 Good evening everyone and welcome to our second lecture of the semester. We are in for a treat. It's my pleasure to introduce Ted to look into you all, although some of you will be familiar with him as he was one of the teaching firms in residence here this past fall at the school. Ted received his Masters of Architecture with distinction from the University of Michigan in 94 and went on to practice at the office of Machado and Sulvedi in Boston before starting his own practice to Lugian to Lugian in 2003. Today's office is an award-winning awesome architecture and urban design firm specializing in complex and diverse building types. Most recently his office, which you may know was recognized among Architect Magazine's top 50 design firms in the country coming in at an impressive 30. Their work includes commercial, residential, cultural, institutional, and historical projects ranging from new construction to adaptive reuse. But their design approach, you know, I would say looks for really clear narratives that blend the client's mission and relevant qualities of place in which the project is being conceived and it's abundantly clear in their work, which is on display in the gallery right now, and I invite you all to enjoy during the reception that will follow the lecture. The work reflects a really thoughtful, thorough, skillful, inventive approach to material combinations and technologies and it relies on multiple channels, I would say, of meaning in understanding the character of sites and what their contribution will be to that site. These could include things like sustainability or cultural history, for instance, and it's why it should be no surprise why the title of Ted's exhibition is Context Enriched Craft and the lecture is as well. But before I let Ted take the mic, I want to take a moment to thank everyone at Ted's office and our very own Georgia Rhodes, who really did a fantastic job, a fantastic job in assembling a really excellent exhibition. And with that, please join me again in welcoming Ted to look in. Thank you, and I think I appreciate Nate's introduction and also want to say a few things about thank yous, you know, just to get the exhibit together. People in my office work tremendously hard and really were passionate about collecting this, hopefully, voice that we've been able to accrue together as an office and bring it into your exhibit space and then hopefully try to project it here on the screen. And certainly Georgia was a big help and Lauren, I don't know if Lauren's here, Irons, she was a big help too, helping us build some models, which was certainly a big lift to bring together. But just before I get into a few things, I was here last semester and I was really impressed with your school and your professors and your leadership. You guys are getting great training and you may not realize it as much now, but as you go into the world, you're gonna begin to see what exposure you're getting. And I look back on my education and just things have just progressed so much. I was telling people in my office just like, oh, you guys are so much more advanced than I was when I was there. And the same for this group of students here. So I really enjoyed it. And mostly it's the peers system that you've created. The studio that we had last semester, I didn't have to teach as much because they all were interacting with each other and teaching each other things about architecture and that's the kind of environment that you guys want to continue to pursue. And that's gonna define your education. They give you a great platform and just take advantage of it. And it's a little bit like my office. We're a small office. We're about 10 people and I believe firmly in the way to run an office is really to empower the people that you have within it and really grow that in a way that allows them to encourage everybody to work well together. And if you go in the exhibit, I was talking to Steven and I said, it's just greasy fingerprints of everybody from my office all over the walls and all over the models. And that's what's really exciting for me is to try to bring that together in an environment. And really part of that too is the diversity, not just of the people and their experiences in the office, but their, the work that we do. And maybe it comes back to some of my previous athletic experiences. I've never good enough to play one position, so they have me play lots of positions. And because of that, I kind of developed this interest in not just doing all the same building type, I would always say I'd go crazy if I had to do houses on the south shore every day when I got to the office. But if I didn't do a house on the south shore, I'd also go crazy. And so it's all these different experiences and all these different project types between pavilions or restaurants or retail spaces or housing that makes it so exciting. And I also say that it's these diversity of experiences build a knowledge base. And I think that also reflects a little bit in where your education program is. You have these different schools, different people between art and historic preservation and architecture. You know, your sustainable studies, your aesthetic and technology studies, all these pieces is what makes it so exciting. And this is also tied to what really motivates our work. And it really is around this interdisciplinary exposure that we gravitate towards. What does that mean? The singularity of approaching architecture in one silo is great, but when you're able to merge all the different skills from a numerous amount of people between engineers and consultants as deep as acoustic consultants or envelope consultants, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, architecture gets so complex that it makes it so difficult to actually pull it apart. Like everything's like locked together and that's the part that makes it really exciting for us is there a way to completely embed these things so that you can't pull anything apart. And it's great when you go to a client, he said it starts to be a project, you know, value engineering is like, well, no, you see, if you take that apart, then this doesn't work. And that makes you stronger in the in the world is your investment, not only in architecture, but your investment with the people that you work with in a way that makes all of them come together in a solid cohesion. And I think that's where we're trying to be with our work. And what I'm going to do is try to express that a little bit in some of the systems that we do. But another piece for me has been always around that interdisciplinary action and the parts around people has also been about expression. And that's a complex word. It reaches a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And really, as the source of this exhibit tonight is, you know, context and riches craft, like, what is that? Right? That's great. What is that? It should be that way because each place has something different to tell you and to uncover. And if we we can work, you know, towards that, understanding our context and things that we can't immediately see and and pull that out in a way that we can then express it in a way that uncomvers a certain poetic sense of place gives people identity. What I mean by that is sometimes we'll work on projects in other cities or other states and people say, I want I want this to be about Detroit or I want it to express Greensboro. I don't want it to be about Boston. And what we try to do is find that sense of place and express it and and really emerge that with the construction tectonics. And so that's that's what the source of that kind of context and riches craft is. And I'm just really going to try to