I will just start with an introduction to Derek Simons and Peter Schengiga of HNS, and truly excited to have their voices as part of this global lecture series in urban design, and we have students from around the world as part of this lecture series, not only students from Columbia University, but urban designers from all around the world, and you are all welcome, and we're so thrilled to be in dialogue with all of you today. HNS is a firm that truly has been a global leader in many ways, first of all with a kind of what I would call a creative and collaborative approach to urban design, landscape architecture, planning, and systems thinking. They have an incredible range of projects from new energy landscapes to living with water that span from speculation to built work, and I just feel that they have been such a strong voice in the profession globally, pushing ahead these notions of not only the agency of practice and the agency of designers within the built environment, but also through very creative and frankly applied thought processes, applied to climate change, and applied to multiple scales from the scale of a development or an artwork as they'll be showing to broader regional transformative landscape projects. So it's truly instructive for us as designers, as urban designers, as landscape architects and planners to hear from both Peter and Dirk this morning and or in this afternoon wherever you are, and I couldn't imagine a firm more I've been hyping your lecture all semester because in the Columbia context, we are working on a project on revisioning the Mississippi River and transforming that into a living river system alongside the revitalization of the many towns and cities that are along it. So I couldn't think of a firm that was more apt to kind of put some contextualizing words and some inspiring kind of process notes to to our class, but welcome, Peter and Dirk and thank you again. We have our at the end of the lecture, David Smiley, the assistant director will be moderating some Q&A so folks are welcome to put your questions in the chat box. And then I guess I would just remind everybody kind of formally that this lecture is being recorded for academic purposes only it'll be on the Columbia server. And that once we start sharing screen if you would kindly turn your your video off and then just so Peter and Dirk you're aware we'll turn the videos back on for Q&A so you can see faces and have a little bit more interaction, but welcome again. I'm just so thrilled to have you both here with us today. Thank you for being with us. Okay, thank you Kate for inviting us. Well, in the pre-corona days, invitations like this would include a trip to New York. Well, I'm afraid we have to see something else to see your beautiful city again. But please let me introduce us. This is H&S Landscape Architects in the Dutch Landscape as you can see. This is my colleague, Peter Scheng, and this is me, Dirk Simon, and our lecture will be in two parts. First, I will try to share the emotion I felt when I was waking up in the Anthropocene one morning and I want to present four possible positions for worldviews towards this new age of mankind. To manage expectations, none of these positions need to have the silver bullet to solve all the problems we are facing. After that disappointment to lift our spirits, I want to cross these four worldviews with our four professional attitudes that we as Landscape Architects and Urbanists have in our toolbox. My colleague, Peter, will after the intermission show some H&S projects covering two of these four professional attitudes because you are working in the Mississippi Lincoln River Studio. We decided to emphasize the room for the river projects because as an office, we were involved in this program on all levels of scaling. After Peter's showcase of projects, I will be back for a couple of minutes with some after thoughts. Let me start with a look back to the 2014 international architecture in Rotterdam that we curated. I think that urban by nature, the emphasis is that we are in nature. We live in nature and nature lives within us. We are urban by nature. The city is our habitat, our ecology. We felt co-has could stop that and from the bottom to the ring with projects about the necessity of guarding the road landscape architecture could have immediate in its nature. The fine tuning of the metabolism of the city to see at least mega structures can play a role in the circular economy. We breathe in the urban carpets to explore how we can make these changes in the existing situation in the existing urban landscapes. There is no new frontier anymore. Exploring the underground, maybe that's a new frontier and of course projects about the adaptation to climate change where we featured the rebuilt by design projects that were in their planning, in their hopeful planning phase in 2014. But the overarching theme was the Anthropocene, sketched in several essays in the catalogue of the Biennale. I was often asked, what's all this do about the Anthropocene? Do we need this grandstanding? Is it just the latest metaphor of the environmental movement to raise the level of alarm? What did change and what didn't change? Let me start with a book that changed my way of looking at the environment. It contains the proceedings of the International Conference at 155. Can I interrupt you? I thought I had a problem here but I think no one has seen your screen now. I don't know if you shared your screen again. So we will miss some first images. Okay. Let me try to share it again. This is not good. Share a screen. Can everybody see my screen now? Yes? Yes. Thank you so much. Yes. Okay. Well, you missed a lot of fun. You missed this. This is Peter. This is me. This is the structure of the lecture. This is Overlooking Urban by Nature. And here we are, starting with a book that changed my way of looking at the environment. It contains the proceedings of an International Conference at Princeton in 1955. Some 150 scientists, people like urban sociologists, numerous manfors, and the theologists, like Thaïard Desjardins, discussed man's role in changing the pace of the Earth. I bought it secondhand in 1976. 900 pages, good for days of reading and living too. And with wonderful studies, such as the reconstruction of the forest coverage of central Europe. And if we look at the table of contents, one observes that all the present-day things were all red, daring, mischievous, the age of fossil fuels, the specifics of urban meteorology, the way man influences plant communities, et cetera. So what's new? Well, first of all, I think the epistemological change that new instruments brought to link all these different elements together. For instance, in this beautiful 1980 portrait of the USA by system ecologist H. E. Oden. Here, the human economy and the natural world are described in one and the same ecosystem model, suggesting that we will be able to predict the whole system's performance. And well, I'm afraid that will be a promise forever. Even quantum computers and big data won't allow real modeling here because we just lack to you and are still unaware of much of the cause and effect relationships and the sheer complexity of the whole. Well, big data, of course, can be very helpful in producing evocative pictures like this present from your NASA. A humongous amount of data has been aggregated to animate here in the CO2 life of our living planet. I show this picture to make clear that the real rupture in thinking was the observation that we do not influence on the scale of the ecosystem, on the scale of the man's scale, but that we have disrupted some of the earth's systems. The earth systems that are drastically altered are the geochemical cycles, thereby disrupting the climate and the acidification of the oceans. The sediment flows that are, now that all the big rivers are dense for energy production, land use change fuels by reclamation for agriculture, and urbanization and finally and most important, the erosion of biodiversity. This reckoning of man as a global force was the main reason for our fellow countrymen, Paul Christen, to co-intern the Anthropocene. And one of the implications of this idea to sink in, it will not let go. The history of man is twinned with the history of the planet, the realm of the necessity and that of the free will merge. A night without much sleep thinking about it made me wake up in the Anthropocene the next day. This idea is seriously being studied by the Strudman Geographic Committee of the Royal Geological Society. The focus of the debate is on when this Anthropocene is supposed to have started. You have the old school that's proclaiming that the migration of mankind over the globe hunting the large vertebrates and predators to extinction will be the start of the Anthropocene. The pragmatic school that's at the obtaining of the patent of the steam engine from James Watts and the start of the large-scale use of fossils might be the good point to start or perhaps and this school seems to get the upper hand in the discussion at the end of World War II when the atomic bomb testing left clear geological markers of radioactive isotopes at the start of what is called the great acceleration and rendered in a graph this great acceleration looks like this. You can see that all the indicators of population use of natural resources speed up in an exponential way and go almost through the roof. Question is where what are we looking at? Is this progress? Is this an at-way of summing up the environment of problems or can we blame the baby boomers for this or are we looking at the apocalypse as Bruno Latour suggested and we are in the middle of it. That's an interesting view. No black horsemen stuck in a zip-bane moment but our exploding wells has a sort of extended apocalypse. For now let's set on it that it is the start of the Anthropocene and if we agree on living in the Anthropocene there are basically four different philosophical positions or attitudes one can take to this condition. In this scheme based on the work of the Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton two extremes are mixed. On the vertical axis the way one could look at the position of mankind well at the top as a futile of mother species important in changing the course of the planetary systems and at the other extreme at the bottom a mighty almost omnipotent mankind. On the horizontal axis on the left the world as a sort of unchanging backdrop that our inexhaustible stores and kids where human projects land or and our utopias are projected on. On the right the living and mighty planet that is not that is not passable but it is able to cause unpredictable troubles if its systems are disrupted and this is the strange note I want to take you through these four positions. Let's begin at the top left corner where the idea is that man is unable to change creation on his own strength and that the planet and all there's on it stirs us being the crown of creation. I think that a large large proportion of the earth's inhabitants are actually still ignorant of for instance climate change and its possible implications. That number could decrease due to information and education but also to disasters. There's also a hard core of malicious ignorance the climate deniers who frame it as a big conspiracy of the elites