TRANSCRIPT 

00;00;02;24 - 00;00;32;01

MN

We looked at references of Eastern European architecture that felt familiar to them in terms of their context. Right? So, they grew up in small villages in southern Poland, where a lot of the typical houses there are just built out of clay brick, and the clay brick is exposed. All the mortar is exposed. So, it's all load bearing. One could look at that and say, well, that's really utilitarian and reflective of the structure of the house and, you know, where's the cladding? But to me I find that really interesting. I'm like, Oh, that is the cladding. And how do we kind of represent that in a new way?

 

00;00;33;00 - 00;01;01;25

DP

This is my guest, Mateusz Nowacki. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight his project, The H-House. The H-House is a residential home. The name is derived from the shape of the home, in plan, with the two story central spine and flanking single story legs clad in brick. The building uses standing seam metal, a variegated red brick and large modern black windows.

 

00;01;02;17 - 00;01;51;10

DP

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Today we're talking to Mateusz Nowacki, architect of the H-House in Manotick, Ontario. Mateusz is the founder of Everyday Studio. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Carlton University and is Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. He's been practicing architecture in Toronto for over eight years and is a licensed OAA member.

Everyday Studio’s work has been recognized in various architectural media, including Dezeen, Dwell, Ottawa Magazine and GOHB Housing Design. So, Mateusz, tell us a little bit about your firm, Everyday Studio. Where are you located? What's the size? What kind of work do you do?

 

00;01;51;17 - 00;03;02;00

MN

Yeah, so I founded Everyday Studio in 2019 after doing a few years of freelance work, small projects here and there. I got a kind of first larger residential project of around 3500 square feet. It felt like a good time to kind of describe the notion of a studio that looks at the practice of researching and thinking about different housing prototypes and using that first project as a case study for that.

And it was sort of a kind of deviation of the thesis that I worked on in 2015 that looked at housing prototypes as well. And so, the purpose of the studio was really to be a kind of collaborative space to work with clients or contractors or trades or researchers to kind of understand the possibilities that housing can take in alternative forms than the typical vernacular.

And those studies can be polemical or literal. So, in some cases they might just be research based or text based. In some cases, they might be full houses. So, the kind of idea being that this collaborative space is meant to bridge that gap between what's on paper and what's actually built. So, we're located in Toronto, my studio right now. So, it's usually just me, but sometimes I take on some seasonal stuff and we can kind of range from a 1 to 3-person office.

 

00;03;02;08 - 00;03;08;21

DP

Okay. So, tell me a little bit about how you got this current project. The H-House, and how you get work in general.

 

00;03;08;29 - 00;03;55;29

MN

Yeah. So as any startup office does, work comes from just networking and passing on of a name. So, one project turns into another project and into another project. So, this one came from a client that was interested in the property in Manotick, and started off as a conversation with that client. And I think he had seen some of the past projects that I had done in that area as well.

Interestingly enough, like in that rural area of Manotick outside of Ottawa, I did I think two other kind of full houses which started to breathe a little bit of attention and got this client’s attention. So, it started off as a conversation, which turned into a kind of concept design for the project and the initial sort of idea was to create a house that's better connected with the site and with nature than some of its neighbors. And I can kind of touch upon that in a little bit. But it started off from there.

 

00;03;56;05 - 00;04;05;00

DP

I mean, I think that's a great place to start. So, give me a little bit about the history of the place, the location, the town, the neighborhood, the buildings.

 

00;04;05;09 - 00;05;17;11

MN

Yeah, to that point, I think that's such an incredible and important part of the story of this project. So much of where we drive inspiration from is context. You know, where is this thing located and why is that important. In the case of this area, so, the town is called Manotick. It used to be flagged with a number of agricultural fields.

It was a really kind of agrarian farming village some 75 to 100 years ago. And it hasn't developed much since that. Manotick itself is a small little town, you know, with single family homes surrounded by kind of two rivers and the kind of external area of that, the sort of periphery is surrounded by still some farming fields and some kind of larger sort of developments for larger scale homes.

