TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;17

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;19 - 00;00;30;25

William Smart (WS)

The approval authority wants us to respect how it looks from the outside and how it integrates with the streetscape, with the materials of the area, which is predominantly brick with sawtooth roofs. And they also want you to kind of reinforce and retain the great character of the precinct. So to keep these big, large, open plan offices with sawtooth roofs, I feel as a designer, we nailed it. We really got the design exactly right.

 

00;00;30;27 - 00;03;09;28

DP

This is my guest, William Smart. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault will highlight William’s new Smart Design Studio building. The new Smart Design Studio is an innovative, sustainable and sculptural building with both new and renovated facades that sit within an inner city conservation area of brick warehouses. The design relates to the industrial buildings from the precinct.

 

While it makes a departure with a modern facade of tiles, galvanized sheeting, steel frame windows and dynamic forms of curling and curving brick. Structurally, a large portion of the building feels industrial with precast concrete slabs, structural brick roof vaults and steel. Environmentally, the naturally lit and ventilated studio collects its own water and generates its own power, creating a carbon neutral building.

 

In addition, large full length clear story windows enable natural light to enter the single industrial scale workspace. The Sawtooth roof trusses and a portion of the facades were retained with the exception of the offices on the western street frontage. That's where a narrow, highly designed apartment runs atop the length of the building. The apartment features four self-supporting offset brick, catenary vaults that allow light into the apartment.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. William Smart is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects. He's also the founder and creative director of Smart Design Studio, established in 1998. The Office is a multi-disciplined design studio offering professional services and architecture, interior architecture and design. Over the past 23 years, Smart Design Studio has delivered a wide range of projects from large scale master planning, cultural buildings, offices, workplaces to private houses and product design.

 

Smart Design Studio’s buildings have received critical acclaim since its inception , SDS has received over 50 international and national awards for architecture, urban design and interior design. William was also the recipient of Indie Award’s Luminary Award. Williams taught and lectured across Australia, published written work and is an active participant in the design community. So welcome, William. Nice to have you with us today.

 

Before we get started, tell us a little bit about Smart Design Studio. So you're coming to us from about 16,000 kilometers away. So tell us where you're located. What's the size of your firm and the type of work that you do.

 

00;03;09;28 - 00;04;33;03

WS

Doug It's a real pleasure to be here. Our studio is located in Sydney, which is on the east coast of Australia, and it's a temperate climate, so subtropical. So like today's the middle of winter, the maximum temperature will be 18 degrees Celsius in summer it gets quite warm, reasonably humid, but not quite tropical. It's quite a nice environment.

 

I'll talk about that in more detail because we've tried to do a very sustainable project for our offices, but we've been running for about 25 years now and with 50 people and we think that's just the perfect size for us because we can do some large projects that run over many years and we can do some small detail projects that allow us to be more innovative or to get a level of detail to explore and develop.

 

And we love integrating architecture and interiors and view it as one and through our own way of working, we've developed a methodology which we call design from the inside out or architecture from the inside out. And so we try to think of our buildings from the interior perspective. First, what is the space we're making? How do the occupants use the building?

 

And then we work through from that perspective toward the outside of the building and try to build an armature around it that's responsible, sustainable, complements the character of the community that we live in as well and tries to synthesize all those things together. But the approach is definitely to build it from the internal spaces.

 

00;04;33;06 - 00;04;34;20

DP

So form follows function.

 

00;04;34;20 - 00;05;25;19

WS

Absolutely form follows function. But we also think you can be really powerful with form and you can develop emotive responses to form. So just in that idea of internal spaces, we think that in a really great building, and the best of ours achieve this, you take someone to a moment when they go, Whoa, this is amazing, this is beautiful.

 

And sometimes that's more than the functionality. It can be just an internal space where there's a staircase or a vista or place you go to that's a surprising experience. And I'm often in my mind imagining how an occupant or a user of the building will circulate through it, how they will walk into a room, what the transition of light is from outside, inside and from one room to another.

 

And how they go to this place and think, Wow, I wasn't expecting this at all.

 

00;05;25;21 - 00;05;27;03

DP

That's a beautiful description.

 

00;05;27;10 - 00;05;27;22

WS

Thank you.

 

00;05;27;29 - 00;05;33;06

DP

Absolutely. So I was on your website, pretty extensive. What type of projects do you guys take?

 

00;05;33;12 - 00;06;56;17

WS

Well, we've been running for 25 years now, and that means we've really grown the company into a place where we can be careful about the projects we take. So we are looking for projects where we can design the architecture and the interiors as one. And that's borne out of our philosophy of how we work. And we're also looking for projects where we can achieve a lot of detail, and that doesn't necessarily mean we need to use expensive materials.

 

We actually quite like inexpensive materials, things like the everyday brick is something we're in love with and how we use that is probably where the innovation starts. But we like to do architecture and interiors has one a lot of detail and work on projects from start to end so we can really achieve the details and in that we prefer to have a range of projects.

 

So at least half of our work are residential projects and they can vary from large apartment buildings where there's more complex of buildings down to small houses and everything in between. And then we also do a few commercial projects, cultural projects such as art galleries, or recently we finished Science Gallery in Melbourne, which is about the fusion of art and science in this new space.

 

And we use architecture to bring the two together and then we also tend to end up working on a few product design projects as well. So door handles, grip rails, other things going down into there. Very fine detail is something that we love doing concurrently.

 

00;06;56;24 - 00;07;04;18

DP

That's really cool. I have a lot of questions. We'll get to them in just a minute. So tell us a little bit about yourself. So how did you start Smart Design Studio?

 

00;07;04;24 - 00;08;50;03

WS

I started my own design studio in ‘98, so 25 years ago. And after graduating, I worked in France for a year and a half and learned about traditional ways of building. Following that, I worked for just over three years at Foster and Partners in London, which is a very big commercial practice and has built a number of buildings in the US.

 

And then I came back to Australia in ‘96 for the Olympics and I wanted to work on an Olympic project and I wanted to try living in Sydney because I grew up in the country, in Western Australia, in the outback, and I moved to Sydney to work on the railway station at the Olympic site. So I've gone from working on large projects and as that last project was nearing to an end, I felt this need to set up my own studio and do my own projects.

 

And I chose that name without having any projects in mind or in place. I thought I had something to say and I didn't know what it was, but I just felt I had a voice and I needed to create a platform to develop my own voice. And I wasn't getting that in working for other practices because I was channeling the voice of that practice.

 

So that's why I set it up and it's taken really sort of 15 years to find out what that voice is. I had things I liked I was interested in. There weren't always the budgets on the first few projects to achieve those things, but over time we've developed these interests in materials who work with the details, who work with the forms, the collaborations with other architects or engineers or other consultants and contractors, and have kind of come up with some buildings that are remarkable that people think and ask us, How did you do that? How was that made? How could you do all that? It seems unbelievable, which is great. I think that's what I wanted to do when I started this practice 25 years ago.

 

00;08;50;09 - 00;09;02;00

DP

It's great. I have some of the same questions for you today about your building. So clearly when you got started, your office was relatively small. You've grown to 50 people. What's your role in the office now?

 

00;09;02;02 - 00;10;17;06

WS

How I see my role is to kind of help guide a large team of people towards the great outcome. So we need to achieve. So my favorite thing is preparing drawings or writing specifications. I like that more than the other stuff that comes with running a company of this size and often there's a lot of meetings. But this morning I just was in an early morning meeting with some contractors about trying to nut out some key details that we couldn't let go of on a new commercial building we're doing.

 

And then the project architect that's running that's doing an amazing job, but at this moment needs me to come in and say to the contractors, this is the way it's going to be. We've got to document and develop in that way. So that's kind of how I end up steering things. And I work four days a week from Sydney and then one or two days a week out of town and on that day I try to sit down on the drawing board and not our new projects or complex projects, but I love that drawing time.

 

So I'm kind of like a person in the team that's almost like a coach that tries to help everybody get to the right place and at times I'll step in and lend a hand and at times I'll be working in the background, checking things and reviewing things and trying to help develop the direction of projects. But it's sort of like this really strong helping role that I've developed over time.

 

00;10;17;09 - 00;10;23;05

DP

I'm sure this varies, but how many projects do you typically have in the office running at the same time?

 

00;10;23;05 - 00;11;21;10

WS

I would say there's probably about 20 active projects at the moment and from that we would have three or four that are going through planning approval processes. And in Australia that's very slow. It takes probably a year for us to get planning consent on a project and they don't take a lot of work, but they take sporadic pieces of work.

 

So accounts who might come back and say change this time or work on that for a short while. So maybe five or six projects in those stages. We've always got a couple in preparing for planning. We've normally got a few in the documentation stage and then we’ve normally got half a dozen or even more at the moment that are under construction.

 

And some of those are very large projects that go over three or four years and then some of them are smaller ones. It might be a year or a year and a half, but it just naturally works out that somehow it's all fairly evenly spread between all the different stages, and it means that we can resource it well and improve on our systems and ways of documenting from the work we're building on site all the time.

 

00;11;21;13 - 00;11;41;15

DP

Well, it certainly sounds interesting for you because you get to bounce around on a lot of different projects at different stages in the process, so it sounds like a lot of fun. So let's dig in here and talk about our building. Tell us about the new Smart Design Studio. So how long have you guys been in your current location and before that, what was your original location?

 

00;11;41;18 - 00;14;32;23

WS

Before this, we were in an area in Sydney called Surry Hills, which is kind of a beautiful, quite central, historic part of town. And we moved to this new industrial area that's being transformed at the moment, halfway between the center of Sydney and the airport. And that means we're actually only four kilometers from the city center because our main airports very close to town.

 

What attracted us to this particular area was that we could get a very large piece of land at a relatively inexpensive price and build a studio where the whole of the team could work on one floor. And linked into that is a desire to not grow anymore. We've sort of arrived at 50, for us that’s the perfect size. We can do some large projects, some small ones, and control all of the stage as well.

 

So we do want to grow anymore. But we did recognize that from our last project and our last office that we needed to all be in one room and work from that space. So we bought an old warehouse building in a conservation area. And for us that means that it's not a heritage listed item, so you can make changes to it.

 

And quite extensive changes, but you've got to work within the character of the area and the approval authority wants us to respect how it looks from the outside and how it integrates with the streetscape, with the materials of the area, which is predominantly brick with sorted roofs. And I also want you to kind of reinforce and retain the great character of the precinct and to do that internally.

 

So to keep these big, large, open plan offices with sorted roofs. And that just worked perfectly for how we wanted to use that particular space. So we have an office of about 800 square meters just over. So it's almost 20 square meters per person. It's like a lot of room because we've had our own office before. We've understood what it is that we need and how we work and what the best range would be.

 

And I feel as a designer, we nailed it. We really got the design exactly right. So it's one big room which is about 20 by 20 meters. And then on the outside of that, we have four separate rooms, one for model making. One is a kind of breakout space, what we call the canteen. One is a materials library, and then the last one is the front of house and meeting room area.

 

And so the activities that need to be segregated from the main working space are on the outside of that, but within the same volume and then the central space is flooded with natural light and has a beautiful acoustic to it. So you can hear the sound of people talking, but you actually can't hear what they're saying. So it doesn't take your attention away from what you're doing.

 

It's a really great space to work in. And one of the interesting things is we make a lot of models, we do a lot of hand drawings. All the walls are pinned up with work, and then there's maybe more than 100 models in various states of completion or degradation, over time through the studio space. So you feel like you've walked into this creative space where work is being developed and being designed on the run.

 

00;14;33;00 - 00;14;51;25

DP

So I've always found that it's really hard to be my own client. And I'm kind of wondering, so you first lay out the programmatic requirements and as you start designing, did that evolve? Did the program change a little bit for you? What was a client like? Just kidding. And did you know right away what you wanted?

 

00;14;51;28 - 00;16;06;23

WS

I've done a few projects for myself now and I'm designing a couple more and I love working for myself. I don't find it hard being my own client. The only sticking point every time is budget. Actually, I always run over budget dramatically and have to find a way of making that work. But I love designing for myself and the main studio spaces who are designing it.

 

And in fact the whole building almost felt like it designed itself. I didn't even feel like I was designing it. It just felt like it all fell into place quite easily for us. Those projects are rare, certainly the minority, but this one felt like as soon as we drew something, it felt right. And then you just made minor adjustments along the way and it kind of sold together quite beautifully.

 

And I feel like in just about every area, we got it really right because we put so much thought into what is it we need and how much space do we need for these kinds of materials? And you know, when we have all the models, what do you want the clients to see when they walk around the studio?

 

We even thought about that tour through the studio and how we would walk prospective clients and consultants through the space and tell the story of how we work and who we are. There's so many layers to the design and we had time to think about it properly and do a good job. So I feel like we've got it right.

 

00;16;06;23 - 00;16;11;29

DP

The final design included an apartment. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

00;16;12;01 - 00;17;59;16

WS

This conservation area in Sydney, what the city wants is for this to be a hub of activity and for that to not be where people live. They want businesses here, they want makers, they want microbreweries, they want art galleries, they want live music. So they're kind of trying to develop that in this particular area. So they have prohibited housing, including apartments in this area except for a caretaker's residence they allow.

 

So we were able to get an approval to build a caretaker's residence on this site. And that's why it's called the caretaker's residence, because it was permitted under the planning consent. And it's where I live with my partner and my dog and these catenary shaped and structural brick vaults. And there's two big ones and two small ones and the big ones are about seven meters wide and 4.2 meters high.

 

And the small ones are about five meters wide and 2.7 meters high. And in between these vaults, they're offset from each other, we have these large sheets of glass, and it allows light to flood into the space. I think what we were trying to do with the project on many levels is to be something that was very responsive to this precinct.

 

So it was a positive contribution to the heritage area that we work in. And also we wanted to just have a bit of fun with the project and do some things we didn't know how. I've been dreaming of doing beautiful vaulted brick structures like you might see in Barcelona. I've been dreaming of them for a long time and I couldn't find a client that wanted to do it because we generally get to a sticking point, which would be a conversation a bit like, Tell us about your experience in doing this.

 

So I haven't done it before, but I know how I can work it out and then a clients would just get to a point where that's how I want to be your guinea pig. I don't want to test this for you. So we were able to do that with ourselves and it's actually a beautiful space to be in.

 

00;17;59;18 - 00;18;18;17

DP

It looks really wonderful. I'm going to stop you right there because we're going to come back to the vaults. Let's talk about the building design and we'll start with the basics. So tell us a little bit about the site now. It didn't look like there were any unique topographic features. Seemed pretty straightforward and there was a building on the property already. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

00;18;18;19 - 00;19;35;27

WS

So there's an existing warehouse here and the front strip of that building, which was where the offices and meetings had been adjusted so many times over the past 60 years that it had lost all its integrity. And we demolished that front seven meters and rebuilt that. And then we kept the rest of the warehouse, which was about 80% of the footprint, and restored that.

 

And that's where that big room is in our studio. And the front strip, which is seven meters wide, has a beautiful brick vaulted facade that almost looks as though it's peeling open the brick kind of curves outwards and leans downwards. And we worked out a way to lay bricks facing downward direction and peels up again the other way.

 

And at the top of that three story structure, we have this apartment building which is got the four votes that we spoke of before. And so what we tried to do with the project was to use everyday ordinary materials like galvanized roof sheeting and galvanized steel windows and a very simple brick. But to take these materials and do something extraordinary with them.

 

So my kind of beautiful sculptural shapes or to make beautiful load bearing brick vaults. So that was one of the primary objectives and that talks to the history of the area and really relates back in a very sympathetic way to the context.

 

00;19;36;04 - 00;19;45;16

DP

So you'd said it was a conservation area. Were the zoning restrictions challenging for you guys? And then was the building ultimately reviewed by a review board?

 

00;19;45;22 - 00;21;11;18

WS

Totally. It was very well received and mostly it complies with the planning controls that the biggest challenge for us was getting this caretaker's residence approved. But one of the great initiatives of the project also was we wanted to make all our own power, collect our own water, and reuse that on onsite to be a carbon neutral building.

 

And the city responded very well to that. And because Sydney's quite a hot climate in summer, we need some way of controlling the climate and really stopping the sun from coming into the spaces. So we designed this sustainable building where we don't have any air conditioning in the studio or the apartment spaces and it's just naturally ventilated. And we have underfloor heating which has got hydraulic pipes that extend and wrap around through the floor and in summer they work in reverse and I call the floor and that chill the space.

 

And in Sydney, which has relatively high humidity, we have to manage that carefully so you don't get condensation on the floor surface. But we do all that through a building management system, which is like a computer that opens, it controls the windows, it also controls blinds, it controls the fans, it controls how much water goes through the floor and what temperature and so forth.

 

And tomorrow is thinking about today. And it's managing all that quite beautifully, actually. It all works extremely well. And it's a real milestone. There aren't many buildings in Sydney that are comfortable to be in without air conditioning in summer. It's just so hot here in the summer months and humid that it's a real challenge to make that work.

 

00;21;11;20 - 00;21;24;00

DP

Yeah, I don't understand that. So it's natural ventilation, meaning windows or open air is flowing through the building. You've got to control the humidity on the interior. How is that done?

 

00;21;24;03 - 00;23;32;14

WS

So how it works is the building sets up about five different climate times of the year. One of those is extremely hot and extremely cold. So they're two different times of the year. And then you have temperate and then warm and cool and then the perfect temperature. So this time of the year is a cool time of the year.

 

And what happens now is the windows will stay closed all day and then around midday they'll open for an hour and change the air and they'll close again. So they have little motors that open and control them. They're called actuators. And at nighttime, the building opens up all year round for either two or 5 hours, depending on whether it needs to cool down or heat up or how much air we need to change.

 

So big volume space, you can do this because there's so much air for the number of occupants that you don't need to have the windows open all day long. If you had a regular office building, you've got to rethink that because you run out of oxygen and people start to feel sleepy and tired. So what the building does is it kind of breathes in a way and lets the oxygen in at nighttime and fills up the space with the fresh air.

 

And in the daytime, if it's moderate like springtime, the windows just stay open all day long and they don't open a lot. They only open about an inch. So you're not getting air running through at high velocity. You're just getting a trickle of breeze running through the space. And what often happens is the high level windows are normally open a lot to let the hot air out.

 

So we have an overheating problem more than a problem of being too cold and we've got to warm up the space. But today it would be all the windows would be closed. Now, as I mentioned before, we're trying to hold on to the heat. And then what we're going to try and do is just block some of the heat load to stop, particularly the eastern and western sun from coming into the space and overcooking the space.

 

The building design has less glass on the east and the west than you would normally see in most office buildings. And then our design thinking is about what you do with the light when it comes into the space. How do you reflect and bounce it and make a beautiful private atmosphere to be in without having a huge amount of glass that would lose a lot of heat in winter and gain a lot of heat in summer?

 

00;23;32;17 - 00;23;37;25

DP

Very interesting, very different than what we're used to here in the US for the most part.

 

00;23;37;28 - 00;24;32;03

WS

Yeah. So glass is sort of interesting, isn't it? Because you think of it as the way of bringing light into the space and it absolutely does that. But in another way it's a poorly insulated material compared to others. So if you think of it as a very thin sheet of plastic or cling film or something like that, then even if it's not getting sun directly on it, it's going to let the heat out or the heat in whichever one you don't want.

 

It's just going to allow the temperature to move towards what's on the outside, even if you don't want it to. So a principle that we have is to reduce the amount of glass in buildings. We try not to do buildings that are mostly glass, you know, in an office building to get at least 30% of the facade is solid, but we're targeting more like 50% solid.

 

And you have to be very thoughtful about the occupants of the building and the desire of the tenants to have a lot of glass in the spaces and how you're going to be really responsible with that as well.

 

00;24;32;10 - 00;24;57;21

DP

So let's go back to the building plan for a second so our listeners can imagine this. So you've got, as far as I understand it would be like a large square. The front end is a long rectangle, the series of stories and then the leftover, much larger rectangle is the workspaces. And then along that long front facing rectangle atop that is the apartment, am I correct?

 

00;24;57;27 - 00;24;58;16

WS

That's exactly right/

 

00;24;58;16 - 00;25;12;29

DP

Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the style choice now. So when you're walking in the alley in the back, you see one facade and you're walking along the main road in the front, you see a very esthetically different facade. Tell us a little bit about those.

 

00;25;13;02 - 00;27;58;20

WS

Yeah. So the laneway at the back, which is called Balaclava Lane, is the original facade of the building. And it's interesting when you walk through this precinct because what you see is the laneways are almost exactly as they were built in the 1950s. So you see rusty old windows, old timber, rickety doors, original brickwork that's never been painted.

 

And they're beautiful, they're just gorgeous to look at. And people who find them think they're incredible. And this is a little bit of an undiscovered area right in the center of Sydney. It's kind of remarkable. And then on the front street faces of the building, all of the people have gone and renovated them, I guess, every ten years and modernized them.

 

And so there's no good buildings left behind. They've done them cheaply, badly. They've kind of destroyed the integrity of the streetscape. So we saw an opportunity with our building was to leave the back as it was because it's so beautiful. And our work there was to make it durable, waterproof, more environmentally responsible, but not stylistically too different. And then on the front streetscape, we had an opportunity there to be quite expressive.

 

So we tried to do a modern version of the building opposite ours, which is the only one in our street that hasn't been renovated. And it's a classic sort of modernist style where you have very long horizontal steel frame windows, a kind of beautiful ribbons of glass in between those in a bit of a tower at the end.