it's a hoax. We must realize that these denialists will not disappear given correct information. Thanks to autocrats like former President Trump the Brazilian President Bolsonaro and President Modi of India a strong political movement has started of which climate change is just about the core and cognitive dissonance is being the heels in deeper even when confronted with an undeniable truth. It also shows how environmental problems ended up in a left-right contradiction in a possible fatal way. We must also realize that there is a denier in each of us. There's a voice that evokes our politicians must act now but at the same time the voice that whispers I hope they don't have to I would hate to give up my privileges. You could say that the hardcore deniers locked themselves up in an everlasting present and a longing for a non-existent past. This is similar to the situation in the brilliant film The Truman Show where Jim Carrey does not notice that he is the protagonist of a reality TV show in which everything is aimed at maintaining disillusion for him. That comes to an end only when he gradually seems that it is a constructive world he eventually discovers the edges escapes to a staircase and makes a final bow for his audience of millions. But what is behind that door in which reality does he end up? In which reality do people end up? Who concludes that denial is not sustainable? Most likely in the quadrant of modernism and eco-modernism where the promise is the best is always yet to come and where the great acceleration is considered as progress and where the idea of internal progress is kept alive it is the world in which economic growth can be combined with the reduction of the ecological footprint. Should this growth give problems? Well that can all be solved with rational means. Eco-modernism is a variant of this in which we simply use technical means to come up with rational solutions for the problems of the end of the scene as well or construct qualifying stories that the consequences will not be too bad. It is a radically optimistic shoot of the environmental movement that has its most focal force in the breakthrough institute. Mankind is ingenious. Science and technology will help us if things really go wrong. They will intend something to science our way out of the problems, won't they? Well in this solutionist way of looking, clearly defined problems in this buddhistic list are solved rationally one by one. Geochemical cycles influence, well there we have the circular economy. Settlement flows, well we just start and hard coastal events as a duplication of the ocean. Well adding iron, iron and chalk surely will help. Climate change, why don't we try geoengineering? Biodiversity eroded, why novel ecosystems do the same job and maybe in the near future we have de-extinction problems and can bring extinct species back. Shifting land use, well the new green revolution will feed the billions of people. Well this is perhaps a good moment to make some general remarks on modernism. In this enlightenment view on the world, nature and its resources are an unchanging constant. The factor, the moving direction is emancipation, as you can see from the key notions, modernism, promise of freedom, promise of freedom and breaking loose from the chains of nature. Both politicians and designers formulate their ideals in solutionist and utopian terms. The most striking example of the drive of this technological optimistic belief in promise is perhaps Norman Belgaris General Motors perfume at the 1939 World Fair in New York in which the Americans were prepared for the blessings of mass mobilities and the type of cities adapted to that. As you can see, people can hardly wait for this utopia to materialize. 13,000 visitors a day, but the bottom pit I have seen the future. In our time the future Rama might be the image of the mighty man that rises from the book Homo Deius by Duval Haveraile. Man becomes more machine and machine more human and thanks to big data in our smart cities we can predict and regulate our behavior. The great disconnection between biological and technological evolution has begun. For the real technical ancestors the leap to colonization of Mars is a small step after making the earth untenable. How this mentality translates into the climate problem is aptly expressed by Exxon CEO and former minister of foreign affairs of the Trump administration Rex Tillerson. It's only an engineering problem adding sulfur particles beaches of oil refining and iron into the ocean will solve the problems but the side effects can be unpredictable and disastrous if the earth is not changing back for human action as modernism supposes the sources as an apprentice effects could be disastrous. Modernism is hitting its boundaries and its golden age seem to be gradually coming to an end. The earth turns to be an active party the promised emancipation of shredding the change turned to turns into a constant concern the consensus that it succeeds as a same time to grow and to reduce the footprint turns bleaker every day freedom and detachment turns into their opposite whereby man becomes in a philosophical sense an embedded subject connected via web of other living and dead actions designers have to wonder whether they will remain the faithful accessory of modernism like they always were or be part of some counter force if we must abandon this familiar belief in progress it might be good to say that to my estimation about 90 percent of the environmental discourse takes place in the last part of this figure both positions are embedded within the existing economic paradigm of neoliberalism admittedly it is very difficult to propose a coherent alternative as the philosopher Slavoj Cizek observed it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism there is a growing rift between the left side and the right side of our technology as if someone would have cut the bottom in the bark of a growing tree before we look before we look at the right side of the scheme where one assumes that the earth is an active force we must realize that for a reductionist scientist as well as modernist this is a kind of superstition which is nicely illustrated by this little idea at superstition indeed and well there's also let's say a way where the right side sees the right side the left side there are in there a few naive reductionists playing with their atomic kids and I sometimes think that the barrier between the two halves of the figure is being fought by the difference between reductionist thinking and wholism the people still holding the idea on the left side that we are in a gradual process that can be reversed and at the right side people convince that we are that we forced a rupture in the earth systems with complex and irreversible effects well let's jump over the fence and see what's there starting in the sector where we combine the modest mankind with the belief of the living planet championed by love gloves gaya theory seeing the earth as a self-regulating super organization and behind the philosophical jargon of ontological pluralism there's the idea that all sorts of way of being may and must exist side by side the ways of western culture are equal to other cultures and the ways of being of indigenous people after decades of critical studies the social sciences about race gender space capitalism has finally arrived at human complacency in post-humanism man is supposed to take a step back and realize that he is only a small cog in the web of life if we consider the the earth and nature as an immobile black cloths a necklace to the continuous history show of human civilization more and more people are convinced that the stage itself has started to move and participates in this performance the once solid border between culture and nature is troubling on all fronts things are happening on this cutting edge that we don't have yet the right words for hybrids are being formed in this way of seeing everything we have mentioned so far is essentially the twinning of what we used to call natural and human processes so even the climate is a hybrid and perhaps a larger artifact than the endless urban landscape we built it is not strange to see initiatives emerge these days to give landscape or landscape elements their own legal status such as the recognition of the one new year in museum the minority has been negotiating for them for the last 140 years and it is no coincidence ontological humanism has played a part in this breakthrough closer to my home the establishment of the embassy of the north sea very steep on the long forehand where all the other embassies are in the aim of emancipating the north sea and all its diversity to become a political player to all the collectives of people and non-humans even the abiotic might have their own ontology or the enriching experience and design practice to allow yourself a vacation from being human like artist Thomas Twitz managed when he transformed into godman for a couple of weeks and more with him you immerse yourself in an ocean of air where your metabolism and that of an old gross force get in close contact in virtual reality seen in the Sanchi gallery well criticism of this approach is that man tries to make himself small as an eagle in the web of life but with that he puts his influence under the grain man has caused the catastrophic already has an immeasurable impact and mistake responsibility accordingly if we are a plague organization we better be a reflective one and this is the starting point of anthropocentrician 2.0 also known as eco fragmentation this is perhaps gloomier or more realistic movement that takes responsibility and distinguishing itself from eco modernism by the estimation that the worst might still be avoided versus the best is always yet to come the diagnosis of the situation is also quite different all hybrids enter the dance floor together with humanity there seems to be a perfect storm building up of unpredictable events that hopefully will teach us to to write the cycle what we know of such complex systems is that that they are fundamentally unpredictable no countless vital occasions of development and most of all they never return to their point of origin the arrow of time points relentlessly in only one direction and I'm still educated with concepts like the balance of nature and that we as a humanity overstep this balance and only had to take a few steps back to restore that balance now we know that there was never such a thing as the balance of nature and that we will never return to that calm and stable policy with some technical interventions no misunderstanding is new anthropocentrician is not anti technological technology is considered in a gluten way it can be a blessing for humanity but also it's downfall in this way of seeing the ethical discussion about science and technology is dominant not everything that is possible could and should be allowed to happen technology has to be domesticated and that might be a hard thing to do observing that technology seems to have taken an autonomous course and is gaining momentum what are the kind of perspectives for action that equal pragmatism has to offer how can man take responsibility my personal intuition is that these lay in the realm of recovery repair undoing defragmentation etc and I'm moving example for