29-year-old Iñaki Romero Larrea describes himself as an "urbanist before architect." As one of the five members of design and architecture collective Paisaje Transversal, he is particularly interested in figuring out how to revitalize Spain's cities without indulging in the time-consuming traditional bid process or incurring exorbitant construct...

On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect, planner and consultant who lives in Piedmont, California, some 10 miles east of San Francisco, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone. Remarkably, Downey m...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson As an architect, Michael Hansmeyer asks, "What is the origin of the forms we design?" And he asks: "What kind of forms would we design if we had no bias, if we had no preconception? What kind of forms would we design if we could free ourselves from our education?" "How," he says, "Would we go about creating...

On September 21, gunmen attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing at least 67 people, with many others still missing. We are extraordinarily saddened to hear that among the victims of this violence were TEDxKraków speaker Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz. Ross, an architect by trade, gave a beautiful talk at TEDxKraków 2012 abou...

On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect in Piedmont, California, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone. Yet as he tells Alison Prato, Downey never once thought of giving up his work in architecture....

Architect Ole Scheeren fights against the rigid hierarchy of the skyscraper. When Ole Scheeren (TED Talk: Why great architecture should tell a story) unveiled his design for a complex of residential towers in Singapore, his clients were stunned. “There was a moment of silence, and I could feel that there was a degree of disbelief in the room.” ...

Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan brought warmth and light to the TEDWomen stage in 2016, sharing their vision of queer love and possibility. As a Black trans activist, writer and media maker, Tiq Milan expands the cultural imaginary on what it is to live beyond the margins. It's an interesting time to be Tiq; he's working on a book, just compl...

If you look closely at the Lideta Mercato -- a shopping mall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, designed by TED Fellow Xavier Vilalta -- you will notice a unique pattern on its skin, inspired by the beautiful, bold patterns found on Ethiopian women’s dresses. But if you look closer, you will also notice something else: that the design is based on fra...

In today's talk, Teddy Cruz looks at San Diego-Tijuana border, where some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States are just a short drive from some of the poorest communities in Mexico. As used materials flow from San Diego to Tijuana, transforming the kinds of structures created there, people move from Tijuana to San Diego, retrofit...

Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a "body architect" – an artist who straddles the worlds of fashion, technology and the body. Trained as a classical ballerina and architect, her work invents and builds structures on the skin that reshape the human silhouette, creating provocative and often grotesquely beautiful imagery. Tell us about your h...

Today, TED is thrilled to announce the 25 new members of 2012's TED Fellows class and 12 new Senior Fellows. A Lebanese open-source hardware inventor, a French computational architect and the founder of Skillshare.com are among 25 members of 2012's class of new TED Fellows. Twelve new Senior Fellows from seven countries, selected for two mor...

We're thrilled to announce the 19 members of 2011's TED Fellows class. Founded in January 2009, the TED Fellows program handpicks world-changing innovators from around the globe, and brings them to the TED stage – literally and figuratively – to raise international awareness of their remarkable work. TED also announces today its 2011 Senior ...

Watch Theo Jemison’s video of artist Kiel Johnson’s installation “Everyone’s an Architect” at TEDActive 2012. See how the project grows throughout the week, with dozens of collaborators stopping by or spending long hours to help build Johnson’s charming cardboard city -- lit up with LEDs powered by human foot traffic and a hand-cranked gener...

Kibwe Tavares combines his training as an architect with his love of storytelling and animation to create futuristic 3D animated/live action films with social and political depth, creating incredibly detailed, vivid, and kinetic visual environments to entice audiences. His short film, Robots of Brixton, distributed on the internet, won a speci...

Artist Kiel Johnson, who led the amazing workshop “Everyone’s An Architect” last year at TEDActive, was featured today on both the Huffington Post and Sinbadesign for his intricate cardboard city creations, which TEDActive attendees helped build in Palm Springs last spring. Since then, Kiel’s been involved in a couple of TEDx events aroun...

