-
We've been asked to address
the theme of changing conversations.
-
And I think certainly
in the field that I'm in,
-
that's a really important point to be at.
-
From the discourses that are going on
within architecture
-
as well as throughout society,
-
I think it is time to change
the way that we look at things.
-
As an architect, I've been involved
with architectural projects,
-
with urban planning projects,
-
and more recently, projects that engage
much more with the landscape.
-
Now I can see so many opportunities
-
and so many ways
in which design can contribute
-
and has the capacity
to effect social change.
-
And that's what I'm going
to talk to you today about.
-
Starting off, I think it might be useful
to talk a little bit about architecture,
-
because I think for many people,
-
architecture is a slightly
mystical activity.
-
Not many people know what architects do.
-
A lot of the time, I'm not sure
the architects know what they're doing.
-
But we try,
-
and it's important to try and embrace that
-
and try and understand what that means.
-
When I talk about architecture today,
I'm not talking about the profession.
-
I'm not talking about an activity that's
pursued by a select group of people
-
with some specialized knowledge.
-
I'm talking about architecture
in the bigger sense:
-
architecture in terms
of the room that we're in,
-
architecture as a pervasive activity,
-
architecture as the activity
that is the creation of shelter,
-
the creation of space,
-
the design and the creation
of spaces between buildings,
-
the landscape.
-
It's man's interaction with the landscape.
-
Our construction
of the built environment --
-
that's what I mean by architecture.
-
It's not a specialized thing.
-
And over the last, I suppose,
20 or 30 years,
-
with the predominance of the internet
-
and the wonderful
and exciting advancements
-
that are taking place in technology,
-
one of the things that has happened
is that our perception of the world
-
has become commodified.
-
It's become reduced in many ways
-
to a perception that is two-dimensional.
-
We spend a lot of our time,
a lot of our lives,
-
looking at the world through screens,
-
whether it's our laptops
or television screens
-
or monitors at airports
or in the workplace
-
or even our telephones are now screens.
-
And it has this effect of reducing
our perception of the world.
-
It expands it in many ways,
but it can reduce it,
-
it can turn into icons our idea
or our notion of certain concepts
-
or ideas that are, in fact,
maybe a lot more pervasive
-
than the two-dimensional image can convey.
-
And I think that's true
about architecture.
-
I think we've grown accustomed
to thinking about architecture
-
in a really primarily
two-dimensional way, in a flat way,
-
that the building is about
what it looks like, how it appears,
-
it's visual commodity.
-
But it's much more than that.
-
It's much more than an aesthetic
or just a sensory experience.
-
That's very important,
-
but it's much more than that.
-
It's a complex operation.
-
And a big part of architecture
and a big part of design
-
involves understanding the context
in which that design exists
-
or in which it's going to exist.
-
It's having the imagination
to try and predict or project
-
where the building
or where the urban space
-
or where the landscape
is going to be located,
-
how it's going to be used,
-
what are the operations,
what are the activities
-
that are going to take place
in that space.
-
And you might call those
the programmatic aspects of architecture,
-
the programmatic aspects of design.
-
And I think that in recent times,
we've tended to privilege
-
or put at a higher level
-
that visual sensory perception
or desire about architecture
-
ahead and in advance
of those programmatic needs.
-
We've tended to kind of
create monuments, create icons
-
that create a sensation or create effect,
-
without really thinking through
the value of the operation
-
that those places
or those spaces can affect.
-
And it's in that zone or in that area
that I think we need to start looking
-
or trying to understand
-
how architecture or how design
can really impact on society,
-
and how it can address
some of the problems
-
that we're facing.
-
The big buzzword in design
and in what I do
-
and I think what everybody does
-
is the idea of sustainability.
-
Sustainability is an idea,
a notion or a concept
-
that's triangulated by three very
important concepts or ideas:
-
the environment, the economy and society.
-
Well, the global economy seems to be
currently in a kind of meltdown situation.
-
A lot of work needs to be done there.
-
The environment
that we live in is challenged.
-
We've got global warming,
we've got rising tides,
-
we've got all sorts
of disasters taking place,
-
all sorts of things happening
-
that threaten the equilibrium of the world
and the environment that we live in.
-
And society itself
is also challenged and threatened
-
by some of the issues
that we're faced with.
-
I think we've heard about
some of those issues today
-
and the need to change the paradigm
in which we perceive those things.
-
It's really very crucial that we do that.
-
So how does design impact that?