So, where this property is located, it's in a neighborhood that was developed called Rideau Forest. So, it's filled with these two-acre wooded lots. So, it's quite a heavily forested area. But interestingly enough, like there are still traces of the agrarian history of the site. So, when you kind of meander through some of the still available properties there, you can see some of the old kind of stone walls which divvied up different fields for different species of crop and things like that. So, it has this really inherent tied to farming and to that kind of nature of the site, even though it's evolved now to be this neighborhood of two acre properties in really large houses.

 

00;05;17;17 - 00;05;21;28

DP

Is it typical to have an architect in that neighborhood?

 

00;05;21;28 - 00;06;17;09

MN

I would say no. Most of the houses that are built in that neighborhood – they come from two kind of forms. They come from either the client looking to have a sort of full-fledged design build project where they contact their custom home builder, per se, or they come ready with a plan that they've found or purchased or something like that. So, although the houses are quite custom in nature, they follow a kind of similar and typical pattern. Whether these large houses with these kind of large wings and adaptations. And what happens is they get quite visually noisy, they have quite deep floor plates, and the amount of carving that has to sculpt the roof geometry becomes very intangible from a visual perspective. And the way that we wanted to approach this project was sort of an antithesis to that was how do we marry the former context in kind of a gray and sort of idea of this site and its history with the understanding of what the site is today and the kind of neighborhood context.

 

00;06;17;18 - 00;06;41;06

DP

It sounds to me like – I mean it's pretty challenging to get sophisticated clients and then in a neighborhood like that, to end up with a client that's really interested in making great architecture, right? And listening to an architect and working through these challenges. So that must have been a nice experience because it doesn't sound like you knew them per se, right? They found you through relationships that you had with other people.

 

00;06;41;06 - 00;08;00;24

MN

Well, well, wait Doug, there's more.

So, we definitely started the conversation, the cons design with this client and to kind of emphasize the story a bit further, he also contacted my father, who has a construction company in Manotick in Ottawa. So, he has basically a custom home building company. He's one of these custom home builders in this area. So, he wanted to kind of work with us together at one point or another in the project, the client kind of backed away, you know, had alternative plans and sort of wanted to go in a different direction, I think ended up moving to a different country.

And so, we had this relatively well-developed design that was at a good point, a good conceptual point, and we had already invested a lot in how to create this marriage between site history and current context of neighborhood and things like that. And so, because my father was attached to the project, he kind of inherited its journey and was like, you know, I still want to move forward with this project, whether it becomes the project that we just build as a sort of passion project and sell, or whether it becomes something that is tied to our living, then he’s game.

 

So, he inherited the journey of the project. And so, from then on, we started to really look at incorporating nuances of my father, my mother's kind of Eastern European history into the project and see how the context of Eastern Europe and the area that they had lived in could start to influence materiality and tectonics of the project as well. So, it had this kind of new layer that was thrust upon it afterwards.

 

00;08;01;04 - 00;08;04;01

DP

So, am I getting this right? This was ultimately for your mom and dad?

 

00;08;04;06 - 00;08;05;10

MN

Yeah. So, they live there now.

 

00;08;05;12 - 00;08;06;12

DP

Oh, that's so cool.

 

00;08;06;12 - 00;08;07;12

MN

Yeah, they live there now.

 

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

DP

Unbelievable.

 

00;08;08;11 - 00;08;23;02

MN

It was an interesting kind of story of starting off with someone else, you know, and then kind of transferring it over, but not wanting to abandon it because so much was invested in in the first place. And then, you know, starting to layer on this new level of thinking to the project as it became more about them and less about the previous clients.

 

00;08;23;02 - 00;08;25;05

DP

So, you get along with your mom and dad?

 

00;08;25;05 - 00;08;29;06

MN

I do. I mean, yeah, Eastern European stubbornness aside, you know, I do for sure. Yeah.

 

00;08;30;14 - 00;08;31;19

DP

Do you have brothers and sisters?

 

00;08;31;28 - 00;08;34;29

MN

I have one brother. He works for the company as well. He's like, Yeah.

 

00;08;35;02 - 00;08;38;29

DP

So, your interest in architecture was early on, right? Your dad was a builder?

