About two weeks ago we actually experienced the
anniversary of
the first photograph of our blue planet
taken from about
6.7 billion
miles away, and so that's where we are and we'll begin with where we are. But if we think about
Everything from scale from a molecule to something as big as our future
It's amazing just to ponder that we're the only known living thing in the entire Universe
As we get closer to home with this famous photo - the first photo - only 43 years ago of Earth
We realize how finite our resources are.
And how everything on the planet
that exists exists within that contained volume.
As Buckminster Fuller called it -- it's really "Spaceship Earth," and we're all on it for the journey
Now of course we've had this perspective on the terrestrial
that our resources are infinite.
When we look out at the ocean
Everything looks like it's infinite
but we've certainly come to realize and when we look back at those photos of where we are
as the speck in the atmosphere
we realize how finite our resources are.
Now nature has existed for billions of years -- in perfect research and development --
And no species are unemployed in nature
But also there's a dictum of waste equals food in nature. And that's an amazing construct because
waste equals food
Is so different than in our society. In our Western society we've had a
philosophy -- a Western philosophy -- that's really looked at our position on Earth.
whether we are dominions over species or a part of the earth
So over the years
we've had a huge human footprint. When we think about scale and something that's small
-- of course we would think about an ant as something very, very small.
until we actually think about
the biomass of the ants on the planet
exceeding all of the humans by over five times
and even up to 35 billion people in terms of equivalent biomass
So something that small has huge impacts.
Now of course man has had huge impacts
in the way in which we've continued to use secondary-primary resources as our population grows
and has a desire for raw material extraction
and the creation of waste
and so this is certainly led to
being beyond the limits of the planet's carrying capacity
and frankly
I've lost all objectivity
around these environmental issues over the years
but suffice it to say
that the science is robust and unequivocal
that man has had tremendous impact on our planet on our planet
and on the resources
and part of that is because of the design construct
an industrial design construct about planned and perceived obsolescence
and what we consume
and the ephemeral nature of that -- that leads towards consumerism.
and that typically
has been something that I've been interested in
in terms of what we take and what we make and what we waste
and that intersection of the waste.
And the fact is that in America we make waste. For every truckload of products that we produce
32 truckloads of waste are generated
So it's it's staggering the amount of waste.
Also, we have 5% of the world's population and we generate 30% of the world's waste in the United States
So I've been very interested in in that and I've been interested in looking -- like nature -- at our technical waste
essentially as a nutrient.
so in nature we saw certainly waste equal food -- It's a biological nutrient
but we can look at our waste as a nutrient in the way that nature looks at it.
And so that's been my interest over the last 30 years
and it has been in looking at architecture.
I'm an architect and have a multidisciplinary practice that looks at furniture,
design and especially materials
with an interest in sustainability.
In 1983 I started to experiment with a lightweight kind of concrete-based composite
made out of post-consumer carpet fiber -- some of the six billion pounds of carpet that gets landfilled each year
and ash and other natural products
But in Venice and and in Santa Monica when I started
there was still manufacturing
and I would go to the manufacturers and look at the sweepings
the offal that would fall on the floor from a brass screw manufacturer
or from the plastic recycler or bottle glass or computer parts
and I began to pick up this detritus and throw it
in this kind of amalgam of a contemporary terrazzo made out of our waste stream
materials that didn't have recycle value because they were co-mingled and mixed together
so they became monstrous hybrids.
And I worked with many different companies to try to match their waste stream with creative output
So this is a project I did for a record company
And we took tens of thousands of records and CDs and VCRs and we used a South Central
LA gang intervention program
After the LA riots to take their aggressions out on these records and cassettes
And they became the flooring
And you saw every little bit of those parts and those pieces, so in the end, the company made creative flooring
with tiles out of their own waste stream in a socially-responsible way
and so that mimicked a kind of natural process.
Now as an architect
I've been having to try to rationalize my place in the world
as somebody that actually came from an environmentalist background, but loved building.
and so how do I rationalize my place in the world when buildings are so invasive --
in fact, the number one global greenhouse gas emitter?