me is Brazilian photographer Sebastian Solgado who was an embedded photographer in all the disaster areas of the world in the first 30 years of his career he got a burnout and an artistic crisis and complained his soul was broken as an antidote he made a beautiful homage to life on the planet and nature in his book Genesis and also it's indigenous people the reason I wanted to forward with Solgado's as landscape activist is that together with his wife Leila he stepped out the observing and commentary role as a photographer into a direct acting role they decided to re-forced he wrote it and completely cleared Hacienda of his father you see that in the top left they did this with 400 endemic plants and three species of the Atlantic rainforests and were proving that the erosion of biodiversity don't have to be irreversible their initiative organized in Instituto Terra proved to be the idea for the white surrounding of the farm and after that for the whole region offering an action perspective and act their nurseries now have a capacity of one million seedlings per year when vendors make a beautiful film the sort of Earth of this retro engineering could also be an acting perspective for anthropocentric 2.0 a sort of planet repairman like removing the thousands of dams without any function to re-establish the possibility of fish migration or working with natural processes instead of hard simple engineering to satisfy human needs such as with the sand engine where Peter and I were at the cradle of as a new way of coastal protection well finally let's take an overview of the position taken in this first part collection between them you can suspect the various ideological outlines that will determine environmental and political debates in the coming decades because there is an enormous amount of political energy in the dynamics between the different positions but the four positions typology is also a handy navigating tool and you have the question you can plot the position of almost all the environmental philosophers here in Brunelat tour here using some other to follow who died by learning Clive Hamilton who is the father of this four-fold typology and and rent of outlaw shrubs and of course you can also navigate your local bookstore with the four quadrants politically it's going to be oh there's another one sorry and another one politically it's going to be a bumpy ride to and it's really a challenge for our politicians trying to find the right course in a situation where you yourself and your constituents are offenders and victim at the same time what you see now is that politicians hide behind the mind that there is no public support and that they act like a sort of intermediary for the public viewing what we hope that's they act like responsible delegates chosen by us to see that they protect the physical existence of our low-lying delta and prevent the situation where the protesters have to be exchanged for yellow life vest in a way to address the design community we represented these hallways of looking into a peeping box for the Vienna Biennale that opened last week as said earlier the design community is still largely in an in-between state between modernism acknowledgement of the end of the scene being the hermit of mulliability and thereby for so long the complexes to one or more of the many crises we are in what are we doing what are our perspectives are we solving are you let's say making a contribution to solving the world's problem like ellen bircher seems systemic design can change the world well i think that we have to realize that sometimes we might be part of the problem rather than the solution can we form a counter force what agency can design or landscape architecture has i think we can't be too cocky about what design can do we are still recovering from the hangover of the period of spatial determinism where we thought that almost also a cycle problems could be solved with spatial limits already in the 70s of the 20th century Austrian architect Hermann Tschech came to the sobering conclusion architecture is not life itself architecture is the backdrop the background all the other scenes are not architecture architecture won't solve our political our social not even our environmental problem just as music won't solve our noise pollution problems but so not solving noise pollution problems didn't stop musicians from composing music our contribution to the world problems might be a little bit more indirect this might precisely be why there is still attention held between the will to engage with environmental problems and the pride designers take on keeping a critical distance that is needed in their eyes to have a cultural relevance there are ways of course to combine the two what can we contribute to and tangle this commendable i want to dissect our four our possible roles into four professional attitudes that of our day-to-day practice as a landscape architect that of landscape activists certainly our role as landscape researchers and research by design and finally that of land artists artists in the second half of our two part lectures peter will give some hms projects that are well showing that working for a paving climate a client doesn't have to stand in the way of making a meaningful contribution and that of a landscape artist so these two niches will be handled in the second half of the of the lecture thanks so far we have a quarter of an hour uh intervention so i'd like to suggest that everyone bring that cup of coffee back over to your screen and we'll get started on the next portion which is thank you for for those sort of very contextualizing words and now we will hear more from peter on some projects take it away peter yes thank you kate um well they introduced the different approaches or different roles you can take as a landscape architect and in order to make a smooth transition from his story we thought it was good to start with this this project in which we tried to operate as as an artist or that's the result the outcome of this this project it's a nice reduction park redesigned it's a park area in the neighborhood of schipel airport our main airport close to amsterdam and it's a well a special thing um the airport is positioned in the harem amir which is a big polar area close to amsterdam uh originally deep open agricultural land that would love space for developments like an airport but also an area in which houses were built in the past and still are being built and also the airport is developing um after the polar track the polar runway was created there was a lot of complaints there were a lot of complaints from people living in the neighborhood after the area complaints because the the noise they experienced and schipel was forced to measure the noise much better than they did before and they were also um yeah had the assignment to reduce the noise to those houses with 10 days bill and it was especially uh low frequency noise caused by um uh yeah actually airplanes rolling on the tracks to their uh runways or from the runways to the terminals um um and by measuring this uh by accident they discovered that after the crops were removed from the fields and the the lands were ploughed that uh the noise was uh much lower than before and that made those researchers think how could this work what what happens and apparently the reflection of the noise by those riches really did something in their measuring so um well they discovered some interesting uh systems so this is more or less how it how it works and then the idea came up can we construct um uh some structures in this area between residential areas and the uh airway and can we design something that reflect those waves in order to reach the goal of lowering of 10 days bill um and that's was the point where we as an office were involved um and the idea was uh uh uh yeah to to to make some some riches that were higher of course than the ploughed land riches of uh uh around three meters with a sharp top and also a sharp ditch in the middle and this sharp shape should help to reflect the noise and uh well then they started to to do so they started to build those uh one of those riches um somewhere in the agricultural land um uh real size uh uh to test this is a rich after it's uh just constructed and here until until it's gone now it's gone so um they start to test with large uh uh speakers on on this car to make a lot of noise and on the other side they start to measure and it really appeared to work and it worked much better than they expected and that was really interesting of course um and then a plan was made to introduce all those riches in the aquaculture area but at the same time there was also a park area that was uh uh at the edge of the of the residential area that was already being designed the design was quite far already and then the it was this was the original park design meadows uh trees uh tree lines uh a lot of open space and uh you know we certainly uh got the idea to change to ask if we could change this park design and to introduce those riches in this park to make something special working uh noise buffering or noise reflecting landscape we were together an artist also and together we uh found out that it was a good idea to uh following the principles from the noise come up with some kind of a uh a stamp a pattern with uh uh this size and these degrees of angles and to use the sharp angles uh to make also an expressive landscape and this is the final park design it's not completely north orientated but you can see that at the north that's the left side of the of the drawing that the pattern is more dense there's an open area in between and it becomes less dense at the southern side and there are only some some free pyramids in the open field and this um pattern is rolled out over this area and it also works as some kind of a large maze a maze where you can walk around and there's also a model in the area of this main structure um this is it seen from above so um yeah a very open uh a large area where the riches are orientated to to reflect the sounds where paths cut the the riches and uh by opening and dancing the pattern you experience the area in a very interesting way and here's a short movie of the the project noise reduction park schipol after the new runway was built at schipol airport the ground noise near the adjacent residential area increased to such an extent that measures were required it appeared that the ground noise largely disappeared when farmland was plowed by dispersing noise the noise is reduced and this mechanism forms the technical basis for the design of a ridged landscape the park was developed as a single land art project and is at the same time europe's largest maze well here are some some images of the the area flower fields around maintenance is important of course because it needs to be uh empty and smooth also those riches in order to keep its function and look through those riches and one in the opposite direction the central path that cuts through it and you're looking over it and you also see one element added by an artist the artists who work together with some kind of a shell and or an ear position there to listen to listen to listen how it works i'm switching now to a completely other issue more connecting to the studio you're you're doing also it's about our