-
How can how can I, as a designer,
or anybody as a designer
-
or any architect
-
or how can society --
-
in what way can design impact on that,
-
in what way can it affect that?
-
I'm going to talk today
-
about ways in which I think
design can impact on society,
-
very specifically on society,
-
and how that idea of design
can infiltrate the idea of society
-
and work with society
in the operations of society
-
in this programmatic way
-
to effect social change.
-
This is an image of Frederick Street
in the early part of the last century.
-
And I think it's a good image
in lots of ways.
-
It seems like that little triangulation
of the environment,
-
the economy and society
-
seems to be in a kind of balance.
-
So it seems that in cities
we can see that balance
-
that cities are symbols or ciphers
-
or ways in which we can we can understand
the confluence of those forces.
-
And through time,
-
there have been times when cities
have done that very successfully.
-
There are lots of examples
of very good cities
-
which have found themselves
at a specific moment in time
-
at a point of balance or equilibrium.
-
If we look at Port of Spain as a city,
-
and we consider the idea
that, once upon a time,
-
Port of Spain was just a little cluster,
-
a little fishing village
at the mouth of the St. Ann's River.
-
And yet it's grown to be
such a big, complex conglomeration,
-
a big conurbation of lots and lots
of complex ideas.
-
And the Italian architect Aldo Rossi,
-
a 20th-century architect who died
at the end of the last century,
-
made a very profound statement.
-
He said architecture is the making
of the city over time.
-
I think that's a great statement,
-
because it talks, on one level,
about the individual production
-
and manufacture
of an object -- architecture --
-
and it talks about architecture
as being a form of cultural production,
-
as something that speaks to an issue
-
or speaks to ideas that are bigger
than the sum of the parts of the building,
-
and it relates it to the city.
-
It also suggested that it's a constant,
dynamic, changing process.
-
And I think that's a very
important thing to understand,
-
that it's also part of the program.
-
It's nothing to do with visual,
it's to do with the program.
-
It's how does this evolve,
what are the dynamics,
-
what are the components,
what are the elements
-
that contribute to the unraveling
and the creation of the city?
-
It also speaks to the fact that the city
is something that can be imagined.
-
In the same way as we can conceive
and imagine of a space or a building,
-
we can conceive and imagine of a city.
-
And it speaks to the idea
of the individual and the collective.
-
And it's that link --
the individual to the collective,
-
the idea of the civitas, the idea
of the society --
-
that I think is a really important axiom
-
for understanding
how design can infiltrate
-
and how design can effect change.
-
These are some images
of how Port of Spain evolved
-
over a relatively short
period of 200 years,
-
from a colonial plan that was developed
following some ordinances
-
sent out by the king of Spain,
-
called the Laws of the Indies.
-
Many cities in the Caribbean
and Latin America
-
were predicated and formulated on this.
-
It was a gesture, it was a single design
-
that addressed the needs
and the requirements
-
of those establishing
cities and new colonies.
-
And it expanded, and over time,
as trade began to develop in Trinidad,
-
the city expanded, and it grew,
-
and it started appropriating,
more and more, the surrounding landscape,
-
until it grew to pretty much
what we have today,
-
or what we understand to be
the city of Port of Spain.
-
But as we all know,
-
that process grew also on a kind
of macro scale as well.
-
We have the evolution and the development
of this big conurbation
-
that stretches from Port
of Spain to the west
-
and over to Arouca in the east
-
and seems to be continuing.
-
So we've developed
into this concept or idea
-
that far exceeds the original
Laws of the Indies plan.
-
And it's turned into a complex
arrangement and matrix
-
of infrastructures and complex issues,
-
issues that, in many ways,
have led to a lot of problems.
-
They've led to a lot
of infrastructural problems.
-
And we share this
with many, many cities in the world.
-
Cities all over the world
are expanding, they're increasing,
-
they're undergoing the same type
of development that we've undergone
-
to the point where the original Port
of Spain and the downtown Port of Spain
-
that used to comprise the city,
used to constitute the city,
-
has now turned into this sort
of megalopolis, this sprawl,
-
and it's difficult to comprehend.
-
And when we think of the problems,
-
we think of the infrastructural problems:
the water, the power,
-
the traffic congestion,
-
the crime, the segregation,
the polarization that exists,
-
the situation that has led to what's
happened in this country recently
-
with the state of emergency ...
-
Sometimes it seems
completely insurmountable.
-
It seems like we've got to a point
where we can't really control it
-
in the way that we can control
that original plan.
-
We can't really control this anymore.
