TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;08

Doug Pat (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;10 - 00;00;22;07

John Hutch (JH)

One of the missions was to continue to keep the character of Broadway, of Fell's Point through those storefronts and set back the building's mass so that it was not present or felt when you're walking along the sidewalk.

 

00;00;22;14 - 00;02;25;12

DP

This is my guest, John Hutch. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from The Design Vault. We highlight John's Project Marketplace at Fell's Point. Marketplace Fell's Point is located in historic Fell's Point, Baltimore, Maryland. The new urban lifestyle apartments feature open rooms that maximize exterior daylight and the views. The bulk of the units in the marketplace project open onto private courtyard space, complete with firepits and water features.

 

Many of the units are rehabbed historic buildings from the late 1800s with large windows and special features. The apartment buildings have direct access to over 100 community retail and entertainment venues on Fell's Point waterfront. In addition to the private courtyards, the project also features a club room, lounge, fitness center and secure parking for the residents.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. John Hutch, one of the founding partners and a principal at JP2 Architects in Baltimore, Maryland. John has a Bachelor of Science degree in architecture from the University of Cincinnati. He plays an active role in the professional development and awareness of sustainable design within his firm. He brings 30 years of experience leading the design process of employing project management with an emphasis on project delivery.

 

He has a background in both public and private sector work, which provides diverse experience for all of the projects the office takes on. John has an international portfolio of mixed use projects which include corporate hospitality, retail, multifamily and entertainment facilities. So welcome, John. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about JP2 Architects, where you guys are located in Baltimore? What's the size of your firm? How long have you been around and what kind of work do you do?

 

00;02;25;14 - 00;03;00;16

JH

Great. Thanks, Doug. We are about a 20 person firm, and we're located in the Canton area of Baltimore, which is adjacent to Fell's Point, where this project is located. We founded JP2 Architects in 2006 and I have two other founding partners, Jamie Pett and Gordon Gaudet. The three of us have been working together for almost 30 years now.

 

When I moved here in 1995, I got to know the two of them and we've been friends and colleagues and now partners ever since.

 

00;03;00;18 - 00;03;02;12

DP

Wow, That's really cool. How did you meet?

 

00;03;02;13 - 00;03;19;23

JH

So we all met at the large international firm of our RTKL, and we were each in the commercial group. Although I tended to bounce around between groups, which gave me a diverse experience. But we were still young, rising up through the ranks and learning a lot.

 

00;03;20;00 - 00;03;23;19

DP

That's really interesting. Did you guys always know that you wanted to start a firm together?

 

00;03;23;21 - 00;03;54;10

JH

No. We each probably had different starting points. I'd say it was always my dream to start a firm and I can thank my parents for saying hold on, hold on, hold on, you need more experience. So when I moved here to Baltimore, met the two of them, I spent about ten or 12 years there prior to the three of us starting, and I couldn't ask for better partners.

 

We each fulfill a different niche and role in the firm and bring different experience and complement each other very, very well.

 

00;03;54;13 - 00;04;05;00

DP

That's wonderful for our listeners. Sean and I were talking before we got rolling here, and I used to work in Baltimore, Maryland for Zeiger Sneed. I guess I'm wondering if you ever ran into them.

 

00;04;05;06 - 00;04;11;06

JH

I haven't met them in person, but we still run into them every once in a while, competing on a project.

 

00;04;11;11 - 00;04;19;27

DP

I'm sure you do. I'm not sure how involved they both are in the firm at this point, but they certainly did something really wonderful in Baltimore.

 

00;04;19;29 - 00;04;37;14

JH

They have and they've won a lot of awards in the area. And why I plan to my roots here in Baltimore was because the design and architectural community is strong, thriving. It's a livable city. And I really love the passion that everybody brings to their projects and profession here.

 

00;04;37;17 - 00;04;45;04

DP

That's great to hear. So tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you been practicing and what's your role in the office as a partner?

 

00;04;45;06 - 00;05;38;09

JH

Sure. So I graduated from Cincinnati in ‘91. That was probably not the best time to be graduating and looking for a job, but I struggled through those first few years gaining experience. And so when we started JP2, as I mentioned, as I think it's always been my dream to start a job. So a lot of the business planning, the oversight of the firm in general, my background is probably more design delivery heavy.

 

But I think one of the beauties of the practice we've established is that we have an amazing group here that all overlaps and has a terrific sense of projects and project management and design from beginning to end. So I will take on some master planning and some design roles, but I can tell you that my partners can draw circles around me.

 

00;05;38;11 - 00;06;22;00

DP

We talk a lot about this with our guests, our university experience. So you go to college and you learn about design, you know, structures and HVAC equipment and all those kinds of things. But you never really think about everybody's going to be good at something different, right? Or they're going to be good at a few things and then somebody else is going to be.

 

And so you really need that if you're going to have a partner, if you're not going to run your own office, you're going to have partners. It's really important to overlap. It's important to complement one another and then allow those people to do a good job in the areas that they're good at. Right? It's not something that anybody ever discusses in college. You get out and it becomes reality where you got to run a business and make money.

 

00;06;22;02 - 00;06;50;20

JH

Exactly. It's amazing how many hats and projects I may touch in a day, but having a team around us and having colleagues that I work closely with allows that overlap. What it does is it extends those initial ideas of a project and allows the whole team to be on board throughout the process so they know the vision, they know what we're executing when you go from a design concept to actually detailing a project and how to deliver it.

 

00;06;50;26 - 00;06;58;09

DP

So true. Okay, so let's dig in here and talk about Marketplace at Fell's Point. So how did you guys get that project?

 

00;06;58;11 - 00;07;58;06

JH

It's a wonderful, wonderful history. And we actually made contact through an ex RTKL employee who was in the landscape department and he got out of the design profession and started purchasing and renovating a lot of row houses here and Fell’s Point and Canton area. And he and another developer, David Holmes, the person I was speaking about is Dan Winter, and the two of them started realizing that they had properties near each other.

 

So that became a genesis amongst the two of them. They were pursuing a strategy of basically a garage with office above it, and it was seven or eight stories tall and the community fought them all along the way. And Dan, knowing that we had just started our practice and respecting our design skills, said, Hey, can you guys give me some advice?

 

Take a look at this. What should we do here? That was how we landed the project.

 

00;07;58;06 - 00;08;00;07

DP

And essentially the function changed?

 

00;08;00;09 - 00;08;51;22

JH

There you go. So I'd say I'm probably a frustrated developer because I love to look at something and say what belongs, what fits, and also how do you make it financially viable? The project, as initially conceived, wasn't penciling out from a financial standpoint, and it was a lesson of less is more. Why fight what should be here, which is a dense, residential neighborhood of two and a half, three and a half story tall row houses.

 

There are lot lines throughout, so we being old school, put pencil to trace and started sketching some ideas and they started to look at it and lo and behold, they started to peak their interest. They started to put some performance together and look at it and said, You know what, this works. That was a big change.

 

00;08;51;25 - 00;08;55;09

DP

Yeah. So the architect sold the developer in a way.

 

00;08;55;10 - 00;08;59;07

JH

Exactly. We brought an idea.

 

00;08;59;10 - 00;09;06;17

DP

Yeah, you brought in a great idea. So give us a little history of the location because you guys use some of the existing buildings, correct?

 

00;09;06;19 - 00;09;59;11

JH

That is correct. The site is fantastic. As you know, Fell’s Point is rooted in history going all the way back to the late 1700s and early 1800s. It's a waterfront community here on the harbor in Baltimore. And is known for shipbuilding sales, it's a port. So the establishments, bars, restaurants, all of that catered to folks who were in that industry.

 

Fell’s Point at the time, which would have been 2008, was what you probably hear about Baltimore, boarded up windows and storefronts. And a lot of these properties were not worth much. And so as Dave Holmes and Dan Winter were purchasing these, they had to have some kind of hope and vision that they could transform them.

 

00;09;59;13 - 00;10;05;18

DP

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

 

00;10;05;20 - 00;11;05;28

JH

Sure. The scope of the project, the buildings have historic storefronts, even though many of them, think about it is the 1800s, they were not historic, they were new. And so over time, they go through a transformation that was anything but historically sensitive. So one of the missions was to continue to keep the character of Broadway, of Fell's Point through those storefronts and set back the buildings mass so that it was not present or felt when you're walking along the sidewalk.

 

I'm starting from a massing standpoint to tell you about the program because the storefronts then would still be, and there's about 28,000 square feet of retail and and entertainment. And then there are in total, there are two blocks. There's one on the east side and one on the west side of Broadway. And they total 160 apartment units.