work at the dutch river area as part of the room for the river program and also some things we did before on dike reinforcement the office has been involved in rivers actually since since founding of the office ended but i got back to to that we worked on it for for many years first something about the dutch river region how it's how it works the system the Netherlands over here is part of the Rhine basin that stretches over part of Germany or France but also Switzerland the Alps where an old rainwater and melting snow is collected and all needs to pass our country on its way to the sea and the Netherlands of course as you know probably is a low country which mainly is as a genesis in the last let's say 10 000 years not completely but the eastern part is more sandy but after the the ice ages ended and the seas started to raise the land raised also by the deposits of a clay from the rivers and from the sea and around around 2000 years ago the present coastline started to come up the dunes closed and after dunes a lot of peat could grow that's the the brown corner so most part of the country is that consisting of peat and and clayland and in this area we through the centuries have been occupying this this area and of course by occupying in this wet land it was important to make it make it dry and first this happened by digging ditches in it later pumps were installed the peat was dug out also and in the end the Netherlands is one big puzzle with all small pieces on different poles on different levels but mainly below the sea level and this model that's in the corridor of our office this illustrates how this this works in the rivers are not lying in a valley in the Netherlands but the rivers are actually surrounded by big dykes and behind those dykes there's low lying ponderland and this really illustrates why it's so so risky and why we need to take a lot of care of our dykes of course a flooding is not a valley filling up but is suddenly by a breach for example a flooding of a whole area including our main cities something of the origin of the river area this is the map from let's say a hundred years ago around that you could see in the white color you can see the fluvial ridges which are natural and you can also see that all those fluvial ridges the occupation started people start to live there and later for medieval times people start to build dykes along the rivers and there's even also a dyke perpendicular to the river to protect this area before the dykes were made rivers could follow their own course and I often choose new directions and all those different paths are lying on top of each other and by manipulating this river system it got changed like this more or less the river dykes were closed at the end of the medieval times later they started to build dykes they started to lead all those little streams and combine them to one stream also to make shipping possible and that again happened somewhere in the 19th century on a much bigger scale and shipping were also imported that it dominated the whole river system the layout of the river there's a typical cross section of the river normally in case of low discharge the river is here the water is only here and it's some of it then there are grounds they are built to keep the speed of the of the water so high that there's no or not as less as possible sedimentation in this shipping girly then there's a flood plain and there's also wind so-called winter dyke that's the type that protects everyone that's living behind and there are a lot of little dykes in the flood plains and those dykes are built and maintained by the farmers to keep their land land dry well during the last century a lot of space for river natural space for river was also minimized mainly by growing cities like you see here at the city of Arnhem for example you see a very wide winter bed a very wide flood plain but this winter bed was minimized by realigning the dyke around it and here the result is a so-called urban bottleneck and of course this makes it hard for the water to pass in case of heavy of big discharges and of course the result is higher water levels mainly upstream climate is changing the river area was until 15 years ago safe to deal with an amount of 15 000 cubic meters per second to pass in a safe way to the sea without overtopping of our dykes but 16 000 cubic meters was expected because of climate change and on the long term it can even be 18 000 and this amount of water happens well not so often with a return period of around one to twelve hundred and fifty so that's also the safety for this this area safety level um let's skip this one and of course the natural reaction to higher water levels has always been the raising and enforcement of of dykes and in the safety especially this went very rough in a rough way well villages were taking down removed and a lot of cultural and ecological ecological values disappeared from the river the area it was a lot of opposition by inhabitants by ecologists by people of the landscape so this process that was already going on of reinforcing the dykes that stopped somehow for around 10 15 sometimes 20 years not much was done on those dykes um and uh uh in the nineties 90 uh 95 this picture is from um the discharges were high the the water raised almost to the top of the of the dykes and it became very very clear that it was uh really dangerous not doing things on those those dykes a lot of people had to be evacuated from the river area um and with a lot of work and a lot of hoping the dykes kept it in in that place they were not over topped the water was uh lowering just in time you could say but it came became very clear that something needed to be be done yeah um but it was also clear that those old plants with removing all the qualities that that's what that was not the way to go um alternatives were developed uh our officers also involved uh in the thinking this is a dyke along the valve uh river um constructed in uh just before 2019 98 um in the section below you see the old dyke that's a bit lower but also very steep and was not strong enough to the uh modern standards so it needed to be higher and it also needed to be wider um but a standard dyke with gentle slopes would look like a very um yeah thick thing in the landscape so one of the ids developed by our office was to um make it gentle at the top and a bit steeper uh at the top and gentle at the bottom so that you get a hollow shaped um dyke section and this still gives you the feeling that you're a little bit above the landscape and and that's a way to react actually on the the old situation and also to make uh to build new new qualities and a part of the reinforcement measures were not um um constructed in the dyke itself but in the on the outside a lot of clay was put here and it could also that could be uh go together with nature uh development at the dyke uh so um yeah this was a positive way of of of solving this problem some old qualities um vanished but you can also bring new qualities back and at the end everyone likes these uh yeah transformed uh landscape dyke landscapes um this is a newer example i've been working on it uh myself a few years ago um this was a dyke along the lake uh river you see it here in section and here in the in the map and uh this landscape in the central part of the Netherlands is really small small scaled houses are um lying close to the dyke uh you also plant things the land use is is hitting the dyke almost and um our idea was to not to to to build the dyke as a standard the mold of ground if you would do so you would get the section you see here below and it means that there would be a fence here at my mouse and that this whole area from there to there would be the domain of the water boards one big barrier actually as division of the landscape rather than a line in the landscape and um the idea to overcome this problem was to put extra a little bit of extra ground on top of it and give it a very gentle slope here that connects to the original height of the landscape over here and by doing so it was allowed to give um the right to to own and use this area to the people here and you could bring back the existing land use after um raising those dykes and you can see it here for example this is where the dyke starts the dotted line this part is used by as as an integrated part of this parcel and this is what you experience as as the dyke itself still again a way to to make the those new dykes strong dykes fit in the landscape and this is an example of how people react on that for example here was an orchard it needed to be removed that to realize this dyke reinforcement and a vineyard came back so that's the way people actually like and occupy the new landscape um but so far the dyke reinforcements somewhere at the end of the 80s beginning of the 90s something special happened in the river area and that was uh uh yeah also part of the result of this plan it's called a plant oivar it's a plan uh part of a of a competition and dyke was uh uh part of the team who made this this plan and it was a way to deal with a loss permanent loss of nature in the agricultural area and the idea the concept was to actually assign the whole flood plains along the rivers as a part of ecological backbone system it's called the approach called kasko kasko banan and kasko plan and by proposing this the idea came up also to think about the special kind of nature in those those areas not nature that's maintained a lot but nature that has the power to develop itself making use of of good conditions so it was more about creating conditions than about creating or planting the nature itself so a completely new alliance between the rivers and the nature and nature development that was already already there already starting so the transformation of those typical section i showed before was also imaginable it was imaginable that a big part of the river area transformed into nature instead of being agricultural and in these conditions problems with dyke reinforcements the urgency of dyke reinforcement on one hand and the positive approach about nature those two things these conditions led in the end to a completely different approach about dealing with water and high water in the river area and it's parallel to the room for river project with a lot of projects on a low local scale that were constructed the idea is that instead of higher dykes to deal with high water that you could do something to actually keep the water as low as as possible and that's possible by widening of the river instead of narrowing that you also see i've seen before let's make more space make more room for the river that's the idea so that's one one special thing the other special thing about this program is that that's not only about water safety or engineering but it's also was about spatial quality the idea was that by constructing all those room for river matches that's also the environment should improve in a recreational way ecological way urban way all kind of ways these are different some not all of them different measures that are part of the room for river project for example the relocation of dykes remove the old dyke build a new dyke a little bit more on the land side the existing floodplains could be lowered obstacles could be removed some high water channels are constructed means