Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 174 of the Free Cities podcast,
brought to you this week by two wonderfully Free City aligned sponsors.
That's, of course, Veritas Villages and ArcPad.
Veritas Villages are building off-grid freedom-oriented communities in Latin America.
Click on the link in the show notes to inquire about their new project in Costa Rica
and their other projects in Nicaragua and Panama.
And if you're a Bitcoiner like me, well, you can spend your Bitcoin at a Veritas village.
You can buy land and property with Bitcoin and you can mine Bitcoin with your energy self-sufficient house.
www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities art pad.
Also, they're planning a second iteration of their groundbreaking reef resort in the Philippines.
this time off the coast of that's right prospera in honduras one of the most important free cities
projects in the world you can purchase ownership in the prosper reef resort either outright or via
fractional shares tinyurl.com forward slash arc pad if you would like to buy a piece of seasteading
history there and also then benefit from the revenues and use of the arc pad resort as well
of course. Right, I'm in planning and packing mode today. Off to the Freedom Festival in the
UK this weekend. Lots of great speakers there and then straight on a flight to Prospera for the
Liberty Acceleration Summit. After that, I'm going to be walking the talk, as they say, by, that's
right, living in a free city for a month. I'm going to be based in the Doona Tower in Prospera
for four weeks working from there and of course diving into the mechanics of daily life in one of
the world's premier free cities can't wait for that experience it will be the longest i've ever
been away from my children in one go but obviously i'm looking forward to seeing how things pan out
i i see a future in positioning myself and my family in a free city probably a number of them
in rotation if I'm being honest but who knows certainly I will know a lot more in six weeks
times and I'll be informing you every week of how things are going right today's guest
it's a great one it's very highbrow one as well Patrick Schumacher is one of the most influential
architects alive right now he's a longtime partner at Zaha Hadid Architects a major theorist behind
parametricism and a founder director of the aa design research lab in london i'll give you a
quick uh definition of parametricism since we talk about it quite a bit in the show it's patrick's
term for a 21st century architectural style driven by computational parametric methods
this means forms are generated and continuously varied by adjustable parameters example site
circulation program structure etc etc so buildings and urban spaces become more fluid more adaptive
and interconnected but still coherent and legible as a unified system rather than just a pile of
unrelated objects patrick's a bit of a free cities og google image search here is your best friend
just search the word parametricism and you'll get to the brief pretty quickly right today's
conversation well it's certainly not about what makes buildings pretty it's a free market critique
of the built environment itself why housing is unaffordable why planning regimes kill the
discovery process and why urbanism in places like the uk has become a politicized rent seeking
machine instead of a competitive entrepreneurial one patrick's origin story is also very interesting
He says that the 2008 crisis is what pushed him into Austrian economics and consequently full-on libertarianism.
Then he followed the thread straight into free cities via Liberland, Prospera and Titus' book Free Private Cities.
We get into his core idea that cities are a form of spontaneous order
and that the job of architecture is not to impose a rigid blueprint,
but to make the real network of human relationships legible.
From there, we go deeper why he thinks parametricism is basically order emerging from complexity,
why AI will actually accelerate the frontier rather than flatten everything into sameness,
and why Patrick believes free cities should look like the 21st century,
not nostalgic reenactments of the 19th century.
That one's going to divide the community, I'm sure.
right value for value people and comments this week unfortunately you're going to have to wait
i'm recording these next two episodes uh way in advance because i'm too busy to do anything during
my first two weeks on the road in honduras so you'll have to wait a couple of weeks for those
sorry about that uh a quick mention the free cities conference talking of prosper is now just
166 days away and this year's event well it's a huge one for the first time ever we'll be holding
our flagship annual conference inside a real functioning free city but you already knew that
didn't you in previous years we've gathered in europe we've done prague we did mulheim in
switzerland and monaco back in the early days but this year prospera is ready to host us on the
beautiful island of Ruatan in Honduras. This event is quickly becoming our most anticipated conference
yet and we're expecting more international attention than ever before. What can attendees
expect? Well all the things that made our Prague conferences so valuable, presentations and updates
from more than a dozen of the world's leading free cities and seasteading projects. This includes
projects like Ciudad Morazan, Varistas Villages, CryptoCity, ArcPad, Atlas Island, Liberland and many more.
Obviously, they're just the stalwarts from the movement.
But what makes this event a first is that you won't just be hearing about free cities.
You'll be experiencing one firsthand.
If you're short on time, the core conference program in Prospera runs from September the 3rd to the 6th,
Featuring keynote talks, panel discussions, project presentations and plenty of opportunities for networking.
Of course, that's a massive part of our events.
Many a project has been dreamed up at a Free Cities conference.
Let me tell you, my own included.
We'll also have our famous VIP dinner and auction with Mr.
Mark Edge for those who want to upgrade their tickets.
But if you have a little bit more time, I strongly encourage you to arrive early.
and take part in our optional activities on September the 1st and 2nd.
These include a prosperous site tour, networking events with local businesses,
snorkeling over Ruatan's famous coral reefs, chocolate tasting,
visits to wildlife parks, championship beach volleyball and much more.
We also offering a special day excursion to Ciudad Morazan which is another famous free city project on the Honduran mainland these trips will take place on the 2nd of September and again on the 7th of September So if you can extend your stay
you'll have the rare opportunity to visit not one but two free cities in a single trip.
Siudad Morazan has a very different personality to Prospera, which you will see if you manage to
get there this really is a historic moment for the movement not only are we hosting our conference
inside a functioning free city for the first time but the political winds in Honduras have recently
shifted in favor of free cities with the election of a new president if you can make it this truly
will be an event not to be missed and tickets well you think what's this worth thousands possibly
no tickets start at 239 people what's not to like there but be aware prices increase
after april the 30th so be sure to secure yours soon and start planning what should be the trip
of a lifetime and also probably worth mentioning we're limit slightly limited on space compared
to Prague. So this event will sell out, I would imagine. So don't sit around for too long. It's
the kind of thing you need to plan and that includes many of the intricacies of getting
to Roatan and visas and things like this. So start thinking about it now and start planning.
Right on to the conversation. I would advise you to grab your most ergonomic seating apparatus
and as you dream of a skylines shaped by feedback loops well just sit back relax and enjoy my
conversation with patrick schumacher okay easy going yeah very easy going i mean i've got
I wouldn't say I'm nowhere near an expert on obviously on architecture, but I did dive into your world of architecture.
And it's a lot to take on board when you come from where I come from, which is, you know, period properties and etc.
And things like that.
This is my, but I am absolutely fascinated.
And I source, I've got a lot of questions actually
about the way you think about architecture
because I thought I could see some things
that don't make sense to me, if you sort of know.
But we'll come to that.
Tease them out, probe me.
We'll come to that.
Can we start with just how you got involved
with the Free Cities movement?
I know you've been dipping your toes in and out
for quite a long time now.
You've got connections with Prospera, with Liberland, with a lot of the projects.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
So first of all, I became a libertarian through the 2008 crisis.
And a lot of people shifted left, became anti-capitalist.
But I had been there from the mid-80s into the mid-90s and moved out of that.
So I wasn't going to be tempted back into left-wing ideology.
So when I discovered the Austrian School of Economics, because the explanation of the crisis made a lot of sense to me.
And people like Peter Schiff, you know, predicting it and somebody like Tom Woods explaining it.
And then diving rapidly into picking up the readings, writings, and I discovered the Mises Institute and so on and the works of Rosbott.
But I've already been familiar to some extent with Hayek's works.
So that's where I started.
And it applies beautifully to the built environment
because in the development process, urban development process,
we don't have much market process left.
It's very, very heavily kind of controlled and regulated and politicized
and to the detriment of development.
It basically leads to some kind of paralysis.
And in the end, the housing crisis, for instance, we have affordability crisis.
It can be traced back to that.
and it's all rent-seeking and it's rather than proper competition, entrepreneurship, discovery process.
None of this exists in a built environment in the advanced countries, for instance, Britain.