 

00;11;06;00 - 00;11;16;17

DP

I'm trying to picture what this looks like because we got some existing buildings down here and we do have some new architecture as well in plan form. What am I looking at?

 

00;11;16;20 - 00;11;59;23

JH

You're looking at like an amoeba. Unfortunately, apartment units don't like that shape, but the West block touches all four streets around it, so it almost has tentacles and reaches out. So along this storefront were basically 2 to 3 stories and we were able to do that and then set back. But the setback piece is more of a U-shape so that you didn't again have a mass of a building just lurking behind these.

 

You only had the ends of the U-shape. A lot of the use of brick and color and materials in that area was so that they felt like they fit in.

 

00;11;59;25 - 00;12;03;02

DP

So the retail space, is that all new architecture?

 

00;12;03;04 - 00;12;52;10

JH

It is. So the whole block has new storefronts, but they're restored. So they're restored to the historic significance. We went through many photos and did a lot of research. The Historical Society was incredibly helpful in that front. The depth of this storefront or what was behind those is new. When you go out into, say, the suburbs, you're used to a concrete podium with, say, four levels of stick frame construction above it.

 

That is essentially what we did in this project. We have a concrete podium that separates the retail use from the residential use above that's needed by code, but also makes laying out the apartments above much more easily.

 

00;12;52;12 - 00;13;03;09

DP

So let's talk a little bit about stylistic choice for the new architecture and then what you guys ultimately did to restore to the exteriors of some of these existing buildings.

 

00;13;03;12 - 00;14;21;23

JH

Terrific. Yeah, we had a good dialog with the Historic Preservation group here. One of the concerns is always when you create new are you competing or you're trying to match the historic facades. And we literally had on the west block two missing teeth that were non contributing and it was obvious they were not contributing to the historic fabric of the community.

 

So our challenge was how to blend in. And this is where Glen-Gery was incredibly helpful with the brick choices, the brick style and how we detailed it. So we went with a more simplistic detailing of soldiers and roll locks than a brick facade on both of the missing infill pieces. So you had a character that was still there but not trying to replicate, and that's how we worked on the Broadway facades. Around the perimeter, if you want to look, there are two alleys on either end of the buildings. Those are brick buildings. They fit in, but took the same approach where we use bricks so that it became part of the urban fabric without trying to mimic the historic aspects of the existing.

 

00;14;21;26 - 00;14;28;02

DP

Did Glen-Gery have bricks that matched the original bricks from that long ago? From the 1800s?

 

00;14;28;05 - 00;14;55;02

JH

No. But we had some that fit really well. There were molded bricks. We use the Catawba, which is a Cushwa line on the Broadway faces. In the back, we used 56-DD brick, which is more of a monolithic brick. So that one, it's still molded, but it was more uniform. So you did have a little bit more of a contemporary feel or use to the brick than you do on the historic facades.

 

00;14;55;05 - 00;15;10;13

DP

Interesting. So back to the planning process for a second. So you guys, you sit down, you do some sketches, you got some ideas, you talk with the developers, and then when did it turn into a project and how long did it take from beginning to end?

 

00;15;10;20 - 00;17;56;28

JH

How long do you have? I think the process started in early 2008. We started our firm in 2006, so this was a significant project for us. We worked very close with Dan Winter and Dave Holmes through this process. They had been working with the neighborhood groups, listening then what they want. So we took these bum wad sketches and floor plans and stuff like that, and then it started to become real.

 

And then we could start to put together some imagery of the facades. We could start to look at how we were affecting adjacent neighbors and start showing them a reduced massing than what was proposed before we started this project. And that started to win over some converts. And so that process and going through, which you may have heard in this area called CHAP, which is the Commission for Historic and Architectural Preservation, was that historic piece probably took a year.

 

So we were still in a design process for a good year after we started and then I'd say about another nine months to a year after that, we got into construction documents again, history, right? So now we're into 2009 and we all know what happened in that era with the real estate market. So we had finished construction documents as a recession, The Great Recession was happening and the thought process was, let's file for permit. So again, I'm glad you're sitting because it is a long story. I'll try to keep it somewhat short and there are details to fill in that are fascinating. We did file in 2009. It sat for years for a number of reasons. For one, they couldn't get financing.

 

You can imagine paying 2006, 2007 prices and then suddenly the bank takes a look at your property and says it's worth a 10th of that so you don't have equity in the project anymore. And so they were running up against hurdles for this. So the project sat and they were then looking for partners that could help with the project.

 

So enter Klein Enterprises and Dolben is out of Boston, Massachusetts, and Kline is a local developer here. So they came in and basically took over the project with a little bit of revisioning. So it was probably two years after that. And the construction wound up, I think it was 2012, 2013 when we finally had substantial completion.

 

So you're looking at four or five years.

 

00;17;57;00 - 00;18;05;18

DP

Yeah, that's a long time to hang with the project, especially when you're done with the drawings and then everything just sits here like, what am I going to do now?

 

00;18;05;19 - 00;18;44;19

JH

Right, right. It was interesting. I learned a lot about developers along the way as we took the plans, took the idea to a number of other developers to partner with. Some of them didn't want anything to do with the retail piece. They love the residential, but they don't do retail. And I think that's where this partnership and where it landed was a great fit.

 

Dolben has tens of thousands of apartment units. Klein, there's a lot of mixed use, and so they were not afraid and they know the neighborhood and started to have a vision for what they could create in terms of an atmosphere and a buzz in that part of Fell's Point.

 

00;18;44;22 - 00;18;57;22

DP

So back to construction. So you're under construction. Any unique construction details that you guys came across using brick or anything else, especially with all these existing buildings out there, right?

 

00;18;57;25 - 00;20;23;26

JH

It was probably one of the most challenging projects you’re going to look at. I'm sure you've talked to a number of architects that when you do an urban infill, it's a challenge. We touch over a dozen property lines on the west block and over a dozen on the east block. Each one of those neighbors needed to be notified.

 

You had to figure out how you're going to close the gap on those property lines, how you're going to flash onto other people's party walls. Essentially, as boring as the back of the place was. We had wall sections at every property line because each one was a unique condition on the west block, where we have almost 100 apartment units, we also have an underground parking garage.

 

So we have about 60 parking spaces underground and all the initial readings or that we have a water table. So here you're creating a bathtub, you've got a water table. And I think it was Hurricane Sandy that had a storm surge that pushed water up to that block as well. So now you're thinking, okay, how do I prevent water from above and below from filling this garage?

 

And so we had to create under-floor and remediation for the ground water as it swells and being able to pump it, that water table rises and lowers. So when it rises, you're pumping 24/7.

 

00;20;23;28 - 00;20;31;06

DP

So how did you guys resolve this? You're still pumping water out of there. When the groundwater rises up and it's like a bathtub that you built.

 

00;20;31;11 - 00;20;33;07

JH

Exactly. You are.

 

00;20;33;09 - 00;20;35;17

DP

Unbelievable. That's expensive.

 

00;20;35;19 - 00;21;07;07

JH

It's expensive. And again, you can imagine, I mean, now we're 12 feet below all the properties around us as well. So there was an incredible amount of documentation of the properties adjacent to this project. To be sure these 1800 structures don't settle, don't crack, and then making deals with each one of them that if that happens, we'll repair it.

 

So there was an incredible amount of liability on the contractor owner and architects and engineers as well.

 

00;21;07;09 - 00;21;30;06

DP

Wow. You guys have a real constitution. I don't think I could handle that. Just way too much responsibility. You know, interestingly, I did some work with Habitat for Humanity when we lived in Baltimore. And I remember these brick buildings, these row homes, they were crumbling. When the brick is that old, did you guys run into issues like that?

 

00;21;30;09 - 00;22;27;06

JH

We did. The interesting part of this was finding a right contractor that could deal with this. You weren't looking at a suburban stick frame guy. They'd look at it and were scared. So we needed somebody that had some chops. We ended up with Lendlease and they did a terrific job supporting the historic facades during this time. And so we had every ten feet, a steel column going up the front of the facade and then being supported laterally with other beams and huge cement blocks to keep them from falling as things were excavated behind it.

 

So it was painstakingly slow at that point. But then also the timing had to be right in order to get the concrete slab there to then reinforce and support those walls and to tie them back in to the concrete slab so that they wouldn't, you know, fall out or fall in.

 

00;22;27;08 - 00;22;52;19

DP

It takes a special kind of person and firm to do this kind of work, to be involved in that stuff. Architects do all different kinds of jobs, right? And this is one of them working with historic architecture. So what about drawings? What kind of drawings did you guys put together for the architecture? Was it 2D, 3D, lots of details? And then of course, you had to hire engineers and do drawings for the existing condition work.