 

00;08;39;04 - 00;09;42;03

MN

Yeah, for as long as I can remember, since I was ye tall – for the listener, I’m pointing very low to the ground. Yeah. I've been on construction sites with my dad. I fully attribute my interest in architecture to him and to kind of him putting me in a context of watching things materialize and happen. And so, I think as a child, I was just inherently interested in – what are we actually building? You know? Like, it's great that we're building it, but what does it look like? What does it form? What kind of space does it create afterwards? And so, I married that with another interest of mine, which was really kind of urban thinking. Though this project is in a rural context, I think my suburban upbringing really planted the seed in me to want to think about a kind of different way of thinking about architecture and living and urban qualities of sites and things like that.

And so, when you look at it through that scope, this project was sort of the evolution of those things of me being kind of surrounded in this type of, you know, suburban, rural kind of context as a child, being able to come back and work on a project with my dad was a sort of full circle moment.

 

00;09;42;06 - 00;09;51;23

DP

Yeah, it's an amazing experience. That's wonderful. You seem like a very intuitive, very curious guy. So, let's go through quickly what were the client's programmatic requirements?

 

00;09;52;02 - 00;11;14;12

MN

So, a kind of synthesis of space, really trying to tighten the space a lot so that there was no wasted space in terms of program. So, I mean, at its core of programs, there's a living room and a kitchen in the dining. There's no accessory spaces, there's not a secondary living or sitting room or a secondary nook for eating.

It's just a simple kitchen, dining, living space associated with that typical mudroom powder room, a small home office, a main bedroom, and then a series of bedrooms with individual on-suites upstairs, as well as a library kind of gallery space. But the idea was to kind of be able to synthesize all these into a very tight knit floorplan.

So, when you look at the plan of the project, it's actually only a bar, the kind of adaptations that come off of the ends, house a garage, kind of veranda, lanai space off of the back, another garage on the other side. We kind of broke them into two. And then the main bedroom is actually the only programed interior floor space that comes off.

So, the house is quite tight. It's all housed into kind of one bar, and that tightness allows for the program to kind of work its way around each other. So, there's this constant sort of voyeurism as people move through the house. They're seeing each other from multiple levels and multiple rooms, and it invites cross ventilation, which is really important to the way I approach projects. There's a certain depth to the floor plate, which allows you to cross ventilate the space and creates really good environments for living, quality of light wise and ventilation wise.

 

00;11;14;19 - 00;11;27;19

DP

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, I’m going to keep going and maybe we’ll come back to it. So, tell me a little bit about the site, the topographic features. Is it flat? Is there any change in elevation and how did that affect your plan?

 

00;11;27;25 - 00;12;03;29

MN

It's a relatively flat site. It's not a site that has really strong topography to it. It does drop off a little bit at the back. But we didn't see the design from the get go as something that could start to play with elevation because it would feel forced if we would do that, you know, if we were starting to carve out spaces out of the topography to create walkouts or things like that, we really looked at the site as something that we said, okay, this is a planar condition. It's quite nicely treed around. So really, let's emphasize the connection to the sort of natural vegetation on the site and create the sense of living within this forest condition, which is, you know, why the house is heavily glazed towards the kind of more rare private conditions.

 

00;12;03;29 - 00;12;11;01

DP

Yep. Not everybody is that lucky. Sometimes it's a little easier when you don't have a ton of topographic issues to deal with.

 

00;12;11;09 - 00;12;16;07

MN

It's certainly easier. You tend to seek out the challenges in other places… At least, I do.

 

00;12;16;07 - 00;12;29;28

DP

It's almost nicer, I find as an architect, to have a challenge because then it makes you really work at design, right? What about project restrictions? So, like zoning, building codes…was there anything that was challenged in regard to that?

 

00;12;30;09 - 00;13;58;13

MN

So, from a zoning perspective, not really, because in this area like that, the zoning is quite lenient for a neighborhood like this. Within the frame that we were building, the size that we were building, we didn't have to deal largely with zoning issues or setback issues or anything like that. From a challenge perspective, I think the biggest one is one that surrounds the way in which I approach all my projects, which is buildability.

With that I mean, I try to find a way to create really interesting and engaging architecture using really conventional methodologies. So, this is a stick frame house that limits its use of steel, and yet we see cantilevers and floor protrusions and things like that. It's like, how do we get there if you're not building a full house out of steel?

