TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;07

Doug Pat (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;10 - 00;00;30;11

Daniela Holt Voith (DHV)

Part of our design philosophy is to really make more of a home, both in terms of individual buildings, but also in terms of the context. And this design really is right up our alley in the sense that we love to combine mission and image. There is a strong mission to get the dining hall, which is for the fifth formers, a chance to rebond.

 

00;00;30;13 - 00;03;05;12

DP

This is my guest, Daniela Holt Voith. I'll share more about her shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight Voith and MacTavish Architects Abbott Dining Hall in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The Abbott Dining Hall is located at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The renovation of the 1960s era dining hall exclusively serves senior or fifth form students in their last year on campus.

 

The project responds to the style of the adjacent upper house dorm and other Peabody and Sterns architecture and reminds one of both Shingle Style and Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. VMA’s reconfiguration blends seamlessly into the Lawrenceville esthetic with new brick facades, pitch slate roof and vaulted interior ceilings supported by glulam hammer beam trusses. In addition to a complete redesign of the kitchen and servery, custom white oak furniture and booth seating clad the interior, white oak paneling, terrazzo floor and over scaled fireplaces complete the vision.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Daniela Holt Voith is an architect and founding principle of Voith and MacTavish Architects and Director of Design. She holds degrees from Yale University School of Architecture and Bryn Mawr College. Since the early 1980s, she's taught at Yale University as a TA, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and has developed and taught Bryn Mawr College's Design Studio program.

 

Mayor Michael Nutter appointed her to serve on the city's award winning 2008 zoning code Commission, which revised the city's 50-year-old zoning code. Danielle is currently president of the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, Philadelphia Chapter director of the Carpenters Company of Philadelphia and Board member of the Design Leadership Foundation. Daniela has dedicated her career to promoting the advancement of design for educational environments.

 

Her client-focused practice supports leading edge pedagogical thought and encourages mindful ways of living and learning. Daniela loves to travel, bike and ride trains. She speaks French and German, travels frequently and collects early 20th century train lithographs. So welcome, Daniela. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Voith and MacTavish Architects or VMA in Philadelphia.

 

So where in the city 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;05;15 - 00;03;41;14

DHV

Our firm has been celebrating its 35th year this year. We are located just on the edge of Center City on the Schuylkill River. So we have fabulous views of the river and city skyline. We are about 40 people, I think maybe 41 just this minute. And our primary focus is on design for education from pre-K to post-collegiate. But that encompasses a wide range of services, preservation, planning, architecture, as well as we have an interior studio and a wide range of projects, which is why this client type is so exciting for me.

 

00;03;41;19 - 00;03;45;14

DP

Interesting. So the firm size has grown over the years, I would assume.

 

00;03;45;17 - 00;03;55;08

DHV

Yes, we started off as two people and now our, as I said, almost 40. We actually grew during the pandemic. I have no explanation for it.

 

00;03;55;11 - 00;03;58;08

DP

That's incredible. And was that mainly in school work?

 

00;03;58;13 - 00;04;33;09

DHV

Almost exclusively, we do architecture planning, interiors and preservation, and we service school work primarily, but we do other work for other institutions, primarily nonprofit. For example, we're just completing a almost 100,000 square foot renovation of some factory buildings for an organization called Philadelphia Youth Basketball. So it has seven basketball courts, classrooms, leadership training, those sorts of facilities up in one of the more disadvantaged areas of Philadelphia.

 

00;04;33;11 - 00;04;35;10

DP

And do you guys do any residential work?

 

00;04;35;14 - 00;04;45;27

DHV

We do, actually. Thanks for asking. We just brought on three new partners, one of whom is Scott O’Barr, and he is heading up our residential studio. It's fairly new for us.

 

00;04;46;00 - 00;04;48;11

DP

Well, that's great. That's actually my, that's what I do. I do.

 

00;04;48;11 - 00;04;55;25

DHV

All right. Well, we started off doing residential but grew out of that and now we're coming back to residential again with the addition of Scott.

 

00;04;56;02 - 00;05;04;22

DP

That's great work. Good for you. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been practicing and what's your role in the office as a principal and director of design?

 

00;05;04;24 - 00;06;15;06

DHV

Well, my first job in architect's office was when I was 19 at the Architects Collaborative. I got an internship between my sophomore year and junior year at Bryn Mawr, and I loved it so much I took a year off and stayed there. Sadly, that firm doesn't exist anymore, but it was a great introduction to very high level design.

 

I graduated from architecture school in ‘81 and I've been working pretty much since I formed a partnership with my first employer, Toni Atkins. So it became Atkin Voith and Associates. So that existed for sadly only about three years. We were doing great, but somehow the relationship just wasn't going as well as it should have been. So I broke away and formed a new firm with one of the people that was an employee at the previous firm.

 

So Cameron MacTavish, who is a wonderful human being and very talented person, and I just bought him out about five years ago because he wanted to do other things and we're still great friends. That's amazing. And just this January took on three new partners. One of the people who was a partner previously, John Cluver, heads up the Preservation Studio.

 

So there are now five of us, the VMA five.

 

00;06;15;08 - 00;06;28;12

DP

Well, it sounds like your firm clearly has grown and you do wonderful work. I've been on your website and we'll talk about that a little bit later. So let's talk a little bit about this project. How did your office get the project?

 

00;06;28;15 - 00;07;12;00

DHV

Well, just as we usually do, it's a competitive business. I think we won it at the interview. The RFP was one of the most unusual ones that we've ever gotten because the brief was written about love and loyalty and how can architecture help young students form a really strong bond with a place. There is also a lot of humor involved at Lawrenceville.

 

There are a funny bunch, they love to joke, and so in our visual response that we sent in with our portfolio, we photoshopped the head and face of the CFO, who had written the RFP into almost every photo that had people in it. So he only found five of them.

 

00;07;12;02 - 00;07;13;04

DP

Where's Waldo?

 

00;07;13;07 - 00;07;28;24

DHV

It was exactly like Where's Waldo? But we tried to approach the interview in responding exactly to that. How do you create a sense of belonging and a sense of fascination and otherness in a place?

 

00;07;28;27 - 00;07;30;25

DP

So you didn't know the clients and you got the job?

 

00;07;30;26 - 00;07;31;17

DHV

That's correct.

 

00;07;31;17 - 00;07;38;05

DP

That's wonderful. Good for you. So let's talk a little bit about the history of the location you said is kind of special.

 

00;07;38;07 - 00;09;17;03

DHV

So Lawrenceville is one of the premier boarding schools in the country. It has a long tradition. Its original campus was laid out by Olmstead, and a lot of the architecture was done, as you mentioned, by Peabody and Stearns. Originally, it was laid out in a circle as many older boarding schools are. And as it grew, the planning paradigm became more oriented around quads.

 

This dining hall was built as an addition to a Peabody and Stearns dormitory. It had a flat roof, a pretty unsympathetic brick, big glass curtain wall that faced West, which you can only imagine was sun beating in at dinner time. So they pulled the curtains. So it was almost always dark. And so there was a lot to improve, but they didn't really want to diverge too much from the footprint of the building.

 

But essentially we took the building down to its foundations. We left the steel, took off the roof and kept these two side wings that are almost square and planned and put a new roof and new structure. As you mentioned, the big glulam trusses that look like heavy timber and then made a basically a six foot addition on the Western facade to create some really deep windows so that that West facing sun would get mitigated as it comes in and then really responded to the facade of the original dormitory on the other side.

 

So the facade is characterized by a round tower which forms the entry and six Romanesque arched windows, three on either side. So it has this very heavy look about its sense of gravitas.

 

00;09;17;06 - 00;09;23;05

DP

So this building really looked nothing like what it does today. Is that correct? The facades are completely new.

 

00;09;23;09 - 00;09;25;00

DHV

Completely new.

 

00;09;25;02 - 00;09;41;01

DP

So what's interesting about that, as I'm reading about your renovation 1960s building, I'm thinking this was clearly a very talented architect in the sixties. Now, that's amazing, right? So this building, he just took it down to the foundations. Okay, Now it all makes perfect sense.

 

00;09;41;01 - 00;09;41;19

DHV

Pretty much.

 

00;09;41;19 - 00;09;44;16

DP

My goodness.

 

00;09;44;16 - 00;09;47;00

DHV

It was a flat roof, 1960s building with a curtain wall.

 

00;09;47;06 - 00;09;53;05

DP

Yeah. Wow, that. Okay, that's pretty cool. So you guys know what you're doing? This thing is beautiful.

 

00;09;53;05 - 00;10;36;19

DHV

Thank you. Thank you. Well, part of our design philosophy is to really make more of a home, both in terms of individual buildings, but also in terms of the context. And this design really is right up our alley in the sense that we love to combine mission and image. As I said before, there is a strong mission to get the dining hall, which is for the fifth formers, their culminating year at the school, a chance to rebond. The school is organized so that there's a freshman dorm, but then they divide up into houses and they're in those houses for two years and then they come back together again as a class. So it's a chance to rebond.

 

00;10;36;21 - 00;10;41;22

DP

So tell me a little bit about the scope or programmatic requirements of the project from the beginning.

 

00;10;41;29 - 00;11;53;02

DHV

Right? So the dining hall seats about 250 to 300. The servery was a very old fashioned cafeteria line, which is way outdated in terms of food service. So the kitchens had to be upgraded, the servery completely renovated, the loading dock assisted and that sort of thing. So they also wanted to be able to use the room as an event space.

 

So it needed to handle various different seating configurations, a lot of AV component ends, video, that sort of thing. And they wanted to be able to clear out the room, as I said, for some events like dances. So I worked very closely with Thomas Moser. There's a fine mill worker up at Maine to develop a table. It looked like a very heavy wooden table.

 

It is a very heavy wooden table, but the top flips and you can put it up onto skateboards essentially and move them away. So it's now called the Daniela table, and it's available on their contract side if you're looking for a nesting trestle table. And that was really about it. It serves three meals a day other than the events that they do.

 

So one of the first was a wedding for the head of school, his daughter.

 

00;11;53;05 - 00;11;59;26

DP

So they must have had a decent budget for the project, right? They ended up making some custom furniture.

 

00;11;59;28 - 00;12;15;24

DHV

I think by most standards it was decent. The project in the end all in was $8 million. It's a 13,000 square foot building, so it's not incredibly expensive by residential short, but a lot of value I think, for what they invested in this building.

 

00;12;16;00 - 00;12;29;03

DP

So let's go backwards a little bit and talk about the building stylistically. So you mentioned, I mentioned earlier, Peabody and Stearns Architecture. I guess they may have been well known for shingle style architecture.

 

00;12;29;09 - 00;12;44;00

DHV

They were they were a firm of big reputation. And so I think the board members must have nabbed them from New York and brought them down to Lawrenceville. Shingle style definitely. But also this kind of masonry structures as well.

 

00;12;44;02 - 00;13;06;21

DP

So let's talk a little bit about project restrictions. So I don't know a whole lot about how to get a building built on a boarding school campus. What was that like? And are you working with the town and zoning ordinances there? And you're also working with the school and with esthetic issues. And are there any historical challenges other than trying to match certain architecture?

 

00;13;06;28 - 00;14;22;12

DHV

The zoning was easy because we were really staying pretty much within the same footprint. We're not adding impervious coverage. The construction logistics were tricky and we essentially cut a new entrance road onto the campus, a construction entrance, and fenced off the construction area. Obviously, student safety is a huge concern. Embedded into our specification are behavioral guidelines, no smoking, shirts on, no swear words.

 

There's a lot of that sort of thing that's required by most school campuses, actually. The construction needed to happen within a year. They only took that dining hall offline for just one school year, basically a real tricky part of the project was that the original contractor was somebody that we had done maybe 15 to 20 projects with, went out of business in the middle of the project.

 

So that was heartbreaking because they were such good contractors and caused a huge hiccup and because they were having such trouble, there was construction work that was done that wasn't necessarily supervised, and the school wanted some work to continue. So there was a lot of logistical issues that happened in transferring to another contractor.

 

00;14;22;19 - 00;14;27;29

DP

Did you have to hire like a construction manager to come in and help put it all back together?

 

00;14;28;01 - 00;14;48;15

DHV

No, the school, you know, was fairly sophisticated in terms of construction. Many schools are not, but there was insurance involved. And so there was insurance oversight. There was banking issues. There were a lot of things in transferring all that knowledge from one contractor to another. Not having the backup was challenging, but they did an amazing job in the end.

 

00;14;48;18 - 00;14;52;03

DP

So how long did the planning and design process take?

