 It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight who I think a number of you know, Haril Pandya. Haril is an architect and a principal at the thriving office of CBT in Boston where he's also a director of asset strategy and repositioning. Haril has over 24 years of professional experience with corporate and commercial buildings and campuses in urban and suburban context in the Boston area and beyond, but his work is orbited primarily around existing properties and developing modern approaches to upgrade, evolve and transform them. His design studio at CBT has an impressive array of over 90 projects they've completed since their inception about a decade ago and in doing the work he's leveraged the fact which we've heard a number of times I think underlined in this lecture series this fall which is that reusing existing buildings can translate into a really good business proposition but also one that brings with it a really strong environmental argument as well. Haril is also active in seeking ways to reposition architecture in public perception I'd say and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Fortune magazine, Huffington Post, just to mention a few, but he's also appeared on local and national media spreading the message about his particular approach to the work. He's also recipient of the Young Architects Award and an active architectural educator as many of you know who may be even in his studio. Haril is currently leading the graduate level design studio for CBT here as a teaching firm in residence at the school and the work of the studio is very much focused on precisely this kind of work. So I'll let him take over for now and please join me in welcoming Haril. Thanks a lot. How's everybody doing okay? Seven o'clock. Good. Thank you for having me today it's an honor to have been asked to not only be part of the teaching firm in residence by Dean White earlier but also being asked to speak as part of the lecture series here at Roger Williams. As Nate said my name is Haril Pandia. I am a principal at CBT in Boston as mentioned my focus is in building repositioning and asset strategy. A concept of looking at new ways of transforming old buildings and making them beautiful, modern and market competitive. We are an award-winning multidisciplinary firm with 225 people focused on architecture, urban design and interior design but simply put we are focused on design at all scales. This is our 50th year it's our birthday this year so it's it's quite exciting and we continue to be a big part of the ever-changing skyline of Boston and beyond. So you see I believe that there's intrinsic value in all buildings. I believe that each building possesses a story in its walls. I believe that each building has a responsibility in contributing to the overall betterment of the community, city in town and experience of the general public and its current and future occupants. One thing that we can rely on is new or old, the users, the residents, the occupants, the tenants and the public will change over time and the demands these people place on the buildings too will change over time. We as a society, a race, community are constantly evolving and adapting to our environment but sadly our buildings don't always evolve to adapt to us. It's easy to say that once we outgrow a building we will simply build a bigger or better one because we need more space. Our kids are growing up so it's time to get a bigger house or renovate this one or let's just buy the new McMansion that this builder made over there and that's bigger and better and stronger than every other house. So as we evolve, can the buildings around us, new or old, evolve and adapt to? How are we different than we were 50 years ago? What's changing and what are new ways that buildings can change with us? So today we'll touch upon the evolution of us and some forgotten buildings. Hey, it works. So when you look at the definition, which is always the easiest place to begin, evolution, a process or a change in a certain direction. So the first definition doesn't really quite talk about good or bad. It just says in a certain direction. A process of continuous change from lower or simpler or worse to a higher or more complex state. So essentially talking about growth. So now evolution in a sense was talking about growth or betterment. And a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political or economic advancement, advancement, sort of the more key term here, growth, advancement, betterment. There are a lot of good examples of evolution and many things that we see around us. We can start with the very most simplistic thing. The phones have evolved, right? It used to be a hello operator, can I help you type of a scenario? And of course now we've evolved into something a lot more dynamic, user friendly. And technology is a very easy place to go and look and talk about an evolution of things. These are good evolutionary things. Of course they're bad evolutionary things, right? So the waltz, a very fantastic dance from yesteryear, has sometimes sadly devolved into not so great dances. And not necessarily the focus of today, but you can tell there's positive evolution and negative evolution. So how have buildings evolved? Well, one way to simply look at it is buildings are taller than they've ever been. They are definitely feats of engineering improvement. And we're looking at better materials. I'm trying to put this in front of me here so I'm not going to keep looking at my, I'm cracking my head over here. Better materials, better shapes, better form, better aesthetic, and better design. So that's one way that buildings have changed over time. The other way to look at it is as these buildings get bigger and taller and whatnot, they tend to take up more land. They tend to take up more space. When you're in downtown Manhattan and more and more buildings get built, they block access to natural light. They use more energy and sometimes destroy older buildings in the process. So there's definitely pros and cons in doing this sort of thing. Over time, we've seen buildings change rather drastically. There have been simpler forms, you know, like obviously the pyramids, very simple, utilitarian building form. And then as technology changes and we discover new materials like steel, and we're able to achieve new heights, we can get fantastic forms of architecture. So there's a sense of evolution that have evolved