And largely like my kind of interest in that was trying to make engaging and good architecture available to both clients and contractors at a better price in a way that feels more approachable from a building standpoint. And because with this house – my father being the contractor working on it – I knew inherently how he likes to build things and what his limitations are as a builder.

I use that as a framework within which to start thinking about the design, thinking about the tectonics, thinking about really strategically, where we're using more costly steel, where we were using larger expanses of glass, but also where we were tightening them up. And so, though the house looks like it's tectonically a lot more maybe complex than it looks, if you peel all of it back to the bones, it's no different than all the neighbors, which are just typical conventional stick-built houses with wood trusses.

 

00;13;58;21 - 00;14;03;00

DP

Right. So, a lot of thought went into, I would imagine, how much this thing was going to cost.

 

00;14;03;11 - 00;14;50;19

MN

Certainly how much it was going to cost, and just the approach to how it was going to be built. So, I remember, you know, when we were working through the construction documents on the project, having weekly conversations with the contractor and with trades that were involved from the early onset of how do we want to actually make this thing materialize, how do we want to build this thing? Like, you know, how is this beam going to sit? What kind of posts is it going to sit on? And almost working through it with a really solid understanding of structural engineering without going right to the consultant and asking him what to do. Like, we had this really intimate relationship with how this thing was going to be built and in a way that sort of harkened back to the agrarian structures that it's influenced by was the individual who owns that property is going to come in and look at the timber he has and build it himself. And we're sort of creating a modern interpretation of that approach in some degree.

 

00;14;51;01 - 00;15;02;15

DP

So, a big question would be, in particular, if I was working with my folks, the style choice. So how did you guys end up doing a modern building? Was that something they wanted right away?

 

00;15;02;23 - 00;16;37;27

MN

Yeah, it started off as a contemporary project with the first client that we were working with, and they were interested in a sort of a contemporary expression of a sort of farmhouse condition, right, using sort of materials that were natural and kind of warm tone to work with the site really well. And so, we kind of kept in that vein, but certainly started to work more specifically once my father was on board with kind of continuing the journey of the project.

So, from a style perspective, the houses certainly a deviation from them like they used to kind of live in a house that was quite ornamented and detailed and things like that was a beautiful house. Right? But I think them seeing me continue to work on projects and the kind of projects I was working on, it really started to kind of have an effect on them and me coming on home at Christmas and talking about how important natural light is and that kind of stuff.

It really had an impact. So, they saw that as something that they could kind of work with themselves in terms of how to approach the house. And then on top of that, we looked at references of Eastern European architecture that felt familiar to them in terms of their context, right? So, they grew up in small villages in southern Poland where a lot of the typical houses there are just built out of like clay brick, and the clay brick is exposed, all the mortar is exposed.

So it's all load bearing. One could look at that and say, well, that's really utilitarian and reflective of the structure of the house and, you know, where's the cladding? But to me, I find that really interesting. I'm like, Oh, that is the cladding. And how do we kind of represent that in a new way? Hence where we landed with the materiality of this project, which is a kind of smoked darker tone sort of clay brick that ages really well and it has this kind of grace and it's a timeless quality. So, we looked at those precedents as a reference in terms of where the style of the house itself lands.

 

00;16;37;27 - 00;16;47;06

DP

So, your choice of brick masonry, really, you knew from the beginning that you were going to be using masonry there at some point, right?

 

00;16;47;16 - 00;17;53;28

MN

It was set out at a conceptual level, yes. Though the tone or the color or things like that were sort of up in the air. Then when my father and mother had, during the project, they kind of seemed interested in carrying on that idea. Specifically, I remember for my mother when I said, you know, we're thinking about this kind of clay colored brick and something that looks really natural.

She loved that idea. She really never understood why more houses in a kind of contemporary context didn't do that, at least in the context where they live. And to some degree because the house, you know, in its design, in its formal and massing quality, it can appear really stark compared to its neighbors. The materiality choices of it are meant to sensitize that approach.