extra river courses to provide extra discharge capacity and in order to select those measures the locations for those measures were also yeah put on a list actually and where were many of them but all those measures work together if you do something on the one side you also need to take care of what's happening some kilometers upstream or downstream and also yeah we needed to look at how those measures could contribute to to the spatial quality and as one way to come to an answer we were involved in a team that made the long-term perspectives or long-term vision for a river area and we tried to combine those measures in a very logic way and one idea was to integrate all those measures as close to the urban areas as possible mainly because there's a problem but also because the new orientation of those cities to the surrounding could improve with those measures another measure was another proposal was to to spread it equally along the rivers it's difficult for every municipality you can say and everyone has a little bit of benefit maybe awesome and this one is a very natural model where a really big new rivers are constructing through the open land behind the fluvial reaches but this helped a bit to to select those those measures here are some of the room for the measures that were were selected and I'm also going to tell you about our project in Kampen, Rave-Deep Isle Delta and the other one is Neimech along the Waal that comes a bit later here's a map with the 34th room for river projects as spread through the Netherlands along the the Isle River which is the smallest one the Rijn and Lek that's the next one and the Waal that's the biggest river it was a big program completion for most projects was in 2015-2016 and what's special also is the way the national and local governments worked together it was a natural program, natural tasks or assignments per project the local governments worked out their own projects and combined the assignment with the local qualities, local needs, local ambitions and that's part of the success and the national quality which and Dirk was also a member of that guided all those projects so the national government also helped the local governments to make it as good as possible so now let's zoom into two of our projects on a local scale the first one is room for the river in Neimech along the Waal there's the map of the plan and this is the Waal River, the existing river that was already there it's very big you also see it on this aerial picture and you see also a lot of ships the main shipping channel between Rotterdam and Germany but I'll come back to that later this was the situation before during a situation of high water on the left side you see the old city of Neimech and on the right side of the picture you see yeah the pretty empty agricultural land with some villages in there like it was I think this was somewhere in 1995 since it should be 20 years 25 years ago I can also see the railway bridge that connects north and south and the bridge for cars over here the city was actually completely orientated on the on the south side of the river right here you see the principle of of Raimte van de Waal this line that I show my mouse that's the original dike this dike is partly removed and it's brought back here in this red line and that means that all this area is a part of the flood plain and now and there's also a large big guling over here constructed that takes out the water here part of the water and a large discharge capacity or at smallest point and it reconnects to the well over here and as part of the plan some new bridges are constructed and that's also important because Neimech decided already before the river came up to develop a lot of house on the northern side of the of the river this was their old plan their old sketch and it's well remarkable that you can see that the city is completely filled in on the north side and this was the existing dike and yeah intermediate zone with recreation and special kind of buildings was planned between the existing dike and the new city so the whole recreational program was actually behind the river and completely not orientated on the on the flood plain and the flood plain on this sketch is only caught up with it well a light green color not important for the for the city at all in the room for the river process different alternatives were a part of the of the survey this one is chosen at the dike realignment over here and while this process was going on the city of Neimech started to rethink about their orientation to the river and the plan like it was you see over here started to turn and also started to to turn a lot and the flood plains in the end were considered more as part of the city and also as a connecting part between north and south instead of a barrier and as part of the room for the river project not only had but they already started with the whole new infrastructure in Neimech was also yeah realigned there's new urban city ring some bridges were constructed and the flood plains were part of the of of the park area well this is the concept also that the flood plains bring the nature and the landscape in the heart of the city and are also used to connect north and south it's completely different park than the park areas they already have it's more much more natural less programmed also open wide and it also has the water dynamics of course this is the map we wait for this plan the design and the map the message map has different layers and a layer of what we planned to build for construction drawings but also a photoshop that showed how we think the landscape could develop because it the flood plain has many yeah actually soft banks and the the shapes of the of the banks can also change by the stream the currents the western part of the area is very open there's an event area also here's a new bridge of the city ring and there's also a new path structure with a bridge that connects the existing dike to this pen insulin this is the central part with a hard k on the north side that could be part of the urban development it's still being planned but it will be constructed in the end and the urban development can also take place on this this raised island in the middle of the flood plains and these are houses that were already there and these are new houses that are built back because also some houses need to be needed to be removed moved over here and you can also see the inlet and this is the natural area at the inlet side like i said a park area with different kinds of possibility for for use but not really programmed as are almost no buildings in the area itself and the people start to discover it and are also taught to are are using it very well at the moment like you can see here this is during quite calm situations but even if it's high water and there are big currents then this is an event to to take your canoe and to start to float in the in the streams here special special thing many bridges are constructed designed by different architects and this one is a very special one it's a bridge that can flood and that's also a special event that's the bridge to the event area in normal circumstances you follow this path and if the water is raising there's a moment that you can only reach the peninsula by making use of those stepping stones and it's really an event that people are queuing for it to to experience this some construction images from the air this one and this as an end result and also in case of quite high water levels you can see that the inlet is almost covered by by water over here and the area seen from the south the side of the old city and you can also start to see that the expansion of the residential new residential areas is going quite hard at the moment and here from the west overlooking the whole area the both sides of the city actual data a bit quicker this one this is the city of Kampen in real delta area with different river branches originally they are all closed except from the main river course this is the former Zuidersee in which big polar areas are constructed and the city of Kampen let's see let's skip this one here it is yeah and as part of the roof of the river plans a completely new river bypass river course is constructed over here at the south of the city um here you can see the concept again an inlet over here which actually nothing more than a little dyke that can flood new dykes that are constructed almost 15 kilometers of new dykes a new division of the lakes that were already here the opening of this sludge the sludge that was already dead is going to be removed and the water can not only pass like this but also like this at the moment so that there's much more space for the river and high water levels over here in city of Kampen but also much further upstream are prevented well Kampen is in the medieval city also you can see here the urban bottleneck that's there at the place where the river connects to the to the former sea the south from the city was a very open agricultural land but a lot of uh yeah uh remains of old dyke bridges had the interaction between the sea and the river was here a very big thing always you can see an old picture from the 18th century with the different river branches most of them are closed and there's the picture of the plan where a new river branched is constructed again uh some pictures of how the area grew through ages so it is the interaction of the river the delta deposits and the um different polis that were made there like this and here on the south side of the existing city there were stalls some remains of uh old the old interaction there were some some some uh yeah uh little lakes as a result of an old dyke bridge the old dike ring from south was going like this the old dike from north was going like this and we positioned the new bypass just in between those two old dike rings um the idea was also to uh decide it as a real river branch with a sluice that also connects the isle water uh to uh to the bypass river branch uh so it's also interesting for recreation shipping and whole new quiet routes exist and it's also a natural area in which the water can can flow and it can also move caused by the winds that are mainly from the west blowing up here and suddenly the water can can raise and can lower and that's interesting for the nature development over here the map again you can see here that this part is a bit drier because the fluvial rich and it becomes really wet also former peatland and the existing uh bridges and and lakes that were integrated and the river the branch we designed widens and flows like a white river into the existing water of this this lake so pictures from here there's the old dike that's still there and it still needs to be removed the inlet construction the sluice the new dike on the north side and new dike on the south side the sluice again also designed with a minimum of fences and everything like like like really like a thing architecture and landscape the central part that's really wet the highway that's left over this area the same happened with the railway and here look from the east to the west where the railroad bench becomes wider and wider and ends up in a big marshland with a lot of reed some of the bridges the main roads the local road but very thin uh uh peras uh standing in the water one