through the buildings that we see today. There's always that sense that we want to create bigger and better, it seems, as architects, as designers, you know, we tend to kind of push the envelope, push the boundaries, work with technology and materiality, as I mentioned, to really try to get much taller and better buildings. But what it comes down to is a sense of cheating time a little bit with buildings. We want to build buildings that outlast. Pyramids are a great example of buildings that outlast. As architects or designers, we want to create an impact. That's kind of why we do what we do to a degree. Personally, we probably want to leave a legacy, meaning as an architect, it's like you want to be proud of the thing that you've created and help design and impart and leave in the city or in the town. And you want to sort of affect the imprint of the city as far as what you're doing socially, what are you doing sustainably, what are you doing economically to help improve, and you want to leave that everlasting sort of imprint behind. These are a lot of the reasons why I went into architecture, is to think about creating things that outlast me. Thinking about things that I've seen that have outlasted my predecessors before, colleagues and, sorry, architects and historic architectural figures that we studied before, that we study now today. So, slight detour. For me, I got the classic question when I was young, which I'm sure a lot of you did, which is what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, a lot of architects probably decided that they wanted to be an architect maybe much later in life before they even hit undergrad. But for me, it kind of started when I was nine. So, it's hard to believe I've had such a direct path for 30 plus years that's straight-lined into architecture that really hasn't veered at all. But for me, when I was nine, I had actually visited India and where I'm from and I visited this dairy. So, it's, you know, functioning manufacturing dairy, milk, cheese, etc. And I'm walking around this thing and I was wondering, I'm like, why are we at this dairy? And, you know, my mom kind of turns to me. She's like, well, your dad helped design this thing. Now, my dad passed away when I was three. So, this was sort of an epic revelation for me at nine to be able to look at a building that has some imprint, some legacy, has outlasted time that someone very close to me had worked on. Now, that's sort of a profound thing when you're a young kid and when you're that age and you haven't met your dad, really, to think that that's the thing, that's the legacy that he's left behind. Pretty much from that point on, I was pretty convinced I'm like, this is kind of what I'm gonna do. And that was a really big piece for me personally to say that, you know, if I can do something that can leave an imprint behind, that can leave a profound effect on me, wouldn't I? Of course. Since then, when I decided to become an architect and go down that road, I decided to go to RPI, and that's sorry, Roger Williams, but I went to RPI for my undergrad. And, you know, here's where the seeds started to get planted. On campus for five year program, you know, as school of architectures tend to be. And I sort of discovering that the buildings that were there on campus were not necessarily being used for the original intended use that they were. And I said, it didn't really quite hit me until much later that that was the case. So you look at the church that's in the middle, that's the computer science lab. You look at the armory in the lower left, that's the gym. And, you know, the upper left building is the new so there's newer buildings that are there on campus to sort of ultimately be leave those footprints. But I just find I found it really interesting in a very sort of, you know, classic style campus set of campus buildings that there's a lot of sort of reimagining and repurposing going on already. So that's we're going to plant that seed. We're going to come back to that a little bit later. But that I thought was quite interesting that, you know, that's what was the phenomenon as I moved from on campus to whoops, to off campus. I found that a lot of my, my friends, my, you know, schoolmates there were all moving downtown now Troy, which is a really horrendous and depressed industrial town. Troy, New York had a lot of library schools and mills and all things were converted into residential buildings. And I'm like, This is fantastic. So when you look at the lower right picture, this is a picture of one of the mill buildings in Troy that's been converted to residential. And, you know, when you're an architecture student, you're like, This, this is amazing. This is something that you wanted to sort of be a part of. And, you know, we were we were looking at that a lot in school to the point where we're really interested to create and do projects that were about conversions of buildings so much so that actually I did my entire thesis on a conversion of a building in on Beacon Street in Boston. And essentially, it's, it's those that cluster of four with the white tops over there. And it was about turning that building into adaptive reuse. So it was to be a temple, a school, cultural center performance. That was that was the entire thesis was based on transforming that thing and creating a presence and something really different and new and intervention along Beacon Street that was part of already an academic subculture that's there because there's so many universities and buildings. But you can't tell because it disappears into this fabric of brick that you can't really quite tell what the use is. So the thesis for me at that time. So yeah, sort of seed number two being planted. So I graduate school and I leave and I decided, well, I got to go be an adult and get a real job and, you know, and start being a contributing member as a designer and do something and leave my imprint, my time, my legacy, my timeless architecture, how I had no idea. And but that was the that was that was the concept. And I think that's, you know, that's part of a lot of what you and what our studio is was focused on is how do we take what we're learning here in the studio and translate it beyond into the workplace. So after a couple after a few jobs, you know, before I really settled into CBT, it was a learning experience. There's a lot of developer based work, a lot of destroy a lot of sites and