Name: Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Biomorphic Urbanism’ and Cities of the Future
Uploaded: 2024-12-05
Duration: 16 min 29 s
Description: Peter Kindel, Cities and Climate Lead, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Peter Kindel, Cities and Climate Lead, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, In conversation with Clay Chandler, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: ‘Biomorphic Urbanism’ and Cities of the Future

Conferences

Thank you, Nick Peter. Welcome. Thank you so much for uh Hi, everybody. Um It's a real honor to be here with uh with you Peter. Um I'm a great admirer of your work and, and really look forward to kind of diving into some of it uh Here this afternoon. Um Let's just start by talking a little bit about. Uh uh So M skidmore, owings Merrill, this is one of the most storied architecture practices in the world. Tell us a little bit about the scale and the type of work that it does. Yeah. So I think maybe many of you have heard of som those of you in the architecture field uh were a 88 year old um design firm started in 1936. Um And uh some of the major buildings we've done are Burj Khalifa in Dubai, uh Jin Mao Tower here in um in Shanghai and many other projects in China and Hong Kong area. Um And I think what's unique about som is we've tried to maintain a collaborative um design studio between architects, uh structural engineers, mechanical engineers. So it's a very integrated approach to architectural design and I think that's led to some of these iconic structures that we've been able to create. Um along with that we do have a, what we call the City Design practice, which I'm a member of, which is our um design studio that's uh manages large scale projects. Let's talk a little bit about that. Tell us about your, your role and you know what, what it means to be the city lead at uh at Good morning. Yeah. So, I mean, we've heard all day today about design at various scales in various uh guises. Uh So I designed probably at the largest scale possible, which is really at the city scale. We don't often design cities from scratch that, that really doesn't happen in my profession. But what we do is parts of cities or components or uh districts often times um for both uh city leaders and uh private developers. Uh So you may know Xin TDI in Shanghai, that was a big development in the late nineties, early two thousands, very well known that had to do with cultural conservation as well as new development. So that, that's the type of scale that we work at. Um But um my background is also as a landscape architect. Um And so I have this natural interest or affinity with um ecosystems and that's really what's led to what we'll talk about today, which is the integration or relationship of urban design and ecosystems. It's a great segue to kind of take a look at this concept of uh we get the slides up there, there it is uh of, of biomorphic urbanism. Uh What is that? Can you explain it for us? Yeah. So you just heard about biomimicry. Biomorphic urbanism is really a um uh a related idea that we can um um uh influence what we, how we design cities through natural processes. So, bio meaning life and morphic is form. So uh cities that are formed by life and what I meant by that or what we mean by that is it's actually 22 sort sort of sides of the equation of life. So it's natural processes, but also human uh interaction with those processes. So the cultural side of um how we design cities. Um So biomorphic urbanism really is about cities that are shaped by nature and cultural history. Um And I just added at the bottom there that the measure of a biomorphic um project is, does it have a net restorative benefit? So we talked a little bit about degradation of environmental systems uh earlier in the introduction. So the idea behind Biomorphic urbanism, it has a regenerative or restorative benefit, both culturally and environmentally. So this is a little bit similar to uh uh Bill mcdonough, who's a great friend of uh brainstorm design, uh His idea of cradle to grave that it's not enough to slow the rate of death of atrophy of the planet that you have to actually reverse it. And that, that's the real mandate of a designer if you're thinking about sustainability. And what, what I, what I love about your philosophy here is that um it's increasingly emerging that it's not just kind of a nice way of thinking about cities, it's a kind of existential imperative, right? I mean, that's, you know, it's nice to talk about ecosystems and cultural connection and, and all that, but it actually has a practical purpose which is to protect our cities. Uh make our cities more resilient, both culturally and ecologically manage uh sea level rise. