Tag: architect

• Episode 15: The Master Builder

  My friend Ben Stevens runs a blog called Skyline where he interviews people involved in the built environment (architecture, real estate, planning, and so on). You might remember that I did an episode with him about a year ago where we talked about the overlap between architecture and development.

  His most recent episode is with San Diego-based architect-developer Jonathan Segal. I’ve mentioned Segal before on this blog and that’s because he is well known and admired in certain circles for (re)creating a process that places the architect in the position of “master builder.”

  He is singularly driven by one goal: to have ultimate control over the architecture that he creates. Making money is secondary. It is a byproduct of goal number one.

  To achieve this, he has worked to cut out every conceivable middle person. Design is in-house. Construction management is in-house. Property/asset management is in-house. He even avoids bringing on investors for his projects, out of fear that they will start to dictate what he can and can’t do.

  If this approach resonates with you, I definitely recommend you watch the interview. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UT–CAS1g?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2017.01.14

• Kanju (and the future of cities)

  There is so much interest in cities right now and I think that is absolutely wonderful. Earlier today my friend Derek shared a video with me on Twitter called, The Future of Cities. It’s by YouTuber Oscar Boyson, who I recognize from some of Casey Neistat’s videos, but whose own videos I have never watched before.

  I highly recommend you watch this video. It’s just over 18 minutes. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOWk5yCMMs?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  It’s well-executed, a joy to watch, and packed full of information and ideas. There are soundbites from lots of well known urbanists (both living and dead). And I also love how Oscar crowdsourced ideas and content from cities all around the world.

  The title of this blog post will make sense once you’ve watched the video.

  2016.12.15

• Crazy home prices

  

  This afternoon I walked the High Line with a friend of mine who seemed to know everything there is to know about new residential development in Manhattan. 

  She recently purchased a place and so she had done her homework. She was pointing out every building and telling me the price per square foot range; whether the floor plans were well designed (or if they had misproportioned rooms and awkwardly placed columns); and who the architect was. 

  Takeaway: To be competitive in the luxury segment in New York, you really need to have a name brand architect on the project. That seems to be the price of entry.

  As she was telling me about the “competitively priced” building in the low $2,000′s psf and the expensive penthouse that recently sold for $7,000+ psf, I started to wonder about historical pricing in New York. How has it trended? 

  I also told her that you could buy a really great condo in Toronto for $700 psf. She laughed at how affordable that was. It’s all about your point of reference.

  In any case, I found a research report from 2004 called: Why is Manhattan So Expensive? The story is one that you’ve heard before. It’s about the impact of land use restrictions on home prices. But it does also include some historical data on average condo prices.

  In 1984, the median price per square for a condo in Manhattan was $359 psf. It peaked in 1987 at $505 psf and then dropped back down to the $300′s in the early 90′s. That was not a great time for real estate. However, by 2002, the median price had rebounded to $606 psf. All USD figures.

  From 2002 onwards, Manhattan saw a dramatic increase in home prices. Below are two charts from Corcoran (Q3 2016 data) and Castle Avenue, respectively:

  

  Toronto is obviously not New York, but’s interesting to consider that the average price of a downtown Toronto condo, today, is probably in the low $600′s psf. That’s in Canadian dollars and that’s pricing that New York saw decades ago. 

  It reminds me that “crazy pricing” can oftentimes be a psychological reaction to a pricing anchor that we previously set in our minds. It feels crazy. But is it?

  Image: Me

  2016.11.06

• Building crap

  Last night I participated in an excellent dinner discussion with a group of planners, architects, city officials, and politicians from Amsterdam. They were visiting Toronto to see first hand what rapid intensification has done to this city. And I very much appreciated the invite. Thank you.

  My message was that intensification has created a far more vibrant and exciting city compared to 15 or so years ago. It’s hard to know what exactly could be correlated with intensification, but we have certainly seen an explosion of culture, innovation, and pride in this city – among many other things. (It could be all Drake’s doing.)

  However, the counter argument at the dinner table was that Toronto is letting unfettered development produce unremarkable architecture. We are simply building glass tower after glass tower. And I know that, for many of you, this will ring true. I hear it all the time, including in the comments of this blog.