run through maybe five projects that kind of give you an example of it. And then hopefully you'll have some questions and I'll try to answer them. So all right. So now I'm going to flip this. Is that it? Okay. All right. So I'm going to come around. I'm going to grab the mic. I won't dance. So this is the first project which is in Canton, Massachusetts. I'm showing this image because the site was formerly an airport. And it was abandoned. And there was like this rich history of all these different airports that used to be around Boston that suddenly like went out of business. And then because of that there became like a lot of environmental problems on these sites and they kind of went into just sort of a decay state. And so we worked with a landscape architect and their park design and really develop some pavilions for them. And there's a basically a pavilion. Is it a laser pointer on this? I'm sorry. The red button. This pavilion right here is centered next to a comfort station which is basically a screen for a series of porta-potties. And there's this great loop path that runs around the whole perimeter of this site. And what that did for us is allowed us to sort of see this pavilion in different ways. And also in a manner to get this pavilion to be activated on this lawn we sponsored a series of different uses that could be seen in the silence when no one's there or for passive seating, for events. And when we worked through the project we took advantage of that loop path which was over this we call it a jello mold which was a big environmental cleanup site. They basically took eight to ten acres and scraped a foot off the site and they put it under a park and we built these pavilions. And when we worked through it we were like what's this reference? This is about this sense of flight. How can we evoke this in our architecture? And so we looked at combining the forms of these pavilions in such a way that when you walked around it along this loop path that they begin to virtually move or take flight. And that was a lot of fun and it's really a very basic situation. We walk up to the pavilion from the parking lot and we begin to circulate around it and the shapes, simple geometries, folded planes just begin to dynamically change and make it an experience when you move around the park to be enjoyed and certainly be under. And I think this is where it comes together for us is that that idea that they can be used and that they could be used in many different ways either as just passive seating, outdoor education classrooms or big events. And to make architecture be flexible has been a real and adaptable has been a really source of interest for us. But also how to build it. Build it economically a set of parts much the way a plane is built. And so we looked at different tension cables and steel frames and wood pieces in a deck and basically try to pull some of the memory of this sense of flight in the parts of a airplane and pull them together in a really systematic and economical way. And so you're looking at right here are all these little pieces and frames that we built in a shop and then we assembled it like on the site and it came together in a really simple form. And being shop made and made it very economical you'd be surprised what contractors do they'll they'll use cranes like this when they should it's for backhoe and they're picking up piece of equipment but they got it done. And all the pieces were built and thought of ahead of time to receive all the different tension cables and the different wood parts all the different pieces in the bolts. And it's amazing if you plan these things out they can really work to your advantage. And so when they go together they just fit like a glove and make these really beautiful shadows and pieces that come together and it's just down to that bolt that hole and you look at that guy he's looking at me up on the thing and they're all looking again. So that's one of my favorite slides but they're like what are you doing up there but that's all right. So that was a nice project and I think where it started for us is that sculpture raw structure use really could be distilled from just working with something that you didn't really have to occupy in the conventional sense and we've done a number of these pavilions that allows us to really just understand some very basic systems and they've been a part of our architecture in the future. So sometimes buildings have personalities sometimes they get names certain things this one of my favorite movies but really this building was called the Darth Vader building. And we interviewed for this job it was a group out of international group out of Los Angeles and they bought this building and they said we hear it's called the Darth Vader building but it's we're a religious organization and we wanted to change we want to make this different and this building was once an office building built in the 80s then it was an art school and then it became this religious building but really identity is so much a part of what we do and they asked us they said hey you're not you got to help us here because you're not going to believe it when you come to an opening all these people are going to be so happy to see you and they don't want it to be Minnesota they want it Boston what can you do to make all of our buildings all across the country different so that we have this identity which is about a Boston I was like oh Jesus is going to be a tough task so we went back to the site and we looked at all the cars and I don't know if you've been up and down route nine in Boston it's very fast street you never see facades but clearly when whoever designed this building was like very facade-driven it's real product of the 80s and you know driving up and down now is very fast and it's that speed of the street that really interests me is like you're driving by it and it's like boom you don't really see these buildings I can tell you how many times I've gone up and down that road never really noticed it I was like there's something about this speed and this movement that we need to find and being you know a fan of Frank Stella you know it's like have you ever been to one of his paintings you ever seen it the first time I went to one of his paintings I was like walking through the gallery and like wow what is going on you walk by these paintings and they like move they shift and you're like well that's really fascinating and it's just through very simple lines that he's able to make buildings these paintings change and move and it's that movement that we wanted to bring into this facade and we looked at very simple techniques and said well what if we paint the building right and we took advantage of that deep core here and we put this louvered screen that undulated back and forth so that when you drove by it it actually began to move and it created this really dynamic facade it went from like a shell or a cave to something that's very vibrant and the depth of the louvers and the movement of the louvers across that panel we also modified the height of the window wall to express that became a real tool so that when you don't drove down the street it really became active part of that environment I can't I never get this well someone called someone called our office one day and Travis could tell you the story in there like I love this building we have never seen you know we've driven by it so many times and never noticed it's amazing what a little white paint can do for a building you know to make it go alive but more than that like paint buildings can change color and taking advantage of color and I love the way the light touches this building sometimes it's pink