[Music] [Music] I've been doing research and working as an academic and researcher and communicator of the research results for more than 50 years I actually started this study of the relationship between life and form way back in the middle of the 60s by traveling to Italy on a grant from Carlsberg to spend half year in Italy where my wife and I my wife is a psychologist and we very early started to be suspicious about what was going on in architecture and in all the new suburbs and all the modernistic concrete housing areas and whatever and that was exactly what I learned when I was in school of architecture that was modernism where we were sitting with big models and moving optics around and thought of Howard or the model say wow this is this is a good city and never spend any time sort of walking around in the model little when it looked nice from the aeroplanes it was a good city that was what I was taught and I went out of the University to do all these wonderful modernistic things and make room for the cars which was the future then I married this sociologist and then we young architects and the young psychologists of mine my wife's friends we met many times and all the time they asked us why are you not interested in people you architects why don't they teach you anything about people in school of architecture and have you ever thought about why your professors go out at 4 o'clock in the morning to photograph the architectural objects so there'll be no disturbing people in the foreground for the lectures that of course that was sort of the start where we started to discuss and and investigate that there was a fantastic gap between the social sciences what they were doing and the architecture and planning professions what they were doing and that also it was evident that whatever was built had an influence on people's lifestyles and people's quality of life and all this was not investigated nothing was known and looking back now I can see that with the modernistic philosophies which started in the 20s but took off in the searches were not used for many years during the war and the early years after the war but then when all the cities started to expand all over the world in around 1960 this philosophy of modernism was ready it was easy to apply it was easy to mass-produce you could make a nice housing whatever and then it took off in the big way and if you look closer into this modernistic movement they were very very strict and saying that everything in the past must be discarded the traditional man is dead now we have a completely new creature modern man and everything should be new for this modern man he needs new city planning new site planning new architecture new interiors new furniture everything new because this creature is completely different from anything of the past in this process all we knew about making good cities which were handed from one generation to the next to the next through many many years of urban habitation of Homo sapiens all that was thrown out of the window so when we came to the 1960s nothing was really known about what what are the criteria for good City and how can we create a nice City which people would like to live in that was sort of what my wife and I way back in the 60s started to discuss between my architect friend and her psychologist and then we realized that there was a lot of things we needed to be found out [Music] once upon a time I was at a conference in England and there was this architecture critic in Walpole and he stood up and took up shop and object base or something like this and he said I feel sorry for you architects because you are you mean of communication is the still photo and the two-dimensional drawings and constantly you take pictures of the form and CEO to each other and then that way form becomes an obsession of your profession but this is not architecture this is sculpture architecture is the interplay between form and life and only if life and argot and form interacts in a good and successful way will this be good architecture and of course it's much easier to study form and to communicate form than to study life and communicate this and also even more complicated is it to study the interaction between life and form and that actually helped me a lot this explanation became Worple to realize what I've been doing in all these years I've been lying on my knees and trying to find out about this and about this which actually supplements the sculpture and turns it into architecture and good architecture and good urban design and City Planning so this is a little bit about this relationship and what we found of course was that it plays an enormous role for what is going on inside the buildings how the building is organized and it plays an enormous role for the way the city is functioning whether they see the buildings are placed with big distances whether they are they are close together whether the entrances are here on the backside whether there are open ground floors and whether you can walk in the place and you have to drive in the place all this is very much influenced by the forms you make in City Planning and architecture some of the things which which happen and which was very dominating when I was studying architecture in the fifties that was this enormous obsession with architecture for architects own sake and actually having been in school of art it for 40 more years I have followed of course that this obsession if anything got stronger when we started to have the digital world and could throw more pictures around and so that and also especially in the 90s we had this big series of stocky texture with these architects who went around and did funny funny shapes in all cities and they competed on who could makes the most funny shapes really sometimes I call it the perfume bottle composition that you try to make it look different but actually it was the same stuff what is really important is really not how it looks like but how it lands in the city and how it adds to the quality of city or district we know now that first we can form the cities but then the cities form us we know that architecture and city plan has an enormous influence on the patterns of life and we know that every time we build anything or plan anything we manipulate with a number of