 

And we almost mimic that design. But we did that in a way that was more nuanced to keeping that hot sun out in particular and giving the views out from the internal rooms that we wanted to see. So in the main meeting rooms, we needed to have solid walls in the spaces so we could pin up our work and control the light.

 

And then we have high level windows to let light into the meeting rooms and low level windows to look out to a garden that's on the street below. So when we worked from that idea of what the internal spaces needed to be, and then we married that with what the environment needed to do and then thought about the context, it led to a new building from the outside, which looks like very long strip windows.

 

And the positioning of those relates to the internal functions of the space. And then we tried to be creative and inventive and to take that everyday material being a brick and just to kind of push it to do things no one had done with it before in our minds. I mean, you have some amazing architects in America, like Frank Gehry, who's done incredible things with brick as well.

 

But we sort of thought there's an opportunity here to represent this era of technology and to be a design that came from the 2020s, for example, rather than something from the 1950s.

 

00;27;58;22 - 00;28;05;25

DP

So tell us a little bit more about this peeling brick facade. How did you guys make these partial vaults?

 

00;28;05;27 - 00;30;54;05

WS

All of the work is in sections and cross section, not in plan. So when you look at the building as a floor plan, they're all rectangular rooms on the inside. But in section we have a part of the facade that peels outwards at the top and sort of leans outwards. And we worked out a way to lay the bricks on top of each other almost at 45 degrees.

 

And we're able to do that with creating a small jig to lay them on. And then we laid up to three courses at once and then we'd have to leave it for overnight and then lay another three courses the next day. So it dried and then on the bottom part, we lay them over a steel frame and on that steel frame we had a curved sheet of metal, so they were laid onto that curve sheet of metal and then tied back using brick ties to that other element that that projected outwards.

 

So that's sort of what was done in construction. How we came up with that was to work collaboratively with our bricklayers and our engineers and just sit down at the table. And we knew who we wanted to build the project before we'd finished all the documentation. And so we were able to sit down with them at a meeting table.

 

And I kind of said, here's the vision, this is what we want to do, and this is how I thought you might make it. But I don't really know how to lay a brick. Can you help us with this process? And the builders we chose I experts in heritage construction and they also know a lot about engineering. So they were able to sit down with their bricklayers and myself and our structure engineer and we workshopped it together.

 

And in a few hours we worked out how to do that. And then they went away and did on their own. And what I've learned over the last 25 years of doing my business is that sometimes you need to monitor something very closely and sometimes you actually just have to let it go. And these bricklayers were so good and so careful.

 

And they loved this job so much that they just wanted to be let go. And I hardly had to do any supervision work at all in the project. It was just developed by them. And one day I remember they turned up on site and they said, William, we think we have to change your brick causing dimension, which I'd set at 51.3 millimeters.

 

They said, we need to change it to 51.4 millimeters. So that's the height at which each brick goes from one to an x one. And it kind of came out with this big bit of paper that looked at all the maps and showed me how that would work and how many bricks it would be. And then I just thought, if we're talking about 0.1 of a millimeter, then you guys don't let me at all, you are there, you really embrace the project.

 

So it was 100% a really strong collaboration project where they would come along and say, We thought we'd like to change this part. And this is our suggestion. And most of the time it just made it better. That's the best part of collaboration, I think, is when you enjoy the process and other people make the project even better.

 

00;30;54;07 - 00;31;12;01

DP

Yeah, for sure. I think I've asked every single guest we've had so far if they had trouble finding a mason, almost every one of them, I think every one of them so far said they did not have a difficult time. I know we've had some challenges over the years finding really talented Masons. It's a dying breed.

 

00;31;12;03 - 00;32;08;01

WS

This project was a wonderful opportunity for some of those bricklayers to really show their skills and to be proud of what they did, and they're really proud of it. The two bricklayers we had here related that was Gareth, who is over 70 years old, lies drick six days a week, loves doing it, and his son in law, Harvey, Harvey, married Gareth daughter and they've been laying bricks together for like 30 years or something incredible.

 

And they just really love this project. And I realized that as architects we actually have an opportunity to create buildings where the tradesmen can really shine. And what I believe is that if you kind of create the vision and the project, the people will come to it. You'll find the people to make it. There'll be someone who just loves the challenge of doing something that's not square and upright and the standard thing. They want to kind of do some experimental parts of the project as well.

 

00;32;08;04 - 00;32;17;03

DP

You said that you were thinking, Well, there's a lot of brick out here. I'd love to use brick. Were there any restrictions because it was a conservation area.

 

00;32;17;05 - 00;33;57;08

WS

Not explicit. I mean, the cities, it's quite merit based in its assessment, I suppose, because what they're saying is we want you to make a positive contribution to this area. I think if you went in, proposed something like an aluminum clad building, they would reject the plans, but you probably could do concrete or concrete block or maybe stone as well.

 

But it seems so logical in this area that it'd be made from brick. I've had quite a lot of experience in working with brick site over the years. I've started to understand how to do mortar joints really well, how to make it kind of work gymnastics so it can do more expressive forms and it felt like the right material.

 

And then for us it came down to the point of choosing exactly the right brick. And we have two types of brick in our building. One is called a dry press brick, and that's made about 60 kilometers from Sydney, so very local. And they're beautiful. They're white, they're in the space that I mean, now they're chalky, they chip easily, they have incredible material quality to them.

 

And because they're on the inside, we can afford to use these more softer bricks and look after them. Well, and then on the outside of the building, we used a very durable brick called La Paloma, which is made in Spain, actually. And we wanted to use a black brick on the outside of the building for a bunch of different reasons.

 

But in Australia we don't have the really good clays that make good black bricks, so we had to use the Spanish brick and I made a special profile for us. So they were able to customize it and they're just incredibly strong and durable and look beautiful with the trees and the landscaping that's in this area and marry perfectly with the building opposite that I mentioned.

 

00;33;57;10 - 00;34;16;12

DP

So let's get back to these unique vaults in the apartment. How did you build these? There's a series of them. I saw some photos. They looked like they were built in one location or perhaps moved or were they built at the spot they ended up in and also really unique shape, right? They're elliptical.

 

00;34;16;15 - 00;36;58;22

WS

Yes. They're all built in situ. And how we built them was pretty close to what we imagined at the start. So we made a catenary shaped false work curve. So like a hollow boat sitting upside down, we made a timber plywood form and then we literally put the brakes top of that form so that the mortar didn't leak out in between.

 

We didn't use regular mortar. We use two terracotta tile glue and we glued the bricks together so that there's no mortar joints. And if you’re laying them up down, that's a good way to do it, because you don't have that problem of the mortar leaking out in an uncontrolled way towards the inside face. We made the timber false work that was all CNC cut was put together without using nails.

 

We worked out that you could make this CNC machine work very hard for you and accented cutting is incredible force work because you can make it a perfect shape and it's really fast. They were all cut overnight, delivered in one day, all assembled within one week. So a very fast process. We laid the bricks across the top and then we put a thin layer of reinforcing mesh over the top of that and we sprayed it with 60 nostics of concrete.

 

Now, in that process, with all the bricks glued together and you have this concrete on the outside, the brick itself, in this catenary shape doesn't need any support. It will hold itself up. It is the perfect structural shape. And that shape can also be described by or represented by taking a chain and hold it at the two ends that slumps to a catenary shape in tension.

 

When you invert that and put that up the other way, it stays true to its shape, but it's all in compression and brick has a great material for compression. It's strong when the forces are loaded on top of it. And the person that made that famous is the Sagrada Familia Building in Barcelona uses catenary vaults everywhere. And Antonio Gaudí is the master of how those elements come together.

 

We laid bricks on top. We spread it with a thin layer of concrete, but we call shock crete. In Australia, it's a similar way to how you build swimming pools. They trialed that off and they left it to drive for a month and then after that we took it away. So the concrete in that system provides provide stability because you could imagine if you make this brick vault, then it's a bit vulnerable when you have kind of a strong sideways force, like a very large wind or a branch or a tree falling on it, it could all fall sideways and topple over and then take it away.

 

And it stands up beautifully in this place is kind of fun to do all that. We worked collaboratively with one of the local universities who helped with the CNC cutting. They wanted a project where they could talk about real life building within education programs, and they linked that into the software and how you would shape and develop it and how even patterned the bricks internally. It was all done through parametric software as well.

 

00;36;58;28 - 00;37;01;27

DP

So I'm curious, do the walls have to be insulated?

 

00;37;01;29 - 00;37;22;02

WS

So in that construction, we have brick on the inside, then we have this thin layer of concrete on the outside of that, we have a 100 millimeters thick insulation that you might only see in a courtroom. So it's rigid insulation, it's got silver socking it, it's very strong. And then outside of that, we have plywood and standing same galvanized roof sheeting.

 

00;37;22;08 - 00;37;23;04

DP

So you had to curve the plywood?

 

00;37;23;06 - 00;38;39;22

WS

Yeah, we curved the plywood and they were laid in strips that ran the length of the catenary except for in parts of it where we wanted to see this very thin edge. We use seven millimeters thick plywood and laid them in two different directions and glued them together. Gluing sounds like a horrible word, isn't it? Sounds like you're cheating in a way.

 

But if you think of it as adhesives, there's a lot of technology that's developed with very strong and durable adhesives now, so they can work well together and as I mentioned earlier, this space we're in now has no air conditioning in the space. It's a beautiful climate. There's a lot of thermal mass. So there's brick walls, stone floors, brick ceilings, effectively relatively small amount of windows.

 

So maybe 10% of the wall area is window. But it's a bright space because we carefully think about how the light comes into the space. So it is very comfortable all year round. We'll go through that week of very hot weather in the middle of summer where the temperatures soared to over 40 degrees and the humidity is up over 80%.

 

We go through that week of the year with a maximum temperature in the space would peak at 26 degrees. It's really comfortable. It works very well. It's a good illustration of that concept that a well insulated environment that has a lot of exposed thermal mass will be very resilient in hot weather as long as you keep it well insulated.

 

00;38;39;24 - 00;38;46;03

DP

It sounds like it. So how long did the process take then from design to completion for the whole project?

 

00;38;46;06 - 00;40;35;20

WS

The whole project was three years. So it was a year and a half to design and document and get planning consent. So while it was chugging its way through the consent authority, which is a very slow process in Sydney in particular, we were documenting the project and then it took us a year and a half to build. It was a wonderful experience.

 

I thought to myself at the outset of the project, here’s three years of my life and I've got to keep working at the same time to keep my business running. I really want to enjoy this and make it a special experience that I won't ever forget. So in doing that, I came to site with my dog every Saturday morning from seven and left at about two in the afternoon and spent a lot of time with the builders working through things, thinking about things, making sure we're prepared for the next week, and then did two site meetings a week on Tuesday mornings and Thursday mornings came down for a few hours each time and I got know every single person that was on the building site really well. So to that level where you knew where they lived, you knew what their family was like and developed a really strong kind of bond in the process. And many of these people have gone on to work on other projects, but we all know each other now, so friendships form in that process and I look back on it as a really wonderful time in my life where I kind of immersed myself in construction and it gave back more than I had to give it.

 

It taught me so much about building, about design, about opportunities with projects, about just if you have a vision, put it out there and just let the people come to it and let them do their magic. That doesn't always work perfectly for everybody because some people just don't want to do the hard stuff. They want to do the easy stuff.

 

But I feel like if you put it out there in the right way, then you will attract the people who want to do the really good projects.

 

00;40;35;22 - 00;41;04;18

DP

Yeah, it's my favorite part of the job is the people part. Actually, I love to draw, but I love going out into the field and meeting people and listening to them and asking them questions and really feeling out early on how they would solve a problem before I tell them how it's going to be solved because I'm always going to learn something.

 

So I completely agree with you. You had said that you loved to draw. Who did the drawing for this building? Was it you and a series of other people or and did you do the drawings in 2D and 3D?

 

00;41;04;20 - 00;43;25;05

WS

I led the team. For me, it was a personal project and that was my opportunity to have very strong and close leadership on every aspect of it, from the architecture to the interior design. In that interior design sort of realm, we custom designed about 13 new products for the project, from chairs to stools to grab rails to door handles to lighting fixtures.

 

For us, the product design stuff takes a lot of time, but it's very rewarding and we couldn't develop new product for it. But we went down to custom designing a whole lot of special things. We did the architecture and the interiors, and I led the design team. At its peak it was about five or six people working on the project during the documentation phase where in construction we had a full time architect plus myself and I was working actually about 40 hours a week on the project to kind of do all this, meetings and make sure everything was done properly. So I was probably not just a project architect, but a little bit of a developer, manager and managing the consultant to the council and other people in that process as well. And we drew it all in 2D software called Micro Station, and that was one of the last projects we did with that software.

 

We now use Revit for most of our documentation and we also used a little bit of software called Rhino, and we did a little bit of scripting for laying out pick patterns with that software, able to very quickly change the shape of the catenary and check the light coming into the space and very quickly change all that brick patterning, which is quite unique, sort of the bricks aren't light in a normal brick bound configuration.

 

They're laid where the offset is very close to the end of the brick. You get this beautiful rifling pattern of the vertical brick joints through the room. And so we used a bit of software for that, and then we made five cardboard models for the space. There was the early version which didn't have a catenary vault. It had a barrel vault in its roof.

 

And we made two other models of the apartment space and a few test models for the facade of the. So I've come to realize that the CGIs will kind of give you a perspective view on the space. A cardboard model will give you a three dimensional, very fast feeling of what the volumes are like. You see the light coming in.

 

It's a very different experience and we find that preparing a cardboard model with a CGI is the perfect way to describe a project to our clients. They love them.

 

00;43;25;12 - 00;43;38;10

DP

Before we move on to one or two other questions, I wanted to go back to sustainability for a second. We talked a little bit about the lack of HVAC system there. Tell us a little bit about the water savings system.

 

00;43;38;12 - 00;46;18;07

WS

So in an old warehouse building, we have a large proportion of roof to the floorplan. So the building here is just over a thousand square meters in its footprint on the land and more than 80% of that is a sawtooth roof which has tall windows facing south. That's our kind of not sunny side and then the inclined roofs facing pitching towards the north which is our sunny side in the southern hemisphere.

 

From that we collect all the water and push it into large rainwater tanks and then that's filtered and used for flushing toilets and for irrigating the property. So we have some irrigation pipes in the ground that drip feed the plants in the area in summer, able to harvest all the water and use that to be honest, we could have put much bigger tanks in because it collects so much water in heavy downpours, a subtropical area, you would kind of go through a month where there isn't any rain or two and then quite often have a big downpour where sometimes it will rain for a week without stopping.

 

So having bigger tanks is the next stage of the project. Actually, we're going to do the next stage, which is another building a few years on from now, and that building will have really big rainwater tanks in there because we can save it up even more for the future. That roof also allowed us to install 260 solar panels, which is about a 95 kilowatt solar farm system, and that generates in its own right more than twice the power that we need in our office.

 

And so we've set up a little network where we export the power to one of our neighbors and we sell them the power at the rate that they would buy it from the normal supplier. We just have a meter on it and we use that money to start to pay down some of the investment on this very large solar array system.

 

We also have a backup battery. So every day we fill up the battery and draw down that in the evening and some of that battery is reserved for backup power. If we were to have a power failure, it will help to run our server to shut down slowly and or things like that. We have a stage two for the project and a few years on from now we're going to build an even larger building on a neighboring site, which we also own, and that building will even be more sustained.

 

We're going to push this even harder. We've just launched our plans to the city to see if we can get approval for it, and it's being favorably received at the moment. But we believe there's a market in Sydney for spaces without air conditioning, with a lot of natural light, with natural ventilation and kind of a unique character that's not your average copper tiled ceiling tiled, sealed office building. I don't think people want that anymore, but we'll find out in the future.

 

00;46;18;09 - 00;46;33;14

DP

It sounds profoundly unique and profoundly valuable. I mean, that is incredible. So because you're not spending all this money on energy, you're generating enough power to run not only your building, but you're selling it the energy as well. That’s amazing.

 

00;46;33;17 - 00;47;54;14

WS

Our sort of energy system is quite advanced in allowing many different roofs of buildings in cities to have solar panels and then to blend that power with the power system of the city. So a lot of people have their own solar array systems. And if there's an excess, so a day like today, it's beautiful and sunny in Sydney and right now we would be making more power than we're using without doubt.

 

And what would be happening is the surplus power would be used to fill up the batteries and once they're filled up, that goes back into the grid for the city and the blend of power is distributed to other buildings in the area. We thought rather than doing that, we could firstly push it to our neighbors and then any top up power comes from the grid and any surplus power goes back into the great.

 

So it's the network set up to have these blended power sources and that makes a lot of sense because you really are producing the energy at the same place that you're using it. And a roof, for example, isn't a redundant asset in our mind. A roof should be used for, in addition to its performance to keep water out, it should be used to collect energy or to make green spaces for people and other animals like birds and bees to live in, in those spaces as well.

 

So we see that as an incredibly valuable asset to every building project.

 

00;47;54;21 - 00;48;07;14

DP

Very forward thinking, really interesting. So one of the last questions got for you, give me one or two things that you guys learned during the design, drawing and construction process on this job. What was new to you?

 

00;48;07;16 - 00;50;43;16

WS

One thing that I had thought about for a long time that this project absolutely cemented in my mind was this idea of bringing people to the table. So I spoke earlier about having our bricklayers and our engineers and the builder and myself come to the table and just say, Here's the vision of the project. I don't know how to lay bricks, but this is what I thought they might be like.

 

And they would say, Yes, it works like this, you don't know that. That was really successful. And we did that almost in every single building element. So we would do the same process for the windows, for laying the floor tiles, for laying the roof shading. I kind of lay out here, here all the drawings. This is what I thought about.

 

This is what we're working towards. Do you think this is the right way of working? And in that process, I got a lot of respect from particularly the tradesmen doing the work because that really happens within they often get told what to do and they don't get asked what their ideas are. And I also realized that it gave them an opportunity to be engaged with the project mentally.

 

So they felt invested. And for that the reward that we had was we got a higher standard of construction than you would normally see. We got people bringing their ideas to the project and we got friendly, smiling faces on a building site. So it kind of had this great energy about it. So that was kind of good. I've been trying to roll that idea out in our practice where we call them briefing meetings.

 

We sit down with a contractor before they start preparing their detailed drawings of how to build what they're going to make. And we tell them about the vision. And people are very, very receptive to that. So that's kind of one thing that I learned in the process. I suppose it ignited this idea that I have now that a part of our role is that we could create opportunities for people to shine like tradesmen, to really show their ways and rather than bricklayers as being borderline ordinary bricks in unremarkable buildings, you could do special things.

 

And the other one I've touched on as well as just I think if you have a vision, then you probably just can just go after that, go looking for the people to collaborate with you and find them and bring them all together so that it's been kind of really invaluable. And I feel like in that process and in collaborating, this always works this way, you need to get to say this is what we're going to try to get out of the project. And in other times you've got to be loose about it and let the collaboration evolve. The design I hate that is not what I want, but you've actually got to back off a little bit from that and listen to them and hear what they're trying to say, because that's what collaboration is.

 

It's two minds coming together to make something better than what one person could do on their own.

 

00;50;43;19 - 00;51;37;06

DP

Yeah, I always find when I ask somebody to give me their opinion or to tell me what they think the solution to a particular challenge is even if the idea they give me isn't something that I'd prefer. I always go back and think about it. And sometimes there are parts of that idea that I end up really falling in love with or liking a lot more than I did or incorporating somewhere else.

 

So I think as architects, we forget. We don't move beyond design all the time. We forget that this is a people business as much as it is about design and it's about money. So, you know, when we get out there in the field, we're working with human beings and to involve them in our jobs and make them invested in the thing that they're making, it ultimately makes a much better product.

 

So I think that's all very insightful.

 

00;51;37;06 - 00;51;40;25

WS

The process is way more enjoyable if you do that as well.

 

00;51;40;28 - 00;51;43;00

DP

Absolutely. My goodness.

 

00;51;43;03 - 00;52;28;13

WS

The part that comes to mind really for the project is longevity is something I really believe in and we've spoken a bit about sustainability in terms of energy consumption or collecting water, but another layer of sustainability is if you design things to last a long time, then you can make really big gains in projects. So we won quite a few sustainability awards, principally based on this idea of making way more energy than we use and not having air conditioning, which is a real hurdle to sell over in our environment.

 

The other thing I think is just if you make buildings last for 50, 100 years, then you know, all the embodied energy that goes into making them is really amortized over a long lifespan and becomes much less significant.

 

00;52;28;15 - 00;52;51;03

DP

Yeah, in college we hear a lot about timeless architecture, right? That's our goal is to make architecture timeless and it's so incredibly challenging to do just that. So I commend you guys on the building out there. It's really wonderful. So after all these years of being an architect or running a firm, if you could give your younger self some career advice, what would you say? What have you learned?

 

00;52;51;06 - 00;54;23;16

WS

What I think in architecture is that it's a very broad spectrum of opportunities. You could be really good at detailing or you could be really good at design, or you could be really great with clients and consultants and approval, in a way you’re so good with words. What I feel like is that there aren't many people who can do all of those things extremely well.

 

People tend to have an area that they're good at for people to excel. I feel like you kind of got to go with what you're naturally good and develop and grow that skill and become amazing at that. That's probably what there is to do now that can be architectural detailing, or it could be a type of building that you're interested, or it could be a place you get excited.