-
It's almost as if we're
victims of the city,
-
rather than people that have willingly
or willfully designed the city
-
or formulated the city.
-
Another phenomenon that has happened
commensurate with these issues
-
of size and scale of infrastructure
-
is the predomination
of what I would call "typologies,"
-
different types of development.
-
We're all familiar
with the high-rise development.
-
This is some buildings in Hong Kong,
-
you know, the magnificent, tall structures
that cost a fortune to build.
-
But they predominate;
-
it's almost as if you can't have a city
-
unless you've got
a high-rise building in it.
-
They're symbolic, they seem emblematic
with modernity and development.
-
And then shopping malls
is another predominant type,
-
another prevalent type
that all cities want to have,
-
the idea that you can
concentrate all these shops
-
and all this retail activity in one place
-
and create an environment for people
to come and do specific retail functions
-
and purchase things and be
in a specific place at a specific time.
-
And then the highway, the idea
of cutting through landscapes
-
to create how it's to increase the speed
-
with which we can get
from one point to another.
-
And then we also have
suburban development.
-
These are all typologies
-
that are emblematic of the type
of development that has taken place
-
in modern cities, in Port of Spain
and cities all over the world.
-
Now, there's nothing wrong
with shopping malls,
-
there's nothing wrong with highways,
-
and there's nothing wrong with high-rise
buildings or suburban development.
-
What is kind of wrong
is that what we seem to be doing
-
is privileging types or ways of building
-
or ideas about building
-
above other really very important ways
-
of how we can conceive
or how we imagine space.
-
What about schools?
-
What about parks?
-
What about making streets
that are really comfortable to walk on
-
and the people are not confronting
traffic noise and congestion all the time?
-
Where is that in the equation?
-
It seems that with our focus on these
types of structures and these typologies,
-
which are motivated and driven
primarily because they generate profit,
-
they're part of an economic
consumer system,
-
they generate profit,
that's why they're favored,
-
that's why they are privileged
above other types of development.
-
But schools,
-
parks,
-
elements of cities that used to be really
significant and really important
-
are being diminished and marginalized
-
as a consequence of the focus
on this type of development.
-
They're undermining
the integrity of the city,
-
they're undermining
the capacity of the city
-
to accommodate social interaction,
-
to accommodate everybody,
-
because the other thing
is they're also exclusive.
-
To work in a high-end office,
you need to be qualified,
-
you need to be educated,
-
or you need to have
access or the resources
-
to get the qualifications or the training
that allow you to get the job in there.
-
If you don't have those,
you work outside somewhere.
-
We're not concerned about
what those places are like,
-
you just go and work somewhere else.
-
Similarly, those people that used
to live in the cities
-
or used to live and contribute
to the life of cities
-
are being pushed out because buildings
like high-rise buildings push them out.
-
There's a premium on land price
that pushes people out of cities.
-
People can't go to shopping malls
unless they've got cars,
-
because those malls are generally
located on the peripheries of cities.
-
People can't go buy things
in shopping malls,
-
because they don't have
enough disposable income;
-
they're not going to spend money there.
-
So those types of buildings,
whilst they work for sectors of society,
-
don't work for everybody.
-
They're not equitable.
-
Yet, an undue amount of attention
is paid by government, by society
-
on ensuring that those types
of buildings proliferate,
-
because they're seen as positive
aspects of development --
-
at the expense of types of building
and types of program
-
that could be beneficial to everybody,
-
types of program
that encourage interaction,
-
that encourage education,
-
that encourage people
to be with each other
-
and encourage a sense of community.
-
These types of development
dissipate society,
-
they disaggregate society,
they polarize society.
-
They create isolated groups of activity
-
to which access depends upon how much
money you've got in your pocket.
-
It's a polarizing and negative force.
-
We see it in this city,
-
and we're seeing it more
and more other cities.
-
And what ends up happening
-
is that we end up with this sort of stack,
that's like a time bomb.
-
At some point the system must collapse,
it's really not sustainable.
-
It's like the economic
system in the world today --
-
it's really not a sustainable system,
-
and we have to find ways of addressing it.
-
Design can't provide the solution,
-
but what it can address is some
of the conditions that people live with.
-
It can address some of the circumstances
in which people find themselves,
-
some of the areas of cities
-
to which people have
been shunted or pushed aside
-
because they can no longer
afford to live in the center,
-
and they can't participate
actively or fully
-
in this consumerized, capitalized system.