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the work that, that uh shows that purpose. So yeah, it's not just about, you know, a, a nice idea. Um And the idea really emerged. Um We, I did a piece for National Geographic, they asked us to design a future city. Um I met the editor here actually in Hong Kong. Um And I said, if you ever wanna do an issue on cities, I'd love to contribute. So she took me up on it and she gave us about two months to come up with a design for a future city if you go to the next slide and we organized our thinking and what we do at som is we use 10 principles typically to organize our urban planning work. And they're shown here in bolded letters. Um And so for net geo, we worked at five scales. And on the next slide, you can see that we started on the right hand side of the image at the scale of the living unit, right? And then the second scale was on the left hand side of the building. So we want to show the relationship of these two scales, these two parts. And then we went to the third scale which was the um sort of this district or neighborhood scale. Um So you can start to see the integration of, of ecological elements into this drawing. Um And then the third, the sorry, the fourth scale was what we called urban hubs. And this was actually modeled on a project that we did in Kuala Lumpur. And you can see how we've allowed the water to circulate in and around the um urbanized areas. So it's a very integrated design with natural systems. So instead of, you know, Glanville and trying to force all that water out to sort of welcome it in and yeah, so that water can go up and down depending on rainfall, depending on flooding. Um It doesn't hurt the city at all. Um Now, this is again speculative here, this is not real design. Um But um and then we took it to this scale which is a regional scale and this is, you can see in the lower right we introduced with where the idea of biomorphic urbanism first was introduced. I think the regional scale is really important because it shows in purple, the uh urbanized areas yellow is agriculture. But you can also see that we talked about conservation, marine conservation, um upland conservation, micro wilderness, um ecosystem conservation. The shape of this coastline looks vaguely familiar, right? So this was a speculative, again, a speculative project. But we took this as a snapshot of a coastline just north of, of Hong Kong actually. So this is very close to where we are today. All right. So can we take you quickly into talking about this project and particularly about water? Uh because you know, as I I mentioned yesterday, one of the things that I love most about your work is that it's so conscious uh of water and the role of water in the life of, of cities. And it really uh you know, embraces this philosophy that, you know, water is your friend, not your enemy and you need to learn to work with it. And this is just a fantastic uh example of this. Um Everyone's heard of the High Line. We'll kind of look at that in a second, but this is an idea called the Water Line. What is it? Yeah. So I, I moved to Hong Kong to start our urban design studio in 2014. Um I lived here for four years um until 2018. And one of the things that always struck me about Hong Kong and the areas around here was the incredible beauty. First of all, of just this place. But the fact that you can't really get to the water very often, it's difficult to actually get to the water. You gotta go to a specific beach or a specific park. So what I proposed to our studio and we did this over about a one month period. Um I said, wouldn't it be cool if we could build a path all the way around Hong Kong Island? Because um and so that was the genesis of this. But the reason it relates to biomorphic urbanism is again thinking about scales of work. Um And so we said, OK, well, it's a trail. That's fine. That's a nice idea. Everyone likes a trail. But what is, how does it relate to Hong Kong's ecological problems for instance? Or um you know, some of the social benefits that we might get from a, from a project like this. So that's what the Hong Kong Water line is. It's a circumferential trail around the island. Um If you got that great idea, let's look at maybe some of the specific. And the other thing that struck me was thinking ecologically about this area is that there's very little protected marine environments around Hong Kong, which I think is really a tragedy if I can be a little blunt. Um There's a few but not enough for country because there are so many country parks, but they are not kind of as many, right. It's all on land, but there's this incredible asset right in front of everyone, which is the seat. Uh So the lighter blue areas was an idea about expanded marine conservation out. And so that would inform and provide a rationale for why you might want to create a trail, right? So it's a little more holistic and if you go to the next slide. Um So today, there's two main trails on Hong Kong Island, the Hong Kong trail and the Wilson trail. But they're both inland. The, the red line and the yellow line are the two trails. There's no way to get to the coast. And if you want to get to the coastal edge, you have to go to one of these