And so that's what I've been interested in and of course green building has been fantastic
with minimizing
the impacts of the built environment on the natural one,
but it's really not enough.
And I think what I'm interested in and I think the future will look at is
truly a restorative architecture
that's regenerative.
And that is that a building should be able to actually consume
or generate more electricity -- harvest it from the sun -- than it uses.
It should be able to collect more water than it uses.
Then have more vegetative and living walls
and matter than even existed on the site before
that way it'll start to heal the damage that we've done
instead of just lessen the bad
And we've had some interesting projects.
This is a small forty acre atoll in the middle of the South Pacific
And an island is analogous to our planet --
and so working on an island where there's very limited resources has been a really fun challenge
This is one where we of course use water catchment and natural ventilation,
and we use the obvious intermittent sources like wind and solar
But how do you make a very primitive system on an island when you don't have a way to treat waste, etc.?
and so we found tremendous fuel contained within organic waste on the site --
coconut husk and palm leaves --
and developed a gasification process to run these with with compressed air heated by the sun
and those are the types of systems thinking that we've been interested in
and in our more conventional work
We still try to incorporate prefabrication, living, vegetative walls, green spaces, reclaimed timbers
as well as commercial projects where we try to repurpose and reuse.
a 1905 Sepulveda beach house here in Venice, an old factory,
an old school that would do the grain of Mill Valley for Smith & Hawken
and an old historic building in Santa Monica.
And an office building that I have on Market Street
The brick building from 1922 that was also shown here in the 1958 "Touch of Evil" Orson Welles film
With some of the same mounts for the sign are still there
Or in this project what I'm working on
off Abbot Kinney [Boulevard] for a local Venetian
who worked at the property, lives on the property, and bought it to preserve it
and to develop a boutique hotel on the parking lot that was an abandoned railroad --
the private parking lot in the back --
and a suggestion of an outdoor living room an extension of a lobby
that expands the existing courtyard with the idea of repurposing materials
out of the Venice funky vernacular
so that the new buildings have a dialogue with the old buildings
so it looks like it's always been there
And I think that part of it is the provenance of these older materials that help
Now I've been interested in creative aspects
like this automotive museum that I designed where I used car windshields as the canopy
these are things tying in to the waste.
Or this dress, which we designed for the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles
out of milk jugs
So how can we transform waste into creative endeavors that are beautiful?
This is a light fixture that I designed for my office out of a sailboat boom
From a restoration project my wife and I have been working on
restoring an old wooden boat
and in looking at boats
I had heard about these ghost ships
these up to 2000 ghost ships at one point in San Francisco Bay
with toxic paint exfoliating into the marine environment
chained together.
It's a tremendous waste of stranded resources that are really captured
and sequestered in in these things
and I went up there and took a tour and started to look
and there was this enormous hangar that Howard Hughes built for the Glomar Explorer
and in it was a stealth ship called the Sea Shadow
and I was working on a non-profit marine animal rescue facility
on Dockweiler Beach down below LAX
and I thought about taking this ship
motoring it down, bringing it on the beach, burying it into the berm
and making the hospital on the lower level
and then a exhibit on the top for marine ecology
and so this is about the conversion of a wartime asset
into a peacetime and environmental asset
and an interesting conversion
Now ultimately we were not able to outpace the bureaucracy of the Navy
and save it and it was destroyed.
But there's a lot more --
And where there's boats, there's planes
and I remember as a kid
Driving up in the desert and seeing this incongruous sight of these airplane tails out in the desert
where these airplanes are
desiccating in the desert of obsolescence
and there are 4,400 military airplanes in the western United States
1800 of them are commercial airlines
just right outside of LA.
And I was just fascinated by -- what we generate, what we take and make and waste,
and when you look at the amount of aluminum that's in an airplane
One 747, I mean, it's staggering
150,000 pounds of aluminum
over four-and-a-half million cans
that's a tremendous resource that tied up.