 

Like I get excited about incredible internal spaces. That's my favorite thing to design and that's sort of what I try to build is opportunities with our projects. How do we build these amazing interiors? For me, the outside is secondary to that. I always do the insides first and then come to the outside afterwards. That's my favorite thing. And then I kind of work on the things that I'm not very good at.

 

I find conceptual design really hard. It exhausts me. I put a lot of time into it. I set my standards very high, so I do it again and again and again. So I get it right. But once I've got the foundation right, it feels like a lot of our projects, everything falls into place. So the second part's much easier.

 

Okay. I guess in my advice, you don't leave the parts you're not so good alone, but you probably have to recognize where your strengths are and also play to those as well.

 

00;54;23;18 - 00;54;38;12

DP

Yeah, I always heard in business pick one thing and do it really well and ultimately you'll be successful. So that's a part of it for sure. So, William, it's been great to have you here. Thank you very much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about this Smart Design studio?

 

00;54;38;18 - 00;55;04;16

WS

Now Website SmartDesignStudio.com has a lot of information about the projects we've completed and our team. And then also just on Instagram, we kind of put a lot of work in to updating people on what's happening, what's currently happening. So that's @Smart.Design.Studio. There's a lot of updates on that side about who we are and how we're working on all the very current information. It's been a great pleasure to be on the podcast again. Thank you for inviting me.

 

00;55;04;18 - 00;55;24;12

DP

It was great to have you here, William, I learned an awful lot. The building's beautiful and the architecture your firm does is really quite wonderful. So check out the website.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;14

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;17 - 00;00;33;16

John Woelfling (JW)

We looked at that rectangle and where the opportunity was to expand the building horizontally, and then really started to figure out where the best units would be located, where the best apartment layouts would be in the existing building. It was actually a challenge. We were not going to change the fenestration where the windows are located or the size of the windows.

 

So that really dictated a lot of the apartment placements and the size. So I think we were pretty clever about putting all the like fundamentals and figuring out how the floorplan would come together.

 

00;00;33;23 - 00;03;17;20

DP

This is my guest, John Woelfling. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight John's project 50 Nevins Street. 50 Nevins Street is located in downtown Brooklyn. It literally appears to be two buildings in one. The approach was to reinvigorate a century old building through gut renovation and addition, which provides affordable housing, housing for formerly homeless individuals and mental health services.

 

The historic site, with its new ten story addition, features 129 new apartments. The building was originally designed by famed Brooklyn architect Frank Freeman, opened in 1913 as a YWCA. In the early 1930s an extensive portion of the building was shaved off to enlarge. Schermerhorn Street and make way for the subway line. That adjustment resulted in an imbalance to the original Colonial Revival building.

 

The new couple design ascribes value to the existing building and helps restore the balance it had lost. The existing red brick building remains shorter with a classical cornice. The new building sits slightly taller, flush and adjacent with a recessed connector which visually separates the architecture. The contrast in masonry color, dark connector and stylistic changes to the forms and facades set the two buildings apart esthetically, though clearly their co-combined.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. John Woelfling is a partner at Dattner Architects in New York City and holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech. John leverages his broad experiences working across project types like education, recreation, health care and infrastructure to inform his leadership of the firm's mixed use residential projects.

 

John is a recognized passive house expert. His focus on sustainable design practices is guided by proactive education of evolving green technologies and incorporating them into his work. John's committed to creating sustainable, efficient designs that use an integrated, holistic approach. He frequently lectures about affordable housing and sustainability. Speaking at the Center for Architecture, the New York State AIA, Urban Green and Green Build, Forum for Urban Design, Reimagine Conference and the Phius Passive House Conference.

 

So welcome, John. Nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Dattner Architects in New York City. Where are you guys located? What's the size of the firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;17;22 - 00;05;20;11

JW

So Dattner Architects is a firm that's been around for close to 60 years. We are located in Midtown Manhattan, just like a ten minute walk from the studio, so it's nice and easy to get over here. We've been there for a little over a year and a half, but our offices have been in New York City for our entire life of the firm, we’re about 110 people now.

 

I just met with a few people and we're looking at hiring some more people. So it's a good time to be practicing in New York City and working on housing and the wide variety of work that my firm does. We do a mixed bag of cornucopia of project types. We do housing, which is what we're going to talk about today.

 

We do subway stations, we do marine transfer stations for garbage, we do a salt shed here or there, medical health care, schools, libraries, a whole mixture of projects. I'm going to talk about some of the advantages that gives us a little bit further on if we can.

 

One of the projects that you or maybe some of your listeners know is a project that's on the West Side Highway at Spring Street. It is a salt shed. These types of projects that you might normally see that are a salt shed are very utilitarian domes, and they just protect the salt from the elements. But our project, we did something kind of clever, which was we created this shell that was inspired by the crystal and shape of the salt. So it's this kind of crystal that sits along the water along the West Side highway.

 

So if you're going up and down the West Side Highway, you've probably seen this. Keep your eyes open for it now. But that's an example of how my office has this sensibility of taking these very civic things that could be very plain and very understated and look for those opportunities. And sometimes we hit a home run, sometimes, you know, we get on base.

 

But each one of those projects is a real opportunity to take a civic piece of architecture, which is what we do. We do civic architecture, and we look to make the city, the city that we live in the best that it can be. So I'm very proud to be part of the work that we do. It's a large group of people, as I said, 110 people. It's inspiring every day to be able to go into the office and work with such a great group of people.

 

00;05;20;14 - 00;05;37;25

DP

That's so great. I mean, you're doing exactly what you're taught to do in architecture school, right? You're taking advantage of the project at hand, you're being creative, you're being thoughtful, you're impressing the client, you're making beautiful things for people that live in the city. It sounds fun and it's a good time to be working. You said you're busy.

 

00;05;38;02 - 00;06;15;19

JW

Yes, we are busy. We've had some ups and downs. But I do think one of the advantages of our firm is that we have this mixed group of typologies. So, you know, when housing was like going gangbusters a couple of years ago, we were really busy and a lot of our work was housing. But as things have shifted over to more infrastructure, which is actually what we're seeing, we're seeing a lot more investment in infrastructure.

 

We're having those subway type projects, those marine transfer stations, those types of utilitarian transportation and infrastructure projects are taking over a greater percentage of our work. So we're continuing to stay busy. So the old adage of diversifying your portfolio applies to many, many things.

 

00;06;15;21 - 00;06;20;29

DP

So you are a principal in the firm. How long have you been there and what's your role in the office now?

 

00;06;21;01 - 00;08;13;19

JW

So I have been a principal there for 20 years. I've been practicing as an architect in the city for 30 years. So I landed at Dattner relatively early in my career and found it to be a great place to stay and work. So I've been there for that long. One of the things that I focus on now is our housing work, our housing studio.

 

As I mentioned a few minutes ago, the housing work has been a great source of workload in the past decade, 15, ten years. As that work became more and more important in the office, we needed to have leadership to take over and really guide that practice. And one of the things that me and others in the office have been focusing on is integrating really innovative, sustainable design strategies into our housing.

 

And this, I think, has its biggest benefit in affordable housing. The way housing often gets developed in dense urban environments like New York City is that it is the harder to develop sites that are most likely to be affordable housing because they are the less desirable sites, the sites that are either adjacent to a highway, adjacent to a subway, difficult geometry, a lot of rock, some sort of challenging situation, which thank you for the recognition that my firm and me personally are doing what architects are trained to do looking at these challenges and finding the opportunities.

 

So that's what we do. We often are faced with challenging sites that maybe are right near infrastructure that is really adding to pollution and environmental degradation. So this idea of sustainable, affordable housing I think is really in our work translated into environmental justice, taking people who might normally live in these underserved communities that have this infrastructure and a real inequity for environmental considerations and trying to make that better. And one of the ways we do that is through Passive House.

 

00;08;13;21 - 00;08;20;04

DP

So let's dig in here and talk about our building. Tell us a little bit about 50 Nevins Street. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;08;20;06 - 00;10;13;14

JW

So one of our clients, ICL, which stands for Institute for Community Living, and they are a not for profit organization that does just tremendous, phenomenal work in the city, serving really at-risk underserved people in New York City. They owned this building. They purchased it in 1986. As you mentioned in the intro, it was originally designed as a YWCA as an SRO, a single room occupancy building.

 

So all the rooms were like single bedded rooms. There was a common cafeteria and kitchen and common bathing facilities. So it was like really stacking people in. And this was like an old model of housing people that was, you know, appropriate at a certain time in the city's history. But not really contemporary residential standards, what we would expect today.

 

So that was kind of the history of this building. You also mentioned the shaving off of the north end of the building, which actually we suspected that through some research, but we didn't really get it confirmed until we got into the building and started doing the demolition and saw, oh, this is where they replaced this column with a different type of steel that was in the original building.

 

It was riveted steel. In the new portion it was rolled sections. We'd see the back up wall or actually the composite wall. And the original building was all brickwork. It was all bonded brick wall in the new building in the modified part that happened when they widened the street, it became a terracotta block back up with then the finished brick in front, the window details were different. So it was actually really interesting to have that kind of confirmation and see it once the demo all happened. The building has this legacy of being modified and I think serving the greater good, the widening of the street and the shaving off of 20 feet of the building was done so that there would be this greater public amenity of the subway station that would be improve the life of all New Yorkers.

 

00;10;13;16 - 00;10;18;24

DP

Yeah, interesting. It's all related. So what was the building next to your building?

 

00;10;18;27 - 00;11;33;13

JW

The building next to our building was a recently constructed hotel, which was a very different building type, superstructure type construction techniques, and much taller than the existing building as well. So it was a really dominating presence. So one of the things that we tried to do and I think we were pretty successful is kind of mitigate that presence.

 

It was just to the west of our site. But yeah, we wanted to kind of bridge that more contemporary with the traditional classic building that was retained on the site. The strategy that we employed for the redevelopment was to expand the building both vertically and horizontally. The horizontal piece was easy. You just, you know, you build next to the building.

 

There was a parking lot. Basically a service area for the existing building, which is, you know, very handsome pre-war building. But that pre-war building kind of vintage came with a lot of burdens or a lot of legacy issues that made the building more difficult to use as a contemporary building that needed to be handicapped accessible.

 

The systems were out of date really at the end of their service life. So we had to do some major kind of heroic things to this existing building to keep it.

 

00;11;33;13 - 00;11;34;14

DP

And you wanted to keep it?

 

00;11;34;21 - 00;12;03;18

JW

Yeah, absolutely. It was such a handsome building also, I've mentioned sustainable design, but one of the most sustainable things that you can do if you're doing a project is to keep an existing building, keep the shell, keep as much as you can. Now, obviously, you've got to like do some demolition and throw some materials away. But if you can keep that building out of the landfill, keep that building from having to be shipped to the landfill and all the energy that goes into that retaining that energy that was originally used to build the building, that's one of the most sustainable things that you can do of all.

 

00;12;03;24 - 00;12;06;09

DP

So tell me, is the subway system still there?

 

00;12;06;11 - 00;12;21;03

JW

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. We don't quite feel it rumbling in the building when it goes by, but there were some really special supportive excavation considerations that we had to do. We had to be really concerned about settlement. So there was a lot of thought put into the foundations of this building.

 

00;12;21;03 - 00;12;22;27

DP

Yeah, the new foundations.

 

00;12;23;00 - 00;13;57;28

JW

So the new foundations were complicated. The existing building foundations were also complicated. When we did this vertical expansion above the existing building, I mentioned earlier the term heroic, and it really was heroic. I mean, when I look back on this, I think, Oh my God, what was I thinking? And we actually convinced somebody to do this. We convinced a contractor to do this.

 

We convinced our client, which, you know, there are great clients. I don't want to make it sound like I've deceived them, but it was a really courageous project to both undertake by all parties. In the existing building we built above, there was additional load that we were superimposing on the existing superstructure in that building. We had to brace one of the columns so that we could lower the footing and increase the size of the footing.

 

And the way we did that was and when I say we, I mean it's really the contractor that did this. We came up with the concept, but they executed it. There was a huge beam that was spanned from one column to another that supported this column temporarily, that we were going to lower the footing on, and they jacked that beam up and supported that column so that the existing footing that was undersized could be pulled out, excavated further down, and then a new footing could be introduced and an extension of the column.

 

So gutsy acrobatics to do this. And the way they tested whether that beam, a temporary beam that was put in, whether it separated the footing from the column, was they took a piece of paper and they slipped it between the footing and the base plate of the column to see if it was actually separated. So they wanted to test that to make sure there was daylight before they pulled out that existing footing. Phenomenal construction sequencing and logistics. It was a gutsy project I'm very proud of.

 

00;13;58;01 - 00;14;00;21

DP

So what were the project restrictions like for you guys?

 

00;14;00;26 - 00;15;33;11

JW

So there were a couple of restrictions. When we first started looking at this, we wanted to increase the density of the project because it was a rare kind of once in a building's lifetime opportunity to increase the amount of affordable and supportive housing that could be provided in downtown Brooklyn. So our client ICL, knew that this was kind of their one chance.

 

So we looked at a couple ideas, a couple of options, and to get to 129 units, we had to bend, maybe break the rules of the New York City zoning resolution. And the way you do that is you go through something called a ULURP. It's a process that involves community engagement. It involves talking to city planning, New York City city planning departments, and doing something that is not as of right.

 

The current zoning resolution and building code allow you to build certain things. As long as you get approval from the Department of Buildings, you can build those. But we needed to bend the rules here or break the rules to make this actually happen. So we went to the various city agencies, went to community boards and made this proposal to expand the building vertically, to increase the floor area ratio, the amount of floor area that you can build on the site.

 

And we were successful in that because I think a lot of these stakeholders recognized that this project was going to really make a difference to so many people's lives and be a community asset. So normally we've all heard the term NIMBY, not in my backyard. Normally. That's one of the things that we bought up against when we do these types of projects and there was some of that, but I think it was much more toned down because people recognized the benefit of this project.

 

00;15;33;18 - 00;15;37;18

DP

So did you guys have the building completely designed when you went to the people?

 

00;15;37;21 - 00;15;48;12

JW

No. We had the vision. We kind of had a good idea how many units were going to go into the building. We knew what the program was going to be. We had some of the renderings completed because that's really important to making that pitch to stakeholders.

 

00;15;48;18 - 00;15;51;24

DP

What about height requirements for you guys? What limited you?

 

00;15;52;00 - 00;16;15;09

JW

I'm going to try not to get too much into the weeds and the zoning resolution, but this is it actually falls into a limited height district in downtown Brooklyn, which we adhered to, but we needed the increased floor area. The height was somewhat limiting, but there were other limitations on the building as well. We could only add so many floors onto the existing building before we kind of maxed out on what we could really feasibly do with the existing foundations and the existing superstructure.

 

00;16;15;11 - 00;16;24;13

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the building plan. So the existing building is like a long rectangle. So what did you guys do with your additions?

 

00;16;24;15 - 00;17;55;23

JW

So one of the really critical things for affordable housing in most housing, all housing is efficiency. And the efficiency was really driven by the desire to maximize the number of units that we could put here so we could serve the most people. So we looked at that rectangle and where the opportunity was to expand the building horizontal lean and located our cores, our elevator and our stairs in a spot that worked best for that, and then really started to figure out where the best units would be located, where the best apartment layouts would be. In the existing building, it was actually a challenge. We were not going to change the fenestration where the windows are located or the size of the windows. So that really dictated a lot of the apartment placements and the size. New York City has something called light and air requirements for the apartments, you need to have a certain size window for a certain size room, and you can't go below that for both light daylight and ventilation.

 

So the existing building’s layout was determined largely not completely, but largely by the existing fenestration layout. And then we had more flexibility in the new building portion, but that was also a challenge because it was a very limited floor plates and it really had to integrate with the existing building. We had corridors that we had to figure out.

 

We placed the elevator in the inside corner where the two buildings meet, because that's a place where you can't really put apartments because there's no windows there. So I think we were pretty clever about putting all the, like, fundamentals and figuring out how the floor plan would come together.

 

00;17;55;25 - 00;18;01;04

DP

How did the apartment sizes compare from the old building to the new building? Are they exactly the same?

 

00;18;01;06 - 00;18;57;09

JW

No, it is dramatically different. The original SRO, the single room occupancy, I mean, the rooms were eight feet wide, ten feet deep. So really puny and not in any way contemporary or fair housing model for the residents that were going to come back. So we basically blew out all those interior partitions and relaid out the building interiors.

 

The original building was actually a double loaded corridor. And when I said below the corridor, I mean there's a hallway down the middle and it's got apartments on either side, fairly efficient way to do it. But it was such a narrow building and the site is so narrow that when we redid the building in this more contemporary model of apartments, we couldn't fit a double loaded corridor in there.

 

So it's really a single loaded corridor in the existing building. In the new building, we had more flexibility in the site dimension, so we were able to do a double loaded corridor in that portion. But it was, yeah, a real challenge to adapt the existing building. But as I said, you know, it's one of the most sustainable things you can do.

 

00;18;57;16 - 00;19;01;06

DP

Are the apartments a lot larger in the new building and the windows taller?

 

00;19;01;12 - 00;20;38;07

JW

I would say in the new building, no, they're not significantly larger. They're just kind of what they are. I think the windows are maybe a little bit taller, certainly wider. We wanted to have some affinity between the two buildings. We didn't want to have like completely different fenestration sizes, which really I think would be inequitable to the people who would move into this building.

 

But we did in many ways, we made the new building distinct from the existing building. You go around New York City or any other city that's been around for a while and you see these buildings that are historic and have been adapted. You know, there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can either be matchy matchy about it and try to replicate in new construction and new materials a very similar thing.

 

And that's usually pretty apparent. It's never seamless, even if you could make it perfectly matching, I just don't think that's genuine. I don't think it's a truthful representation of where we are in the construction and it's not necessary. There may be times when it's merited, but it shouldn't be your knee jerk reaction. It shouldn't be the starting point.

 

So one way is to be absolutely seamless about it. One is to put a cap on top of the building. But we wanted to make this building really tell a story about the history of it. So we basically wrapped this new piece of contemporary construction up in around the existing building and allowed it to kind of finish off the existing building.

 

You mentioned earlier some of the adaptations that have happened to the building that I think really compromised the original integrity of the design, the symmetry and the way the building ended. So I think we kind of rectified that with this new construction that comes over the top and helps finish the building in a way that I think looks more appropriate.

 

00;20;38;12 - 00;20;42;27

DP

So tell me about the cornice on the existing building. Is that new or was that there?

 

00;20;43;02 - 00;20;51;14

JW

That's actually a really interesting question. The cornice we thought from the street level. Oh, that's the original cornice. It looks very detailed and looks contemporary on the building.

 

00;20;51;16 - 00;20;52;11

DP

It's gigantic.

 

00;20;52;11 - 00;21;05;12

JW

It's gigantic. Yeah, it's probably four feet tall and overhangs three feet. It's yeah, it's enormous. But we got up there and when we started to do that demolition that I mentioned earlier, it's made of fiberglass. So it was actually done some time, I think in the…

 

00;21;05;12 - 00;21;06;06

DP

Sixties or so?

 

00;21;06;06 - 00;21;27;27

JW

I think it was actually in the eighties. I think after ICL originally bought the building, they did a couple modifications to make it better suit their needs, not to the extent that we'd most recently renovated, but they, I think, replaced the existing cornice with a fiberglass one. The fiberglass one is in great shape. We kept it. We like took it off where we had to for construction sequencing and logistics, but then put the thing back and just re-caulked it. It's done now.

 

00;21;27;28 - 00;21;40;09

DP

But it's a great cap to the existing building and it really sets the two buildings apart. And when you look at the additions, it all kind of makes sense. And that cornice I think does a lot to do that.

 

00;21;40;14 - 00;21;53;23

JW

Yeah, it's a very formal gesture, that retaining it and then allowing that to be part of this kind of bridge. In this reveal that you also mentioned earlier, the reveal is very intentional to help make that separation very visible and legible.

 

00;21;53;29 - 00;22;01;25

DP

So did you guys have to make many structural changes to the existing building? You gutted it and it's steel? On the interior?

 

00;22;01;25 - 00;22;06;18

JW

Steel frames, multi exterior wall. We did do window replacements.

 

00;22;06;20 - 00;22;08;26

DP

Changed the way the walls are insulated?

 

00;22;08;29 - 00;23;14;11

JW

We did, yeah. We did a spray-on insulation. I know there's some critique of spray on insulation, but it really was the right material for this because it gave us our vapor barrier and our improved insulation all in one shot. But yeah, we did that on the inside of the building. One of the principles of Passive House, which is a system to really decrease the building's energy requirements, you significantly drive down the energy loads in a building using the system.

 

And the way you do that is a high performance building exterior. That's one of the strategies, is you make a high performance building exterior, which is both your windows and your insulation and your continuity of the insulation and your air vapor barrier. So in historic buildings you're somewhat limited with what you can do with that continuous insulation because you've got your slabs coming in, the slabs are buried on the exterior wall or the steel, but there's thermal bridges that just can't be avoided in these buildings of this timeframe.

 

But we did the best we could. And on balance, with the insulation on the inside and the new building’s envelope, we were able to get a building that could easily comply with the energy code. So yeah, we had to insulate the existing buildings walls and that's how we dealt with that.

