Translator: Tatjana Jevdjic Reviewer: Els De Keyser
I'll start by saying that for me
utopia is primarily
a potential that has not yet been experienced.
In 1960, sending a rocket to the moon
was a completely crazy utopia.
There was no technology, no one knew how,
we had no idea.
And yet 10 years later, it is an old story.
Perhaps that is utopia.
It is to set a goal and to try to achieve it.
The utopias that I'll show you
are much less crazy, less unreasonable
than sending a rocket to the moon.
To begin, I would like to say that
I feel very uncomfortable towards
the world in which I live.
I feel uncomfortable because when I meet a child
and I look into his eyes, I wonder
what we will bequeath him
once he gets in charge.
A world devoted -- its main value is money,
this value which crumbles permanently,
a world that is functioning, a society that functions
based on consumption,
a frenetic consumption boosted by advertising
to make us believe that the superfluous
is indispensable, before we fill our bins.
After meeting the gaze of a child
or an animal,
my discomfort is equally large.
When I see how much his environment has been damaged,
when I see the fate that is waiting for him,
when I see what happens to biodiversity.
When it comes to the vegetable kingdom,
the discomfort is the same.
When you see GMO progressing as fast
as deforestation, we say that
the world we live in
has a really very big problem.
And not to mention climate change,
wars, famine, radioactive waste, etc.
I'll stop the list there
and move to a different phase, to proposals.
It has been more than 35 years
since I made this observation and tried to resolve this challenge
to respond in a positive way,
and say, "But what can I do?"
So I designed, I built myself,
with some friends and my family,
this house that you see there, the Réjeunat home.
It is a self-sufficing house
which works using solar energy and has a wind turbine,
I collect rainwater to supply the house,
there is an organic garden, there is an orchard,
the house was mainly built
with recycled materials.
And I wanted to see how one could live
as much as possible independently from a society
that I doubted very much.
For me, it was important to experience it firstly
in my life and home.
Everything that belongs to this house should belong
to a different logic than is usually
found in most homes.
For example, the furniture was made
of untreated beech wood.
I have kept it raw, because I thought
I needed to preserve the link with the forest nearby.
This may be the most accurate move,
one that best reflects the quality
of the surrounding environment.
At the same time when I had finished building this house,
the cartoon was an opportunity for me to describe
how this different world could be,
how we could run a village, a society
and how we can stage
a complete history that includes such things.
And then I started to dream of an ideal habitat,
a kind of structure that would grow,
because it is great when it grows,
forms that emerge have a certain lively quality
because they are integrated so much into the environment.
So I drew a lot of structures, dwellings
that are created, not from trees
that are reduced to rectangular parallelepipeds,
whose living parts were redesigned
as it was done in the Art Nouveau era,
where they eliminated anything out of the norm. That did not seem right to me,
it does not seem right to redesign a tree
when the tree was there first.
So I said to myself, why not plant trees,
guide their growth, prune it, graft it,
do all kinds of things to control these structures
and then make dwellings from them.
On this basis, I imagined all sorts of things,
but I also wanted it to be concrete
and make things happen. So for the city of Brussels,
I tried to plant the first seed
that would make this vegetal city
that I will develop later.
Here is a wasteland in Brussels
that has been abandoned for years.
There are some advertisements that are usually put on the walls.
And then from there, I imagined
a portion of nature being re-implanted in the middle of the city.
That is what we lack so much in the city:
life, this quality. And that, you will see,
is something recurring in my work,
this constant inspiration
from life, from nature.
So that's a large waterfall, placed in the middle of the city,
utilizing solar power.
It is not an opened tap
flowing in waste, it is water flowing from the roof
and it is operated by solar collectors.
The more sun, the more water that is flowing.
And the more sun, the more you want to see the water flowing.
The water is collected from the roofs next to it.
At the same time, the rock piles that you see there
are not imitated nature either,
as did mock rock painters at the turn of the century,
it is the only natural materials in the city: it's waste.
These are from sidewalk slabs,
recoveries, which can create a wall that looks like rock.
For the project to be complete,
the work is realized by job seekers, different people,
so that this ecological project also includes the human dimension.
Here, we are in a district of Brussels, in 1800.
I plant my easel in that place and I ask this important question,
which is a philosophical question,
"Where do we come from? Who are we? Where do we go?”
And I try to answer in my way.
That is primarily a question I ask myself.
And I restore the landscape as it was 200 years ago.
In 1900, the landscape has changed significantly,
a major real estate boom happened
but it is the opportunity to see
that a city is always moving.
Here, we are in 2000,
there is a century between each of the passages.
The big drama for an architect or a painter, a photographer,
is that when he takes a picture of a city,
or something else, he freezes the city at a time.
The city is constantly changing.
So I'm trying all different ways to accomplish this dimension
that is not static,
that is moving,
and that evolves over time.
I observe how this city could be, if we begin to design it
as I would like cities to be designed,
by projecting live materials
as building materials in the city.
I do not work alone. I work with biomimeticians,
with Biomimicry Europe, with whom I imagine all kinds of systems
that can allow the city to live
and find atmospheres and climates
that don't currently exist.
And here, we're getting closer, we see that the city
is not demolished,
a new city is not conceived, as was customary in the past,
we start from the existing city
and, in certain places, give it a new skin,
something that breathes.