So, this notion of really conventional brick is meant to appear familiar to kind of an onlooker or to the person that lives at that home. It has this really timeless quality to it. It's like I can understand that house because it's made of brick. It's made of a conventional thing that I know that's been around for ages and has its conventional color. That's the color that brick usually looks like. When you ask a child to draw a brick, they're going to draw a red brick, maybe with three cores, if the child is advanced enough. Right? There's this familiarity which helps make the architecture more digestible.

 

00;17;54;08 - 00;17;59;22

DP

So, set up the building materials in general for us because the palette isn't just brick.

 

00;17;59;22 - 00;18;09;04

MN

Yeah. So, the kind of two wings that ground the house at the base are a Smoked Tudor Velour modular brick. So, it has this kind of rusty sort of clay color.

 

00;18;09;10 - 00;18;15;10

DP

And those colors, I would use the word variegated. Right? So, we see a series of different colors in that red clay.

 

00;18;15;11 - 00;18;40;01

MN

Yeah. The specification of the brick itself has a variation in it. It's up to a good bricklayer to make sure they patronize it quite well. But a lot of that is just coming from like the brick looks like it's been smoked at its edges and some are more smoked than others, which is where you start to get that kind of differentiation. And we like that a lot because the house has these really monolithic large brick volumes. And so, the kind of variation, the slight variation in the tone really help to kind of break that monotony apart a little bit.

 

00;18;40;08 - 00;18;43;07

DP

Was it hard to find a mason?

 

00;18;43;07 - 00;18;44;05

MN

A good mason? Yes. It’s always hard to find a good mason.

 

00;18;44;06 - 00;18;45;25

DP

It is! It's crazy!

 

00;18;45;25 - 00;19;18;20

MN

Yeah. And so this is why, you know, as a studio, we think it's important to kind of collaborate with trades early on because they can help kind of understand or they can help kind of propose ideas about how to get the masonry right at these angles or at the cantilevers that we’re proposing, things like that. And then the other materials were using a black standing seam metal above. So conceptually the volume that hovers above these two things floats. So, metal felt more appropriate. And then we're using a composite wood system in between the windows. So that's meant to kind of be a homage to sort of old wooden shutters that kind of peel away from the window itself.

 

00;19;18;24 - 00;19;20;15

DP

Where did you find that?

 

00;19;20;15 - 00;19;35;08

MN

It’s a product – I think it's based in the States. I can't recall. It's meant to be a veneer, but it's made out of wood fibers that are infused with like fiberglass and resin. So from a durability perspective. There's no maintenance. And it retains its color over time really well.

 

00;19;35;12 - 00;19;41;03

DP

And you're using steel lintels over these large openings that you're then using this wood infill between the windows.

 

00;19;41;09 - 00;19;45;05

MN

Correct. With the main one being the cantilever at the front entry of the home.

 

00;19;45;14 - 00;19;47;25

DP

So how did you pull that off?

 

00;19;47;25 - 00;20;06;05

MN

So, you know, we're looking at brick as a simple material and it's execution that appears very traditional in the way that we're applying it. But we found moments where we could start to kind of give it a more contemporary execution, and the main one being the cantilever at the front entry, which is just upheld by steel beams that are cantilevering out and transferring their way back to kind of point loads in the house.

 

00;20;06;05 - 00;20;07;23

DP

So they're tied back into the walls.

 

00;20;08;00 - 00;20;20;19

MN

Yeah, correct. And that cantilever holds a terrace on the upper floor, so a dormer above the entry that opens out onto a south facing terrace that you can use. And even in the kind of cooler spring months, because the sun engages that terrace quite nicely.

 

00;20;20;25 - 00;20;23;23

DP

Right. And that's a clear glass guardrail up there.

 

00;20;23;23 - 00;20;24;08

MN

Just a butt joint across.

 

00;20;24;08 - 00;20;25;07

DP

No frames.

 

00;20;25;07 - 00;21;03;01

MN

No frames. Yeah. So that it just kind of appears really minimal and visually to kind of carry on the notion of this house being an antithesis, that's exemplified in this entry now. You know, just talking about it, so many of the houses in the context, you know, the entries are these large columnar conditions, you know, with very ornamented roofs and things like that meant to kind of evoke this kind of grandiosity.