 

00;14;52;06 - 00;15;28;09

DHV

Probably just about a year, maybe a smidge longer. There's always that moment. We go through the design. We made models, we did beautiful drawings. There wasn't, like there often is, a hiatus for fundraising because the project was fully funded from the get go, so a single donor basically anteed up. So it was a fairly smooth process from the beginning of concept through the construction documents, the construction documents were a thing of beauty.

 

The Millwork was so detailed, the brickwork is so detailed. There is a lot to that set. I'd love to show them to you at some point.

 

00;15;28;12 - 00;15;34;22

DP

I'd love to see that. So what was the size of the team that you had working on the project?

 

00;15;34;24 - 00;15;47;17

DHV

Core team of myself, the project manager, Sennah Loftus, the architect, Andrew Lipschitz. And then there were probably two other people who were helping. So that's 5.

 

00;15;47;17 - 00;15;51;06

DP

And did you guys work in 2D and 3D?

 

00;15;51;08 - 00;16;03;20

DHV

This is a project that was done entirely in CAD so much detail that it not a lot of repetition and so many one off kinds of details that working in Revit would have hindered us.

 

00;16;03;20 - 00;16;11;29

DP

I think and you guys presented I'm assuming, drawings and ultimately maybe even models to the clients along the way. Did they enjoy that?

 

00;16;12;01 - 00;16;24;23

DHV

Of course, there's nothing like a model. So we actually made a model where we could take the roof off. The client could actually understand the roof structure and then see the space inside and then put the roof back on.

 

00;16;24;25 - 00;16;27;01

DP

Did you guys hire that out or did you make them?

 

00;16;27;01 - 00;16;43;09

DHV

We did it in-house. We have a great shop where we can do both woodworking, we have a laser cutter and also 3D printing. I think we're in the midst of phasing out the woodshop, sadly. But the other aspects of it is that prototyping is really important to us.

 

00;16;43;12 - 00;16;55;01

DP

So that's a good segway to the building esthetics. So I'm looking at some photos of the architecture. Did you guys replicate some of the archways that you found on campus and other buildings?

 

00;16;55;09 - 00;17;44;11

DHV

The main arches that are on this facade are derived directly from the front of the original dormitory. It's called Upper House. So from the upper house facade. But the curved tower entry was something that, you know, we studied Peabody and Stern a fair amount and we thought that would be appropriate. It, of course, was very tricky construction and detailing wise because not only is it curved, but we also put an arched top over the main doors.

 

So that arch is curving in elevation and in plan. Interestingly, if you flatten it out, it's actually and ellipse and the underside of the arch as you get into the door itself actually expands from the doorframe to the door head. It gets steeper because the curve is coming around.

 

00;17;44;13 - 00;17;46;09

DP

So they built formwork for that?

 

00;17;46;11 - 00;18;34;12

DHV

No? Well, I'm sure they did in terms of having an arch to lay everything up on. But the arches are actually true arches and we wanted that really deep window recess. So the brick is laid up on a facing block. So it's actually an eight inch facade on top of the structural law we have that depth really makes those arches read.

 

The arches have a stone arch on the outside. Then there's another arch on the inside that's made up of a header and a stretcher. So it's that deep. And then there's a hinge brick underneath that has a molded shape on it, basically, not quite a full round, but I guess a three quarter around section. And then it goes back into the return, which as I said, varies in depth as it goes around.

 

00;18;34;14 - 00;18;38;11

DP

Did you have any trouble finding a mason to do that work?

 

00;18;38;14 - 00;19;20;00

DHV

So we didn't find the mason, the contractors did. And the Masons on this job were really good, so we were happy. The brick is kind of a orangish red. The way we've laid it out has a very, almost monolithic feel because we picked a mortar that blends with the brick. It doesn't highlight each individual brick. So the mortar itself has that a similar coloration to the brick.

 

There's not much of just facade and it's laid up in running bond. In between the arches we have round medallions that are also made of brick. And then the center those medallions are a herringbone pattern. So there's an incredible amount of richness in the brickwork and it's highlighted by these masonry elements.

 

00;19;20;02 - 00;19;25;09

DP

I would imagine you did a lot of drawings in house of what this, ultimately, the facades were going to look like.

 

00;19;25;09 - 00;19;28;04

DHV

And then the shop drawings were amazing.

 

00;19;28;06 - 00;19;31;01

DP

And did you do many mock ups in the field?

 

00;19;31;04 - 00;19;54;24

DHV

So we did a mock up of the wall and a return. We did not do a full on mock up with the window inserted. We often do, but in this case we didn't. Tricky part was putting one of these arched openings into the existing brick of those sidings that I mentioned To start with. The brick actually is slightly different than the 1960s brick. That's the only bit of facade that remained.

 

00;19;54;27 - 00;19;59;01

DP

So the brick facade remained on those wings and then you matched?

 

00;19;59;07 - 00;20;04;06

DHV

Now we didn't match their contrasting sixties. Brick has more variation in it.

 

00;20;04;10 - 00;20;06;13

DP

It looks a little redder in the photos.

 

00;20;06;16 - 00;20;21;19

DHV

Yeah, it's just has a little bit more variation in the brick. But we tried to choose a brick that would blend both with the original Peabody and Sterns and those existing pieces of wall. I mean, in the end we could have just taken them down and started over, but we didn't.

 

00;20;21;21 - 00;20;36;24

DP

Right. You always, at least in my experience, you kind of pick and choose what you're going to keep and what you're not going to keep. And you look back, you're like, man, we probably spent more money keeping things than just tearing it down to the foundation gradually.

 

00;20;36;25 - 00;20;50;17

DHV

Absolutely. But part of the transformation of this building was not only this incredibly detailed facade, but also the very, very steeply pitched roof that's all slate. The dormers have copper on them and the tower itself has some copper on it.

 

00;20;50;19 - 00;20;55;14

DP

They must have loved that, the peak roof, the idea that they were getting rid of this flat roof.

 

00;20;55;14 - 00;21;04;21

DHV

Absolutely. I'm still hearing, I mean this was finished a number of years ago, and I still hear from people who've been on campus how amazing the space is.

 

00;21;04;24 - 00;21;13;14

DP

Let's talk a little bit about the trusses on the interior, even though they're not masonry. So in my experience those are called hammer beam trusses. Am I incorrect?

 

00;21;13;16 - 00;21;51;24

DHV

No, but basically this is a modern building and the span was fairly large. And so our engineers wanted this to be self-supporting. So they're made up of glulam pieces and then bolted together. There is a lot of concern actually by the client when they first saw the trusses go up because they weren't stained yet. And it has these heavy bolts in the plates and they're really worried that this is going to get too industrial looking.

 

And we painted the steel bits in a color that kind of calms down the contrast between the steel and the wood. And by the time the roof went on and everything else was going on, everybody's in love.

 

00;21;51;26 - 00;21;57;02

DP

You would never know. And I looked at those photos online. You'd never know there was any steel.

 

00;21;57;04 - 00;22;07;02

DHV

Yeah, it's just the balls. Sometimes we've done roofs that look like they're heavy timber but are actually steel clad. But in this case, the wood is actually self-supporting.

 

00;22;07;05 - 00;22;08;23

DP

Yeah, the interior's stunning.

 

00;22;08;26 - 00;22;09;10

DHV

Thank you.

 

00;22;09;10 - 00;22;14;21

DP

Is that one large rectangular space on the first floor other than the wing?

 

00;22;14;21 - 00;23;21;18

DHV

Yeah, other than the wings, it's not quite rectangular because the ends have sort of apses. They're angular. And so in the middle of each and there's an enormous fireplace, we pulled the base of the fireplace up off the floor so that you could see in to the fireplaces from the seated position. And then we had these incredible carvings done that are representative of themes on the campus.

 

And then, they're not wood burning their gas, but they certainly give this incredible warmth to events and the floor is made of terrazzo. And we carefully made a pattern of the terazzo. So but I said, these people are jokesters, right? And so one of the things that you can do with terrazzo, so it's imbed brass shapes into it.

 

We found a number of shapes again of animals and other things that are kind of spread through the Lawrenceville law. And then we put cockroaches on the floor. That's so there's like five or six cockroaches. So there's the question always is, well, where's the cockroach?

 

00;23;21;20 - 00;23;23;03

DP

I'd love to see that.

 

00;23;23;05 - 00;23;25;04

DHV

I can send you a photograph.

 

00;23;25;12 - 00;23;31;03

DP

Please do. So, did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process? Anything kind of new for you?

 

00;23;31;05 - 00;24;04;08

DHV

One of the things that we were very interested in anyway was the issue of the Western exposure. And we're a firm that is oriented towards sustainability. It kind of is part and parcel of every project that we do. And so the light mitigation was a big piece of it. So we did a number of lighting studies to see how deep we needed to make the niches to really be able to cut off the direct glare to the inside.

 

That was an interesting piece of work for us. The combination of computer modeling, lighting, simulation and facade design.

 

00;24;04;11 - 00;24;18;24

DP

Very cool. So, Daniela, you've been an architect and educator for some time. Based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for your younger self or maybe for young people coming up in the field today?

 

00;24;18;27 - 00;25;06;09

DHV

So everybody has to find their own selves. And I mentor a lot of women. Our office is more than 50% women. Being an architect on the job site is always a challenge. I found my own way, partially because I played a lot of basketball growing up and I played a lot of basketball with men. I already had this kind of knowledge of both teamwork, competitiveness, defensiveness, all of that all plays out in sports and then into real life.

 

But most people don't have that experience. They're not as big as tall as I am. I try and say, You're going to have to find your own way. But ultimately on the job site anyway, the person who signs the requisition for payment has the power. So I think my biggest piece of advice is learn to trust yourself and stand on your own two feet.

 

00;25;06;16 - 00;25;23;26

DP

It's great advice. When I think about myself as a young architect, a young human being for that matter, I was always looking for answers from someone else, always asking someone, How do I do this or How do I get to where I want to go? Or what do I even want to do with my life.

 

00;25;23;28 - 00;25;25;09

DHV

That only comes from inside.

 

00;25;25;15 - 00;25;36;22

DP

But it takes a long time to figure that out. And it's really nice that there are people that come alongside you and say, Hey, you know what? You have to look inside. The answers are actually all there already.

 

00;25;36;24 - 00;25;37;27

DHV

Correct. Nice way to put it.

 

00;25;38;00 - 00;25;47;18

DP

Well, I'm glad you've been there for lots of other women. So, Daniela, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about VMA and yourself?

 

00;25;47;20 - 00;26;08;14

DHV

Our website is cumbersome in terms of its name, but its VoithandMacTavish.com. There's lots of information. If you want to know more about me, search Daniela Voith I think will get you there. You don't have to add my middle name, Holt. I even have a Wikipedia page. So there's a lot of information out there to be had about me.

 

00;26;08;20 - 00;26;12;18

DP

That's pretty cool. Well, thank you very much for your time today.

 

00;26;12;25 - 00;26;15;11

DHV

It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

 

00;26;15;14 - 00;26;42;05

DP

Our pleasure.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;14 - 00;00;30;13

Peter Miller (PM)

Gentrification is always an issue in New York City, and trying to deal with that in a responsible way as an architect is something we often think about. Some people, you know, have a problem with larger buildings, but we're not talking about towers. The most bulk is on avenue is where I think people are a bit more comfortable. And because we're bringing residential into the neighborhood, that's usually something that's appreciated.

 

Everyone in New York believes rents and housing prices are too high and we need a greater supply.

 

00;00;30;18 - 00;01;00;18

DP

This is my guest, Peter Miller. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault we highlight Peter's project 625 Rogers Avenue. 625 Rogers Avenue is the site for a new mixed-use building with a primary use of residential ground level, commercial and community facility uses with a below grade enclosed parking lot. The architectural design for the building divides the overall mass into two distinct volumes a lower and upper.

 

The lower is a rectilinear form that relates to historic buildings in the area. This volume is meant to create a more contextual streetscape and a friendly residential feel. In contrast, the higher recessed form is articulated to relate to the new character of the neighborhood. It steps back and recedes as it rises, making it more private and less visible from the street.

 

The lower form is brick, the upper is stucco, the lower is dark, the upper is light. A side yard is included along the south elevation for more daylight glass and a restaurant terrace. Hi, I'm Doug Pat, and this is Design Vault. Peter Miller is a partner of Palatte Architecture, which he co-founded in 2010. He holds a B.S. in architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis and a master's degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

 

Peter is a director of the Executive Board of AIA New York and a Design for Freedom Working Group member. He's a registered architect with 20 plus years of experience focusing on designing and implementing innovative building systems and components. His notable projects include Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut, The National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, The Revitalization of Forest Park in Saint Louis, the Confluence Masterplan of Missouri and NYC HPD's Small Lots Development Program.

