Gensler Veteran on Mission-Critical Design | Workspace Design Lab Ep. 4

What happens when technical excellence meets human-centered design? 

In this episode of Workspace Design Lab, Syl Vander Park sits down with Michael Rane Downey, retired architect from Gensler San Francisco, to explore the design process behind some of the most mission-critical workspaces in North America. From data centers to gas operations command centers, Michael shares stories that blend technical rigor with thoughtful design, and lessons every architect and designer should hear. Whether you’re new to workspace design or decades in, this conversation will change how you think about architecture, culture, and collaboration.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Why Gensler led the industry in interior architecture
• The difference between designing for equipment vs. designing for people
• How a childhood love of drawing evolved into a lifelong design career
• Why mission-critical environments require architects who can listen
• The story behind PG&E’s Gas Operations Center after a tragic explosion
• How to prepare clients for unknowns in complex projects
• The pros and cons of design-build vs. design-bid-build
• What architecture schools get wrong about teaching design
• Advice for students trying to break into the field today
• The importance of visioning sessions in successful workplace design

BEST MOMENTS:
00:03:38. “I fell in love with things that were different from where I grew up... it changed what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be.”
00:04:58. “A friend of mine’s father was a contractor... I started designing golf courses.”
00:08:38. “You’re really a novice when you get into the real world of architectural practice.”
00:12:25. “By the time data centers hit it big, I already had 20 years of experience.”
00:20:58. “The reality is a good architect will take all the information and disseminate how it’s going to go together.”
00:28:40. “These projects were a hybrid—part critical facility, part workplace. That’s why they were some of the best.”
00:36:03. “We knew you guys were going to be the ones doing it... it was a win-win for everybody.”
00:51:00. “Now we can start to design. Now we’re getting to where I said in college what I felt was lacking.”