sometimes it's white and I gotta tell you it's a little bit of an accident you put up mock-ups and you put paint on the wall and they're only showing you a little square and everyone's yelling at you because they want you to pick out this paint color because they want to paint it before it's too cold and you're like all right that's fine we'll put that one up and it's sure enough it had such a great quality that it really adapted and changed and I think what makes that paint color so interesting in that it just changes throughout the day and so not only is it about that street and that movement and that depth but also it's about the way the color on the facade changes and that that's been fun for us on this part of the skin and the envelope and that whole expression that you guys look at in your school work and what is that surface tension right there's more to it what is behind that facade and in order to give meaning to our moves you're like well not just is this something that undulates and moves it reflects the program that is behind it and working with a religious organization sometimes their rooms are more private and sometimes they're more public and so we we did is in the areas along this this is their main worship space it's much tighter in their main public space it's much wider and then in their semi-private public spaces it undulates and so the rationality behind our decisions goes back to that interdisciplinary thinking your programming the way you drive your program and your thoughts the way you put your materials together all of it seems to coordinate so when you look at the facade and that layer behind the facade you begin to understand that it's not just a skin it's not just a frivolous wall that it's connected to that space here and the public space and the thin space the the semi-private space so as you move through a building it also begins to uncover what is there and so we really try to orchestrate that narrative they told us you know a lot of people come for the first time sometimes people come they've been there all the time we want that narrative that experience to move through it and so we really try to orchestrate coming in i'm gonna go back for a second and it's really interesting because i think this really low compression is the main entry this architect must have been a luikon freak because if you ever been to the yell british art gallery come in really low right and but as you move through this and you circulate around it it always came back you know to the center and being a luikon guy myself growing up in new haven and anybody been to the yell british art gallery you guys got to take them down there one of my favorite buildings you come in off the street it's like darkness has been thrust upon you and you walk in and it's this great light cavern his use of materials are fantastic and it just makes the whole expression but this architect wasn't luikon because this is what it looked like before and this is his skylight and it's there and so we really wanted to make that experience something special and so we started with the skylight and we basically reminipulated the way the ceiling worked and to bring light down deep into it but luikon i think what makes it the spirit special is that the center is where people gravitate towards and the center is where when you have a very deep building you can diffuse light into all the dark areas and spaces in the building and that's truly what he did and luikon what i love about his work here is that actually all these openings allow art to be viewed in different areas and so art became part of that experience where you viewed it in different ways and for the people in this organization that this center was their social space the observation in the middle and we wanted to activate it by bringing light in and really make it a part of the whole experience in the center and so we worked in terms of bringing the stairs in pulling people to the middle and then finally to their worship room and that's that was kind of it so we really enjoyed working with this group they they were really a really great experience in bringing this together so adaptive reuse work that we do often being in boston i particularly like that as well as new work because you're using a resource that's valuable to people and being clever about what you can do is always interesting so we started working out in detroit and i think i just been fascinated by these post industrial cities i went to undergraduate at lehigh university which is in bethlehem pennsylvania and that's a really um bethlehem steel sort of a very important steel mill went out of business uh but i used to sneak into some of the steel mills and take pictures and get picked up by security people and but i love going to these cities and i don't know how it worked out but this is our second job in detroit but um we've been beginning to work there a little bit more and um daniel bernum everyone know who daniel bernum is yes i really hope so he's an amazing architect and this building here in white it's called the four building right yeah right here and uh brilliant because you can't really see it but back in the day everything was brown stone and brick and really dark and he built this like white night and it was like the tallest building in the city and it's absolutely stunning and beautiful and detroit had a great uh sense of public space they have a great park system actually this is campus marshes which is one of their say spaces but he really knew how to connect these buildings to the street and to these public spaces um and i think is about his core of his architecture is that they're not just about you know the building they're a much deeper connection in other parts of the city and so to be working on this building and renovating was quite terrific but you know what happens in detroit over the years which is also fascinating here's the building right here everything else got built around it and it became dwarfed by all these other buildings and it lost its presence around the city and actually when you come down the street here's this building it's just there's a lot of darkness and and it just doesn't doesn't grow and it doesn't bring people to it and interestingly enough this historic building has been modified a number of times at its entry and the new owners bought it back in um June July we interviewed for the job and they uh we actually were thankful to uh be awarded it and the first thing I want to do is like we got to really rebrand this building Daniel Burnham is an amazing architect but so much of its history has been um violated or changed and particularly this front entry we need to look at that so history is something very interesting we're back to the archives we started looking at you know this entry I'm going to show you this right here there's this canopy here that was added on at some point to the front of this neoclassical front and we realized that back in the 60s or 50s they built this steel canopy where people would come up to it oh that's interesting and then back in the 80s they put this stucco cornice canopy on it and it was really just not in keeping with the architecture and so we snooped around a little bit and found that you know that steel structure that was there we found the old steel cables like I think the steel is still in there and let's just you know change this entry entries are so important to how you you know approach a building of course and but what oddly enough about this building it's so symmetrical and neoclassical these these columns were chopped literally at its base and they don't extend through and the canopy goes to the fourth bay and you would never know