Every hour we produce a pile of 38 meters. This is and this is the cone of plastic bottles, every day, and every month we can bury the tallest tower on planet earth in a cone of plastic bottles... [W]hen you look at the flow of plastic, the vast majority is discarded after a single use. A good part of it is still in use in different components. The stuff that gets recycled, quickly gets discarded again, and then a small fraction becomes put to... more constant use or incinerated for the energy value. If you look at the sources of energy, the vast majority of mismanaged plastic is in Asia Pacific. The global river plastic input to the oceans, massively Asia... and massively packaging. So these are the sort of mismanaged pollution hub spots, and these are the outlets into the global oceans creating this kind of distribution because of the currents of plastics, where the biggest... is the .
Danish architect (b.1974)
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In Sevilla, the hottest city in Spain, we are building the for the . It's half a public square and half the... Commission. It's covered by this... canopy of photovoltaic panels that creates a shaded square, which means that we can make the facade in one of the sunniest places in the world entirely out of glass, because it's... shaded... It's a naturally ventilated square... The building... produces twice as much energy as it consumes... [T]he photovoltaics are funded and maintained by the local energy company... It becomes... an energy machine or a decentralized power plant...
[T]rying to... take the entire sensibility and... philosophy of René and noma and trying to create a portraiture or capture the essence... the architectural equivalent of what René has created, and a powerful manifestation of this... urban ecology... in the middle of , but the honey is made there, most of the ingredients...
[T]he intermittence problem... 99% of the earth's populaton lives within this zone [10,000 km]. ...If each 24 hr zone could provide 1/6 of the power of the planet, the site that has light could... power the other side. ...With current high-voltage connections you lose 3% of the power per thousand km. This means that the maximum loss, you lose... 1/3 of the power if you're going all the way to the other side. ...You already have regional grids. ...[T]here's plans to connect ...northern Europe and north Africa and the Middle East. There's plans to connect the [US] east and the west coasts and Mexico. ...[Y]ou have all of these partial plans. ...[W]hat if you could ...create an entire worldwide grid. The sunny side could power the dark side, or the windy side could power the less windy side... This kind of grid could... unite us all energy-wise...
There's another aspect, which is the shine effect. So , the Anish Kapoor patented black, the least reflective material on earth, had a shine effect of zero, and perfect white, of one... [A]n ocean or a parking lot has almost no shine effect so it absorbs a lot of heat. So the more open ocean... the more parking lots, the more heat is absorbed, whereas fresh snow has a... good shine effect... [T]o give you an idea of how impactful this is, if earth was all ocean we would have an average temperature of 27°C. Today it's 15°C... If 1/3 of the planet was glacial, it would be frozen. So 1% of change in the shine effect of earth is the equivalent of doubling the amount of <chem>CO2</chem> in the atmosphere. So it's also an important factor that... now works against us.
For Google we created this... canopy of ... next to the , and the landscape is... root zone gardens, so the roof canopy collects... rainwater, then all the gray and black wastewater is... filtered through the landscape and... let clean into the bay. The only material is photovoltaic tiles... a Swiss product that... has a textured surface... making power out of light... [T]he structure is a grid shell that has a catenary curve, because the natural sagging is the most materially sufficient way to make a long span, so minimizing... how incredibly thin the roof structure is... [T]he smiles are proportioned to let in... the perfect amount of daylight...
[W]hat we're trying to do... is try to apply the kind of tangible, practical thinking. We almost took the... way we would normally approach an architectural project and a master plan. So this is the kind of index... for the master plan of the planet, and going through it with this kind of pragmatic utopian approach, hoping that we can develop insights, and ideally a master plan for the planet that could be... handed... to corporations and governments with a much more tangible and... promising concrete plan of action than the reports or sort of political agendas that... exist today.
[W]hat was mesmerizing... was this... marvel of modern engineering... was going to be the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world. No toxins coming out of the chimney. So we thought maybe a mountain of trash could become an actual mountain. Our nearest ski slope... is 6 hours away in Isaberg... Sweden... We could put 2/3 of Isaberg's main slope on the roof of the power plant, and so we did. ...The kind of cliff face of the mountain is made out of these gigantic folded raw aluminum bricks that are... planters. ...Raw aluminum so they... reflect the surroundings, so... the building changes color over the course of the day. ...The entire power plant is ...daylit. 50% of the facade is transparent. ...This spring it's going to open the tallest in the world, 300 feet. ...[T]he roof is maybe the most exciting facade. ...[T]he skiing is ...free. It's a public park. If you want to use the lift system, you have to buy a lift pass. It's... designed to... help spread vegetation to the surrounding... post-industrial area. You have hiking paths, different... activity zones. You have... vegetation that changes over the... season. There's more than 400 different trees. ...It's purely indigenous species. If Denmark had mountains this is probably what they would look like. ...[T]he entire roof park has been made for a budget of... $13 million dollars... absurdly inexpensive so everything has... been done with... the least... maintenance and... acquisition cost. ...Maybe the most important material, because Denmark doesn't have enough snow so... we found this Italian company that makes this... mat that has the same friction as a groomed slope. The only problem was that it was... ugly. Also because of the and contraction it had to be split in... 7x7 foot squares. So we sat down... with the company and... managed to develop a... new product... by joining every two circles [holes in the material] in two... directions... This... simple geometric invention... now the standard product of the company, meant that we could have a continuous surface on the... roof... We color-coded it so that the brighter the slope... the less likely... to crash... [E]ventually the grass grows through... [T]he grass... holds the mat to the roof, so eventually it's going to be like skiing on an alpine meadow. ...What is amazing ...it ...shows this ...world-changing power of architecture ...[M]y son is ...never going to remember that there was a time when you couldn't ski on the power plant in Copenhagen ...[F]or him and his entire generation, that's going to be their normal ...the starting point from where they start having crazy ideas about their future. ...A landmark for this ...idea of hedonistic sustainability, that a sustainable city can also be, not just better for the environment, but better for the people living there.
So what are our energy sources? We have 4... the sun, that provides photovoltaics, solar heating, fossil fuels, wind power is all... solar energy; Earth... thermal energy..; the moon, tidal turbine energy... because of gravity; and nuclear energy... So... all the different forms of energy are related... Gravity creates pressure, nuclear activity through fusion provides sunlight. Through sunlight is translating into chemical energy that can... be burned to provide heat, that with an engine can be translated into kinetic movement, that can then be turned into electricity... [O]ver the years we've been... mastering more... of these translations... [A]ny kind of energy source is translation... so a water mill or hydropower is gravity turned into kinetic movement and from there into electricity. Nuclear fission is nucler energy translated into heat and from there into mechanical and electrical. Batteries: from chemical to electrical... [I]f you look at the energy storage vs. batteries... It's not very efficient. 1/2 ton of batteries has the same stored energy as 5 kilos or 10 lbs. of hydrogen.
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