TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

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

Ross Padluck (RP)

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

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

DP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

Okay. That's a great neighborhood.

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

So you didn't know the clients?

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

And FAR restrictions, is that what they call them.

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

It was me and at the time, John Ike.

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

And what about the color?

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

Did you guys do the building in Revit?

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

RP

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

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

DP

So no 3D renderings?

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

RP

Nope. Except for hand renderings.

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

DP

Is that pretty typical for your office?

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

Yes.

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

DP

Whose idea was that? Where did that come from?

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

RP

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

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

DP

So was that difficult to have made?

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

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

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

RP

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

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

DP

And do you have your own Instagram account as well?

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

RP

Yes, that's @RossPadluck.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

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

Gabe Deck (GD)

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

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

DP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GD

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

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

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

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

DP

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

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

GD

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

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

DP

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

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

GD

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

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

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

DP

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

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

GD

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

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

DP

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

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

GD

Derek and I started working together. He was my first employee, actually. I met him through mutual contacts when I realized I was spread too thin, working out of a spare bedroom in my home in the early days of my business. Derek was currently working for a firm across town, that’s, I'd say, one of our competitors. He was looking for something new, and it was the infancy stages of the business, so he came to start working with me.

And fast forward to three years later, we had a team of four of us and we were ready to rebrand and create GNOME Architects.

00;06;40;13 - 00;06;57;06

DP

So let's dig in here and talk about the project. This is really beautiful and I would imagine it took some time to get done in Center City, Philadelphia. So how did your office get the project? And you did mention obviously that you had some relationships or acquaintances that were developers.

00;06;57;09 - 00;07;23;25

GD

This project actually came from one of my very first clients that I had who was connected with the real estate office where I hung my license at that time. It was a partnership between that long existing client and a couple of developers from New York City that purchased the property, and we assisted them to take it through all of the permitting process and all the hoops we had to jump through as it's a pretty sensitive site.

00;07;23;27 - 00;07;28;02

DP

So could you give us a little history of the location before your buildings?

00;07;28;04 - 00;07;57;09

GD

So the site is on the western end of Center City, Philadelphia, about a block away from the Schuylkill River, sits in a floodplain about five feet or so below the FEMA flood zone line. It was a three sided site. So we had challenges to create, drive all access and building entrances and maximizing the use of both Center city and looking west towards the river.

So it was a challenging yet a site that had a lot of great opportunity as well to work with it.

00;07;57;12 - 00;08;03;10

DP

Yes, So unusual to get a piece of property in the city with three street frontages.

00;08;03;13 - 00;08;18;27

GD

Yeah, it's pretty uncommon, but it actually allows for some benefits as far as how you apply the zoning code and how city planning orients. The frontages actually worked to our benefit to get a driver on the back and five houses fronting the broad side of the site.

00;08;18;29 - 00;08;43;06

DP

So, Gabe, what was the scope of the project and what were the programmatic requirements for the townhouses?

00;08;43;09 - 00;09;09;12

GD

So the scope of the project was to try to maximize as many townhouse units as we could across the site, while also ensuring that they felt large and spacious and wide with Philadelphia townhouse development. You're often dealing with very narrow properties, so anything that's built new construction is typically somewhere between 14 and 20 feet wide or so. So we wanted to make sure we could fit as many units while making them as wide as possible.

00;09;09;12 - 00;09;30;29

GD

So five ended up being kind of the magic balance point to get them feeling pretty wide. The developer wanted to make sure we could provide as much parking as possible, so each unit has a two car garage and then really maximizing at least four bedrooms, five plus bathrooms, elevators, and then the big thing here also is just outdoor spaces.

00;09;30;29 - 00;09;42;01

GD

So roof deck spaces are pretty key for Philadelphia Center City Townhouse developments. These houses each contain three roof deck spaces.

00;09;42;04 - 00;09;45;02

DP

And how many stories has the project has had? Four or five.

00;09;45;04 - 00;09;59;18

GD

It's technically five stories by way of the code. However, there is a pilot house on top of each house, which also contains some livable or habitable space, which makes the buildings read as six stories interesting.

00;09;59;18 - 00;10;21;08

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the style, the architecture, some of the buildings that surround it. I had mentioned that we had some pretty strong cornice lines locally and you probably picked up on that in terms of brick courses. And then we've got some really beautiful, tall, decorative patterning on each one of these facades.

00;10;21;15 - 00;10;45;02

GD

We typically like to do our best to work in some contextual elements into our projects. So with this site, there's a lot of surrounding context that has primarily brick material, very strong cornice lines at the rooflines. So inserting a new development that is essentially six stories adjacent to a lot of three and four story buildings, we had to kind of get creative to make things fit in.

00;10;45;05 - 00;11;08;23

GD

So we kind of struck a line at the top of the fourth floor for the brick material. Coming up to that, a chorus line at the top of the fourth floor. And then we selected a kind of a gray, brown, beige tone brick, as a lot of the neighboring buildings are a variety of colors. So there's not really a strong predominance of red brick or white brick or brown.

00;11;08;23 - 00;11;16;20

GD

It's kind of all over the place. So the gray brown tone of the selected brick that we used kind of was a nice middle ground for it.

00;11;16;22 - 00;11;34;10

DP

So let's go back to the zoning for a second. So these buildings step back as they move up above that third story. Plus they're up at least on one end, at least five feet, creating these stoops. Did you have to step the buildings back? I know you clearly did that for functional reasons to have these roof gardens up there.

00;11;34;17 - 00;11;57;18

GD

Yes. So it was, again, just a way to kind of fit within the context of the lower height buildings around us. The zoning code didn't really require us to set the buildings back where we did. We did it more for the outdoor spaces, but the fourth floor line was kind of the natural place to do a material transition to make the massing fit well with the vernacular nearby.

00;11;57;20 - 00;12;00;28

DP

Were there any historical reviews by the zoning board?

00;12;01;00 - 00;12;31;12

GD

Surprisingly, this was not a historical designated site, so we were not subject to any historic review. I would say the biggest hurdles we had or really within meeting the flood zone regulations. So it was a challenge to make sure we maintained all the FEMA regulations so these buildings don't have basements. We have flood doors on all facades and the challenges related to keeping your habitable floors above the flood plain were the big driving elements for this.

00;12;31;15 - 00;12;45;24

DP

Okay, so first floors above the floodplain, the base, the plinth, I'll call it, is masonry, is brick masonry. So you have these doors. Do they have to be a certain size? And I would imagine they're breakaway or is that the way it works?

00;12;45;26 - 00;13;06;23

GD

So each structure had to have a number of flood vents on at least two sides of the exterior walls. The size of these denser, I believe, one square inch per square foot of building footprint. They allow for the passing of flood water going in and out of the building just to relieve the flood pressure that the building would be subject to.

00;13;06;28 - 00;13;21;11

GD

So we did our best to hide them in kind of inconspicuous areas along the front facade where they were required, as well as the back of the building where the dry is. That's not really seen from the public right of way. So it was a nice place to hide these vents.

00;13;21;13 - 00;13;32;09

DP

So tell me about the apartments and plants we get along rectangle and each one of these is more squarish in plan. And I'm also wondering, I don't see the two car garages.

00;13;32;11 - 00;13;56;26

GD

Yeah. So the garages are all facing a rear drive aisle that we were able to hide. It's like a one way drive I'll access that comes in off of one of the small side streets, exits on the far end of the other side street. And then there are two car garages at the rear of each home are facing this drive while the driveway is also covered by a series of exterior decks, each deck serving one of the houses.

00;13;56;26 - 00;14;01;13

GD

So it's a covered drive aisle with a garage door. At either end of it, you never actually see it.

00;14;01;19 - 00;14;04;11

DP

And the buildings in plan are the each rectangles.

00;14;04;13 - 00;14;17;17

GD

Yes. So they're roughly, I'd say, 22, 23 feet wide by 40 to 50 feet deep with the drive at the rear and the main entrance at the opposite side facing the street frontage.

00;14;17;20 - 00;14;23;24

DP

So what was the building review like with the city of Philadelphia? Was that challenging? Was it time consuming?

00;14;24;01 - 00;14;45;16

GD

So it had a bit of back and forth. Our office handling primarily projects in Philadelphia. We've made a lot of good relationships with different plans examiners, different city agencies. I've gotten to know the process pretty well, as it is rather daunting for anyone who's unfamiliar with it. So I would say this project had a number of rounds of verifies from the plans.

00;14;45;16 - 00;15;10;14

GD

Examiner is mostly related to the interpretation of the parking that was implemented as well as kind of the interpretation of the roof deck access structures and that type of things. And typically it's a dialog with them to make sure everyone's kind of on the same page and there's a middle ground you need to find. But I would say we got through it in a couple of rounds, which was better than we had expected given the sensitive features of the site.

00;15;10;16 - 00;15;25;02

DP

So building materials you guys used primary Li Brick, I mentioned to you before we got rolling, it's a light. It appears to be a light brown brick. It's actually called Stonington gray velour. It's got a wide variety of values or shades in it.