buildings so I can we can make new buildings didn't really quite sit quite quite right. But I thought it was still it's par for course is what we do as architects. It was all really it was all really kind of going great for quite some time. Started at CBT in 2004. And, you know, I was honored and privileged to be a part of a lot of leadership based things 40 under 40, worked on the board of the BSA, the architects award that name mentioned, you know, we're getting a little bit of momentum did some video work even while we were at CBT. And we was just a lot of fun. We were having a good time 2006 2007, really big heyday economically, we were doing, we're at the pinnacle 288 people in the office we had grown tremendously. And, you know, we're really trying to we were really making some some headroom. But, after 2008 economic disaster, and this affected our industry, rather profoundly, as architects, if you've lived through a few recessions, you would know that, you know, we're the we're the last to get hit. We're also the last to recover. And that's a it's a pretty big challenge. And we had to find a way to to reinvent ourselves. And, you know, we were front, we were at 280 some odd people, like I mentioned, but within three months, we were down to 120. And it was a really, you know, tragic and soul crushing time for a lot of folks in the design industry, kids who are coming out of school couldn't get jobs and folks who were who had jobs couldn't retain the jobs that they had. So a really, really tough time. So but you can imagine, at that moment, to really go out there and try to win work and win projects and keep the the engine of the company fed, we had to find a different way to reinvent what we what we were doing. So in that time, in 2006 and 2007, we I'd worked on a few projects that had come into into the city. And they were sort of they were repositioning projects, they were done independently through for a few different owners. But it was part of it was part of a big change in Boston when a few asset owners had come in and really bought a fair amount of real estate. But in that time, and working on those projects, it's sort of when I had my, and these are some of the projects that I mentioned, this was, you know, adding new faces to the front. And we'll talk about some of these in case studies in a little while. But, you know, repositioning old 70s and 80s buildings was a big sort of thing going on in in 2006 and 2007. And these are some of the projects post office square, all around post office square, the middle one is one Memorial Drive, and we'll come back to some of these. But when I started looking at this, and we were in the middle of the recession, these were successfully completed projects. I started putting two and two together, I started remembering a few things of some of the buildings that I saw on on campus. And I started having my aha moment, slow, but I had this sort of light bulb moment, where I'm like, wait a minute, I think this is a thing. And we had to find a way to be creative in an incredible down economy, to be really creative and find a way to position reposition ourselves, frankly, and find a new way of looking at architecture and design. And I could stare at this guy all day, he makes me smile no matter no matter what, it's a great movie, if you haven't seen it. So the case was that we had to, and simply put, we had to look at buildings very differently. We had to look at making very small changes because we had clients and building owners that really couldn't afford big, big moves like you saw earlier. Those were a 13, 15, 20, 30 million dollar moves back in that day that no one was going to pay for in 2008. No one was even going to pay for a new piece of art or a chair, let alone, you know, all the sort of large scale repositioning work. So we had to find ways to actually provide graduated value and create value add in buildings for people who owned assets that weren't doing large scale developer work. But we're willing to put in a little bit of work, a little bit of design, a little bit of money to separate and differentiate their building versus the other guy. And I think that's where, and we can stare at this all day, that's where I sort of started looking at how things, how buildings really start evolving. This brings me back to sort of the original, original diagram that we were talking about. And the evolution here, so you have the classic diagram below, which is sort of the, you know, the ape to man. But I'm looking at it a little bit differently. So in one way, the ape to man sort of represents growth, advancement, betterment, we're getting smarter. But at the same time, it's a very in my mind, does not represent the views of others. In my mind, it's always that it's a very simplistic solution at times to just simply design a big tall building. It's an answer to a need for space. It's a developer, you know, move or it's a profitability move, or you've been commissioned to do something and you want to make something epic that leaves creates a profound statement in a city or urban realm or something like that. It seems pretty simple. In one way. It's sort of an expected thing. Maybe there's not a big story around it. But then if you look at the buildings up top, as they get smaller and they go back to sort of the older buildings that were there at that time, the sort of forgotten buildings, maybe it's as we get smarter and more evolved, we find new ways of bringing those buildings back to life and adapt to us and not simply knock them down, create to create more space to build just more tall buildings. Now this has sustainability repercussions this having the sense that we're looking at buildings that are already there and we're finding ways to bring them back. So to me, it's a little bit more of a different way of looking at sustainability. It's we can be more creative. Sometimes the outcomes are unexpected, like when you walk into one of these mill buildings or it used to be a school or it used to be something and now you walk in and your experience in your mind is totally blown over the fact that I had no idea this was on the inside. It's pretty, it's pretty amazing to be able to create that experience. So the transformative quality of doing that to me, I found really kind of exciting and energetic because to have these older buildings become new and competitive, competitive members of the community and the urban society and