big line of 400 meters and uh yeah the area is really really wet and uh depending of of the wind uh it's almost completely wet from between the dikes or you see a little bit of land and here the city at the background the city is also making plans to expand and the new dikes will become a natural border uh in the end the dike design the dike um has uh uh cycle paths almost along its all length on the north side they're positioned high so that you can overlook the area and the southern side is more quiet with a path as a track much lower so that you feel part of the nature a few from the dike top of the dike of this track through the inlet construction and here you see the sluice I already showed okay I have one more project that's well maybe a quick quick look not completely um it's also about working together with engineers of course uh there are a lot of standards for constructing dikes uh for dikes a special clay is needed and this clay is then transported from somewhere in the country to a project that's not very sustainable because of transport of course and uh it also lets always stop the same types of of dikes this is special area it's along the moose uh river um where dikes needed to be constructed but um it was uh originally a very shape with terraces so an area without uh dikes I'm going to skip this a bit but this is maybe the most interesting we developed some new types of of of dikes together with the engineers that were completely different than the standard dike building in the Netherlands uh in orange you see dikes with constructed with a steep a steep edge the dotted lines are dikes that are completely covered in higher ground so extra ground is used here uh a red hard case and in some parts was needed to construct a classical dike that are the green lights and here you can see what what happened this was the idea before we were involved in the plan construct uh standard dikes with slopes top slope again on this side and uh our proposal was to cover up the whole area between a natural terrace edge and a new dike and extended a bit and designed as steep as possible and not a proposal was to build a high ground dike so with very gentle slopes also higher than possible with the length used that rolls over it without any barrier in between this idea was very beneficial for the whole ground and soil balance in this project but first was not allowed because it didn't meet the the the standards of the of the commissioner and water board so our team needed to prove that those dikes were strong enough if we could make them build them up in this section and also make use of ground of soil that was found locally because it was different than than the standard so it was really tested in a gulf gutter where a little bit of dike was was built up and it got hit during a certain a period of time by by water to see if there was no damage going on now in the end this appeared to be a successful concept and this is the way it's it's being built um for the water board it was a strange thing a bit then they needed to get used to it because those dikes can also erode a bit and this area is filled up it almost doesn't look like a dike this is the flood plain and this dike can be erode and of course the erosion and the steep edges are very beneficial for all kind of ecology um and here you see it from from the top again and we also really site the ecological structures the streams and connect to the moose area and image from the from the field um the whole movement of the of the water the water fluctuation in in time as part of the experience of course in the area part of the design so parts of the of the areas are are not accessible during uh high waters so uh yeah so far this this overview of three projects uh Room for River and also some things about dike reinforcement the other the other approach um I promise with Dirk that he would switch back again somehow I must stop my screen yeah but uh David David and Kate uh maybe uh we could switch to the q and a directly because otherwise uh I would sort of use up all the time to half past seven for us and half past one for you uh so maybe we chase to the q and a I think that's a great idea and uh well if everyone can go on their zoom squares and David will help moderate a few questions it's just stunning stunning work like even this last image that you closed on very quickly was quite beautiful and the time lapse of change within this landscape so let's have some questions David I'll turn it to you okay thank you Kate um thanks Derek and Peter um for a double header if you will theory in practice which is uh gives us all you know something to think about depending on our our tendencies of thinking and doing um I um I'm I'm just going to start in with uh some questions that uh some students have have um posed uh I thought I'm I would I hope that the students at some point perhaps during their discussions today could look at the quadrant model um which I think is absolutely worth its own um incredible set of questions um and maybe there's some kind of quadrant overlay we could we could create to uh you know destabilize the stable destabilization but anyway um one question uh has to do with um um relationship between um uh dyke building and uh revising the concept of dykes to essentially broaden the scope of mediated landscape and what is the relation of that uh to architecture um some students are wondering um if uh landscape um will meet architecture in some other way um and if that's come if that's been part of your study or perhaps some of your consultants or partners have also added to uh what I'm calling this kind of extension or mediation of of uh landscape so it's essentially the architects of the msaud are wondering um uh what else how can we extend your thoughts about this new form of landscape into some kind of architectural practice yep um yeah what can I say about that um in in fact what we are doing is also a kind of architecture of course uh but it's um like the river project is more um a framework design almost it's uh it's designing the framework in which the development of the area can take place so uh we are also not uh designing and result somehow but we're designing conditions for the future development and I think also for the future architecture um and uh of course uh if we take River River as an example I think this works out quite well for example in Nijmegen you can um divide the whole layout of the plan in different areas with different types of um different qualities um and um yeah the the urban expansion can can react on that if you build on the one place it's going to look completely different than in another place I think but um what you could do as an architect to uh to yeah I think always always zoom out to the bigger scale that's one thing of course try to discover the system that your um that your that you have impact on that and and what so that's that's something and in that one it's it's it's on the level of the building it's quite quite clear it's a building in the flood plains for example is simply not allowed usually so very innovative solutions like I have seen in New Orleans building on stills or whatever interesting but uh we don't do it very often we build behind the dykes and we make those dykes as strong as possible is that a bit a related question is what is the relationship between a government-owned land and private-owned land or cooperatives or whatever yeah um it depends a bit on where you are uh some of the land um that was included in the River existing flood plains some of it was already owned by nature organizations but most of the land that's added to the river river expansion was privately owned um so it took yeah many years actually to get all those people involved and also yeah also those people uh to to sell their land in the end it's possible because it's for public need to force someone to to to sell the land for projects like this but the projects I'm involved in it's in the end it was not necessary some farmers there were helped to to start over again in a different place for example that happens in the company area if I may if I may add something David I've been involved in the first face of a room for the river as a state advisor on on landscape and uh chair of the quality team and what we saw was that uh the basic uh let's say paradigm shift of not automatically raising the dikes but give more room uh to the river which to my mind is a very wise choice because uh well this climate change is not ending at 2050 it's also not ending in the year 2100 it's not going to end in the year 2200 so it's not going to be that in 100 years there will be loud speakers shouting to all the dutch people okay dutchies this was a drill well done I lower the temperature again that will not happen but uh let's say uh giving more room to the river was also shifting from let's say the easy solution that on the length of the water board you are strengthening the dike but all the solutions that peter showed uh makes it evident that you have to deal with other forms of land use and that was the main driver to make it into an integral approach and not only a water safety approach because we were forced to deal with farmers with municipalities with leisure projects etc etc so uh in a way the uh let's say the dividing line between what was privately owned and what was publicly owned uh was made uh well it it was less clear uh than uh in the in the traditional way of of planning our water safety projects I think that um another question that uh several students are hinting at um is that uh if I can put it in slightly different terms is that when some of these places are densified or urbanized what is the next phase so in room for the river there seems to have been a prediction of certain densification and growth and so is there uh is there one a time frame you're hinting there kind of isn't one but the second is also um what is the effect down river or up river or whatever the right term might be further out in the boulder or something like that I mean how how does this even though you're already dealing with large scale how do you deal with the even larger scales because yeah in many ways you're you're begging that question yeah well it's all uh let's say cut up in uh project areas and each project area that is on target in lowering the mean high water uh level and that's all calculated for the whole Dutch river area but there are also of course upstreams effects in the German and even the Swiss part so all these countries work together but in a way looking at the topographic map of the Netherlands the people from Rijkswaterstaat in the ministry concluded that uh we still are in the situation where we can give more room to the river because the river runs through agricultural lands and in a way uh you don't know what uh let's say the situation in 100 years or 150 years from now is that all the fertile deltas in the world might be the last safe haven for millions of climate migrants for instance so it is not impossible that our whole delta will be urbanized 150 years from now and now we are in still have the opportunity to give it more room while if we wait for a scenario like that to emerge we won't have the possibility anymore to give more room to the river I agree and maybe also sorry in addition to that also that um well there