00;15;25;08 - 00;15;46;03

GD

This was a really beautiful brick that worked well for our goals to kind of strike a line between the various masonry colors of the surrounding buildings. So it actually has a nice amount of variety in it. Some of the bricks are a lot more brown and darker. Some of the bricks are very light kind of in the the off-white color range.

00;15;46;03 - 00;16;06;16

GD

So once you get close, you really see the variety of color that's in there, which is really nice. And then at different times of the day, it also reads a little bit differently in the morning in direct sunlight. It kind of has a more of a warm brown tone to it and kind of in the twilight hours of the sun going down, there's a lot of reflectivity is caught.

00;16;06;16 - 00;16;13;14

GD

And when you look closely at it, so it really speaks well to the contemporary approach that the building esthetic has.

00;16;13;16 - 00;16;42;09

DP

What I love about this project is the brick pattern. You guys really spent a lot of time working on all the different patterning that's happening at the Stoops and around the windows, at the cornice lines. So tell us about how you did that in the office. Right? Typically we see a designer working on exterior elevation drawings and then, you know, the lead designers review them and it's back and forth and then eventually you're putting that into the CDs and you're doing mock ups in the field.

00;16;42;09 - 00;16;43;19

DP

So how did that go?

00;16;43;22 - 00;17;09;08

GD

Yeah, so it surprisingly went pretty smoothly on this project. The brick patterning that we went with was kind of a solution to a number of problems. We had planned driven windows, which is typical of these Philadelphia townhouse projects where you don't have a lot of space. So your windows can only go in certain areas. But then when you want to create alignments vertically on the facade and such, you've got to kind of get creative.

00;17;09;08 - 00;17;32;11

GD

Sometimes if that's a goal. So the brick patterning that we implemented was a tool to kind of strike these alignments vertically in the facade. So we have this recessed entry portal that is maybe two thirds of the width of the frontage, but the windows on the upper floors could not necessarily align with the jams of that portal opening.

00;17;32;11 - 00;18;01;20

GD

So we implemented brick patterning at the JAMB locations of the windows to then create a hard line that would align with the portal entryway below. That's one way we used the pattern to help. We also used it to just create interest on the facade. As I mentioned, the flood zone required us to keep the living spaces pretty high out of grade and that resulted in what would otherwise be a rather blank wall at the base of the building.

00;18;01;20 - 00;18;17;09

GD

The changes in brick pattern were a tool to kind of add some interest, so the brick we chose in relationship to a lot of cast stone that also creates some interesting accents around the window openings was a nice balance.

00;18;17;12 - 00;18;26;27

DP

What I really love is in this photograph on the far left you've got the brick patterning at the center stoop, but the patterning is completely different. On the left and right.

00;18;26;29 - 00;18;52;27

GD

The stoops were a huge focus of the design, so we had to get the occupants about 5 to 6 feet above the sidewalk level to the entry doors, which instead of having kind of a visible staircase that would otherwise dominate the sidewalk, we utilized a screen wall of brick in front of the staircase entryway that was also in front of a patterned planter box.

00;18;52;27 - 00;19;16;10

GD

So you have these multiple layers of masonry that add interest at the staircase. It allows us to insert some greenery as well. So it's a very tactile experience as you walk up to the front door of these houses that worked out very beautifully and the execution of the masonry and saw was fantastic by the mason as well, which we were very pleased to see.

00;19;16;12 - 00;19;39;18

GD

We had a series of conversations with the GC to make sure everyone was on the same page with the detailing. Our construction documents were very thorough to make sure that the areas of recess patterning as well as kind of projected roll lock and soldier course detailing was achieved and all the shadow lines could be read throughout the day as the sun moves around the building.

00;19;39;20 - 00;19;42;16

DP

So did you guys draw this in 2D and 3D?

00;19;42;18 - 00;20;12;01

GD

Yes. Our process typically starts with a three dimensional model of the building that we get to a comfortable point. We utilize sketch up primarily for a design tool in the schematic phase. And once we're happy with the sketch model, we move into 2D drawing. This project was done a few years ago before our office implemented Revit, but we were still able to successfully document how all the masonry patterning was working in 2D.

00;20;12;04 - 00;20;16;29

DP

So did you show the three dimensional model to the clients along the way?

00;20;17;06 - 00;20;42;27

GD

We did. We had a number of options for this projects. They were all similar in the materiality, but some were maybe a little more traditional, others were even more contemporary looking. So we utilized the 3D models as a design tool to visualize the project to the client. And in the end they were very happy with one of the options we chose, which had very minimal changes that they needed to see.

00;20;43;00 - 00;20;47;25

DP

Clients love 3D models, right? Were you able to model any of the BRIC in SketchUp?

00;20;47;27 - 00;21;17;18

GD

We built the SketchUp model and applied some custom made material swatches that we built utilizing other brick colors, and we made sure we could match exactly what the Stonington gray velour would look like. And then it was just a matter of scaling the pattern down to the brick unit. So even in the areas where you have these dimple patterns that read against the entryway walls, all of the patterns were aligned perfectly to align up with the massing recesses that took place in the model.

00;21;17;18 - 00;21;19;20

GD

So it ended up being pretty successful.

00;21;19;22 - 00;21;23;26

DP

So how many people worked on the team for the project from the architects office?

00;21;23;28 - 00;21;40;10

GD

I would say that through the design process there were at least four of us that work through the design concepts together and I would say primarily one designer and myself kind of pushed the design to where it is now. But back when we did the project, it was a pretty collaborative effort within the office.

00;21;40;13 - 00;21;48;08

DP

So I feel like every project I learn something new. Did you guys learn anything through the process of working on this project?

00;21;48;11 - 00;22;11;06

GD

We learned quite a bit, especially in terms of the brick detailing here. We kind of learned that certain patterns have rules around them, especially when you're utilizing like a stacked pattern where you have these very clean vertical lines that need to be maintained. It's tricky to make sure that things don't read as a mistake within that patterning, especially as it relates to where you put windows.

00;22;11;08 - 00;22;31;10

GD

So we had to make sure our window spacing was just right. So you didn't results in little slivers of brick that would be noticeable and read as a mistake. So we took a lot of care in making sure that the tolerances and the actual window sizes and everything were worked in to make sure that we didn't end up with those kind of conditions.

00;22;31;12 - 00;22;45;08

DP

And that takes some pretty close work with the. Mason You mentioned that you thought the execution worked out well. Did you guys have a tough time finding a mason or was the first mason you guys ended up meeting the person you used.

00;22;45;10 - 00;23;11;22

GD

So the general contractor, it was his team, really. And the mason that he chose and started the project with kind of nailed it right from the start. We had probably two or three on site meetings with the Mason, looking at the drawings. That's a back and forth with some questions. And then ultimately we had a small mockup in the field and everyone was on the same page and collectively in the room together to make sure that the execution was going to happen just right.

00;23;11;22 - 00;23;12;18

GD

And it did.

00;23;12;20 - 00;23;40;09

DP

So last thing I wanted to ask you about was the metal panels on the fourth floor and these large bay windows on the outside edges of the building. Really beautiful. These are great details. You see these bay window details everywhere on 1930s and forties, city architecture. And I think doing that on the ends of these buildings and then adding the flat lock metal panels to the fourth floor is really beautiful.

00;23;40;11 - 00;23;41;19

DP

Great detail.

00;23;41;22 - 00;23;59;21

GD

Yeah. So back to kind of the challenges of working in Philadelphia and not a lot of space to work with. The bay windows are always a tool to add a little bit more interior square footage, but the challenge is always Hadia clad them. How do you make them feel appropriate when the rest of the facade material is masonry?

00;23;59;23 - 00;24;29;00

GD

Yeah, we kind of struck a line with a traditional meets contemporary bay esthetic to compliment the window patterns within the masonry as well. So the bays have very kind of glassy windows, wrapping all sides in the same style of windows as the punched openings within the flanking brick masonry and then the color of the bays being much darker than the masonry was meant to draw more attention away from the bay and actually focus it on the adjacent brick masonry.

00;24;29;02 - 00;24;48;17

DP

One more comment or question. These entry portals are beautiful. Was it tough for you guys to decide? Okay, we're going to set back the front door and these very large windows lose a little bit of square footage, but we get these entries which are highly differentiated on the facade or along the facade.

00;24;48;20 - 00;25;11;06

GD

Yes. So the entry portal was a result of trying to solve a problem around the narrow sidewalk. The city only allows you to project so far into the public right of way and you're trying to make this nice prominent entrance for this luxury townhouse. And in order to achieve a wide staircase going up there, you got to kind of recess the frontage of the building.

00;25;11;06 - 00;25;31;25

GD

So we accomplished that by recessing just the entryway that the ground floor. When I mentioned being in the floodplain, we had to get the first floor up pretty high. So the entry door is actually at a middle landing between the garage level in the first floor. The first floor is actually up about ten feet above the sidewalk. So we recessed the entryway.