 

00;22;52;25 - 00;24;05;19

JH

That's correct. And early on there's a bit of surveying that you do. I would say that it was also incredible working with a civil engineer, because if you think each one of these properties also has utilities coming in and out of it, making sure that we're staying away from all of these. So the underground piece of this became incredibly complicated. The three dimensional aspects, my partners and I are not old, but, you know, we still do a lot by hand. So a lot of the three dimensional stuff in order to get information out there quickly was by hand a lot of two dimensional facades around the project to see how it would relate to the adjacent properties. A lot of wall sections. This would have been wonderful if we had the technology today and, you know, have a drone or something scan the existing conditions in three dimensions. There was a lot of back and forth. Fortunately, it's only a half a mile from our office, so it could be down there in a heartbeat as soon as they discovered things during construction. And that was a vital way of solving some of the problems that came up because so many of them you can't anticipate.

 

You can only suggest a solution until things get uncovered.

 

00;24;05;21 - 00;24;14;11

DP

Yeah. Instead of getting in your car and driving a half hour, you walk right out onto the street and walk down the street and you can take a look at whatever challenge you face that day.

 

00;24;14;14 - 00;24;15;08

JH

That's correct.

 

00;24;15;15 - 00;24;23;27

DP

So did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process? That's a loaded question.

 

00;24;24;00 - 00;26;07;16

JH

It is. And I'd say, you know, even just this discussion, you can see I mean, all of these things are something new. And I think that's the beauty of the profession. As you mentioned, you work on so many different types of projects. And what I love about how we work as a firm that we don't have these vertical silos, we work across different typologies and bring that knowledge base to each project, which lends itself to something like this where you have mixed uses.

 

So the retail spaces on the ground floor needed to have If I'm going to put a kitchen in there for a restaurant, I need exhaust. That's got to go up through a couple stories of apartment buildings. So that kind of coordination, anticipating the needs of each component so that each of them stood alone and was able to be successful on their own rather than handicapping one.

 

One of the things we were not able to do is create what would be normal for a retailer today in terms of ceiling heights. We had to hit the second floor windows of the facades. So sometimes that meant that a retailer could only have maybe a nine or ten foot ceiling in there in order to get all the ductwork and lighting and everything else below the concrete slab.

 

I'd say what we really learned was from a design perspective, how to work with the community. I think that was the big success here, that we were able to revitalize an area of Fell's Point, bring life to it, bring housing for people, for more activity, and to do that successfully where the community was extremely happy with the end result.

 

00;26;07;18 - 00;26;24;04

DP

So I'm curious, some of these brick buildings, the existing brick buildings, how did you guys handle the new interior wall systems insulation and how did that work and did that decrease then the interior space? Because some of these buildings are probably pretty narrow.

 

00;26;24;09 - 00;27;18;17

JH

That's correct. Working with a different module that you're basically given was different and you ended up with almost a wall within a wall in order to get the proper insulation and which made for some unique conditions out the windows where you notice how, you know, like suddenly you've got a big inset that's about a foot and a half to the window.

 

There were some cases where we had to bump up the ceiling or bump down the floor a little bit where some of these windows were as as much as we tried. There were some things we just couldn't change. So this section is what was fascinating on these projects in that front facade along Broadway, we had to ramp down a couple of feet in order to get to the level that was needed for those apartments.

 

So it was both in section and then also horizontally in terms of laying out apartments that utilize the existing facades.

 

00;27;18;19 - 00;27;30;22

DP

Yeah, a lot of site specific challenging conditions. I can see why being out there, being in person was really important because every building's going to be just a little bit different.

 

00;27;30;29 - 00;27;31;28

JH

That's correct.

 

00;27;32;00 - 00;27;46;16

DP

Before you go, John, you've been an architect for some time. Based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for either your younger self or maybe young architects coming up in the profession?

 

00;27;46;18 - 000;29;02;11

JH

I'd like to just call it dumb luck, but I was really, really fortunate to land in a dream job in the late eighties, and it set me on a course for a career that was, this has been phenomenal and a journey. Going to the University of Cincinnati, having a co-op program was fascinating. Your third year, you're going to work for a firm for three months and nobody wanted to work in New York City.

 

And so I said, I'll go. And that firm happened to be KPF. So I cut my teeth in college with six months working at Kohn Pedersen Fox working on international high rise structures. That set me on a course that took me from there to Disney Development to the West Coast, then back to Ohio before I even graduated college. So I tell that story because that's my advice to folks.

 

Go for it. Don't be shy. Try to find a path that speaks to your heart. And you know, it's one of the beautiful things about the United States is you can travel, you can go to another location where the jobs are, where you want to be, where you fit.

 

00;29;02;18 - 00;29;07;04

DP

Well, that's a really interesting point. I think we forget that. I certainly do.

 

00;29;07;06 - 00;29;11;03

JH

Got a little international connection that reminds me of it quite a bit.

 

00;29;11;05 - 00;29;18;18

DP

So, John, it's been great to have you here today. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about JP2 Architects and yourself?

 

00;29;18;21 - 00;29;37;17

JH

Well, we are active on social media, so your normal spots of LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Our website is JP2architects.com. And as with a lot of folks, we're looking for people to grow with us. It's an exciting time right now.

 

00;29;37;20 - 00;29;41;11

DP

That's a great little plug. Awesome, man. Well, it's been great to meet you, John.

 

00;29;41;17 - 00;29;51;29

JH

I'll do one more plug. Part of this project is an isolated corner of the 600 block of Broadway, and that is where Brickworks is located.

 

00;29;52;00 - 00;29;53;04

DP

Get out of town.

 

00;29;53;07 - 00;30;27;18

JH

So that is one of the main reasons we wanted to use this project, not only because of the incredible history and everything else associated with it. We thought for sure that corner was made for a Starbucks, a first floor and a second floor seating. But that is not going to happen in Fell's Point. Fell's Point is about local businesses, local restaurants and Brickworks Studio there is phenomenal. I love it. It is such a great fit and we love having them a resource that's just down the street.

 

00;30;27;25 - 00;30;52;07

DP

Yeah, it's kind of perfect.

TRANSCRIPT 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

DP

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

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

Is it typical to have an architect in that neighborhood?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

Yeah. So, they live there now.

 

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

DP

Oh, that's so cool.

 

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

MN

Yeah, they live there now.

 

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

DP

Unbelievable.

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

So, you get along with your mom and dad?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Do you have brothers and sisters?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Was it hard to find a mason?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

It is! It's crazy!

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Where did you find that?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

So how did you pull that off?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

So they're tied back into the walls.

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

Just a butt joint across.

 

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

DP

No frames.

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Yeah.

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Do your folks hear anything?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

A number of different software.

 

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

DP

Like Revit, ArchiCAD?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

Revit was the main software?

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

But I’m not an expert at any of them.

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

 

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

DP

You're still talking?

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

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

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

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

 

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

DP

Yeah, particularly important with your parents.

 

MN

Yeah, indeed, indeed.

 

DP

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

 

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

MN

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

 

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

DP

And tell everybody how they can find you.

 

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

MN

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

MN

Yeah, thanks, Doug.

TRANSCRIPT

 

 

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;13

Doug Pat (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;16 - 00;00;20;14

Shane Neufeld (SN)

I think what was special about this project was that the clients were able to generate a lot of input that forced me out of my comfort zone, think about things in new ways, and take some of the systems and strategies I had in place, but to create something completely different than had been done before.

 

00;00;20;20 - 00;02;47;11

DP

This is my guest, Shane Neufeld. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight Shane's project in Brooklyn, New York, called The Z House. The Z house, named for the shape of its stair is a renovation, providing a unique model for the urban domestic experience. At the Project Center is a new switchback stair that integrates the house vertically and horizontally, carving out the existing structure in order to shape dynamic sightlines that connect inhabitants in new ways.

 

The stairs drama is heightened by the placement of large windows punctuating the rear facade. These allow the vertical space to open to the exterior directing views from the stair through the house and to the yard beyond. Descending from the rear of the parlor floor is a smaller stair slotted between a steel guardrail and oak millwork. This connects the living room to the new horizontal additions below.

 

Here, the added square footage accommodates the kitchen and dining room in a single dramatic double height space that visually unites the rear yard and the parlor floor above. A green roof located above the garden level helps to buffer sightlines and cultivates a natural intimacy for the residents inside.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Shane Neufeld is an architect and artist born in Brooklyn, New York.

 

He received his B.A. in Fine Arts from Amherst College, where he studied painting and literature and his master's degree from the Yale School of Architecture. He is a registered architect and the founder of Light and Air Architecture and Design in Brooklyn. The firm's work has been widely published and completed projects include the Z House, Switchback House, Sterling Place, Skylight House and Nassau Street Loft.