And here I think we're trying to evoke a grandeur, but we're doing so in a more nuanced way, layered elements, a kind of a structural acrobatic of this cantilever, the brick kind of enveloping you, your eye moving vertically towards that dormer. It's creating that grandeur, but doing so in using kind of tectonic architectural elements.

 

00;21;03;11 - 00;21;08;20

DP

So, did using bricks of any particular design challenges for you or for your clients?

 

00;21;09;01 - 00;21;42;17

MN

From a design challenge perspective, I think you sort of touched on it before, but it was how to allow the house to bridge the gap between the history of the site, the approachability of this kind of architecture in this kind of neighborhood and this sort of nostalgia of materiality for the client's past. Right? When we looked at those three conditions, Brick felt like a very natural material to kind of start to solidify that.

So that was the challenge of how do you build something like this in this kind of neighborhood? And brick really started to provide an answer for that in terms of how to bridge those gaps and how to create an architecture that feels timeless.

 

00;21;42;25 - 00;21;50;11

DP

You've got these traditional gable forms and yet you have these modern flat roof forms. What are the neighbors think? Have you heard from any of them?

 

00;21;50;21 - 00;21;52;20

MN

From when I'm around the house and I've been there.

 

00;21;52;20 - 00;21;53;10

DP

Yeah.

 

00;21;53;10 - 00;21;59;23

MN

A lot of cars roll by very slowly, I suppose. Although, I haven't heard many words being spoken, right?

 

00;21;59;29 - 00;22;00;21

DP

Do your folks hear anything?

 

00;22;00;21 - 00;22;18;25

MN

You know, I'm sure they only hear the good things. No one's going to say their real opinions. But to me, architecture is not about pleasing everyone. It's a subjective, you know, discourse, right? So it's about creating something that feels specific to the client, but also feels like it's mindful of its context and of where it came from in a really intelligent way.

 

00;22;19;04 - 00;22;27;21

DP

That's well put. Besides the cantilevers with the masonry, with the brick, were there any other unique construction details that you came across as you were building this thing?

 

00;22;28;02 - 00;24;22;01

MN

Yeah. So I mean, you can see in one of the photos we're looking at here in the studio, the interior, we use the bricks in the interior as well on the main kind of fireplace wall. So, the interior planning is kind of regimented by these volumes. So, as I mentioned before, the kitchen dining and living spaces are sort of one holistic space and they're separated by these equal 16 foot wide, almost like objects, one being the kind of back bar of the kitchen clad in a kind of white oak, one being the sort of kitchen island, 16 foot long cloud, and of course the main one being the fireplace clad in the brick, and then the third one being a kind of double height staircase, which has these sort of steel slatted risers that link the two levels together.

So, the main rooting element was the brick on the interior. And so, from a kind of challenge perspective, we had to just understand how to reinforce that brick on a conventional concrete foundation system with two steel beams trying to look at how to do that in the most conventional and cheapest way that we can make it work from a size of a beam perspective. But in execution, we found when you lay brick inside, you have to sequence that really specifically with all the other materials that are going in the house of the all the other trades that are coming in the house. You know, when is the right time to install the brick?

And we had to perform a few acrobatics with there because there's a kind of linear expression of the fireplace that's clad in a kind of thin steel plate reveal. So, we had to kind of cantilever the brick around that as well and kind of find a meaningful way to transfer it down. And then to express the tectonics of the build – and thankfully, the good work of the trades – we have uplighting that shines up on the brick in the kind of evening moments which really help to kind of show its tactility and it's rough surfacing. This brick specifically has a really natural finish to it. It's not polished or anything like that. We really like to use materials that look like they're supposed to look what they are. Bricks should look like brick. It should feel natural, it should feel rough, it shouldn't feel metallic or shiny or things like that. And so updating it felt like a celebration of selection of the brick, too.

 

00;24;22;01 - 00;24;32;15

DP

So, who did all the drawing? I love to ask that question because I love to draw, and this must have been really a wonderful experience for you because you're working with people that you really know well.

 

00;24;32;26 - 00;25;13;12

MN

It was primarily me. Like, I was doing the drawing from kind of early concept design to the CD's – construction documents – and to the landscape design as well. We didn't touch upon that one either, but because of the H form of the house, it forms two courtyards, one at the front and one of the back of the house. You know, conventional front and back.