Now, so I was very intrigued when I – so I was a full-on libertarian,
and also understood that it's very important in the urban development process to liberalize.
I just heard about Liberland and being founded I was intrigued and more or less immediately
in the first year of founding I flew to Prague and visited with Jelitschka the president and
founder of Liberland and we had a whole afternoon on his roof terrace debating discussing and so
So that's where I connected and then I went to also to visit Liberland.
I mean, you couldn't go there, but there was a Liberland conference close by in Serbia.
And Eric Brimman picked me up, was there at the time consulting WIT and New Way Capital trying to help WIT to negotiate deals.
and so I met with Eric and we also learned about Prospera at the time and through that also came
in touch with Titus and also he had just published a book around that time, Free Private Cities,
which I was eagerly gobbling up and then I got involved with Eric. We were in parallel working
with with with vit we did helped him to organize some architectural competitions and then we
developed the metaverse for liberland i went to several of his conferences and i also connected
up with eric and titus visited prospera and we did studies actually urban development studies
for Eric and then also you know more detailed housing proposals with a very
new concept of kind of market exploration through co-creation which is something
you couldn't do in Europe because of the planning restrictions so that's yeah
that's why I got into it and I was at the time also been going around speaking
at many libertarian conferences,
Students for Liberty in various places in the US,
Liberty Con and so on,
and met with people and became part of a network.
So here's where I find it really interesting
because you're the...
Did you invent parametric design?
Not parametric design.
So I coined the phrase parametricism
and recognizing that there's something very profound and fundamental called the new epochal
style for the 21st century and that was my role and also so kind of canonizing to some extent what
has been achieved over a number of years by that time it was nearly 15 years in some kind of wave
a whole generation of architects investing in these new computational design concepts but also
the physiognomy morphology of these compositions and urban plans became kind of radically different
and new much more adaptive much more organic through the kind of techniques of integration
adaptation and this coincided with the with the idea of the so-called urban renaissance where
the period in the mid century there was this kind of sub greenfield factories sleeping cities and not much communication required in the city because everything was command and control planned through big corporates or the state and you have this kind
of re and have this kind of flow back into the city with the beginnings of the knowledge economy
through the computational and telecommunication revolution and so so that was in architecture
meant more dynamism, more complexity, layering new onto old.
And that developed some kind of new transitional styles.
Postmodernism came out of that so-called deconstructivism.
And I was involved with that, with Zaha Deed,
was one of the major forces of so-called deconstructivism.
And out of that developed something which I later, in retrospect,
called parametricism, which is quite distinct,
but I think much more long-lasting.
So postmodernism had 10, 15 years, deconstructors in 10 years, and then primatism, we're now literally 30 years in.
But the 2008 crisis took the steam out because what was great in the period up to that, there was much more dynamism development.
You know, there was the remarketization of a lot of development processes.
and you had phenomena like Dubai and Europe,
a lot of booming cities,
and that energized the whole field
and gave also younger voices, new voices, work to do.
And 2008 was a general moment of retrenchment,
where you had the anti-capitalist flourish,
where there wasn't work,
where the schools of architecture also became kind of more politicized and anti-capitalist.
And so that, in a way, took the steam out of this movement, Permettism, unfortunately.
Because throughout the 90s and up to 2008, 9, 10, it was really, the field seemed to be converging on this.
And, I mean, we kept going, and there's a number of other protagonists,
the small hand of protagonists kept going, and we kept rolling out and maturing and developing.
but it didn't deliver that kind of takeover of the field
similar to what the modernists who started in the 1920s
and into the 30s.
Then there was a disruption of the Second World War
but then post-war was rolling out throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s
and transformed the physiognomy of that planet all over.
And so that didn't happen with parametricism.
So we got this kind of strange retrenchment
going into retro styles, going into quiet, inconspicuous.
And the field, the discipline itself,
started more talk about social justice and sustainability
and criticizing growth.
There was, I call it also some kind of vogue takeover of the field,
which hampered in a way the kind of optimistic, progressive,
in a positive sense, let's say, technology-fueled advancement of urban life.
So, okay.
God, there's a lot there.
There's a lot there.
Did I hear that right?
That parametricism came out of postmodernism?
Yeah, it's a version.
I mean, postmodernism injected some kind of degree of complexity,
and there was this kind of idea of collaging motifs
and integrating new over old,
but it used traditional motifs.
It was a kind of pop collaging with traditional architectural motifs,
but you get something which is more lively and rich and varied
than the modernism, which is this paradigm of endless repetition.
And so postmodernism started to be more playful and versatile, but with historical motifs.
Then deconstructorism picked up the kind of versatility and complexity build up, but no longer with historical motifs, but with more abstract geometric elements.
And so that was, I thought, in advance.
And they had additional, let's say, compositional opportunities, which postmodernism didn't have.
And out of that, though, this wasn't, in my view, sustainable because it became very quickly too complex and illegible.
These compositions, they became kind of, let's say, visual chaos, nearly.
And so parametriism comes out of this ordering that chaos, but having the intricacy, versatility, adaptiveness of what we try to aim for in deconstructors.
but with the new tools, computational tools,
we could do something which was more coherent
and more legible, let's say.
Here's where when I was looking into all this,
this is where my mind found a problem.
And we should probably define parametricism before we go on.
But basically, you've just said it there,
parametricism was a way of creating order out of chaos
in a way you've just described that's right but but i i got i was under the impression that
parametricism is more about a spontaneous evolution of something it they they seem like
they seem they seem or like you mentioned hayek and his spontaneous order yeah but they seem at
odds with each other you've got this formal regime deciding what's what and then you've got a
spontaneous order no okay i can resolve that first of all on the step back on a more general
philosophical level, we looked at process of self-organization, spontaneous order, you know,
complexity theory, chaos theory, the way, for instance, a complex formation of eddies and flows
and happens when the water flows across some rocks. These are lawfully, but they're quite
complex and rich and adaptive. And they're not invented. You don't impose. You allow the various
parameters and influences to come together and have a kind of self-organization.
And that's something which Hayek could also use that phrase, because he was interested
in these processes of self-organization, complexity theory, like cybernetics.
So I think there's the connection right there.
Now, when it comes to the spontaneous order of the city, what I'm arguing is this.
we need to allow entrepreneurial freedom.
We need land use should not be described by any planning regime.
I think that people come together into the city
by seeking out very particular connections
and a multitude of connections.
And they have to find each other.
There needs to be the degree of freedom to associate and self-organize
what I call the co-location synergies.
That's what you need, maximal entrepreneurial freedom.
And then the role of the architect is not to impose a formal order preconceived,
but to congenially articulate this emerging network of relations
by making these underlying connections, affiliations,
what belongs together more or less, legible by articulating that.
organizing that spatially and articulating this.
So when you come into a site and you say,
I wanted to be here because I wanted to be close to some of these neighbors,
and so you establish then not you come in with a preconceived form.
You say I have to be adaptive because I want to make my entrances into my building,
line up with the entrances of the neighbors I want to connect to.
I also want to formally affiliate to the buildings perhaps they have There a certain geometry a certain path hitting my building I allow this to continue in that direction so that you see the building forms out of these relations
And parametricism allows for that.
And that's the spirit.
So it is some kind of spontaneous order, but it needs to be articulated.
The profession, as has been, wasn't able to do this.
It had a very rigid vocabulary and insisted on proportion symmetry, a certain orthogonality, but often sides, for instance, are not orthogonal.
So you can exploit with a pliable, amoeba-like kind of approach.
You can fit yourself much better, and also if there are different levels coming to your building, you can mediate.
So these moves mean that we can trace and make visible the spontaneous order which emerges and we're not imposing.
Our view is that we have to trace, follow, articulate the affiliations and connections because that's why people come into the city, to have these connections, to be close to things they care about.
but also to work together with things they choose to be next to.
And sometimes if everything is kind of visually chaotic,
you don't understand what functions together.
But if you formally affiliate and pick up some of the materiality,
some of the geometry, some of the alignments and directions,
you can kind of intuitively read this environment better.
