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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Think about the neighborhood you grew up in. Could you tell the buildings and houses apart, or did they all kind of look the same?
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Truth is, most homes today are designed by developers for the market and not for the people that will live in them. Modularity became a tool for urgent rebuilding, and it worked fast, but often at the cost of character.
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That's architect and researcher Riyadh Jutka. He grew up in a home designed by his architect father, a house rooted in regional tradition, natural materials, and family story. In his talk, he shares how his experience shaped a career spent asking what if we could build homes that are both efficient and deeply personal? He shares how 3D printing and local craftsmanship could change what our homes look and feel like, and how they can help us reconnect with our cultures. That's coming up right after a short break.
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This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum. A good hire? They can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sit sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire get started by posting your job for free@LinkedIn.com terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. If you've been feeling overwhelmed by climate headlines lately, here's something worth your time a show focused on solutions. It's called Planet Visionaries, hosted by Alex Honnold. Yes, the climber from Free Solo, who recently completed an impressive skyscraper climb in Taipei, now turning his attention to protecting the only planet we've got. What makes this show stand out is the people you'll hear from scientists, explorers and storytellers who are actually building a better future and making it feel tangible, human and possible. One conversation features Coral restoration leader Tituan Bernacote, along with legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle, sharing what it really takes to restore our oceans. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this podcast. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Health AI Let me ask you something. Why does getting care so often start with paperwork? Forms that ask for the same information over and over, as if your story has to be retold from scratch every time? We've come to accept that friction as part of the process. But it doesn't have to be. Amazon Health AI is built to change that. It can understand your health history so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time actually getting the care you need. Amazon Health AI Healthcare just got less painful. And now our TED Talk of the day.
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What if the places we lived in could truly reflect who we are and not just what's fastest or cheapest to build? This isn't about everyone designing their own house. It's about rethinking how homes are created in the first place. We've all seen rows of homes so alike you can only tell them apart by the color of the car parked outside. It's designed for efficiency, not identity. Truth is, most homes today are designed by developers for the market and not for the people that will live in them. These template driven systems leave little room to innovate or think about form or function. But this reliance on standardization isn't new. Historically, modular systems were not designed to maximize profit. After World War II, when entire cities across Europe were flattened, there were a way to get people back under roofs quickly. Prefabs, kits of parts, temporary housing. Across the world, modularity became a tool for urgent rebuilding. And it worked fast, but often at the cost of character. Sadly, today once again, architecture and heritage are being erased. In places like Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine, what disappears isn't just people and buildings. It's memory, belonging, culture. I'm not here with a simple fix. What I'm saying is we must rebuild, but we need to rebuild with identity in mind. My name is Riyad Jukka. I'm an architect based in Dubai, where I run a practice called Mean, the Middle East Architecture Network. What excites me is finding ways to fuse novel technologies with local stories. And sometimes that means experimenting with 3D printing and robotics. At other times, it's about rereading a tradition and giving it a contemporary form across different scales. From a single object to a cultural building. Our projects look at ways of how local materials and craftsmanship could be given a new life through technology. We've worked in different places across the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. but the constant is every project tries to be forward looking while remaining grounded in space. And that's what excites me the most about housing. It's where technology and belonging meet most directly. Because our homes aren't just shelters. They should be mirrors of who we are. And to further introduce myself, this is the house that I grew up in, designed by my father. You see, both of my parents are architects. Both of my grandparents were notable artists. So I grew up in a household surrounded by conversations around art, culture and space. And that's how I see design today. Not as a template, but as something truly rooted in family stories and place. The house truly reflects the traditions of the region. This scan from al Bina magazine, 1994, wrote about the house. I pulled these from my father's archives. You could see natural light being drawn through skylights. Natural stone facade covering the exterior. Very typical of houses of the region. A Majlis cast in concrete in the walls themselves. My father describes it as post traditional architecture because postmodernism never really fit our context. One of the few things him and I agree on when it comes to work. No, but the house really is a reflection of our traditions, but in a contemporary form. And I keep returning to this traditional wisdom. The mezlahs for gathering. The ones for hosting spaces that extend beyond their functionality to bring people together. Courtyards that cool in shade. Spaces that make the outdoors livable. Barjeels are wind catchers that breathe air through a home. Passive design. Centuries before we used the word sustainability. Screens that filter light and create privacy. Mashrabiyas design that shapes atmosphere as much as structure. And we use a similar vocabulary for our house at meen. For house 00, the first house we designed, we designed the house around a courtyard with a water body cooling the exterior. The house is wrapped with this corrugated stone facade, echoing the language of the topography of the mountains surrounding it. The house sits atop Jebel Jais. And to me it's a real interpretation of traditional forms. But in a contemporary home. Cosmos House we collaborated with artist Julia Ebini to designed these mesroviyas. We used algorithms and fractal geometry to filter light into speckled shadows. The house is designed to be 3D printed using sand from the surrounding environment. The ancient wisdom of desert architecture reinterpreted using digital tools. Beyond practice. I also lead the Adaptive Measureless research project at Zayed University. We're looking at ways of how 3D printed modular systems could help us reinterpret these traditions. Today, the Majlis, a unique typology of the region, is being rethought through the lens of modern technology, local craftsmanship, and contemporary lifestyles. That same thinking helped shape permutable assemblies, a modular system we developed at Mean for Housing. We asked ourselves, we need to produce a modular system with a certain goal. And that goal is to design for a modular system that is personal, local and expressive. And we asked ourselves, instead of erasing character, what if modular systems helped showcase it and express it, responding to context, climate and culture without any added cost? Gemini's great mast in Mali is the world's largest adobe building. But what's remarkable isn't just the architecture. It's the people. Every year, the community gathers to repair its walls and replaster them, turning maintenance into a festival. The building survives because of the community that maintains it. And that sense of shared responsibility is something that we've lost in many modern cities. Here's how our system works. A builder, developer, or simply any user enters parameters around their spatial needs, context, climate into a digital platform. It then generates layouts composed of modules shaped by their context. These parts are then prefabricated off site using local low carbon materials, produced with precision and little waste. The parts are assembled piece by piece, almost like a modern kit of parts or a set of Legos, if you may, into a home. The process is fast and efficient. But unlike traditional prefab, it does not force sameness. See, traditional modular systems rely on repeated templates. With 3D printing, we can break that mold, designing for efficiency as well as belonging. The system scales up from house to neighborhood, where every home shares a logic, but no two are alike. It's modularity with character, turning repetition into rhythm. 3D printing makes curves, textures and ornamental, practical at scale. Screens inspired by local patterns, walls that read like the desert. Details prefab usually cuts out. See, modularity doesn't have to mean sameness. It can mean variation, intention and agency. Design shouldn't come from a catalog. It should grow with you, respond to you, and reflect you. And that's what architecture should be. Not imposed, not distant, but deeply rooted. We shouldn't keep repeating the same formulas. We can build differently. We can invite people and communities to shape the spaces we call home. Because design, real design, belongs to everyone. Thank you.
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That was Riyadh Juka at TEDCG in 2025.
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If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmarniewong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh
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idea for your feedback.
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Thanks for listening.
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This episode is brought to you by Capital One Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to choiceology@schwab.com podcast or wherever you listen.
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