 

00;23;14;18 - 00;23;22;17

DP

You guys had to replace some of the existing brick. So talk a little bit about that and then tell us what kind of brick you used on the new addition.

 

00;23;22;20 - 00;24;41;25

JW

Sure. Yeah. The existing brick, we had to undo some sins of the past at lintels the repairs that were done previously. Not quite sure when they were done with maybe a little bit less sensitivity to matching the brick and the mortar. So that was some of the repair work that we did at the existing building. The existing building also has a base, a very formal base.

 

It's a very classical design to have that base. So we wanted to, that was another one of these affinity points that we wanted with the new building. So we created this base, which was a dark grounding brick that's a Glen-Gery product, it's a Black Hills velour. The velour is the finish on the brick. So that kind of established the base of the building.

 

Then above that, we did a much lighter, more contemporary brick, also a Glen-Gery product, White Plains velour. Again, the velour is the finish of the texture of the face of the brick, and we did similar coursing, the mortar is very different. The mortar in the White Plains is its own mortar. The existing buildings, mortar repairs were their own mortar, so they would match that building's texture and coloration.

 

But through a combination of the same brick size, the same coursing, and also picking up on that limestone detailing that's in the existing building we did kind of create this affinity between the two buildings. So they're definitely distinct from each other, but they're also kind of of a family.

 

00;24;42;01 - 00;24;48;23

DP

Yeah, it's a nice touch. It ties the two buildings together. So how long did this whole process take from beginning to end?

 

00;24;48;25 - 00;26;00;29

JW

That is a good question. So the ULURP is something that you don't normally undertake. The ULURP is a discretionary approval process, so that added about a year to the design time. So I would say it took about 18 months to design the building, and the construction of it was also really complicated. It took, I think, 30 months to build it, and that included demolition, it included the excavation, and a global pandemic.

 

So it was one of these projects where, you know, we had to figure out how to do this, how to work remotely, work with the contractor, with all these site safety considerations. So we were fortunate enough that in the city there was a program that allowed for affordable housing to proceed. So it was told to the Department of Buildings that this is an affordable housing project and they give you a special permit that you post on the construction barricade.

 

And that allowed us to proceed. Now, it doesn't mean that we could proceed business as usual. Before the pandemic, there were all sorts of hand-washing stations and protocols for staff to be, you know, separate. And we would show up on site, we'd have masks, we wouldn't walk between crowds of people. So the fact that it got done in two and a half years is kind of a real testament to the partnership between ICL, the contract and the design team.

 

00;26;01;05 - 00;26;21;21

DP

So you'd mentioned the unique construction detail with this steel column that you guys had to alter the foundation for. What about some of the masonry on the exterior? Were there any unique construction details that you guys had to come up with? For example, for the connector, how did you guys end up doing that? I mean, is it all pretty straightforward?

 

00;26;21;23 - 00;27;03;24

JW

Well, yeah, I guess straightforward is a real simplification of what's involved. But yeah, we had to figure out where the steel was going to go, where we were going to break that new steel versus the existing steel. There's got to be some tolerances for movement and construction tolerances. That bridge was really made through that recessed metal reveal that you see separating the two buildings.

 

So we made it easier on ourselves by doing it in that different material that allowed for a lot of tolerance. It could be pushed back 18 inches and if, you know, was 16 inches in one place and a little bit different on the other side, you couldn't really tell because it was a very different material. So I think we're smart about making our lives in the contractors' lives a little bit easier.

 

00;27;04;01 - 00;27;08;11

DP

And how does the new additions touch the building next to it?

 

00;27;08;11 - 00;27;12;07

JW

There is a seismic joint.

 

00;27;12;07 - 00;27;13;06

DP

Really? Is that pretty typical?

 

00;27;13;06 - 00;27;41;21

JW

It's pretty typical, yeah. And it's based upon the various heights of the building. For every 50 feet it's one inch. So I think we had a setback from the property line three inches because we were just over 100 feet. So for every 50 feet you got one inch. So if you're 110, you got three inches. So we had something called an MCO joint, which is just a squishy finished joint that you kind of stuffy in after everything else is up and constructed. And that allows for any sort of seismic movement in case there's an earthquake.

 

00;27;41;23 - 00;27;45;28

DP

So tell me a little bit about the Enterprise Green Communities Program.

 

00;27;46;00 - 00;31;03;17

JW

It is a program that any affordable housing project that is going to be using public funds needs to adhere to. It's a little bit like LEED, LEED is a very broad system. So Enterprise and LEED are broad. They talk about community connected communities, recycled materials, water usage, energy usage, healthy interior environments. So that system is really helpful and I think it helps there be a consistency through all of the affordable housing that's being built now that there is this level of sustainability that is not only about carbon, it's about water, it's about interior indoor air quality.

 

So that's a really important system. The Passive House system that I've touched on a little bit earlier takes one piece of that, the energy piece of it and really ramps it up. So Passive House is about investing in that building exterior. You have a high quality envelope with continuous insulation, continuous air barrier that allows for very little air to come in or out of the building.

 

And that continuity is also part of the windows. And the windows are usually high performance windows that are either triple glazed or just high performance glazing. And what that really allows the envelope of the building to do is to be almost like a winter jacket. I think a good analogy aside from the winter jacket analogy, is like a thermos, an insulated cup versus just the standard deli coffee cup.

 

Your deli coffee cup is going to lose the heat in the coffee pretty quickly. If you've got the thermos, it's going to retain that heat for a lot longer. So what that allows you to do in the building is retain interior internal heat gains. And the internal heat gains are lighting, appliances, people occupying the space. So those internal heat gains that you can gain passively and retain in the building allow you to really drive down those heating loads in the building.

 

So in a building built in New York City, similar to 50 Nevins on its scale and its size and its number of occupants, you can heat the apartment with a hand dryer, so you really drive down those heating loads. You've got to cool the building too. So that high performance envelope also helps keep that cooled air, that energy that's invested in the air, keep that inside the building.

 

It's not leaking outside the building. You're not getting hot, humid air bleeding into the building when you're exhausting the bathrooms and the kitchen. So Passive House is really taking the energy component of any affordable housing building and really ramping up the stakes and making it a much more high performance building. There's more to it than that. The mechanical systems need to be designed and balanced for that.

 

There's domestic hot water that needs to be taken into consideration, but it's an area of practice that we are really pushing for and advocating with our clients for not only just being democratic and equitable for the buildings and the environments that they're often located in, but there's also regulatory pressures that are coming down the pike. There's something called Local Law 97, which is going to fine buildings if they don't have certain energy performance, if they emit too many emissions, whether it's carbon or sulfur dioxide or whatever, there's metrics for buildings of certain types and their sizes. And if you are not meeting those standards, there's going to be penalties to pay.

 

00;31;03;19 - 00;31;04;26

DP

So that's coming down the pike.

 

00;31;04;26 - 00;31;42;01

JW

That's coming down the pike. I think 2025 is the first threshold or maybe it's 2026. But we're designing buildings now that are going to take a year to design, two years to build. So by the time they're operational, we're in Local Law 97. So we're advising clients to not put your heads in the sand on this. You know, a lot of people aren't doing this.

 

The intense heat that we've been feeling, the wildfires in Canada, the fires and migration, we're starting to see the stuff hit the fan. So our clients are reading the writing on the wall. Local Law 97. There is a Local Law 154 that's banning gas usage.

 

00;31;42;04 - 00;31;43;20

DP

Natural gas.

 

00;31;43;20 - 00;31;53;10

JW

Yeah, natural gas. And you've actually done something that I want to check you on. Yeah, sure. It's natural gas, but who told you it's natural gas? It's fossil gas. The idea of that, it's natural. Okay.

 

00;31;53;10 - 00;31;55;02

DP

I was distinguishing from propane.

 

00;31;55;06 - 00;32;17;11

JW

Okay, well, it's kind of all the same stuff. It's all carbon that goes into the atmosphere and affects our climate. So I don't mean to be a jerk about it. And I find myself kind of being programmed by certain, you know, sales pitches and how they want you to perceive these things. So, yes, there's a natural gas ban, however nice you want to say it. So there's all these regulatory pressures.

 

00;32;17;11 - 00;32;20;23

DP

When you say local law. So this is New York State, New York City?

 

00;32;20;26 - 00;33;06;12

JW

Local law is just New York City. There's state legislation that's also banned gas fired equipment. And California's doing a similar thing. So it's amazing how much the landscape is shifting under our feet. There's a building in New York City not too far from where we are right now that was designed six or seven years ago. And one of the really innovative, cutting edge technologies that they used was to use a gas turbine to produce all of their electricity.

 

There was a cogen plant, so on the top of the building on the 73rd floor, they've got a gas turbine. And I believe it's also producing domestic hot water for the building's use, which seems, you know, at the time innovative, were going to be more independent. But I can't imagine trying to propose that sort of strategy now. So it's really amazing how much the landscape is shifting under our feet.

 

00;33;06;14 - 00;33;12;19

DP

So you've been an architect for 30 years. If you could give your younger self some career advice, what would it be?

 

00;33;12;21 - 00;33;55;23

JW

Knowing what I know now, I wish I would have been more thoughtful about sustainability and how important that is, because I think the decisions that we're making now, we're only really going to see the benefits of that or the implications or the results of that down the road and when I think about how much carbon has been put into the atmosphere since, like I think 1992, I think 50% of the carbon that's in the atmosphere was produced I think since the nineties. So it's not climate change, global warming. It's often thought about as something that's occurred in over a century. And a lot of the legacy emissions were from the beginning of the industrial revolution, but it's really not the case. It's really in this compressed time frame that's in the last 30, 40 or 50 years.

 

00;33;55;25 - 00;34;02;22

DP

John, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where could people go to learn more about Dattner Architects in New York City and yourself?

 

00;34;02;25 - 00;34;18;20

JW

It's really easy. We've got a website, Dattner.com, I think we have a good representation of our work there. You'll see that all of our work is basically in the city and we can ride the subway to get to our site. So it's a pleasure to have spoken to you today and glad to be able to share some of my experience.

 

00;34;18;23

DP

Thank you very much and great to have you here

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;12

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;14 - 00;00;33;10

Jay Valgora (JV)

So, it's very complex. It's two residential towers and it's mixed use. It has retail at the base with a series of astonishing amenities and public spaces that link them together, including a fantastic pool deck overlooking the ocean, overlooking the roller coaster, and a whole series of public spaces. Because, you know, there's a social life to a building, too.

 

00;00;33;17 - 00;02;02;09

DP

This is my guest, Jay Valgora. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode of The Design Vault, we highlight Jay's project 1515 Surf Avenue. It is a two tower, 26 and 16 story residential building complex in Coney Island, Brooklyn, designed by Studio V Architecture. This street corner project will span 470,000 square feet and yield 461 units 139 designated for affordable housing and 11,000 square feet of ground floor retail.

 

The building facade is variegated white to cream colored brick, with the main building podium facing Surf Avenue, featuring a soaring ground floor elevation with several diagonal columns, its sloped roofline is further defined by a stepped series of wooden platforms the design team calls the vertical boardwalk. The building features curved glass lined balconies and amenity deck heated pool and green roof.

 

Residents have panoramic views of Coney Island Amusement Park and the Atlantic Ocean. The total outdoor space will span over 20,000 square feet. The building includes a fitness center, lounges, co-working spaces, indoor basketball court, handball court and accessory off street parking. When completed in 2024, the property will be the largest geothermal heated and cooled building in New York City.

 

00;02;02;12 - 00;03;17;08

DP

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Jay Valgora is the founder and principal of the architectural design firm Studio V Architecture in New York City. Jay grew up in Buffalo. He tells the story that it was the steel mills where his father worked and the historic grain elevators of Buffalo that influenced him to become an architect.

 

Jay received his Bachelor of Architecture at Cornell University and his master's degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was also a fellow in the Fulbright program to the United Kingdom. At Harvard, Jay studied under Pritzker Prize winning Portuguese architect Alvaro Cesar. Mr. Valdora is on the forefront of urban design with nine projects on the New York City waterfront.

 

He works closely with entrepreneurs to create innovative designs and programs, collaborates with government agencies to address policy infrastructure, environmental issues and approvals, and is deeply engaged with communities through innovative public space design. Welcome, Jay. Nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Studio V architecture in New York City. Where are you guys located? What's the size of your firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;17;11 - 00;04;07;23

JV

So Studio V is right in the heart of Manhattan. You know, we're right in the middle of the island. I like to say that we live in a city of four islands and a peninsula, and we're right in the middle on 32nd Street and Park Avenue. Actually, by the time you broadcast this or soon thereafter, we've even purchased a small building, which we're currently redesigning right now, and we'll be moving to 111 East 29th Street, where we've created our own studio, which is currently under construction.

 

I guess the only other thing I can tell you is that Studio V is really all about the people. We have a really incredible range of people that work with us. We're about two dozen, and so we really see ourselves as a boutique architecture firm, but we handle tremendously large and complex projects because we have a really wonderful team and very diverse clients and very diverse projects. So we really pride ourselves on doing things that are a little bit different.

 

00;04;07;26 - 00;04;13;20

DP

So tell us a little bit about the firm. When did you get started and what's your role in the office now?

 

00;04;13;27 - 00;04;57;04

JV

So I began the firm and founded it in 2006. So I guess we've been around about nearly eight years and I'm the principal and the founder of the firm, but I have seven senior staff. They collaborate with me on all the projects. It's really an open atelier. I intentionally always call it a studio. It's not really an office, it's not really a firm.

 

It has the whole atmosphere and character of a studio. We have no offices, we have entirely open spaces. We have huge collaborative areas. So my role really is to work with and inspire the great designers and talented architects with whom I work and to provide leadership. But really they play an essential role. It's not Valgora architects, it's Studio V, and the studio really comes first.

 

00;04;57;08 - 00;05;10;16

DP

It's really interestingly described. I haven't heard somebody talk about their office like that. So tell me a little bit about how you get your people to pull mostly from New York City? And do people hear about your office and they want to work for you?

 

00;05;10;20 - 00;05;59;16

JV

We have a really diverse range of people, but there's sort of a running joke in Studio V that isn't really intentional, but somehow it proves to be true. I would say that many of the people at Studio V come from two places. It's really not intentional. It's not a policy. But many come from the heartland of America. I myself grew up in Buffalo and I consider that really secretly to be part of Ohio, not New York state.

 

It's completely part of a midwestern kind of ethos. And many of our talented architects come from around the American heartland in the Midwest, but the other half come from all over the world, throughout Europe, Asia, South America. And so I'm very proud of the fact that we really are part of New York City and kind of represent the diverse talents that come from New York City. And yet I think we're also grounded in certain optimistic ideals that come from my upbringing.

 

00;05;59;18 - 00;06;08;03

DP

Well, it's really great to hear. So let's dig in here and talk about your buildings. So tell us a little bit about 1515 Surf Avenue. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;06;08;05 - 00;06;58;14

JV

Well, first, we really can't do great projects without having a great client. And LCOR is our client on this. And they approached us with the building and it was really a breakthrough building for us. So Anthony Tortora, who is the partner at LCOR, knew me from another firm at which he had worked before, and he decided he wanted to give us a try.

 

But they did a competition and they put us against some really other serious architects, and we were really proud of the fact that we were able to prevail in that. I think it's all about the power of our ideas. It's about the design concepts that we bring, but also about solving our client's problems. And I think Studio V is really about those two things.

 

It's about maintaining ideals and an optimism about what a great design could be, and at the same time solving our client's real problems about bringing a project in on budget and doing something creative that they can actually build and that meets their needs.

 

00;06;58;17 - 00;07;01;28

DP

So how many people were involved in the competition to get the job?

 

00;07;02;04 - 00;07;45;09

JV

There were a handful of us. I put a couple of my best designers on it. It was a paid competition, albeit a small amount. Yes. And so we were up against these other serious firms. And really, I'm sure we spent three times the amount, but I was determined to do something special for it. And also I was inspired by Coney Island.

 

The principal, the partner, Anthony, actually grew up near there and he really was committed to the idea of remaking this neighborhood and that also fit studio visit. Those were really interested in transforming communities, rebuilding communities. And Coney Island has an incredible history and past and yet has suffered terribly under urban renewal and other elements. And so now we see this as one of the signature projects that's helping reestablish this really important and historic neighborhood.

 

00;07;45;17 - 00;07;51;07

DP

So that's a great place to start. So tell us a little bit about the history of the location where this building is.

 

00;07;51;14 - 00;08;49;12

JV

So this is right at the corner of Surf Avenue there, these great street names in Coney Island. You know, it's between Surf and Mermaid Avenue, and it's between 15th and 16th Streets. As a matter of fact, it's right across the street from a roller coaster and sits right on the beach with stunning views of the iconic Coney Island Beach and boardwalk.

 

So to me, I don't know if I'll ever get to work on a site again that is next to a roller coaster overlooking the Atlantic Ocean with stunning views of the historic parachute drop. It looks diagonally right down at Nathan's Hot Dogs. And it's catty corner to the iconic cyclone. So really, it's a fantastic site. Historically, all of these elements that I just described were part of it.

 

And historically it was part of the whole Coney Island landscape. But by the time we got there, it was a parking lot. There was nothing there. And so really it's an opportunity on this major avenue that had so much historic importance in Coney Island to really help rebuild one of the essential centers of this community.

 

00;08;49;19 - 00;08;55;18

DP

Yeah, you must have been amazed when you got out there and stood on that property and looked out, thought, wow, this is going to be really cool.

 

00;08;55;25 - 00;09;17;26

JV

Even now that construction is going along very well and it's fully tapped out and they're adding all the facade elements as we climb up through the building. It's stunning the relationship it has to the Manhattan skyline, to the ocean, to these iconic architectural rides and amusements and buildings. It really sits in the landscape and kind of draws these elements into it in a way like no other site I've ever had.

 

00;09;17;28 - 00;09;21;24

DP

So what was the scope of the project? What were the client's programmatic requirements?

 

00;09;21;27 - 00;10;02;00

JV

So it's very complex. It's two residential towers and it's mixed use. It has retail at the base and one of the towers is market rate and the other is affordable. And yet they wanted us to treat them both with the highest degree of quality, with a series of kind of astonishing amenities and public spaces that link them together, including a fantastic pool deck overlooking the ocean, overlooking the roller coaster, and a whole series of public spaces.

 

Public spaces, meaning spaces for the residents to share because, you know, there's a social life to a building, too. And I think this is one of the key elements of the building that we were inspired by the social life of residential buildings in New York and how we could create spaces that would bring people together.

 

00;10;02;07 - 00;10;14;15

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the building design. So we already discussed the site. There weren't any unique topographic features raised, just a giant flat parking lot. Was it a parking deck or was it just a giant lot?

 

00;10;14;21 - 00;11;14;17

JV

It was an open parking lot, and I guess the geographic features would just be these iconic buildings and structures that surrounded it and the ocean itself. The ocean is one of the key elements that did really influence the project, though, because there's a topography to the project, even though the site was flat that responds to the ocean. And that, of course, is resiliency.

 

You'd mentioned earlier, Doug, that we do a lot of waterfront projects. And one of the things for me is that this sits in the middle of a vast floodplain and we're creating 461 new residences, and we're really at the forefront of dealing with resiliency and climate change. We're very proud of the work we do there, including pro-bono work.

 

So one of the things we had to do is elevate the entire building and yet still really engage the streetscape. So as a matter of fact, this led to the main design concept, the vertical boardwalk, the idea of elevating the building with a series of step platforms that protects it, and major storm events such as Sandy, and yet also creates a series of spiraling public spaces that work their way up through the building and create these stunning views of the surrounding landscape.

 

00;11;14;24 - 00;11;23;13

DP

So that's a good way to segue. Tell us a little bit about the project restrictions, the zoning codes, how far off the ground to the building have to be raised?

 

00;11;23;16 - 00;12;56;02

JV

Sure. So of course, like most buildings in New York City, it's an as of right building. So we worked within the existing zoning ordinance. And so in a sense, some of the massing of the towers was pre-established city planning had done a rezoning of this community a few years before, and that actually led to this development and has helped catalyze the transformation of Coney Island.

 

But then within that, there are certain requirements from FEMA and from flood requirements. But I'll tell you also that the client was very supportive of this. We exceeded those requirements. We didn't just meet the code, we added additional feet of elevation. We did three feet of free board. On top of that, we really pride ourselves on exceeding the code requirements.

 

As a matter of fact, after we finished the initial permitting of the building, the city amended the code partly in response to advocating that we had done in order to allow buildings to increase their height, to allow extra elevation for climate change and have that not count against the development because it's a positive thing to lift the building up.

 

The other thing we did that was also important though, is not just lifting it up, it's still engaging the street. So for example, at the corner of 15th Street and Surf Avenue, we created this great porch as the client had this idea that we really need to bring back the streetscape, the retail streetscape, and that would be a fantastic site for a restaurant.

 

So we created this wonderful porch that has multiple levels that actually allows it to engage the street instead of being too far elevated seven or eight feet up. That's only three feet up. And we allow that to flood in a storm event. But it doesn't go into the building. And that way we can have these series of stepped platforms and public spaces that activate the streetscape and bring Surf Avenue back to life.

 

00;12;56;05 - 00;13;01;23

DP

So how do you do that? How do you make these objects that can flood and yet they're still functional?