And that's our idea.
And also to give, you know, don't stuff, also internal relations.
Don't stuff everything which needs to be accommodated into a preconceived box, internally preconceived.
No, you allow the requirements to push the envelope, to structure the internal relations without preconceived geometries.
so the metrics yeah that they're based on then they're preconceived right are they metrics well
okay as in parametricism can i can i just explain can i tell you what i think i'll tell you what i
think okay because i'm probably wrong but parametricism is um a design language based on
algorithms so you choose some algorithms yeah and then that forms the uh framework for within
which within which anything can spontaneously evolve yeah right so so there are kind of
preconceived yeah there's always frameworks but not only in parametrize the point of parametrize
is that the frameworks are more versatile pliable they have more input parameters but also i can
choose to have many potential frameworks I could bring to bear. Compared to older styles, there's
only one or two or three inverted commas frameworks to start with, and they have less
pliability. So it's always comparative. You can't get away from what I call the formal a priori,
the kind of framing set of categories, even when you describe something. You come with a language.
The question is, is your language more versatile, expressive, subtle, adaptive, or is it more crude, simplistic, etc.?
So my argument is, parametriism has a more advanced, meaning sophisticated, pliable, expressive language,
also more tools to pragmatically adapt, it's not only a question of expression,
of expression as our accommodation to pragmatic conditions which are more complex. I mean the
previous in the old world, you know, life in various institutions was more static. Nine to five you
come and sit always in your same cell. At lunchtime you go to the canteen and after lunch you go back
and then everybody streams out and you don't need to have inter-awareness, inter-visibility,
in continuous recalibrating you have maybe a few scheduled meetings and that's much more dynamic
now particularly knowledge economy so every day you need to make sure that you take note
of what all the other moving parts are you plug into and then you kind of roaming around you often
have not as fixed desk you're roaming around in different settings detail at a space for instance
and you have meetings meetings meetings with with internal external conditions you also right after
work and in between work you have lunch meetings which are business meetings maybe outside
networking after hours you go to the pub or go to an exhibition opening or conference
so it is much much much more dynamic and interactive and therefore the settings
you need to emphasize different things you need to emphasize that that you accommodate all these
flows and relations that people also have more legibility of all the other things going on which
might be relevant to them that's why we have opening up the section we have atria inter
visibility into awareness and we have more kind of fluid and different settings you can quickly
shift from one setting to another it's not closed rooms once you sit in the closed rooms and then
you come open the door there's an empty corridor and you have to know where you're going but if
you're an open bureau landschaft over many levels you get a sense what's going who's coming who's
going and and what might be relevant to you and if you go to a Google campus that's what it's like
actually at Google people have 20% of the time free used to have to freely associate set up
teams set up projects because you can no longer come out and control from above it's moving too
fast knowledge is dispersed work is self-directed so we are creating the environment for that
and it's not corporate headquarters and factories on the green field which which just get follow a
blueprint you know so it's continuously rewriting the blueprint and that's what we want to we want
You want to accommodate that and express that and facilitate that.
And of course, you have always some kind of, you come with a kind of systematic systems framework,
but there are many competing ones and they update quickly.
So there's not one frame which we stuff everything into.
It's like the endless species of nature.
None of them is arbitrary.
they start arbitrarily but then they adapt, they evolve, they exploit a niche and things in nature,
these species, they co-locate and synergize and feed off each other.
And that's the way I see the world of the spontaneous order of the knowledge economy.
Something we end up discussing a fair bit on this podcast in relation to free cities,
because they tend to be located often in brand new places.
Which I was interested to hear your take on that.
Because when you look historically at a lot of cities,
they amass around something, normally a resource,
and then they seem to evolve over a period of time.
One of the kind of potential problems with free cities
is you kind of have to plant them in one place and make them.
So do you think you can build a full city from scratch
or do you think you have to sort of start it and then let the market decide
what happens to the place? Yeah you definitely have to let the market come in
but also you need to seed it with something of something which already has
the rough general features I wouldn't start with a grid of 100 equal blocks I
would start with something which is a default differentiation or range economies of scope so
you can have small medium large enterprises but you also allow them to
connect so you can kind of
fuse blocks into allow for bridges etc. Yes you can fully invent on the drawing board but when you
come to seeding a city and making first sketches you need to invite people to something which
they can imagine but then there's something already you know there will be updates and
and there will be transformations and flexibilities.
You have to be very agile on that.
And we can do that because we don't destroy the figure by making changes.
If you become a very rigid, neoclassical, symmetrical, axial plan,
if you adapt something, it will be out of whack and shows us a mistake.
That's not the way we would design.
So it's inherently flexible.
We thought this through also with respect, for instance,
something like Liberland or Prospera.
So we're saying we can start in parallel with some kind of curated center.
It just remains adaptable.
Then we have other districts where we're trying to say, okay, come in,
and we let the group of owners who started to invest,
they can kind of arrange amongst themselves how to curate some rules.
Because you might need some rules to contain negative externalities.
but then you also should
be proposing a kind of free
for all where you come with
the risk, I'm placing something
here, I'm unrestrained but
I therefore cannot control what happens next to me
but I would trust that somebody
next to me might
be here because they
want to have something to do with us so we'll be
synergetic but you can't
predict so there's a bit of more
risk but also more opportunity in the free
for all so I was
opting for a kind of mixture of regimes in parallel,
a central curated where the managers and owners,
let's say the free cities investors,
make propositions.
And it is more predictable that you come in here
and we were roughly in this environment.
But then, of course, you also rely on the fact
that it is being filled out by the planned kind of functions.
And you wanted to say there will be a conference here,
you have to actually find somebody who's hosting conferences,
unless the city developer wants it himself
to become a conferencing company or exhibition company.
So there's the pros and cons.
And the way we looked at it,
we're saying we start on three or four fronts simultaneously,
and then let's see what catches on.
and then remain agile to adapt as we go along.
So, yeah, it's definitely something which you can't do overnight.
What is very important, though, is that you start with a critical mass.
Everybody waits for everybody else to be there to have the network starting.
So the network effects, like with any company which relies on network effects,
a city is relying on it.
The difficulty is to kind of bootstrap that out of nothing,
particularly in a remote location.
So that's why I think it's very important to have things like a metaverse version or to build a community ahead of settling.
So there's relations, there's expectations, there's plans that have been shared and recycled.
And we developed this tool of a co-creation virtually, a digital twin evolving, which you can already use for communications, for conferences like Liberland.
The Liberland metaverse, for instance, played that role and wanted to play that role.
and I think that's important because the difficulty is as I said yes it will always
start relatively small but it has to be kind of rapidly grow to a certain extent that you're not
isolated I mean the good aspect is that you also can be plugged in into a telecommunication network
but you also want to have things happening at site and even if it's just to share certain
facilities but also to have collaborators. So that's why I also thought it's important to try
in the curation to target certain industries first where you feel and you know when you open
a new building the same you can say I'm calling this a media center because I wanted to not
randomly have any tenants which have nothing to do with each other. I want media companies here.
So you have to play a little bit. I want to kind of reserve these for media companies,
try to find and bring some media companies.
That will then bring other media companies.
And then you have something, you don't need to be very large
to have critical mass of co-location and synergy.
That's, I think, a strategy which I would emphasize.
You need to kind of niche or have some kind of,
in the world division of labor, some kind of specialization
so that you don't need to have, you have 10 different seats
which each of them lacks critical mass.
and the relevance of these to each other is insufficiently strong.
So that's the tough task.
And sometimes you have to hold a little bit longer rather than giving up too quickly
and it becomes a kind of random sampling of anybody who somehow feels too.
Of course, so that's the kind of thing which I think Prosper has been doing that
with respect to, for instance, crypto and certain things which make sense there.
like innovative health tourism and health innovations.
So I think that's important and that's the entrepreneurial task
and we are very alert to that and we then help to support that as architects.
We're not writing these briefs and programs.