 

After graduate school, Shane spent three years with Rogers Marvel Architects in New York, working on a variety of projects that focused on urban, residential, commercial as well as institutional architecture. Additionally, he was a project architect at Christopher Fernyhough Architecture. Shane is also served as a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's School of Architecture. So welcome, Shane.

 

Nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Light and Air Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. So obviously you're located in Brooklyn. What's the size of your firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;02;47;13 - 00;03;42;19

SN

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Our office is 2 to 3 people. It varies from project to project. We do mainly residential work in Brooklyn, although we have done apartments as well in the city. We're trying to get beyond residential for institutional projects, so we're very open minded about the kind of work we want to do.

 

But we see a lot of potential spatially, in particular with residential work and in townhouses here in New York. For us, the townhouse is rich with opportunities to explore, and in a city that tends to maximize every square foot, we kind of take a more artful approach where we want places that people want to spend time in rather than maximize.

 

And so we pursue clients and tell clients this off the bat so they know what they're getting into. And it's a different type of work in our mind than what new people normally see and people are used to.

 

00;03;42;21 - 00;03;44;11

DP

So how long has a firm been around?

 

00;03;44;17 - 00;03;55;15

SN

We were founded in 2017. I founded the office on my own house, the Switchback House, which was a derelict brownstone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and I used that as a starting point.

 

00;03;55;20 - 00;03;59;01

DP

So that's your home? Yes. Oh, that's so great. It's beautiful.

 

00;03;59;05 - 00;03;59;19

SN

Thanks.

 

00;03;59;25 - 00;04;01;28

DP

It must have been a great project for you.

 

00;04;02;04 - 00;04;28;12

SN

It was intense. I was working still at an office, so I was drawing the plans at night and eventually left my job to work on it full time during construction. It was an incredible learning experience. I hadn't really worked with Townhouse in New York before. I'd work on the Louisville Museum of Arts and Craft, which was a masonry building that would use steel. So I was familiar with the kind of means and methods are getting into, but not in Brooklyn itself.

 

00;04;28;14 - 00;04;32;13

DP

So you have a family and you all lived through construction.

 

00;04;32;16 - 00;04;45;05

SN

I actually had a loft in Bed-Stuy, what I call Home Depot Heights, which wasn't so nice at the time. It's loud, but we lived there at the time. My son wasn't born yet, so it worked for us.

 

00;04;45;07 - 00;04;54;03

DP

So tell us a little bit about the history of the location, the building. How long has it been there? Was it always three stories?

 

00;04;54;06 - 00;05;33;01

SN

Yeah. So with the Switchback House, my work got out there pretty fast and a young couple came up to me interested in exploring ideas of a new house for themselves that wasn't traditional, that had aspects and qualities that they saw in the Switchback House. And so they had purchased a derelict brownstone in Clinton Hill. It was two stories and a basement, so I guess that's three.

 

But it can be confusing, but parlor with one above. Basically it had a kind of 1960s faux concrete facade at the time. It was split up into multiple units. They had a big vision for transforming this house entirely from the get-go.

 

00;05;33;03 - 00;05;39;14

DP

So let's back up a little bit. So you explained how your office got the project. Did you know the clients?

 

00;05;39;16 - 00;06;31;22

SN

I did not. And so that's something that I've tried to be, you know, getting clients in architecture is very, very difficult. It's very much word of mouth. Obviously, people are spending lots of money. They want to work with someone they're comfortable with, someone they know will provide a product that they're happy with and that works. But it's a catch 22 at the very beginning.

 

Those connections don't exist. And so what I've really tried to do, and I think this originates from my background as a painter, is that I try to make work that's evocative and I want people to see the images. I want them to say, Hey, that's what I like, that's what I want, and kind of bypass a lot of the other stuff.

 

That's the hope at least. And so I think thus far I've been able to do that. And so they saw my projects online and had that reaction. And through a series of interviews and get togethers and walkthroughs, eventually they felt comfortable with me through other recommendations, obviously, as well.

 

00;06;31;26 - 00;06;36;06

DP

So what was the scope of the project? What were the clients’ programmatic requirements?

 

00;06;36;09 - 00;07;54;17

SN

That's pretty interesting as well. So I mean, there was this idea early on that we sketched of a kind of grand public floor on the stoop level. Basically, they knew they wanted to add to the building horizontally. We weren't yet sure about vertically, but the original building, it was wider than most townhouses, 22 and a half feet, but it was only 32 feet deep.

 

So the addition was necessary in order to function, basically. Then the idea of the living space on the parlor floor and with bedrooms above and originally, as I've done in other projects, I thought of the adult level on the second floor with the kids above. They pushed me to invert this, which created a very interesting programmatic and spatial result.

 

Basically with the vertical addition on the rear, you end up having a terrace on the top floor off the master bedroom. I think what was special about this project was that the clients were able to generate a lot of input that forced me out of my comfort zone, think about things in new ways and take some of the systems and strategies I had in place, but to create something completely different than had been done before.

 

So in that respect, when I first started this project, I thought about it as, you know, Switchback House 2.0. I like this idea of the Switchback as a typology that offers a multitude of spatial outcomes depending on the family's needs.

 

00;07;54;19 - 00;08;04;07

DP

So it can't be easy getting a new addition done in Brooklyn, right? I mean, what do you go through in terms of project restrictions, zoning codes, etc.?

 

00;08;04;10 - 00;08;27;29

SN

That's a very good question. I mean, luckily this building wasn't landmarked, so we didn't have to go through landmarks review. We were given kind of free range to do what we wanted. But a horizontal and vertical submission is significant. It requires an old one change of use. We went from a two family or three family to a single family.

 

It was significant time for approvals. We did not do SOE. We we didn't dig out the cellar in the rear.

 

00;08;28;02 - 00;08;30;18

DP

So the building plan, straight rectangle?

 

00;08;30;20 - 00;08;47;05

SN

It's actually staggered slightly in plan and the addition and that has to do with the lot line itself. So you can see that in the kitchen, the area where the sink and window are that that actually pushes out slightly beyond where the sliding doors are that defined the end of the dining room space.

 

00;08;47;11 - 00;08;48;12

DP

Do they have a backyard?

 

00;08;48;13 - 00;08;49;15

SN

They do.

 

00;08;50;39 - 00;08;52;12

DP

So they were encroaching on it when you put the addition on?

 

00;08;53;29 - 00;08;54;03

SN

Slightly but 30 feet to the rear is the code.

 

00;08;54;09 - 00;08;56;11

DP

So they still have a backyard. They've got room.

 

00;08;56;18 - 00;08;57;25

SN

Oh, yes, significant room.

 

00;08;58;02 - 00;09;04;27

DP

So how long did the planning process take? City Review design to construction? Like start to finish? How long were you on the job?

 

00;09;05;03 - 00;09;17;15

SN

Well, I started the project. I started designing think it was the end of 2018. It took about a year to get started and the project itself took another two years to finish. Year and a half. Two years.

 

00;09;17;15 - 00;09;18;07

DP

And pandemic.

 

00;09;18;11 - 00;09;34;10

SN

Yes, through that as well, through price increases on plywood and windows that took over a year to arrive, miserable at times. But a truly wonderful client who trusted us trusted the process, communicated well, and we really got through it together.

 

00;09;34;15 - 00;09;41;02

DP

Yeah, a common story for we architects. I mean, everything took longer, cost more. It was insanity.

 

00;09;41;09 - 00;10;38;09

SN

Yeah. I mean, I think what's really interesting for me about this project was that this addition that we had, we wanted it to feel completely different than the front of the building. We actually restored the front of the building to its original state, which was a cementitious or brownstone facade. Despite adding a floor, we made it look, appear as if that's the way it had always been.

 

So we were playing up this Jekyll and Hyde inside, outside contrasting relationship. And so the rear is this monolithic kind of earthy force in a way that appears entirely different from the front of the house. And there was a real desire with the large windows to bring light and air into the space, to feel continuous ness of the space between the inside of the building and the rear.

 

And I think that's really where the search also for the right brick came into play because we knew that whatever we did, which we wanted to be masonry on the rear also had to be that same masonry on the inside of the addition as well.

 

00;10;38;17 - 00;10;52;02

DP

So tell us a little bit about style choice. So the owners, did they just say right away, hey, we want to do something contemporary? They're looking at your project, the Switchback House, and they're thinking, this is what we want to do. That's why we came to you.