00;25;31;25 - 00;25;40;02

GD

It allowed us to have four or five foot wide steps leading up to the front door and a nice prominent procession up the steps to the front door of the house.

00;25;40;09 - 00;26;03;15

DP

Well, Gabe, it's a beautiful project. When I first saw these photos, I was really excited to do this interview. So I have done so many different things in my career while being an architect. And while it's not that unusual, I've found that being an architect has helped me to be good at lots of other things in my life.

00;26;03;18 - 00;26;30;10

DP

The other thing that I will say is that we end up working on many different things in our lives, even if we're let's say you end up doing stair details for a large firm for ten years and you think I wasted all that time doing stair details. The reality is we never really know when any of the things that we learn how to do will come in handy and can ultimately change our life in some way, even if it's in a small way.

00;26;30;10 - 00;26;45;28

DP

So I think it's really cool that you got your real estate license because you made all of these relationships or just a couple relationships that ultimately helped you become a successful architect. It's a big deal, right? So I don't think you give yourself enough credit.

00;26;46;00 - 00;27;04;16

GD

Yeah, I think I realized early on that I was good at some things, but not good at everything I needed to be good at. So the relationships were everything, especially in the early days. So knowing when to reach out to the people who know the solution is a big part of being an architect, a big part of being an entrepreneur.

00;27;04;16 - 00;27;22;22

GD

Starting a business as well is, you know, you need to do it right. You have a license that you got to hang your hat on. So it's critical for you to understand when it's time to reach out for design professionals outside of your purview and outside of your profession for the right solution to problems on your projects.

00;27;22;24 - 00;27;29;20

DP

So, Gabe, it's been great to have you here. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about No more architects and yourself?

00;27;29;22 - 00;27;44;25

GD

Sure. So our website is pretty current websites WWE and gnome arch dot com genome RC. I would say even more current than that is our Instagram account, which is also at Gnome Arch.

00;27;44;28 - 00;27;47;19

DP

So one more question. Where did you get the name?

00;27;47;21 - 00;28;09;22

GD

The name actually came from a rebranding exercise that we did back in 2018 and we were looking to create a new identity that spoke to the residential nature of our products and we wanted to kind of speak to the home and a place of being. So the gnome, the garden gnome is a character that does that. It's the marker of place.

00;28;09;22 - 00;28;35;29

GD

We also wanted the branding to be very memorable and approachable, so we initially kind of wrote off a name that came to us from our rebranding company and we thought it was crazy. And the more rounds of more names they suggested to us, the more we came back to that first stab of GNOME being the solution and so happy that we trusted in the company that we rebranded with and it's worked out for us very well.

00;28;36;05 - 00;28;37;25

DP

It's a great story. Well, thanks again, Gabe.

00;28;38;00 - 00;28;41;13

GD

Thank you.

00;28;41;16 - 00;29;05;01

DP

Thanks for listening. If you learned something today, share this episode with a friend and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to help others find the show. If you want to find out more about today's project, visit Glengarry com forward slash design dash vault that's gleaned GSR y dot com forward slash design dash vault one even more inspiration.

00;29;05;01 - 00;29;28;24

DP

Take a look around Glengarry icon while you're there. Glengarry is one of the nation's largest brick manufacturers and an industry leader for its diversified product line of more than 600 brick products with inspiring photos, useful resources, easy search tools, helpful design studios, and more. I'm sure you'll find the inspiration you need to stretch your imagination

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

00;00;05;12 - 00;00;34;05

Michelle Todd (MT)

So the whole idea was to fix the parapet and also to fix all of the step cracking within the facade. It was a beautiful building of brick in the front and the original status was that it had stucco on the very rear portion. We wind up finding out that this particular building, it wasn't brick behind it, it was actually wood.

So that therefore became more of an extensive project in which it wasn't just a renovation of the exterior facade, it was now a whole new addition and also an entire new rebuild.

00;00;34;07 - 00;01;01;23

DP

This is my guest, Michelle Todd. I'll share more about her shortly. In this episode from The Design Vault. We highlight Michelle's restoration project at 102 Bainbridge Street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The Bainbridge Street renovation project is located in the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District. It was built within a row of buildings, which is a long group of houses planned to form seven freestanding architectural units.

00;01;01;28 - 00;03;46;13

DP

102 is situated at the end of the row. It's a modified Spanish residential style home with a triple arched loggia made of red brick laid in Flemish pond. The roof parapet rises at the center in an arch supported on concave shoulders. The restoration was begun to repair a buckling roof parapet, deteriorated walls, damaged pediment and cracking stucco facade.

Renovation work was extensive and a decision was made early not to replace the stucco, but rather leave and repair the natural brick masonry. The building scope also changed during construction from an exterior renovation to demolition and reconstruction due to construction material issues. Structural engineers were also consulted to create a necessary and unique wall construction method. The existing roof skylights, roof hatch and areas of limestone and bluestone were also repaired.

The project was also recently awarded the 2023 Lucy G. Moses New York Landmark Conservancy Award. Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Michelle Todd is an architect and principal of M.Todd Architects in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. Michelle has a master of science from Columbia University in architecture and urban design. She also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in France.

Michelle grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the 1970s. She knew she wanted to be an architect by the age of ten. Her interests today focus on urban planning and socially responsive architecture. After a brief stint at Perkins Eastman, she opened her own firm in 2008. Since then, she's worked for small and large corporations such as Snapple, the New York City Agency Office of Emergency Management, as well as private residential projects.

Her studio in Brooklyn, New York, focuses on historic renovations and additions, collaborating directly with clients and working closely with the general contractor during construction. Michelle's worked on Landmark designated buildings, bakeries, restaurants, schools and renovation projects. She's an adjunct professor at the New York City CUNY College and a licensed architect in New York State and Maryland. She's certified as a consultant with the International Institute of Building Enclosures, and Living Future accredited with the International Living Future Institute.

Welcome, Michelle. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about M.Todd Architects in Brooklyn. So where in Bed-Stuy are you located? What's the size of the firm? How long have you been around? And tell us a little more about project types.

00;03;46;16 - 00;04;19;19

MT

The firm is in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant on the whole Z Street. Been around since 2008 was almost 15 years as of March of this year, 2024. And basically the firm is small, is about three people, we specialize specifically in historical preservation, as well as residential private editions, commercial projects such as restaurants, bake houses and also schools. So basically you have a realm of achievement in different areas, which is commercial, residential and also business.

00;04;19;21 - 00;04;26;09

DP

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

00;04;26;12 - 00;05;00;18

MT

I've been practicing architecture since 2008, when I received my license. However, I do have decades of experience before then in working at previous larger offices, in smaller offices to gain the experience I needed. Because, as you know, as an architect, you have to have at least three years working first in the field and then afterwards you're able to take the examination.

So once I did that, then just made initiative to just start my own practice. And basically I am the principal where I do a lot of marketing as well as clients in order to obtain business.

00;05;00;20 - 00;05;02;15

DP

And you said you have some employees?

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

MT

I do have employees. They're basically consultants. So basically I have a expediter. I have a drafts person. I have also my consultants, such as structural engineer, mechanical engineers.

00;05;13;19 - 00;05;21;08

DP

That's interesting. So you have an expediter that you guys use. And is that to make the process working with the city a little easier?

00;05;21;11 - 00;05;33;17

MT

It really does make it easier because as a person with a small firm, your hands are in everything. So to have somebody to be on the outside, to be able to do that type of work is appreciative and helpful.

00;05;33;19 - 00;05;46;05

DP

That's really cool. I mean, just as an aside, I hadn't really thought about the need for an expediter in a firm like that, but that makes perfect sense. So let's dig in here and talk about the home. How did your office get the project?

00;05;46;07 - 00;06;08;01

MT

I received the project in regards to as a dear friend, where I'm on the New York City Landmark Committee for Bedford-Stuyvesant specifically, and Community Board three, and he was a good member, Fred Jones, rest in peace. He had a friend who was in need of architectural services, so he recommended me to the client, which is the richest family, about this project.

00;06;08;03 - 00;06;10;01

DP

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

00;06;10;06 - 00;06;18;04

MT

I didn't know the clients. It was a friend of a friend, and he just talked highly about me and said that you should work with me in regards to this project.

00;06;18;06 - 00;06;24;26

DP

So give us a little history about the location. And was I correct in stating that the unit is an end unit?

00;06;24;29 - 00;07;08;00

MT

It is. It's in the beautiful, original, historic district of Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is known as Stuyvesant Heights, and it was established as a landmark district in 1971. So this set of buildings, it's literally between Stuyvesant and Lewis on Bainbridge. There's about 14 series of the buildings, and it's at the end row and there are Spanish style Renaissance buildings. That was created by W.f. McCarthy, who was an architect back in 1919.