of things which has to do the quality of life for people and for many years it was not known how we manipulate it and how we could do otherwise and that's actually what has been now for 50 years in a number places around the world has been the subject of research and studies and I would say that now we know quite a bit about this influence and also we've seen much to my joy that this sort of this discipline that architecture is not the form but it's the interaction between form and life and only if architecture supports life is it good architecture a good city planning all this has maybe especially since 19 since mm in the last 15 17 years has been more and more recognized and is generally being used and we've seen the most wonderful examples of cities completely being re conquered for the people after for 50 years being invaded by traffic and motorcars whatever they have been one after the other re conquered and taken over much higher degree by the people I've personally worked of course with Copenhagen but with a number of cities especially in Australia they've been very good in improving the cities they were also very bad before that by the way but but cities like Melbourne and Perth invest Australia they have made fantastic turnarounds a New York has done quite a bit we've also been involved there and one of them most reasons has been Moscow and I've completely impressed with what has been accomplished in Moscow to push the invasion of the motorcars back and organized the parking so that people can pass on the sidewalks and get across the streets and Street crossings and pedestrian crossings there's been a number of improvements it's it's been very impressive they even started to introduce bicycle systems in Moscow in in my research and during my many many journeys over all these years to all corners on the world I really come to realize that basically it is the same creature who lives in all corners of the world being at Greenland or South Africa or Japan whatever and it's the same Homo sapiens the same species we all had the same biological history we are all walking animals our senses are made for this walking animal our move the way we move and and and and can move around in the city this is all the same and that is millions of years old that is developed through a long long story and that is common for all of us then of course there are a number of cultural changes and and of course it's times change and some countries have a higher living standard than other countries and certainly the climate is a very important factor some places are very cold and some places are very warm and that all this has to be taken into consideration but actually in the research we have found a number of things we just sort of stand out which you can use in all corners of the world some quality criteria you can ask yourself are these quality criteria MIT if you go to the best places public spaces or squares or streets in the world and take along this list of 12 quality criteria criteria you will find in a place such as the campo in siena which is one of the finest public spaces in the world it's been there for seven hundred years and has worked brilliantly in all those years and still does and if you take these quality cut here and go to Siena and go in there and you realize one by one by one you can come up with a resounding yeah indeed certainly and in in in the end you can also ask is this made with concern for architecture for art for details for materials for texture for enjoyment of the trees and water and and nice things for the senses yeah and when all these things are when all these things are actually made you have this feeling that you you belong there that you can hardly get yourself to go on because I have arrived this is it in other places where you have been not being careful with these things and I know our places out of the 12 quality criteria they have overlooked 13 or 14 and in these places you will see people run out of the space as soon as quickly as they can they don't want to spend a moment there because it's windswept and they are nowhere to sit and nothing to look at and they know into all the misery so there is a number of basic criteria and that is the same in Greenland and in New Zealand and in Japan and in Canada [Music] maybe I should mention that one of the twelve political tea has to do with the the question of human scale and human scale is of course something which relates to the census and the way we move around and actually if you go to a city like Venice which is kintyre Lea made for people walking around every space is in human scale because it's made to walking and it's made so that you can see what you have to see and you can enjoy what you have to enjoy and nothing is over dimensioned and there's no low streets have been widened to make room for fast-moving cars or whatever so in Venice the average width of the street it's three meters and that's easily enough for eighty five persons to move per minute and it's seldom you have that much traffic of foot traffic in any city on any sidewalk so small dimensions actually works as long as we are moving on our feet and moving with the speed we are made for and that's also why a city like Venice is very essential because you have all the sense impressions very close to you so it's very very rich in sensual experiences and when I bring my friend my children and later on now my grandchildren to Venice they just explode with joy because it's so delightful so interesting there are so many things to look at and to to they experienced so much as opposed to going to a suburb anywhere where there's so little to experience so all this about human scale is very logical and it has to do with the body and in the old days we always built cities based on our movements and the census actually we have in all the old cities had two building blocks which goes again and again one is the street which is actually the feet who move linearly and many of the street started with a little pass going down to the river where you could cross a river and along the pass the farmers came and sat down and sold their potatoes and after a couple of hundred years they had little stalls along the pass after another couple of hundred years they have shits and then gradually they had houses and