And then the orientation of the pool is actually perpendicular to the orientation of the house, which kind of pulls the eye out towards the backyard and then towards a kind of pool house which is not pictured on these images we're looking at. So that sort of tertiary structure, that pool house there, kind of completes the series of objects that encapsulate that rear design of the site. We looked at an execution of that as well when I was drawing this thing up.

 

00;25;13;21 - 00;25;20;04

DP

Did you create three dimensional renderings for your folks? So, this is 3D modeled and then what software did you use?

 

00;25;20;15 - 00;25;22;00

MN

A number of different software.

 

00;25;22;04 - 00;25;24;12

DP

Like Revit, ArchiCAD?

 

00;25;24;12 - 00;25;31;19

MN

Sketch paper to start. You know, trace. A lot of rolls of trace paper. And then software wise, yeah, I mean, it starts in CAD and then it moves to Revit and then--

 

00;25;32;00 - 00;25;33;13

DP

Revit was the main software?

 

00;25;33;13 - 00;25;36;24

MN

Yeah. And then some studies in Rhino and SketchUp, and some rendering--.

 

00;25;36;24 - 00;25;40;13

DP

So, you know your way around that whole suite of products.

 

00;25;40;13 - 00;25;45;04

MN

Like most things, architects know a little bit about a lot of stuff. So, I know a little bit about every program.

 

00;25;45;04 - 00;25;47;08

DP

That’s so well-put. It’s so true. I'm not an.

 

00;25;47;08 - 00;25;48;03

MN

But I’m not an expert at any of them.

 

00;25;48;03 - 00;26;02;19

DP

So, tell me, sustainability is something we talk a lot about and you talked a little bit about that. Could you expand on this notion, the idea that you used Brick because I guess partially because it is a sustainable material.

 

00;26;03;02 - 00;27;37;14

MN

Sustainability from the perspective of the material choice? Yes. That's exactly why. Like, we like that on this project, brick is long-lasting. It is a material that requires zero to no maintenance and only improves over time. The patina that it develops over time is a likable factor of the project. Thinking about, let's say in Toronto, downtown Toronto, a lot of the older buildings that were built in the late 1800s or early 1900s were built from brick that was made at Toronto factories. And it usually is just the clay brick, right? And the exterior walls are all masonry load bearing walls and the interior structure is usually heavy timber. A lot of those went down in a large fire like most projects in the Chicago, right? But the ones that are still there, which there are quite a bit of them, they're looked at as precedents of really good, timeless architecture.

And you think about why that is a big influence. That is the long lasting quality of brick. You lay it and it feels organically and naturally sustainable without having to look at other projects as a precedent, given that the manufacturing process of the brick and also have a pretty low carbon footprint. And if you're sourcing it from a plant that's close to the site itself, that all kind of engages in that sort of sustainable approach of the brick.

And then outside of that, as a piece of architecture, we talked about the tightness of the project, the tightness of the envelope, all to create forced air ventilation that feels really well rounded because the air doesn't have to move all through the house. The HVAC design of the project is really, really tight in terms of how, you know, air movement gets kind of forced into all these spaces.

And of course, in the summer months you can all but turn off all of your heating and cooling systems because the house is so naturally ventilated. So, it creates really cool environments in the hotter summer months as well.

 

00;27;37;27 - 00;27;51;08

DP

So, give me one thing that you guys learned. It doesn't have to be about brick, but something that you learned through this process of designing a house, having two different clients, and then getting to the finish line.

 

00;27;51;19 - 00;28;28;21

MN

Working with a family member can be challenging, but can also be very rewarding. It can be challenging in the sense that a family member like my father, who has years and years of experience of building houses already, right? So they're really ingrained in how they've been doing things and here comes this young’in that's trying to look at a new way of thinking about this.

So that butting of heads and that friction can be very challenging. So, it's important to kind of keep your eye on the ultimate goal that you're trying to achieve together from the outset and not lose sight of that and let cool heads prevail, essentially. Right? I think that was a big lesson learned and so much so that, you know, my father and I are still continuing to work on some projects together.

 

00;28;28;21 - 00;28;29;16

DP

You're still talking?