-
And we need to try and conceive
of how we can transform
-
these types of spaces,
-
how we can integrate the activities
that happen in these types of spaces
-
within a bigger picture,
-
how we can identify small moves
or small gestures,
-
whether through design or economic
initiative or social initiative
-
that effect change and that allow
transformation of spaces
-
that encourage and facilitate
greater participation.
-
And there are lots of ways of doing that.
-
And whilst it might seem complex
when we look at cities,
-
when we look at the aggregate parts
of cities, it may seem insurmountable.
-
But if we try and isolate individual acts,
individual ways of looking at things
-
and formulate a program, a manner or way
of understanding how we can do that,
-
then we can get nearer
to achieving or effecting
-
some kind of social change.
-
And there are examples in the world
where that's been done.
-
Barcelona is a really good example
of a city where people sat down
-
and collectively and actively
tried to conceive of ways
-
in which they could effect change,
-
and they did it very successfully.
-
And nearer to home, in Bogota,
-
Enrique Pe�alosa, the mayor of Bogota,
-
when he took office, he decided,
-
"I'm not going to spend billions
of dollars on creating more highways.
-
I'm going to appropriate the funds I have,
-
and I'm going to create places --
-
parks that everybody can use,
public spaces that people can use."
-
And as he created, more and more
people came into those spaces.
-
And those spaces were very effective
in encouraging participation,
-
encouraging senses
of community amongst people,
-
getting people to come together
-
to forget what little trifling contests
they had between each other,
-
to start doing things together,
-
to start moving around the city together
-
and try to start acting together.
-
So there are ways of doing it;
there are models.
-
And it comes back to this idea of program.
-
What's our program?
-
Well, I think we want to create
equitable society.
-
Then we want to create societies
-
where there's active and equitable
participation for everybody
-
and where we can break down
some of those inhibitions, those barriers.
-
We can remove economic stigma,
-
we can remove stigma around race,
-
around where you live,
around all those factors
-
and try and bring people together
in constructed and effective ways.
-
In Trinidad, there are
a number of examples.
-
There are opportunities to do this
all over the place.
-
This is City Gate.
-
It's the entrance to the city
for tens of thousands of people.
-
People come in and out of it every day.
-
And yet, what they're confronted
with is pretty bleak, horrid, grey,
-
unwelcoming and sometimes unsafe
-
because of all the traffic zooming around.
-
And that space from City Gate
that moves up to Independence Square
-
could be a really wonderful experience,
you know, with landscaping,
-
with proper accommodation
of the sort of facilities and amenities
-
that people would need and would enjoy.
-
It could become a really
very important civic space.
-
This is the Prado in Havana.
-
It's just a notional idea
of how that space could be treated
-
so that movement
in and out of the city every day
-
becomes a really important
and uplifting transition
-
from the maxi taxi
to the place where you work.
-
In San Fernando we've got the waterfront,
-
which is a really very beautiful part
of this landscape in this country,
-
but is in complete neglect.
-
There are some really beautiful,
fine examples of 19th-century architecture
-
that form, in and of themselves,
some really fine spaces.
-
We need to we need to look at
those spaces, we need to appropriate them,
-
we need to determine uses for those spaces
-
that would encourage
all types of activity:
-
spaces for performance,
-
spaces for children to play in
-
and learn that it's cool and it's OK
and it's fun to be around other people,
-
spaces for people to do all the kinds
of activities that people like to do,
-
that they enjoy doing collectively
-
and that benefit society
-
and encourage people to interact,
-
regardless of their social
or economic circumstance,
-
or places for people to reflect,
-
parks, places for people to sit and relax.
-
And there are lots of ways we can do that,
-
ways in which we can address and look at
how we break down those barriers.
-
We can do it with architectural language.
-
We can look at the ways
that spaces are formulated
-
to break down divisions and barriers
between inside and outside,
-
between green and hard surfaces
-
and try and generate spaces
that really encourage interaction,
-
encourage people to do things together
-
and encourage a sense of community.
-
We need to mandate government,
-
we need to provide examples
to developers, to people
-
to generate that the benefit
of these may not be measured
-
in a financial return on investment,
-
but the social benefit to us all is really
immeasurable in the long run.
-
And if we do that,
I think we can demonstrate --
-
and we've demonstrated in the past that
designers had the capacity to do that --
-
I think if we can do that,
we can demonstrate to people
-
that society is an inclusive community,
-
and that if everybody is included,
-
and if everybody feels part
of the society,
-
then we have a much better chance
of ensuring a sustainable future.
-
Thank you.