Around the world, cities are growing at an exceptionally fast clip. As the oft-quoted statistic goes, by 2030, 6 out of every 10 people on the planet will live in a city. So how do we make sure our urban areas are filled with beauty, complexity and possibility rather than simply with overcrowding? TED is pleased to announce TEDCity2.0, a one-...

"Like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can be the same anywhere on earth," says architect Michael Green in his lyrical TED talk, "Why we should build wooden skyscrapers," in which he lays out his thesis for designing and engineering the world's tallest buildings from one of its oldest materials. "Mother Nature has fingerprints in our buildings,...

Two best friends inadvertently turn their hometown in Zanzibar into a tourist attraction, in this short film directed by TED Fellow Kibwe Tavares. How did they do it? By taking a chance photograph of a gigantic fish -- far bigger than a human being -- leaping out of the nearby water. The film, called Jonah, brings together stunning, surreal u...

"E pluribus unum” worked in Syria once too. The merciless six-year civil war in Syria has destroyed cities, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. The Syria of a decade ago is but a memory. The causes have been detailed exhaustively -- social, economic, religious, geopolitical. But one woman, an architect who ...

TED2013’s tagline is: “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” And this year’s class of TED Fellows will be representing all three. The TED Fellows program brings together young innovators from around the globe, all with insightful, bold ideas that have the potential to influence our world. In addition to attending TED2013, the Fellows will ...

Architect Michael Hansmeyer is not one for the T-square. As he explains in a fascinating talk from TEDGlobal, this “computational” designer took inspiration from nature -- specifically from morphogenesis, aka the splitting of cells -- and created algorithms that help him design highly unusual shapes. Instead of the same old boring Doric, Ion...

Before you can create a new world, you have to imagine new possibilities. The speakers in this session are the visionaries who propose that which couldn't be seen before, and suggest new paths that not only haven't been traveled yet -- but haven't been thought of. Here are the speakers in this session. Click their name to read a recap of thei...

Announcing the speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2011 -- happening July 11-15, 2011, in Edinburgh, and via webcast around the world. The 12 sessions of TEDGlobal expand on the overall conference theme, "The Stuff of Life," with session titles such as "Bodies," "Bad Guys," "Coded Patterns" ... TEDGlobal is hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED's Europ...

Nurur Rahman Khan was born and bred in Dhaka, Bangladesh; here's a taste of his home city, photographed by Mohammad Tauheed, a TED Senior Fellow, architect, designer and technology consultant. This wasn't your regular photoshoot. Tauheed was hampered in his task by the tense political situation. He told TED in an email, "We just faced around ...

The TED Fellows program is excited to announce the new group of TED2018 Fellows and Senior Fellows. Representing a wide range of disciplines and countries -- including, for the first time in the program, Syria, Thailand and Ukraine -- this year's TED Fellows are rising stars in their fields, each with a bold, original approach to address...

Air conditioning used to be a luxury -- but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant. This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings -- especially skyscrapers -- are built with floor-to-ceiling...

With TEDSummit 2019 just two months away, it's time to unveil the first group of speakers that will take to the stage in Edinburgh, Scotland, from July 21-25. Three years ago, more than 1,000 members of the TED global community convened in Banff, Canada, for the first-ever TEDSummit. We talked about the fracturing state of the world, the ...

You could, on first glance, see Dhaka as a fast and loose place, the kind of city that draws people in, churns them around and spits them out after a few tough years. Many in Dhaka face circumstances similar to those in other South Asian cities: poverty, limited education, exploitation. Dhaka itself sits at or near the bottom of rankings of ...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are ...

"I am in love with cities,” says British designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick (TED Talk: Building the seed cathedral). “It’s just incredible that we all live together, and together we add up to something incredibly rich.” Heatherwick has already come up with some pretty bold urban designs -- including a garden-topped bridge across the R...