it like you walk up to the building you can't even see this and it's very surprising but what's interesting about the asymmetry sometimes these moves happen over time you don't really understand why or how they happen but there's this great public space here and the asymmetry played into this entry here and how people would move out to the Detroit River and so actually the building itself is actually behind here and so how can we pull people from these great public spaces down the street to the forward building and we looked at that front entry you know as an opportunity to sort of draw people in and grab them and so what we did is we basically went back to the original steel structure and we added a metal sort of glass frame extended the columns through with these glasses fluted systems opened up systems that looked up into the skylights and put on a new forward building sign that allowed us to work through it but what it came down to when we were working with the historic commission was how do we deal with the centering of this traditional building you had this great you know division of three bays that have been completely offset from this original building so we re-centered it extended the columns through in a modern way and put glass and a folded up that looked up through it and presented a sign and what that allowed us to do was really just reactivate this whole core in a way that also was very transparent and so working at the ground level signage also is a great opportunity for architects to rebrand what you're doing think about it and so we painted the letters on these louvers in such a way that were on the skin and on the facade so that when you walk by it it actually began to change and move and so what we tried to do is really just whoops I'm gonna go back to that just tried to make that sign a part of the experience that drew you into the interior so what happened on the inside of this building the context of it there wasn't any in the 70s they completely altered it and there was really not much left of it and there was a ceiling above the ceiling all the historic moldings were gone and we're like oh so we went back to the history of this place actually the Ford building is actually not for the Ford Motor Company it's the Ford Libby Glass Company and they actually made all the glass for the twin towers and it's very interesting and so this is a huge company that did a lot of work and so talking with the owners identity expression was so important and so we looked at ways that let me say that Daniel Burnham's building had been changed anyone know this building the Rookery building in Chicago another amazing building is that this actually was renovated by Frank Lloyd Wright back at his period in time and he covered some of the stairs but most importantly it's these centers it's this glass it's this whole experience let me go back to this where these very heavy dark buildings or stone-like buildings have these incredibly light interiors and so what we did is that looked at the sort of idea of an amethyst if i'm saying it probably you know it's this glass interior with this really solid rock exterior and we just really appreciate these beautiful interiors of glass and so what we did was look to really just create a glass ceiling with very simple pieces using standard parts putting them together in different unique combinations to create this sort of glass chandelier so basically all this is is glass fins that are assembled with different colors and different light that actually create this large glass chandelier and by doing that and putting glass on the ceiling of this roof that's highly reflective we're looking at ways to bounce light up and really activate this chandelier not just with electric light but also with the natural light and also by doing that as i mentioned i was able to look up and experience that that ceiling these are interesting things just how you do it there's like you walk around buildings and you start focusing on things so sometimes i'll work on a project i'm like doing with a doorknob and all of a sudden every doorknob is as big as like that clock all you see is doorknobs and so when you're when you're looking at how am i going to support this glass all you see is smoke baffles like all over the city and so you say wow this is pretty cool we can just basically make smoke baffles hang from the ceiling and put them together and you can make combinations and these are just some more of the images that we're working with the owner with wood and creating environments that are social in the lobby that really just make a brand new entry so this got a fun job it's really just going getting started and we're looking to be in construction in the next couple months so it'll be exciting so this is a fourth project that we did in we're doing in charlestown massachusetts the navy shipyard and boston has this great tradition like many cities and the whole navy shipyard is you see it this is where they repaired these great huge boats and today it's pretty extinct but there's this real history of like objects you know on the waterfront you know where they bring they dry dock these boats and submarines and they repair them and the memory of these things are so there you know you go walk around the navy shipyard and you see parts and pieces and you see these places where vessels were it's pretty amazing so our client asked us to work on a marina on a building in on a pier in boston so you guys are probably studying this has become more of an issue in all of our education not just professionals is what about what's the what is the resiliency issues you know what is the issues surrounding sea level rise or storm surge it's a real problem and these are diagrams that sort of make believe but they're really not that they're studying very closely what is happening in and around boston and so what you're looking at is the edges which are susceptible to flooding and there's our site which is pier eight which is when you look at the atlantic and you look at the boston harbor islands and you look at this this wave attenuation that comes through the mouth of the river here excuse me right through the mouth of the harbor and up in pier eight where our site is for this marina we're doing is right at like the head of all this activity so when you think about that i don't know if anyone remember the storm maybe a month ago you see on the news like a lot of the seaport in boston was under water and i've actually been talking to some of the restaurant owners down there they got like six inches of water and it's a new it's a real problem and it's actually complex business problem because these people have like some responsibility for their own space but then you have a landlord responsibility for how to you know maintain these spaces so when you look at the back bay and it's being all filled if you're familiar with parts of boston the back bay has been filled it was pretty much a swamp and in the victorian era they basically built all these houses you know the projecting like this idea that it's gonna flood and i you know if you're in our studio last semester you know we work with the gulf of main research institute this is their main thing you know they're studying what is sea level rise in the gulf of main and it's up and down the coast and i actually think it's a significant design opportunity for architects so i remember i want to tell you this quick story when i worked at my childhood seven years ago i went out to la we were doing a project out there and we went to the neuroscience center by todd williams anyone people familiar with the building beautiful building and we're just stumbling around and there