the urban realm is really quite, is really quite amazing. Now another way to look at it is say that, well, all you're doing is renovations. There's really nothing, you know, you haven't really reinvented the wheel. There's nothing really exciting or fancy about what you're doing. Yeah, that's true. But remember, this was birthed out of the fact that this was a response to an economic time where no one was willing to do anything. You could be, you were an architect without work for quite some time. So we had to find a way to get really, really smart and creative about it. And there's the simple breakdown that I'm showing here is that there's the idea of preservation when we talk about old and forgotten buildings. There's the idea of renovating them and there's repositioning them and then there's sort of this whole notion of adaptive reuse and the line between these are, it's a fine line. But the way I'm looking at it is when you look at preservation, it's often entrenched in history. You're sort of keeping the narrative. The building that was is the building that is. Nothing is really quite changed. You're replacing things in kind and you're restoring them. I think of preservation as a restoration thing at times. You're doing repairs and the building still remains frozen in time. That's to me sort of the sense of preservation. Nothing wrong with it. I think it's fantastic. There's a lot of amazing preservation projects. That's not even the commentary. This is just understanding the arc. Then there's renovation where you have this sort of mix of old and new at the same time. And it's kind of like renovating your house. I often bring it back to the house because everyone has lived in some sort of home at some point. So imagine if you or your parents or anyone else has renovated your home and you're like, well, we just did the kitchen over and that looks fantastic. But the living room still looks like it's got the flower wallpaper from 1976. That's what it is. It just kind of fell short. And sometimes renovations are there. They're in selected areas and they're fixes for moments in time. Then you get to repositioning. This is where I sort of enter the realm and I start getting really excited about it because it's now starts blending. You can take historic buildings, old buildings, forgotten buildings. You can create a new narrative within the same building. You can rebrand the building. It was called this. Now it's called that. You can completely change the experience of the person walking into the building. It's got a fantastic, sustainable story because I haven't really quite destroyed very much, if anything. And to me, the exciting part is the fact that it's market driven because the best part about market driven means the market changes. It means I got to change too. And I think that's what keeps us as designers really nimble. You can't put the same recipe and the same equation and keep applying it over and over again. It changes. It has to be responsive. And then there's a whole notion of adaptive reuse, which means it used to be this and how it's something totally different. It used to be a brick mill building that produced paper goods and delivered them. But now it's residential building and they're just very different things in the same skin. It's a new narrative just as the other one is. It's transformative. It's evolving the use, meaning we're not tearing it down and doing something new. And again, it too has a sustainable story. So I like to think that I dance in this arc of four topics pretty regularly, leaning a little bit more towards the repositioning and the adaptive reuse side of things. Oddly enough, our firm was founded in preservation 50 years ago in 1967. And that's where we got our start as CBT was in preservation. So the building on the left is the John Adams Courthouse in Boston preserved. We won a great preservation award for it and we spent many, many years meticulously going over all the paint and the trim work and bringing it back to life. And ideally, if you were to walk in that building today, it looks exactly like it did when it was first put up. Mine is really cool lighting probably now and some modern and more up-to-date furniture. The middle project is the addition that we did to the MFA and worked with Sir Norman Foster on it. And that's a renovation project, right? So there's old parts of the museum that still remain and there's new pieces in the addition that our new experience, our new narrative. The upper right is one post office square that's a repositioning exercise, meaning the most, the bigger, the majority of that building is still intact. We've branded it a little bit differently. It's market driven because the building had tenants that were about to leave and we had to resign a ton of tenants to make sure that they would stay in 2006 and 2007. The architecture here was responsive to market conditions. The owner was willing to pay $14 million to do it, but that $14 million was against the fact that they could make a certain amount of revenue, right? So that's what I mean by market driven. And then the lower right building is adaptive reuse. I know some of the students here have seen this building. This is a post and wall fan outside of Boston in the suburbs. And this used to be, or is, a half a million square foot mail distribution facility. And for the students here, mail is a thing. We used to write letters. We'd put them in envelopes. You put a stamp on it. You put it in this blue box. It would disappear and magically show up. We used to write letters. And so it used to be a mail distribution facility and it's defunct. You know why? Because we don't write letters anymore. However, the owners that bought the building saw a greater story. They said, can we turn this building into something else? And we ended up turning it into a half a million square feet of really creative and tech office space. But keeping post as part of the narrative. So the landscape design actually in this courtyard that we'll, I will show you this because it's part of the case study that we created, is actually, although the granite lines in the landscape is barcode. And that barcode actually represents a zip code of wall fan in the city that it's in. And if you zoom out far and you can scan it on a Google Earth thing, it actually registers Waltham, Massachusetts. Fun stuff. But we took a lot of these projects that we were doing. And we started talking