 

00;10;52;04 - 00;11;14;22

SN

To be honest, I always tried to actually sidestep away from conversations about style, but there was an idea from the get-go that they had seen our work. They wanted something in that vein. There was no conversations about whether something should be stylistically historical or modern or contemporary. There was just questions about where things should be, how they should function, and what material should be the outcome.

 

00;11;14;29 - 00;11;20;07

DP

Did the city dictate that the third story on that front elevation had to be a traditional aesthetic?

 

00;11;20;09 - 00;11;22;25

SN

Absolutely not. That that was a client driven.

 

00;11;22;25 - 00;11;23;16

DP

Client driven.

 

00;11;23;19 - 00;12;04;00

SN

Yes. And you know what? At first I thought, you know what? If the vertical edition was something modern, stepped back and those were ideas that I was really interested in to play as a counterpoint to the historical facade. But the client and I think to their credit, in the end, this idea of really disguising the kind of dynamism that was going on inside that the front played a more subtle, subdued role.

 

I really like that. In the end, the front door is a reference to their heritage. Actually, it's a mahogany lattice that references Geoffrey Bauer's work and some of the screens that he developed in his work. So there's suggestions of a kind of different world within, but it's very subtle.

 

00;12;04;02 - 00;12;10;15

DP

So tell us a little bit about the building restrictions. Was there an FAR? Zoning codes?

 

00;12;10;17 - 00;12;28;14

SN

Yeah, sure. So it's a 20 to by, I think a little under a hundred foot deep lot. So obviously you have to do your calculations. But no, we are not maximizing FAR, we're close, but not maximizing the envelope is, I believe, 50 feet on the street side. But we're not engaging any of those limits.

 

00;12;28;20 - 00;12;31;12

DP

You guys used masonry on the interior as well.

 

00;12;31;16 - 00;12;34;11

SN

We did. And those are full masonry bricks on the inside.

 

00;12;34;18 - 00;12;35;17

DP

So it's load bearing.

 

00;12;35;24 - 00;13;13;10

SN

Well, we're not using the bricks for load bearing purposes. It is a CMU all in the addition, but the bricks take up the three and five eighths inch width, which is I think really interesting. I think this is again speaks to the kind of work that we do is that we looked at tile products. I think Glen-Gery very makes tile products too of some of those bricks but we wanted it to turn corners.

 

We wanted it to move, we wanted it to appear fully authentic. And in the end, I think once we had reflected on all the products available, that using the same brick, the same finish was the right move. And with the 22 and a half foot wide lot, it really afforded us that opportunity.

 

00;13;13;12 - 00;13;18;29

DP

So tell us about some of the unique construction details that you guys ended up using on the project.

 

00;13;19;01 - 00;14;20;08

SN

This whole project, this whole house was bespoke. I mean, it kind of drove us mad how difficult it was. We were there almost every other day figuring things out. You know, my office is near Clinton Hill, so it's a five minute bike ride. And there were lots of things to consider constantly as the construction progress went on. But I think that one quality that we like to achieve in all of our projects is this notion of materials and volumes, kissing or abutting in very sensitive ways.

 

So knowing that if you want two finish materials to have a tolerance of, let's say an eighth of an inch or a 16th of an inch next to each other, one has to constantly move back from those materials and think about what's on the inside. So we worked with Henrybuilt on this kitchen. Henrybuilt produces very beautiful high end kitchens.

 

But I the architect am the verifying field for that if you can believe it we actually designed and dimension this kitchen before the masonry was built so the masonry that you see in the kitchen was actually designed to the specs of the kitchen.

 

00;14;20;13 - 00;14;22;16

DP

Wow, that is backwards.

 

00;14;22;21 - 00;14;38;26

SN

But I had to know where everything was. So we have the CMU in place. I had to understand the depth of all the materials where they would end up. And using that information we decided what the kitchen was, where it would be. And then I'm on the field supervising, making sure that the masonry is indeed where I think it will be.

 

00;14;39;03 - 00;14;50;06

DP

Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. It's pretty rare to see masonry on the interior of a building. You just referenced, there were other materials you guys talked about using for both the interior and maybe even the rear facade.

 

00;14;50;08 - 00;16;19;11

SN

The client, they had this dream of a masonry rear facade. I did too. I mean, it's what made sense. I mean, masonry is a East Coast material. It is something we see a lot here. The beautiful old buildings, you know, of the Northeast are made of brick, many of them red brick. And so that was a theme that came up as well.

 

The client did have a bit of a dream of this red brick facade, but knowing that this brick would live on the inside as well, esthetically, I felt that a red brick spoke too much of exterior use and would be a kind of too much of a contrast to the type of mood and space we were trying to create on the inside.

 

A lighter brick reflects light. It bounces light around. It doesn't present itself as a color so much as an opportunity for variations in tone throughout a space. There's so much light in this house that we kind of, after some time and looking at many, many different products in many Glen-Gery products, we decided that a white light cream colored brick was the right choice.

 

And then it came to question, Well, how do we get a white brick that has the texture that works both on the outside and on the inside, and doesn't force someone to see that as an issue in one way or the other. And so we went with, in the end, white velour, which we felt was this perfect middle ground of cream colored was not too white, was not too beige, not too reflective, not too matte, and had a wonderful kind of authentic handed texture to it that I think really helped the house out a lot.

 

00;16;19;13 - 00;16;23;21

DP

And used a slightly darker mortar. Right? So we didn't know it's brick.

 

00;16;23;21 - 00;16;39;26

SN

Correct. We tested it out. So that was a sense of do we want the lines to go away? That's always a question you know, architects deal with. I think we found something that wasn't too much of a contrast, but very clearly spoke to the manual craft that goes into putting brick walls together.

 

00;16;39;29 - 00;16;41;29

DP

So you guys have a green roof on this?

 

00;16;42;04 - 00;16;42;23

SN

We do.

 

00;16;42;26 - 00;16;46;11

DP

So sustainability was something you guys talked about?

 

00;16;46;12 - 00;17;13;21

SN

For sure. We have solar panels on the roof and a green roof, 100 square feet of green roof is required now of new construction in New York on residential projects. If you don't have solar panels, we kind of decided to do both. The solar panels actually came a little later on in the project, but the green roof is integrated into the addition, so that actually when one descends down the stair from the second to the first floor, they look out of a window that views out upon the green roof.

 

00;17;13;24 - 00;17;30;24

SN

And that green roof also, the intention is over time it grows, it's exotic, it falls down the facade. And so the idea of the brick as a kind of monumental monolithic material that as a counterpoint to the organic quality of the roof itself, our hope is that they really begin to work together in a lovely way.

 

00;17;31;01 - 00;17;34;05

DP

How much energy can they generate with the solar panels?

 

00;17;34;08 - 00;17;40;23

SN

Probably anywhere between 40 to 50%. You know, I think obviously in the winter, not so much, but in the summer a lot.

 

00;17;40;26 - 00;17;49;03

DP

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Let's talk a little bit about the architectural process, 2D 3D. Do you work in both? What are the programs you're using?

 

00;17;49;08 - 00;19;06;00

SN

Yeah, well, I'm an artist in the truest sense of the word. You know, I'm a draftsman and I was a painter in college. I still paint, I think, with a pencil and paper. I think through watercolors and painting. And that's how ideas begin to formulate in my mind. And so everything begins in a kind of old school way for me, it's kind of funny.

 

I like digital tools, but I think that I'm most creative on working directly with my hands. So I also think that's very exciting for clients. People forget that you're sitting at a table with paper and you're with a client, and to be able to communicate ideas through drawing is a privilege and it's fun.

 

And so that's how I begin the process. And then very quickly, we're moving to we use Rhino for all of our 3D design and a lot of model making. So our office, we have a 3D printer, we've created a hybrid process where, you know, as you can see in the photograph, our models have 3D printed components, wood components that are done by hand, concrete.

 

In a funny way, the models are a kind of precursor to the actuality of the house itself in that image. That's a quarter inch model there. It's a significantly large model and I think we use that with clients. They enjoy it. The model really offers a quality of light and experience that the renderings don't.

 

00;19;06;02 - 00;19;08;06

DP

Yeah, I was going to say clients love models.

 

00;19;08;09 - 00;19;12;26

SN

Yeah, they do. We don't charge for them, but we should.

 

00;19;12;28 - 00;19;17;04

DP

So you said you had two other people in the office working with you on this project?

 

00;19;17;11 - 00;19;35;07

SN

On this project, it was just me and one employee. You know, we worked together. Hands and hands, both of us. All hands on deck, figuring this out. I did most of the CA, Construction Administration, on this project, and I'm very hands on on site as well, drawing, sketching with builders, working directly with the foremen. And, you know, those are all things I really enjoy.