and behold the owner of the neuroscience center like comes up to us on a really nice day he's like hey what are you guys doing you know we're just architects like walking around i'll give you a tour he gives us a tour of the whole building and he starts gloating about todd williams who gave a talk here last semester right one of my favorite architects amazing and he's showing all these moves and he starts i started looking at this ramp and he had modified the design of a ramp in such a way that the handrail didn't begin if you can imagine this until you get up to a certain height and really what it was a very clever lesson to me i said well this guy he understood the building code that the handrail didn't need to begin until a certain height and so he didn't include it and so it was that very interesting interdisciplinary knowledge about taking a restriction and using it to your advantage and making it art making it sculpture this is where we can be in this space so if we're going to encounter flooding and they're going to be looking to architects to design buildings for everybody and how to to combine these problems and solve problems and be leaders what do we do about it how do we study it and so when we looked at this pure eight project being right on the mouth of all that harbor and all that activity we also looked at all the mapping the sea level rise scenarios over time they're really what they're doing here is they're projecting like over a 70 to 100 year period that there is going to be significant sea level rise like over time and that nobody knows what the answer is but you got people with all different opinions you know one two three four five six feet kind of rising above where the waterline is right now and then you have this other complex situation where you have sea level rise right slowly creeping at different high tides combined with storm surge or you know category storms so these are pretty intense storms like category one is like 75 mile an hour so you start combining 75 mile an hour with sea level rise with buildings and sites that are potentially underwater you have serious implications and i'm telling you in the real world this is a major conversation take advantage of this in school because you can really gain a lot of exposure to what's going on here and so in this site where we are at the top of this pier and all this movement there's all this really great combination that happens in the state is that everybody wants access to the water and so they have this state law called chapter 91 and this is this red line right here that runs all the way around the perimeter which is actually for certain parcels it says that a developer or a landowner has to provide public access to the water's edge it's a tremendously awesome rule because really if you go to certain cities you have no access when we were up in portland our class we really couldn't go to the water's edge different situation very industrial but there was a like invisible line there and so when you combine programmatic opportunities for bringing people across the water's edge with all this other flooding issues like that you realize that you know how can you make it safe how can you make it acceptable for people to come there so this is a photo which is taken really at the end of a of a wharf in Boston these are public spaces and you know they're under water very dangerous and really it's starting to extend I think this photo was taken just inland maybe two blocks it's off broad street you know you got serious other water issues and so we can take advantage of that as an opportunity to design things sensibly that integrate with our environment so what's interesting about this is this map I love this map too because you're looking at all the flooding and then you're looking at all the raw land I was in a meeting a couple weeks ago I actually worked for the convention center in Boston and we've been uh I'm on their designer selection panel where we vote on capital projects swimming room and someone said these are just like a couple days after the big storm and someone said yeah it's like mother nature is taking their land back it's a very interesting comment so we started like looking at the map of like here's downtown Boston here's all the areas that were filled remember I showed you that picture of the back bay and you're looking at how is that really different than some of the mapping that the scientists are doing it's really going back to its water's edge which is a fascinating sort of dilemma dilemma so now to the project you have this pier and you've got these docks and we started going a little deeper and being a little quantitative it's great to look at qualitative pieces in design but sometimes getting it to some data helps you make formative design decisions and so we studied what are the different heights along that dock edge on a real height level that we would need to be to be above some of these category storm heights and storm surges and really what we did is we designed this building which is a marina building which is really offices and a public event space on the second floor and some amenity spaces for them we elevated all these are different planes that respond to the different category storms so as you look at this you have you know the category one two three and you look at these different heights and so what we did is we just basically set the building and its heights at different locations so this is the dock height which is slightly above a one the second floor the third floor and they're really truly calibrated to these different areas and so what that did is it gave us an opportunity to merge the design decisions that we made with some of the real resiliency studies that are things that need to occur and looking at the programming and being at the end of the pier we wanted to take advantage of some of the views and we wanted to take advantage of the dock remember I told you about that chapter 91 circulation that goes around the perimeter well that is right along this dock edge and so this is a section showing the different storm heights and calibrating the floor levels above that and so when we went to diagram it with our client we said well first thing we had to do is get the the pier up the pier is set at 15 we're going to move this up about a foot or two and realize that being high you're not really accessing the water so we extended the dock down below and walk through so we could extend that public space and then we did some very simple masking studies and said hey if it's a two-story building it's going to take up all of your pier and a big block building you still you can satisfy your walk around the water but what if we offset the building and made a three story building and took advantage of that chapter 91 walk to create a public space that would serve the building and the marina and they really like that idea and so what that did is you walk down the dock and you go up this ramp we were framing views that looked out to the water and also these event spaces on the upper floor were able to get above some of the main the boat heights as well to give unlimited views to the water and by doing that and building that third floor and created faceted forms around the perimeter that took advantage of the different views this allowed us to really also open up the building and really create a different experience that opened up directly to the water so now that the building that was once inhibited or or sort of screened from all the docks is really approachable in the long run and that's been a fun project hopefully they'll move back so so this is um the last project I show which is really this project we just