 

00;13;01;29 - 00;13;53;26

JV

So we really worked with a great team of people, the overall residential levels and all the habitable levels are well above the floodplain. So they're really up to about elevation 13, which is three feet of freeboard above. These are NAVD 88, which is the datum that's used in New York City. And then for the lower areas, really the lobby is accessible.

 

So we're using flood barriers there to protect one tiny small area, which is a grade which allows the full lobby to be accessible. But all the areas are elevated and then the retail spaces are also elevated. But we stepped it down with this outdoor porch, and that's designed very specifically so that the floodwaters can come in, but they won't enter the building.

 

They just enter this kind of lower porch level that really engages the street. There's also a parking garage and that does go a bit below grade, and that is allowed to flood. But it has special vents and special technical requirements for the materials that allow it to be flooded and to drain out. And that's the right way to do it.

 

00;13;53;29 - 00;13;57;10

DP

So tell us about the building plans. We've got two buildings out there.

 

00;13;57;13 - 00;15;41;24

JV

So the building plans were really interesting. And this is one of the things we did in the competition. It's a little hard to describe, but there are the kind of inside corners of buildings where it's difficult to put residences, the kind of the reentrant in corners when you have large, complex residential buildings, it's difficult because you can't put windows there.

 

And so we came up with a really, I think, creative scheme, and that's actually what helped us win the competition. What we did is we took the left over the dead spaces where you could put windows and we created double height amenity spaces, public spaces for the residents, and we created the coolest, craziest collection of these spaces. There's a media library with a basketball court overlooking it and an elaborate kitchen and a pool deck and a gym.

 

All these different elements weave together and overlook one another. So we took the kind of hidden corners and places that you normally can't use in the development. And we created instead vast, soaring two story spaces overlooking one another, creating this almost voyeuristic experience where one space in one activity overlooks another. We find today, too, in a post-COVID environment or whatever environment we're in now, that more people are living and working in more creative ways, sometimes they're working from home, sometimes they're going to work.

 

And we think the idea of having this fantastic residence right on the Coney Island beach, but then you can work within the building. We created many different spaces for people to interact socially, for co-working, for living, for entertaining. And so these staggered multilevel spaces work their way all the way up through the plan. And it's even kind of telegraphed under the facade with this series of folded plans that you referred to earlier that really bring you all the way up to the rooftop and to the pool deck. And so this was really the big move on the plan. And the client was so excited about that that they awarded us the project.

 

00;15;41;27 - 00;15;45;04

DP

So how long was the design process then?

 

00;15;45;04 - 00;16;36;15

JV

Overall to do a building of this complexity, the complete design probably takes about a year. One reason why I think this was also a great client is we really collaborated from the beginning. We didn't just do a design and then hope it would work out. We worked with them at every step with their marketing people, their technical people, their construction people.

 

We did budgeting throughout, which is really important to me. As a matter of fact, it's critical that if we're going to do a creative design, we have to work with the client in order to figure out how we're going to hit their budget exactly, which I'm very proud of with this project. For example, we have a whole series of highly sculptural elements that are made of GFRC, glass fiber reinforced concrete, and they really wrap around the brick elements, which we'll talk about a little bit later and kind of create these wonderful transitions.

 

These are very complex forms, and we really had to work closely from the beginning to make sure we could meet budgets. Same thing on the brick. We're using some really unusual and more expensive and more fine forms of brick and custom brick that we'll talk about. And we had to make sure that we could really work within budgets and yet maximize the impact and create something that would be really special that hadn't really been done in this neighborhood before.

 

00;16;51;25 - 00;17;02;12

DP

So that's a good segway to style choice and the style that your office works within and the style that you chose for this building. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

00;17;02;18 - 00;17;58;10

JV

Well, I believe I'm an unrepentant modernist. I believe that we live in an astonishing time in the 21st century when we're redefining so many things technologically, socially. So I believe very much in creating works that are of our time and that are contemporary. But I love to combine that with traditional understandings of urbanism, of the way people live within cities and materials.

 

So, for example, a project like this really combines both of those where we're really using first we're creating very unusual forms, complex shapes. We're working with special computer technology in order to model these. We're working with computer numerically controlled bills and robots to actually build components of the building. And on the other hand, we're working with Brick, which is one of the most ancient materials that we have, one of the most enduring and beautiful materials.

 

And I love the idea that we're combining these different elements together to create something that is both timeless and of our time.

 

00;17;58;12 - 00;18;06;26

DP

So you said design was about a year long after that. What about city review? And then ultimately it's still under construction right?

 

00;18;06;28 - 00;18;59;24

JV

So I would say the total design process to complete all the technical documents and we did this project in Revit, we did it to the highest technical standards and construction documents, which is really helpful to figure out the different components takes about a year overall for the full design, but really at the same time as we're doing that, we're working on the permitting.

 

And so the permitting was really ready to go right at the conclusion of that. And because the project was as of right as we were developing the final technical documents, we were already going through the process of doing permits and then obtaining the foundation permit and then moving directly into constructions that really allowed us to facilitate the schedule and go quickly.

 

I would say one of the challenges on the design, which is really one of its greatest features, is the geothermal, because that required a lot of planning up ahead and doing a geothermal project of this scale in New York was very difficult in the construction because it required coordinating all of the geothermal wells with the foundation elements and doing that right from the beginning.

 

00;18;59;27 - 00;19;02;25

DP

So whose idea was it to do geothermal?

 

00;19;02;28 - 00;20;13;23

JV

I have to give the client credit again, like we really do a lot of projects that address sustainability, and I was very excited to do the largest geothermal project in New York, but it really required the commitment of the client and they had a great partner in Eco Save who was the engineering and geothermal firm that actually helped develop the geothermal systems and also work out the financial models that would allow it to work.

 

So this was really a terrific thing, but the client gets the credit and that's really also due to the changing codes in New York City, which are so stringent that the client felt it was worth the investment in new sustainable technologies. Well, actually, geothermal is a very old technology, but applying it in new ways, in ways that aren't typically done.

 

One of the things I'm most proud of is the second largest geothermal project in New York today, after this one's finished, is called St Patrick's Cathedral. So really doing geothermal on this scale for a residential rental building is the bread and butter of New York City, that kind of makes up the fabric of neighborhoods for me as groundbreaking. And also one of the buildings is an affordable building.

 

So the fact that we could do that level of sustainable design and help combat some of the future issues we're dealing with energy and climate change with this kind of building, I think is the extraordinary thing.

 

00;20;13;25 - 00;20;33;07

DP

So you said that you brought in the contractor early, so as a high end residential architect, we typically bring a contractor in right after schematic design to take a look at the project and help us determine whether or not we're going to be even close in terms of price, did that help you guys working with the contractor early on?

 

00;20;33;14 - 00;21;24;10

JV

Absolutely. And again, L Corps had a partnership with LRC Construction, So they're the construction manager doing the job. And really we worked with them on a pre-construction basis closely with the client. You know, often it's described as sort of a three legged stool with architects, you know, the architect, the owner and the contractor and really if one leg of the stool doesn't hold up, you know, it falls down.

 

And so really all three of us worked together intensely from the beginning. And this was critical, for example, with some of the brick elements, because we wanted to work with this beautiful format called Roman Maximus, very unusual format. We really found that very compelling. It was something we wanted to do from the beginning of the job and we had to work out how would we meet budgets, what would the cost of that be, how would we integrate that with the other elements, how much of it would we use? And so we really worked out those elements of the pricing very early in the schematic phases of the design. Instead of waiting till the end.

 

00;21;24;13 - 00;21;28;01

DP

Did you ever think about using another material rather than rrick?

 

00;21;28;03 - 00;21;56;05

JV

You know, we looked at different things for the building and we looked at GFRC at first for the whole building. But I love the idea of brick because I think it's such a classic material and in the end we ended up doing a hybrid where the brick is the majority material for the building, which I think works very well.

 

And the GFRC elements, these kind of sculptural concrete pieces are sort of the transitional pieces around the front entries and around the main amenity spaces and public spaces of the building. So I think it's very balanced by having both of them, although brick is the main material.

 

00;21;56;07 - 00;21;58;20

DP

So how did you end up dealing with Glen Gary.

 

00;21;58;22 - 00;23;19;27

JV

So Glen Gary really was very special for the project because they had this really unique product we've been looking for actually for years before I'd even heard of Glen Gary, I loved Roman Brick for my own studies. Even as a student at Cornell and at Harvard, I would travel extensively around the world. I would travel through Europe, and I loved the old Roman brick, which of course is a longer thinner brick.

 

And I saw in contemporary brick manufacturing they were starting to return to that. As a matter of fact, for years I tried to use it and so few manufacturers would really work with it. Then we found Glen Gary was doing something even more special. It was a longer thinner brick, what they call Roman Maximus, if you will. It's even more elongated and there's something special about that proportion.

 

It doesn't just stack up in the way that regular bricks do, which is fine too, but it almost creates a beautiful surface. And then we also did the detailing which was very important, where we created deep reveals along the horizontal edges of the brick. It's an old trick that Frank Lloyd Wright used to use. And so by creating a raked joint at the horizontals, it kind of creates this beautiful texture, almost like corduroy, and that along with the long, thin proportions of the brick, gives it a kind of a beautiful surface quality that's much more monolithic and much more beautiful.

 

And so we use this material all around the base of the building in order to really accentuate that and create a very strong presence to the street.

 

00;23;20;00 - 00;23;22;05

DP

So you had a good mason from the get go.

 

00;23;22;11 - 00;23;33;08

JV

We had to work very closely with our Mason and work out all of the details. Let's just say that there were a lot of mockups and a lot of reviews in order to make sure that we would maintain the quality of the project.

 

00;23;33;10 - 00;23;40;07

DP

So did you do drawings in house? First of combinations of brick or colors or you worked most of that out in the field?

 

00;23;40;09 - 00;24;06;17

JV

We actually worked extensively on all of that, so we had to work out special brick shapes. We did do curved bricks because they're a series of curves throughout the project, which were critical and we had to do specials for that. We work closely with the technicians at Glen-Gery as well as with the masons in order to work out how to do the specials.

 

We also had a great facade consultant, Frank Seta & Associates who were really integral to helping us work out the different components of the brick, the attachment, the waterproofing. They're really terrific.

 

00;24;06;24 - 00;24;16;10

DP

Interesting. We had talked a little bit about geothermal and sustainability. Was that a larger issue for some of the wall systems, insulation, etc.?

 

00;24;16;14 - 00;24;30;23

JV

Absolutely. I mean, the building has a very, very robust energy envelope and again, as I say, helped us with that as well as we did full energy modeling with IMG Engineering of the building in order to make sure that it met and exceeded really all the sustainability standards. Absolutely.

 

00;24;30;26 - 00;24;34;23

DP

So you talked a little bit about Revit. How long has your office been on Revit?

 

00;24;34;25 - 00;25;44;26

JV

That is a great question, Doug. So really, I guess we probably did our first Revit project ten years ago, and it was pretty early for us. We've always embraced new forms of technology and always embraced tools that help us be better designers. But I would say in the last several years, we've really moved towards using Revit on all of our larger projects.

 

We don't use it on every project yet, but more and more, even in our own office building, even on our own studio building that we're building out now for ourselves, we're doing the project and Revit, so we're moving towards using it now on smaller projects as well as definitely on all of our larger ones. I have to tell you what I like about it, in addition to the technical aspects, the way it helps you with construction takeoffs, integrating different components in real time of the architectural drawings, having them refer to each other, updating drawings. But I love it as a design tool. And in this project where we had this whole series of really interesting, complex spaces, Revit was terrific for actually allowing us to really make cuts through the building and understand the relationship of all the different components, relationship of inside to outside, relationship of one space to another, relationship of one material and how it meets another. Revit was fantastic as a design tool and really helped us do this building in particular.

 

00;25;45;04 - 00;25;57;23

DP

Yeah, I would imagine clients. Well, I already know this. I mean, clients love looking at three dimensional renderings. They come in and or you send them drawings by email and they're blown away right? I mean, it's like the building's already done.

 

00;25;57;25 - 00;26;53;19

JV

Renderings are a big part of what we do. And it's interesting here we were talking a little bit earlier because to me, one of the things I'm impressed by is we work really hard to make the renderings reflect the final design, but it's almost impossible to convey ideas of color and lighting and in renderings. People often think they represent reality, but you can manipulate it.

 

One of the things we did in the renderings for this project was we really tried to convey the color and character of the brick, where you could really sense the warmth of it when the light hit it and how it changes color and becomes a little bit more neutral and shadow. And it creates a real modeling for the building in sunlight, which I think is really critical.

 

And something I'm proud of with the renderings that we did is I'm amazed as the brick goes on now, I can see that it really reflects exactly how the brick is operating and how it takes on different colors and textures in changing patterns of light. It's especially important on a site like this, which is open and facing south directly overlooking the ocean. So it really gets tremendous light.

 

00;26;53;21 - 00;26;58;00

DP

Did you guys end up with any masonry on the interior? Any brick on the interior?

 

00;26;58;02 - 00;27;51;25

JV

So I love the idea of bringing inside and outside together. And so there are a few key places where we brought the brick into the interior. Actually, in the lobby we're doing something very special where I brought the brick right into the inside and actually made it a major feature right behind the front desk, kind of the entry point and I even pushed and pulled that great Roman Maximus brick to give it fantastic texture.

 

And we lit it beautifully. We're working with Susanne Tillotson, a remarkable lighting designer who's going to light up the texture of that. We're going to put artwork there too, and we brought brick into a few other places in the interior. Also, it's at the rooftop space that we call the Skydeck, where it folds in and becomes the base for some of the seating.

 

There's an area that we call the living room with the kitchen that overlooks a giant garden over the parking garage. And we pulled the brick in there too. It's in a few places in the entry sequence, going up to the gardens from the lobby. So I like the idea of referring to the brick. It's mostly on the outside, but there's a couple of key places where it makes its appearance on the interior.

 

00;27;52;02 - 00;28;10;29

DP

Might be a dumb question. You do a lot of projects along the water. Of course it affects the materials and the choices you make, but is it a large consideration for you in most of the buildings that you do? I see a lot of wood on the interior at the front entryway here. What are you guys doing? Are you treating those materials differently?

 

00;28;11;01 - 00;28;42;01

JV

Absolutely. So it's very important when doing projects on the water that we have to address that it really probably affects other things more. It certainly affects our window specifications. It affects the coatings used on the windows, which have to be to a higher standard. Again, this is where FSA was a great help to us. Brick is a great material for the waterfront because it's really a rain screen.

 

Brick doesn't really stop the water. The water barriers are behind the brick, but the brick itself is so durable that it does really well in, you know, difficult environments such as Coney Island where we really have a maritime environment and a lot of salt in the air.

 

00;28;42;03 - 00;28;44;22

DP

So how big was the team that worked on the job?

 

00;28;44;24 - 00;28;51;07

JV

Gosh, it's hard to say because there were so many different people. I would say, you know, a dozen people. And then, of course, there's a really wonderful team of consultants that we worked with. So a very large number, probably 12 or 15 consultants who really played a key role. And then the client too. It was really a tremendous team and a really great group effort.

 

00;29;06;26 - 00;29;16;01

DP

So did your office or you in specific learn anything unusual or interesting along this journey of making these two buildings?

 

00;29;16;07 - 00;30;10;16

JV

You know, I learned things from every project. My favorite thing about my job today is that I feel like I'm certainly teaching a great deal and hopefully working hard too, if I can lead and inspire. But I find my younger staff are teaching me every day. They're showing me how they're using the technology, they're showing me better ways of doing things.

 

So I learned a tremendous amount in this. I certainly learned a lot about and I thought I knew quite a lot about brick detailing, doing special bricks, some of the special fabrication we're doing, the robotic fabrication with the GFRC. And to me, every project is really an opportunity to figure out how can we do that even better? How can we apply to the next job, how can we build our body of knowledge?

 

I also love the fact that all of our projects are different. Our real signature at Studio V is that each design is really unique to that site, that client. So for example, we're doing another building with this client now on a different site in New Rochelle, and it's a completely different look and feel, even if the program is somewhat similar.

 

00;30;10;22 - 00;30;23;20

DP

It must be reassuring for the client, right? Because they feel a lot more special because the building you're designing every time the program changes and the site changes, you change with that, right? So that must be great for them.

 

00;30;23;25 - 00;31;20;04

JV

Exactly. Doug I don't believe in the idea of like the architect as an agent where they kind of put their name on it even. That's why I said it's not Valgora Architects, it's Studio V, it's a collective of people. And to me what's really important is that we find a solution for each project. We definitely have obsessions and themes that I think work through our work.

 

For example, we were just in the Venice Biennale early this year and we're still up actually, it's up through November and we showcase this project along with four other projects. And so one of the themes of that show was called On Edge, where we talked about all of our work, which is about edges, gaps, interstices, kind of repairing the frayed edges of our cities.

 

And Coney Island is one of them, both literally and figuratively as a community, as well as an oceanfront site. And so to me, the idea of instilling a series of social spaces within that and yet kind of repairing the edge of this community, remaking Surf Avenue and really helping be an agent for transformation is really what our work is about.

 

00;31;20;07 - 00;31;28;17

DP

So you've been an architect for some time. If you could give your younger self some career advice, can you think of something you'd tell yourself many years ago?

 

00;31;28;19 - 00;32;50;11

JV

I guess I've certainly made many mistakes in my career, and although those have been things that I've learned greatly from. But the other thing that's driven my career is optimism. Where I would often go from project to project, place to place, city to city early in my career, I actually found myself going from San Francisco to London to Toronto and eventually ending up in New York.

 

And really I feel lucky about that. So I guess in terms of advice, I'm wondering if there was a kind of serendipity to that kind of an unplanned nature to that, and I would almost hate to interfere with that. I think the freedom that I had in my youth to try different things, learn from different people, live different places, was actually the most transformative thing.

 

So I guess I would say that to myself, but I guess I was lucky enough just to fall into that. Maybe some of it came from where I grew up because I guess I couldn't really stay in Buffalo when my dad worked in the steel mills when I was part of those industrial buildings. That was just at the point when that was all failing and they were getting ready to tear it down.

 

Now, the mill where my father worked is no longer there, but now my greatest inspiration is to go back and try to reinvent those communities. One of the things I'm most proud of is that I'm going back to Buffalo and doing work there now to bring back my hometown and to create transformative buildings there, including at the old grain elevators at Silo City are other projects in the heart of Buffalo, like where we're doing projects over in the Elmwood District, our wonderful historic district where we're doing a new building now.

 

00;32;50;13 - 00;32;57;07

DP

Wow. Well Jay it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Studio V Architects and yourself?

 

00;32;57;09 - 00;33;23;22

JV

Well, they can certainly find us online at StudioV.com. They can find us at our Instagram site. And most of all, you know, if you're ever in New York City, we'd encourage you to come see us. Come visit us at our studio itself, which is going to be at 111 East 29th Street. Or visit some of our projects, such as the Empire Stores, one of our most iconic projects in Brooklyn that's been very popular with people. We'd really welcome to have people get in touch with us or please come by the studio.

 

00;33;23;26

DP

Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;09

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;11 - 00;00;30;15

Ross Padluck (RP)

What we did on the inside was opened the living room, the dining room and the family room in the back with these pocketing doors so that when the doors are closed, you can have these very private moments in the house. But when they're entertaining, the series of pocket doors opens up. So the property is really open from the front terrace into the living room, dining room and the yard in the back so you can kind of open the house up front to back, or you could close it down from more intimate settings.

 

00;00;30;17 - 00;03;44;04

DP

This is my guest, Ross Padluck. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight an Italian art Deco private residence designed by Ross. The private residence we're discussing today is located on a narrow urban lot in a neighborhood which includes many homes from the 1920s. These homes feature various elements of brick and stone cladding combined with tile roofs and decorative windows.

 

The new home was inspired by the Italian art deco movement, as well as the German Expressionist. It draws from the work of Piero Portaluppi, a preeminent architect of streamlined art deco classicism in Italy in the 1920s and thirties. Other inspirations include German architects Fritz Hogar and Heinrich Muller, well-known for creative and experimental forms constructed with brick.

 

The exterior of the home is composed of details that decidedly complement the vernacular of the neighborhood. The construction palette of masonry includes brick, lilac sandstone, black windows, black slate and copper. Interestingly, the brick shapes, which appear to be custom, are actually all standard Glen-Gery modules. The course work is detailed and unique. The leaded glass panels in the windows are restoration glass and the roof dormers are clad in copper.

 

The details of the house are mannerist yet subtle, and the brick is creatively patterned in coursed to give the house a unique personality. Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Ross Padluck is a registered architect and partner at Kligerman Architecture & Design in New York City. Ross has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from New York Institute of Technology, where he received AIA Henry Adams medal as valedictorian of the School of Architecture.

 

Ross’s passion for architecture started young. Back then, he remembers being fascinated with the historic homes of New England. He joined Kligerman Architecture & Design in 2010. His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Lux Interiors, and Gallery. His firm is known for design, rooted in tradition, but modern in its sculptural forms, precise details, material integrity and liberal use of glass.

 

The firm still creates presentations by hand and uses the latest digital technologies, including 3D printers and VR. So welcome, Ross. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Kligerman Architecture & Design in New York City. So where are you guys located in the city? What size is the firm? How long has it been around and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;44;06 - 00;04;29;13

RP

Well, thank you for having me. Kligerman Architecture & Design, we’re actually just up the street from the Brickworks Studio. We're on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue across the street from the library. We're in 505th Avenue, which is a Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Building which is, I guess, considered the sister building to the Empire State Building. They were built at the same time with the same architect and 505th was completed first before the Empire State Building.