And the unique thing about these buildings is that it's the only buildings I've ever been in with it has two staircases inside where there's one in the back and one in the front. So I guess back in those days they would have the servants come through the back and then the owners come through the front.

00;07;08;03 - 00;07;10;14

DP

Roughly, what's the square footage of the project?

00;07;10;16 - 00;07;13;09

MT

It's about 1200 square feet.

00;07;13;11 - 00;07;17;05

DP

And what was the scope and the programmatic requirements from the owner?

00;07;17;07 - 00;10;08;12

MT

Well, the original scope and program was that it was in terrible need in regards to the existing structure, the parapet was buckling. So on the north facade as well as the south and west facades, it was just crumbling. They were scared that it was going to fall down in some way. So the whole idea was to fix the parapet and also to fix all of the step cracking within the facade.

But then as we went along, we started to think also, it was a beautiful building of brick in the front. And the original status was that it had stucco on the very rear portion. Once we started to do the renovation was like, you know, we don't really need the stucco. It really looks beautiful with the brick itself. So we started to expose all the stucco, and by exposing all the stucco, we wound up finding out that this particular building, it wasn't brick behind it, it was actually wood.

So that therefore became more of an extensive project in which it wasn't just the renovation of the exterior facade, it was now a whole new addition and also an entire new rebuild. So we found out the history, and that was the nice thing about it. We really had to go back in the history of it. This is where the assistance of the expediter really came into play, because basically we found out that back in 1956, the building itself had a permit to actually do a addition because all of these beautiful houses.

What makes them so special in this neighborhood, too, is that they have their own private driveway, which many people don't have in that area. And also they have a garage. But then also on the second floor of each of these houses, they have a beautiful sunroom with a balcony. The person who owned the property at 102 Bainbridge, he basically wanted to make an addition.

So he eliminated that balcony and extended the whole square footage of the building so it can be enclosed. When we removed the stucco, we found out that instead of it masonry, he had it wood. So that was back in 1956. So we had to go back all the way to the building department to find out what the original drawings were, which we found out which were these beautiful blueprint drawings that you don't see anymore.

And it said that year they were legally supposed to have an addition, but it was supposed to be made out of brick, not wood. So that's where the whole expedition kind of came in. I had to go back to New York City building department, as well as the landmarks, because everyone was like shocked that it was wood versus masonry.

And we basically had to do a whole reconstruction. And that's where I guess the product of Glen-Gery came into play, because what happened to you is that on the back of the facade, all the bricks in the building weren't the same. The bricks in the front of the building were made out of Beldon, and it was a different type of color scheme.

But then when we removed the stucco in the back, it was a beautiful match with the Glen-Gery Kushwaha Calvert Plantation Middle Plantation, 52DD. It was a perfect match to it. Again, we had to go back to landmarks to make sure that they were approve of that brick to match what was in the rear facade that was being used.

00;10;08;15 - 00;10;17;12

DP

So what's interesting about the photographs that you sent is that the building looks as though some of these walls were completely taken down.

00;10;17;18 - 00;10;59;01

MT

It was because due to the fact it was stucco and I'm an architect that's very conscious about the environment. And stucco is something I concrete and it adds to the carbon footprint. So the whole idea was that this project specifically was to eliminate that process in really being more progressive and more enhancing to the environment. So that's why we didn't use stucco.

We wanted to just expose the beautiful masonry itself. And therefore, by eliminating the stucco, we saw the building was in need of much deeper repair than we expected. That was the thing, because in 1956 you figured that the contractors would be honest and they would do what they were supposed to do. But he wasn’t. And therefore that made this more of an adventure to get it right.

00;10;59;03 - 00;11;05;27

DP

So I would imagine there are a number of other buildings on that block that were also made of wood, that the interior wall construction. Is that correct?

00;11;06;00 - 00;11;44;10

MT

I don't know. That's the whole thing. What happened is, what makes this special is that this is the only house that has the addition. That's it. Everybody else has the sunroom. So this once in particular you thought that you would put it in masonry, but it's in it makes sense. First landmarks had to come and see it.

They were, like, shocked. Then I received the structural engineer, which was SOMA Engineering Firm, which is a great engineering firm. They came, they were shocked. The construction company that we work with, Naim Construction, all of us was basically shocked that this was behind the stucco because it looked like everything was fine. But when exposed, that's when we all gathered together as a team to like how we can resolve this.

00;11;44;16 - 00;11;52;22

DP

Interesting. Let's back up and talk a little bit about the plan of the building. I would assume it's just a large rectangle, two storey rectangle.

00;11;52;24 - 00;11;54;23

MT

Exactly. It was a two storey rectangle.

00;11;55;00 - 00;11;59;29

DP

And had you been contracted to design the interiors as well?

00;12;00;04 - 00;12;20;18

MT

I have for later date because what happens is based on the fact that now the photographs that you have here show of what it was existing. We went back to the premise of what it was back in 1919 when the solarium had these beautiful corner windows. So the design now is encompassing back the original style of that format.

00;12;20;20 - 00;12;25;05

DP

So you had to work with the city. How long did that process take?

00;12;25;08 - 00;12;53;21

MT

This is how it began. The project began in May 2020, during the pandemic. Then we actually had approval to start construction in April of 2021. Then all of these items, open issues about the facade not being what it was, and reconstruction, we basically spent about two years after that, and it was completed around October 20, 23. So it was back and forth with New York Landmarks as well as New York City Building Department.

00;12;53;27 - 00;12;55;09

DP

And the client had somewhere to live.

00;12;55;16 - 00;13;08;12

MT

He lived on the first floor. So the top floor. It was a blessing that he was able to live on the first floor while all this construction was going on. And in the top floor, basically, he had tenants, but then they moved out. When this major construction of us doing the rebuild.

00;13;08;15 - 00;13;09;07

DP

A lot of noise.

00;13;09;13 - 00;13;11;04

MT

It was a lot of noise.

00;13;11;04 - 00;13;11;23

DP

Very dusty.

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

MT

But it was fun.

00;13;15;02 - 00;13;24;10

DP

That's great. I'm interested as an architect about the drawings that you created in the very beginning. Did you work in 3D or just 2D?

00;13;24;12 - 00;13;33;28

MT

I worked in 2D, but then afterwards, when we started to look at what this condition that was taking place in the rear, I started looking at it in 3D and how it would be.

00;13;34;05 - 00;13;38;05

DP

And did you have to present drawings to a historic commission?

00;13;38;07 - 00;13;47;14

MT

Yes, we present it to Brian Blazak, is one of the senior preservationists on in New York City Landmarks. We had to show the drawings of what we planned to do.

00;13;47;16 - 00;13;48;26

DP

Exterior elevations?

00;13;49;03 - 00;13;50;24

MT

Yeah, exterior elevations.

00;13;50;26 - 00;13;58;25

DP

So again, backing up a little bit, you removed the stucco on one facade and replaced masonry on another. Is that correct?

00;13;58;28 - 00;14;25;03

MT

It's on the same facade. What happens is, is that the entire facade was placed in stucco. But then when we looked at the south elevation, so the windows were there, but it was infilled with wood. And that's what was shocking to everybody because basically it was really dilapidated and it also kind of made sense for the owner later on because he said his tenants always felt cold in that part of the room.

And it made sense because it was the wood and that masonry, there was no insulation whatsoever.

00;14;25;06 - 00;14;30;17

DP

So tell us a little bit about the new wall system that you guys had to create because of that condition.

00;14;30;19 - 00;15;17;03

MT

So the new wall system was still going back to what was historically done in regards to the rear facade was made out of three widths of brick, which basically is like three layers. And what we had to do is that we had to abide by what the actual, once we removed the stucco, what the actual pattern was, because it was a common bond, because as I stated in the beginning, the pattern in the front of the house was completely different than the pattern in the back of the house.

So once we established that, then we wanted to really make it structurally sound and we incorporated steel within the wall. So basically you have the three whiffs of brick on the outside, then you have the steel. It was stainless steel that made sure it was resource sustainably. And then we have our insulation and then our finishes in the inside.

00;15;17;06 - 00;15;26;25

DP

So the project sounds really interesting. Did you guys learn anything new about construction technologies or about building typologies in working on this project?

00;15;26;27 - 00;15;58;06

MT

Yes, the use of materials because again, was very selective about which materials we're going to use because since this building was already historically landmarked since 1919, we wanted to make sure that it lasts for another 100 years. So was very selective on who the steel came from, where the insulation came from, where the bricks came from. All of these were really mindful things and I think moving forward with other projects, I continue doing that, making sure that they are friendly to the planet as well as to the people who are going to live and utilize the buildings.

00;15;58;08 - 00;16;04;18

DP

So did the client bring the general contractor to the project or did you interview a number of contractors?

00;16;04;20 - 00;16;10;09

MT

We did interview a number of contractors, but then the client himself selected Naim Construction for it.

00;16;10;12 - 00;16;15;19

DP

And clearly there's a lot of masonry work. Did you have any challenges finding a good mason?