I like the word "skin" because of the liveliness it conveys.
And roofs become areas where you can walk.
We regain access to the horizon.
The horizon is very important.
We don't have access to the horizon in our cities any more,
When we walk the streets, we don't have this value any more,
this reference point. Here, walking at that height,
there is a vision of the city that opens up to the sky
and to something different.
It is a living city. We are living beings.
Planet Earth is an organism, a vast living organism.
Maybe we should also think of the place where we live as a vast living organism,
like the coral reef, like a primary forest,
encasing all kinds of ecosystems in one another
and use this as something that can withstand the test of time.
Our cities have a life that is completely limited:
we do not have the energy nor the raw material to continue,
our population is too large, and so on.
We got it all wrong by creating some system
that self-destructs through the workings we put in place.
Here is a little idea of what Nantes might look like,
one day, if we choose this attitude.
And it is through the means
of transportation in the city that I will continue to reflect.
When we think about a city, its transportation is essential.
When the fuel is gone, when we can no longer
use this energy and waste it as we do now,
perhaps we will think differently.
It's always from structures that are close
to the functions seen in animals
that we may be able to find solutions
in flexible devices, which mostly work with electric assistance,
which allow for easier movement.
Certainly it is much more pleasant to live
in a city that is filled with machines that would work like that,
rather than with huge cars that weigh tons,
pollute and are very aggressive.
That's what public transportation could look like.
It is a modular tram. The tram, these small modules --
are programmed to form a convoy. They are automatic
and they take power from a central rail.
And they never stop. They only stop
when someone wants to come down. They move to a sidetrack,
but the whole train continues.
So it pulls away, and there is a part that goes on the side
so that people can get on or off.
These small vehicles are much lighter
and of course they only run when they are full.
When they are empty, there is no need to use them.
Now we have trams that weigh 40, 50, 60 tons
and circulate with two or three passengers.
This kind of thing, I apply it.
So I run a car that weighs 200 kg.
Traveling at 90 km/h, it takes me everywhere.
There is an electric motor that propels the vehicle
and I am pedaling too, because I like it
and then it increases my independence. If I do not pedal,
I can travel 100 km with one fill-up.
If I pedal, I travel 150 km and that amuses me!
Plus it is a great way to communicate.
People stop me and ask, "What's that thing of yours?"
And I say, "But you know, the future began today,
we can live differently."
The electricity costs me between 30 and 40 euros per year,
because I recharge from an electrical outlet.
If I have solar panels, it does not cost me anything.
You can continue to think like that for everything.
The example is always in nature.
Nature, never forget that, is 3.5 billion years
of research and development.
In nature, all that is not profitable,
it was abandoned, it was not retained.
We do not have this wisdom.
Watch the flight of a bird.
For an equal weight, a flying bird spends two times less energy
than the same device with a propeller,
because flying by flapping wings is much more rational than the propeller.
So why not imagine, when we run out of oil,
having vehicles lighter than air,
moved by flapping wings, and an upper surface filled with solar collectors
that supply small engines that operate the bellows.
These devices don't make noise,
don't bother anyone and don't pollute.
They take energy that happens upon them
and when two of them bump into each other, they are like two cushions that collide.
There is no stress, we are in a completely different environment
and it is possible!
It is lighter than air so it is also a completely different story.
We haven't experienced it
because we want to go much faster.
Going so fast, we lose that sense of travel,
the quiet beauty one may experience during flight.
This is a view of Lyon in 2100, with the Crayon Tower.
It has now become, with its large leaves,
a way to capture solar energy.
Inside turbines are transforming it into electricity,
and then you see ornithoplanes
and you see the large residential strips, their roofs converted into landing areas
for these ornithoplanes.
At the same time, you see that all roofs have become a kind of landscape.
They are footbridges, green frontages,
there are kitchen gardens, there are orchards in the city,
there are also hen houses, etc, dovecotes,
there is a whole range of things that makes the city
largely self-sufficient in energy.
We cannot make any more cities which are so dependent.
The examples, I always find them in my natural habitat.
Here we have an example of a city that is made ​​from earth,
and then from there, we can imagine many cities
made of something as simple as the earth element.
Here we have a hollow city
made from the earth element.
The tree is the best way, for me, to imagine
a city that it is built from a structure that is grown.
When it grows, the tree does not only not pollute
but it absorbs the CO2 from the atmosphere.
The structures of houses can provide forms
that are quite complex and very amazing.
Here, with a strangler fig, we can imagine a city
that forms a very dense structure
that can accommodate homes and entire families.
And the last city is the city of waves,
inspired by a coastal environment.
It will imitate what is directly in the soil
and on the sand in that environment.
I have often been drawing cities like this.
It is part of the things that I integrated
into my everyday life.
I live much more in this world than in the present world.
By drawing it,
I fully integrated it.
I tried to make it as pleasant as possible and invited other people
to come and join me,
because sometimes I find myself a little lonely.
So this is, for me, an alternative way
to open a door to accommodate more people into this other possibility.
I just want to end with this little reflection.
The world is going to change anyway.
It is the only possibility.
So, we can just imagine
that it will be thanks to us -- and then it will be really a great pleasure --
or it will be in spite of us, and then it would be unfortunate.
The choice is ours.
Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)