about, and this is, we started talking about the why. This is, I know some folks in my class, we've watched this thing. But Simon Sinek is one of my heroes. And if you haven't seen a video by this guy, you really need to go watch it. Especially this one. It starts with why. It's short, but it's definitely worth to watch. This is where things started really changing for me and what I thought about bringing to life in architecture. And he really simply called it the golden circle. And that's something that he kind of came up with. And, you know, he kind of delineated it by saying, the middle is why, the next layer out is how and what. It's easy to compete with what you do. We're architects. We're designers. We create products and buildings all the time. How we do it is kind of relatively the same from firm to firm or from person to person. We use the same software. We use the same tools for the most part. We have a lot of folks that come out of architecture schools that for the most part teach the same-ish type of things. But what you need to know is why are you doing what you are doing? I find now, more than ever, that if I can convince a client why I'm doing what I'm doing and if I can get them to believe in the why of what I'm doing, the what becomes really easy to sell. The how is expected because they expect we're an architecture firm or design firm. They expect you to do it because you can. So the what is just an outcome. It's a byproduct of the why. If you can get them to agree with why it's important to you and make them believe what you believe, then the why becomes critical and it becomes a very, very effective tool and not only convincing folks of your design, but ultimately convincing your clients why they should build what you're doing. So I highly recommend you go check them out. Very engaging guy. But the why thing became very critical and that's when I went back to the buildings at RPI and that's when I went back to the lofts that my friends stayed in and that's why I went back to my thesis and I went back to 2006 and 2007 and those quick repositioning projects that we did over a couple years and I said there is something here that not many architects are doing in a very sort of definitive way. Again, like I said, it's we all kind of do renovation projects. There's really nothing inventive in a renovation project unless you kind of put it in a particular method or lens to look at it that makes it very unique. So we started talking about it and we've had to again remember this was in 2008 where the recession was right in the swing of things and we had to come up with a way to talk about this differently than anybody else in our competitive set. So we started treating the building like a person. It was the easiest way to talk about it because everyone can understand that. We started talking about making certain changes like you would make changes to yourself. You wear a hat, you wear a shirt, you wear shoes. Are you going to wear the most expensive shoes? You're going to wear, you know, you're going to pay less. You shop in an old Navy or you shop in a Gucci. And when you start looking at it a little bit like that, although comical, a little whimsical, it put it into a context for the client to understand saying, you know what, I can wear a great fake or I can spend the investment and wear something that's got value over time. And we were trying to get them to believe that there's putting value add in buildings that will increase the value of their buildings over time. So we started calling it small, medium, large, extra large, just like, you know, your clothes. You can do small things and you can do super extra large things to a building, but it came down to the level of value. We always used to say, well, you can spend all this money and the value meter will only go so far. Or you can get to a certain point where it creates enough value to remain competitive and that's where this succeeded because it was a great day to tool. So we put it in a book saying this is how we do it. We were very open about it because we wanted to make sure that everybody understood it and everyone knew that we were the only ones doing it at that time, which was sort of a critical piece because we had to somehow pull ourselves out of this economic conundrum. Skyrocketed, we added a bunch of staff, we grew, we did a lot more projects, it was fantastic. We started creating a national dialogue about it. We started talking about this because people wanted to hear because there were some factors that really started changing this now. When we're dealing with corporate commercial space in a city like Boston, there's not a lot of single family homes in our portfolio at that time and because we were a firm of that size, a lot of the work we were doing really had to deal with corporate commercial. So it's office buildings, you know, multifamily residential towers, that sort of thing. And we had academic and some other components, but we wanted to create a national dialogue. And what we started realizing right away was there's a huge influx and a generational swing that was happening in the workplace that really was starting to define who uses the space and why they use the space. And I wish I had another sloth picture because that was yet another aha moment because at that moment we realized that the thing that we need to talk about most is a generation that at that time is affecting us the most, our friends and millennials, right? But we went past the millennials because we kind of got a little bit millennial overload and we started talking about Generation Z and I'll talk about that in a minute. But we started creating a national dialogue, Ted talks, the whole thing about understanding what's coming. I did this Ted talk a while ago called The Death of the Corner Office and I'm not going to necessarily do it, but the highlights essentially, which is what I wanted to hit, is to really understand the fact that a very simple notion of the corner office, I think my family growing up had that notion it's a little bit of a generational thing that there is a amount of success associated with being in the corner office. Being in the corner office says I've arrived, I've made it, there's some sort of recognition for being there, but it didn't systemically address how people work. So I would point out by saying there's people that work in cubicles that look like this, right? Where they just sort