00;16;15;21 - 00;16;45;27

MT

Oh no. He has very excellent masons and they were very accommodating because we had to go back and forth with New York City Landmarks when we were selecting the bricks where we had to actually do a sample of the wall where the wood infill was of how the brick was going to look. So one of his masons, George, was really who's one of the oldest ones there.

It has most experience. He was very patient. We went on the scaffolding and it was a really cold day, but we did the whole mock up and it came out beautiful. And therefore Landmark said, Yes, go with it.

00;16;45;29 - 00;16;49;16

DP

So you did the mock up and the city came out and took a look at it?

00;16;49;19 - 00;16;56;05

MT

No, we took photographs and then afterwards they were like, because it was cold.

00;16;56;07 - 00;17;05;24

DP

So the city doesn't like to go out on cold days? I think we’ll leave that in there. That's good. So I assume the client's living there now?

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

MT

He is. He's living in the bottom floor still, but he's happy with the work.

00;17;09;20 - 00;17;12;25

DP

So is it complete? And he has a tenant on the second floor?

00;17;13;00 - 00;17;22;21

MT

He doesn't have a tenant on the second floor. And it's not quite complete yet because now we're just waiting for the historical windows to come in. So that is the last crème de la crème.

00;17;22;23 - 00;17;24;27

DP

And who is the manufacturer of the windows?

00;17;25;03 - 00;17;36;10

MT

It is Norwood Manufacturers, a Canadian company. And again, it was very selective on them because the way they use and harvest wood in order to make the windows, we're really mindful about that.

00;17;36;17 - 00;17;39;23

DP

Interesting. Are they double glazed? Triple glazed?

00;17;39;25 - 00;17;49;03

MT

They're triple glazed, low e glass index and they're quite beautiful. They're the original to what was there before of the windows? So they're replicating those.

00;17;49;05 - 00;17;57;00

DP

So I'm curious in terms of color, you were able to find a brick that you were happy with. You said that matched on the exterior.

00;17;57;02 - 00;18;12;16

MT

The contractor has suggested he was like, this will be a perfect break. I did research and was a Glen-Gery Kushwaha Calvert 52 DD Middle Plantation. That was the one that was selected. And when we put it in place, it was perfect to what was there from 1919.

00;18;12;22 - 00;18;15;27

DP

So do all these row homes, they all must look the same?

00;18;16;02 - 00;18;45;16

MT

They basically all look the same. And the other fascinating thing too, with the project, when we were doing the demo for the wood infield, all the bricks, I learned this like recently from my practice that the bricks that we were removing, that were there all had the names of the brick companies on there. And you don't see that anymore in which they were actually etched into the brick.

I was like, Wow, It's like, fascinating. So it was like an archeological project in the same way of doing something better for the building for another hundred years.

00;18;45;19 - 00;18;52;24

DP

So when you guys put these new windows in, what about the color? Can you do whatever color you want or the colors have to match the other homes.

00;18;52;26 - 00;18;57;13

MT

The colors have to match. It is going to be made out of wood, but they're going to be of a white finish.

00;18;57;16 - 00;19;00;10

DP

And they have to be traditional in style to match the others.

00;19;00;16 - 00;19;01;06

MT

Exactly.

00;19;01;06 - 00;19;11;17

DP

Interesting. So, Michelle, you've been an architect for some time. Based on what you know today about being an architect, you have any words of advice for your younger self or maybe architects coming up in the ranks?

00;19;11;19 - 00;19;41;21

MT

I would say don't quit on yourself. That's for me personally, as a woman and a woman of color in this industry, to always just believe in yourself, that what you find really interesting and powerful within yourself will just keep working at it and you'll get recognition. But it's not really about the recognition. I've always known I wanted to be an architect.

I feel architecture is like a stewardship. You are helping other people to obtain their desires and dreams and designs, but then also, too, helping the planet.

00;19;41;24 - 00;19;49;23

DP

So, Michelle, it's been great to have you here today. Thank you so much for your time. Where could people go to learn more M.Todd Architect and yourself?

00;19;49;26 - 00;19;56;06

MT

You can find me on my website at  MToddArchitects.com and then also I'm on LinkedIn.

00;19;56;08 - 00;19;58;10

DP

Well, thank you very much. It has been great to have you.

00;19;58;17 - 00;20;00;24

MT

Thank you so much. Appreciate the opportunity.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Pat (DP)

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

00;00;05;14 - 00;00;30;24

Will Quam (WQ)

The Fulton Market area, I think, is the place where some of the best brick architecture in Chicago is currently happening, because it's a place where you have a lot of these historical buildings and you have a lot of people coming in there building offices, residences, restaurants, and they want to make it feel like it's part of that history.

And so they're using brick. And then you have a lot of architects who are really pushing the limits on what they're able to decoratively do with the brick.

00;00;30;26 - 00;01;42;04

DP

This is my guest, Will Quam. I'll share more about him shortly in this bonus episode from the Design Vault. We talked to Will, an architecture photographer, writer, researcher and man who was fascinated with brick.

Hi. I'm Doug Patt and this is Design Vault. Will Quam lives in Chicago. He's currently writing a book for the University of Chicago Press on the history of brick architecture in the city.

He documents brick as a way to pay more attention to the world around him and encourages others to do the same. He believes it's been like learning a whole new language and a means to discovering great texts hidden in the buildings that surround him in his own words. Everything built is designed and has impact, good or bad. It's easy to walk by something like a brick building and pay it no mind.

But the world is so much more interesting when you ask the question, What is that and why is it the way it is? Above all, he believes nothing is boring and everything can be interesting and exciting, even bricks. So welcome Will, it's nice to have you with us today.

00;01;42;07 - 00;01;43;29

WQ

Thank you so much, Doug. It's great to be here.

00;01;44;02 - 00;01;50;09

DP

So tell us a little bit about where you're from and how you became so interested in brick and brick architecture.

00;01;50;16 - 00;03;52;24

WQ

I became interested in bricks through a very circuitous route. I am from Saint Paul, Minnesota, originally, which is a good brick town, a smaller brick town. I studied theater, I directed, I did set design. I acted, and I moved to Chicago originally to be a theater teacher, and that's what I did for about nine years. I taught middle school theater.

I taught afterschool programs, in school residencies. I wrote and directed plays with middle schoolers. The great thing about that work, besides just, you know, it was so fulfilling working with kids is my work brought me all over the city in the suburbs of Chicago, and Chicago is massive. The south side of Chicago alone is the size of Philadelphia.

And so coming from a place like Saint Paul, it was an introduction to a much larger built world. And so through my work, I was, you know, on the north side in the morning, the south side in the afternoon, the west side, in the evening, the suburbs the next day. And going around Chicago, you start to see that there are these very repetitive building types, the bungalow, the two flat, the courtyards style, the apartment hotel, and they're all made of brick pretty much exclusively.

You get some stone, you get the very occasional wood, but brick is the defining material. And I started to notice that it was the brick and specifically the face, the bricks on the front of these buildings that made them all unique. And they weren't just these red rectangles that I'd always thought of a brick as being. There's texture, there's color, there's pattern, there's usage.

And so I started taking pictures on my phone. And then one day in the basement of a theater where I was running a middle school theater camp, I started Instagram and posted them and people started asking me questions. And so I said, Well, I better research this, dove down the rabbit hole and then seven years later, here I am.

It's become my full time job, taking pictures for architects and suppliers and engineers. And then I lead these brick tours to such a natural spinoff of my earlier work. Taking that excitement and giving it away. I think that's the biggest thing about my work is I'm not trying to gate keep anything. I don't have a background in this.

I'm just a very passionate learner. And then on, my goal is just to give everything away in the most interesting and exciting way possible.

00;03;52;26 - 00;03;55;08

DP

Do you ever think to yourself, I should have been an architect?

00;03;55;14 - 00;04;36;20

WQ

I'm very lucky in that my great grandfather was an architecture journalist and instilled a lot of that in my dad. My great grandfather's the great John Entenza, who did the case study houses. I never met him, but my dad knew him well. So we grew up going on a lot of architecture tours, a lot of historic home tours.

And really the importance of the built world was instilled to me as a young man, but it was always something I thought, you know, I would just enjoy. And maybe that is I'm very lucky that I grew up playing trombone and singing in choirs, and I went to space camp and I was encouraged to have all these very multifaceted interests by parents who had these very multifaceted interests as well.

And so I was very lucky to be able to feel like I could explore things.

00;04;36;25 - 00;04;58;26

DP

It sounds really cool. I mean, it's almost like you're walking down the street and you see a building and it's made of brick, and it occurs to you, you get this thought like, Hey, that's kind of cool. I wonder why that looks like that. And then the next day gets a little more important. The next day gets a little bit more fascinating, and all of a sudden you've got this interest in something that sits so far outside of your wheelhouse. In a way, it's amazing.