But I would highly recommend your point is very true that it will have to emerge
and if for instance the health tourism takes are much more than the crypto which might have
different requirements then then you need to also be able to pivot or recalibrate the priorities
and let this emerge because we know blueprints into the long future
are vulnerable particularly in such dynamic times. I'd like to take a couple of minutes
just to tell you about what I think is one of the most interesting real-world freedom projects that
we've come across recently. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I'm
always looking for things that actually exist, not the concepts, not the renderings, but real projects
where people are already building the future. And this brings me to the Reef Resort, developed by
the seasteading company ArcPad, founded of course by Mitchell Suchner, who many of you will remember
was the winner of the Innovation Award at the 2025 Free Cities Conference.
The Reef Resort, as far as we're aware, is the world's first operational seasteading resort.
It's located just off the coast of Samal Island in the Philippines, where ArcPad currently operates.
14 floating units available through Airbnb and other platforms,
a project that has already hosted thousands of guests in both their accommodation and floating restaurant.
now. Here's the development that will be especially interesting to listeners of this podcast.
ArcPad is planning a second reef resort, this time off the coast of Prospera in Honduras,
one of the most important Free Cities projects in the world. And construction is intended to
align with the 2026 Free Cities Conference. So this is where the opportunity comes for you.
You can now pre-purchase ownership in the Prospera Reef Resort. Ownership is available either outright
or through fractional shares, allowing you to purchase from as little as 1% up to full ownership.
Your ownership percentage determines your usage rights, your share of rental income from the
eco-resort operations and your voting power in property decisions. This also gives you the
opportunity, of course, to be part of a pioneering ocean-based development within the Free Cities
ecosystem. Full units at the Prospera site start from $95,000, but with fractional ownership
available you can participate at whatever level suits you if you'd like to explore this opportunity
i included a link in the show notes where you can register your interest and access the pre information if you interested in free cities frontier living and the future of ocean communities then this is a chance to get involved at the
ground floor. Seasteading is no longer just an idea. It's happening and now it's coming to prospera.
So is it fair to say you still design using parametricism?
Oh, yeah. Right. So is there is there a specific visual language to it then?
Because when I think about at least my sort of limited knowledge of Zaha D buildings is, oh, they all look, they've all got that look, which is a parametricism look.
So so does that mean a free city needs a specific architectural language?
I what I think a lot of people appreciate, first of all, yes, because the look is not the immediate intent.
the look is an outcome of a rational and adaptive process and it's not this interesting you can
recognize it but it's at the same time more versatile than all the other styles put together
it's a bit like you always will recognize whether a form is an organic form let's say or a natural
form inorganic or organic rather than a mechanical form right even though the there's so many
different natural emerged forms like inorganic or organic nature,
you recognize this isn't an invented mechanical piece of equipment.
So that's sometimes the puzzle where people think,
oh, it's recognizable, that's why it's in inverted commas all the same,
on a very abstract level, it is all the same, it remains recognizable,
but it's like the infinite forms of nature.
So it's much more versatile and rich in variation,
although recognizable it has one label and it's not actually recognizable as zaha deed
not to the extent i would say then i wouldn't be proud of that recognized as parametricism
i'm proud of that it should be and there are many others who coming in since we're such a
dominant mothership of this movement in terms of the large-scale operation will consistently work
that. It is often kind of conflated and associated. But there are many other authors. And some of the
major corporations also author projects like this, but not consistently. So I would say, yes, there
is a language in the in the in the broadest sense. And also, it means that it gives a certain identity
to a place.
So what people dislike today
is that there seems to be
a lack of identity
in different places.
They all start to look the same,
but if you look closely,
it's not the same,
but you can't get the gist
or essence of the place.
I call that garbage spill urbanization.
If you spill out various
cans of trash,
they all have
quite different ingredients.
But as a field of trash, they all look the same.
Because it is amorphous.
It has no form, shape, order, logic you can hook onto.
Even though the one has a Coke can and a milk carton and a crumbled paper,
and this one has plastic pieces and no Coke, but smashed glass bottles.
Because in the end, we respond to them, well, it's all equally white noise, disorder.
And so that is where we have to a bit reflect what we think is sameness, what is difference.
And we crave for identity.
And with parametricism, it's very clear that we can build up, not preconceived,
every town would evolve in a past-dependent way
because it starts with certain conditions,
certain materials, certain climatic conditions.
There's something which gives it a particular identity.
And if you work in paramedicine,
you're meant to affiliate as things come together
because they want it to be together.
And they have a certain look and feel and sets of relations.
This builds up.
And this might also include ingredients which were there.
You know, whether it was a valley, a river, an island, whether it's tropic climate or Nordic climate, all of these parameters and aspects will imprint.
So you end up with recognizable places.
Very similar, in a way, to the vernacular, where you had to, through the constraints and parameters and with less blueprinting, but evolving village forms, town forms.
often they're concentric, not because somebody invented a concentric plan, because you start with
some kind of fortification and then the first ring of houses around that, second ring, third ring,
and then the whole thing is kind of locked onto a river on one side, so it has this asymmetry and
orientation to one side. So these things evolve and in a way that's, parametriism does it too. So
So the vernacular kind of settlement structures, they have not been planned, they are crew,
but they have character and logic because there are certain regular parameters which imprint themselves
and generate unity and the right variety relative to conditions.
And that's the paradigm, of course, in today's world.
We are operating on a different scale with more versatility,
but the principle of let's say self-organization spontaneous order um is still there how does that
fit in then i know in the free cities movement like titus is a good example there are a lot of
people that idolize for example a european a beautiful european period city say something
yeah and i i know that a lot of people wish to create to sort of recreate that mainly but say
base it around a square use use period vernacular you know and what what do you think about that so
my response to this is they're quite right to if i the different environments we pervade
that there's something, a sense of place, a sense of coherence,
versus that jumble of incongruent buildings which have no rhyme, no reason, no correlation.
Because in the current world, it is actually failing of our discipline,
but as well as the kind of randomness of a land use plan,
where you have to build only can build this which is prescribed here
and there is no therefore no immediate synergies
but also the planners prescribe too much
so you can't articulate then architects try to bring their own kind of
relatively self-indulgent ideas
and the discipline is quite fragmented
I would also choose the historic city.
As I said earlier, there's like the vernaculars, but also then the kind of later centuries where architecture was involved,
but mostly involved only in the primary buildings.
And the bulk of the building was still kind of tradition-bound building vernacular.
These are more lovely, more places with more identity.
And also, as I said, the convergence back to the historic centers, to the cities,
this kind of more dense life is also better adaptive now.
And also this idea of pedestrianized cities
where you have to connect up and be in many places quickly
than the greenfield and mechanically mass-produced sleeping cities.
So the intuition is right.
And if you had to choose with what available either this kind of concrete mega building or the garbage spill cluster
I also would choose the historic city and center.
And that's where postmodernism started.
But it also wouldn't be, if you now compare what we could deliver,
a kind of spontaneous order which is more adaptive to the actual needs.
Because with the historic center, you have preconceived elements.
They're nicely ordered, they create a nice ensemble and city,
but still the buildings are too small,
the buildings didn't have enough variety between buildings,
and we can deliver variety between buildings without collapsing into garbage.
We can make larger variety but have gradual transformation from one type to another or make them similar in interesting ways.
So basically, because the attraction is going to the best we've got, but we have something much better we can deliver.
That's my response.
And so is it so would you say, is it impossible for the two to live, to coexist in the same place?
Oh, yes. I mean, look, I would when I would make a new place.
I mean, we're also learning from some of those features of the historic city.
For instance, the focus on the on the void spaces, on the plazas and places and streets as spaces rather than only at the buildings and the in between has no shape.
No, we also want to shape the space, the urban space, and not only the buildings as object.
And sometimes the buildings as object have to retrieve, retreat into a framing surface to focus on the space.
There's lessons we can learn.
Also, the variety and the different types of cities are more monumental and more intricate with small alleys and small surprising plazas.