finished in Detroit and um since I grew up in New Haven I get the subscription of the New York Times I'm still a Yankee fan and so one day I'm I'm reading and I see this come outside Detroit by and this is before we got the job and I went to school at the University of Michigan and I remember the first time I went to Detroit here I'm this probably your age you know nothing else to say on that and uh going and oh I'm gonna go to Detroit I'm thinking oh this is great it'll be just like Boston it'll be like New York it'll be Boston City the silence like tumbleweeds walking around Detroit in the 90s is not like today it was a dangerous place and when I saw this I said wow they got a lot of open space that's just abandoned lots and what opportunity is occurring so the New York Times this great article back in um I think it was 2014 or 15 and so we got approached always through some odd set of you know people that know people that get us out to a qualification list and we went out to Detroit and DT Energy who's the big energy provider for all in Michigan right and so what happens is when you pay your electric bill uh there's a certain couple pennies nickels it's sort of like that movie office space you know they just kind of roll around and aggregate and they go into this community uh or sort of let's call it a community revitalization fund that they then have to give something back you know to their community so uh went down there and you're looking at the site and it's just a massive amount of parking lots and I have to give it to the CEO Jerry Anderson great vision he saw the parking lots and he said I want to build a public space here and I want to build something that is that is going to be uh equitable for all and that all can enjoy and also be activated by a building so um Detroit have you guys studied much of it it's it's really a fascinating place and I go out there and you know people always are you know so amazing you know it's when you come to another city and you work with them and they ask you your opinion about you know what they think of Detroit or what we think of Detroit but really what's occurred over the years is that there was tremendous growth you know over time that built up the city when the automotive business was really really running high octane right and I think that there was a very interesting graph that we've come across the rise of population that occurred across you know the 2000s and somewhere around the time of the 50s 60s it was one of the biggest cities in the country and they were making cars they were making music and you know there's a lot of series there's a whole other talk about you know what happened over time here that caused you know the decline in population decline in industry and what happened here you know where they filed for bankruptcy it's a great place you go back there now and it's it's got so much personality people are doing things and really but on the heels all that is that going back to the story about what people ask me about Detroit like I kind of think that everybody in America has some connection like either through the car right or through music right Motown you know the the muscle cars of the 60s everybody has some connection I've never met anybody that's not rooting for Detroit unless they're playing the Patriots but that's a different topic they but they they I think people just gravitate want Detroit to be successful and you hear it when you go there and so when we worked on the project there's so much amazing personality and this is where it kind of gets into this context enriches craft and these things that motivate us that I was talking about in the beginning of the the talk about your client about their mission about all the people that work together is one of these principal pieces and that when you look at your client what they want to do with this big dirt site and you look at your context there's so many stories that are occurring around it so here's this Michigan theater just like pretty banal building that exists right around the edges is an amazing majestic theater you can literally go in there now and it is a parking lot I cannot believe it and if you go in there they basically have you sign a waiver because all of this ceiling could fall on you and you walk around but you just can't believe it it's like merging like you know music with automobiles in this one space and you know there's M&M he does his video in there I mean it's quite a place people like are on pilgrimages to go to this building and you never know it when you drive by it right this building which I'm gonna go back behind it which is really this building right here that faces it is another incredibly interesting building it was this old hotel the Leland hotel and and if you read about it and you can still go in there you actually cannot find a room on Expedia or one of these other kayak sites you can't but you can get a room there but you don't want to sleep there and the history of this building is that in the in the prohibition period is interesting as a human interest story this is group called the purple gang a very violent gang that ran you know alcohol between Canada and Detroit and so the people and the personalities around this thing are quite interesting and interesting enough actually when they were looking for Jimmy Hoffa that's where they went first and it's true too just before we started construction the some of the high executive people said I tell you I want to tell you something I'm gonna start excavation if we find Jimmy Hoffa there serious we're gonna stop the project and it is true so that was where it was so what we end up doing was putting this great public space in that was been the mission of our client and we created this building here that really tried to connect to it's all of its environs environs in different ways and so it's a very transparent light building as strong forms again like back to that building that had the undulating wall you know they're not just frivolous because that's how you can pull them apart they actually should have meaning and so when we were designing the structure and we were looking at how to get those roof forms to have meaning we begin to think about and these are drawings we show our clients they you know this cancel lever that sort of hangs out over the street modern building but what makes it great to do a modern building is that respect for historic structures around you right and so I would tease on today it's like we are tipping our hat right to the grand army of the republic building and we created this central stair that went up and looked at literally one of my favorite buildings the book tower which is this amazing building when you drive down the street it's literally on axis with grand river which is a major axis that brings you into the center of Detroit and it's totally modern building I mean it's literally offset it's like a camel I mean it's like crazy and but this is such if you walk around Detroit if you want if you're lost you just look for that building and you can find your way around and they're in the middle of renovating it but it's these little subtle moves that connect it and one of the couple things we did with the roofs and the structure is that we want to pull people from the metro the bus station so when people come to the city want to create a funnel that pulled them into this public space here this is our client their DT campus they said hey make sure that you give a route for all of our people to have lunch in this park and so making sure that we can have a walkway that pulls them in into that public space as well and then Detroit which is a year unique city you have tiger stadium