00;04;59;02 - 00;05;37;16

WQ

Exactly. You know, it starts with somebody asking, What's that pattern? And me, I guess I'll look on Wikipedia and then I'm emailing a brick dealer, and then I'm finding books on the history of brick architecture to the point where now last week I spent a whole day at the University of Illinois Library reading through old copies of the brick and clay record from the 1970s.

And what makes it so great in Chicago, too, is you truly can walk down any street and you'll find great brick architecture, any residential street anywhere in this entire city. And the city is so big and changing so much so constantly that you can go down the same street again ten years later and you can have so many new things to discover.

00;05;37;19 - 00;05;41;03

DP

Yeah. As an aside, have you been to the Monadnock Building?

00;05;41;10 - 00;05;42;19

WQ

Love the Monadnock Building.

00;05;42;26 - 00;05;59;14

DP

Right? When I was in architecture school and I learned about that building and the fact that the base is six feet thick of brick masonry as the load bearing structure. The first thing I did when I got to Chicago was go to that building. I'm I just couldn't believe it. Right. It's amazing.

00;05;59;17 - 00;06;40;15

WQ

It's an unbelievable it's one I found has such lasting power as well as I interview architects. So many times, I'll ask them, what's your favorite brick building in the city? And I'd say 50% say the Monadnock Building. It's so honest with its material and so inventive at the same time. You know, one of the things as I've looked at it and photographed it, I've noticed is there's no hard lines on the building.

It's all using this molded brick made by the Chicago Anderson Brick Company. You get the sort of the plinth that rises up and then curves into the building and that it's not a sharp edge from a brick to another brick that's turning; there's a rounded brick to bridge that gap at every point. So the lines are kept incredibly smooth throughout the whole thing through this really intentional use.

00;06;40;17 - 00;06;41;27

DP

Yeah. Now, how about the cornice?

00;06;42;03 - 00;07;31;18

WQ

Oh, tremendous. Every piece of that was intentionally planned that way. There's nothing was done on accident, and that's still true today. You know, one of the things I try to push back on a lot is, you know, in my work, I'm a lot of times focusing and studying and photographing historic buildings and they're amazing. But people sort of feel that permission to say, oh, well, we just don't make them like we used to.

And there's only crap being made today and it's just not true. There's a lot of really amazing buildings being built today. The way we make them is different. The style we make them is different, but that's because so much has changed in the materials we use, making things efficient, making labor safe. And there's a lot of really great design out there that if we just say we don't make them like we used to, we neglect the work that architects and designers are still doing today with the same intentionality they were doing in the 1890 and the man was built.

00;07;31;25 - 00;08;38;20

DP

Well, it's a great segway. So we're going to talk about a few pieces of architecture today, two Chicago pieces and one New York City and then maybe some other buildings. So let's dig in here and learn a little bit more about brick architecture. First, let's talk about the Chicago Park District HQ Building by John Ronan Architects in Chicago.

The Chicago Park District headquarters is a 78,000 square foot building comprised of headquarters office space for the Chicago Park District Staff and Field House on a 17 acre park. The headquarters building is a two story circle in plan, with two courtyards. The building has a unique facade with individually curved metal panels, curtain wall glazing and a light brown brick facade with brick patterning.

An interesting fact that Will points out about the building, and in regard to the brick masonry set, the bricks used are all Chicago common bricks which were made locally. So Will, let's start out with that. Tell us a little bit more about the bricks of this building.

00;08;38;23 - 00;12;56;07

WQ

Yeah, they're made of Chicago common bricks which are the bricks made locally in Chicago and most cities in the 1800s and for part of the 1900s were producing their own brick, both common brick and face brick, face brick being the nicer, more intentionally made brick used on the fronts of buildings and common brick, the cheaper stuff to go in the guts.

What made Chicago unique is that we only made common brick. Our clay, which we had in massive abundance thanks to this glacial lake that you cover all of this dry land in Chicago, Lake Michigan used to extend far over what's now dry land. The still waters of that lake allowed all this clay to settle, but all this other stuff settled in that clay as well.

The perfect mix for making bricks. But it made bricks that were, frankly to those architects of that era, very ugly. They weren't predictable in any way. The levels of mineral in them were really varied, but one batch might come out yellow, one brown, one pink, one red, all these chunks of limestone in them. But the clay was right there and it was super cheap to make.

And so we made a ton of that and threw it in our buildings. But then we would import other bricks, nicer bricks from Saint Louis or Milwaukee or Pennsylvania or Texas to put on the fronts of buildings. But Chicago kept making these common bricks, and we made a massive amount of them. In 1871, the year of the Great Fire of Chicago, Chicago produced about a hundred million of them a year.

And part of what makes the timing of the fire so good, a little ironically, is that the year of the Fire, 1871, the Chicago brick industry had really finished mechanizing pretty much by that year. And so when the city burned down, the city was in, the brick makers of Chicago were in a unique position to help rebuild the city out of brick.

So that fire code, a new fire code could be met in a way that other cities like Boston, Boston's burned down several times because they kept having to rebuild out of wood. Chicago had this local brick making machinery to make it possible to rebuild with brick. So the year the fire reproduced about 100 million of them a year.

Ten years later, Chicago was producing 200 million of these a year. And by 1916, Chicago was producing just shy of 1 billion common bricks a year. And that's the year Chicago actually surpassed the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, which provided all the common brick for New York City. By 1916, Chicago's producing more common bricks than the entire common brick area of New York City.

About 11% of all the brick made in the United States in 1916, face brick or common brick was Chicago, common brick and more by about 100 million than all the brick made in Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa and Indiana combined that year. So we made a ton of brick in these surface plants all over the city, and we kept it all local for the most part.

And so you go around Chicago into alleys and sides of buildings, and this is the brick that you see, this messy looking brick. And it was always covered up because it was considered too unpredictable, too ugly. But what happened was, starting in the 1960s, as we're entering this era of bright glazed bricks or these sort of sleek, smooth, sort of noisy and modern bricks, you get a generation of architects who start to be really drawn to the antique accidental look of these bricks, the variation on them.

This is the time as urban renewal was sort of ravaging Chicago, when all these buildings are being torn down all over the place and people start to save these common bricks and put them in new buildings because they can add the sense of antique ness and age to buildings in a way that a modern market and this new market of reclaimed brick is born.

And then by the 1982, when the last Chicago common brick manufacturer shuts down, there's suddenly this massive market for these reclaimed bricks. First for an antique look to a building in the seventies and eighties as people are really drawn to these earth tones, browns and rough sort of creamy whites of brick. But then today, especially, and in the case especially of this new Chicago Park district headquarters, these bricks, they've embodied carbon in them and so they get you a lot of lead points and they're much more eco friendly material to use.

And so you start to see a lot more use of this reclaimed material because of the way it ties in to a greater focus on ecological buildings. And it's perfect for this building. It's a gorgeous building sitting on this massive park and having this really earthy brick that's full of color variation, full of all these stones, full of all this stuff.

It makes it feel like it really is growing out of the park and a part of the park rather than a lot of park buildings that feel like they’re just placed down into the park.

00;12;56;09 - 00;13;07;03

DP

So I'm curious, just to back up, why did Chicago stop producing common brick? Was it because brick masonry was no longer load bearing? We were using steel and iron.

00;13;07;10 - 00;15;23;04

WQ

Yes. So Chicago and the country stopped using common brick, mostly after the Second World War when cavity wall construction became prominent. Concrete block is just a lot larger and a lot cheaper. In 1952, in Chicago, a 77 square foot wall of Chicago commons would cost about $120 to lay parts and labor. The same size wall out of concrete block was about $45.

And so this cost savings were huge. As labor then became more and more expensive and concrete became more and more affordable, people started moving away from the common brick. Then what happened is in 1970, Congress passes the Clean Air Act, forms the EPA and brick plants all over the country are putting tons of sulfur dioxide and ozone and smog into the air.

And for a lot of those companies, it was not too difficult to get into compliance. You know, you have a big beehive kill or tunnel kill, and you could put a scrubber on your vents and start to clean up your operation. These common brick manufacturers, by that point, there were just two left in the Chicago area. They were using what are called Pskov kilns, which basically you take a bunch of unfired bricks, make them into this massive pile with channels running through it.

You cover it in fired bricks and set it on fire from the inside. It's a super cheap way to make bricks that don't need to look nice but are effective. But the comparison I like to make is a traditional kiln works like an oven. You take your turkey, you put it in the oven, you close the door, you turn it on.

A Pskov kiln that the Chicago commons were made in. You take that same turkey, you put it on your countertop, you stick a gas jet in the butt you cover it in deli meat and light it on fire. It's a lot more messy. It does the same job, but it's a lot more messy and it's a lot harder to clean up.

And so the Chicago common plants looked at the economics. They were losing market share. They looked at the clay. They had left the Illinois brick company in Blue Island decided, we've only got about three years clay left or just shut down. And then they looked at the environmental impact. One of these companies in Muncie, Indiana, on days that they were burning there were certain intersections you just couldn't drive because they were so smog filled. To the credit of the American beer company who was in that last company, they spent tens and tens of thousands of dollars trying to find ways to come into compliance and to make it a cleaner operation and continue this business.