  Now, I will be the first to admit that there has been a lot of shit built in this city. No argument there. Some people have no taste. But at the same time, I think it’s myopic to assume that it’s strictly because of profit-motivated developers. 

  Oftentimes the perception is that development projects are awash in cash. There’s tons of money in which to do the right thing. Developers just need to stop being so greedy and start being more creative.

  The reality is that developers operate within a market. There are real limits to what people will pay for new space. And when, for instance, land prices go through the roof (an input), municipal fees jump (cost of doing business), and approvals drag (time value of money), guess where everyone starts looking for savings? In the build.

  I say this not to justify building crap. If I had it my way, everything would be beautiful. I champion design whenever possible. I say it simply to shed light on the process. Because when we all understand the factors at a play, I believe we all become more effective at finding solutions.

  2016.09.21

• 3 thoughts from Rem Koolhaas

  Earlier this year, architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA spoke with Mohsen Mostafavi (dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design) to close out the 2016 AIA convention. 

  I still remember my first architectural theory class where the professor told us all that Koolhaas was the most important living architect of our time. And today, if you think about all of the stars that have grown out from his firm – such as Bjarke Ingels and Joshua Prince-Ramus – it is certainly a defensible argument.

  Koolhaas is generally very critical of globalization and the market economy when it comes to creating good architecture. His view is that “pure profit motives” are leading to cities that are basically not designed.

  This is a fairly common belief within architectural circles, which is why many celebrated names would rather work on a museum over a residential condo project. The latter is too motivated by profit. It’s not architecturally interesting.

  I, on the other hand, have always believed in working within the confines of the market to try and promote great architecture and city building. I’m not saying that the market is perfect, but profitability is a constraint that every industry deals with. Architecture is no exception.

  That said, there are other things that I agree with Koolhaas on. Below are 3 verbatim highlights taken from a Fast Company article summarizing his talk with Mostafavi: 

  Communication needs an overhaul.

  “Architecture has a serious problem today in that people who are not alike don’t communicate. I’m actually more interested in communicating with people I disagree with than people I agree with.”

  "To have a certain virtuosity of interpretation of every phenomenon is crucial. We’re working in a world where so many different cultures are operating at the same time, each with their own value system. If you want to be relevant, you need to be open to an enormous multiplicity of values, interpretations, and readings. The old-fashioned Western ‘this is’ ‘that is’ is no longer tenable. We need to be intellectual and rigorous, but at the same time relativist.”

  Architecture’s greatest value in the future might not even be architecture.

  “Architecture and the language of architecture—platform, blueprint, structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley. They took over our metaphors, and it made me think that regardless of our speed, which is too slow for Silicon Valley, we can perhaps think of the modern world maybe not always in the form of buildings but in the form of knowledge or organization and structure and society that we can offer and provide.”
  

  Preservation is a path forward.

  "We’ve tried to discover domains and areas in architecture which are not a simple vulgar multiplication of uninspired global projects. Recently, we have looked at preservation. The beautiful thing about preservation is you begin with something that already exists and therefore is already local. By definition, a preservation project is an homage to earlier cultures and mentalities to which you can add a new dimension, a new function, a new beauty or appeal. Almost every impulse signals that globalization needs rethinking or adjustment.”

  2016.08.04

• If man had developed a third arm, where might this arm be best attached?

  Roman Mars of 99% Invisible recently published an excellent episode called The Mind of an Architect. It has to do with a set of research studies completed in the late 1950s by an organization at the University of California, Berkeley known as the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR).

  IPAR was founded by a personality psychologist named Donald MacKinnon. He initially worked for the precursor to the CIA and founded IPAR with the intent of studying “combat readiness and efficiency.” But over fears of how creative the Soviets were getting, the focus of IPAR shifted to instead studying creativity.

  And architects were deemed to be an ideal test subject (from 99percentinvisible.org):

  “Researchers saw architects as people working at a crossroads of creative disciplines, a combination of analytic and artistic creativity. As professionals, architects had to be savvy as engineers and businessmen; as aesthetes, they also acted as designers and artists.”