of put dead plants, family photos, the whole thing and it's adorned and you're allowed your eight by eight cubicle and that's the end of it, you know, and you had to work like you had to work and you had to work like she had to work. There was no difference, you were just a lot of that space. But we're nesters, so we try to take over this space and like fine, this is what I'm going to get, I'm going to make it my own. But the corner office was still the big prize because everybody wanted their privacy, they wanted their silence, it was sort of the crowning jewel of what it is. But if you go back in time as to how that, you know, sense of office space really arrived, we started talking about the notion that no one worked in a very collaborative way back in the day like we work today. And I'm not even talking about, you know, student life because we have very collaborative spaces here that are very conducive to conversation but back in the old and golden days of office, everyone was allotted their little pieces of furniture and those little pieces of furniture represented your little chunk of real estate, that's where you had to stay. And if you wanted to talk to somebody else, you'd be like, I'm going to send my secretary a memo and that secretary's going to walk it over six feet, drop it off to Bill, Bill's going to read the memo, respond back to the secretary and come back to me. I mean that was like, that's how it was. And, you know, everyone was sort of looking straight ahead, there was really no big, big change of what it was. But now, you know, when you go into the workplace, the pendulum has swung completely the opposite way. So if you've ever gone to any, anyone who knows office space and they got ping-pong tables and food tables and they got free food and they got bars and baristas and they got all kinds of crazy stuff, it's great. It's fantastic when you're trying to hire a new talent because, hey, come check out this office, we've got really cool stuff. It's not, hey, we do really cool things and you have to believe in what we do. We just have cool stuff. So come work here, right? So it's gone so far that it's kind of, it's, you know, it's a little inexplicable. We're, you know, with the term open office, you know, which is the sense that everyone used to have sort of their set 10 by 12 offices and that was it. And you come out of your office, go talk to the other person, go back into your office, shoeboxes. But now everybody wants this open office. It's so wide open that you're hearing like some guy coughing, laughing, sneezing, whatever it is, headphones, leaking music, like the whole thing. It's gotten a little bit so far that it's starting to annoy people, frankly, and it's kind of gone so far that it's distracting. But we kind of were thinking, well, how do we get there? And I go back again to the evolution of how we use space and how we've occupied home. So I went back in time a little bit and I said, well, the evolution of the modern home was in the track houses that were done in World War II. All the houses were the same. Every room had a purpose and there was a purpose for every room, the sewing room, parlor, dining room, guest room. We left everything in pristine condition. Folks were only allowed to use the one room, the parlor. That was it. That's where you entertained. That was the end of it, right? And then as time went on, then I happened in the 70s and 80s, what happened was what I like to call the great room phenomenon. Everyone had a great room in their house. I don't know if some of you guys still have a great room back at home. And that was like a centralized location, not a small place. It was a centralized location where everyone got to hung out and did their thing, right? It's where I'm like the kid on the rights where I used to play the video games and that's where we entertained company when they came over. And then technology untethered us and we got to move around and we took work out of the office and we went to local coffee shops and everyone was like, I'm going to go work at Starbucks because you can work at Starbucks. You're not in your home anymore. And that was the next big thing. So we started looking at this thing and started to realize that the generational shift has caused an evolution in a way that we have to really look at the buildings that we are currently occupying. When you look at baby boomers, this was what I like to call the who generation. Who worked? The man worked back in those days. So the workplace was designed around the man working. Mahogany, lined walls, big desks, those green lamps with the pull chains. You work a couple of jobs. You get your pension plan. You get a gold watch and you're out. Generation X, that's me. That was the Y generation. And that was the we weren't making a ton of money. So why are we all working? My family needs to be working. If I'm my spouse needs to be working, everyone needs to be working. The workplace had to evolve to accommodate that. And then we get to Gen Y with the millennials, right? Those are the friends that we were talking about earlier. And they're the where generation I call them because they can pretty much work anywhere. Technology evolved to the point where they can pretty much roam around the universe and get stuff done. But what I was really interested in is what's really going to force the next push, which was Generation Z. And, you know, they're not out in droves yet because they're still pretty young. But they're the how generation because they're defining how we work or how we use buildings, how we use the space. They're not, they're about crowd sourcing. They're about co-working. They're not worried about, you know, who's making the decision or anything like that. They want to do it together and they want to do it right away. So, you know, I kind of attribute this to something very simple like Minecraft. So those of you guys who are familiar with Minecraft, it's a video game that came out. It got really huge and popular. Microsoft bought it for $2.5 billion a couple years ago. So, yeah, a big thing. And really, not so awesome graphics with 8-bit graphics, but it took off like crazy because kids were able to log on to a device, get into this fictitious world, build stuff. And what they cared about is not necessarily what they built, but how they built it. Can I borrow that saw? Can I borrow that block? Can I borrow that other thing that hammered? Sure. 18 