Now to Retrospect, session two of the TED 2014. As the first scheduled speaker, Bran Ferren kicked off the session. From Ferren’s TED biography,

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After dropping out of MIT in 1970, Bran Ferren became a designer and engineer for theater, touring rock bands, and dozens of movies, including Altered States and Little Shop of Horrors, before joining Disney as a lead Imagineer, then becoming president of R&D for the Walt Disney Company.

In 2000, Ferren and partner Danny Hillis left Disney to found Applied Minds, a playful design and invention firm dedicated to distilling game-changing inventions from an eclectic stew of the brightest creative minds culled from every imaginable discipline.

Ferren used a standard storytelling technique as do many of the TED speakers. (Note: Techniques become standard because they work.) He started with personal stories of his childhood which apparently included exposure to art and engineering. His family of origin was heavily involved in the visual arts while other family members were engineers. His moment of truth was during childhood when he was taken to view the Pantheon and its occulus (from its Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

The Pantheon (/ˈpænθiən/ or US /ˈpænθiɒn/;[1] Latin: Pantheon,[nb 1] [pantʰewn] from Greek: Πάνθεον [ἱερόν], an adjective understood as “[temple consecrated] to all gods”) is a building in Rome, Italy, commissioned by Marcus Agrippa during the reign of Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD) as a temple to all the gods of ancient Rome, and rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian about 126 AD.[2]

The building is circular with a portico of large granite Corinthian columns (eight in the first rank and two groups of four behind) under a pediment. A rectangular vestibule links the porch to the rotunda, which is under a coffered concrete dome, with a central opening (oculus) to the sky. Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.[3] The height to the oculus and the diameter of the interior circle are the same, 43.3 metres (142 ft).[4]

It is one of the best-preserved of all Roman buildings. It has been in continuous use throughout its history, and since the 7th century, the Pantheon has been used as a Roman Catholic church dedicated to “St. Mary and the Martyrs” but informally known as “Santa Maria Rotonda.”[5] The square in front of the Pantheon is called Piazza della Rotonda.

I cannot adequately convey Ferren’s appreciation and moment of inspiration where all in a moment he understood how engineering and art could be one and he also understood something new about light; it can have ‘weight’. He then describes the engineering feat in more detail and notes that we are barely able to achieve a structure like the Pantheon with today’s battery of technological innovations and understanding. He talked about what the ‘miracles’ need to achieve similar feats today and then he segued into autonomous cars and that’s where he lost me. Call me a peasant and an ignoramus (perhaps once these talks are made public it will be obvious I misunderstood his point)  but I am never going to view an autonomous car as being an engineering feat similar to the Pantheon. As I see it, Ferren left out the emotional/spiritual (not religious) aspect that great work can inspire in someone. While the light bulb was an extraordinary achievement in its own right, as is electricity for that matter, neither will are likely to take your breath away in an inspirational fashion.

Brian Greene (not listed on the programme) was introduced next. Greene’s Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Brian Randolph Greene [1] (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality, and related PBS television specials. Greene also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode “The Herb Garden Germination”, as well as the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy.

He also recently launched World Science U (free science classes online) as per a Feb. 26, 2014 post by David Bruggeman on his Pasco Phronesis blog.

The presentation was a history of the world from Big Bang to the end of the world. It’s the fastest 18 minutes I’ve experienced so far and it provided a cosmic view of history. Briefly, everything disintegrates, the sun, the galaxy and, eventually, photons.

The last speaker I’m mentioning is Marc Kushner, architect. from his TED biography (Note: Links have been removed),

Marc Kushner is a practicing architect who splits his time between designing buildings at HWKN, the architecture firm he cofounded, and amassing the world’s architecture on the website he runs, Architizer.com. Both have the same mission: to reconnect the public with architecture.

Kushner’s core belief is that architecture touches everyone — and everyone is a fan of architecture, even if they don’t know it yet. New forms of media empower people to shape the built environment, and that means better buildings, which make better cities, which make a better world.

Kushner, too, started with a childhood story where he confessed he didn’t like the architecture of the home where he and his family lived. This loathing inspired him to pursue architecture and he then segued into a history of architecture from the 1970’s to present day. Apparently the 1970s spawned something called ‘brutalism’ which is very much about concrete. (Arthur Erickson a local, Vancouver (Canada) architect who was internationally lauded for his work loved concrete; I do not.) According to Kushner, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like ‘brutalism’ and so by the 1980s architects fell back on tried and true structures and symbols. Kushner noted a back and forth movement between architects attempting to push the limits of technology and alienating the populace and then attempting to please the populace and going overboard in their efforts with exaggerated and ornate forms which eventually become offputting. Kushner then pointed to Guggenheim Bilbao as an architecture game-changer (from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain.

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One of the most admired works of contemporary architecture, the building has been hailed as a “signal moment in the architectural culture”, because it represents “one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something.”[3] The museum was the building most frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in the 2010 World Architecture Survey among architecture experts.[3]

Kushner’s own work has clearly been influenced by Gehry and others who changed architecture in the 1990s but his approach is focused on attempting to integrate the community into the process and he described how he and his team have released architectural illustrations onto the internet years before a building is constructed to make the process more accessible.