your buildings today have something in
common they're made using Victorian
technologies this involves blueprints
industrial manufacturing and
construction using teams of workers all
of this effort results in an inert
object and that means that there's a one
way transfer of energy from our
environment into our homes and cities
this is not sustainable I believe that
the only way that it is possible for us
to construct genuinely sustainable homes
and cities is by connecting them to
nature not insulating them from it now
in order to do this we need the right
kind of language living systems are in
constant conversation with the natural
world through sets of chemical reactions
called metabolism and this is the
conversion of one group of substances
into another either through the
production or the absorption of energy
and this is the way in which living
materials make the most of their local
resources in a sustainable way so I'm
interested in the use of metabolic
materials for the practice of
architecture but they don't exist so I'm
having to make them i'm working with
architect neil Spiller at the bartlett
school of architecture and we're
collaborating with international
scientists in order to generate these
new materials from a bottom-up approach
that means we're generating them from
scratch one of our collaborators is
chemist Martin hands up and he's really
interested in the transition from inert
to living matter now that's exactly the
kind of process that I'm interested in
when we're thinking about sustainable
materials so Martin he works with a
system called the protocell now all this
is and it's magic it's a little fatty
bag and it's got a chemical battery in
it and it has no DNA this little bag is
able to conduct itself in a way that can
only be described as living it is able
to move around its environment it can
follow chemical gradients and it can
undergo complex reactions
of which are happily architectural so
here we are these are protocells
patterning their environment we don't
know how they do that yet here this is a
protocell and it's vigorously shedding
this skin now this looks like a chemical
kind of birth this is a violent process
here we've got a protocell to extract
carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and
turn it into carbonate and that's the
shell around that lobular fret they're
quite brittle so you've only got part
one there so what we're trying to do is
we're trying to push these technologies
towards creating bottom-up construction
approaches for architecture which
contrasts the current Victorian top-down
methods which impose structure upon
matter that can't be energetically
sensible so bottom-up materials actually
exist today they've been in use in
architecture since ancient times if you
walk around the city of Oxford where we
are today and have a look at the
brickwork which I've enjoyed doing in
the last couple of days you'll actually
see that a lot of it's made of limestone
and if you look even closer you'll see
in that limestone their little shells
and little skeletons that are piled upon
each other and then they're fossilized
over millions of years now a block of
limestone in itself isn't particularly
that interesting looks beautiful and but
imagine what the properties of this
lines of stone block might be if the
surfaces were actually in conversation
with the atmosphere maybe they could
extract carbon dioxide would it give
this block of limestone new properties
well most likely it would it might be
able to grow might be able to self
repair and even respond to dramatic
changes in the in the immediate
environment so architects are never
happy with just one block of an
interesting material they think big okay
so when we think about scaling up
metabolic materials we can start
thinking about ecological interventions
like repair of atolls or reclamation of
parts of a city that are damaged by
water so one of these examples would of
course be the historic city of Venice
now Venice as you know has a tempestuous
relationship with the sea and
is built upon wooden piles so we've
devised a way by which it may be
possible for the protocell technology
that we're working with to sustainably
reclaim Venice an architect Christian
Carrigan has come up with a series of
designs that show us how it may be
possible to actually grow a limestone
reef underneath the city so here's the
technology we have today this is our
protocell technology effectively making
a shell like it's limestone forefathers
and depositing it in a very complex
environment against natural materials
we're looking at crystal lattices to see
the bonding processes in this now this
is the very interesting part we don't
just want limestone dumped everywhere
and all the pretty canals what we needed
to do is to be creatively and crafted
around the wooden piles so you can see
from these diagrams at the protocells
actually moving away from the light
towards the dark foundations we've
observed this in the laboratory the
protocells can actually move away from
the light they can actually also move
towards the light you have to just
choose your species so these don't just
exist as one entity we kind of
chemically engineered them and so here
the proto cells are depositing their
limestone very specifically around the
foundations of Venice effectively
petrifying it now this isn't going to
happen tomorrow it's going to take a
while it's going to take years of tuning
and monitoring this technology in order
for us to become ready to test it out on
a case-by-case basis on the most damage
and stress buildings within the city of
Venice but gradually as the buildings
are repaired we will see the accretion
of a limestone reef beneath the city an
accretion itself is a huge sink of
carbon dioxide also it will attract the
local marine ecology who will find their
own ecological nieces within this
architecture so this is really
interesting now we have an architecture
that connects the city to the natural
world in a very direct and immediate way
but perhaps the most exciting thing
about it is that the driver of this
technology is available everywhere this
is terrestrial chemistry we've all got
it which means that this technology is
just as appropriate for developing
countries as it is for first world
countries so in summary i'm generating
metabolic materials
as a count opposed to Victorian
technologies and building architectures
from a bottom-up approach secondly these
metabolic materials have some of the
properties of living systems which means
they can perform in similar ways they
can expect to have a lot of forms and
functions within the practice of
architecture and finally an observer in
the future marveling at a beautiful
structure in the environment may find it
almost impossible to tell whether this
structure has been created by a natural
process or an artificial one thank
traffic is a global epidemic us traffic
is creating forty-five percent of the
world's air pollution in the UK time
wasted in traffic costs twenty billion a
year would you pay for cleaner air in a
faster commute Stockholm put it to a
vote I voted for is yes I voted for it I
vote for it we're not old enough to know
we have to do something in stock on cue
improve the environment and to get a
better flow in the traffic we put a
price on taking your car into the
central parts of stock on and we call
that congestion charges if you start a
system like this and it doesn't work on
the first day then you will be in big
trouble it must be perfect from day one
there are 18 m two gates to the city
each is equipped with cameras pictures
are taken or the rear and front license
plates these pictures are sent to a
central system that identifies the
license plates and make sure that the
right person pays to the right passages
one of the obstacles we overcame was the
OCR the optical character reading of the
license plate we went out to ibm's
global organization and the R&D centers
and find a very good software we could
use and we managed to implement it in
two months time this is the heart of the
system rule images and passages are
being processed over nine to nine
percent of all pictures are correctly
identified
no it's nice this is how it should be
all the time behind me you can see the
traffic and the clock is 6pm before we
have the congestion charge in the
traffic was chewing up at this time of
the day Jessie them dope idea I think
it's a good idea because I think that we
should take care of the environment in
the CD the traffic went down with about
twenty two percent under the air
pollution was about fourteen percent
better it's a huge international
interest from different part of the
board from the United States from Latin
America from China and its really
pleasure to tell people not what we are
planning to do what what we actually
have done in Stockholm I voted for it
yes I did not my husband so the I did I
think he is not thinking like me for the
future I'm thinking for the children
than the grandchildren