 

Peter's work has won many design awards, including several AIA National Honors Awards and the Mies Crown Hall America's Prize. His work has been featured in Architectural Record, Elder Corps, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He's originally from rural Indiana and is from a family of craftsmen, engineers, entrepreneurs and tinkerers. He treasures the creative process of turning ideas into physical form.

 

So welcome, Peter. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Palatte Architecture in New York City. So it was founded in 2010. Where are you guys located In the city. What's the size of the firm? What type of work do you do?

 

00;03;17;08 - 00;04;01;09

PM

So we're located in the, I like to say the Union Square area. We're on 16th Street and Sixth Avenue. We are 11 people in total, three partners and eight architects. The work that we primarily do is residential in nature. It spans from multifamily, residential in the mid-sized range. 50 dwellings is probably an average size for a mid-sized development to custom residential townhouse projects within the city and custom houses ground up outside of the city.

 

In addition to the residential work, we do a variety of other things early education is a big part of what we do. Preschools, daycares, things of that nature, and some other commercial projects spanning from retail to restaurants.

 

00;04;01;12 - 00;04;02;08

DP

How's business?

 

00;04;02;14 - 00;04;30;04

PM

Businesses up and down. You know, when you own your own business, it's always a rollercoaster. I would say we're busy. There is a lot of work being constructed right now. We have a lot of projects in construction. Design work continues to come in. It's not quite as strong as it was a year ago. I think interest rates are affecting particularly the custom residential side of our business, but the multifamily business continues to be booming. We stay busy.

 

00;04;30;07 - 00;04;31;28

DP

Has the firm grown?

 

00;04;32;01 - 00;04;52;08

PM

We try very hard to stay the same size. We have a team of people that we really like and we trust them. And I think a big part of who we are is the consistency within our office. So when times get slow, we find ways to keep those people productive, and when times are busy, they go the extra mile for us and they put in the extra work.

 

00;04;52;10 - 00;04;59;17

DP

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

 

00;04;59;20 - 00;06;10;10

PM

So I've been practicing since early 2000s. I attended Columbia University for graduate school and finished in 2006 and spent a better part of a decade working for well-known firms, doing international projects, particularly of like museums and high end residential. We formed Palatte Architecture. I had two business partners, John Sunwoo and Jeff Wanders, and then we met at Columbia in studio, and there was always an idea that we wanted to work together.

 

It took a while. We had our own careers in other firms for a while and came back together and formed the office in 2010, but it took a little while to get off the ground. Within the firm my role is partner. We are fairly equal. It's one of our core elements at Pallet architecture, the three partners. We have complementary skills, but we all can perform anything within the office.

 

Projects are organized where each partner is in charge of one, and then beyond that, we have some other roles. One of my roles is sort of business management and human resources, so I do that in addition to all the design work, the construction administration.

 

00;06;10;09 - 00;06;15;17

DP

All right, so let's dig in here and talk about 625 Rogers Avenue. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;06;15;19 - 00;07;07;25

PM

So this is with a client we've been working with for a while is a little bit of background on Palette Architecture. We really started this firm fairly early in our careers. As such, we didn't have as many connections. A lot of things started out as they do in sort of those classic ideas of architecture. You're doing somebody's bathroom, somebody's kitchen, and then you do a good job and you end up doing their house and eventually you work your way up.

 

So it's been that way. We met this client when we were doing a lot of houses and they were looking to turn a house into a residential building, a multifamily four. So it was to turn like a big townhouse into a four family. And so we did that project for them and we built a relationship that's led to, I think, ten different projects with them now.

 

And this is the latest one. And so they've grown in scale each time. And this one's, I think, 25 units.

 

00;07;08;02 - 00;07;14;29

DP

The project is considerable size. So give us a little history of the location and what was there prior.

 

00;07;15;01 - 00;08;17;11

PM

This is in the Prospect Lefferts neighborhood of Brooklyn. So that is on the northeast side of Prospect Park. We've done a number of projects in this area. The site before this was largely vacant, there was a couple of dilapidated houses in that area. It was mostly a small demo and clearing the project is near the corner of Parkside and Rogers Avenue.

 

Rogers is the major thoroughfare through the Prospect Lefferts neighborhood. We do not have the actual corner lot, which was kind of an unusual situation in terms of design. There is a small brick building on the corner that has a bodega in the ground floor. Adjacent to them there was an easement in place for them to have access to the back of their building.

 

So we have a minimum of eight feet that we needed to keep open between us in their building. So we ended up with a building that had two facades, even though it wasn't on a corner because of the easement.

 

00;08;17;13 - 00;08;22;24

DP

So tell me a little bit about the scope of the project and the client's programmatic requirements.

 

00;08;22;26 - 00;09;08;03

PM

So the scope of the project is largely multi-family residential. As with any case, working with a developer, you know, it's maximizing units and floor area for the residential use. However, because it's on Rogers Avenue, which is a major thoroughfare, there was an overlay for commercial. So there was a desire to try to put as much commercial in here as was viable in terms of sales. On the ground floor we have two commercial spaces. One is designed to be a restaurant and the other is a bit more flexible, likely to be more of a retail establishment. And then in addition, there is a small community facility space on the ground floor. There is a lobby also on the ground floor that leads up to the residential spaces. And there is five floors, two through six, that is residential apartments above.

 

00;09;08;05 - 00;09;12;03

DP

So building plan. Could you describe that on the site shape?

 

 

00;09;12;05 - 00;09;27;04

PM

Yeah. So it's L-shaped, I would say, with one of the major legs being across Rogers Avenue and the other leg running parallel to this easement that I mentioned before. And then there is a courtyard in the back portion of the L.

 

00;09;27;06 - 00;09;33;10

DP

So project restrictions, zoning codes. What were you guys dealing with out there other than the easement?

 

00;09;33;12 - 00;10;21;05

PM

One of the things that has generated a lot of our work in Prospect Lefferts Gardens is there was a zoning change probably about a decade ago that allowed for larger bulk in the area. So a lot of the buildings along Rogers Avenue and in other parts of the neighborhood, are suddenly getting a lot bigger. And in some cases you're seeing full tear downs.

 

In some cases you're seeing vertical enlargements. In our case, it was important to have this contextual approach that some of the smaller buildings were going to remain for decades and others were going to instantly become larger. So we wanted something the span between those. That meant having a form that followed the context of those smaller buildings. So it's larger up to a setback, and then it sets back at the height of our neighbors and then becomes something a bit more fanciful above.

 

00;10;21;07 - 00;10;28;09

DP

I'm thinking about the neighbors, right? And I'm thinking about the neighborhood. And you said these buildings are getting bigger. Is that driving anybody crazy?

 

00;10;28;12 - 00;11;09;05

PM

Oh, certainly. It's a mixed neighborhood and gentrification is always an issue in New York City. And trying to deal with that in a responsible way as an architect is something we often think about. And it's certainly an issue in this neighborhood as well. Some people, you know, have a problem with larger buildings, but we're not talking about towers.

 

The bulk has risen from like four stories to six or seven stories. So it's a bit bigger. The most bulk is on avenues where I think people are a bit more comfortable with it. And because we're bringing residential into the neighborhood, that's usually something that's appreciated. Everyone in New York believes rents and housing prices are too high and that we need a greater supply. So there isn't a lot of tension, I think, on that.

 

00;11;09;08 - 00;11;17;22

DP

What is the city do in terms of review, esthetics and building height? Is there an open meeting and you guys are just about to go into construction?

 

00;11;17;29 - 00;13;21;19

PM

We are in construction. We've been in construction for almost a year. The superstructure is in place. A lot of the interiors are framed out and the building is fully enclosed. At this point, we are about to clad the exterior, so we're pretty far along in construction in terms of the city's take on the shape and the zoning of the building.

 

New York City is fairly as of right city. If you are following the zoning code, zoning text in the building code, you can largely do what you want, but it is fairly constrained, especially if you want to maximize the floor area, maximize the amount of units. So you often find yourself into these rectilinear envelopes if you're trying to maximize, but there's room for play.

 

And I think that's really what we were trying to do with this lower mass, is to build that out, make it very tight and taut and follow the context of the neighborhood. It was a bit more challenging on our site because we also had to deal with this easement. And so the easement is a whole swath of the property that you can't use.

 

You're probably aware, but in New York City, the amount that you can build is a factor of the lot size. So the larger the lot, the more you can build. However, if you're not allowed to build on a portion of the lot, then that same amount of area has to fit into a smaller envelope and so it gets tight.

 

That's kind of what led to the L-shape, is that we couldn't simply do it in a bar building across the main avenue. We had to put some sort of extension on to the back. But we were fortunate that that extension could follow the easement. So we get a lot of natural light and air from that. It's not legal light and air, which I think people from New York will be familiar with, which is something is a requirement for all apartments.

 

But we were able to get that through our courtyard and through our rear exposure. And so this was really like bonus windows and bonus light and air that we could get because of the easement. In addition, this corner building is quite a bit smaller, so we are afforded a lot of wonderful views over the top of it.

 

00;13;21;21 - 00;13;37;24

DP

So tell us a little bit about the design process. I just typed in 625 Rogers Avenue and there's a nice website that comes up and there are some great three dimensional images there that tell me a little bit about the design process. How does that work in your office and how long did it take for this project?

 

 

00;13;37;27 - 00;14;19;02

PM

The design process is usually quite rapid in New York City. I would say the actual meat of the process, which is kind of something that a lot of times you learn in school, you spend some time, you make some models, try out a few renderings and you come up with something and then you say, Well, we're not going to do this part.

 

Let's change it like that. That part of like coming to a form and a floor plan was probably an 8 to 10 week process. And then, of course, there's many stages after that coordinating with structure and mechanical and doing all the fine details and then that sort of thing, Then that's probably another couple of months.

 

00;14;19;04 - 00;14;21;21

DP

So were the clients excited about the project?

 

00;14;21;23 - 00;16;41;07

PM

Yes, they do value design a lot and so they were quite excited about it. I think there was always a question of how were we going to deal with this easement? And I think they were very excited about this idea of this lower box that is contextual. We weren't formally contextual. I think that's also probably important to mention.

 

It is a black brick, so it's not your traditional New York red brick or yellow brick that you might find in there. It is a black brick, so it is meant to pop a bit. What was important to us as a firm was to make something that was formally contextual, didn't look bigger than the neighbors didn't look imposing.

 

We're not interested in a building that like sticks out like a sore thumb. I think a lot of architects think that you need to make something flashy in order to be noticed, and then for people to come and want you to design another flashy thing that wasn't necessarily what we were after. We wanted something that had a calm facade to it and felt a bit like the neighborhood.

 

But this isn't the early 1900s, like the context was built in, so we can't do exactly that. So we were looking for something that was formally similar but materially different. And so we went with this black brick along the lower volume. And then of course we had more area to use and we had to put it somewhere. So we set it back and we gave it more articulation.

 

 

It's a bit of push and pull of rectangular volumes above, but it's a very light color and the idea was always to be set back enough to where it wasn't initially visible. It was more of a second look sort of thing that when you see the building, you're like, Oh, that feels like the size of other buildings in the neighborhood.

 

And then when you look a second time, you’re like actually it is not. And what's going on up above is really articulated and interesting. And why did they do this sort of thing? And the reason why we did a lot of that on the upper volume was to create outdoor spaces. This was a project that was conceived during the pandemic and then finalized throughout that process.

 

There was a lot of interest in our office about making outdoor spaces, particularly private outdoor spaces, beyond the size of balconies, spaces that were more of room size so that you could actually spend time outside with others and you could work outside when the weather is good. So a lot of the articulation on this upper volume was about trying to create private outdoor spaces for each of the interior units.

 

00;16;41;10 - 00;16;45;07

DP

So were there any unique construction details throughout the project?

 

00;16;45;09 - 00;18;20;15

PM

Certainly. And we are talking about brick, I'm sure, today. So I think that has a lot to do with it. We've been finding that thin brick has been really advantageous to us throughout the process. New York City is all about every inch. Every inch matters. Real estate agents will tell you that. So the thin brick does afford us a thinner wall thickness, which allows every unit to be a little bit bigger, the sales area to be a little bit bigger.

 

So that's something we'd like to do. But what we found great about the true brick system, which is what we used, is that it's a mechanically fastened thin brick which affords us new types of details. When you see the classical full brick, you can do corbelling, you can have some bricks, project out from others to create shadow lines and other types of articulation, which wasn't initially available in thin brick because everything just had to sit inside of a tray and anything that projected out would become too much of a load and either pop out.

