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Imagine that when you walked
in here this evening,
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you discovered that everybody in the room
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looked almost exactly the same:
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ageless, raceless,
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generically good-looking.
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That person sitting right next to you
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might have the most
idiosyncratic inner life,
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but you don't have a clue
because we're all wearing
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the same blank expression all the time.
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That is the kind of creepy transformation
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that is taking over cities,
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only it applies to buildings, not people.
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Cities are full of roughness and shadow,
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texture and color.
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You can still find architectural surfaces
of great individuality and character,
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in apartment buildings in Riga
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and [???].
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social housing in Vienna,
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Hopi villages in Arizona,
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brownstones in New York,
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wooden houses in San Francisco.
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These aren't palaces or cathedrals.
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These are just ordinary residences
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expressing the ordinary
splendor of cities.
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And the reason they're like that
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is that the need for shelter
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is so bound up with the human desire
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for beauty.
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Their rough surfaces give us
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a touchable city.
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Right? Streets that you can read
by running your fingers
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over brick and stone.
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But that's getting harder to do,
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because cities are becoming smooth.
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New downtowns sprout towers
that are almost always made
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of concrete and steel
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and covered in glass.
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You can look at skylines
all over the world --
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Houston, Guangzhou,
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Frankfurt --
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and you see the same army
of high-gloss robots
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marching over the horizon.
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Now just think of everything we lose
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when architects stop using the full range
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of available materials.
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When we reject granite
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and limestone and sandstone
and wood and copper
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and terra cotta and brick
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and wattle and plaster,
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we simplify architecture
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and we impoverish cities.
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It's as if you reduced all
of the world's cuisines
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down to airline food.
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(Laughter)
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Chicken or pasta?
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But worse still,
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assemblies of glass towers
like this one in Moscow
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suggest a disdain for the civic
and communal aspects of urban living.
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Right? Buildings like these are intended
to enrich their owners and tenants,
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but not necessarily the lives
of the rest of us,
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those of us who navigate the spaces
between the buildings.
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And we expect to do so for free.
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Shiny towers are an invasive species,
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and they are choking our cities
and killing off public space.
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We tend to think of a facade
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as being like makeup,
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a decorative layer applied at the end
to a building that's effectively complete.
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But just because a facade is superficial
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doesn't mean it's not also deep.
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Let me give you an example
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of how a city's surfaces affect
the way we live in it.
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When I visited Salamanca in Spain,
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I gravitated to the Plaza Mayor
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at all hours of the day.
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Right? Early in the morning,
sunlight rakes the facades,
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sharpening shadows,
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and at night, lamplight segments
the buildings into hundreds
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of distinct areas,
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balconies and windows and arcades,
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each one a separate pocket
of visual activity.
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That detail and depth, that glamour
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gives the plaza a theatrical quality.
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It becomes a stage where
the generations can meet.
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You have teenagers sprawling
on the pavement,
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seniors monopolizing the benches,
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and real life starts to look
like an opera set.
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The curtain goes up on Salamanca.
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So just because I'm talking about
the exteriors of buildings,
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not form, not function, not structure,
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even so those surfaces
give textures to our lives,
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because buildings create
the spaces around them,
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and those spaces can draw people in
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or push them away.
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And the difference often has to do
with the quality of those exteriors.
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So one contemporary equivalent
of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca
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is the Place de la Défense in Paris,
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a windswept, glass-walled open space
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that office workers hurry through
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on the way from the Metro
to their cubicles
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but otherwise spend
as little time in as possible.
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In the early 1980s,
the architect Philip Johnson
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tried to recreate a gracious
European plaza in Pittsburgh.
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This is PPG Place,
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a half acre of open space
encircles by commercial buildings
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made of mirrored glass.
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And he ornamented those buildings
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with metal trim and baize
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and gothic turrets
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which really pop on the skyline.
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But at ground level,
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the plaza feels like a black glass cage.
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I mean sure, in summertime kids
are running back and forth
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through the fountain
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and there's ice skating in the winter,
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but it lacks the informality
of a leisurely hangout.
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It's just not the sort of place
you really want to just hang out and chat.
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Public spaces thrive or fail
for many different reasons.
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Architecture is only one,
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but it's an important one.
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Some recent plazas
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like Federation Square in Melbourne
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or Superkilen in Copenhagen
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succeed because they combine old and new,
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rough and smooth,
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neutral and bright colors,
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and because they don't rely
excessively on glass.
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Now, I'm not against glass.