But it ultimately just wasn't economically viable.

00;15;23;10 - 00;15;34;11

DP

So back to the Chicago Park District headquarters building, did you ever read anything about why John Ronan Architects ultimately used common brick for the exterior of New York?

00;15;34;14 - 00;16;42;04

WQ

Yeah. A friend of mine supplied those reclaimed bricks for him. A big part of it was that environmental impact using that embodied carbon, using a local material, not needing to create any new emissions through the creation of material, and also the fact that it's a reclaimed material taken from demolished buildings nearby. It's taking that local material and using it for a local purpose, making it something more true to that place.

Then a different kind of imported brick. And John Ronan is an architect who really loves brick and has used brick in really creative ways. In Chicago, he did a high school at South Shore International Academy where he was very specific about these different colors or slightly different tones of brick, sort of a creamy white and a little bit more of a beige and figuring out exactly where he wanted these bands to go on the building.

He had a house on the north side that uses these super long format bricks in a really interesting way to enliven up this very geometric or rectilinear facade. So someone who's super intentional about brick and so the Park District headquarters is another example of him using brick in that really intentional way.

00;16;42;07 - 00;17;36;17

DP

Yeah, the building's really unique and it sounds like a very thoughtful office. So next, let's talk about McDonald's HQ in Chicago. The architect of record was Gensler. When I sat down to do a little bit of research online, I really couldn't find a whole lot of pictures which describe this building. There are many exterior pics that are kind of further away shots.

The interior photos that I did find on a variety of websites, really quite stunning with wood clad interior, gracious curves and a very contemporary feel. The exterior is also quite interesting. The building almost seems inverted with a steel and glass base and square glass curtain wall openings framed in brick above. So these brick frames are really actually quite beautiful.

And you sent me a couple of photos of these. Let's talk about those.

00;17;36;20 - 00;19;44;07

WQ

Yeah. So it's a big steel and glass building, but it does have these large brick frames that surround two stories of windows each. It's all precast thin brick made by a company in Germany. And to get to the importance of what that brick is on the building and why it's there, I think it's important to talk about the neighborhood it's in.

It's in an area called Fulton Market, part of the West Loop of Chicago, which a lot of people have probably heard of as sort of Chicago's new restaurant and tech hub. It was an area of meatpacking and warehouses and manufacturing for many, many years. In the last 15 years, it's become this massive area for some of the best restaurants in the city.

Google has a building there now, and so it's full of all these big brick buildings, these big old brick warehouses or storage buildings with large windows. And so I think it's so wonderful that this new steel and glass building made the intentional choice to embrace that brick material. But the other thing I love about it is that we talked about with Chicago common brick brick is no longer really being used as a structural material in the United States.

And so buildings like this that take that nature, that brick is no longer a structural material. They take it and use it instead as a purely decorative material. And I think they do such a wonderful job on this building because it's the thin brick that runs around these windows, sort of blue ish and golden and orange colors with a rolled edge and a little bit of sort of a knock or sort of bumps and stuff on the face of it.

It describes this herringbone and zigzag pattern through these spandrels and these mullions that run along the building in a way that serves no structural purpose at all. But it is beautiful to look at and tie in through the use of that brick. It ties it into the neighborhood. I think that's just such a wonderful thing to do at a time when a lot of new construction and here I've said earlier, there is a lot of great new construction, but there is a lot of construction that's using brick and really uninspired ways it's just slap at a bunch of structures up on a wall or between windows. And so to see a building like this, a really prominent building in a really prominent location, in a historic location, I love that they're using brick in such an interesting way.

00;19;44;09 - 00;20;03;15

DP

Yeah, I'd love to see the studies in the architect's office for all of these or for the variety of brick patterns where you get soldier coursing. You've got stacked herringbone, as you stated, you almost have something that looks close to a Greek key as well. It's really quite beautiful and the color is stunning in the sun.

00;20;03;22 - 00;20;29;01

WQ

It really is. I captured it in those photos I sent you. It faces the north side of the street. And so you get this beautiful raking light on it in the summer evenings and in the shadow, it's still got this sort of lovely warm orange to it. So it really is very present and there's so much going on.

It's the sort of thing where you look at it and you trace it along and you to start to, like you said, start to find all those little details, different details scattered throughout the brickwork.

00;20;29;08 - 00;20;54;03

DP

You know, it's really nice too. It's almost as though they're expressing the structural system on the exterior with these super tall piers which frame these windows. One starts to think, okay, well, maybe the structural steel system is hidden within that. I don't know whether or not that's actually the case, but it does remind one of an industrial building in Chicago 80 or 90 years ago, right?

00;20;54;09 - 00;21;49;09

WQ

Yeah. And those are the buildings that surround it there. And another little twist. I like that they idea is that those brick frames are not surrounding every single window or they don't run on every single story that you do get these big frames that surround two or three stories I can't quite remember. And so it still gives it this very light feeling, this very open feeling, while having that strong brick tie into the neighborhood.

And the Fulton Market area, I think is the place where some of the best brick architecture in Chicago is currently happening because it's a place where you have a lot of these historical buildings and you have a lot of people coming in there building offices, residences, restaurants, and they want to make it feel like it's part of that history.

And so they're using brick and then you have a lot of architects who are really pushing the limits on what they're able to decoratively do with the brick. And the McDonald's was a pretty fairly early example of that. But there are many more that have come in since they're in the area.

00;21;49;11 - 00;21;58;24

DP

That's an interesting point. So early McDonald's structures across the United States, do you know if they utilize brick pretty heavily?

00;21;58;26 - 00;23;58;26

WQ

You know, I've researched this. I have emailed with a fast food historian to find some answers. So, yeah, the early McDonald's drive ins were clad in ceramic tile, whites, bright whites, bright red, and then they made a very intentional choice. In 1975 or so, they did a big redesign sort of as the baby boomers who were driving there are now buying homes.

And what they did was they started putting these dark brown bricks. They redesigned their restaurants using this very dark, earthy brick and adding that classic McDonald's double mansard roof. And this is the era when like Wendy's ads for solariums, the restaurants become these very earthy buildings. The first one of those was in Matheson, Illinois, in the south suburbs.

And that was the time too where McDonald's actually built their first corporate headquarters in Oakbrook, Illinois, designed by Dirk Lohan. Mies van der Rohe's grandson, like those restaurants, is a building very much, it's covered in this wonderful sort of earthy iron, spotted brick and surrounded by a manmade lake and all these trees and very much engaging with nature at a time when they're trying to push away from that kind of bright colors, machine age, looking stuff into a more earthy thing.

And then you get into the 1990s and McDonald's does another major rebrand, adding these sort of pastel colors or a lot of painted white brick that I think a lot of people my generation are familiar with as well. And then now a lot of those McDonald's, they've torn them down. They've rebuilt them using smooth grays and blacks and whites.

And so McDonald's, you can really follow you know, one of my big passions is following how people have used brick throughout every decade of history that you can look at a building and based on the color, the texture, the use of the brick to tell when it was built and McDonald's in specific is a great way to do that.

You can look at the restaurants and see how they've changed the restaurants, and that gives you sort of a bellwether of how ideas about what purpose bricks should serve has changed. That's a very long answer to say, yes, McDonald's has used a lot of brick in their restaurants throughout the country.

00;23;58;29 - 00;24;08;04

DP

The building is really interesting because it's also kind of flipped, right? I mean, so the base should be masonry and the upper portion should all be glass and windows.

00;24;08;07 - 00;24;41;18

WQ

I hadn't really noticed that until you brought that up. It is pretty unusual in that way. It's about a two story big steel and glass expressed base story within the brick rising up above, and I don't know why that choice was made, but it is pretty striking and it creates maybe a much open feeling based story. And the base story, they have a restaurant where you can order, you know, all the traditional McDonald's things, but you can also they have a rotating list of items that you can get at McDonald's around the country. So you can get sometimes like a curry burger or something like that that they'd have in McDonald's, India, or I guess it wouldn’t be a burger, a curry chicken sandwich.

00;24;41;25 - 00;24;43;02

DP

The McRib, maybe.

00;24;43;02 - 00;24;46;12

WQ

Yeah, the McRib. All year long. Who knows? We can dream.

00;24;46;15 - 00;25;57;18

DP

Oh, you know, can dream. Oh, that's great. The final building that I'd love to talk about is the Grand Mulberry in New York City by Morris Adjmi Architects. I got to meet Morris Adjmi in the city. We talked a little bit about the Grand Mulberry that evening. The building is absolute stunning. It's incredibly creative. This is paraphrased from their website.