 

And so what we were really excited about with this thin brick system, the true bricks, is that we could have a variety of brick depths while still saving these inches. And so there was a lot of thought about that in terms of details. We used different depths of thin brick to articulate slab edges and also areas of pattern and texture.

 

So within this brick volume on the base, there are strip windows. In between each strip window. We do have a textured brick that creates a bit of interest. It creates a patterned shadow on the facade, and then that is all captured in between these sort of expressed slab edges.

 

00;18;20;17 - 00;18;24;29

DP

So could you go through a wall section for me? Exterior to interior.?

 

00;18;25;01 -  00;19;29;12

PM

So we have on the exterior a variety of different depth thin bricks that snap into the true bricks tray system, which is sort of like a channel shaped system that is then attached into a kingspan karrier panel. So this is sort of an all in one cladding waterproofing insulation panel. I believe it's an XPS insulation that's wrapped in a metal panel.

 

And these are tongue and groove panels that come together and they're flashed at their tongue and groove. So the metal panel on the outside acts as waterproofing, especially when the joints are flashed. Then there is this completely separated other metal panel on the interior, the separated by this XPS installations that provides your insulation and then that interior panel allows you to attach to the studs.

 

So there's no need for sheathing or waterproofing layer or another set of insulation. It's all in one. So we have that karrier panel and then that is attached to the stud. And then on the interior of the stud we have our finishes, which is general sheetrock.

 

00;19;29;14 - 00;19;33;06

DP

And the installation values of the walls?

 

00;19;33;06 - 00;19;36;24

PM

Two and a half inches. So I'm guessing that's probably about R 14.

 

00;19;36;26 - 00;19;46;17

DP

That sounds really interesting. And using thin brick, I mean it's a veneer like anything anyway, so whether or not you're going to use something that's three and 5/8 thick or it's a half inch thick, it’s still a veneer.

 

00;19;48;19 - 00;20;22;13

PM

100% agree. We live in a world now where energy code and sustainability issues are vitally important. And for the most part we know Brick classically is like a veneer as a cladding and a structural system, but it's just really not done that way anymore. It's mostly a cladding system now because we need to have this rain screen where where air can move behind the facade, and we need continuous insulation.

 

So if it's going to be mostly a veneer. Now I'm a fan of the thin brick systems because it saves you that extra couple of inches.

 

 

00;20;22;16 - 00;20;40;15

DP

Yeah, I totally agree. And you touched on this a little bit. Just back to the esthetics. So tell us about the style choice. The building is contemporary. When I read about the architecture you guys talked about as statically trying to work with the existing architecture in the neighborhood. Tell us a little bit about that.

 

00;20;40;17 - 00;22;28;22

PM

I think it's largely about scale. So as I mentioned, we are trying to create a datum that matches with the neighbor. In terms of height. I think the concern back to what you mentioned before is that people are going to feel like their neighborhood is growing rapidly and that it feels much more urban than it used to. And so that was really important to us in terms of context to make the scale feel as if they had always known this building.

 

Beyond that, we felt that Brick was an important choice. There's a lot of brick in the neighborhood. We felt that other materials might feel too distinct from the rest of the context. I don't think it's important that we try to look exactly like the neighbors because we're in a different era, a different technology. But there needs to be some tie to the way it is.

 

And it was also sort of important to us that the windows had some sort of gridded logic to it to match the neighbors. So there's a nod to that. Beyond that, we felt freedom to go a different way. And so we relied on sort of a color choice as one way to do that, to create this darker volume on the lower part would sort of emphasize the height of the building that it matched the others because it's so present in its darkness.

 

The other thing we liked about the darkness is that it made all the details a bit more subtle. It gave us a little more freedom to do things like these patterned bricks and these shadow lines that indicated that this was a newer building and that it has some innovative techniques and details to it. But wasn't flashy to the point of look at me and forget everyone else in the neighborhood.

 

00;22;28;25 - 00;22;39;02

DP

That's well explained. So when you guys did drawings for the architecture, for the construction process, all 2D, 2D and 3D, Revit, what are you guys working out?

 

00;22;39;02 - 00;23;05;06

PM

Yeah, well, Revit. Our office is 100% BIM. We are an office that was founded since 2010. So the partners, all the employees, we all grew up in this, so we're 100% BIM. We use Revit as our software. So everything is done in Revit from beginning to end. We found this really beneficial with some of our clients too, because we can get the visualizations a lot quicker and that just makes them feel comfortable.

 

00;23;05;08 - 00;23;16;07

DP

Yeah, clients love that. Yeah, for sure. So do you guys learn anything interesting through the design in what you're currently in construction process? Anything new for you as you've been working on the architecture?

 

00;23;16;09 - 00;24;17;03

PM

Well, let's see things that I would want to talk about. Usually the lessons are the things that like you didn't see coming or you feel like you could have control. I think one thing that we really learned on this project is moving to this Kingspan panel that I mentioned before is a new thing for our office. We're doing it on two projects or two simultaneously.

 

We knew a lot about the details going into it and we really believed in it and we love it, but our contractors were not familiar with it and so there was definitely a lot of lessons in how to communicate these details because a lot of them came in and were like, They see these new Legos for the first time and they're like, Oh, they must go together like this.

 

And then you arrive at a site and you say, No, actually you put that piece on wrong. It should be like this. There was a lot of back and forth and learning about how to communicate, when to come in in the process with somebody that hasn't used the technology before and really get them up to speed on it.

 

00;24;17;06 - 00;24;42;15

DP

That's funny, yeah, GCs love that when you walk out into the field and you tell them they're wrong. Yeah, sure. Before you go, Peter, you've been an architect for some time based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for your younger version of you, or maybe for some students or young architects that are just getting rolling?

 

00;24;42;17 - 00;25;03;01

PM

Well, that's a great question. It's easier for me to advise my earlier self than advise a generic architect in school, and I hope this advice applies for me. I was always an introverted sort of person. I come from a very conservative rural background and it took me a while to learn how to really speak my voice to people.

 

And I think in school there's this sense that your work is always out there for critique and that you should be careful about everything you do. I think I've learned over time that as long as you follow your own voice and your own beliefs, that those things will fall in place. And so I would advise myself, when I was younger, to not be concerned about whether or not your voice is going to land perfectly amongst your audience.

 

I think as long as you believe in it passionately and you talk about it strongly and you think about it all the time and you critique yourself, that that will lead to stronger work and it will lead to people wanting to see your work and interact with your work and make sure that it gets built in the way that you had always imagined it.

 

00;25;03;02 - 00;25;51;16

DP

Yeah, I think that's a really beautiful way of looking at things right that it will land in the right location. You're just responsible for finding your voice and expressing it as best you can within the framework of the work that you do. That's great. So, Peter, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Palette Architecture and yourself?

 

00;25;51;19 - 00;26;13;22

PM

Well, certainly you can go to our website, PaletteArch.com, or they can follow us on Instagram also @PaletteArch.

 

00;26;13;24 - 00;26;29;26

DP

Well, Peter, thank you very much. It's been great to have you.

 

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;22

Doug Patt

Let's go inside the vault. The Design Vault.

 

00;00;05;25 - 00;00;20;17

Michelle Wagner

One of the nice things about the site is it's next to the landmark districts. So the heights to the north are low and set, and they won't go any higher. So we knew we wanted to be tall and get as many apartments above that height for views to Manhattan.

 

00;00;20;20 - 00;02;15;29

DP

This is my guest, Michelle Wagner. I'll share more about her shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault we’ll highlight Michelle's project Front and York. Front and York is a 1.2 million square foot mixed use and multi-family complex in Brooklyn, New York. The large scale two tower development occupies an entire city block and encompasses a unique blend of apartments, condos, and luxury penthouses, as well as an unparalleled package of indoor and outdoor amenities, and more than 140,000 square feet of retail.

The project features a blend of more than 750 condo and rental units, as well as an interior courtyard that spans nearly one acre. Not to mention a challenging 25-foot grade change across the site. The building resembles that of a late 19th or early 20th century warehouse or factory, but significantly more luxuriant. With a glass fiber reinforced concrete frame and light gray brick infill, the building is quite beautiful and absolutely massive.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Today we're talking to Michelle Wagner, registered architect, LEED AP. Michelle has her Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado and is a registered architect licensed in New York and Colorado. Michelle is a project director at Morris Adjmi Architects. Before joining Morris Adjmi, Michelle worked on the World Trade Center Master Plan and design guidelines with studio Daniel Libeskind.

With more than 25 years of experience, she excels in the management of large-scale projects and has played a vital role in leading the design and delivery of some of the firm's most ambitious assignments. So, let's get into the details. Welcome, Michelle.

 

00;02;16;03 - 00;02;18;08

MW

Thank you, Doug. Thanks for that introduction.

 

00;02;18;12 - 00;02;26;08

DP

So first, tell us a little bit about Morris Adjmi Architects. Where are they located in New York. What's the size of the firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;02;26;16 - 00;02;49;29

MW

Sure. We are in lower Manhattan, downtown, really. Right near the stock exchange. It's about a 100 person firm in New York. We also have a small office in New Orleans, about maybe a dozen people now. And that's where Morris grew up, actually. So he still has a home there and family there. And that office covers a lot of our work that's in the South now as we really branched out.

 

00;02;49;29 - 00;02;57;23

MW

We started as a very New York based firm in 1997. Do you want me to go ahead and tell the story of Morris's origin story?

 

00;02;57;24 - 00;02;59;13

DP

Yeah, sure. I'd love to hear it. Absolutely.

 

00;02;59;15 - 00;03;25;27

MW

OK. He was working with Aldo Rossi in Italy. He speaks Italian and he became kind of Aldo Rossi's right hand man in New York when he got the commission of the Scholastic Building in Soho, which you probably know. It's kind of a very modern, but fitting into that historical context very well, right next to the Little Singer building, which is a very famous piece of architecture we all probably learned about an architectural history class.

 

00;03;25;27 - 00;03;36;29

MW

So Aldo was tragically killed in a car accident in the nineties, and Morris finished that project for him and kept the office going and started his office from there.

 

00;03;37;06 - 00;03;39;23

DP

Wow. So what kind of work do you guys do today?

 

00;03;40;00 - 00;04;00;04

MW

We really focused on multifamily, office, hospitality work, our core. We also have art services and interior design, so we really try to deliver all of those services whenever we can. We also have a guy that focuses on urban design, so we've got some multi parcel experience in master planning as well.

 

00;04;00;07 - 00;04;03;21

DP

Wow. So, a comprehensive list of services that you guys offer.

 

00;04;03;24 - 00;04;04;26

MW

Absolutely.

 

00;04;04;29 - 00;04;11;08

DP

So, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up at Morris Adjmi? How long have you been there and what's your role in the office?

 

00;04;11;10 - 00;04;49;02

MW

I came to New York originally to work on the World Trade Center Master Plan with Daniel Libeskind, which - with my husband - which was really supposed to be a six-month contract. And we've been in New York for 20 years now. So that's the way things go. After that, I really enjoyed the experience of working on large scale master planning projects.

So, I went to another firm for a while that focused on master planning and architecture. And then through a friend that I met at that firm, I just heard about this great architect, Morris, and I started to look at the work and I got invited for an interview and that was seven years ago, and I haven't looked back.

 

00;04;49;04 - 00;04;51;06

DP

Oh, that's so great. So, you're clearly enjoying it.

 

00;04;51;06 - 00;04;52;16

MW

Very happy there. Yeah.

 

00;04;52;18 - 00;05;00;12

DP

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

 

00;05;00;14 - 00;05;14;08

MW

It was an invited competition. It was LIVWRK and CIM. There were three or four architects, I think. Bjarke Ingels was one of them... ODA. So, we all had a charrette. It was paid, but you know, not a lot.

 

00;05;14;10 - 00;05;15;13

DP

Sure. Of course.

 

00;05;15;15 - 00;05;28;02

MW

It was a lot of excitement around this competition because it was a big, big block. And you just don't get projects this big in the city very often. So, a lot of effort went in, and we won. So that was great.

 

00;05;28;05 - 00;05;35;20

DP

So just as an aside, are there a lot of competitions like that in New York that firms like yours or firms that are your size try to get?

 

00;05;35;25 - 00;05;51;04

MW

We're often invited to competitions where they've already kind of pre-selected architects and asked to participate. And of course, it's optional if you want to do that, because you know when you're going in for a competition that you're going to put a lot of effort in really to win that project.