then the street was invented the street is the movement the space for movement based on the linear animal the other space which is in cities all the old cities are the square the square is actually what you can command with your eyes so streets are the feet and squares are the eye the eye can see everything inside about a hundred meter so all the good squares in all the old cities they are never bigger than 100 meter on the biggest dimension it was only when we started to move with 60 kilometer an hour we started to have 60 kilometer an hour architecture where everything is big where the signs are peak where the houses are withdrawn from the streets where there are no details because you cannot see details if you move fast and you cannot see people if you move fast so all these about human scale we have had to refined and we invent and we introduced in the cities to make sure that people are comfortable when they walk and bicycle which of course we must do nowadays because we have to build much more sustainable and we have this serious problem now of the seating syndrome that is that for 15 years we made City Planning which invited people to sit from early morning to late night weather in the behind computers or in the cars and now the doctors remind us very sternly say you must make CD planning which invites people to walk and bicycle as much as possible this is formulated in the strategy World Health Organization to all the cities make cities for walking and bicycling so that people really feel invited to do that that will be give them a much better life much more quality of life much better old days and much cheaper for the health systems [Music] again it is a privilege to be as old as I am and have been through so many periods and seen so many things and I of course have been living here in Copenhagen for 80 years and have been married for 54 of them and have seen the city improving and also of course I and other people have speculated about what is it what has happened to Copenhagen and I think there's a number of things which can explain the situation here but one of them is effect that we at the school of architecture in Copenhagen were some of the first who started to investigate the relationship between life and form and start to make books and reports about this relationship and we at the School of Art we always used Copenhagen as our laboratorium whenever anything change in Copenhagen we went out and studied what has happened and we had old records - Wow how it was then we could show that every time you improved situation for people there were more people and more variety of activities and after a while because Denmark is a small society where the lines of communication are rather small we of course we noticed that the city planners in the city were interested in what was happening in the school of architecture and the politicians became interested and we had quite an exchange of so whenever we did anything in the school of art it the city planners and the politician kept it right away and used it to to renew their policies and now fifty years later I can see that the fact that we have one of the academic centers of this kind of research in copening has quite an influence I know that I've been teaching at some time in at one point in Berkeley and they always did much better research than we did but their lines of communication their influence was much more complicated to the American cities than ours have been to the Danish cities that's why it was possible to accelerate the situation and the improvements in Copenhagen to a state where it became the way the way we do it here I have a little story I like to tell to illustrate some of these points about what has happened in Copenhagen I was in Vietnam to publish a book out there and then there was this lady in Vietnamese lady in the Danish Embassy in Hanoi and she said she's just been coming for a course with the foreign minister and see she was very surprised in Denmark because in Copenhagen because we really had a very serious baby boom and we I said pay people we haven't got a baby boom we have a problem of of reproduction no but but she's seen all these children aha so what she has done is that she's seen a lot of children in the city and that's what you can do in a good city you can help your children on your bicycle you can have them in the cargo bike you can teach your children to basically from there five years you can walk around with the kindergarten on the sidewalks in the parks and the squares and the pedestrian streets and and thinking about it you see many children in a city like Copenhagen and that has led me to say that if you see a city with many children and many old people using the city the public spaces then it's a sign that there is a good quality for people in that [Music] what has actually happened is that at first they started to push out the traffic from various streets and squares in the medieval city but later on they moved out to other parts of the city and in 2009 the city of Copenhagen City Council they formulated a new strategy we will be the best city for people in the world and emphasizing that all these good things for people should not be in the city center for the tourists and for the shoppers it should be for everyone around the city and we some of the examples of these policies may be that when you have small streets going into peak streets you always take the sidewalk across a small street so that you can continue your walk or your wheelchair whatever with uninterrupted and the guys coming from the side so it would have to go up on the sidewalk and go down again and I thought this was just a very good idea but then I heard from my daughter that now my granddaughter Lauda who at that point was 7 years because of this change in the way they conceived crossings now Laura was able to walk all the way to school because she could stay on the sidewalk from her front door to the school door and it's a very great difference when you are seven if you have to cross four streets or if you can stay in the sidewalk all the way so that's a sign of a more humane policy in a more humane city and city quality for everyone another example from Copenhagen is that nearly all the streets were s well from one wall to the other but now they are typically