  So over a series of weekends in the late 1950s, some of the most celebrated minds in architecture – including people like Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, and Louis Kahn – were studied and picked apart. 

  

  They were asked to do quick sketches, create mosaics, and they were asked questions such as this one: “For the next 45 minutes we would like you to discuss this notion: if man had developed a third arm, where might this arm be best attached?”

  In the end, here’s what they concluded:

  The researchers began to notice certain patterns across creatives of all professions and genders, including a tendency to nonconformity and high personal aspirations. They also found many creatives shared a preference for complexity and ambiguity over simplicity and order. Creatives could make unexpected connections and see patterns in daily life, even those lacking high intelligence or good grades.
  

  In short: IPAR found that creative people tend to be nonconforming, interesting, interested, independent, courageous and self-centered, at least in general. Many of these traits may seem obvious today, but they were not necessarily obvious prior to these studies. Back when their tests were being conducted and findings presented in the 1950s and ’60s, the very idea of a “creative personality” was a novelty in academic and public discourse.

  The findings may not be groundbreaking to us today, but the documents and recordings produced during the study are certainly interesting. If you’re into this topic, there’s also this book you can pick up.

  Oh, and if we are to have a third arm, I would like mine to run almost parallel to my existing dominant arm (right). That way I could double up on my most potent dexterity. It would also be far less intrusive than an arm on one’s head or in the middle of one’s back. Then again, it would ruin our symmetry as humans. And perhaps that third arms need to be celebrated instead of being masked.

  What would you suggest?

  Image: Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley / The Monacelli Press (via 99% Invisible)

  2016.07.17

• White and minimal

  The Douglas House by architect Richard Meier was just designated by the National Register of Historic Places. The house was originally designed in the late 1960s for Jean and Jim Douglas of Grand Rapids, Michigan. But it was more recently restored by Marcia Myers and Michael McCarthy. They purchased the tired property in 2007 and apparently had architecture professors knocking on their door shortly thereafter.

  Here is a beautiful photo (via Curbed) by James Haefner courtesy of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office:

  

  I love the positioning of the house within the landscape. In fact, it’s built into such a steep slope that you actually enter the house at roof level via a bridge. However, once inside, you’re then able to look down to the living and dining areas, as well as out to the sundeck overlooking Lake Michigan.

  Interestingly enough (according to designboom), the Douglas family had originally purchased a lot for their new home in a residential subdivision. But when the developer of the subdivision prohibited them from working with a stark Modernist like Richard Meier (those damn developers), they decided to sell the lot and look for something else. Above is what they ultimately decided on.

  I’m glad they stuck to their guns. Otherwise this house probably wouldn’t exist today. And that would be a shame. I’ve always liked the work of Richard Meier. It’s always white and minimal and I like white and minimal. Simplicity can be surprisingly difficult to achieve. As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

  2016.07.13

• The back-end of our cities

  I love cities. We all love cities right now. 

  Everyone, for good reason, seems to be fixated on both people returning to cities (like those narcissistic Millennials) and people urbanizing for the very first time. This latter scenario is happening rapidly across the developing world and in many cases – but not all cases – it is helping to lift people out of extreme poverty.

  But by most measures, urban areas represent only about 2-3% of the world’s land area, despite housing over 50% of our population. So here’s an interesting thought for this morning: What is happening and what will happen with the remaining 97-98%?

  In this recent talk by architect Rem Koolhaas, he attempts to dissect the future of living, loving, and working through the lens of architecture. However, he starts by saying that architecture is, in fact, too slow to properly capture the zeitgeist of any time period. It is, “an unbelievably slow art.” That said, Koolhaas has a remarkable ability to identify what is happening (see Delirious New York) and then call it out in a way that you probably haven’t thought about. 

  In the above talk, he hones in on the impact of Silicon Valley – certainly the spirit of our time – on the rural landscape outside of our cities. Interestingly enough, he also talks about how the tech industry has begun to borrow terminology from architecture in order to describe itself.