 

00;19;35;10 - 00;19;39;08

DP

So you're out on site every two or three days, which is wonderful?

 

00;19;39;15 - 00;19;43;11

SN

Or terrible, depending how you think about it. But in this case it was wonderful.

 

00;19;43;11 - 00;20;01;24

DP

Of course, I was just wondering, you know, you spend so much time with the GC and the subs. There's something you learn like every day. I mean, I feel like I learn an awful lot. I'm 54. I've been an architect for close to 30 years, and I feel like I'm learning something new, whenever I'm in the field that happened with his job or any other jobs?

 

00;20;02;02 - 00;20;44;15

SN

Yeah, I mean, I really enjoy it because it's really humbling. I mean, I'm not the type of architect who thinks they know the right answer all the time. I really approach my projects from a kind of artful spatial perspective, and I rely on the different trades and the experts that I surround myself with to help me through the process to get the project realized.

 

And so that means I have a trusting relationship with GCs as best as I can, that, you know, we work together. I take their advice. You know, I follow their lead at times to help resolve certain things that I might not know how to do. That's not frustrating for me. That's the best. And I like architecture because of that. Every project offers me a chance to learn something new and I find that challenge exciting.

 

00;20;44;17 - 00;20;53;05

DP

It's a great attitude. It's a humble one, and it's one most architects should have, right? We go out there and we can learn an awful lot from the people that are doing their job.

 

00;20;53;12 - 00;21;17;29

SN

Yeah, I mean, at some point I want to be in a position to maybe have a bit more knowledge. But I also think you can't be too trusting. I mean, there are moments when things aren't done right or mistakes are made that will realize in making the project not what it should be. It's hard to speak up at those moments and take agency, But yeah, it's a fine line. But all in all, I approach it through teamwork and being humble and listening to those around me.

 

00;21;18;01 - 00;21;21;07

DP

Did you guys end up using the Mason that you found right away?

 

00;21;21;09 - 00;21;30;20

SN

This project is pretty amazing in that the crew that we worked with did everything so the Mason was not someone subbed out. It was a crew of guys that did everything on this project.

 

00;21;30;22 - 00;21;31;29

DP

That's pretty unusual.

 

00;21;32;04 - 00;21;34;12

SN

Yes, maybe not as much in Brooklyn, but yes.

 

00;21;34;17 - 00;22;02;27

DP

So Shane, you're a young architect with a presumably long runway in front of you. Do you have any advice to young architects out there that are looking for projects and they're wondering, like, how does this work? You had said early in our discussion that in the very beginning it's really hard to find work. I mean, you've got to kind of wait for somebody to find you.

 

And how do you get your work in a magazine and then somebody finds it and then, you know, you're recognizable. It's a long it takes a long time.

 

00;22;03;00 - 00;23;29;16

SN

I have a lot of varied interest in my life. You know, I have a family, I paint, I do other things. Architecture, obviously is my career and it's what I want to do. But I think, one, it's helpful not to have all your eggs in one basket so that there are many things in life that make you happy.

 

And I think that helps and affords one with the patience that's needed to be an architect because a project from its beginning to its end to its publishing is five years even on a house, right? So that kind of patients you need, that can be really frustrating I think if you take a step back and think about it that way.

 

But it's just the reality. Working hard to get the images out there. I do believe I hate to say it, but the photographs are the medium by which our work is understood. It's very important to photograph your work with someone you trust in the way that you imagine it to be understood. I don't think people do that enough.

 

I work with my best friend is someone I grew up with who's my photographer, and it's very collaborative. We spend one day actually just in the house taking 500 shots. We then go through all of them, choose our favorites, revise, edit, iterate, and you know, then it's a two day shoot and it's a lot of work. We didn't hire a stylist or anything like that for this project.

 

This is us moving things around, using the client's furniture itself. This is all their stuff. And that's something I worked with the clients on as well. But yeah, just making sure that the project ends up looking recorded the way you intended to be. I think that's really, really important.

 

00;23;29;18 - 00;23;36;16

DP

So Shane, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where could people go to learn more about Light and Air Architecture and yourself?

 

00;23;36;18 - 00;24;09;27

SN

Yeah, I mean, they should go to my website and look through the work. You can email me at Shane@landa-arch.com, or just search Light and Air Architecture. Either way, you'll end up at my website, and my website shows a selection of finished work and ongoing work. We have a really interesting townhouse that's in construction uptown on 95th Street.

 

Similar ideas, but completely different type of stair, all constructed out of steel offsite and being brought in more constantly, exploring different ways of thinking about the New York house. So yeah, feel free to get in touch.

 

00;24;10;00 - 00;24;35;12

DP

Well, thank you very much, Shane.

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;11

Doug Patt (DP)

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

 

00;00;05;13 - 00;00;22;00

David Gross (DG)

Most of our buildings are taller and bigger. And this was a little bit of a throwback. A five-story building, not too many square feet, but it was a challenge for us and an opportunity to look at our housing work on a smaller scale and very proud of it.

 

00;00;22;02 - 00;02;59;25

DP

This is my guest, David Gross. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight David's project Park and Elton.

Park and Elton is a development with 38 residential units in the Bronx, consisting of two distinct five story buildings. These buildings correspond to the Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Plan. The plan provides a range of affordable housing choices for the Bronx.

The use of simple building materials, including brick in various patterns, colors and facade wall depths, makes these modest buildings appear quite unique. The simple modern masonry cornice and the differentiation of the window header detail with soldier course patterns reference the historical brick clad buildings found throughout the district. The subtle volume and height of Park and Elton also maintain a satisfying human scale.

Construction of the buildings included sustainable design elements and incorporated New York City Green building standards. Park and Elton are considered equivalent to LEED certified buildings.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Today we're talking to David E. Gross, AIA. David earned his Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated cum laude with distinction.

David is the co-founder and executive partner of GF55 Architects, a national firm with offices in New York City and Miami. GF55, has expertise in multifamily, retail, educational, hospitality and industrial architecture. Since 1984, GF55 has designed and built over 12 million square feet of housing nationally. David's projects have received two Urban Land Institute Models of Excellence awards and was the recipient of the Andrew J. Thomas Pioneer and Housing Award in 2010 from the New York City AIA chapter.

David received an award of merit for the renovation and addition of a historic and significant mid-century modern house in Rye, New York. His work has also been featured in Architectural Digest and The New York Times. Today, we're going to talk to David about GF55’s Park and Elton Project.

Welcome, David. So, before we get started, tell us a little bit about GF55 Architects. I understand your firm is in both New York City and Miami. What's the size of the firm and do the offices take the same kind of work?

 

00;03;00;04 - 00;03;17;11

DG

We're very much a New York firm with a satellite office in Miami and the Miami offices in support of the New York workload. The needs of staffing vary, and sometimes we have the ability to staff the projects through the Miami workforce as opposed to the New York workforce.

 

00;03;17;13 - 00;03;24;03

DP

So, tell us a little bit about GF55 architects, who you're the co-founding partner. How did you guys get your start?

 

00;03;24;09 - 00;03;52;06

DG

My partner, Len, he's the “F” and I - Len Fusca - we met in grad school, and we were partners right away in both architectural terms and friendship terms. Down the road, 15 years later, we met Shy, also, who's our third partner and the three of us are close professionally and friendship wise. We're all friends. We have about 50 people right now and we have a varied practice. But really a specialty in housing.

 

00;03;52;08 - 00;03;54;18

DP

How long have you had the Miami location then?

 

00;03;54;25 - 00;03;57;23

DG

I would say since 2012.

 

00;03;57;27 - 00;03;58;27

DP

Has that been helpful?

 

00;03;59;01 - 00;03;59;27

DG

Very helpful.

 

00;04;00;03 - 00;04;04;25

DP

Do you have people that you work with locally and then you also work with them in Miami?

 

00;04;04;29 - 00;04;41;01

DG

Yes. The Miami office specializes in retail. We do a large amount of retail buildout work across the country, but our main office, I would say, is New York. In New York, we do a lot of projects that are versions of Park and Elton, but much larger. We also do charter schools and medical facilities, and we're working on a large storage facility near the JFK Airport, which came to us right before COVID and then the entire process of COVID with Amazon, it was all of a sudden that's a building type that was very much in demand.

 

00;04;41;06 - 00;04;46;21

DP

Ironically, it's a good segue way to what is your role in the office. Right. Everybody's doing something different. What are you doing now?

 

00;04;46;23 - 00;05;53;26

DG

I like being an architect. You know, sometimes I find that I maybe I'm focusing on the buildings too much. I would say that my role is focusing on the long-term growth of the company and the direction of the company.