 

And at the time it was the tallest building in the world. Before it was surpassed by its sister, the Empire State Building. We're about a 40 person architecture and interiors firm. We do high end residential architecture, mostly single family. We were known as Ike Kligerman Barkley when I joined the firm. We went through an ownership transition last year when I became a partner.

 

00;04;29;20 - 00;04;39;06

DP

Well, interestingly, as an aside, I do high end residential architecture. I worked with a gentleman named Joe Moore for about 20 years. He's up in the Greenwich area.

 

00;04;39;14 - 00;04;40;27

RP

Okay. That's a great neighborhood.

 

00;04;41;02 - 00;04;48;24

DP

Yeah, that's really cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself. So how long have you been practicing architecture and what's your role in the office as partner?

 

00;04;49;01 - 00;05;20;11

RP

I always knew I wanted to be an architect. Since I was in preschool. I was sort of drawing houses and building them out of blocks when I was in preschool. So it was just a natural career. And I come from a family of architects, so it just sort of all made sense. My first job actually, I started of working for an architect when I was 14 years old.

 

Yeah, I did. After school drafting for an architect in high school and kind of had various internships and stuff from there at Kligerman, as a partner there, I run a studio, oversee probably about a dozen projects at the moment.

 

00;05;20;18 - 00;05;24;27

DP

Tell me about your family. Family of architects. That's interesting. Both mom and dad?

 

00;05;25;01 - 00;05;41;03

RP

No, my uncle is an architect who was a kind of huge influence and resource on me. And I have a cousin who's an architect and one is an engineer. I have another cousin who's a graphic designer. So there's this sort of creative energy in the family. My grandmother was a painter, too.

 

00;05;41;06 - 00;05;43;27

DP

That's really cool. I mean, architects are pretty rare.

 

00;05;44;01 - 00;05;50;05

RP

It's kind of a not a common profession in families, but it sort of comes naturally to us, I guess.

 

00;05;50;12 - 00;05;56;01

DP

Very cool. So let's dig in here and talk about the home. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;05;56;07 - 00;06;05;15

RP

So it's a community that we've done a lot of work in over the years. We have a long history of doing work in that community and it was a referral from another client that we got the project.

 

00;06;05;17 - 00;06;07;09

DP

So you didn't know the clients?

 

00;06;07;09 - 00;06;10;09

RP

Did not know them, but they were friends of one of our other clients.

 

00;06;10;16 - 00;06;13;06

DP

And what about the location? So was there a house there?

 

00;06;13;13 - 00;06;23;24

RP

There was a house there. It was sort of a turn of the century house that had been badly renovated in the eighties. You know, we were growing family and it was time for a new house. So they turned to us to design it.

 

00;06;23;28 - 00;06;32;13

DP

So the location, there are lots of homes from the 1920s era and are they still there and simply getting renovated or is it turning over?

 

00;06;32;16 - 00;07;03;27

RP

There's not many left, the kind of vernacular of that neighborhood. There were a lot of homes built in that sort of 1920s timeframe that were kind of brick and stone and had slag glass windows and tile roofs like you mentioned. And there's kind of very Spanish and Moorish ornate feeling to them. Unfortunately, a lot of them have been torn down.

 

They've been replaced with newer and larger homes, but there's still a few left in the neighborhood. And the neighborhood is sort of maintains that character, even though the homes have been replaced of the sort of 1920s buildings.

 

00;07;04;00 - 00;07;16;20

DP

So that ultimately did impact the esthetic of the home that you design. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So what was the scope of the project? That is, what were the programmatic requirements for the project?

 

00;07;16;23 - 00;07;31;06

RP

It's a single-family home, so it had to have entertaining space and living space on the first floor for them. They do a lot of in-house, entertaining large parties and then enough space for the clients and their children on a very small lot.

 

00;07;31;09 - 00;07;39;08

DP

Yeah. So what were the project restrictions in terms of the height of the building and the size of the building on the lot? Were they pretty stringent?

 

00;07;39;08 - 00;07;55;03

RP

Yeah. The zoning in that neighborhood is pretty restrictive, so you have to fit a lot into a very small envelope. So you have to be really creative of how you use floor space and how you configure the building envelope to fit within the zoning requirements and the floor area restrictions.

 

00;07;55;05 - 00;08;01;13

DP

And you couldn't go over two and a half stories or okay, so I nailed that. That was the restriction. Two and a half stories?

 

00;08;01;13 - 00;08;07;03

RP

There's actually not a restriction of stories, it's a restriction of height. So that's what limits how far you can go.

 

00;08;07;10 - 00;08;10;02

DP

And FAR restrictions, is that what they call them.

 

00;08;10;02 - 00;08;13;02

RP

Yea, floor area ratio, it's pretty tight there.

 

00;08;13;04 - 00;08;41;24

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the building design. Stylistically, we talked a little bit about this already, the Italian art deco influence and of course the reference that I made earlier to the German architects. Interestingly, I was looking at Portal Whoopi's work online. I know it sounds a little bizarre, but it almost seemed like a modern cross between Palladio and Boulay, right?

 

I mean, it's just the symmetry is gorgeous. Some of the buildings that this man designed were unbelievable.

 

00;08;41;26 - 00;09;16;27

RP

Yeah, they're really incredible. I've had the fortune of being in a few of them in Italy, and Porto Lippi was sort of off the radar up until a couple of years ago. And now it's, you know, there's all these books out about them and everyone's sort of looking at it. But he just did really incredible sort of forward thinking work in Italy in that timeframe that was still sort of rooted in tradition, not too dissimilar from the work that we do at the firm.

 

So it sort of just seemed like a natural influence for us. A lot of his work was urban, a lot of it was in Milan, so it sort of had that urbanity to it like this house does.

 

00;09;17;04 - 00;09;22;27

DP

So tell us a little bit about the building plan. Looks relatively straightforward, like a large rectangle.

 

00;09;23;05 - 00;09;52;11

RP

Yeah, the sort of narrow rectangular lots. So there's not much you could do with it. What we did on the inside was opened the living room, the dining room and the family room in the back with these pocketing doors so that when the doors are closed, you can have these very private moments in the house. But when they're entertaining, the series of pocket doors opens up.

 

So the property is really open from the front terrace into the living room, dining room and the yard in the back so you could kind of open the house up front to back or you could close it down from more intimate settings.

 

00;09;52;14 - 00;10;00;17

DP

That's a really nice idea for a relatively narrow house. Who came up with that idea where the client's like, Whoa you guys showed it to them and they thought, Wow, this is really neat.

 

00;10;00;24 - 00;10;05;14

RP

You know, they were really kind of happy with it. We sort of hit it on the first shot, I guess you could say.

 

00;10;05;21 - 00;10;08;28

DP

So how large was the team that was working with you on the.

 

00;10;09;00 - 00;10;11;25

RP

It was me and at the time, John Ike.

 

00;10;11;27 - 00;10;19;17

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the facade, which is very interesting. All brick, who decided on brick?

 

00;10;19;23 - 00;10;31;19

RP

It's the vernacular in that neighborhood. Just about every house uses brick or stone or a combination of them. The natural choice to use. So we wouldn't recommend anything else in that neighborhood.

 

00;10;31;26 - 00;10;33;02

DP

And what about the color?

 

00;10;33;05 - 00;10;39;26

RP

So we wanted to create something that was a little richer, a little darker, a little moodier. And that's how we ended up with that color.

 

00;10;39;28 - 00;10;59;28

DP

I want to back up a little bit. I always ask our guests about the town reviews, like how long that process took was a challenging historical neighborhood, that sort of thing. What did you guys go through in terms of presentation? So you meet with the client, you show more schematic design. Then ultimately you've got to go to the town and get this thing approved.

 

00;11;00;07 - 00;11;05;15

RP

There wasn't any sort of historic or architectural review board there, so it was just the building department.

 

00;11;05;21 - 00;11;12;22

DP

And in terms of zoning requirements, the building had to be relatively narrow rights for the setbacks. Were they restrictive or?

 

00;11;12;25 - 00;11;24;10

RP

Restrictive on the sides? The biggest challenge is the floor area, which is very restrictive. You kind of have to fit a lot into a very small footprint. So there's very little wasted space in the floorplan.

 

00;11;24;12 - 00;11;42;01

DP

So let's talk about the facade. What I loved about this house was the figuring in the brick, right? So there were all stock sizes and shapes used by your company and was that intentional? You didn't want to spend extra money having these custom shapes made?

 

00;11;42;04 - 00;12;16;04

RP

Yeah, we wanted to have that in mind of trying to do this with stock shapes. We wanted to do an all-brick house, which is inherently a little more expensive. And instead of doing custom shapes, we looked through the Glen-Gery catalog to see what was available, sort of quote unquote in stock that wasn't custom made. And then we took these different shapes and create a different patterns and modules with them.

 

And that's how we created those sort of columns that are between the windows. And we created that corduroy texture that's on the chimney all out of Glen-Gery shapes.

 

00;12;16;06 - 00;12;27;19

DP

Yeah, I found that really beautiful. The piers in between the windows are figured, right? So when you guys design that, did you ultimately do mock ups in the fields to see what these things looked like?

 

00;12;27;25 - 00;12;40;03

RP

We 3D printed the brick shapes and then sort of put them together almost like Legos to see what makes sense and what makes an interesting shape. And we did mockups on our 3D printer with those brick shapes to kind of lay it out.

 

00;12;40;10 - 00;12;52;27

DP

And what about some of this interesting coursing that I found as I looked around the exterior elevations, for example, at the entrance, right? The coursing above that entrance is almost done in a star shape or a crown like shape.

 

00;12;53;04 - 00;13;16;03

RP

Yeah, it's sort of a star shape or a crown, as you say. And we had originally designed that in stone, and the owner had wanted the house to feel a lot more monochrome. So I said, Well, why don't we do it in Brick? And it sort of created that crown shape out of, it's just modular standard brick that's laid at different angles and it sort of radiates around the arch to create that pattern.

 

00;13;16;10 - 00;13;19;06

DP

To remind me some of the other details on the house.

 

00;13;19;13 - 00;13;58;12

RP

The house is about that arch. It's the entrance. It's very subtle because it's all done out of the brick. It doesn't really stand out, but it's a detail that you notice right away just the way the mortar joints are run to create that pattern. And then we have, as I mentioned, the special piers between the windows, which are created of three different pieces of brick special shapes that create that.

 

And there is the chimney, which is the corduroy texture. We also used some of the sill pieces to create a water table or sort of base around the house. And then we experimented with different patterns of brick running bonds and stock bonds to create different patterns and sections of the house to break up the mass of it a little bit.

 

00;13;58;19 - 00;14;01;11

DP

And the dormer is done in copper, which is really cool.

 

00;14;01;16 - 00;14;15;03

RP

I like when Dormers feel like objects on a roof. I don't like when the metal roof comes out. So we created them to feel, you know, like these copper boxes sitting on the roof, which is a very German kind of mannerism of going about that.

 

00;14;15;05 - 00;14;23;16

DP

So on a project like this, it's obviously really important to find a good mason. So you guys clearly found somebody liked. What was that process like?

 

00;14;23;22 - 00;14;37;18

RP

We worked very hand-in-hand with the Mason to create that. You know, we're very specific about all these different patterns and layouts. So it was a lot of site visits and working one on one to make sure our vision came to reality on the house.

 

00;14;37;20 - 00;14;47;28

DP

So you were talking about having a 3D printer and making these that must have been a really fun process, right? I mean, that's like the awesome stuff that architects get to do.

 

00;14;48;01 - 00;15;02;08

RP

Yeah, it is. The 3D printer itself is kind of a pain to use. It's finicky, but once you get it to actually do what you want it to do, being able to just sort of create these shapes and put them together was really satisfying. That's sort of how we create our vision.

 

00;15;02;08 - 00;15;04;20

DP

Did you guys do the building in Revit?

 

00;15;04;26 - 00;15;09;13

RP

The building was actually done in CAD, believe it or not, all 2D.

 

00;15;09;17 - 00;15;11;00

DP

So no 3D renderings?

 

00;15;11;02 - 00;15;12;27

RP

Nope. Except for hand renderings.

 

00;15;12;29 - 00;15;14;29

DP

Is that pretty typical for your office?

 

00;15;15;02 - 00;15;38;11

RP

Most of our projects are in Revit now. For me, the intricacies of the house, I felt more confident doing it in 2D. It's just the way my brain thinks. I still think of old school drafting and that's kind of what CAD does. And the house was small enough that it was manageable. A lot of our other houses that are much larger than this, it makes sense to do them in Revit, but I felt kind of old school doing it in CAD, but it worked out.

 

00;15;38;19 - 00;15;42;14

DP

And did the clients get to see these little models, the little modules or?

 

00;15;42;18 - 00;15;50;21

RP

Absolutely. We showed them, you know, this is the pattern and these are the different shapes of brick and they got a kick out of it, but they were excited.

 

00;15;50;24 - 00;15;59;05

DP

Yeah, very cool. So, we talked about the size of your team. There were two people that worked on the project essentially and start to finish. How long does that take for your office?

 

00;15;59;13 - 00;16;19;23

RP

Search to finish a house of the skills is about three years. We're about a year for design from when a client first hires us to get through schematic design construction documents, permitting, all of that. And then construction is about two years, which seems like a long time. But our houses are very custom and we're doing very one off sort of things.

 

00;16;19;28 - 00;16;22;05

RP

It takes time, but it's worth it in the end.

 

00;16;22;07 - 00;16;31;08

DP

Yeah, you know, that process can be pretty interesting for people that haven't done it before, the clients. Have these clients been through a custom home before?

 

00;16;31;14 - 00;16;38;06

RP

Not to this scale. They had renovated a home before, but they hadn't built a home like this before, so it was a first time for them.

 

00;16;38;09 - 00;16;40;17

DP

Well, I'm sure that we're very happy, the house is beautiful.

 

00;16;40;24 - 00;16;44;01

RP

Thank you. They were very happy. So we did our job.

 

00;16;44;03 - 00;16;50;10

DP

Awesome. So the column in the front. Very cool. Reminds me a lot of Frank Furnace.

 

00;16;50;16 - 00;16;50;28

RP

Yes.

 

00;16;50;28 - 00;16;53;11

DP

Whose idea was that? Where did that come from?

 

00;16;53;17 - 00;17;15;21

RP

That was mine. We wanted to create something special on that corner. Since it is the main entrance to the house. And it was inspired by a lot of the work that Portaluppi did, where he uses more classical elements and we didn't want to do another piece of brick there. It was time to do some stone. It is solid lilac sandstone that's supporting that brick arch.

 

00;17;15;24 - 00;17;18;00

DP

So was that difficult to have made?

 

00;17;18;02 - 00;17;25;01

RP

We had it custom made, unlike the brick, we did have the column custom made. It was milled in Canada.

 

00;17;25;03 - 00;17;36;04

DP

Did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process? It's clearly a pretty unique home, so there were a few new things for you guys, I would assume.

 

00;17;36;11 - 00;17;55;25

RP

Yeah, I think working through the brick shapes and the course thing, we try and get Windows to line up with brick coursing or if the windows are off, you adjust the stone sills to make up for the difference in brick. And I think we learned a lot about just making sure that the brick lines up everywhere.

 

00;17;55;28 - 00;18;06;19

DP

So were there any instances of we drew it this way, but then you get in the field and you're working with a mason, They're like, no, you know, we're not going to be on course here and we're going to have to adjust things.

 

00;18;06;19 - 00;18;32;16

RP

There were a few instances where the cursing under the windows was ever so slightly off, but we were able to adjust that with the stone sills and make it work. I was very exact when I drew it to make sure that everything mathematically worked out just because the design was so important to us and to the clients, we really wanted to make sure you could actually build it the way we intended it.

 

The drawings were pretty precise, and that led to a fairly smooth construction process.

 

00;18;32;18 - 00;19;03;09

DP

That's great. It is one of the most important things to me. After the house has been designed, we sign up the GC, we get rolling on the project, the project managers get to know one another. This would be the architect and the project manager for the general contractor. Those first couple meetings between those two people are really important because at that point you get to spend a lot of time explaining, okay, this is why I drew it this way and I need you to keep this in mind when we build it, right?

 

00;19;03;16 - 00;19;25;09

RP

Yeah. We were fortunate to have a really good contractor. He was really a craftsman. Very hands on approach, like we have with design and construction. He understood our design goals for the house and the quality goals, he really paid attention to the details and worked with us throughout construction to make sure the vision was carried out.

 

00;19;25;11 - 00;19;37;20

DP

So Ross, before you go, you've been an architect for a little while now. Based on what you know about being an architect today, do you have any words of advice for your younger self or even young architects getting started?

 

00;19;37;22 - 00;20;11;11

RP

I do. You know, the advice is to stick with it. A lot of people that I went to school with did not end up pursuing a career in architecture. For me, it's something I love doing. I'm very passionate about it and it's not an easy educational process. It's not an easy career. I think a lot of people get discouraged by that, but if you love it and you care about it, just stick with it because it's very rewarding and we get to do really unique and special things.

 

There's not a day that goes by that I don't regret my career choice.

 

00;20;11;16 - 00;20;24;07

DP

Well, that's really cool. Being a high-end residential architect can be extremely challenging, but also very rewarding long term because you're working on a singular typology and you can get really good at it.

 

00;20;24;11 - 00;20;56;25

RP

Yeah, well, you're designing for the end user and you're spending their money. So it's a high stakes process, but it's also very creative and you get to work with unique materials and work with craftsmen and people who are really good at what they do. So in that respect, yeah, it's really rewarding and we're creating things that people and families are going to use for the rest of their lives.

 

They're going to live in them. They're going to have their friends over. As challenging as it can be to work in that environment, we're just creating such special things. It's wonderful.

 

00;20;56;27 - 00;21;02;03

DP

Yeah, I like to say that we've got to know a lot about a lot to be a high-end residential architect.

 

00;21;02;05 - 00;21;13;16

RP

Yeah, you have to be an architect. You've got to be a plumber. An extra installer, a lawyer, an accountant, a marriage counselor. You have to be everything. A materials scientist.

 

00;21;13;17 - 00;21;27;01

DP

I like that. Marriage counselor. Marriage counselor, for sure. My goodness. So Ross, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Kligerman Architecture & Design and yourself?

 

00;21;27;03 - 00;21;31;21

RP

Check out our klingermanad.com. And you can also look at our Instagram account [@kligerman.ad].

 

00;21;31;24 - 00;21;34;00

DP

And do you have your own Instagram account as well?

 

00;21;34;01 - 00;21;38;06

RP

Yes, that's @RossPadluck.

 

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;10

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;12 - 00;00;30;08

Gabe Deck (GD)

We wanted to make sure we could fit as many units while making them as wide as possible. So five ended up being kind of the magic balance point to get them feeling pretty wide, really maximizing at least four bedrooms, five plus bathrooms, elevators and then roof deck spaces are pretty key for Philadelphia Center City townhouse developments. These houses each contain three roof deck spaces.

 

00;00;30;10 - 00;03;16;07

DP

This is my guest, Gabriel Deck. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight Gabriel's Sansom5 Project in Center City, Philadelphia, Sansom5 is a collaborative venture between Philadelphia and New York developers. The site is a 5000 square foot rectangular parcel with three street frontages that previously contained small office buildings. The site is in Center City, Philadelphia, close to the Rittenhouse and Fittler's Squares.

 

There's a five foot grade change across the main frontage, and the parcel sits within a flood zone adjacent to the Schuylkill River. Most neighborhood buildings are primarily brick masonry with strong cornice lines, which drove esthetic and material choices. Each townhouse features entry door locations where grade changes mitigated and the facade is recessed within a portal of capstone. The project, which is light brown brick, also features facade materials that include gray, flat block, metal panels, wood, accent cladding, and a mix of black and brown clad, slim profile windows.

 

The project includes five high-end townhouses which maximize square footage. Each home contains four bedrooms, six bathrooms, an elevator and three outdoor spaces. Hi, I'm Doug Pat, and this is Design Vault. Gabriel Deck has a Bachelor of Architecture from Temple University. He describes himself as a big time Philadelphia guy, having stayed in Philly after college and continues to do business there.

 

He began his career working for Wallace Roberts on a variety of project types. After the 2008 recession, he got his real estate license, where he made a number of contacts in residential development over the next few years. These relationships led to a number of small residential design projects. He eventually started his own small firm. His work was mostly urban, small scale residential editions, which quickly grew into new construction townhouse developments and then larger adaptive reuse residential projects.

 

The scale of work grew over the first few years, as did the business. The firm was rebranded GNOME Architects in 2018. The team is currently nine people operating out of a repurposed public high school in South Philadelphia. The firm has 400 plus projects to date, mostly in Philly, but also in other parts of the country as far reaching as Colorado and Maine.

 

Welcome Gabe. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about GNOME Architects in Philly. Where are you guys located? What's the size of the firm? How long has it been around and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;16;09 - 00;04;27;27

GD

So GNOME Architects has been around since about 2018 after a rebrand of my previous business. We're currently a team of nine people comprised of myself and my business partner, Derek Spencer, and a handful of designers. So the business started back in 2013. Originally when I quit my job at WRC to focus on some small residential projects that I had acquired from developer contacts that I had made working in real estate.