 

00;05;51;12 - 00;05;53;16

DP

And how many firms do you usually compete against?

 

00;05;53;22 - 00;06;11;09

MW

We don't always know, honestly. At the time, sometimes it's a blind, so we don't really know. And then we try to find out, with some difficulty. But, you know, three or four small group, I think if it was a large number, we'd be less interested. Yeah, because you got to feel like there's a good chance.

 

00;06;11;11 - 00;06;14;07

DP

That's great. And how long does that process take?

 

00;06;14;13 - 00;06;15;13

MW

Usually, six weeks.

 

00;06;15;22 - 00;06;18;27

DP

So, you have six weeks to complete the project. And then...

 

00;06;18;27 - 00;06;20;00

MW

A concept design.

 

00;06;20;00 - 00;06;29;00

DP

The concept design. Okay. And then they pick somebody. Well, that's going to be challenging to like scheduling projects in the office. Are we going to get this one or are we going to get that one?

 

00;06;29;02 - 00;06;42;16

MW

Oh, yeah. Well, that's a lot of what I do now as a director. A lot of the scheduling. When I worked on Front and York, I was the project manager, so it was really about the project but have been elevated to director. So, it really is more about scheduling and staffing.

 

00;06;42;17 - 00;06;44;17

DP

I bet, with all those people.

 

00;06;44;17 - 00;06;45;05

MW

Yeah.

 

00;06;45;07 - 00;06;54;03

DP

So, tell us a little bit about Front and York. So, tell us some of the history of the location of Front and York and then how did that impact the design?

 

00;06;54;05 - 00;07;03;07

MW

So, the location is a full city block in Dumbo and it was formerly a lead factory and so there was contamination on site.

 

00;07;03;07 - 00;07;04;09

DP

I can only imagine.

 

00;07;04;09 - 00;07;23;12

MW

Yeah. And I think maybe that's why it sat vacant since the eighties. I think maybe it was a private parking lot and fenced for decades. So, you know, it really needed a big development like this to afford to clean off the site because really, we remediated like 50 feet of soils in some areas.

 

00;07;23;12 - 00;07;24;07

DP

50 feet?!

 

00;07;24;09 - 00;07;38;14

MW

Yeah. So, all of the contaminated soils were dealt with, some carted away somewhere, cleaned on the site under supervision of AKRF, our environmental engineer. So, it really took a big project like this to kind of utilize that site.

 

00;07;38;16 - 00;07;41;08

DP

Was the area around the site already well developed or...

 

00;07;41;10 - 00;07;49;01

MW

It was. There were already towers around the site. 100 J Next door was a tall tower. I don't know. It's probably 20 years old at least.

 

00;07;49;04 - 00;07;59;09

DP

So, what were the client's programmatic requirements? You guys won the competition and they said, okay, this is what we need. Or you already knew that because you had entered the earlier competition and won it.

 

00;07;59;11 - 00;08;14;27

MW

Yeah, they came with a residential program, mixed use. They already knew what they wanted the program to be, of course. We weren't sure how we were going to handle the middle of the block because it is an extra-large block. So, some of our early options had a road in the middle.

 

00;08;14;28 - 00;08;15;16

DP

Oh, wow.

 

00;08;15;20 - 00;08;54;17

MW

One thing they really wanted; they wanted cars to be thought of as part of the site. Whether we drove up with a big turnaround in the middle, like the Antwerp, I think it's got a big turnaround in the middle. So, we looked at that. At the end of the day, we decided that the center of the block really should be a park and it would bring the value up for all the interior apartments as well as the street side.

One of the nice things about the site is it's next to the landmark district. So, the heights to the north are low and set and they won't go any higher. So, we knew we wanted to be tall and get as many apartments above that height for views to Manhattan.

 

00;08;54;19 - 00;09;03;02

DP

For those of you who are listening, should take a look at the site plan and the floor plan because it really is quite beautiful with almost like a park-like feature right in the middle.

 

00;09;03;06 - 00;09;22;21

MW

Yeah. As you mentioned, in the beginning, there's a massive park. It's like almost the size of a football field. It's for all the residents. We have a mixture of apartments and condos, front York, but everybody can access the park and even there's a lifetime fitness there as well. And they have some access to that park.

 

00;09;22;26 - 00;09;35;03

DP

Oh wow, that's so great. So, I know there's something unique about the site, right? There's a change in topography. So, when you guys first went out there and looked at that, am I correct, it was 25 feet approximately.

 

00;09;35;08 - 00;09;35;27

MW

About 20.

 

00;09;35;28 - 00;09;47;23

DP

So that's a big deal for a lot. That is as big as this one. You have to start to think about this going to be a really big building. Where do we enter? What floor we entering? How did you guys deal with that?

 

00;09;47;25 - 00;10;09;24

MW

It was a real challenge and of course we had to look at many iterations on how to deal with that. One thing we did know is that we wanted the condo lobbies really to see through to the park, and the condos are sited on opposite corners of the site. So, there's a big grade change from the lobby floors on each corner, like 20 feet.

 

00;10;09;29 - 00;10;24;04

MW

But we wanted to see that park. So, you know, eventually what we came up with was really like rolling hills in the park. I think when you go there, you'll notice it's very kind of hilly and there's a lot of winding path and it feels very organic and natural.

 

00;10;24;08 - 00;10;33;20

DP

Not like a city. So, tell me a little bit about the zoning ordinances there. You said you guys could be taller than buildings that were nearby. How is that even possible? And what were your restrictions.

 

00;10;33;23 - 00;10;57;02

MW

Actually, we are an as of right project. We did not apply for any variances. That was part of the directive from the beginning. We didn't want to wait for that. It can take months to get a ULURP or a zoning amendment here. So, we were as of right. So, we just maximized the floor area and the height limit and really didn't have to get special approvals.

 

00;10;57;04 - 00;10;58;24

DP

Interesting. So that's kind of nice.

 

00;10;59;02 - 00;10;59;22

MW

Yeah.

 

00;10;59;29 - 00;11;05;07

DP

Right? Walk into a project like that. So, tell us a little bit about the building plan. So, it's like a big donut.

 

00;11;05;12 - 00;11;31;16

MW

It's a big donut, yeah. With a large park in the middle, there's sort of a lower podium level that's about eight stories and then on opposite corners there's the towers, which are the condo apartments that are 22 stories tall, and those were sited on diagonal corners and also diagonally from another existing tower in the neighborhood, just to maximize view corridors and make sure that we weren't blocking any view corridor.

 

00;11;31;18 - 00;11;37;06

DP

Did you guys go through a lot of design iterations in terms of where those towers were and how tall the building was?

 

00;11;37;06 - 00;11;38;01

MW

Absolutely.

 

00;11;38;02 - 00;11;38;29

DP

A dumb question!

 

00;11;39;01 - 00;12;07;24

MW

Well, an interesting thing is, though, in our competition, it was similar massing with the two tall towers on the corner, but they told us, okay, that was the competition. Now we're starting over. So, we looked at every possible massing scenario again. And then of course, we ended up back with the towers on the corner. But the big changes, they were more massive. They were bigger towers, more like bars, because they really wanted to have great views in these apartments.

 

00;12;08;01 - 00;12;25;03

DP

So, style, I said in the intro, it looks a little bit like a factory warehouse building. I mean, it does, but it doesn't, right? I mean, it's incredibly stylistic. Talk a little bit about how you chose the particular style because it's a little traditional and it's still contemporary.

 

00;12;25;05 - 00;13;03;23

MW

You know, I think we were inspired by all the factory buildings in Dumbo. I mean, that is the period of significance, that early American factory building, which were very large, and they had big factory windows and were usually brick or masonry.

The storefront, you might notice we have a very tall sort of metal, blue metal storefront, and it looks very muscular, almost like structural steel. It's aluminum, but it looks like structural steel that was really inspired by the Manhattan Bridge, which you can see just down the block from both Front and York. You see the structural steel of the bridge.

 

00;13;03;25 - 00;13;09;05

DP

So, you guys decided from the get go that you were going to make a brick building, right?

 

00;13;09;07 - 00;13;48;22

MW

We did. We always wanted the brick. We actually looked at this building as precast donuts initially, just really a client directive thinking that was going to be the most economical solution. But even as precast, we wanted that gray brick. I mean, we were really trying to kind of fit into the neighborhood. There's a lot of granite, gray cobblestone in Dumbo and it was a big building, so we wanted something a little recessive and quiet, I think, in the brick color. So, we were looking for that dark gray brick, even when it was a precast building, which ultimately, it's not precast. It’s hand-laid Glen-Gery brick.

 

00;13;48;25 - 00;13;53;04

DP

So, what are some of the unique construction details that you guys employed here using brick?

 

00;13;53;25 - 00;14;37;23

MW

Well, the first thing is the brick itself. I mean, we had actually gone pretty far down the road with the precast and had a gray color in mind. But, you know, of course, economics are always a factor. And we couldn't find an economical gray brick that suited us.

So thankfully, we had a great salesperson that told us about, new at the time, custom color Glen-Gery on go clay coating, which is not like a clay coat that's very opaque and solid. It's actually more translucent and we could pick any color that we wanted and it was pretty economical. So that's what we did. We found a beautiful kind of dark, medium gray, very muted, and then a little lighter gray at the penthouse. On the kind of additions on top.

 

00;14;37;26 - 00;14;48;01

DP

And I'm looking at some really beautiful details here, particularly the recess in between that kind of frames out every one of those windows. Was that a detail that you guys spent a lot of time working on?

 

00;14;48;01 - 00;15;04;08

MW

Yes, that was actually a detail that we developed when it was precast donuts. And funny enough, we really liked it because it just gave that little bit of detail to the facade that without it, it felt a little bit flat. So that was originally there to hide the precast joint.

 

00;15;04;08 - 00;15;05;20

DP

Oh my gosh. So, it's a remnant of an earlier design.

 

00;15;05;20 - 00;15;14;01

MW

It's a remnant of an earlier design. I think at one point the client suggested maybe we should take it off. And we all said that we really like it.

 

00;15;14;08 - 00;15;16;15

DP

Yeah, it does an awful lot for the facades.

 

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

MW

We're going to use it to hide the brick control joint instead. So, that's tucked in there. And that's why you don't see them at the windows.

 

00;15;23;16 - 00;15;25;01

DP

So the control joints are inside.

 

00;15;25;03 - 00;15;26;17

MW

There in that reveal to one side.

 

00;15;26;26 - 00;15;32;05

DP

Oh, I'd love to see a blow-up detail on that. Tell me a little bit about the concrete structural frame.

 

00;15;32;07 - 00;15;34;18

MW

That's the GFRC. The white frame.

 

00;15;34;18 - 00;15;35;19

DP

Yes. Is that structural?

 

00;15;36;08 - 00;15;53;18

MW

Really beautiful. It's not structural, it's trim. This is a concrete building. So yeah, that is a device really to help modulate the scale of the building and also to help it read from a distance. I mean, you can see, actually, you can see that from a plane. I've seen it flying overhead.

 

00;15;53;19 - 00;15;54;22

DP

Are you serious?

 

00;15;54;24 - 00;16;12;15

MW

Yeah, it really does help bring down the scale because, you know, could you imagine if you didn't have that trim? I think the white color, it's really kind of neat standing on Front and York and seeing the blue and white bridge just right there and just kind of the colors just feel good. They fit into the neighborhood. There's white on the bridge.

 

00;16;12;22 - 00;16;17;28

DP

Had you guys looked at doing that in any other color, like gray, having it melt back into the facade?

 

00;16;18;05 - 00;16;34;02

MW

We study everything. We're very iterative, I think in our process. And you - we always internally look at three options. You know, we really push it and then we narrow down the options for the client usually, but lots of options.

 

00;16;34;04 - 00;16;38;08

DP

So, did brick solve any particular design challenges for you guys or for the client?

 

00;16;38;14 - 00;17;10;07

MW

I think the choice to go to brick was just feeling competitively at the time it was cost, but also just the control of knowing that you could go to different masons if you needed to. I think a lot of times there were more than one trade for - I don't know about the brick. I think that was just one mason in the end, but because it was such a big building, they wanted to make sure that there was some duplicity, I guess, of trades being able to work on things. And I think they got nervous about getting all the precast from one place.

 

00;17;10;14 - 00;17;20;17

DP

Did you guys have any challenges finding a good mason? I mean, I would imagine in New York it's not a big deal, but even in a Westchester County where I do a lot of work, we always have a challenge finding good masons.

 

00;17;20;17 - 00;17;35;25

MW

The masons were great. Everybody was great. New Line was the CM, New Line Structures. And we worked on this three years in construction. After three years, it was really hard ending construction because we were kind of a big happy family at that point. It was great.