 

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

MN

Yeah, still talking and still doing this stuff together, which is fantastic. At the end of the day, we love and I particularly am really thankful that I get to leave this kind of legacy behind with him, you know, of doing a project together with him. It's really a great kind of thing to leave behind, you know, a physical thing.

And outside of that, we talked about it before, but getting trades involved early. You know, we had some hiccups, of course, on site, as every project does. But we did learn on this project that getting trades involved early in the process was helpful in terms of how we were able to execute exactly what we wanted because we could have those conversations and planting the seed in whoever is, you know, working on whatever the product may be that they're installing or are working on. They also feel like the project is partly theirs.

Getting good trades is a challenge from any project’s perspective, but I find when you get them excited about it, they feel like they can bring their best work, you know, in terms of trying to suffice. The challenge of presenting them and make them feel proud that they're part of the process. And I think that's a really important one.

 

00;29;24;28 - 00;29;49;12

DP

Yeah, it's interesting to personalize that. I always ask the clients to bring in our contractors in schematic design, right at the end of schematic design, so we can get a preliminary price on the job. But I like how you describe this as more of a kind of relationship with these people that then grows and they get excited about the job. They're in early, they get to look at the drawings and then they have something to say about the project.

 

00;29;49;18 - 00;30;59;03

MN

Yeah, it's a kind of evolution of the typical kind of architecture delivery methods. So, you've got your design bid build, which really can create a divide between the architect and the contractor and the client to some degree. Then you've got the design build model which tries to integrate the contractor or an architect to some degree and create a more holistic approach.

And so, this is kind of an evolution of that. It's a design build with integrated input from trades and from the clients so that everyone feels like the project belongs to each and every individual that's working on it. There's forms of that called integrated process delivery that can be really timely right? But because we're just looking at house design and house construction, we can still be really intimate and fast tracked about the process as well.

So, this project, from initial design to final conception and kind of move in was two and a half years. I've worked at offices on custom bespoke residential architecture where projects of a similar scale, but with much more rigor and structural acrobatics and things like that were 5 to 6 year process. Right? That's part of what I think is interesting to us as a studio is how do we deliver these projects in a timely manner as well and not abuse the sort of amount of time that these things take.

 

00;30;59;14 - 00;31;07;05

DP

Yeah, particularly important with your parents.

 

MN

Yeah, indeed, indeed.

 

DP

Well, Mateusz, thank you very much for being here.

 

00;31;07;05 - 00;31;08;10

MN

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

 

00;31;08;10 - 00;31;10;14

DP

And tell everybody how they can find you.

 

00;31;10;17 - 00;31;24;22

MN

We're somewhat engaged on social media. So, our website is www.everyday-studio.ca. At Instagram where everydaystudio_ that would probably cover most of the social media, but yeah, we try to keep up to date as much as we can.

 

00;31;24;23 - 00;31;27;12

DP

Okay, well, Mateusz Nowacki, thank you very much.

 

00;31;27;12 - 00;31;28;05

MN

Yeah, thanks, Doug.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

 

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

William Smart (WS)

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So form follows function.

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

That's a beautiful description.

 

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

WS

Thank you.

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

That's exactly right/

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

DP

So you had to curve the plywood?

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

So I think that's all very insightful.

 

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

WS

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

 

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

DP

Absolutely. My goodness.

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

WS

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

 

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

DP

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Patt (DP)

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

 

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

Jay Valgora (JV)

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So how long was the design process then?

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So whose idea was it to do geothermal?

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So how did you end up dealing with Glen Gary.

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So you had a good mason from the get go.

 

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

JV

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JV

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

 

00;33;23;26

DP

Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Patt (DP)

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

 

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

John Woelfling (JW)

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

And you wanted to keep it?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

So tell me, is the subway system still there?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Yeah, the new foundations.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So what were the project restrictions like for you guys?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

It's gigantic.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Sixties or so?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Changed the way the walls are insulated?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

There is a seismic joint.

 

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

DP

Really? Is that pretty typical?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So that's coming down the pike.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

Natural gas.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

I was distinguishing from propane.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

00;34;18;23

DP

Thank you very much and great to have you here

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;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.