 

Philadelphia is a small town in terms of the industry. Word spreads and quickly I was able to get a lot of project work by way of these developer contacts. Most of the projects were third floor additions, small townhouse, new construction, infill projects. And once I partnered with Derek Spencer, we started focusing a bit more on larger multifamily work.

 

The team grew, the project scale grew. Now we are working on developer driven business on one end of the firm doing large multifamily work, low rise podium buildings. Most are 30 to 50 units in scale. And then on the other side, we're doing custom single family homeowner projects with interior design as well.

 

00;04;27;29 - 00;04;41;10

DP

So Gabe you had your real estate license, which is pretty interesting for an architect, and you use that, I'm assuming, for a few years during the recession and then kind of moved back into architecture. When did you get your architectural license?

 

00;04;41;13 - 00;04;58;08

GD

So architectural license came around 2012, couple of years after the real estate license, and kind of was doing the two in tandem, you know, working nights and weekends trying to do sales. I got burned out pretty quickly, doing a full time job with an architecture firm, and then that on nights and weekends, it was a lot.

 

00;04;58;11 - 00;05;15;06

DP

What's so interesting to me is over the course of my career, I have met a lot of architects that end up doing lots of different jobs because architects aren't always busy all the time and they're one of the first people hit by recessions.

 

00;05;15;08 - 00;05;36;28

GD

Yes. And that's exactly kind of what happened to the big firm that I was with. I wasn't sure of my future there, wasn't sure what I was going to do. And real estate. I had a number of friends that were in the business. I went in that direction and I figured it was somewhat parallel to an interest in residential design.

 

So it seemed like a natural fit and thankfully it led to a lot of good relationships and some work to start the business.

 

00;05;37;05 - 00;05;42;19

DP

Yeah, it certainly sounds fortuitous. So what is your role in the office as a principal?

 

00;05;42;25 - 00;06;01;00

GD

I share the burden of running of the office with my business partner, Derek Spencer. I would say my role is more in the CEO traditional sense, while also the design director of the firm, where my business partner is handling more of the technical development of things and more overseeing the design development of things.

 

00;06;01;02 - 00;06;06;14

DP

So it's always interesting to find out how people end up working together. How'd you meet Derek?

 

00;06;06;17 - 00;06;40;10

GD

Derek and I started working together. He was my first employee, actually. I met him through mutual contacts when I realized I was spread too thin, working out of a spare bedroom in my home in the early days of my business. Derek was currently working for a firm across town, that’s, I'd say, one of our competitors. He was looking for something new, and it was the infancy stages of the business, so he came to start working with me.

 

And fast forward to three years later, we had a team of four of us and we were ready to rebrand and create GNOME Architects.

 

00;06;40;13 - 00;06;57;06

DP

So let's dig in here and talk about the project. This is really beautiful and I would imagine it took some time to get done in Center City, Philadelphia. So how did your office get the project? And you did mention obviously that you had some relationships or acquaintances that were developers.

 

00;06;57;09 - 00;07;23;25

GD

This project actually came from one of my very first clients that I had who was connected with the real estate office where I hung my license at that time. It was a partnership between that long existing client and a couple of developers from New York City that purchased the property, and we assisted them to take it through all of the permitting process and all the hoops we had to jump through as it's a pretty sensitive site.

 

00;07;23;27 - 00;07;28;02

DP

So could you give us a little history of the location before your buildings?

 

00;07;28;04 - 00;07;57;09

GD

So the site is on the western end of Center City, Philadelphia, about a block away from the Schuylkill River, sits in a floodplain about five feet or so below the FEMA flood zone line. It was a three sided site. So we had challenges to create, drive all access and building entrances and maximizing the use of both Center city and looking west towards the river.

 

So it was a challenging yet a site that had a lot of great opportunity as well to work with it.

 

00;07;57;12 - 00;08;03;10

DP

Yes, So unusual to get a piece of property in the city with three street frontages.

 

00;08;03;13 - 00;08;18;27

GD

Yeah, it's pretty uncommon, but it actually allows for some benefits as far as how you apply the zoning code and how city planning orients. The frontages actually worked to our benefit to get a driver on the back and five houses fronting the broad side of the site.

 

00;08;18;29 - 00;08;43;06

DP

So, Gabe, what was the scope of the project and what were the programmatic requirements for the townhouses?

 

00;08;43;09 - 00;09;09;12

GD

So the scope of the project was to try to maximize as many townhouse units as we could across the site, while also ensuring that they felt large and spacious and wide with Philadelphia townhouse development. You're often dealing with very narrow properties, so anything that's built new construction is typically somewhere between 14 and 20 feet wide or so. So we wanted to make sure we could fit as many units while making them as wide as possible.

 

00;09;09;12 - 00;09;30;29

GD

So five ended up being kind of the magic balance point to get them feeling pretty wide. The developer wanted to make sure we could provide as much parking as possible, so each unit has a two car garage and then really maximizing at least four bedrooms, five plus bathrooms, elevators, and then the big thing here also is just outdoor spaces.

 

00;09;30;29 - 00;09;42;01

GD

So roof deck spaces are pretty key for Philadelphia Center City Townhouse developments. These houses each contain three roof deck spaces.

 

00;09;42;04 - 00;09;45;02

DP

And how many stories has the project has had? Four or five.

 

00;09;45;04 - 00;09;59;18

GD

It's technically five stories by way of the code. However, there is a pilot house on top of each house, which also contains some livable or habitable space, which makes the buildings read as six stories interesting.

 

00;09;59;18 - 00;10;21;08

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the style, the architecture, some of the buildings that surround it. I had mentioned that we had some pretty strong cornice lines locally and you probably picked up on that in terms of brick courses. And then we've got some really beautiful, tall, decorative patterning on each one of these facades.

 

00;10;21;15 - 00;10;45;02

GD

We typically like to do our best to work in some contextual elements into our projects. So with this site, there's a lot of surrounding context that has primarily brick material, very strong cornice lines at the rooflines. So inserting a new development that is essentially six stories adjacent to a lot of three and four story buildings, we had to kind of get creative to make things fit in.

 

00;10;45;05 - 00;11;08;23

GD

So we kind of struck a line at the top of the fourth floor for the brick material. Coming up to that, a chorus line at the top of the fourth floor. And then we selected a kind of a gray, brown, beige tone brick, as a lot of the neighboring buildings are a variety of colors. So there's not really a strong predominance of red brick or white brick or brown.

 

00;11;08;23 - 00;11;16;20

GD

It's kind of all over the place. So the gray brown tone of the selected brick that we used kind of was a nice middle ground for it.

 

00;11;16;22 - 00;11;34;10

DP

So let's go back to the zoning for a second. So these buildings step back as they move up above that third story. Plus they're up at least on one end, at least five feet, creating these stoops. Did you have to step the buildings back? I know you clearly did that for functional reasons to have these roof gardens up there.

 

00;11;34;17 - 00;11;57;18

GD

Yes. So it was, again, just a way to kind of fit within the context of the lower height buildings around us. The zoning code didn't really require us to set the buildings back where we did. We did it more for the outdoor spaces, but the fourth floor line was kind of the natural place to do a material transition to make the massing fit well with the vernacular nearby.

 

00;11;57;20 - 00;12;00;28

DP

Were there any historical reviews by the zoning board?

 

00;12;01;00 - 00;12;31;12

GD

Surprisingly, this was not a historical designated site, so we were not subject to any historic review. I would say the biggest hurdles we had or really within meeting the flood zone regulations. So it was a challenge to make sure we maintained all the FEMA regulations so these buildings don't have basements. We have flood doors on all facades and the challenges related to keeping your habitable floors above the flood plain were the big driving elements for this.

 

00;12;31;15 - 00;12;45;24

DP

Okay, so first floors above the floodplain, the base, the plinth, I'll call it, is masonry, is brick masonry. So you have these doors. Do they have to be a certain size? And I would imagine they're breakaway or is that the way it works?

 

00;12;45;26 - 00;13;06;23

GD

So each structure had to have a number of flood vents on at least two sides of the exterior walls. The size of these denser, I believe, one square inch per square foot of building footprint. They allow for the passing of flood water going in and out of the building just to relieve the flood pressure that the building would be subject to.

 

00;13;06;28 - 00;13;21;11

GD

So we did our best to hide them in kind of inconspicuous areas along the front facade where they were required, as well as the back of the building where the dry is. That's not really seen from the public right of way. So it was a nice place to hide these vents.

 

00;13;21;13 - 00;13;32;09

DP

So tell me about the apartments and plants we get along rectangle and each one of these is more squarish in plan. And I'm also wondering, I don't see the two car garages.

 

00;13;32;11 - 00;13;56;26

GD

Yeah. So the garages are all facing a rear drive aisle that we were able to hide. It's like a one way drive I'll access that comes in off of one of the small side streets, exits on the far end of the other side street. And then there are two car garages at the rear of each home are facing this drive while the driveway is also covered by a series of exterior decks, each deck serving one of the houses.

 

00;13;56;26 - 00;14;01;13

GD

So it's a covered drive aisle with a garage door. At either end of it, you never actually see it.

 

00;14;01;19 - 00;14;04;11

DP

And the buildings in plan are the each rectangles.

 

00;14;04;13 - 00;14;17;17

GD

Yes. So they're roughly, I'd say, 22, 23 feet wide by 40 to 50 feet deep with the drive at the rear and the main entrance at the opposite side facing the street frontage.

 

00;14;17;20 - 00;14;23;24

DP

So what was the building review like with the city of Philadelphia? Was that challenging? Was it time consuming?

 

00;14;24;01 - 00;14;45;16

GD

So it had a bit of back and forth. Our office handling primarily projects in Philadelphia. We've made a lot of good relationships with different plans examiners, different city agencies. I've gotten to know the process pretty well, as it is rather daunting for anyone who's unfamiliar with it. So I would say this project had a number of rounds of verifies from the plans.

 

00;14;45;16 - 00;15;10;14

GD

Examiner is mostly related to the interpretation of the parking that was implemented as well as kind of the interpretation of the roof deck access structures and that type of things. And typically it's a dialog with them to make sure everyone's kind of on the same page and there's a middle ground you need to find. But I would say we got through it in a couple of rounds, which was better than we had expected given the sensitive features of the site.

 

00;15;10;16 - 00;15;25;02

DP

So building materials you guys used primary Li Brick, I mentioned to you before we got rolling, it's a light. It appears to be a light brown brick. It's actually called Stonington gray velour. It's got a wide variety of values or shades in it.

 

00;15;25;08 - 00;15;46;03

GD

This was a really beautiful brick that worked well for our goals to kind of strike a line between the various masonry colors of the surrounding buildings. So it actually has a nice amount of variety in it. Some of the bricks are a lot more brown and darker. Some of the bricks are very light kind of in the the off-white color range.

 

00;15;46;03 - 00;16;06;16

GD

So once you get close, you really see the variety of color that's in there, which is really nice. And then at different times of the day, it also reads a little bit differently in the morning in direct sunlight. It kind of has a more of a warm brown tone to it and kind of in the twilight hours of the sun going down, there's a lot of reflectivity is caught.

 

00;16;06;16 - 00;16;13;14

GD

And when you look closely at it, so it really speaks well to the contemporary approach that the building esthetic has.

 

00;16;13;16 - 00;16;42;09

DP

What I love about this project is the brick pattern. You guys really spent a lot of time working on all the different patterning that's happening at the Stoops and around the windows, at the cornice lines. So tell us about how you did that in the office. Right? Typically we see a designer working on exterior elevation drawings and then, you know, the lead designers review them and it's back and forth and then eventually you're putting that into the CDs and you're doing mock ups in the field.

 

00;16;42;09 - 00;16;43;19

DP

So how did that go?

 

00;16;43;22 - 00;17;09;08

GD

Yeah, so it surprisingly went pretty smoothly on this project. The brick patterning that we went with was kind of a solution to a number of problems. We had planned driven windows, which is typical of these Philadelphia townhouse projects where you don't have a lot of space. So your windows can only go in certain areas. But then when you want to create alignments vertically on the facade and such, you've got to kind of get creative.

 

00;17;09;08 - 00;17;32;11

GD

Sometimes if that's a goal. So the brick patterning that we implemented was a tool to kind of strike these alignments vertically in the facade. So we have this recessed entry portal that is maybe two thirds of the width of the frontage, but the windows on the upper floors could not necessarily align with the jams of that portal opening.

 

00;17;32;11 - 00;18;01;20

GD

So we implemented brick patterning at the JAMB locations of the windows to then create a hard line that would align with the portal entryway below. That's one way we used the pattern to help. We also used it to just create interest on the facade. As I mentioned, the flood zone required us to keep the living spaces pretty high out of grade and that resulted in what would otherwise be a rather blank wall at the base of the building.

 

00;18;01;20 - 00;18;17;09

GD

The changes in brick pattern were a tool to kind of add some interest, so the brick we chose in relationship to a lot of cast stone that also creates some interesting accents around the window openings was a nice balance.

 

00;18;17;12 - 00;18;26;27

DP

What I really love is in this photograph on the far left you've got the brick patterning at the center stoop, but the patterning is completely different. On the left and right.

 

00;18;26;29 - 00;18;52;27

GD

The stoops were a huge focus of the design, so we had to get the occupants about 5 to 6 feet above the sidewalk level to the entry doors, which instead of having kind of a visible staircase that would otherwise dominate the sidewalk, we utilized a screen wall of brick in front of the staircase entryway that was also in front of a patterned planter box.

 

00;18;52;27 - 00;19;16;10

GD

So you have these multiple layers of masonry that add interest at the staircase. It allows us to insert some greenery as well. So it's a very tactile experience as you walk up to the front door of these houses that worked out very beautifully and the execution of the masonry and saw was fantastic by the mason as well, which we were very pleased to see.

 

00;19;16;12 - 00;19;39;18

GD

We had a series of conversations with the GC to make sure everyone was on the same page with the detailing. Our construction documents were very thorough to make sure that the areas of recess patterning as well as kind of projected roll lock and soldier course detailing was achieved and all the shadow lines could be read throughout the day as the sun moves around the building.

 

00;19;39;20 - 00;19;42;16

DP

So did you guys draw this in 2D and 3D?

 

00;19;42;18 - 00;20;12;01

GD

Yes. Our process typically starts with a three dimensional model of the building that we get to a comfortable point. We utilize sketch up primarily for a design tool in the schematic phase. And once we're happy with the sketch model, we move into 2D drawing. This project was done a few years ago before our office implemented Revit, but we were still able to successfully document how all the masonry patterning was working in 2D.

 

00;20;12;04 - 00;20;16;29

DP

So did you show the three dimensional model to the clients along the way?

 

00;20;17;06 - 00;20;42;27

GD

We did. We had a number of options for this projects. They were all similar in the materiality, but some were maybe a little more traditional, others were even more contemporary looking. So we utilized the 3D models as a design tool to visualize the project to the client. And in the end they were very happy with one of the options we chose, which had very minimal changes that they needed to see.

 

00;20;43;00 - 00;20;47;25

DP

Clients love 3D models, right? Were you able to model any of the BRIC in SketchUp?

 

00;20;47;27 - 00;21;17;18

GD

We built the SketchUp model and applied some custom made material swatches that we built utilizing other brick colors, and we made sure we could match exactly what the Stonington gray velour would look like. And then it was just a matter of scaling the pattern down to the brick unit. So even in the areas where you have these dimple patterns that read against the entryway walls, all of the patterns were aligned perfectly to align up with the massing recesses that took place in the model.

 

00;21;17;18 - 00;21;19;20

GD

So it ended up being pretty successful.

 

00;21;19;22 - 00;21;23;26

DP

So how many people worked on the team for the project from the architects office?

 

00;21;23;28 - 00;21;40;10

GD

I would say that through the design process there were at least four of us that work through the design concepts together and I would say primarily one designer and myself kind of pushed the design to where it is now. But back when we did the project, it was a pretty collaborative effort within the office.

 

00;21;40;13 - 00;21;48;08

DP

So I feel like every project I learn something new. Did you guys learn anything through the process of working on this project?

 

00;21;48;11 - 00;22;11;06

GD

We learned quite a bit, especially in terms of the brick detailing here. We kind of learned that certain patterns have rules around them, especially when you're utilizing like a stacked pattern where you have these very clean vertical lines that need to be maintained. It's tricky to make sure that things don't read as a mistake within that patterning, especially as it relates to where you put windows.

 

00;22;11;08 - 00;22;31;10

GD

So we had to make sure our window spacing was just right. So you didn't results in little slivers of brick that would be noticeable and read as a mistake. So we took a lot of care in making sure that the tolerances and the actual window sizes and everything were worked in to make sure that we didn't end up with those kind of conditions.

 

00;22;31;12 - 00;22;45;08

DP

And that takes some pretty close work with the. Mason You mentioned that you thought the execution worked out well. Did you guys have a tough time finding a mason or was the first mason you guys ended up meeting the person you used.

 

00;22;45;10 - 00;23;11;22

GD

So the general contractor, it was his team, really. And the mason that he chose and started the project with kind of nailed it right from the start. We had probably two or three on site meetings with the Mason, looking at the drawings. That's a back and forth with some questions. And then ultimately we had a small mockup in the field and everyone was on the same page and collectively in the room together to make sure that the execution was going to happen just right.

 

00;23;11;22 - 00;23;12;18

GD

And it did.

 

00;23;12;20 - 00;23;40;09

DP

So last thing I wanted to ask you about was the metal panels on the fourth floor and these large bay windows on the outside edges of the building. Really beautiful. These are great details. You see these bay window details everywhere on 1930s and forties, city architecture. And I think doing that on the ends of these buildings and then adding the flat lock metal panels to the fourth floor is really beautiful.

 

00;23;40;11 - 00;23;41;19

DP

Great detail.

 

00;23;41;22 - 00;23;59;21

GD

Yeah. So back to kind of the challenges of working in Philadelphia and not a lot of space to work with. The bay windows are always a tool to add a little bit more interior square footage, but the challenge is always Hadia clad them. How do you make them feel appropriate when the rest of the facade material is masonry?

 

00;23;59;23 - 00;24;29;00

GD

Yeah, we kind of struck a line with a traditional meets contemporary bay esthetic to compliment the window patterns within the masonry as well. So the bays have very kind of glassy windows, wrapping all sides in the same style of windows as the punched openings within the flanking brick masonry and then the color of the bays being much darker than the masonry was meant to draw more attention away from the bay and actually focus it on the adjacent brick masonry.

 

00;24;29;02 - 00;24;48;17

DP

One more comment or question. These entry portals are beautiful. Was it tough for you guys to decide? Okay, we're going to set back the front door and these very large windows lose a little bit of square footage, but we get these entries which are highly differentiated on the facade or along the facade.

 

00;24;48;20 - 00;25;11;06

GD

Yes. So the entry portal was a result of trying to solve a problem around the narrow sidewalk. The city only allows you to project so far into the public right of way and you're trying to make this nice prominent entrance for this luxury townhouse. And in order to achieve a wide staircase going up there, you got to kind of recess the frontage of the building.

 

00;25;11;06 - 00;25;31;25

GD

So we accomplished that by recessing just the entryway that the ground floor. When I mentioned being in the floodplain, we had to get the first floor up pretty high. So the entry door is actually at a middle landing between the garage level in the first floor. The first floor is actually up about ten feet above the sidewalk. So we recessed the entryway.

 

00;25;31;25 - 00;25;40;02

GD

It allowed us to have four or five foot wide steps leading up to the front door and a nice prominent procession up the steps to the front door of the house.

 

00;25;40;09 - 00;26;03;15

DP

Well, Gabe, it's a beautiful project. When I first saw these photos, I was really excited to do this interview. So I have done so many different things in my career while being an architect. And while it's not that unusual, I've found that being an architect has helped me to be good at lots of other things in my life.

 

00;26;03;18 - 00;26;30;10

DP

The other thing that I will say is that we end up working on many different things in our lives, even if we're let's say you end up doing stair details for a large firm for ten years and you think I wasted all that time doing stair details. The reality is we never really know when any of the things that we learn how to do will come in handy and can ultimately change our life in some way, even if it's in a small way.

 

00;26;30;10 - 00;26;45;28

DP

So I think it's really cool that you got your real estate license because you made all of these relationships or just a couple relationships that ultimately helped you become a successful architect. It's a big deal, right? So I don't think you give yourself enough credit.

 

00;26;46;00 - 00;27;04;16

GD

Yeah, I think I realized early on that I was good at some things, but not good at everything I needed to be good at. So the relationships were everything, especially in the early days. So knowing when to reach out to the people who know the solution is a big part of being an architect, a big part of being an entrepreneur.

 

00;27;04;16 - 00;27;22;22

GD

Starting a business as well is, you know, you need to do it right. You have a license that you got to hang your hat on. So it's critical for you to understand when it's time to reach out for design professionals outside of your purview and outside of your profession for the right solution to problems on your projects.

 

00;27;22;24 - 00;27;29;20

DP

So, Gabe, it's been great to have you here. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about No more architects and yourself?

 

00;27;29;22 - 00;27;44;25

GD

Sure. So our website is pretty current websites WWE and gnome arch dot com genome RC. I would say even more current than that is our Instagram account, which is also at Gnome Arch.

 

00;27;44;28 - 00;27;47;19

DP

So one more question. Where did you get the name?