And we can learn from that.
But again, as I said, maybe we have to do it on a different scale.
We have to do it with more variety.
So there's no lack of learning and that was the whole period of postmodernism was about.
I wouldn't recite, I mean, but there's things like lodgers,
where you have between the street surface in the outdoor and the indoor, you have uncovered buffer
zone, for instance. Features like this we can pick up on and when we did the City for Praxis,
we have in Italy and Sicily.
You also learn, you know,
some of the features of the historical buildings,
they are better adapted to climatic conditions.
In the modernist period,
we could just kind of do a glass box everywhere
and inject mechanical power to heat or cool,
whereas in the traditional architecture,
you had to be more,
you could you had to try to develop comfortable conditions without having mechanical
burning through huge energy because you couldn't do that so you make things like
um wind towers to ventilate out the heat you have shading covered place shades make the streets very
narrow because they're shaded, self-shading and all the things we in the modernist period,
a lot of these subtleties, adaptive subtleties were kind of left behind, not required. Now with the
sustainability conscientiousness they're coming back but also they give character and identity
and therefore you know in different climates where you are. In the tropical you have always
these kind of roofs roof overhangs and oftentimes you don't even have enclosure you're not in closed
spaces you're just covered and that because the wind whatever wind there is should breathe through
freely and so we can work with these conditions but now on a different scale on a and and combine
them with with different requirements so it is it is understood that there's this kind of draw
being drawn to these oldest patterns and we can integrate them so I have this
research paradigm learning from the vernaculars because we can learn how
because there was been hundreds and thousands of years sometimes of of kind
of incremental adaptation to climatic conditions and it's a bit like the
biomimetic research where engineering solutions go out into nature because a
A lot of organisms have developed intricate and surprising solutions to problems,
which we can learn from.
And similarly, I would argue, we're learning from the vernaculars
and the historical architecture.
Because we have to relearn it, because these were intuitively discovered
through trial and error, and they're not written scientific analyses.
But of course, we can't take it over one-to-one,
because as I said, we have slightly different requirements now,
particularly on this level of scale.
But I feel, I think, and the responses we get with our work is that we, the kind of love and sense of comfort and energy people get when they walk into a historical city, we can solicit a similar response with our buildings and cities.
Does parametricism ever come up with like columns, for example, or it does produce, because obviously they were solutions to problems from a natural scenario as well.
The human mind is a natural scenario, isn't it?
It's like, okay, we want a slanting roof.
We want an overhang, right?
We need to prop it up with something.
We work with slanted rooms.
There's drainage.
There's also vaulting, a lot of vaulting.
And the interesting thing is that when we do vaulting, in the old days, it was only possible if you have a full symmetrical condition.
Because if you vault, you have the forces, you rely on equilibrium.
If it is more of a freer form, an irregular form, then, for instance, traditionally they wouldn't know how to equilibrate this.
And you have differential settlements, you wouldn't know how to dimension the foundation, the whole thing would crack up.
Now we can use walls and we can make them more adaptive to
site conditions, to the requirements of spaces and rooms. We don't need repetition and
symmetry to the same extent.
But we like walls. Walls are very efficient.
Because everything is in compression and material is much stronger in compression.
And so we have, that's contemporary research.
So parametriism moved on to what I call tectonism, which is still parametricism,
but it is absorbing many more, let's say, engineering, computational engineering logics and science,
and more subtly integrate that as well.
And these are often nice logics because they bring out typical forms which have a coherency.
And also they relate back in a lovely way to some historical models.
For instance, they have a vault and when you place the stones, there's a certain pattern.
Or if you have kind of reticulations or ribs like in the Gothic vaults,
this is actually quite efficient to make the overall structure lighter.
but still equally stiff, and these ribs pick up a certain pattern
and nearly give a kind of ornamental character to the space.
So when we, in the stage of tectonism,
affiliates even becomes even more akin to traditional structures Because what connects them is this idea of a
adaptive discovery process except that now we have more degrees of freedom and versatility
and they had there are more constraints in the old days but you know the gothic
cathedral is a wonderful structure and the ribbing pattern is beautiful and but the the
the bays repeat. So you're constrained to that. What if your church opens up and each bay and ribbing
becomes larger and the profiles become deeper and the columns therefore become heavier,
the forces become to the outside become larger. That's the way we would do it. So we have this kind of...
And when you look back at a project like this you see ah, it's as beautiful, maybe perhaps more beautiful
than the gothic because you can see the more intricate adaptive structure. The organism is
more complex. If you compare a worm to a snake, the worm has an elegant form but it's segments.
You don't know where's the front, where's the back, top, bottom. And the snake has this kind of
nice tessellation which is very different on the bottom, the sides, the top.
there is a front, the back and there's more intricacy and also superiority.
You know, if you put the snake into a contest with the worm, we know who wins.
And that's the way I would compare a more simple version of an architecture and a more sophisticated one.
It looks the way it looks because it adapts better and is more optimized.
For instance, if you look at the traditional walls and arches, they're semicircles.
It's easier to install.
But a parabolaid arc, inverted commas, not an arc, form is a much more optimized form.
Really?
Yes.
But it's not symmetrical?
The semicircle has problems.
It's easier to make.
That's why the compromise is then the kind of pointed arch.
If you go from the semicircle arch to the pointed arch,
you approximate more closely the parabuloid.
But it's still not the optimal form.
You find the optimal form if you take a chain and you hang it,
and then you invert it.
Okay, right.
And that's not a semicircle.
So we work with these more optimal forms.
Now, they have a subtle, more elegance.
You know, they're more optimized and they're more subtle.
They're very coherent.
They're mathematically organized.
The physics generates them.
And we are not hampered by the restrictions of the builders
who might have been able to do a parabuloid,
but it was also not, you know, how do you draw that?
The semicircle, you just have a compass.
They didn't know.
And also, in the semicircle, you can make each of the stones the same in the paraboloid.
The angle keeps changing, it's harder, and so on and so forth.
So that's where we have this kind of, we're moving from the worm to the snake.
But when you look back at the coherent design,
there is this kind of Sagrada Familia, or the work of Gaudi in some of his later works,
which has this character of the more sophisticated.
you have to imagine stripping down all the ornament and crustaceans
these are more sophisticated versions
of let's say kind of basilica form
already the first glimpses
I'm going to go ahead and assume
that you're using AI in a large way now
and it must be an incredibly exciting prospect
I mean I use it in a very simple way
and it blows my mind continuously
but in parametricism it must be the just unbelievable because and in fact um it must be
working faster than than the whole office could work on this idea of emergent designs
well yes there are different types of ai let's say of course we worked with um algorithmic and
computational design, that was the biggest revolution.
But what you can, and we had a lot of tools
of form finding, the kind of physics simulations,
as I said, the chain model inverted,
but not only in the simple arc,
a three-dimensional chain network.
So we had all this.
Now, when it comes to AI, the image AI,
everybody was so excited about that part.
Yes, you can accelerate, but you rely on the body of work
to train up the AI.
And some of the more sophisticated versions,
which I call tectonism,
there isn't enough out there for the AI to pick that up,
but we have trained our own AI,
feeding it with these examples,
and then it can accelerate that.
Yes, you can shortcut the form finding.
And it is also lovely and creative,
and you can interbreed different prompts
and different references and images
and allow it to kind of compose something more complex.
But yes, it is relying on what has been out there.
And so we also have to target and can train up the networks
so that it can learn the most sophisticated versions.
And then, of course, it speeds up enormously.
Presumably, though, it can study nature in an infinite way.
So in a way, there is a lot of un-mined data for producing parametricism.
Absolutely. And an interesting way, if you step back superficially, it is really happening. If you Google AI and architecture, you can see where the desire is, what people would like to design and build. It's all parametricism, basically. 80% of it.
in the real world you know the planning constraints the difficulty of the construction
industry i mean our firm we're doing it but you need a bit of you still need a bit of a special
occasion a slightly increased budget so um and then with all the constraints particularly in
advanced countries where buildings should be inconspicuous there's always neighbors who
complain there's always politicization so developers try to be as inconspicuous as possible
So that hampers a little bit what is really happening.