all this activity from lion stadium tiger stadium the new red weeks and pulling people into this and it's actually working because they are trying to really create these types of civics based around the street so when we pulled this together and these forms and these connectivity we also found that this is also a very odd set of streets you got like five or six streets that are all converging on you so it's not a square lot someone please do not give me a square lot I love lots like this something that is completely messed up because what you can do with it is a lot of fun and so what we did is we started kicking all these respectful angles to all these different streets around the edges and so again when you get into the form it's something that completely be pulled apart it can't be pulled apart that all of them have direct relationships to all the pieces around it and when you get into these cantilevers and the public space that can occur over it one of the things we did is that here's the public way okay and here's this roof overhang actually hangs over the public way so we're in the meeting with the sort of mid-level people and we're like well we really should hang this building over the public way because it's gonna really make it interesting and like oh no you're gonna have to get like state approval no and they're like I was like no I really think we do it let's chop it they kept saying no and I say all right it kind of came with the conclusion said let's let the CEO decide now let me ask you something if you had an opportunity to meet with a CEO of a major organization said you can hang out over a public way so everyone can see you or just subtly chop it back so no one will see you what do you think he's gonna do you're gonna hang over the street so we got it approved through the state it was very exciting I have to say it was quite a process and uh interesting but aside from you know this poetic identity sense of place I talk about this context how can we enrich our craft and the automobile and what is about an automobile is like I love the form right and when we got into the the car concept all these strong forms pointing in different directions slim lines they're all tied to this automobile and we told them about this and they really embraced it but really the guts of it the insides are what make these things so exciting to this machine not just an urban machine that's interdisciplinary with all the pieces but like this complete automotive machine buildings are like cars they're like planes you know you can make them in such a way so when we were designing the structure we got a great structural unit to work with we work on a couple projects MEP engineer you need a school of mechanical engineering the hardest trade to work with but we just designed it in a very compact way that it's like you pop the hood on this car and when you have a building that has all these buildings around it that look down on it that you can see is like you don't want to see like a cooling tower on top of it so how do you tuck these things in how do you conceal all this equipment it was a total interdisciplinary project love doing it because everyone had a role and I think the teamwork that we have between all the partners on the job made it really exciting really interesting so that steel frame was the beginning of how to part these together they all have different angles they set up we thought through all these things working together again all pieces that go together very make it hard to pull apart worked really in a complex way towards the building but being a car and I don't have a convertible maybe one day I want to get one but I got to have a convertible for a building right something that can adapt it can change and so our client was telling Stephen in the room we we finished the building or just all the documents for sure was under construction they didn't have a they didn't have a vendor picked up like we don't know what we're going to do in this building and so they said you got to make sure we can do just about anything in this building like make sure it can be a restaurant it can be an open-air restaurant that opens out closed maybe we have performances in there maybe we have our boardroom for DTE oh maybe we'll do a farmers market presentation so we're like okay we want the job but so we went ahead and really just made this flexible adaptable you know convertible building that when closed could serve certain functions and then when open can serve other functions and that was a really exciting thing and I think that's a trend in architecture too you're gonna find that people want uses of course to be fulfilled but really they're looking for adaptability because economics allows it so that they're more powerful buildings they're more powerful adaptable structures and it gives a value to your client and this is that something that they really embraced so part of that experience and this potential restaurant I also say like this building is performance-based it's not like a music performance it's like it needed to perform glass hard floors the acoustics of the ceiling were extremely important so when we were designing it's like a restaurant a boardroom music hall we worked with our acoustic engineer and we worked out all these acoustic panels concealing equipment with our mechanical working on collecting rainwater on the this green roof that brought it into the cistern and we're a lead building and that that was another component of it but the ceiling was really the challenge is like how to make this wood ceiling like bring the lines of this machine together that's really crafted but also be extremely well pointed towards the uses so what you're looking at here is all the interior spaces around the perimeter here again around the perimeter here and all that sort of magenta color is actually acoustic material so we work with our acoustic engineer and we started zoning out percentages of fabric it's very very scientific to perform actually I was in there and they got their you know air guns all the sounds and I'm like wow it's really quiet and the contractors would come up to me and say it's really quiet in here and it was a really it was one of my favorite stories that how successful when a builder comes up to you and says wow this building is really quiet I like it and so that was a real fun thing but it's the pieces of how to build this ceiling we're so involved taking advantage of like building things with standard parts putting them together in unique combinations there's economy there but allows you to really craft this project or the pieces and I used to joke with another guy in our office when we were working on laying outside Dylan failure is not an option we're going to make sure this thing comes together and it did it was a lot of fun and really when they bring it into the shop you're looking at the scale of these pieces and how they make it this guy was amazing Steve he really owned all the pieces and you begin to really invest in the people and when they bring them into the site I want to go back to this image right here so what you're looking at is all this acoustic material and then these are unistrut pieces that hang all this steel that then support all the wood okay so hold that in your mind right now and so when you look at this you're seeing them bolted together all cut and then you're seeing the unistrut on the ceiling and you're seeing how the clips just slide in and they get bolted between the wood and really how do you know where to put all these things is crazy see this right here it's hard to tell it's basically a laser cut full scale plan of the entire ceiling that they laid on the floor