 

00;17;35;27 - 00;17;44;18

DP

So, into the office I often think about how many people work on a project. How many people were on this team, and how many people did the drawing for the job?

 

00;17;44;25 - 00;17;50;01

MW

I'd say at least 20 at its peak, when we were in construction documents.

 

00;17;50;11 - 00;17;53;07

DP

Yeah. Now, did you guys do this in 3D?

 

00;17;53;10 - 00;18;35;11

MW

Oh, yeah. We did this in Revit. We usually start with Rhino, something very, you know, design-y and flexible and fast. But once you get into Revit, it becomes you're building a building, right. And a computer. So, becomes more cumbersome. But we absolutely did it in Revit. And actually that ended up being tremendously helpful because we use BIM in construction all the way through. That is, New Line did. That's something they like to do and always do. So, they have specialists that can really run Revit and they model in great detail all of the MEP plumbing and electrical systems throughout the building. So, we find clashes in construction on the computer before they ever happen in the field.

 

00;18;35;14 - 00;18;38;01

DP

How long have you guys been on Revit? Just curious.

 

00;18;38;03 - 00;19;04;14

MW

I think we transitioned, probably fully by 2018. When I started in 2016, I think we had one or two projects in Revit. Now we're all Revit. I think we're starting to lose people that know how to work in CAD, but we still have a few. Well, because everybody does Revit. So, we really, we can export to CAD and everything, but we just don't have many people drawing in CAD anymore - and doing the layers.

 

00;19;04;18 - 00;19;13;07

DP

Oh my goodness. Right. That that's how I operate right now. Well, I do both, but I'm on ArchiCAD. Are most of the people in the city on Revit?

 

00;19;13;14 - 00;19;21;15

MW

I think so. I'm sure there are still people working in CAD, but I think more and more people are going to Revit, especially for big projects.

 

00;19;21;18 - 00;19;29;18

DP

So, did sustainability ever come up as a factor in choosing brick, for example, color, texture, thermal, code compliance?

 

00;19;29;21 - 00;20;03;03

MW

This isn't a LEED project, so we didn't consider it for its sustainability, per se. But we did do something at Front and York, which was we qualified for Zone Green, which is a New York City zoning rule, that if you make your exterior wall thicker and heavily insulate it up to 16 inches thick, you actually get a zoning bonus for that. So, we did that. So, these are 16-inch-thick walls with lots of insulation, CMU back up. That's how this is a sustainable project in terms of the brick wall.

 

00;20;03;08 - 00;20;05;20

DP

So, it's an efficient veneer - it's an efficient facade.

 

00;20;05;21 - 00;20;22;21

MW

It's a very, yes, efficient façade. Helps with heating and cooling loads. We also won the Big Apple Brownfield Award for environmental protection for the clean-up effort I mentioned. Yeah, 2020. So, cleaning up that site was a very good move for Dumbo.

 

00;20;22;28 - 00;20;26;20

DP

Just curious, where does all that go? Where does all the land that they've removed...

 

00;20;26;26 - 00;20;38;12

MW

Sometimes they can actually treat it on site. It depends on - they test certain segments like it's a very involved process. If it's very, very bad then there are places out west that will accept it.

 

00;20;38;12 - 00;20;38;28

DP

Okay.

 

00;20;39;01 - 00;20;54;09

MW

If it's not, that can be landfill like for other projects that can be cleaned and kept local. So, the good fill was - actually like people would come, they put a call out and people would come if they needed fill for their construction projects and they'd cart it away.

 

00;20;54;14 - 00;20;59;09

DP

Yeah. Interesting. So, I'm thinking here, do we see any masonry on the interior?

 

00;20;59;13 - 00;21;08;27

MW

We do a little bit up on the eighth floor and amenities. We have some sort of indoor-outdoor fireplaces that have brick. So yeah, there's a little bit.

 

00;21;09;04 - 00;21;18;10

DP

That’s great. So did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process, something maybe that you guys hadn't been through in the past?

 

00;21;18;13 - 00;22;15;18

MW

I would say that one thing that we found very difficult at first was the redlining process in architecture, where the more senior architects will redline drawings and then give them to the junior staff to pick up the changes. That was very difficult with a 20-person team. So that kind of prompted us to find a tool which we eventually found Blue Beam Studio, which now we use on every project in the office where you can go in and do group markups together and highlight together. So, it's one document and you refresh the document periodically. So, we had a lot of logistical challenges like that.

We had to set certain meeting pulses internally to make sure we were communicating. So, we weren't overlapping or ignoring a corner of the building, which you can sometimes do, and it's 1.2 million square feet. I think there were a lot of things we learned internally through this process that actually help us now on some of our larger projects.

 

00;22;15;26 - 00;22;18;10

DP

How long was it until you guys implemented Blue Beam?

 

00;22;18;12 - 00;22;25;03

MW

It really like started, I think with Front and York and now the whole office is on it and we really do all of our markups that way.

 

00;22;25;11 - 00;22;26;08

DP

That's really cool.

 

00;22;26;10 - 00;22;34;23

MW

QAQC reviews and Blue Beam’s, probably the new CAD, I would say for a lot of us, because it is a very good markup and measuring tool.

 

00;22;34;29 - 00;22;35;24

DP

Yes.

 

00;22;35;26 - 00;22;39;02

MW

And it's cloud based or it can be. So, you can work in a big group.

 

00;22;39;03 - 00;22;40;26

DP

So, you can go in and draw in 2D.

 

00;22;41;02 - 00;22;41;20

MW

Yep.

 

00;22;41;22 - 00;22;44;21

DP

Wow, that's pretty cool. We've been using Procore.

 

00;22;44;28 - 00;22;50;07

MW

Yeah. We also use Procore. New Line Structures did and that was tremendously helpful.

 

00;22;50;07 - 00;22;53;05

DP

Yeah, for project management, it's been great. Super helpful.

 

00;22;53;09 - 00;23;20;08

MW

Yeah. And just the process of using Navisworks and Revit is basically - Navisworks is the software that helps you look at Revit and really find those clashes in the field. This was the easiest CA project, maybe not easy for all of the staff, but in terms of the leadership, we weren't running into big problems. It was very smooth. We were finding the problems in the model in the field. So that was great.

 

00;23;20;11 - 00;23;25;19

DP

How many drawings does a job like this have? Like what does a construction document set look like?

 

00;23;25;19 - 00;23;27;09

MW

Yeah, I think about 500 drawings.

 

00;23;27;09 - 00;23;28;00

DP

Oh, my goodness gracious.

 

00;23;28;03 - 00;23;31;27

MW

Yeah, something like that. Three or four volumes, you know. Lots of trades.

 

00;23;32;01 - 00;23;34;22

DP

Wow. And construction was three years.

 

00;23;34;25 - 00;23;35;15

MW

That’s about right.

 

00;23;35;20 - 00;23;37;19

DP

Wow. So how long has it been complete?

 

00;23;37;26 - 00;23;44;22

MW

I think it's been complete release since the summer. Last summer? I could be off by a month or two.

 

00;23;44;29 - 00;23;46;26

DP

Are they happy? Is it full?

 

00;23;46;29 - 00;23;53;06

MW

I don't know if it's full, but it's very well occupied. I do know that there's 16 penthouses are all sold.

 

00;23;53;09 - 00;23;54;08

DP

Wow.

 

00;23;54;13 - 00;24;12;23

MW

The views are spectacular all around. So, I think maybe they wish they built more larger apartments because really when this was landing, I mean, seems like the trend started to go to larger apartments. With COVID and everything. A lot of one-bedrooms, but they're really nice sized one-bedrooms, you know.

 

00;24;13;00 - 00;24;13;26

DP

Yeah. The photographs are beautiful.

 

00;24;13;29 - 00;24;28;00

MW

Yeah. And the amenities are - we've had so many developers and other people touring the amenities on the eighth floor. There's 15,000 square feet of amenities up there and they're spectacular. And a couple of swimming pools.

 

00;24;28;03 - 00;24;28;25

DP

Oh, my gosh.

 

00;24;28;26 - 00;24;31;13

MW

On the roof. I think that's a real selling point.

 

00;24;31;15 - 00;24;39;12

DP

So, one last question before you go. Personal question, What's your favorite part of the job and what's your least favorite part of the job as an architect?

 

00;24;39;14 - 00;25;01;17

MW

Well, I like to solve problems with teams. I really like large projects because you get to work with large teams and it's just really fun. We have a lot of people that we have a lunchroom at, at MA and we have people that sit around and do the New York Times crossword puzzle together every day, and we just like solving problems together. So that's my favorite part.

 

00;25;01;24 - 00;25;05;05

DP

Yeah, that's great. You don't have to tell me what you don't like.

 

00;25;05;07 - 00;25;10;04

MW

What I don't like, I think would be obvious, which is the stress and the headaches. And, you know...

 

00;25;10;04 - 00;25;13;09

DP

Yes. I can only imagine on projects that are this big.

 

00;25;13;09 - 00;25;18;24

MW

Right. Running into things that you didn't expect in the field. Those are the things that I like the least.

 

00;25;18;24 - 00;25;23;10

DP

Yeah. My boss used to say, “it's always the thing you don't see coming that gets you.”

 

00;25;23;11 - 00;25;24;03

MW

That's right.

 

00;25;24;03 - 00;25;37;09

DP

It really is. It's not the stuff you worry about all the time. It's the one thing you just never saw coming. Well, Michelle Wagner, thank you very much for your time today. Where can people go to find out more about you and Morris Adjmi Architects?

 

00;25;37;12 - 00;25;40;14

MW

I’d suggest our website, which is ma.com

 

00;25;40;16 - 00;25;50;01

DP

All right. You got it. Well, super simple. And thank you very much. It's been great. Front and York’s gorgeous. Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;16

Doug Patt (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;19 - 00;00;34;08

Todd Poisson (TP)

They wanted to expand the building, and a vertical expansion is taboo for individual landmarks. So, in order to get them any significant square footage additions up there, we wanted to go bold. Why not propose a more robust, bold roof scape? And given the history of Chief Tamanend being the namesake of Tammany and with this desire to really honor the Lenape, why not be inspired by the Lenape's origin story of a rising turtle coming out of the water, shedding water?

 

00;00;34;11 - 00;03;33;28

DP

This is my guest, Todd Poisson. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight Todd's project, 44 Union Square.

44 Union Square sits at the northeast corner of Union Square Park in Manhattan. The project includes a remarkable contemporary steel and glass dome addition to the storied landmark building on Union Square's northeast corner for Redding International Ink.

The new building expands the usable square footage of the historic building and adds an iconic anchor to Union Square. The building's former life was as the last headquarters for the political machine, Tammany Hall, an American organization founded in 1786, famous for controlling New York City and state politics for a time.

The restoration and expansion of the building includes preserving two facades, new bronze storefronts in the likeness of the original 1928 design and a three-story rooftop addition. This wild steel and glass building cap is composed of a self-supporting free form shell grid dome atop a reconstructed hipped roof with gray terracotta sunshades.

If you're wondering, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved this incredibly creative design.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault.

Today we're talking to Todd Poisson. Todd received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. He became a partner at BKSK in 2007 and has over 30 years of experience in the architecture profession. Todd has been responsible for the design and construction of some of the firm's most ambitious projects, ranging between residential mixed use and institutional works. Recent award-winning projects include the Gansevoort Row redevelopment for Aurora Capital and 44 Union Square, which we'll discuss today.

Other notable recent projects of Todd's are 200 East 21st Street, a 20 story, highly sustainable residential tower in Gramercy for Alpha Development and 470 Columbus, a passive house, multifamily development on the Upper West Side for the Rowe Corporation. Todd is currently a volunteer with the American Youth Soccer Organization and a long-term coach of regional athletic leagues.

In addition, Todd is a lecturer and volunteer interviewer for Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. So welcome, Todd. Nice to have you with us today.

We're going to talk about 44 Union Square. But before we do, I should mention that we recently interviewed one of Todd's peers at BKSK, David Kubik. He told us a bit about the firm. But for those who haven't listened to that episode, tell us a little bit about BKSK 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;34;01 - 00;04;31;07

TP

Sure. So, thank you for having me. BKSK Architects is headquartered in New York City in Manhattan, not too far away from your center here on West 38th Street in the garment center of Manhattan. We've been in business since 1985 celebrating 38 years. David and I are kind of second-generation partners. We've been in business about 38 years. We have over 200 built projects. David and I both joined the firm about 20 years ago plus and were made partners about the same time.