But what I love with the AI revolution is you can see where the desires are
for all the young architects who play with that
and all the amateur enthusiasts.
They want something which looks much more like parametricism.
So yes, that's very encouraging.
But one also has to, you know, the shift from parametricism
in this more sophisticated version of tectonism,
requires higher coherency and rationality requirements,
it's more particular.
And yes, we can train it, but we have to train it.
And you're quite right, you can also train it on natural formations.
And that's just, yeah, it's very productive.
But it's not an automatic because it relies so much on what you feed it with.
And if you want something novel and different and we don't have enough to feed it with, then we have to first generate these samples to then let the network learn that.
And that's what we're currently doing.
I think that's my overarching experience with AI is that I often find myself using it to create a novel thing based on, you know, a series of parameters in a way.
So it seems to be quite good at that.
If you said, if you said like, you know, this is a bicycle and this is how you pedal it.
Can you apply that to hot air balloons or something?
It would know how to...
It's just sort of like...
Yeah, I think it's surprisingly creative
and also the result has coherency.
I mean, when we first discovered it,
it was also very exciting.
There was a bit of development process up to this
where you can see some potential,
but the results were incoherent.
The buildings were not properly sitting.
The perspective wasn't right.
The light and shadow wasn't right.
But that has been overcome.
So now you get a kind of something quite novel and different, but you can see it's a building, it sits, it has a good orientation, light and shadow play on it in incredible ways.
So you look at it, you could actually model it, so it's a coherent, an image of a coherent object.
Wonderful, but it does, it lacks, most of these still lack the coherency of the kinds of objects we're designing,
which have then not where you have to get these curves and rhythms.
There's more interacting, there are more coherency requirements
which the models have, they don't have enough resource to reproduce.
And that's where we at the moment, where we are generating these sample sets.
and generating synthetic data actually
through various optimization algorithms
which are computationally burden heavy.
But once we've trained up the model,
we can reproduce these results quicker,
maybe not with 100% accuracy,
but good enough to use and discover and generate options.
So that's definitely an accelerating machine,
but it's also, as you said, a creativity machine
because you can mix in prompts.
We would say, for instance, let's take a kind of system
of walls and tensile structures but inject the fluidity of some kind of a landscape formation.
So the model on the feeding images of two or three character types which usually
had so far been separate domains and this kind of meshing and hybridization
is a very nice technique of innovation.
Also in nature, it's kind of recombination.
And we had that by hand, we often were thinking like this.
This is a concept we discovered
and worked that heavily in the 80s and 90s,
what you call generating hybrids, chimeras.
But to do that by hand
it's kind of quite clumsy and difficult do you think that um parametricism or tectonism
will be the the next period of architecture because i i when i think about ai and i think
about technology being able to produce these yeah designs this is now a reality and it wasn't
25 years ago and it never was in historically ever so presumably the world of architecture will
converge on i hope so it should converge i mean it's best practice i'm sure of that
it shows that we how we flourished and grown and how many competitions we win
the competitors not necessarily have the facility don't have the the rigor the tools i mean it's
is hard to build up. We've been able to do it because we have, for 30 years, I have a direct
relationship with a post-professional 18-month degree here at the AA in London, Architectural
Association School of Architecture. We had 15 years of working with teams and a masterclass in
Vienna, Yale, Columbia University, Harvard University, and not only me, many of our staff
teach, for instance, with the
University College London.
These are our kind of
research department. We have internal
research departments, which is very
unusual for
architectural firm, but we are on the
large side of firms. So we have
about 10% working in research,
people who are doing PhDs
and writing scientific paper and reading
scientific papers to translate
into new algorithms. So with that,
it's not so easy
for everybody
to imitate but it becomes easier and easier there are a lot of tools where plugins are made available
endless youtube tutorials students can pick this up so it's spreading that's very important
there's ways of allowing many and nearly everybody to participate in these skills
and now with ai making it even easier also to write plugins and scripts
so easy now with Gemini to do a web app and have an algorithm you don't have to know how to code
so that will help enormously I think to converge and it will also converge because
we need a more open discourse and be more critical of each other but the let's say
functional pragmatic benefits so you can use AI to make an organic form but the tectonism form
would be optimal.
The materiality, so if you do something less rationally,
first of all, you look at it, it's difficult to,
it looks a bit kind of odd and amorphous and arbitrary,
and the one which is optimized, they get a sense of,
ooh, this settles, it's varied, but it also has coherency,
but also it's maybe the material costs,
the amount of cement you need is maybe 50%.
the steel you need, the reinforcement is maybe down to 20%.
And eventually this will come out as cost advantages.
So I think the convergence will happen through that.
The engineering disciplines are also now much more aligned.
If you do a beam and you do a straight extrusion,
there is a lot of excess.
You would have to perforate it.
It should swell in the middle if it's in bending
and thickening in another direction at the edges.
And the extrusion is only rational as long as it's mass-produced.
But if you anyway laser-cut and robotically weld the piece,
do the optimized version.
And that means some of these rectilinear,
and if you then have a beam in a building,
they should all be kind of subtly different.
and it is more beautiful, it is more economic and I would think that therefore
unless there are barriers to continuous rationalization
like planning or like a dysfunctional discourse where people insist
no don't tell me what to do, don't criticize me, I like what I like
I mean, this kind of attitude, a bit backward attitude in our field oftentimes.
If these barriers would come down and a more market process, driven market process would do that, you would have this convergence.
It's just making me think, actually, that because, I mean, it's hard to gauge this, but a lot of people say AI is moving so fast that, you know, in five years time, there's all kinds of people predicting very crazy things in five years time.
I don't know whether it's true or not. It's very hard to gauge.
But when you apply that to design and architecture,
you can imagine that in the not too distant future,
a computer could come up with the perfectly optimized design for any situation could it well i mean we still need an author to take responsibility to you know we are becoming yes
we are we are not the ones who execute and make a hundred individual decisions on any corner
we set up systems we set up metrics criteria of selection and we explore a much more wider range
of options this way and we evaluate these options through metrics, through comparisons,
we have evolutionary algorithms, yes, but you need expert interlocutors,
which also translate the requirements of a client of a site into which systems are relevant.
What are the priority criteria? Which metrics and what range of metrics? Do we optimize to 99%?
and therefore compromise a number of other factors or is 90% good?
There's kind of, let's say, decreasing, let's say there's marginal utility to go from 95,
it's no longer worth it. So these are judgment calls and the judgment calls have to come from
people who know and have been working with these systems. So these systems are very important. I
I don't even see that we have shrinking staff.
Because if you think about, same with the computational revolution,
our productivity per person has been monumentally increased,
but it didn't go into reducing staff and reducing, let's say,
design fees relative to construction budget.
Because investing more in design means you have less cost in construction.
because you can read out all the clashes, you can optimize further.
And also in terms of the benefits.
So if you think of a cascade, the final value of a building is its utility,
the benefit, what it facilitates and allows for.
So for instance, a company like us, we would always go for the better building.
The cost of leasing a building in the overall cost equation of a service firm,
financial or architectural, engineering, anything,
is relatively marginal.
The real cost is staff and salaries.
So if we stuffed our people into a building,
which means they don't see each other, don't interact,
we're missing the point just to save some bucks.
But that's, and the construction cost,
therefore, if you develop something more beneficial,
and we can demonstrate this,
it's worthwhile investing more.
But relative to fees, so construction costs can still grow relative to other costs.
Particularly if land costs come down, then we have a huge land cost politically created.
But the planning cost, the design cost relative to construction costs could also increase for the overall equation be more beneficial.
It will be more economical to invest more in design, particularly if we now have new tools where we can do more.
I mean, for instance, the decisions which we are making for our clients or the clients can make on a basis of way more secure, way more tested with many alternatives.