green spots, these little parks, I'm, I'm sure there's many more than that. But the, the concept was that they're not connected, right. So, so I live down here in Cheko Beach, the head of this peninsula. And you can see from this map that even if you want to go up to Big Wave, the other beach, you've got to follow a paved road, there's no trail, take your life in your own hands because everyone drives really fast and the roads are narrow. But so we proposed this trail so you can see the red is the urban side of the island. I'm sure everyone knows Hong Kong pretty well here. The blue is the non urban side. Let's call it the the south side, um 10 segments, 50 kilometers. Um And the beauty of it is a lot of it is already, it's just about linking it together. So southern ridges in Singapore. Incredible project. I don't know if you haven't been there. Please go. It's really beautiful. So we, there are precedents for this. This is not something we just dreamed up one day. Uh The high line, I think everyone knows there's many others, Actually, there's one in Shenzhen as well. Um And so the team went out and we walked and mapped the whole island each segment and we uh looked in detail. This is AAA very detailed map of Hong Kong. The big, the big challenge was what I called turning the corner was going from the south, the north side to the south side around Cape Collinson, which you can see on the upper right here and then getting back around on the west end because it's uh topographically very, very challenging there. So anyway, we looked at all the segments and we should probably, yeah. Um But anyway, the coast is beautiful. And then we said, OK, there's also this issue of trash on the beaches. So can we use trash to create the component parts to build the trail? And so this series here shows how that would be done and we could then 3d print the components that would build the trail. So you see that here. And we proposed a series of simple modules. So it could be prefabricated and actually brought out to the location because we didn't, we didn't want like Tom's idea of LEGO pieces together because you don't wanna build a trail and destroy the environment that you're trying to, you know, protect to some degree. So we elevated the trail up. So the um we don't destroy habitat, habitat can just move right under the trail, capture the water filter, it, return it to the site. Um And so these just show the different applications. And then we tried to have four or five different applications where if you did have say a road and you want to put a trail next to it, there was a design for that. And so this is an illustration of um going around that Eastern and Collinson. We also as you can see in this image very clearly, it's not possible to do it actually right down at the water line. But we didn't want to do that anyway, because that's a beautiful ecosystem just by itself. So sometimes you're close to it, but generally we pulled it back, um say 100 m from the water edge. So you're still um able to access the water if you want to. And but the idea was to bring people um closer to the coastline to appreciate this incredible beauty of Hong Kong. And you know, for that instance, we were talking yesterday that maybe this could apply to other places like Macau, this isn't, you know, an idea that only has one application. It's a brilliant idea. So what, what's the, you did this pro bono? Right? What's the status of play on this? Why isn't the Hong Kong government all over the place? I don't know. I don't know. I think there's one more. Is there one more? Let's see. It's kind of a rendering. Now today we would have done this in A I in about five minutes. This is more traditional. Um I have, I was talking to a friend in Hong Kong and they were saying that it's, you now can walk quite a ways along the north coast in a interconnected trail. So I think they're just kind of building it piece by piece. But the analogy I use, I'm from Chicago, you know, 30 years ago, they decided to create a setback along the Chicago River over out of time. Um And they said, OK, we're gonna set all the buildings back 10 m 30 ft. And everyone said, why would you do that? Um And they said, well, someday it's gonna be a trail. And I don't know if anyone's been to Chicago recently, but they've finally implemented the whole river walk. So over the last 20 years, everybody has built a piece of it and all of a sudden now it's this incredible asset that and everybody can get to the water in, in the city and it's just become probably the single greatest civic uh feature in Chicago now after Millennium Park. So that's by way of saying you don't need to do it all at once. But if you work on it over 1020 30 years, you get incredible results. So Peter Gall, this is an extraordinary case study and a wonderful uh uh demonstration of how you can use design at the scale of cities which is really powerful. Thank you so much for coming to, to share your ideas and insights. Well, thank you.