only two lanes one lane each direction a median where you can rest while going across the street Street trees bicycle lanes and sidewalks and these streets which are now nearly all the peripheral streets have been transformed this way that is much more beautiful it's much more safe much less accidents it's much more people friendly it's much easier to cross the street and it can take almost the same number of cars as the old streets could because the traffic engineers have been become much smarter then they were in the 70s and 80s so there's a lot of these transformations another big change in coming has been the fact that they decided early on and especially after the oil crisis in the 70s that the old tradition of using bicycles in Copenhagen should be promoted should be celebrated and everything should be done to invite people to try to bike more and they have now put in all these enormous efforts to make it a really inviting City for bicycling and an example could be that my grandchildren of when they art in they allowed to go from one end of the city to the other because it's deemed safe for Lily one who is ten and who has been bicycling around with mom and dad since they were five now they can do it themselves and that is very nice that you can be mobile early and also you can stay mobile a long time after the doctor has taken away your driver's license we one could say that in Canada there's an organization called 880 and the idea is if you can make a city with this good when you're eight years and good when you're eight years then the rest of them will have good city also so aim for the young ones and the old ones and all the rest will be paid also all over the world we see now a very strong tendency that people are seeking in towards the city towards the the many offers of service and entertainment and culture which is offered in the cities I remember in the 70s 1970s and 80s how the going out to the suburbs were the big thing and now and we've all sort of looking out towards the suburbs and when you had children you moved out not so anymore we've seen here in Copenhagen that the city has become so nice and so many green courtyards have been made and so many facilities for children also that people say this is a nice city to live why go out of this and on the other hand we can see people in the suburbs start to move in in growing numbers and that is actually Universal this trend and I we also have this challenge that we shall make cities much more sustainable we shall make cities which invite for much more healthy lifestyles we have this challenge from World Health Organization to make cities which invite for walking and bicycle as much as possible we know that we have to get rid of the old fashioned mode of mobility that everyone has for rubber wheels and a steering wheel and and to have a more sustainable and have more people walking and bicycling we need to improve the public transportation quite a bit and there's some interesting thing also here that is that and that has been found out rather recently that automobile driving in this world peaked six years ago they actually down to the level of twenty years ago in America and so there's this general feeling that the car is on its way out and that new modes of transportation would be smarter in modern compressed cities and it's my personal opinion that the great idea of individual mobility from Detroit in 1905 of creating individual mobility by him everyone for rubber wheels and steering wheel that was great for the Wild West 100 years ago but it is definitely not a smart technology for cities and specially not for big cities going to make Seiko City to say no parallel to Bangkok to Jakarta you can see how stupid that technology is it doesn't give people mobility it gives them congestion and pollution and climate problems whatever and so it's high time that we start to reinvestigate how we can secure individual mobility and also combined with more movement of your bodies and that could go find with a more compressed City it doesn't have to be human scale in all details if you look at the sidewalk say and have some trees and and you have a facade whatever then you can easily have a nice human scale space for people to move in while you have bigger spaces for other purposes so you can easily combine these things you don't have to make a medieval city to make everybody happy but when people say we need to make a lot of towers to have room for all these people I would always say what's wrong about Paris it's got a terrible density very high density it's got six seven storey high buildings and it's got glorious public spaces in between and to me that would be a much better model than Dubai which is a lot of towers and no city [Music] I I do think that in my professional career as a researcher as and as a consultant I have been working to make the people who use the architecture and use the city's visible so that we know about them know what they are doing what they like what they don't like and can incorporate that in our architecture in our city planning and this as I have mentioned has been a some forgotten art but it is a great joy for me to see now that increasingly this is being observed and the various pieces of research and the various examples of cities which have turned nicely around are having quite an influence on the way worldwide people think about architecture and city planning so and sometimes we talk about that we sort of have expanded the area of architecture to also encompass life and and that I think has been a very important and an inviting thing because life was always part of good habitat for Homo sapiens but there was a period when he was overlooked now it's being observed again and that is a great joy for me and I hope and and to think that when we have got this knowledge it will not be sewn out it will it's there it's like finding out that you should put insulation in the walls the moment you realize that you do it and I think it's the same way with this humanistic or human dimension in city planning and architecture the moment we know about it we will it will be integrated in the way we teach young people and the way we we exercise architecture and city planning around the world there Homo sapiens all of them [Music] [Applause] [Music] you