 

00;27;47;21 - 00;28;09;22

GD

The name actually came from a rebranding exercise that we did back in 2018 and we were looking to create a new identity that spoke to the residential nature of our products and we wanted to kind of speak to the home and a place of being. So the gnome, the garden gnome is a character that does that. It's the marker of place.

 

00;28;09;22 - 00;28;35;29

GD

We also wanted the branding to be very memorable and approachable, so we initially kind of wrote off a name that came to us from our rebranding company and we thought it was crazy. And the more rounds of more names they suggested to us, the more we came back to that first stab of GNOME being the solution and so happy that we trusted in the company that we rebranded with and it's worked out for us very well.

 

00;28;36;05 - 00;28;37;25

DP

It's a great story. Well, thanks again, Gabe.

 

00;28;38;00 - 00;28;41;13

GD

Thank you.

 

00;28;41;16 - 00;29;05;01

DP

Thanks for listening. If you learned something today, share this episode with a friend and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to help others find the show. If you want to find out more about today's project, visit Glengarry com forward slash design dash vault that's gleaned GSR y dot com forward slash design dash vault one even more inspiration.

 

00;29;05;01 - 00;29;28;24

DP

Take a look around Glengarry icon while you're there. Glengarry is one of the nation's largest brick manufacturers and an industry leader for its diversified product line of more than 600 brick products with inspiring photos, useful resources, easy search tools, helpful design studios, and more. I'm sure you'll find the inspiration you need to stretch your imagination

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;13

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;16 - 00;00;27;11

Tom Loftus (TL)

So we really had to be mindful of availability of product and the budget. So this is what started driving us to start playing with different bonding patterns. If we stack the brick one way versus another way, if we do a running bond versus a stack bond versus a Flemish bond, how can we play around with our stacking patterns and try to make something unique?

 

00;00;27;13 - 00;02;46;23

DP

This is my guest, Tom Loftus. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight Tom's 389 Weirfield Project in Brooklyn, New York. 389 Weirfield in Brooklyn is a 12 story 50,000 square foot rental project consisting of 66 residential units, a common roof deck, library and cafe. The building was constructed along with a second at 378 Weirfield just across the street.

 

The building features a very unique singular masonry facade we'll discuss today. The sole decorative facade is done in undulating rail like bricks, which is in a creative vertical design. The bricks are dark and called Ebonite Smooth. They protrude in patterns at equally spaced cadence as the facade climbs. The windows are set apart from the vertical masonry bands with frames of varying height, which capture the windows between the horizontal spans. The singular brick facade was a unique way of setting apart a building that might otherwise be much like any other.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Tom Loftus has a bachelor degree in architecture from New York Institute of Technology. He also has a certificate in business management from Cornell University and is a licensed architect in New York.

 

Tom's first exposure to working in the architectural field came from a job in wood frame construction. After a number of years working in Westchester County, he brings over 20 years of project management experience to outgoing architects. As studio director, he has extensive knowledge and experience in project management, schematic design, design, development, construction drawings, design quality and project construction.

 

He's also a leader in building and maintaining client relationships, managing teams’ workloads, plus client and consultant coordination. So welcome, Tom. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Aufgang Architects in Suffern New York. So where are you guys located in Suffern? What's the size of the firm? How long has it been around and what kind of work do you guys do?

 

00;02;47;01 - 00;03;37;20

TL

Great, first and foremost. Thanks a lot, Doug, for having me on the podcast today. I'm really excited to be here. So we're located here in downtown Suffern, right down the street from the train station pretty close to central Manhattan. So our firm is about 50 people right now. We primarily do residential work. I'd say about 90% of our work is in the residential field.

 

We do everything from low rise to high rise buildings, primarily in the five boroughs. But we also have projects in the tri state area and a few scattered around the country as well. A lot of those projects are mixed use with commercial on the first, second or few floors and then residential apartments above. The residential work that we do ranges in everything from luxury condos all the way to homeless shelters and really a range of everything in between.

 

00;03;37;22 - 00;03;39;28

DP

So how long has Aufgang Architects been around?

 

00;03;40;05 - 00;04;19;22

TL

Outgoing has been around. I think we're going about 50 years now. Ari is the third owner of the company, and when I started, I worked together with Ari and our former principal, Hugo, and they partnered for a while and he had also taken over the firm from someone else. So probably in the early seventies, if I have my history of the firm correct.

 

We started in Rockland County doing small scale residential rehab work and grew in time and in size with our clients and our work type from one partner to the next, and really have kept our foot in our roots in residential and then grown laterally in the industry.

 

00;04;19;25 - 00;04;27;22

DP

Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been practicing architecture and your role as studio director?

 

00;04;27;25 - 00;05;16;29

TL

Sure. It feels like forever. Honestly, every once in a while I wonder, am I still really doing this? But I've been in the architecture field now just a little over 20 years, and I started working in Westchester County. Small scale wood frame, residential. It was a natural stepping stone for me. After I got out of high school, I thought I want to be a framer.

 

And after getting really tired of carrying three quarter inch plywood up a ladder, I said, Nope, time to go back to school and study architecture. And from there I worked at a variety of firms in Manhattan, in Westchester County, doing a variety of different work. And when I found this firm, the scale work that we were doing, the residential work, it tied into something I loved with my single family housing experience.

 

It kind of stuck and I ended up staying here for quite a while.

 

00;05;17;01 - 00;05;23;25

DP

It's a long time practicing as an architect. I kind of say the same thing about or to myself about how long it's been.

 

00;05;23;27 - 00;06;23;12

TL

Sure, I've really grown in the company here. It's been a fantastic partnership with Ari. When I started, I came in really as an assistant project manager. A lot of my experience was not relative to the scale of the projects we were doing, although in other firms I was working in a bit of a leadership role running point on smaller scale projects, so it took a little time to learn the ropes, if you will, in the different construction types.

 

And I've moved up into the role of studio director now, so I work very closely with our senior management and the rest of our senior staff looking at our workload, our resource management, project proposals, client relationships and really stay involved with the team from the very start of the project until close out to handle the day to day operations of the office as a whole.

 

Ari, myself and our controller meet frequently to talk about some of the more boring business side of things and then the more fun happens working with the architects on the day to day and the projects.

 

00;06;23;15 - 00;06;33;19

DP

So let's dig in here and talk about this very interesting facade of yours. How did your office get the project, or is this a project that the office created?

 

00;06;33;21 - 00;07;57;02

TL

Yeah, this was actually an interesting project that came at a time when everything started shutting down right at the start of the COVID pandemic. And we had a really good recommendation from a long time client that we had worked with, and we had met a new client remotely who was involved on the construction side of things, and we hit it off.

 

We started talking and it was the first time ever that I met someone virtually and had meetings like this on screens, and we were trying to build a new professional working relationship. So it was very unique in the way that the project started. And again, we do a lot of our work really based on recommendations. We really pride ourselves in building good relationships with our client base, and that's really how the project got started.

 

They had this unique property in Bushwick and if you know the area in Brooklyn at all, it's a lot of small scale row housing, if you will, maybe 3 to 4 storeys and there really aren't too many open lots. And in this particular project it was unique. There was a large portion of the lot that had an easement that couldn't be built on it, and it provided a good amount of air rights which allowed us to follow the zoning path to do a much taller building than you usually would see in this neighborhood.

 

Most of the buildings were very close together, and that's really how it started and how the project grew and how we ended up with a 12 storey building in the middle of Bushwick.

 

00;07;57;05 - 00;08;04;19

DP

So did you guys know right away that you were going to be able to make a tall building there, or did it take a little bit of examination first?

 

00;08;04;21 - 00;08;48;13

TL

It took a little bit of examination. Usually what we do as architects is we really try to help guide our clients to bring their projects to fruition. This is the property I have. What can you build? How much can you build? There are two different zoning parts you can follow, primarily three different zoning parts in New York City that will help you establish the bulk, the height, the size of the building.

 

So we'll study that first and foremost with our clients and present them the different options. And based on the geometry of this lot, when we saw the potential to get a little height on this building, be separated from the other surrounding residential buildings, it gave them a nice opportunity to have a building with some great potential for views in an otherwise low height area.

 

00;08;48;15 - 00;08;53;12

DP

So what was the scope and the programmatic requirements for the project once you got rolling?

 

00;08;53;14 - 00;09;32;03

TL

Typically and specifically to this project, our scope was everything from working with the development team to help them flush out the parameters of their funding program. So when you work with different agencies in New York City and in the state and you're following certain guidelines to provide certain square footages and distribution of units, we work right at the very beginning with them to help them find the right mix and size of units, right with the development team.

 

From there, we work through design and construction administration all the way until the close of the project. So we really gave soup to nuts services here. Full scope on the building.

 

00;09;32;05 - 00;09;48;24

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the building design stylistically. So you guys designed quite a unique facade, while the other three facades, from what I can tell from the photos, are relatively subdued. Tell us about the main idea behind this.

 

00;09;48;26 - 00;11;17;22

TL

First and foremost, we love Brick. Brick as an architect, for us, it's really a timeless material and it's a durable material and it fits in really well to so many different urban fabrics in so many different places. In my opinion, what made 389 unique was the timing that this project was happening. It was happening at a time where the future was uncertain.

 

We didn't know what was going to come of this pandemic. We had to be incredibly mindful of the budget. Many times we like to create building facades that are two different materials having a nice dialog or different color bricks. So we really had to be mindful of availability of product and the economics, the budget, and really try to come up with something that would be unique but be something that the client could achieve.

 

So this is what started driving us to start playing with different bonding patterns if we stacked the brick one way versus another way, if we do a running bond versus a stack bond versus a Flemish bond, how can we play around with our stack in patterns and try to make something unique? So that was really what started pushing us in this direction of going with a single color brick and then really focusing on how to find a challenge enough for the mason that they don't hate us and say these are architects of the worst.

 

Have something be achievable for them. But that also will give a nice unique context to the neighborhood.

 

00;11;17;25 - 00;11;24;28

DP

Were there any aesthetic reviews of the building before you guys got rolling with the city?

 

00;11;24;28 - 00;11;49;21

TL

With the city for this particular project, there were no agencies on the city or state side that had any reason to opine on the design. We were not going for any variances. We didn't really have to go to the community board, although we did not need their aesthetic approvals. It is something that we're always mindful of working within the urban fabric and how it's going to lend itself to the context of the neighborhood is always an important consideration of ours.

 

00;11;49;23 - 00;12;01;09

DP

So let's back up just a little bit. So the building plan, are we talking rectangle, square, relatively straightforward. Then of course, there's parking on the site. You had said that there was a portion of the site that you could not build on.

 

00;12;01;11 - 00;13;07;01

TL

That's correct. So for this particular massing to make this building work, the footprint was rather small. It actually made a very efficient floor plate with a very tight core of stairs, elevator and corridor, and then apartments around all sides of that. So it really became a very compact, high efficiency floor plate with very little loss factor. And it was something that we were able to just work all the way up the building.

 

So there were quite a bit of revisions back and forth, variations that we had worked on to find the right mix and balance of that to fit within the envelope. The same thing then translated to the facade a bit earlier we were talking about what did the design iterations look like there, through the whole process of finding the right solution and the facade design that we felt was the right match for this building.

 

We did digital 3D models, plenty of sketches and even on site mockups working together with the Masons saying, We know you can do this, we believe in you, please don't kill us. And did plenty of mock ups there to really work it out.

 

00;13;07;03 - 00;13;11;25

DP

Was it a challenge finding a good mason, or did you guys have somebody lined up right off the bat?

 

00;13;11;27 - 00;14;04;09

TL

I think that's really one of the keys. You have to have really good subs. So whatever the type of work you're doing in this case, the Masons, you need to have a good working relationship with them. And often it's the architect working directly with the general contractor. But in these cases we invited the Masons into the architecture meetings, we invited them into the AOC meetings towards the end and said, Look, let's work through some of these details.

 

Let's talk through it. How is this going to work? It wasn't incredibly complex or challenging, but we wanted to make sure that the person who was directing their team to install the Brick really felt confident that they could achieve what we were looking for. We never wanted to come out on site and say, This is all wrong. That's not what we want to do.

 

And I really think engaging with those professionals early on is important to try to get the end result that you're looking for.

 

00;14;04;12 - 00;14;16;20

DP

Yeah, we try to bring in a contractor at schematic design. Once we wrap up schematic design, we have them price the project. This is in high and residential work that I do. So single family homes.

 

00;14;16;22 - 00;14;33;09

TL

Right? And in this case we didn't have a mason lined up. We didn't have a recommendation. The developer slash contractor, they were one and the same here. They had already had an existing relationship with this Mason and we started just working with them early on in the process.

 

00;14;33;11 - 00;14;54;17

DP

So could you do your best to describe the evolution of the design of that facade and then try to describe the facade? I'm going to encourage our listeners to go to the Glen-Gery site and take a look at some of these photographs because it's really striking. I've never seen anything like it. It's a great idea. The clients must have been thrilled when you presented the drawings.

 

00;14;54;19 - 00;17;33;18

TL

Thank you very much for that. We've seen a lot of example of brick facade that has quite a bit of movement in it, and these brick facades more often than not, are panelized prefab, and that's a way that you can achieve quite a bit of movement with brick using this idea of this undulation and this movement in the brick as an inspiration.

 

That's what triggered us to start thinking about how a brick pattern, the stacking pattern, really might help us achieve what we wanted to do here. So if our listeners are familiar with Brick parents, which I hope they are, we're in a brick podcast, we utilized a Flemish bond pattern and a running bond pattern. So the Flemish bond pattern has a standard brick with the long face.

 

The following brick is then rotated 90 degrees with the short face and the pattern is repeated. Taking this idea of combining a Flemish bond pattern with a running bond pattern, we now have these bricks that are half size, if you will, square proportion to create the movement and the undulation throughout the facade. We detailed a Flemish bond pattern with a large number of running bond, then a increasing increment of Flemish bond and a decreasing increment to running bond.

 

So we took the pattern and as you got closer to the center of the pattern we created, you had a higher frequency of Flemish bond. And as you moved away towards the end of the pattern that moved vertically up the building, it was stretched out with more running bond. So that's a lot of back and forth with different bond patterns.

 

Ultimately, by having that Flemish bond brick, we then protruded it out from the facade in the center of the pattern where the Flemish bond patterns are stacked very closely together. The bricks protruded the largest amount. And then as that pattern was separated and pulled apart from top to bottom, the brick became closer and closer to the facade.

 

So we basically created a formula that the mason can follow. For every increment, the brick would step out a half inch further, and this is what gave the facade that undulation, as you move up the bricks, steps out and back in by using this bonding pattern. It also created a really dynamic shadow which was something that we really loved.

 

When the sun hits the building the right way, you get a really fantastic shadow where you have that brick and it just really, in my opinion, created a beautiful cadence that worked through that pattern.

 

00;17;33;21 - 00;17;41;27

DP

So it really does remind one of Braille. So how far what's the furthest protrusion for one brick?

 

00;17;42;00 - 00;18;01;07

TL

I do like that description of Braille. You instantly have an image in your mind of these protruding points that they create the pattern. The furthest protrusion is about two and a half inches at the center of the pattern. And then as it works its way down in half inch increments, it goes back down to zero and the pattern becomes flush.

 

00;18;01;10 - 00;18;20;02

DP

So you guys said that you worked on this in 2D and in 3D. I would imagine if you did some sun studies, you got a better sense for how much shade and shadow was going to be produced by these protruding bricks? Did you do the project in BIM? Is it Revit? Because I saw 2D drawings of this?

 

00;18;20;04 - 00;18;42;25

TL

Yes. It isn't Revit. It is a BIM project. While we were in the design phase, we actually used a few different softwares SketchUp and Enscape and Revit along with AutoCAD, and we really did a series of 2D sketches, 2D drawings and 3D studies, partial facade studies. Just to get a sense of how this all might look.

 

00;18;42;28 - 00;18;49;26

DP

And how many iterations ultimately did you go through? I mean, big iterations, like is it two or three or ten or?

 

00;18;49;28 - 00;19;42;12

TL

Once we just came to the conclusion that we need to stick with a singular color brick here in the front, I'd say we probably had about ten different versions. It's a slim, tall building with very large windows, really trying to maintain a nice modulation of those windows in that spacing, but also then maintain a standardized brick dimension. So for a long time we were playing around with the inches of the bricks so that we were at a half size brick or full size brick.

 

Should we use a stack bond and emphasize the verticality of the building? How often should we introduce a horizontal element so that it's not looking like a stack of pancakes, for lack of a better expression? So really, we had a good amount of iterations here until we got to the point where we really like the running bond, Flemish bonds.

 

00;19;42;14 - 00;19;58;19

DP

I like the way you describe that. From what I remember looking at these photos, the windows are framed out differently. So you have a series of windows which have an individual frame, and then at one point in the building, that frame actually wraps a few stories of windows, right? So you break up the facade that way, too.

 

00;19;58;19 - 00;20;26;03

TL

Exactly. Playing with the verticality of the building, we did group a series of windows, two windows stacked vertically, three windows stacked vertically and created a frame around those windows. And this helped take that 12 story building and just give it a little bit of scale as it moved up the building. So these groups have two vertical windows that are now framed together.

 

Then also had the movement of the undulating brick happening between them.

 

00;20;26;05 - 00;20;28;28

DP

You guys really thought through it. It's a real beautiful facade.

 

00;20;29;04 - 00;20;29;29

TL

Thank you.

 

00;20;30;01 - 00;20;34;06

DP

So how big was the team that worked on the project? Just a few people?

 

00;20;34;08 - 00;21;17;08

TL

Every project is staffed with a dedicated associate director who are all registered architects, a project manager, and then the support staff. When we were in the design phase, we had the project manager working together with one of our designers. So we really had a team of to playing around with this and then bouncing the idea back off of the associate on the project.

 

Then once we really ramped it up into production, we would stack two or three people on the project. As you get closer to submission deadlines and trying to get into the Department of Buildings to get permits done, we would build the team up. Usually there was always at least two people on the project that were always there from day one.

 

They haven't left the project and they stayed on from beginning to end.

 

00;21;17;10 - 00;21;26;09

DP

So how long did it take to build the building? I would imagine it was pretty cool watching that facade go up. First couple stories. You must have been thinking, Wow, man, this is going to be something.

 

00;21;26;12 - 00;21;51;29

TL

You know, the construction team, they did a fantastic job. They had a really good crew out there. And around 24 months, the building went up and then all the fine details coming out of the pandemic. It was interesting. There were certain trades that just took longer because of materiality, distribution chain, supply chain, availability of product, which threw little curveballs here and there.

 

But all in all, the sequence and timing was fairly smooth.

 

00;21;52;01 - 00;22;01;13

DP

So it seems like I learned something new every project. Was there anything that you guys learned while you were out in the field or doing these drawings or dealing with the client?

 

00;22;01;16 - 00;22;48;06

TL

There certainly was. You know, I had spoken about the Mason earlier on, and that was certainly a good lesson. Building a good relationship with your Mason early in the project is really important and I joke about it. Sometimes they look at the architect's details and think, Are these guys crazy? We're not going to build this. There's going to be a better way to do it.

 

And I think that was really the big lesson we took here, establishing that good relationship and also giving the tradesmen the respect that they deserve. They're installing the work. They know some of the nuances of how this gets installed and taking that into consideration, finding that common ground so that you don't bring your ego into the conversation and giving them that professional respect and you're going to get it back.

 

That was definitely a good lesson here.

 

00;22;48;08 - 00;23;16;16

DP

That seems like a lesson I've learned over and over again throughout my career. When you're young, you go out there and you think you know everything and you've got an answer for everything, or you're going to fake your way through it, or however you choose to deal with it. But as you get older, you realize that these people that you're working with, many of them have an awful lot of experience, and it would be a good idea to sit and listen to them and actually ask them questions rather than tell them what to do.

 

00;23;16;18 - 00;23;38;10

TL

That's right. And I always find that working with our up and coming project managers and our younger staff, it's always those lessons that you try to instill in them. It helps them understand how to build those relationships because this industry is built on relationships and if we can do that, we're going to navigate successfully through any project.

 

00;23;38;13 - 00;23;58;03

DP

Well, you guys have been around a long time, 50 years. Goodness gracious. That's incredible. Congratulations, Tom. You've been an architect for over two decades. Based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for your younger self or maybe some young architects working their way up the ranks?

 

00;23;58;05 - 00;24;13;16

TL

Yes, don't worry. It's going to work out, if you love it, stick with it. It's a long road. And just when you think maybe you should change your major, you might still be out of college 20 years and asking yourself, Should I change my major? If you love it, stick with it. It's rewarding.

 

00;24;13;19 - 00;24;28;05

DP

That's really funny. I feel like I've changed my major all the time.

 

My goodness. So, Tom, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Wolfgang Architects and yourself?

 

00;24;28;07 - 00;24;38;19

TL

They can go right to our web site at Aufgang.com and they can find all the information about us there. They can follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter and all the different platforms.

 

00;24;38;21 - 00;24;45;21

DP

Well, thank you very much, Tom. It's been great. And I encourage people to go to the site and take a look at this very interesting building. Thank you.

 

00;24;45;29 - 00;24;50;18

TL

Doug. I really appreciate it. It was great chatting with you here today. I had a great time.

 

00;24;50;21 - 00;25;18;12

DP

Awesome. Thank you.