But why that's important is because the embodied energy
from the extraction that starts with clear-cutting rainforest to mine bauxite --
aluminum has the highest embodied energy of any building material
so losing all that aluminum in an airplane is tremendous
Now recycling has been fantastic
and if you recycle aluminum you're saving ninety-five percent of the energy that went into to extracting it
but even the airlines alone -- all those cans -- there's still 58 new 747s that are being thrown away.
So recycling is good
But we've had a linear process conventionally
which is basically just: extract materials,
manufacture them and throw them away
so we might have a plastic bottle
That's good for two minutes or 20 minutes, but if it goes in the landfill, it's going to sit there for 200 years.
It's not a sustainable model.
It's a cradle to grave model
We recycle
like in the case of aluminum we save off a lot, but if we reuse, it's certainly a lot better
And so really, we have to look at upcycling.
You know the this idea that that we can take a product of a lower value and increase its value
by not devaluing it
So for instance you take a
747 and you turn it into a can -- you know -- it's a tremendous resource
that's being devalued
So it was with this kind of concept
that I started to look at radical reuse ideas:
repurposing how to mine the waste stream as a resource.
And there are people all over the world --
they're looking at kind of super use and how these can become
progenitors actually for
design ideas
and it's with that that I was approached by a client who acquired
a beautiful piece of property in northern Santa Monica Mountains
with this huge mountain range
and Tony Duquette a scenic designer had built 21 structures, wonderful buildings all over.
Unfortunately they were all burned in 1993 in the Green Meadow fire when my client acquired the property
But when I stood on that property and I saw that hillside
I said there can't be a building, a conventional building with walls or column.
We need to have floating wing-like roofs and it occurred to me:
"You know, let's build a kind of a wing-like soaring roof."
Why not use a wing? A wing represents the most efficient and judicious use of cantilevers,
it's self-supporting
and it's the highest strength with the fewest amount of material
and so I began to look at -- what if these wings cascaded down the property
and became very thin and profile? Aerodynamic. They touched the ground very lightly
And I began to look at the beautiful sculptural qualities,
proposed this idea to my client, and we went out to look at the wings because you never really get under them
and this is my client saying, "Oh my god. These wings are beautiful!"
And I photomontage her into this early rendering
and we moved from concept to reality
which was 17 governmental agencies as we inquired about the 747 post-9/11
We were paid a visit by Homeland Security.
They realized we were not a terrorist cell and they actually ran some aerodynamic analysis and
FAA so it's not called in as a downed aircraft site
and so we attempted the absurd
and we achieved the impossible,
and that's, you know, with a good visionary client who bought a 747 --
A 357 million dollar plane for 35 grand
It's a radical devaluation in price.
We pulled it away from the herd. We cut it in half lengthwise cut the fuselage into sections
Put the wings on trucks
Closed five major freeways and highways at night with police escort
got at ten miles from the property to an airport
and then used the Chinook helicopter on the way to another project
in a great burst of carbon that lasted two hours
and ultimately
We saved over an acre's worth of forest
equivalent in terms of carbon because we didn't have to bring materials to the remote site.
So it's this "large, less" strategy. Large pieces, but fewer of them
where they're post-consumer,
prefabricated pieces, requiring less virgin materials and energy to bring them there
and so we drop them on the site on tires that we bought -- we reached up and grabbed the engine mount
and only supported it very lightly and so it integrates quite nicely into the ridgeline
development cantilevers over large portions of the site
minimizing site disturbance
you could experience the sculptural aspect of the wing
from the bottom, from the top, as you move around.
Each wing has over 5,500 square feet. You see here the left and right wing and the two horizontal tail stabilizers
Which are used for the
master bedroom wing. The sculptural aspect of these as they taper are really quite remarkable and the
pieces and parts and the rivets and we had to really figure it out piece by piece
We joke through the job that we're winging it through the whole the whole process not knowing how
to really support something like this. We used an engine cowling as a
light piece and fire element. And so ultimately
My goal was to make a a sublime piece of architecture first
but I found that these forms were so beautiful and hopefully it
also is a didactic work -- that is that it sets an example for rethinking the way that we think about our buildings
and I challenge all of you to think about what we take, make, and waste
and how we could use it and mine it for its its creative potential. Thank you.