We give them also way more opportunity to appreciate what they might be getting.
photo realistic immersive environment they can see what they get they can imagine will that work
won't that work they get a bim model where where everything is kind of counted and where we where
we can kind of change per market and see the cost implications so the the more investment in the
planning process as i said also less delays on site uh because things don't fit and you have to
to de-build, to rebuild, clash detection.
There's so many elements of the productivity gains
where it's worthwhile, which leads in a way
to more design always is better.
But you also have to have more design,
just to think of more design makes no sense.
You have to have more opportunity to improve.
And that's what these new systems bring.
So I'm very confident that we won't see slashing of staff, but everybody much more productive for the benefit of the product and for the overall cost benefit and particular cost benefit equation of these products.
Something I've noticed with AI is I've already got a kind of form of fatigue about it.
I'll give you an example.
Yesterday, my wife's doing a new website.
She makes very high-end sort of upholstery things.
And she's doing a new website.
She showed me.
She said, look at this.
This is amazing.
I can point it at one of my pillows and say, put that pillow in another scenario.
And I get all these free pictures.
And my instant thought is, be careful.
Because so can everyone else.
And when you're trying to make yourself slightly different, if you're aiming at a very high-end market,
it there's going to be i think there's going to be a sort of a bit of a revolution against this
kind of stuff because people are going to notice it i already notice it i notice it in an email now
if i if i get a whiff of the fact that an email that's sent to me is ai i ignore it straight away
because i'm thinking that's lazy so i'm not but but but sorry to bite into it but but in but in
your line of work it's going to become a very very deeply intricate part of the design process
especially in in tectonism and you run the risk i suppose of having this kind of sameness
because the ai is gonna is gonna conclude it's gonna do exactly what you want and it's gonna
do the same for everyone it's gonna do exactly i'll dispute and that's not my experience it's
actually more versatile because the conditions are never the same every building is unique for
this respect to place and purpose and the previous paradigms couldn't make it so they were relying
more in repetition and then stuff it in anyway. So I don't see that. Yes, there is more coherency.
It's a bit like they're all proper organisms. And before you had kind of
defunct or ugly or semi-resolved organisms, but we still have, we will have the endless
forms of nature. So I wouldn't see sameness because if you rigorously do that, there will be,
and you have more choices for instance now with these new tools like Xfigura,
you're not relying on one model. You have all the models and you can combine them into a network
and for each thing you choose a different model and so you have more calibration and we're just
at a meeting yesterday somebody else developing a tool called verso where you where you really
design workflows and the designer gets much more ability to select models to chain models to loop
back with metrics into new prompts and and the structured so it becomes more sophisticated so
there's always a curve where we onto the next thing where others just getting familiar with
what has been rolled out. So I'm not worried that we are kind of, it's healthy to have good
competition and that these things are easy for everybody means we're moving on to the next stage
and we don't be lazy. I don't think that fundamental principle of a competitive alertness
and continuous innovation changes. It isn't that, yeah, the AI tools keep evolving,
the way you work with them, deploy them. We also have proprietary, let's say, networks,
which we're training.
And so it a lovely continuous race and it does allow for now which I endorse younger firms and newcomers to break in and catch some of the markets
Now, their limitation is then in the realization.
So they would then have to find somebody to, they can be in the front end, very competitive with us.
In the downstream, they have no chance.
We believe that we are more competitive even in the front end,
because here's a small team with three, four people.
Yes, they have the energy and they're young.
They're just out of school.
They can do it.
But we have a research team of 15 people
and they're also still very young
and they have more resources
and more stamina to focus on that.
So I think this is, I'm excited by it.
I'm not worried.
We're at the head of the curve continuously
and we'll stay so.
Last question.
We'll wrap up soon.
Sure.
Bring it back to the three cities.
Yeah.
because you are the most well you're a very prominent architect in the free cities movement
you are there aren't many architects really but so i i'd love to hear your opinion on whether or
not you think we need a um a kind of uh we need a uh like should you when you walk into a free city
should you know it's a free city should you from from from the from the design of it should you
understand ah i'm in a free city and should that be something that free cities you know use and
connect with each other over because this isn't like this is a new well this is a new iteration
certainly and it's a response to the old world as well it's a very good question i like this
question i think my intuition is to say yes because there's something they share which
which most places don't share.
They basically have more chance with the outcome
of an intricate self-organization process
where degrees of freedom imply more degrees of rational choice
and proper articulation of interests and purposes and value.
And that will come through.
And I think the parametricism-tectonism paradigm would come into play.
But what we, in the real world elsewhere, it can't come into play sufficiently.
It comes into play in one plot and next door something else.
And that doesn't add up.
I mean, we have one exception, a very rare exception,
where we did a so-called unicorn island in Chengdu,
where we did about a million square meter
and designed 25 buildings on different scales
and different programs, including residential offices,
public spaces.
And that's the kind of thing with many talents.
That is unique and rare.
But the private city could be like that,
maybe even more diverse
because there could be multiple authors coming in.
The point here would be that the authors,
the different architects will come into play.
There should be at least a subset.
They should be curated of being those who operate at the frontier of the field
and not a random selection.
That would be required.
If you make a random selection and you bring a minimalist
and then you bring a postmodernist and then you bring a neoclassicist
and then you bring a high-tech person, you get a jumble sale.
And that would make it indistinguishable from any other place.
so that's what i i would feel so and and that means also that although the the the underlying
programmatic order might be intricate and synergetic you don't sense it because you
now have the high-tech building next to the the client of the high-tech building wanted to be
next the client of the neoclassical building and they are next to each other fair enough
but they wanted to be so close to each other and have things to do and things to share and maybe
want to share space in front of them that you don't get a sense of and could you and could you
marry a could you create two places one very much along parametricism lines another along a classical
layout but still you know observing some of the traditions of of a growing city could they still
Or would you still have the same understanding from that?
Well, you could have somebody who wanted to have a range of classical.
The problem is if you wanted to have a Renaissance,
let's say Baroque-style layout,
that was the first time you had these.
Let's say the Renaissance style with the ideal city.
They were pure geometric forms.
If you work like this,
then you end up with the problem of forcing everybody into a diagram.
What might be more successful to have it more like evolve it like a medieval city
which has more pliability and less preconceived structure.
And there were the 19th century urbanists like Camillo de Cité
who kind of described that and made that semi-conscious effort
to do something which has more this adaptiveness and variety.
Something else I could imagine, and you will get a sense of coherence
and you get a sense of adaptive versatility.
The only issue I would have with that is that it's still the range of variety
which this would probably lead to is more limited.
The range of scales you would allow to come in.
So then you end up, for instance, with somebody who wants to have a bigger building,
you end up where they
you have five, six buildings
facade wise but internally they're all
connected. Now that's I find
slightly disorienting. It's a bit like
the Beatles movie where they
all walk into a terrace house
and then inside they have this huge
connected pleasure land.
Now when you come from
the outside you don't notice that
this is pleasure land and that
what I find is a kind of
legibility dysfunction
and we could be more
you could have an equally coherent thing
but you would more realize
and notice, it would become more transparent
what are the different
conditions and players
in your city but without
a sense of disjunction
that would be
so I don't quite believe
I know that you know
people in the libertarian movement
and I explained it
I don't blame them for going for the historical
models because they have
that sense of place, identity, and coherence.
We have nothing else in the real world at this point to go for.
I suppose we're...
But we have visions and we have models.
Unicorn Island, it's a cluster beautifully on a lakefront
with startup companies.
It's kind of incubated.
It's called Unicorn Island.
This is a place where they're supposed to generate unicorns.
And I would say it's a good approximation.
It's a first approximation, a vision,
and it errs on the side of being
maybe overly integrated and coherent.
I mean, you say, but there's a lot of variation as well.
There's versatility and unity and a sense of place.
So I could recommend it.
I would say, compare that to a historical place.
What you find more exciting,
where you could project the kind of knowledge economy
hub you wanted to create.
And I would say, if anything, what I'm really envisioning is something where you get a bit more variety still,
particularly if you have to grow further, you would have.