BKSK specializes in many things. We like to say if you know New York, you know our work. Our work is kind of separated between, generally speaking, cultural, institutional work, libraries, religious structures, parks, and commercial buildings and residential buildings. Residential projects ranging from new condominium buildings, towers or private residential projects, combining units or renovating someone's home.

 

00;04;31;10 - 00;04;34;01

DP

Do you guys do residential projects outside of New York City?

 

00;04;34;07 - 00;04;45;21

TP

We do. In fact, we have a little annex office out in Oklahoma City that we had so much Midwest work. Now we have private residential projects, upstate New York and in Connecticut and in New Jersey.

 

00;04;45;23 - 00;04;53;11

DP

So, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up at BKSK? How long have you been there – I believe you just said that. What's your role in the office?

 

00;04;53;13 - 00;05;49;13

TP

Well, I joined back in 1998. So, 25 years ago I answered a New York Times wanted ad – remember those, actually where you had to get the newspaper Saturday, the Sunday paper? You got to subscribe to get them a day early to rifle through the want ads. And I answered a want ad for a project manager at an architecture firm called Burns, Kendall, Schieferdecker, with this crazy name. I thought it was a law firm. Back then there was no websites. You couldn't look up the firms. You had to go to these places, and you'd open the front door and you'd be disappointed but had to sit through the interviews to see what kind of work they did.

But the moment I met George Schieferdecker – he interviewed me 25 years ago, he's still there, one of the founding partners – knew immediately that I had found the mothership. You know, these guys knew each other from school way back. They were so intellectual. They all had lives outside the office. This was not a sweatshop kind of architecture firm that one sometimes encounters. And I've just had just a great time with them.

 

00;05;49;16 - 00;06;05;23

DP

It's funny, when you were saying that, all these awful memories started flooding in of making one phone call after another and going through the phone book and then showing up and knowing nothing about the work of that architect, and endless interviews. So where were you working before BKSK?

 

00;06;05;25 - 00;06;23;21

TP

I was here in Manhattan already. I was working for Stephen Jacobs Group, an architect who specialized, at the time, in new construction residential work. So, I really cut my teeth as a young architect in the field, hardcore development construction experience in Manhattan, which has paid off a great deal.

 

00;06;23;24 - 00;06;28;20

DP

So now you're partners. So, what's your role like now? Has it changed significantly?

 

00;06;28;22 - 00;07;48;02

TP

Sure. So over time, our roles change as partners as we grow in the firm. David and I and Julie Nelson, the other second-generation partner. Julie, David, and I really grew up there and our roles have evolved from being in the trenches and drawing every line and every detail for projects that get built. Lucky for us, our sites tend to be in Manhattan.

We're also a little bit regional. We have some work in New Jersey and Philadelphia and Connecticut, but still about 80% in Manhattan. So, we are very lucky. We could visit sites very easily to get hands on experience. And so, our roles really evolved quickly into project management, into client facing roles, consultant coordination, field work. When we were promoted to partners, our roles shift gradually into more finding work, finding new work, finding repeat clients, developing those relationships to continue getting new projects, setting the design direction for new projects, and then just kind of being the face of the project.

We pride ourselves to being involved with every phase of design as partners. We don't just disappear after landing a new project. We really stay involved in the trenches at meetings. I just came from a mechanical coordination meeting for a new hotel project we're doing. I really love that stuff. I really love the details – love the field work as well as the design and the client facing opportunities.

 

00;07;48;04 - 00;07;51;00

DP

I'm curious how big was BKSK when you joined them?

 

00;07;51;07 - 00;07;54;08

TP

So, they were about 15 people, I think, in 1998.

 

00;07;54;12 - 00;07;55;15

DP

And now you're 50.

 

00;07;55;15 - 00;07;57;19

TP

We're about 50, 52 people. Yes.

 

00;07;57;26 - 00;08;03;24

DP

Interesting. I love the field stuff, too. I love the people stuff. It's just the best part of the job.

 

00;08;03;26 - 00;08;21;19

TP

The soap opera arcs during it, like a seven, eight year project are just terrific. We refer to them at project meetings or say previously on this project in season two, you might recall that the elevator consultant said the opposite of what you just said. Like years later, it's a way to keep things light at these construction meetings.

 

00;08;21;23 - 00;08;22;20

DP

That is really funny.

 

00;08;23;04 - 00;08;43;02

TP

We try to keep it light and funny, and the construction industry has changed a great deal, as you could imagine, along with everything else. But in the last 35 years since I've been working, you know, sites are tech savvy. It seems to be it's a much more civilized kind of operation, and there's opportunities to really develop great relationships with the builders and consultants.

 

00;08;43;09 - 00;08;50;28

DP

Great insight. Totally true. So, let's dig in here and talk about the building. Tell us about 44 Union Square. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;08;51;00 - 00;17;44;06

TP

So back in 2012, the phone rang. It was Michael Buckley calling from Edifice Real Estate Partners. He invited us – because of our strength of our record of getting very challenging approvals through the Landmark Commission of New York City – invited us to join, I think it was a group of five firms that competed in a competition that lasted a month of design work, and then we each presented our work to the owner, Margaret Cotter of Redding International that month.

The design happened to coincide with when Hurricane Sandy hit Manhattan. So, our office, like many offices in Lower Manhattan, lost power. So, I brought the competition work home with me, and at the time I had a five-year-old daughter, and she sat in my lap, and we drew together. It really resonates with me to this day because fast forward ten years and there we were finishing the project during a global pandemic where we all had to work from home again. So, this project really bookended two kind of catastrophes in New York City, starting with Hurricane Sandy, working from home and then ending with the pandemic and closing out the project in 2020, using my daughter's big scooter to scoot down to Union Square. During the height of the pandemic, as work was finishing up.

So anyway, Michael invited BKSK to join this limited design competition. I dived into the history of the building. We're all students of history. We feel that every project, even if it's not a landmark project, has its history, has context to learn from. And immediately I learned the story of Tammany Hall that was different from what we're all taught in school, at least in the Northeast. We're taught that Tammany Hall is synonymous with greed and corruption and graft. And while that's all true, Tammany Hall is not named after an Irish politician of the 19th century, which you might think given the Boss Tweed stories and the background of Tammany Hall, that's in the social conscious. But in fact, the namesake of Tammany Hall is an indigenous 17th century chief, Chief Tamanend of the Lenape, who signed a peaceful coexistence treaty with William Penn in 1680, an event that's documented in our Capitol's rotunda in Washington, DC, rules that really held in place for quite some time.

Chief Tamanend was revered and legendary to the European settlers as a native representative who welcomed visitors and who wanted to listen to all voices. And listening to all voices became kind of the theme of these early social clubs, which became known as Tammany Societies. We were surprised to learn that there were dozens of these Tammany societies that dotted the East Coast from New York to Cleveland in the early days of the Republic, and I think they even predated the revolution. I think they, maybe, formalized themselves after the revolution, but the clubhouses began even before the American Revolution, where people joined and sat around talking about what ideals the New Republic should represent. And they chose Chief Tamanend to represent them as a symbol of listening to all voices. Over the centuries that story was lost. The only Tammany society to make it into the 20th century was ours here in New York, only to become known for craft, greed and corruption.

So right from the beginning we thought it was an opportunity to rebrand the building in Chief Tamanend’s name – kind of erase this idea that Tammany is associated with just greed and corruption, but is associated with the indigenous population of North America, of the Northeast, especially of the Lenape. Given that background, looking at this Neo-Georgian red brick and limestone building at the corner Union Square, which was designed originally to emulate Federal Hall downtown. Federal Hall is where George Washington was inaugurated on the balcony. Federal Hall was demolished in 1812, but it looked like Tammany Hall does today, except Federal Hall had a much more robust roof line, had a big hipped roof and a cupola, whereas Tammany Hall and Union Square chose the architects Thompson, Holmes, and Converse out of Philadelphia in 1928 – chose to replicate the federal Hall facade quite literally, but they gave Tammany Hall here in Union Square a much more tepid roof.

And so, the thought was, given the brief from Edifice for Redding International, they wanted to expand the building, they wanted to rebrand the building, but they knew it was a landmark. They knew it was an individual New York City landmark. So, demolition was out of the question. And a vertical expansion is taboo for individual landmarks. Typically, the New York City Landmarks Commission approves maybe a handful each year, but they're very difficult to convince the commission that it's an appropriate addition to the base landmark. Union Square is such a vast public space that we knew immediately that even if you put like a shampoo bottle on top of the roof, it would be seen from across the square. So, in order to get them any significant square footage addition up there, we wanted to go bold. We felt that, given this Neo-Georgian base that used to have or was modeled after a building that had a bigger roof, why not propose a more robust, bold roof scape?

So, the question is what form should that take? And given the history of Chief Tamanend being the namesake of Tammany, and with this desire to really honor the Lenape, why not be inspired by the Lenape’s origin story of a giant turtle rising from the sea, creating land to give this Neo-Georgian building the dome that it would have, could have, should have had if Tammany Hall perhaps was more honest with its intentions in 1928, when Thompson, Holmes, and Converse designed this building, which really cloaked them in kind of quasi-governmental garb at this very federal style red brick and limestone building with a pediment, portico, but a tepid roof.

So, we decided to model a very contemporary glass and steel dome modeled after a rising turtle coming out of the water, shedding water as the kind of volume to hold, to house three additional floors. And the landmarks, as you mentioned, Landmarks Commission unanimously approved it. We only had to go back once to tweak the height of the dome and some of the details.

The dome kind of erupts from a reconstructed hip roof. So, we removed the slate hip roof and recreated it in the same inclined plane with terracotta sunshades that intermittently cover the beginning of the glass and steel dome. So, the glass and steel dome starts off as in the form of a hip roof, but then quickly transforms into this parametric shell that looks like classically proportioned when one stands in front of it in Union Square. Looks like any other dome on a classic building, in terms of its proportion. But when one turns the corner and looks more obliquely on it, its organic source kind of becomes more apparent. You kind of sense something is going on there and it's turtle like as it faces north over this arched pediment that was top of the Tammany Hall's balustrade in the middle of the East 17th Street North facade.

 

The original building had this odd arch pediment that was kind of just vertically cantilever in there. We didn't quite realize what it was until we looked more into the history of Tammany Hall. And sure enough, they used to – before this building was built in 1928 – they occupied a clubhouse on East 14th Street down at the other corner of Union Square. And on top of that building is a giant arched, decorative element with, in fact, a 15-foot-tall statue of Chief Tamanend. That building was demolished for ConEd’s expansion in the 1920s, and that's what spurred Tammany Hall to move to this location on the northeast corner of Union Square. Chief Tamanend is only recalled on our facade in 1928 with a headshot, a limestone medallion that faces, on the north facade, over what was Tammany Hall's front door. So, the classical portico facade that faces Union Square was really always a commercial facade. The ground floor was always a retail store location. In 1928 was a manufacturer's trust bank, for example. And now just last week, we celebrated the grand opening of Petco as the new national headquarters giant, 30,000 square foot new store in the ground floor cellar and second floor of the building.

So, it's still a retail presence. And then the upper floors are remodeled to be open office space. So Tammany Hall's front door used to be below that arched pediment facing northeast 17th Street and that's where we decided to kind of turn the turtle's head on the roof. So, the glass dome takes on a little bit more of a turtle-like form as it turns its head to give that arched pediment a little bit of a home. And we think it gives it a little bit more of a reason to exist than it ever did before. And it signals that that was Tammany's front door, once upon a time.

 

00;17;44;08 - 00;18;00;17

DP

Wow. Some great information. There's so much to talk about here, you know, it reminds me of - I'm still a big fan of Coop Himmelblau, it's far more organized, right – but it reminds me of that kind of approach to architecture. So, there were five entries. Did you see the entries?

 

00;18;00;23 - 00;18;39;25

TP

We never saw the other entries. We presented our work to Margaret at Redding, like December of 2012, after a bit of a delay because of Hurricane Sandy. We were awarded the project. It took about a year for contracts and everything to be negotiated to become their architect, but we were awarded the project so roughly late 2013. We brought it to the Landmarks Commission in, I believe in 2014. We received final building department and Landmarks approval in the following year or so, and then it took a few years to build. It was interrupted a bit by the pandemic, but we finished. Construction was finished in 2020.

 

00;18;39;28 - 00;18;42;16

DP

So, start to finish, how long was it then?

 

00;18;42;19 - 00;18;54;08

TP

From the day the phone rang in 2012 to 2020. So about eight years. We've stayed on call as the landlord's architect to help coordinate work for the tenants looking at space inside.