  Screenshot from the video:

  

  Despite their ethereal appearance, technology giants still have large physical footprints for servers, production, logistics, and so on. But there’s no reason – or way – to accommodate them inside of our cities and so they cluster outside, in the 97-98% areas. These are places like the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, which is the home of Tesla’s new Gigafactory.

  Because of sheer scale and because there’s no need for them to possess much in the way of humanistic qualities, these are spaces which are void of architecture, urbanism, and, in some cases, a light spectrum beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific function of the building (discussed in the video).

  Of course, the periphery has long serviced the core. But Koolhaas’ thinking has, as it often does, made me consider this phenomenon in a slightly different way. He paints a picture of a spiky world where we are all crammed into sensor and app-driven cities (the front-end), all of which are then powered by big mechanistic boxes that many of us may be naive to (the back-end). In some ways it feels like the Matrix. What we see and experience could just be the tip of the iceberg.

  Architecture may be unbearably slow, but as a society we have always built what matters to us most at the time. At one point it was places of worship. But today, at least for part of our landscape, it is boxes not intended for us to really experience. Maybe that’s not really architecture. Maybe it is simply the back-end for our cities.

  2016.07.03

• Architecture as a tool of capital

  I just stumbled upon an interesting Architectural Review article from last year called: Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. The author is Reinier de Graaf, who is an architect and partner at the firm OMA.

  The focus of the article is on inequality; capitalism vs. socialism; Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is now on my reading list); and on how Modernism lost its social mission and got repurposed as a tool that just serves capitalist interests. It went from an ideology to simply an architectural style.

  Here is an excerpt:

  “Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”

  Given that I am initially trained as an architect, but that I work as a real estate developer, this article hits home for me. But unlike the author, I am not as fussed by this intertwining of capital and architecture. In fact, I have always believed that the more architecture can understand its economic milieu, the more likely it can affect positive change.

  Of course, there’s the question of whether that economic milieu is even the right one in the first place. I’ll echo this blog post (on the limits of capitalism), by saying that I consider myself a capitalist, but not an absolute capitalist. Capitalism isn’t perfect.

  I like Reinier’s description of income vs. wealth (borrowed from Piketty):

  He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it.

  What are your thoughts?

  2016.06.14

• Fluted glass curtain wall

  New York architecture firm REX is working on a new office building in Washington DC that will incorporate a beautiful fluted glass facade. Here’s a rendering of what it is intended to look like:

  

  Here’s what that looks like in plan (it’s a GIF that should show typical curtain wall vs. proposed fluted glass):

  

  Here’s a photo of the 1:1 mockup:

  

  And here’s a description from the architect:

  The façade’s approximately nine hundred identical, insulated-glass panels—3.2 m tall by 1.5 m wide (11’-6” tall by 5’-0” wide)—are subtly curved to a 2.9 m (9’-6”) radius through a heat roller tempering process. The curve yields structural efficiency, which meets wind load requirements and enables a thinner monolithic outer lite than normal, providing greater transparency. 

  Because of the curve’s inherent rigidity in compression, only the top and bottom edges of the panels are supported from the floor slabs, while the mullionless vertical edges are flush-glazed for a minimalist aesthetic that improves sight lines, while gaining usable floor area.

  They are working in collaboration with Front Inc., which if you haven’t heard of, you should check out. They are a design/engineering consultancy that specializes in facades and building envelopes. They work with many of the big name starchitects. The developer of the project is Tishman Speyer.

  It’s worth noting that part of the impetus for the fluted glass facade was to try and innovate within the confines of DC’s draconian zoning – which mandates that no building can be taller than 130 feet. Because of this, developers and architects are usually forced to build out to the allowable area, leaving little room for architectural variation. 

  But in this case, the fluted glass removed the need for thick mullions and also allowed them to extend out beyond the lot area by 4 inches every 5 feet (the curves are considered “architectural features”). So this move has created both architectural variation and more rentable area.

  It doesn’t appear that the building will have any operable windows, but other than that, I think it promises to be quite beautiful. What do you think?

  All images from REX.

  2016.06.09