people in one room and they built stuff together. A very different concept. You know what the high score in Minecraft is? There isn't one. There's no high scores in Minecraft because you built stuff together. It wasn't about what you can achieve. This is what I grew up with. Me against the machine, right? So it's always about the score, the high score. It was always you were working for the manual, working for the machine. So things had to evolve really quickly. And we saw places like Dunkin Donuts and all these other places that also started to evolve themselves. They did not only just serve coffee, they also had a conference room available for you so you can go work and be flexible. We talked a lot about how it was really about your attention, which is the most important thing. The spaces had to evolve, the buildings had to evolve because what mattered most is not the actual description of the space but how the space could grab your attention. Infinite desk or we had zones. This is a really big thing now in residential buildings and in work in office buildings that you create zones, quiet zones, loud zones, social zones, food zones, play zones. And when you want to go do something because that's how you work then that's where you go. And to a degree that makes sense because again, if I force everybody to go and work in the same cubicle, that's the amount of real estate that you have wouldn't you rather work in a place that was more catered to how you function and work. So whether it has a bar or feels like a hospitality type environment or some sort of cool Moroccan den at the end of the day we kept saying that the best work will always come from will not always come from the best room but from how you work in the room that you have. It was a really interesting thing and it really led us to talk a lot about transformation the evolution of these buildings because the more and more old buildings that we are seeing and these forgotten buildings that we're seeing we talk about how they're going to evolve or they're essentially that just disappear in time. So I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about three buildings that we worked on all slightly different in repositioning versus adaptive reuse and old versus new and first of all the first one here is the Schraff's building now you may have some folks from Boston and New York may have heard of the term Schraff's Schraff's is an old candy company and ice cream company way back in the day and they own about 600,000 square feet of building that used to be a candy manufacturing building meaning giant urns and melted candy and chocolate and the whole thing and right next to it used to be the Domino sugar plant so that whoops that produced the sugar bring it over next door and just make delicious yummy candy and it was in this building for many many years and they had a loading dock out front which used to be the front of the building and at some point in the early 90s or sorry late 80s or they ended up converting the entire manufacturing into an office building okay great adaptive reuse fantastic and they decided to you know we're not making candy anymore and they want to make it into a into an office building so the middle middle picture is sort of you can see these really fun giant heavy columns with these sheer plates in it and that's what because they had to hold up trucks and equipment and all kinds of good stuff and that's where this building was just incredibly bulky and very overdone for an office building so we got approached by the the folks that own the building and they're like well we need to do something very very very different here where there was a a market driven decision where a tenant was leaving creating a vacancy of over half the building that they had to do something to the building to make it competitive right so we wanted to talk about the narrative well you used to be a candy company is there a way to bring that candy sense back can we talk about it in a historic way because you were so part and parcel of you know that era and it was it employed there's some great photographs of you know so many women working in the factories in those days there was so much more community involvement from the people in charlestown and pride at working at shafts we wanted to leverage that so one day we're walking around as the story goes the one day we were walking around and the client was leading us around the building to look at the existing conditions and we stumbled upon this closet we opened this closet and they're frozen in time our boxes of unopened candy from like the you know the 20s and that sort of thing pictures photo frames and we found an old eight millimeter Andy Warhol real because he did a commercial for shafts way back in the day and we're like wow this is gold we have to find a way to leverage all this and when we reposition the building so here's here's how it is today we just completed this recently and there's a huge narrative where there's a big nice chocolate spill on the ground there's a core the candy with the bright reds and that wall that you see at the and the and the top image in the back is every image that we found in that closet scanned and turned into a art wall that talked about the history of the building and what it was all those photographs of all those folks working were there so this is a really interesting project from that perspective because it within when the renderings and all those imagery all the imagery goes out the building is a hundred percent least in under six months of when we finished the project so that's a pretty that's a pretty amazing achievement to be able to get there and lease the building but it it was because of the story it was because of the narrative and it was because of the sort of the threat of the design making its way through you can see the art wall on the upper left conference space we even took the the shear plates off those columns and actually used we came up with this idea of using fiber optics and when you take a fiber optic cable and you send light through it you can see the light going all the way through but when you ding it and chip at it the light leaks out and so to us it looked like little sugar candies you know when you were dry sugar on threads when you were kids is what it felt like so we took the six or seven columns that were in that space and did this cool fiber optic thing to it and it just it just came out