are still a lot of measures on the shelf somewhere because only a part of the possibility was selected but I think that every next measure is more difficult than the one before here because I think yeah that's because of the of the densification of course but there's also some thing some other things going on there because the river was an answer to dyke uh uh reasoning the surviving the dyke but it's not a river for uh uh the dykes being weak the dykes need to be stronger and uh because of new calculations uh engineers know know know a lot more about how our stronger dyke is and they're still or again a big dyke reinforcement program uh going on and mainly responding to yeah to to to that that that mechanism dykes need to be stronger also so um well the main direction of thinking is now focused on the dykes instead of making more space again it was a pretty short time frame we were working on I think one um Dirk you mentioned climate migrants and to me that brings up a kind of global issue which is that in places like you've already learned in New York City where communities in place are not going to take some of the required changes so called required changes without drastic change and so the big U is undergoing considerable attention over over the recent plan to like just destroy a park and put another one on top of it but more broadly um and we hope to have you back to look at the Mississippi work uh the studio is doing because there's there's uh incredible already uh you know kind of difficult situations for many populations for many groups along the river and so I would say you've developed a certain set of schemes and certain working methods uh and but in some ways um we're dealing with very built up very very underserved areas and a system that is like two generations be more more unsophisticated than the ones you've been developing so in some ways the the social problem the political problem um kind of becomes more difficult and so I'm not sure if this is a question so much as an invitation that we we need you to weigh in on uh on kind of the various community solutions that might emerge from uh from the work the students are currently doing. Yeah and Peter what is your experience with the community approach of uh uh rebuilt by design because uh we were also involved there like Kate knows. Yeah actually two different thoughts I think um the community and the involvement of the community is is is much stronger I think than in the in the in the Netherlands that we used to have maybe it's improving a bit now I can remember one uh exhibition we made uh for when the first plans for the river by bus in Kampen uh were becoming clear and um we needed to be there I see the commissioner with I think uh 15 um consultants uh to to meet all those people who wanted to talk about it now the whole evening three people no one um so no one was interested in that time and of course it improved when uh when the plan plans became clear and construction started but um and that's already I think very very strong in the in my experience in in in the US um but my personal experience uh and I can um yeah uh when we started at the rebuilt by design competition for example then uh we came up with a plan uh to um yeah redirect sediments uh in in the whole uh marshlands uh cut off uh uh um yeah a center was was was closed and uh uh built a large uh dams that could uh block the waves and uh riches and everything very very big so there was a system approach and I think it ended up with a concrete project we were asked to to work out with and it ended up with some little rears somewhere in a pond and uh some ditches around some houses so from very big it it got very small and it happened in in a few months so and that's because there's no commissioner to to make those plans and there's also no commissioner to to to build and no commission to maintain and that's that's completely different of course so um yeah and and and what we what we noticed we we sort of uh have the illusion that the United States of America is uh almost the same as Europe and in working in uh rebuilt by design we discovered that they're complete but really complete differences that when when uh we were proposing things like dykes there would be people in the community standing up and shouting but that's communism so there's a completely different let's say uh way of looking at planning and doing something collectively etc that is a really a remarkable difference between the between the two countries on that note as Zizek said we can't imagine the end of capitalism um i'll have to say thank you and thank the students for submitting some questions and it was really enjoyable to see uh your work and to hear your uh your theorization of the work which i'm a big fan that that we need to really have that kind of dual approach to these questions you make a great team so we thank you so much um i hope the students as you shift over to your discussion sections can um you know have a good time there's lots of details to talk about as well as positions and political aspects so um kate unless you want to say anything then let's just say goodbye just just thank you again stunning and so glad to have you as as part of this learning experience and hopefully all the students wherever they are in the world will have a chance to meet and discuss the work that you've shown today so thanks again and we'll be in touch about participating on a review and very soon thank you okay goodbye everybody have a great day goodbye David thank you kate


Welcome traders to another tip mail chart here with me Patrick Manly. I want to draw your attention to some developing opportunities in the QE dollar on the four hour time frame here you can see we're in this ascending trading channel. We're stored out potentially here at a double top at this 7115 area and so this can provide potentially for some two-way trading here. Short exposure should be rewarded through the 779 area looking for a pullback into the 7024 watching this area closely for bullish reversal patterns to then set long positions targeting the fifth wave up through the 72 area from there I'd expect to see a more significant correction as we complete this five-way cycle. As always traders plan the trade, trade the plan and most importantly manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.


We like lots of blue skies because blue skies means lots of sunlight but we also are going to need blue skies to think and produce new science because the future of solar is not settled. We haven't plateaued, there are fantastic opportunities and I want to talk about that this afternoon. As a backdrop conventional solar which means silicon solar cells has been doing very well. If you look at the rate of increase of installation of solar around the globe it's fantastic, it's growing exponentially. It's still only 1% or thereabouts of electricity but if it carries on exponentially it will be doing pretty well and it's growing at that rate because it is actually economical today in some parts of the world. And the real reason why we have to make solar work is because it's the only really abundant source of energy. That red blob is the land mass of the USA that would produce all the USA's energy. Just means saying goodbye to Kansas and you can have your views whether that's a good thing to do or not. Now silicon, I've said it's wonderful. By another measure it isn't. It takes a year or two for a silicon solar panel to generate the energy that was required to make it and put it in place. The year or two isn't bad. It's rather better than the payback time on nuclear generators. But if you compare that with green plants, here it's corn, a corn plant probably has to get its payback time measured in a couple of days every time it puts a green leaf out to get the energy to produce the next green leaf. Days, not years. That is a glimpse of what we should be able to do in the future. I want to go back to something near term and ask, can we make solar cells more efficient? Now here's an analogy. Photons are a bit like trees. They come in different heights or energies. And the homework for a standard solar cell is I want to chop the trees or photons to be the same height. And I want to optimise the total length of tree trunk and I have a trade-off. I can chuck away some trees that are too short and I chuck away a lot of the trees that are nice and tall. Yellow equals what we use in a typical solar cell today if it's silicon. Hugely wasteful, we throw two-thirds of the energy away. Let me make trees multi-coloured and then our photons. Photons, height is now energy in the photon. So we have ultraviolet, then we run through the colours of the rainbow and then down into infrared. And if we have a silicon solar cell, the infrared are rather colourless leaves there, sort of autumn or fall leaves. Silicon solar cells are more relaxed as you can see on the screen. Two-thirds of the energy or more is chucked away either because we don't absorb the photon or because the photons have more energy that is used in the solar cell and that's the waste heat. So lots of approaches may get a more effective use of the potential energy that we have in photons when they land on the cell. We're interested in splitting photons into two when they have enough energy that we can get two, which we could then feed through to a silicon solar cell underneath. So if we do that we can get almost half as much efficiency out of the solar panel if all that works. So what we want to do is to produce a coating that can sit on top of a standard silicon solar cell that will absorb the visible high energy photons, split them into two infrared photons and push them down into the silicon below. Some fundamental science that you will not find in a textbook on solar technology turns out to make that possible. There are some rather particular molecules which, when they absorb light, will create the initial quantum excitation splits into two in a 10 million millinth of a second. It's very efficient because it goes so fast and those two are down in the infrared and we're trying to work out how to coax those to become light emitting. That will make a difference near term. Long term, how do we really approach the materials efficiency that you have in green plants? Well we're not going to do it by slicing up crystals or bulls of silicon. We're going to have to go to material technologies that just use less material and actually printing, roll-to-roll printing, looks pretty good. If you look around at what's going on at research and demonstration level, there's some fantastic advances in getting relatively efficient still conventional solar cells most recently with late-night perovskites where when you've finished, you've just used much less stuff and that will in a few generations or a generation maybe make a big difference. I'll leave you with a slide which shows a solar installation in Africa. A combination of today's silicon solar cells, lithium-ion batteries and LED lights produces lighting and produces electricity for phone charging that is half the cost of the incumbent technology which is essentially burning kerosene for kerosene lamps. The developing world is going to embrace solar even if the developed world doesn't. It may well be that it's there that big changes happen, first of all.