And that would be a multi-author, what I call a multi-author ecology.
Because also multi-entrepreneurial ecology, a synergy cluster,
which forms and emerges through kind of spontaneous evolution which needs these also needs not only the entrepreneurial decisions
where to place and who to be next to and what internal offerings, but how do you articulate that and make that,
that's where the expertise of architecture comes in, to really represent that and make it happen.
and I've seen enough and we've made many experiments
it would give you a sense of identity, sense of place, sense of coherence
and you could say yes, this is one more of those free cities.
I mean it probably would make sense because free cities are a frontier space
that you should use frontier technology.
You should be 21st century.
I mean, my argument has always been
the kind of freedom we're craving for and asking for
and the degrees of economic freedoms we need now,
we never needed them so badly
because of all the opportunities
we can exploit for those freedoms.
And so the over-regulation,
the politicization and planning
was never a good idea,
but it was relatively viable and feasible in the 1950s, 60s
under mechanical mass production,
where Kaplan itself structured itself into big bureaucracies.
The market was squeezed out and substituted by relations of allocation
within big vertically and horizontally integrated corporate agglomerates.
I mean, that world is gone.
And they then had built a kind of modernist company city, company development.
And so that was different times.
We have the computational revolution, the flexible specialization, network society.
We need more degrees of freedom than ever before.
And therefore, I think to express that, we should also express the frontier, 21st century, everything.
and the 21st century everything we need degrees of freedom which we could which would never existed
not even in the 19th century sometimes unhistorical about
patrick thank you very much indeed yeah that's a lovely place to end i i kind of i'm i'm a i'm a
sucker for for old style architecture but i fully understand what you're saying and that that an
identity would evolve from that and it it is an important aspect of the whole movement is to have
an identity so people know what yeah what this thing is and not only is the is the is the frontier
appearing but the technology to create anything it appears i mean you talk about designing beams
that have a little kink in the middle you know this would have been a mistake 50 years ago this
is now something that you can actually print or you can design 3d printing for instance open up
the design space before you could you just had to extrude a profile you know so so so that means
the fabrication was constraining the forms and now you can optimize and then 3d print
or laser cut and laser weld.
You can make every, you know, in a cladding,
you can make every panel different.
So you can make a tessellation which registers
the concave convex, the flat curve, the tight curve,
where the elements become smaller,
like the tessellation on an organism.
And when you look at it, you can sense the intricacy,
the intelligence.
And I think that's,
we sense that as something we respect
and trust
and want to be part of.
You know, if you have,
in front of two buildings,
one is kind of thrown together semi-randomly
and here's something which is intricate
and kind of
complex in order
you say
this could be
dangerous, disorienting
and this
there's a sense of trust
I think it's also
and appeal
what does appeal
I mean the aesthetic sensibilities
in a way kind of intuitive shortcuts
and if you're well attuned
and you have the right
aesthetic sensibility
similar to moral sensibility
you're attracted to somebody
who's a personality
was functioning well, or a place, or an object. Seeing beauty meaning seeing
performance, not calculating through analysis, just an intuitive. We're conditioned,
we learned that. You've seen many things and you kind of in the end you know
what is good for you, what works. You can read it off the form,
you can read it of the superficial markers and that is this appeal.
Every organism, we navigate the work aesthetically, world aesthetically always.
What attracts us, what repels us? I mean it's very deep, very visceral,
a nice smell, a disgusting smell. I mean they're actually signs of something else
and if you extrapolate from this old sense of beauty, I mean you have to relearn
the kind of aesthetic values,
because now the things which are in the frontier of high performance
look different.
You have to learn to love them.
And that's also something I reflect.
And sometimes if you've read it to sensibilities
from yesteryears, high performance,
this nostalgia could hold you back.
well i'm also thinking sorry i just keep thinking of things um we one of the things that i don't
like about the world of mass production is when buildings are built because they're easy to
produce because each thing right but but i i'm thinking about what you just said about having
every single panel made one you know a one-off that can now be mass-produced in a sense so it's
good use of of mass production i mean and and it's more optimal yes um for instance if you had shading
elements brisole elements uh traditionally you say okay you just use the same element and the
same pattern across all sides but west south to east they all need shading but different
the sun comes in flat comes in steep because there might also be a building which so you need to
So in particular view, it's along a curved wall.
It will gradually transform and adapt and change.
That's the rational thing.
What is also good about it, when you come to the building,
you can sense, it's like a compass on an overcast day.
So there's the multiple advantages.
There's materially more advantage.
It's expressively more advantage.
It gives you more sense of an intricacy,
which is you're more attracted to and you should be
because it's less crude.
and therefore less wasteful.
What is wasteful about the other shading
is that you have excessive use of material
and you have insufficient shading
or too much shading
and therefore it's too dark
and you have to switch the light.
I mean, so it's just crude.
And so we can do more than...
We're not stuck in this crudeness.
but a lot of our colleagues haven't yet realized that.
Or they don't have the compass seed.
They're still stuck with this crudeness
because that's all they've got.
It would have been arguably too expensive.
before it was too expensive yeah and even difficult to calculate yeah now we have scripts
where we maybe we can simulate the sun exposure onto a surface that is a differentiation it could
be a color map and then you can kind of align the script feeds into a variation of the louver
automatically adapting the louver according to the sun exposure conditions
and of course you have to set up the system so that's a choice the choice is not i'm decide
deciding on each louver but I'm deciding on a way of measuring sun exposure, okay that's more or less
given, and how I could, there are many many different ways in which I can make these louvers
express them, individual elements, lines which go from horizontal to vertical, or shingle-like,
or so these choices still remain and I can make it into the kind of 90% range of optimal in many
different ways and then there's still creative choices which system to and I have another
criteria by which okay I'm doing it but I'm doing it timber because in my neighborhood a lot of
timber buildings I want to be kind of harmonizing with them and so I make this connection
rather than, and I could have used stone, I could have used metal, they have different
price points, but again, there's a range. So there's a lot of creative choices still too.
And the choices are kind of which systems to apply and which kind of whether I should include the overshadowing of neighboring buildings for instance then suddenly the louvers thin out because I don need them here
and then once the environment was built at least I'm encountering the facade and say
why is this ah okay which gives you inference potential it gives you information you look at
facade and you see what's around it represented in the facade. That's the kind of idea where I feel
and now you don't have that because nothing has the decisions are arbitrary, disconnected,
so they don't tell you more. I want everything you encounter to tell you more. The visible tells
you about what is not yet visible but might empower you to know. So these are the kind of
advantages of this way of working. And in nature you have that. Every dumb bird can find its way in
an environment because where the water flows is where the vegetation is different. The north
phase of a mountain is different from the south phase. The vegetation thins out and the rock crops
up. And so you know what to expect where. And then in these conditions different creatures, flora and fauna
adapt to these. And so this logic and coherence and the rule-basedness helps every creature to find their way.
Whereas in a garbage pile there's no reason, rhyme or logic to follow.
And so I want the city to be as intricately ordered so that everybody can orient And we are more bright and faster learners than birds
It's the eternal battle between bottom-up and top-down, isn't it?
It's fascinating to hear it in the context of architecture, though,
because I see it in daily life.
But it's great to think that you're actually trying to apply this to that field.
Because it can be applied to every field or every job.
You know, everything is a research effort.
I mean, we're doing this with universities, with students,
to explore it, to develop it.
Then the next level is PhD explorations.
Bring the argument.
The next is internal research department.
And then finally, 10 years later, we're rolling out some of that.
so it's not instant
but the pleasure is with the new tools
AI and some of these ecosystems around grasshopper and plugins
we do the research and not everybody has to go through it
so it takes 10 years
to develop but it maybe takes a year to
condense into YouTube videos and plugins
and then millions of end users can pick it up
and get used to it within a few weeks, let's say.
That's the way this spreads.
Well I have no doubt it will spread Now you articulated it Many thanks for spending some time I need to go back away and digest this now
Okay, great.
Many thanks.
My pleasure.
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