So traditionally, Italianate tenement buildings featured a tripartite white facade that consisted of a base, middle and top with different details and brickwork. The Grand Mulberry facade consists of banding at the building's base, pediment windows at the middle and arched windows and a cornice at the top with coin details defining the base. While the facade pattern is traditional, the application of the hand molded domed bricks is modern, the molded bricks representing an offset window pattern to the real ones.

The red orange color pays further homage to the red brick buildings found in the neighborhoods. So this building is really unique, not only because of its aesthetics, but because they used some custom brick.

00;25;57;20 - 00;28;13;22

WQ

Yeah, it's one of my favorite new brick buildings in the United States and one that I had on my radar for a long time. And I took a trip to New York this summer specifically to go photograph several buildings, and it was one of the first ones I hit because it's just such a striking building and I think a perfect use of brick as a modern material in a couple of ways.

One is that color, that beautiful reddish orange color, and talking about, you know, the history of what kind of bricks are people using in areas and those Italianate tenement buildings, that was an era where they were using this very smooth pressed red brick, and that was sort of the predominant material. So first, that color pays homage and two, like I mentioned before, embracing the brick as a decorative material in an age when it doesn't need to be structural anymore, it could have very easily just been a red brick punched opening building, but then using those specifically hand molded bricks to create that design on the building is such a simple, yet unbelievably inventive way to create design across the facade.

It reminds me a lot of one of my favorite buildings here in Chicago. There's a church, many Chicagoans, they know it. It's Saint Stanislaus Kostka. It's right next to the expressway. It's a big brick church right next to the expressway that you've probably driven by. It's built in 1881 for what came to be the largest Polish Catholic congregation in the country, maybe even the largest Catholic congregation in the country at the time.

It's a huge church made entirely of Chicago common brick. So using the cheapest brick they had available. But what the architect, Brooklyn based architect named [Patrick] Keeley, did, the front of the building, the main central window is very small and it's got wood tracery. But he took that common brick and by pushing it out and turning it created this much larger arc that surrounds it with smaller round sort of bull's eyes and these bands of densely and creates on the facade just through the movement of the brick, the illusion of a much grander central window, a much grander central design using that same material.

And I'm seeing the Grand Mulberry. That's what it immediately ties me back to, it's using that same material in just a slightly different way to create the appearance and the remembrance and the reminder of something different all through the use of the same material, but just in a slightly different way.

00;28;13;25 - 00;28;54;06

DP

Yeah, the building essentially has two facades, right? It has a facade that's made out of brick, and then it has a facade or a facade that's articulated in brick and then the real facade with glass and metal windows. It's a really creative piece of architecture. You know what I love? There are some really great shots of this building online from further away and up above, and the building matches all of the other architecture and yet is completely set apart.

It's like this little wonderfully articulated orange red cube which sets itself apart and yet kind of fits into everything around it. It's a really wonderful building.

00;28;54;09 - 00;30;25;04

WQ

It absolutely is. And the other thing I want to praise about it is the use of those hand molded bricks. They could have done any other sort of thing. They could have, you know, done a projecting header or something to create that design. But again, in this era when brick can be sort of freed as a purely design detail and it is a ceramic material that is made of earth sculpted by people and fired in fire.

We see more and more these days projects taking advantage of specifically that hand process. There's a couple projects here in Chicago, a couple of homes like in Lincoln Park that are using these sculpted hand sculpted bricks that brick companies have these artisans who will take that same material and apply this more sculptural treatment to it in all sorts of different ways, and bring the handmade process back into the fold.

You know, you don't have to get rid of your extruded modulus, but we now have the ability to use brick more decoratively. And let's bring a little bit of the handmade process back into it. And I think that's what is so great about this tool. Also, one of the thing is it could have been so easy for them to have those two facades line up the real and the false.

And it's just so spectacular to me that there is that offset, that offset to them also that the building has you know, it's this tripart, the tenements, but they're sort of the two pushed together and then there's it's almost as if another one kind of got built in later with a thick party wall. Again, it's not a perfect repetition of the same form over and over again.

It looks more realistic to how the city would have organically been built.

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

DP

Well, you talk just like an architect.

00;30;28;02 - 00;30;32;26

WQ

Listen, I'll take it. I'll take it. This is what you get if you don't have hobbies for many, many years.

00;30;32;29 - 00;30;40;02

DP

That's great. So I know you give tours. Do you do any teaching? Because you'd be an amazing teacher if you're not already.

00;30;40;08 - 00;33;10;13

WQ

I appreciate that. Yeah. So I don't do any teaching. I have taught photo classes and I have given a lot of talks with groups on the history of brick architecture, both for you know, architecture classes but also for things like various interest groups. But then I give these tours. I started about five years ago. A friend of mine who runs a great tour company here in Chicago called Chicago for Chicagoans basically slipped in my DMs and was like, You've got to do tours, you got to do it.

And I was like, okay, I guess I will. It's been perfect. I love doing it. It takes advantage of the teaching background I have. And like I said, I'm a guy who I like to see things and I like to tell people about them. I never want to and similar, you know, I do all this research for these two words using all these databases and newspaper archives and things.

And whenever anybody asks me how I do my research, I just can't wait to tell them I don't want to keep anything. I want you to be able to do all this research and dive into your own things as well. And the great thing about the tours is, you know, when I first started them four years ago, they were very solely brick focused.

You know, I'm teaching you about rowlock, soldier, shiner and all these things, but now as they've grown to eight different neighborhoods around the city and hopefully ten by next year, I treat brick as the beginning. If I can get you excited about a brick, I can get you to look closer at anything. You're going to look way too close to the brick, but you're also going to see the other ways in which the built environment or even the invisible environments change our city.

And Chicago's this amazing city because it has so much history and so many generations of history with 77 official neighborhoods. All of those are Brooklyn sub neighborhoods, and all of those have had several different generations of people and stories there. So every single place you go, you can find all this depth to dive into. If I can give one of my favorite examples that ties to brick when I tell people about Chicago common brick, you know, I talk about these clay pits that were all over the city.

There's a big one on the north side here. There's three small clay pits, these three small companies, and by 1900 they had formed into one large company, mining one big pit. By 1915, they moved out to Blue Island in the south suburbs. The city bought that pit from the city, filled it with garbage to get it back to ground level, paved it over.

And in 1929, they built Lane Tech High School on top of it, which is one of the largest high schools in the country and one of the most prestigious high schools in Chicago. It's this huge, beautiful gothic revival, high school built on this former clay pit that you wouldn't even know was there. And that's a wonderful example of all these things that are just hidden all over Chicago.

And you really don't have to look too hard to find them.

00;33;10;16 - 00;33;44;17

DP

Well, it's been a real pleasure to have you here today. You know, as much more than any architect or architectural historian about the subject of brick. And you're incredibly intelligent and articulate and what blows me away is that you do talk just like an architect. So it's been a real pleasure to have you here before you go, you're a guy with many varied interests.

Do you have any advice for someone who's passionate about so many things or maybe just about one thing and doesn't really know where to start?

00;33;44;23 - 00;34;22;16

WQ

I mean, I would say it can be hard. It can be difficult to start, but just the thing to do is start small and start somewhere. I'm someone who very much once I find something I want to know about, I can get way in my own way of like, Well, this can be too hard to learn everything, so it's not worth it.

You start somewhere. You know, for me, it was Wikipedia. It truly was just Wikipedia. And I started getting answers to questions. And then I start getting more questions. And that let me keep asking more questions and keep getting more answers and keep getting more questions and more answers. So I think it's just choose to start in a way that is simple and accessible to you and to dive down as deep as you can.

00;34;22;22 - 00;34;37;24

DP

Yeah, I think what's challenging for most people is they overthink it and wonder where everything's going. And it would seem to me that your experience has been so organic that it's worked out for you in many ways that you never really anticipated it.

00;34;37;26 - 00;35;09;21

WQ

Exactly. And something that is also really important to me is saying when I don't know the answer to something, you know, if someone asked me a question I don't know, just saying I don't know, because I think so often the instinct is to if you are want to be an expert in something, to try to pull things together, to create an answer to something you don't necessarily know.

But I think from my teaching days and working with kids and young people, it's so valuable not to do that, to be able to admit when you don't know the answer. And that often will lead people to their own curiosity and finding those answers for themselves. And then you can go off and do your research, too.

00;35;09;28 - 00;35;17;11

DP

Will, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Could you tell us about your websites and how people can find you?

00;35;17;17 - 00;35;53;22

WQ

Yeah. So my website is BrickofChicago.com. And that's where I have information about, you know, you can learn about brick bonds, you can learn about the history of Chicago common brick and my tours and I make a calendar as well and my website WillQuam.com, and that's for my architecture photography work.

I take pictures for architects and engineers and landscape architects and all sorts of people and organizations are around Chicago, so you can see my work there. And then I'm on Instagram, @bricksofchicago, posting different bricks from around Chicago, and then my travels every single day.

00;35;53;27 - 00;35;54;17

DP

Thanks, Will.

00;35;54;24 - 00;35;59;14

WQ

Thank you so much. It's been a delight.