quite nice it was a really interesting detail whoops surprise this was one this is one post office square and this is one that you saw earlier so the right built the right image there is this is building built in the in the late 70s early 80s and just a dark entry for boating entry on the on the entrance of the building it faced a very beautiful park and the goal there was to figure out how to create a much more welcoming entry to be able to to Lisa this was more of a you know a reposition rather than a full adaptive reuse but we wanted to find a way to bring that sense of lobby closer to the park and you can tell there's a lot of dated finishes and things like that in it but we really wanted to make a statement by doing something very very different to this building that could be very engaging so a 30 foot structured glass wall we thought was a really nice way of having an unencumbered view of the park across the way and when you're sitting in there looking out it almost feels like the building becomes part of the park and I think that was version of of a repositioning exercise for us and it did really well there's a view on the lower left to be able to actually see out and see the and see the park beyond light materials it went from a very dark and dingy and dismal lobbying to something really bright and energetic the last project here this is one that we talked about a little bit and this is the 200 Smith Project so this was the post office distribution facility you can see on the right the space just goes on forever and I think if someone were to put a golf ball in there I don't think you'd ever see the end of it because it just disappeared into nothing but we wanted to really leverage the loading dock bays that are there the garage bays and and turn a very opaque building into something really vibrant and transparent we had a couple of really interesting zoning exercises where the building was of a certain size and square footage that you couldn't really add to it so for them to allow us to do it you looked at you can see here we actually cut a slice I'm not the same points at all oh yeah we cut a slice right here with the courtyard so that took away square footage from the building so we can actually create a mezzanine inside here that ran along the edge of the building and create more square footage more square footage more rent you know it's good positive revenue stuff for the client but at the same time told a fantastic narrative for the building and allowed us to really sell a fantastic story to be able to to be able to build so this is the rendering of the of the building we wanted to use natural materials and and really kind of create better access to natural light and that's what the courtyard allowed us to do instead of looking across you know 300 feet of building to find a window now you're only looking at around 90 feet before you see some natural light which was quite nice and this is under construction so no beautiful final photography yet but nonetheless you can see that the the rendering dream is is is realized and and is and is happening as we speak and it's it's going to be it's going to be going to be pretty amazing we're really excited about that so you know when you when you think about it through all these types of projects whether they're renovations repositionings or adaptive reuse we're trying to find ways to creatively bringing buildings back to life re-energize them give us give them a sense of purpose if you will we're previously that purpose either was no longer needed failed didn't work or you know didn't stand the test of time um and we recognize that all designers have egos that's why we're here we love to design wonderful and beautiful things and that's just the way we're all wired and that's nothing to be apologetic for it's actually quite nice it's what keeps us competitive and coming up with the most creative ideas but some designers evolve and some designers really move past the bell curve of doing something really inventive and to me I thought you know jobs is a great example because he was the why he didn't say I'll build you the best phone he said I'll build you the best technology that will keep you in touch with anybody that you want in multiple interfaces that you can take that's portable PS we make great phones so he wasn't selling the what from day one he was selling the why his user interface at that time was the best user interface available so what he was selling was that and that's I often go back to that because that's the why that keeps me driven and as long as you're able to evolve as times change I think that's really one of the one of the key messages because you're trying to impact time create something that's timeless you want to create that impact you want to leave that legacy and you want to change that imprint it's always very very important you know we all go to school to be the best designers that we can be and we want to leave a mark like I said an imprint but for me it was about those forgotten buildings and the ones with stories with character and the ability to transform that anything ability to transform just about anything that's and evolve it and to become and expect something out of these spaces that make us more productive more happy and more collaborative and to me that's really sort of the end goal I think as architects and designers so we sometimes simply just have to listen and respond embrace and engage and I think when you look at it there is that evolutionary component to it we are evolving as as folks we need less space you'll see you know you're dorm spaces or your office spaces or residential and multifamily buildings hotel rooms everything's getting smaller because what they're trying to tell you is get out and sort of explore everything else the collaborative spaces the together spaces that come together in community spaces far outweigh sometimes those personal spaces and I think when we can find a way to evolve those things in older buildings especially I think we've in my opinion at least have done done right by the buildings that were intended to be timeless and have affected us it's time for us to sort of affect them and with that I want to say thank you very much for having me here and I appreciate it I don't know if there's any questions or anything but happy to hang back excellent I was very clear perfect well thank you very much for having me I appreciate it again thank you