially what I've been doing is trying to set up the most advanced research capacity in architecture. And 2 things we can say is that architecture no longer can be confined within one school. The question of the future of the city, it's no longer simply a question for architecture. It's also philosophy, it's also mathematics, social work, law, etc. The whole university will devote itself to the question: What is the future of cities?

Secondly, not only can you not contain architecture within 1 school, you can't contain it within 1 city. We can no longer imagine that all the best ideas of the world will come to the island of Manhattan. We will do a Manhattan project, and densely, densely produce a kind of viral exchange, an explosive density, uh, and then, as it were, do damage to the world.

In today's world we need a global networked intelligence. So the Studio X network I've been setting up is the first real-time global think tank, which allows, um, anybody interested in the future of city to participate in a very radical, uh, conversation.

In my opinion, and this is really the beginning of the university of the future: I think the most advanced universities of the future will pay no respect to the differences between high school, university, and aft.. and afterwards. No respect to the differences between discipline, no respect between the differences between academic and professional, no differences between in the market and out of the market. We are looking for a new kind of intelligent organism that will relish the opportunity to engage and share, um, uh, in ideas about the future of cities. And this is really not an option for us because, um, you know, we're gonna have 9.3 billion people on this planet in the year 2050, 7 billion living in cities. To think about that, to think carefully about that, we need a global networked, collaborative intelligence.

So one of the gr... if the city is the single greatest experiment in human history, we need the single greatest research project devoted to that. And, uh, we're going to do our little part to incubate in this capacity.

(Interview question)

I love this way you're describing it, and I think, um... my main interest, and let's say my expertise, is in the ecology of ideas. I'm in the ideas business. And ideas are, uh, I would say two things: one, they're technology. Ideas are even perhaps the first technology, the first tool. But also when I say technology, they're such an intimate tool, that they're like a prosthetic tool. They're therefore biological. So ideas are of course what make human human.

They... so when we speak about the world of ideas, we are, exactly as you say, thinking about a kind of biological organism, which is at the same time, a technological expansion of our individual capacities.

And just as was dreamed about so strongly in the 1960's of, you know, with (McLewan?) and others. There is a kind of ecological layer covering the whole planet, which is a kind of layer of ideas. And we can no longer distinguish between this layer and the world of technology. And the most obvious example is... is social media. Do we think abou this as a technological system, or as a layer of ideas?

And no longer one think of, uh... that we live in a world with various attributes, and then there is social media. Social media is for many people a starting point. Think about it. Children today are using the iPad at the ages of 1 and 2. That is to say they use the iPad before they use the toilet.

So for the next generation, electronics is the natural environment. The toilet is extremely unnatural. In fact, they'll probably use how to... learn how to use the toilet with some iPad app that will thank them. So for that generation, um, the world of information, and the world of ideas, and the technologies that support that are closer, and a more intimate part of their body. Input/output issues for a kid are electronic first, and physical second. The toilet comes second.

So I totally agree with your thought, and therefore, when thinking, what kind of ecology of ideas will be of greatest value in thinking about the future of cities, we are very much thinking about a kind of organic system. At the very least, what one can say is that it's... it will be deeply open source. I think there's no... [not] any thought that... that future thinking about cities, and by thinking I don't just mean speculation; I mean also design, construction, fabrication, evolution, monitoring, self-reflection, representation, everything about cities will be open source at the very least. Think of it... a city is itself a... is the first social media system. Cities are about maximizing connectivity. Now we have systems that magnify connectivity enormously. That is to say, the world of social media is the city of the future, and we have to get with the program.

(thank you + conclusion)