and they took lasers and they just put up I was very suspicious that this whole thing would work but it did it went together but you know they they have their systems they have their ways of doing it and and it really came together and these are all the acoustic panels and it really kind of goes to the rhythms and the music and just the sound and just just making things dynamic and interesting from that and ultimately this is where it comes together for me is this other piece about the context and about you know the people is really another area that I'm very passionate about which is really are all of our each of our individuals civic responsibility right we have a responsibility to the environment that we serve we have a really a great responsibility the people we work with but the pleasure of all this the ethos of the architecture for us in the office is so geared towards you know just making places that can improve the quality of life that can hopefully find them better or make them better where and then they were before making them a part of the fabric of a community is some of the things that just make it really successful for me and pleasurable and what I want to bring back to you guys and ultimately through all this I will say too another couple things I say that you know it's all a lot of hard work you're gonna find when you get out into the world and even school is that hard work matters but more importantly you know we can all work hard but find your voice right find your purpose about what you want to do in what the work that you want to do and you know leave places better than you find it found it and I think we'll all be successful for it okay so thank you very much no question too small or not oh Greensboro North Carolina yeah that was a project we did a while ago yeah thank you I remember when Nate asked me to send some images over it was great to dust some of those off but it was it was a good project that just for the purpose of everyone here so either project in North Carolina and it was in Greensboro and a similar project like Detroit in the sense that you have a post-industrial city Greensboro is actually that whole area is the home of Levi Strauss and Wrangler and there's a whole textile industry and so a similar client in the sense that he wanted their identity be to come through in the project so we detailed a lot of wood that evoked the textile weaves and that was I think made pleasure for us because they really felt a part of the building they made gave them an identity of their architecture no it's it's that's a good question um you'll find in the in the profession that there are specialists and they are very important it's very important to be a specialist and then there's generalists and I find that the people in the office really gravitate towards this great diversity of experiences and also I demand a lot that they are empowered to actually work with all these different people and I hope they you know that that's a good experience I'm looking at these guys in the back they uh it is it is true we I think the people in the office grow a lot and they contribute enormously and it's a real team we're a small office but we do we actually have a lot of production and it really is because we think very consistently together and we engage uh good professionals I I say this a lot the people that you work with like I want a structural engineer who's not just a structural engineer like am I the guy I did the GeoTech project he's like an architect but he's just a structural engineer my landscape architect is like an architect no my geotech engineer is like somebody else that crossover attitude is going to make you a better professional and make you more valuable in the workforce and hopefully allow you opportunities to really um create more interesting things oh yeah I have absolutely absolutely that would be a lot of fun if you I'm happy to walk in there that would be great okay well uh oh yeah yeah uh I I love wood for a number of reasons because mostly it's a warm material it's natural it's sustainable um and there's something magical about what you can do with it I mean you can shape it you can you can really expose the material qualities of it and um I think that uh it's just the carpenter kind of part of architects that they want to work with wood but I find that a wood alone is interesting but the combination with other materials so uh different question but you know the sort of um CLT mentality yeah that's uh the great um new I think approach to buildings that were also advancing and I encourage people to do the same yeah no I I we love complex problems I honestly it's and complex problems uh that just continue to aggregate more people that we can lead in a design process that can bring things together interestingly you know the new I think the that PR8 project and the common conversation around resiliency is fascinating I mean you know you got so many layers of complex problems that go into a building you know not only with programming or the structure or just the systems and then to sort of put energy into that conversation to put sustainable design into it now to overlay you know these resilient principles I think we're advanced we're very interested in that area because I think it's the area that needs a lot of attention for design and the way design could turn a problem into an opportunity and that that's that's the space that where I think we're most interested right now yes yeah okay yeah it's great it's a great question I think um this is a challenge no doubt uh doing they're doing environmentally sensitive projects or doing projects that like a net zero energy or net zero water there's a lot of capital investment up front to get the returns on the energy savings so they tend to be geared towards end users often or public institutions or entities because they are this end user I do find that it's a very uh it's a very hard thing to to to find value not I shouldn't say that I think where people are going to make those decisions is around value when is it a value add to them to do that it could be marketing so sometimes like we did a housing project it was Lee Platinum they really only cared about doing the Lee Platinum project because they wanted to put it on their marketing brand and appeal to people who are going to rent spaces that we have a Lee Platinum building sure you know the energy costs were lower it it went to the to the renter and that was a big benefit in DTE being an energy provider right you'd think that that would be at the forefront of their value that they need to meet that I don't think it was it was really about just if the design worked and if the dollars worked and if we can combine them together for that project I think he was trying to attract a type of tenant from another state he was looking for like I want to get another Microsoft I want to get somebody big that is going to want to pay attention to that so but what's going to happen over time with all this kind of attitude about energy and about sustainability and about resiliency the friend in that process if you are interested in pursuing that is certainly your design creativity where you can blend it together but also the regulatory process is geared actually towards advancing these topics they want smarter buildings they want more energy efficient buildings we want you know low carbon footprints you know these are things that you go to certain cities are writing new legislation for and so because of that what you're learning now about this is going to be more and more applicable and more relevant so I hope that kind of gives you a kind of over sense of it all right thank you very much appreciate it