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It's an ancient and versatile material.
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It's easy to manufacture and transport
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and install and replace
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and clean.
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It comes in everything
from enormous, ultra-clear sheets
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to translucent bricks.
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New coatings make it change mood
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in the shifting light.
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In expensive cities like New York,
it has the magical power
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of being able to multiply real estate
values by allowing views,
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which is really the only commodity
that developers have to offer
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to justify those surreal prices.
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In the middle of the 19th century,
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with the construction
of the Crystal Palace in London,
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glass leapt to the top of the list
of quintessentially modern substances.
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By the mid-20th century,
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it had come to dominate the downtowns
of some American cities,
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largely through some really spectacular
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office buildings like Lever House
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in midtown Manhattan, designed
by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
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Eventually, the technology
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advanced to the point where architects
could design structures so transparent
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they practically disappear.
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And along the way,
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glass became the default material
of the high rise city,
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and there's a very
powerful reason for that,
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because as the world's populations
converge on cities,
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the least fortunate pack into
jerrybuilt shantytowns,
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but hundreds of millions of people
need apartments and places to work
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in ever larger buildings,
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so it makes economic sense
to put up towers
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and wrap them in cheap
and practical curtain walls.
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But glass has a limited ability
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to be expressive.
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This is a section of wall framing a plaza
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in the pre-Hispanic city of Mitla,
in southern Mexico.
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Those 2,000-year old carvings
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make it clear that this was a place
of high ritual significance.
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Today we look at those and we can see
a historical and textural continuity
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between those carvings,
the mountains all around,
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and that church which is built
on top of the ruins
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using stone plundered from the site.
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In nearby Oaxaca, even
ordinary plaster buildings
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become canvasses for bright colors,
political murals,
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and sophisticated graphic arts.
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It's an intricate, communicative language
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that an epidemic of glass
would simply wipe out.
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The good news is that architects
and developers
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have begun to rediscover
the joys of texture
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without backing away from modernity.
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Some find innovative uses
for old materials like brick
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and terra cotta.
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Others invent new products
like the molded panels
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that Snøhetta used
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to give their San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
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that crinkly, sculptural quality.
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The architect Stefano Boeri
even created living facades.
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This is his Vertical Forest,
a pair of apartment towers in Milan,
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whose most visible feature is greenery.
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And Boeri is designing a version of this
for Nanjing in China.
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And imagine if green facades
were as ubiquitous as glass ones
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how much cleaner the air
in Chinese cities would become.
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But the truth is that these
are mostly one-offs,
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boutique projects,
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not easily reproduced
at a global scale.
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And that is the point.
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When you use materials
that have a local significance,
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you prevent cities from
all looking the same.
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Copper has a long history in New York --
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the Statue of Liberty,
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the crown of the Woolworth Building --
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but it fell out of fashion for a long time
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until shop architects used it to cover
the American Copper Building,
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a pair of twisting towers
on the East River.
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It's not even finished and you
can see the way sunset
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lights up that metallic facade,
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which will weather to green as it ages.
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Buildings can be like people.
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Their faces broadcast their experience.
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And that's an important point,
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because when glass ages,
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you just replace it,
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and the building looks pretty much
the same way it did before
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until eventually it's demolished.
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Almost all other materials
have the ability to absorb
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infusions of history and memory
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and project it into the present.
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The firm Ennead
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clad the Utah Natural History Museum
in Salt Lake City in copper and zinc,
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ores that had been mined
in the area for 150 years
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and that also camouflage the building
against the ochre hills
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so that you have a natural history museum
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that reflects the region's
natural history.
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And when the Chinese
Pritzker Prize Winner Wang Shu
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was building a history museum in Ningbo,
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he didn't just create
a wrapper for the past,
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he built memory right into the walls
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by using brick and stones and shingles
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salvaged from villages
that had been demolished.
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Now, architects can use glass
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in equally lyrical and inventive ways.
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Here in New York, two buildings,
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one by Jean Nouvel
and this one by Frank Gehry
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face off across West 19th Street,
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and the play of reflections
that they toss back and forth
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is like a symphony in light.
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But when a city defaults to glass
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as it grows,
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it becomes a hall of mirrors,
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disquieting and cold.
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After all, cities are places
of concentrated variety
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where the world's cultures
and languages and lifestyles
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come together and mingle.
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So rather than encase all that variety
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and diversity in buildings
of crushing sameness,
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we should have an architecture that honors
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the full range of the urban experience.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)