Alright guys, what is going on? Welcome back to episode number two. We are at day... Today's workout is going to be a back workout. We're going to hit some deadlifts. Now deadlifts is something I haven't actually hit in a long time, but I have done quite a bit of them in the past. They are definitely an exercise that works the back, it works the traps, the lats, the rhomboids, that works absolutely everything.  I can do as many rows as I want, I can do as many lat pull downs as I want and I will never get the muscle soreness that I do off a good session of deadlifts. So today the first exercise is going to be deadlifts. I don't know how many reps I'm going to get, I haven't hit them in a long time, but I do enjoy them and I know it's going to be an epic workout. Now that I'm in a surplus, I'm going to want to hit these compound lifts, these big compound lifts, the squat, the deadlifts, the bench press, the overhead press, etc. So today's workout is back, like I said. I may throw in some rear delts and some biceps to make it a proper pull workout, but we'll see about that. Usually I'll spend at least 30-40 minutes doing deadlifts. After that everything is just icing on the cake. So with that being said guys, I'm going to go downstairs. It's about 7 in the morning. I finished my third night shift in a row, feeling a little bit wrecked, but that's nothing caffeine can't fix, so I'm going to go downstairs, make a pre-workout drink and I will see you guys at the gym. Peace. Do I have a camera too? You want to get famous? Yes. I don't even know what I'm going to say it, man. Actually, I probably shouldn't, not while you're on camera, because then your fans will turn them on. Yeah, I don't look small. Yeah, exactly. What am I going to say this morning? It's day three. Day three we're going to hit some back. I'm going to see a row. I should be a little bit bigger. Go away. Go away is 105. This now, so. Anyways. Deadlifts. That's what we're doing.  All right guys, what is up? We are back in the gym for a back workout. And it is the first time I have hit deadlifts and I would say probably at least three or four months. This entire deficit period that I did before starting this series, I didn't do deadlifts at all. I went between rack pulls and hyper extensions for my lower back. But as far as hardcore balls to the wall training like deadlifts, I didn't do it. So it's definitely, going back into a bulk, it's definitely a movement that I know I should be doing. There is no movement like it for back, like conventional deadlifts.  Conventional is sort of how I've always done it. But being a taller guy, I think sumo may be better for me. I'm not sure. I will be trying that in the future, but not today. So anyway, first warm-up set was with 60. Just an easy warm-up set. Second warm-up set with 100. I always go up in one plate. So I'll go up to three plates here for a third warm-up set. When I was cutting, when I had fuck-all carbs in me, three plates felt heavy as fuck. Today it felt okay.  And I want to bring you guys back to my form once again. Controlling the negative rep. You're not dropping the weight. You're not jerking the weight back up. You're controlling it up and down. Whether that be tap and go, whether it be stop-start like I'm doing now. You control the weight. From here, guys, I didn't know exactly whether this was going to be a good idea or not, but I did go up to 180 kilo, and I decided to try and go for a five-by-five workout.  And that first, like, I was nervous, man. My heart was going fast. I didn't know how it was going to go. But at the end of the day, I did get five reps. That rep was probably my cleanest, to be honest.  I think just getting used to handling this kind of weight again will, in turn, help me with my form, and I'll be able to keep my ass further down throughout the movement, because I don't know, my form, I feel like my form's quite good, to be honest, but five-by-five on 180 is a great starting point. And I think you'll find, actually, I do come back to the camera in about ten seconds and give you guys a little spell on how I'm feeling mid-workout. So we'll have a little listen to that, and then I'll be back to you in a minute. All right, guys. A bit of mid-set, not mid-set, between-set, gym talk. That last set of five reps, which got me up to four sets of five at 180, was the hardest, most grindiest set I have done in months. I'm telling you, there is absolutely no way I'm going to be able to get five reps again after that. That was an RPE of 12, not ten. So what I've done is I've dropped a plate, I've gone down to 140, so for my fifth ball-solid wall-working set, we're not going to go five-by-five, we're going to go four-by-five and one-by-ten. So if I can get ten good solid reps at this weight for my last set after everything I've already done, I'm going to be really happy, so let's see what happens. All right, guys, back into it, and as I said, I would be absolutely happy as Larry if I got ten good solid reps last set after all that work. So let's see how we go. Once again, controlling the negative, I'm going stop-start style. That's one, that's two, that's three. I'm struggling already. Let's see how we go. Five, six. Now I'm struggling so much by this point that I'm not even making them full reps.  I just cannot get that at the moment.  So anyways, we did get the ten reps done, and I can't believe it. And I'm coming back to the camera right now, I do believe. Now if I don't make some gains from that shit, there's something wrong.  But you can't stop there guys. But what I would say is that deadlifts on the odd occasion can be a great workout just by themselves. Although I tend to want to punish myself a little bit more. So with that being said guys, I only did a second exercise or a second set of exercises. Deadlifts was first, second was a superset between these neutral grip lat pull downs like you're seeing and a rope straight arm pull down. I'm not actually sure what this exercise is called actually. I think it's a rope straight arm pull down targeting the lats. Both of these movements targeted the lats. I was going for six to ten reps on each movement.  And yeah, after this, that was it guys. It was about a 60 minute workout all up. I don't usually spend too much longer than that in the gym. And we finished off with a nice lat spread. And yeah, I will see you guys in the car post workout for a chat. Not sure if this is the right angle, but guys, we are off to the gym.  Alright, let's do this. We are off to the gym. The second session of the day. It's six o'clock in the evening. Let me start my fourth night shift at eight o'clock tonight for 12 hours. So what that means is that I've smashed out 48 hours work in my job. Luckily I get paid by the hour. Well, I do get a salary, but I do get paid for overtime, which is fantastic because I know a lot of people that are on salaries that don't get paid for overtime. But what that means is that I've done 48 hours in four days and as well as obviously training, eating right. And I feel absolutely fantastic at the end of a block like that because I know I've just put in work and now I can afford to live like a bodybuilder for the next couple of days, you know? No work, just focus on training, eating. And that is why I love shift work. Alright, we should be good now. So I trained back after doing a 12 hour night shift. I did get a couple hours sleep, but not much. You know, my performance wasn't what I thought it was going to be. But I still did half of my all-time goal, which is 180kg for 10 reps. Stop, start, 5 sets. That would be absolutely fantastic and that is a major goal of mine to achieve in the next year would be to up my reps at 180kg from 5 to 10 solid good reps. So anyways, with that being said, I've got a pre-workout drink, one scoop of Utopia. It's about six in the evening. It's a beautiful day, beautiful evening. You know, not a cloud in the sky. It's like that 95% of the time around here, which is another reason why I actually love it around here. I mean, Alice Springs is remote, but I do have a special sort of connection to the place and I know a lot of people do. Even my age, you know? Like, usually that takes years and years to develop, but living in a place like Alice Springs really does open your eyes to a whole new world and a new way of living. It is a fantastic way of living. It's an easy life, man. Like, the gym is five minutes down the road. Everyone's five minutes away. You don't sit in traffic, there is no traffic.   I'm just being real, so. Anyways, guys, those are some thoughts of mine. We are off to the gym. I'm going to go and do some triceps because I have about an hour spare, so that will be an awesome workout. My arms are measuring about 16 inches, cold, flexed at the moment, so another major goal of mine by the end of this is to get them up to 17 inches. I haven't given them a chance to grow over the last two years. You know, they developed really well from about 14. No, probably about 14 and a half was my smallest.  Well, that was at the start of 2014 and from there, like I've said in the previous video, I haven't really made any gains, so that is the fundamental reason behind this series, is the fact that I've just yo-yo too much and I need something to keep me accountable for one whole year, and I think I'm going to make some good gains. So, arms day always feels good after arms day. I will see you guys when we're done. I'm not going to take any footage. It's far too busy in there at the moment, so I feel awkward enough with the tripod at the best of times, let alone at five o'clock at night. So, I'll see you guys soon.


SCP-522 appears to be a square swatch of red carpet, approximately 3.5 meters on each side. When a human being stands atop it, SCP-522 wraps itself around the victim with surprising speed. Once the victim has been completely unfolded, thousands of hair-like protrusions extend from the surface of the carpet and dig into the victim's skin, quickly draining them of blood over the next few minutes. After draining the victim's blood, SCP-522 unwraps and attempts to return to its original position. Further investigation into the structure of SCP-522 indicates that it is a normal red carpet that has been infested by a previously unknown form of fungus or slime mold.