We have an outside consultant on how to manage the office because at 50 people, all of a sudden, it's way too big for any of the three partners to direct themselves. And we value the expertise that we give, and we are mature enough now to value the expertise that outside consultants give us. So, we try to run the office very professionally. And I would say that a lot of our energy about running the office is motivating the workforce and we motivate the workforce through a carrot rather than a stick.

It's not the old school where you better be here or else. We have to market – intra-office marketing is almost as important as outside marketing. We have to make sure that everyone's gratified and satisfied because anybody under 40 demands that of us. It's challenging and it's interesting and it's – I like it. It's heartwarming.

 

00;05;54;02 - 00;06;01;06

DP

It's a neat paradigm, though. I mean, thinking deeply about your employees and their well-being and wanting to keep them, I think that's wonderful.

 

00;06;01;10 - 00;06;04;13

DG

We should sign you up for the volleyball team.

 

00;06;04;16 - 00;06;05;21

DP

I need about another foot!

 

00;06;05;24 - 00;06;10;00

DG

It's not just volleyball. It's après-volleyball that they like. You know, like apres-ski.

 

00;06;10;07 - 00;06;20;00

DP

That's great. All right, so let's dig in here and talk about Park and Elton. So, Park is at 3120 Park Avenue in the Bronx. Elton is East 159th Street in the Bronx, correct?

 

00;06;20;03 - 00;06;20;17

DG

Yes.

 

00;06;20;24 - 00;06;30;14

DP

So, you're a board member of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, as well as the New York Housing Conference, correct?

 

00;06;30;20 - 00;06;30;14

DG

Yes.

 

00;06;31;09 - 00;06;41;23

DP

You're intimately familiar with affordable housing. This project, did you know it was coming up? What was the process by which you interviewed or took the job or how did that work out for you?

 

00;06;41;26 - 00;07;31;26

DG

It was actually part two of a project. That part one was maybe ten years before that. And unfortunately, the original developer passed away. One of his employees took over the job and it's a unique project for us because most of our buildings are taller and bigger. And this was a little bit of a throwback, a five-story building, not too many square feet, but it was a challenge for us and an opportunity to look at our housing work on a smaller scale and very proud of it.

As you mentioned, I'm a member of housing organizations. I grew up, my father and grandfather were builder developers and while their work wasn't affordable with a capital A, it was affordable with a small A because they built stuff that was a modest price points. And I really have a lot of familiarity with that building type.

 

00;07;32;02 - 00;07;34;13

DP

Well, it sounds like something that can be pretty gratifying.

 

00;07;34;18 - 00;08;02;16

DG

Yeah, I would say that's my main professional focus. And Parker and Elton were challenging because even though they're small in scale, they're important. One of them is on the corner and it forms a strong impact on that street. And it's a part of the South Bronx, that is, the buildings are modest. These buildings are very much a breath of fresh air to the neighborhoods. They're small, but they punch above their weight class visually.

 

00;08;02;18 - 00;08;08;10

DP

So, did the architecture in the neighborhood affect the architecture that you ultimately made?

 

00;08;08;13 - 00;09;44;13

DG

I would say the architecture in the neighborhood affected it in scale, but not in aesthetics. I think that our point was to be not oppositional, but in contrast to the older buildings and, you know, one of our mottos is creative responses with humble materials. If you look at the classic modern architects, the housing was really an issue in the 1920s and it was never about luxury materials. Despite the Barcelona Pavilion and all the history of obviously building these amazing villas in a modernist style for very wealthy people. But the focus, on paper at least, was housing for people.

And what's so great about Park and Elton is because they're a small size, we really had to focus on the details. I would say that I had a great team in the office to work with. The original designer, Dimitri Papageorgiou and I worked on the basic idea. We had a third person on the team, Emily Koustae, who was sort of sitting next to Dimitri offering her opinion, said it so smartly that we listened. And then the woman who ran the job during construction, Ingrid Aguilar, she was also very important because during the construction we started to see some opportunities with the way the brick was laid that we tested it, she looked at it, she photographed it, she brought it back to the office, we changed it. There is a detail of white brick that goes up the building as if it's like bubbles floating into the air. They become fewer as they go vertical.

 

00;09;44;13 - 00;09;45;18

DP

It's denser below.

 

00;09;45;19 - 00;09;48;19

DG

Yeah, and that was all done during the construction.

 

00;09;48;24 - 00;09;52;17

DP

So, let's start with the client's programmatic requirements. What did they want?

 

00;09;48;24 - 00;10;52;28

DG

HPD is the housing preservation development arm of the New York City government. And they have strict guidelines about what size units and what mix you can build. And they have different programs that the developer wants to qualify for to get tax credits.

So, we had to satisfy the specific program for affordability that the city and the developer had worked out. So, we satisfy that the one bedrooms are 650 square feet, studios are 475, etc., etc. There's a million requirements on how big the windows can be and what kind of air conditioning and what the energy rating is. Even though they're affordable, they're built in a very, very quality manner.

So that was the first requirement. Then there's a zoning requirement for a maximum building height and a maximum lot coverage. And there's a lot of metrics and matrices that you have to satisfy in order to finally get to the way it looks.

 

00;10;53;05 - 00;10;56;02

DP

So, there weren't any breaks given to the fact that this is affordable house.

 

00;10;56;04 - 00;11;03;22

DG

No, no special breaks. It's built into the code that you get a certain benefit from building affordable units.

 

00;11;03;24 - 00;11;07;20

DP

So, tell us about the two sites. How were they the same? How were they different?

 

00;11;07;23 - 00;12;10;19

DG

The Park is on the corner, and it has a corner window that wraps the facade, and you see it from a distance. And then Elton is an infill building on a street that is at a diagonal to the building itself. And we knew that in order to come out of this alive, both mentally and architecturally and constructability wise, we had to make the buildings the same.

So, we made them the same. The choice to use brick was an easy one because brick is so flexible, because brick is a unit that's made so that you can change it as you lay the brick which is laid by a person. So, there's a way to get richness and detail in the facade through the brick. It's super durable and the way we did it where we have the window panels are shiny black brick as opposed to the, I think, two color blend on the rest of the building gives it the texture as if it were a different material.

 

00;12;10;22 - 00;12;25;10

DP

When I was reading about the project, you said that the building plans are super simple and yet, you know, you stand back, and you look at these things and there's – you got something going on. So, tell us a little bit about the building plans. How did you make them a little less like a box?

 

00;12;25;12 - 00;14;10;09

DG

There's a little tower on the end, and on each end to give the building a little more shape, you know, lack of a better term. But that's a right out of the zoning code that allows you to do that. New York is actually very conservative because quality housing, which is the current zoning for housing encourage you to make boxes so that when you go down the street, whether it's Park Avenue or 135th Street in the Bronx, all the buildings are the same height. They're looking to create that urban scale that's consistent. And along the avenues, it's taller and along the side streets it's lower. But it's consistent. And you can see from these photographs that our building is within a few feet of the adjacent buildings. So that's how we ended up with the massing.

In terms of the windows, it's very budget constrained. So, it's not just simple materials and creative ways. The whole process, you have to find the design and there's a discipline to using the materials to change the scale. For example, if we had just drawn the elevation with the windows, it would seem like a barracks. It would just be a box and it would seem very closed. But by doing visual tricks, like adding the side panels and a different color that matches the window frame, it expands the visual impact of the window opening and it makes the scale of the implied grid larger. So, it seems airier, but in fact it's not airier. It’s a visual trick. Architects are doing that all over the world to try to bring their buildings into scale.

 

00;14;10;13 - 00;14;17;05

DP

And you change the direction of the brick, right? The way the brick is laid, and the facade undulates somewhat, right?

 

00;14;17;09 - 00;15;22;22

DG

I mean, if you zoom in on the photographs that we're looking at, the horizontal bands, they're vertical and they're a stack bond. They line up as a grid. And the regular brick in between the horizontal bands is a running bond that stagger each joint the half a dimension of the brick. So, you get a different way the sunlight hits the brick. It adds visual nuance and detail, which I think there's a criticism of buildings when they're too stark, unless they're completely stark. And then the starkness is a design feature.

But I think you need to find the details to make the building visually interesting. I think you owe that, as the architect, to the world. It’s beauty, commodity and delight since Vitruvius said it, and he probably wishes he had copyrighted that phrase because that would be a great brand in 1642. But commodity is the function, and the structure is firmness, and delight is it has to look good. I mean, that's fundamental to being an architect. It has to look good.

 

00;15;22;29 - 00;15;27;10

DP

What about the color? How did you guys choose the brown? The variations of brown.