 

00;18;54;13 - 00;18;58;17

DP

And this was mostly a renovation project, but there was some new construction?

 

00;18;58;24 - 00;20;29;26

TP

So that's great that you ask that because it appears from a lot of photographs and even as you walk around it and even when you're in it, it's hard to realize that it's actually a new building behind the 100-year-old street walls. Everything was removed except the two street-facing walls. So, we think that's a real success, that people think it is a rooftop addition with maybe a little renovation inside, because that really was the intent to be as deferential and respectful of the historic landmark as possible. But, in fact, everything was removed. The historic masonry walls were decoupled from the structure. They were braced in place by tower braces that had their own foundation systems through the sidewalk, including through a giant vault that lines the 17th Street side that has a giant ConEd steam pipe running through it. So very complex coordination that the structural engineers at Thornton Tomasetti coordinated with our construction managers at CNY to develop this very intricate tower bracing system.

I should mention Buro Happold also as engineers of the project. So, the facades were decoupled from the structure. Everything was removed inside, including the foundation. A deeper foundation was dug to give the building a very deep cellar and six new stories. So, what was a three-story building with the little caretaker's apartment hidden behind the hipped roof at the front is now a 70,000 square foot class-A commercial building, growing from about 35,000 to begin with.

 

00;20;29;29 - 00;20;32;23

DP

So, you had to match the existing brick.

 

00;20;32;26 - 00;24;16;27

TP

So yes, finally we could talk about brick. Big part of the project was restoring those two street walls, the two 100-year-old historic street walls that are red brick and limestone, modeled after Federal Hall downtown. We researched the brick. Our design partners at Buro Happold gave us a roadmap – and the restoration contractors at Pullman – very detailed road map of the two street facades of which parts needed to be replaced. But remarkably, not a lot of the brick had to be removed. We did repoint 100% of the brick, meaning partially removing, breaking back the mortar joints and replacing the mortar. The front about three-quarters-inch of mortar on all the joints, but only replaced maybe about 15, 10%, maybe less of the brick.

The brick we found; we researched where the brick was in 1928. It was from the old Virginia brick company in Salem, Virginia. And we found an advertisement in 1929 after the building was completed, and they are bragging about their new building on Union Square, and they are linking it – as a Virginia company, they’re proud of this project for many reasons – but including the fact that Tammany Hall was linked to Thomas Jefferson's ideals and Thomas Jefferson, of course, is from Virginia and is famous for designing his home at Monticello. So, the old Virginia brick company has this advertisement that we found in the Archives of Public Library here in New York that they link the brick here at Tammany Hall to the brick used at Monticello. But if you read the fine print, it's not literally the same brick, it's not from the same kilns. They say it's, quote, “in the same size and made in the same kind of cherry and maple molds as those of Jefferson's beloved Monticello.” So even though Salem, Virginia, which is right next to Roanoke, Virginia, still is about, these days, even a two hour drive from Monticello, they wanted to connect themselves to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson with this new building for Tammany Hall, which was pretending to be or, you know, acting as a quasi-governmental building.

They were really a social agency too. We shouldn't forget that even though that they were known for terrible greed and corruption and fixed elections and did all kinds of bad stuff, they really operated as a social service organization for newly arrived immigrants here in New York City. So, they, however, used Lenape iconography in ways that weren't so appealing to us, from our point of view, looking back. They didn't care for the land of a people. They use their imagery. They used Chief Tamanend's name, but they didn't necessarily care for the Lenape people. And we wanted to reintroduce the Lenape authentic voice into this project. So early on, right after we won the competition, we reached out to the Lenape center here in Manhattan. We wanted to make sure that we weren't offending people by the use of Chief Tamanend’s clan's symbol of the rising turtle. We met with Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans, some of the co-founders of the Lenape Center here in Manhattan, and they were thrilled. I was so relieved with their reaction when we showed them this design, a good ten years ago now. And they've been friends ever since. They've been great proponents of the project. They supported it through the regulatory process, writing letters to the Landmarks Commission, appearing with us side by side. So, they've been a great partner with this, and we've shared the design as it developed with them. So, we like to think of them as one of our collaborators in this project. It wasn't part of the brief, it wasn't part of the commercial real estate project, but we kind of thought it was very important to bring an authentic voice to this project from the Lenape point of view.

 

00;24;16;29 - 00;24;28;08

DP

So, we know that you guys had to match the existing brick out there. Was it challenging to find a brick that you could use, and what was that process? What did you ultimately go with?

 

00;24;28;10 - 00;25;50;02

TP

So, looking at the existing conditions of the brick walls, they were in remarkably good shape, considering it was 100-year-old building. We removed maybe five, ten percent of them. We used our construction manager partners at CNY, hired Pullman, incredibly talented folk at Pullman to restore the brick. They used, I think it was like a four-inch diameter grinder blade to remove the first, say, three quarters of an inch of mortar out of all the joints. 100% of the joints were repointed with mortar that we selected to match the original mortar.

The bricks themselves are an incredible mixture of Glen-Gery molded brick, and Heathcote, and spec sand DD-58, and Catawba, and a Roanoke Original. So that is all mixed in to create the dappled, dark red, velvety, rich red brick that are dappled with a very dark rowlock. Some of the rowlocks are very dark, so there's many bricks that are mixed into this, specifically chosen for each moment, each part of the facade that was being replaced. It's only about ten or twelve bricks at a time, in little clumps, that had to be replaced where there was a crack that was going through them. So that's how we restored the Flemish bond of the building. That bond of the landmark has a beautiful Flemish bond pattern to it that we restored.

 

00;25;50;05 - 00;26;02;13

DP

So, let's go back to the roof for a little bit. Was there any discussion internally when you were working on the design that it was just way too contemporary? This was not going to fly?

 

00;26;02;15 - 00;27;41;12

TP

Sure. So, we looked through history at examples of iconic, bold, contemporary rooftop additions onto landmark or historic structures. We looked at, specifically, for example, the Reichstag in Berlin. Lord Foster designed a striking, bold, contemporary glass dome onto the government building in Berlin. Of course, they lost their dome through war and bombing, and it was reconstructed in a contemporary fashion. But, interestingly enough the original Reichstag Dome did have glass in it. That's a fascinating case study for us.

We also looked at other freeform shell grid structures. That is the technical name for this structural system that can span over vast spaces without any vertical supports. So, the entire dome, the entire roof is not supported by any internal column or wall. It rests on new perimeter concrete walls that go all the way down to the new foundation. The loads are distributed down columns that are in between all the windows, in the historic facade, down to the new foundation in the cellar. So, we looked at Foster's courtyard cover at the British Museum, for example, that utilizes the same kind of system of freeform shell grid, which is also boldly, iconically, contemporary against a landmark base. The thought here was by restoring the base, by restoring all the brickwork and the limestone, we strengthen the landmark base in order to allow it to have a contrasting style on the roof, that the roof could be strikingly contemporary as long as we paid attention and were respectful to the restoration of the base.

 

00;27;41;14 - 00;27;55;03

DP

So, I read a little bit about the solar insulation, light infiltration. You were concerned glare clearly was going to be an issue. Could you elaborate on the probability studies you did investigating those elements and how they impacted design?

 

00;27;55;03 - 00;29;31;14

TP

Our partners at Buro Happold did fascinating studies with daylight. We directed them and wanted to make sure that we weren't going to cause reflection problems with this parabolic to other buildings. There are some case studies around the world of curved glass buildings causing problems to their neighbors, including there's one in London that focuses heat to the degree that it was causing fires on the sidewalk across the street. So, we certainly did not want to be known for that. So Buro Happold helped us study the probability of reflection on to the neighbors. We pinpointed the pieces of glass that would be the culprits – the whole selection process of the type of glass, with Buro Happold's help and all their studies – it was determined that a combination of tint and clear glass was the solution to inhibit reflection, but also to prevent too much solar heat gain and also to prevent too much internal glare.

So, from the outside, the glass appears a bit dark. On sunny days, it's reflective just enough to give it a shiny kind of silvery tone, and you can see the clouds, but it doesn't reflect rays of sunlight directly, like laser beams into the neighbors. And while you're on the inside, even though the glass on the outside has a darker appearance from the inside, your eyeballs adjust and it's all color corrected. Your eyes don't see dark. They see blue sky. They see the beautiful terracotta details of the neighboring historic buildings. It was, in the end, success of glass selection to inhibit all those potential problems.

 

00;29;31;16 - 00;29;40;17

DP

So, did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process doing something this unique? I would imagine you've never done a roof like this in the office before.

 

00;29;40;21 - 00;30;52;21

TP

We haven’t. It's our first freeform shell grid. It was New York's first freeform shell grid. There is a similar covering at Moynihan Train Hall to their barrel vaults, but they opened six months after we did, so we are happy to say, after an eight-year design process and construction, we kept saying we're going to be New York's first freeform shell grid. We're the first one to enclose internal space. I think there's a similar system that might be on some like entry canopies. There's one for like the seven-train extension to Hudson Yards and there's one out in Yonkers, but those do not enclose covered space and they're not nearly this large. So, we're proud to say we're New York's first freeform shell grid.

They use acres of this system in Asia and Europe. It's a very common system to span large swaths of space. It is used here in this country. For example, we visited the Smithsonian Institute down in Washington, DC. The Portrait Gallery has a courtyard cover that's similar to the British Museum cover. Foster came here and did kind of an encore for us in 2007 with the Smithsonian cover. We studied that system too, in terms of how it let light in, and in our studies of glare, etc..

 

00;30;52;24 - 00;31;05;21

DP

Yeah. What I find so interesting about the roof is that you could have simply created a typical Mansard roof and then added glass to the top. But the whole thing is glass, which is so unique.

 

00;31;05;21 - 00;31;52;26

TP

And a mansard roof, of an appropriate proportion, wouldn’t enclose nearly this much square footage. So, we wanted to get our client as much square footage as possible on top of this historic building. And it needed that extra oomph. The dome portion in the middle, which would never be able to be really enclosed by a mansard of any kind of historically accurate proportion. So that's what led us to both the form and the structure to enclose it, because the freeform shell grid is kind of the perfect device to span such great distances so the interior can be super flexible.

We built three floors within it, but those could be removed, they could be remodeled, they could be reconstructed to serve any purpose because all the loads from the roof system just go down the side perimeter walls.

 

00;31;53;02 - 00;32;18;06

DP

It's a great project for architecture students to look at in terms of learning how to develop an idea to make form, right. It's just so clear. And yet if you knew nothing about it, you just say, “Wow, they just put a glass dome on top.” But there's so much more to it that created so many unique details and so many beautiful things and facets, and I'm sure that space on the interior is wonderful.

 

00;32;18;09 - 00;32;25;04

TP

It's really terrific. There's opportunities to connect all three floors interconnecting and the possibilities are endless in there.

 

00;32;25;06 - 00;32;40;23

DP

So, you've obviously been an architect for quite some time, over 30 years. So, what career advice would you give your younger self, looking back after practicing for all this time? What have you learned? What's an idea that you've really locked on to that you'll never forget?

 

00;32;40;25 - 00;32;53;00

TP

One of the founding partners at BKSK, Joan Krevlin, said to me 25 years ago when I joined the - one of the things that she always kept with her as a young architect is do your job and tell the truth.

 

00;32;53;02 - 00;32;55;22

DP

What great advice! I love that!

 

00;32;55;29 - 00;33;42;02

TP

It's a great profession. And as you said, students of architecture have a great time in design studios. And this is a project that is really right out of studio in a way. I love showing it to students because like you said, it's super accessible in terms of the visuals, but it has a great connection to social history and the importance of context, the importance of research that you just don't come into a vacuum and design a building. You look at the context, you look at history, and you look at what you can learn from it. Because this could have been, like you said, just a flat top mansard roof. But discovering the history of the Lenape connection to this building was just remarkable and a great opportunity. I've met the Lenape Center folk. They've asked me to join their advisory steering committee. It's just been a wonderful experience.

 

00;33;42;04 - 00;34;03;22

DP

I love what you said. You don't just come into a vacuum and design a building. You don't. You don't. And that's what you learn in school. And hopefully you get to use that information, use that process, use that paradigm when you graduate, and you become a real architect. Right. So, Todd, it's been great to have you here. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about BKSK architects?

 

00;34;03;27 - 00;34;09;06

TP

We can be found at www.bksk.com

 

00;34;09;08 - 00;34;11;09

DP

Todd, it’s been great to have you, man. That was really cool.

 

00;34;11;25 - 00;34;16;12

TP

Thanks. This was really fun.

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.