 

00;15;27;12 - 00;16;14;15

DG

The brick has sort of a brown, gray feel, and we wanted it to seem contemporary and not traditional in any way. I think that that brick that we used, because it's such a small quantity and it's a small relatively a small building, it's a more expensive brick than the cheapest. The developer, the builder, is often looking for the least expensive.

But in this case, the difference in the cost between a better brick and a simple brick was minimal. So, we went with a more fashionable, more stylish brick that you see in other buildings around town on a taller and more higher end buildings. In fact, we use this brick in other buildings, we like this building. There's sort of a little laboratory for us to explore other ideas.

 

00;16;14;18 - 00;16;18;15

DP

How was it working with the mason in the field? Did you guys do mockups?

 

00;16;18;17 - 00;16;46;21

DG

We did mockups. I think that Ingrid, she got the guys to do what she wanted. You know, so much of the world is about how do you get the other person to hear you and how do you get the other person to do what you want? And certainly, the architect has no literal power. They have the power of persuasion. And I think we worked closely with the developer and the contractors to persuade them to help us achieve our visual goals.

 

00;16;46;23 - 00;17;03;03

DP

Yeah, clearly. We're talking a little bit about design challenges here and we're talking about how you manipulated the bricks in various ways to create a facade that looks more appealing. Did brick solve any design challenges for you guys?

 

00;17;03;05 - 00;18;18;19

DG

I mean, brick has been a success since, you know, the Egyptians. Brick has been a success since the Neanderthals almost. But brick gives you a tremendously good thermal rating in New York. Any building that is built with public money or public support has to achieve a very high green rating. It's basically a LEED rating. 20 years ago, 15 years ago, everything was LEED. It had to be rated.

Well, the New York City green enterprise standards are fundamentally a LEED goal. So, we had to achieve that. We have to do an energy certification at the end and brick is just a tremendously flexible material for that. If you use a metal panel, which is much more expensive or a terracotta panel, it isn't necessarily any more energy efficient than brick.

So, brick helps with that because it's a small unit, it's flexible. So, if you run into a funky dimension in the space between your building and the property line in the adjacent building, it's easy to manipulate. And you can work with it on the site and the guy who's laying it can work with it for you.

 

00;18;08;22 - 00;18;24;20

DP

I don't know a whole lot about building in New York City. Talk a little bit about how long was the planning process for the building. How long did the review, the City Review take? How long was the design process? Construction process start to finish?

 

00;18;24;22 - 00;19;14;29

DG

That's a good question. It takes about 9 to 10 months to design a building from start to finish. In the middle of that process, you file the drawings about five months in with the city of New York. It takes four months plus to get the drawings approved. As they are reviewing the plans and asking for more information, you're working on the plans and filling in the information. So, the filing process and the production process, the design process are running in tandem. They're running concurrently.

Then there's another 2 to 3 months for the project to have the site prepared, demolition to take place, SOE which is a Support of Excavation process, you have to support the site as it's being excavated. And then I would say a building like this takes about 18 months to build.

 

00;19;15;06 - 00;19;16;10

DP

Park or Elton?

 

00;19;16;17 - 00;19;40;10

DG

They were both built simultaneously. They weren't built one and then the other built at the same time. So, when they did the foundation on one, they were doing the foundation on the other. The concrete sub was at both sides at the same time. The brick was done at the same time. These are simple load bearing buildings where it's a block backup to a brick facade and concrete floors and load bearing concrete walls.

 

00;19;40;15 - 00;19;41;14

DP

No steel?

 

00;19;41;15 - 00;19;44;14

DG

A miscellaneous steel over the windows. Miscellaneous steel at the corners.

 

00;19;44;20 - 00;19;45;24

DP

Just steel lintels and-

 

00;19;45;27 - 00;19;59;28

DG

Yeah, not too much steel. The spans are that long. And if you look at the building without the details, the masonry is about 35% of the width of the windows. So that's a very short span.

 

00;20;00;03 - 00;20;01;24

DP

What about ARB?

 

00;20;01;26 - 00;20;50;22

DG

There is no ARB in New York City. You can build a 100-storey building and – city planning, if you need any kind of variance, or you have a zoning issue, city planning acts as the architectural arbiter of the project. But if it's a simple project like this, an as-of-right project, you would be smart to show it to a community board because the community boards, you know, that's the smallest governmental association in the city and it's really the local people who are on a community board. Obviously, it's the people that really care. And you want the community board to be a part of your process. So, the developer will meet with the community board quietly, keep it friendly. And a project like this, I don't think there was any opposition whatsoever.

 

00;20;50;22 - 00;20;55;23

DP

And you do that - you wrap up schematic design, then you meet with people that are local.

 

00;20;56;00 - 00;21;20;03

DG

Exactly. To gain support because the last thing you want is opposition. I've worked in other cities and the great thing about New York is there are hurdles in front of you, many hurdles, but they're above ground. It's not like a game, you know, a video game where the hurdles come at you as you're running. You see them in front of you. The rules are transparent, and you can work the system.

 

00;21;20;06 - 00;21;26;14

DP

And when you guys present, do you present three dimensional images that you put together, Revit or-

 

00;21;26;14 - 00;21;47;22

DG

Revit. We do all of our work on three-dimensional building information modeling. Now, we don't use any CAD. Our staff is really talented and expert at BIM, and that means that when they're drawing, the very first line is a wall, not a line. And this three dimensionals are right there. And we have some very talented renderers.

 

00;21;47;25 - 00;21;53;12

DP

I’m sure. So, did you guys learn anything through the process of designing and getting these buildings built?

 

00;21;53;14 - 00;22;21;04

DG

The architecture is a very slow-paced world. If there's a crisis, you're not doing it right. There really shouldn't be any crises. Maybe when you're young and you forgot the most fundamental thing, there’s a crisis. But at this point, I would say that these buildings were inspirational for me because the four of us, the team, we were engaged all the way through, and we kept looking at it. It was a small project, and it was exciting in that way.

 

00;22;21;07 - 00;22;24;20

DP

I'll wrap it up with an easier question – maybe a harder question.

 

00;22;24;24 - 00;22;25;29

DG

Throw them at me. Come on.

 

00;22;26;05 - 00;22;29;05

DP

You clearly have a lot of experience being an architect-

 

00;22;29;29 - 00;22;32;13

DG

I didn't start out with gray hair. I've earned-

 

00;22;32;20 - 00;22;35;11

DP

I had hair.

 

00;22;32;20 - 00;22;37;12

DG

Exactly. Sure, you have hair.

 

00;22;37;15 - 00;22;45;25

DP

So, if you had to look back and give your younger self advice that you didn't know back then. What would it be, about being an architect.

 

00;22;45;27 - 00;23;24;22

DG

That's a great question. It reminds me of something I was thinking about on the way over here in preparation for today's chat. I think in any profession - medical, legal - your user group, your client is turned off to jargon. You can't speak with technical terms or only terms that another architect would recognize. So, I try very hard to be plainspoken and put things in terms of the benefit of the client and I think that that is something that I'm good at and people respond to that because the goal is to have a dialog with your client. And I think that's the best way.

 

00;23;24;29 - 00;23;44;05

DP

You know, interestingly, growing up, you must have seen how important that was with your father and his business. Having a good relationship, being a good communicator, being positive, never telling somebody no. Yeah, we can look at that. Let's give it a shot. So, it would seem to me that you learned an awful lot from your folks.

 

00;23;44;13 - 00;23;44;27

DG

I did.

 

00;23;45;04 - 00;23;49;24

DP

Well, David, it's been great to have you here. Thank you very much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about GF55?

 

00;23;49;26 - 00;24;00;02

DG

www.gf55.com or check out our Instagram page or our Twitter feed for all the stuff about us.

 

00;24;00;03 - 00;24;03;12

DP

All right, pretty straightforward. Well, thank you very much for your time. It's great to meet you.

 

00;24;03;19 - 00;24;05;11

DG

You too. I'm sure I'll see you soon.

 

00;24;05;12 - 00;24;09;01

DP

Right on.

TRANSCRIPT

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

Doug Patt (DP)

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

 

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

John Woelfling (JW)

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

And you wanted to keep it?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

So tell me, is the subway system still there?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Yeah, the new foundations.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So what were the project restrictions like for you guys?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

It's gigantic.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Sixties or so?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

Changed the way the walls are insulated?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

There is a seismic joint.

 

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

DP

Really? Is that pretty typical?

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

DP

So that's coming down the pike.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

Natural gas.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

I was distinguishing from propane.

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

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

DP

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

 

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

JW

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

 

00;34;18;23

DP

Thank you very much and great to have you here