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Transcript

0:29

Good design is going to meet the criteria you tell us. So tell us what you want it to be. Tell us if we are at that level. What happens to the project? We need to understand that because we have means and mechanisms to put some heat on people, because you're going out to contractors and subs and so forth and say, look, I don't think you're going to have a chance to even be in this if you aren't in this range for this element. But you tell us what it is. Welcome to Workspace Design Lab, the show where architects, interior designers and workplace leaders explore the future of workspace interiors. Each week we dove into ergonomic office design, modern workspace trends and sustainable furniture solutions that improve wellbeing and performance. I'm Silvana Vander PARC and together will uncover the stories, strategies and innovations that help you design offices that truly work. Let's dove in. We've met you on TG and E out in San Francisco for there was at the San Ramone. It was actually the San Ramon, the city of San Ramon, but it was for the gas operations group of PGE. That's where I met your father, Tony. I think I don't know if I met you directly that trip or you were. You're involved. But I think I was dealing with it mostly upfront. That's right. Yeah. So he was I remember going through all the design sessions with the user group and and I have pictures of you doing your your sketches. And so those are great memories. And then you came back and and brought us to back to the East Coast with the New York Power Authority. And that's the picture that we're seeing in the background there. Correct. And so your focus was on what did you call them? Critical environments, mission critical environments. So maybe I step back a little bit and I'll give you a I think, you know, no matter what happens as an architect, it's kind of how you grew up and what you who you learned from and where you learned that starts to mold you a little bit. So I grew up in in Decatur, Illinois, and went to school college at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Okay. And there they were known for their architecture school was in the top ten. I would say that they were more leaning towards technical school of architecture, as opposed to some place like Berkeley, which tends to be more design oriented or or theoretical architecture. Okay. So had a really strong technical teaching from there. I ended up kind of starting school when I was 17. I was really young, graduated from high school and went straight in and ended up going to school every summer as well, taking full classes. So I really went through classes quickly and after three years of studies, my last year of school I took in Visi France and the architecture school that was part of the Paris region. It was up to three or be trois, which means three. Yeah. University of Paris, number three. It was part of the Palace of Versailles. It was in the area, which is the the stables. It's a small stable, which is very technical size is the large table, but it's symmetrical facing the main entrance to the palace. And I think that's where I fell in love with Europe. I fell in love with things that were different from where I grew up, whether it was food, religion, culture didn't matter. It was it was eye opening and changed what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be and how I wanted to do it. And when I came back, I wasn't going to go back to Decatur, Illinois. And in 1982, I moved up to Minneapolis in a very, very down market in architecture, didn't get much opportunity. I waited tables, worked and in a hotel doing room service and was drafting in a nuclear engineering firm drawing details of nuclear power plants. So, wow, really was kind of a fish out of water and then took a trip. First time ever. I've been to Europe for a full year, but I had never been to the West Coast. So I took my portfolio and went to Arizona, Nevada and California and got a job. San Francisco back in 83 and then I ended up joining Gensler in 1987 so brings you up to work started Gensler. I wanted to know what got you into the architecture what was what was the pole there. A friend of mine's father was a contractor, but he had a drafting table that was one of his bedrooms and in their house and was always drawing on their had plans on there. I probably thought that he was the one drawing them, but I think he was doing it more for reviewing, going through the drawings to see how the architect was trying to build things. But I started kind of mimicking those things and started drawing floor plans and things like that where I saw something in our local newspaper and there was an drawing of, you know, some special house and they showed floorplans. So I was like, Well, I can do that. And then I started designing and I was a big golfer. I started designing golf courses just literally would find a site somewhere and in my town, get it on a map, get it to scale. And I would start to draw an 18 hole golf course. So it got me into drawing and I was like, Well, I really like doing this. I could spend hours and hours doing that back before cell phones and smartphones. And now you had your encyclopedias and you had free time to play. So that's what I did. And you just you took a lot of summer courses to graduate early from high school. Oh, no, from college. From college. I did. No, I was just young. I was I was late, late, late or just before the beginning of the school year. So somehow I started I started school at four and it was just, you know, everyone was always older than me, but I always thought that was normal. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah. So you've got a real adventurous spirit to you and you still love Europe and your favorite architecture in Europe, or does anything rival it? You know, you grew up close to Chicago and I love Chicago. We try to go every year and my wife and I, my wife is Italian from southern Italy in a region called Calabria. And yeah, clearly Italy holds special memories and so does France. But I think Europe in general is special. Every country was different. It was usually a different language, a different currency. That's changed a little bit. So I would say it's it's not as exotic as it used to be, partly because of knowledge maybe, but more importantly, because it's become a little bit more the same and not as different from each other as they once used to be back in the yeah. In the early eighties. So yeah. But architecture within the States, you know, we just don't have the history. So you're not going to get a lot of that historical presence like it will go, you know, thousands, thousands of years back where we just we were just in the town of Matera, which is supposedly the third oldest occupied city in the world. Now, there's a lot of cities that were older, but at some point in time, it wasn't capitated or or not capitated now. And my trip took me my my travels in school. I would take breaks. And somehow I ended up down in Egypt and in Israel as well. So it wasn't just Europe. I kind of went off and saw other places too. So, wow, what an interesting time to have seen all that other stuff too. Right. So let's come back to Gensler. So you started in Gensler in 87, correct? Well, three and a half years of of work honoring built it another smaller architecture firm. Yeah started smaller firm. Thought I would want to get my hands on everything as much as possible. You know, you're you're coming out of school. You're you're really smart in school, but you're really a novice when you get into the the real world of architectural practice. So. Right. I felt I would be, you know, pigeonholed right off the bat in a in a large firm. So small firm, I think we had four or five people three and a half years there. And I was ready for a change. And that's where I ended up going to Gensler, San Francisco, at that point in time, how did you end up in the mission critical or the, you know, critical operations kind of field? So when you go to school, you're you're trained as an architect. That's kind of a large word for a lot of things. But but the reality is, I think most people are think you're just designing buildings. Well, in some cases, and in Gensler in particular, we made our name doing also interior architecture. It was an area that a lot of architects did, but it was kind of like a secondary thing to something that they may have designed. But there was this back in 65 when Arthur Gensler started his company, there was kind of a hole where people that wasn't their expertize and he created that expertize within the field and renovations of projects. Clients are going into buildings, high rises and they were taking two or three floors. You know, they needed someone who could do that kind of work. And that's so a lot of the work that I was doing was interior architecture, actually. I ended up running a studio. There was interior architecture, so that was our primary focus of my career. But along the way I also realized I had a lot of technical knowledge and I got into details, liked working with engineers and getting into other requirements and some of the things you can and you can't do as opposed to dreaming of things that you would like to do but have no reality to be able to have a great design. And it was kind of funny. My, my boss at the time, this was back in about 1994 or so. There was a company called MF. S, they were based in Chicago and they might have been in shipping and receiving or shipping services, something like that a long time ago. But so they were using railways and when they were building the railways, they were also smart enough to put lines down whether that was copper. But eventually it also became fiber. So they had the ability then to connect cities, countries together. And MFS at that time was basically doing small data centers, actually switch centers for phone companies and things like that, which became MCI later. So I was working and he just pulled me into this meeting and we went out to dinner with this company and he thought, You're technical enough, you can talk, you can speak with them. It makes sense. After that evening, next morning, I was on a plane to Los Angeles to look at three facilities, and from there we just started going. So once you start doing things and you start getting good at it, it becomes easier. Things open up. And then not a lot of architects were doing that. By the time data centers, command centers, operations centers hit it big, I'd already had 20 years of experience in it and everything else was trying to catch up, so it worked out really well. I love traveling and seeing the places, but it became two different things. I'm doing interior architecture, which is really for people, and then I was doing these critical facility locations. There are really not for people, it's for equipment and it's about function and budget and reliability. It is an architect sitting in a room dreaming about what he wants to do. It's an architect sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers and clients who are predominately engineers because they are also the very technical people within their companies. And you have to listen to them to understand what that project will entail. It's interesting, like you, while you were talking about interior design being for people, there were meetings we've had sitting down with users to make sure that at least their needs, you know, in order to to be effective at their job. And that's where the ergonomics comes in, right? That's for absolute users. And you enjoy kind of learning the challenges of each job site and each project. Correct. And when we had our earlier conversation about schools is that, you know, you're kind of dreaming up ideas, but the best experiences really dealing with the challenges, the obstacles and overcoming those correct in my understanding is this conversation is really geared towards people who are in college. I belong to a local gym and one of the instructors there is a young student. While he's not a student anymore, he's actually graduated. But he didn't graduate in architecture, but he studied architecture at the University of Hawaii before moving to Indiana State, which they didn't have an architectural program. And he he ended up not having a master's or a bachelor's in anything in architecture. And it was only halfway through. But he told me how much he liked it and was considering getting back in the field. So some of the conversations that I had with him was, was trying to gear him. He said, What is the likelihood that I could get into a firm? And I said, Well, you know, first you're going to have to have a resume and you're going to have to show that you have some experience, at least in being trained in architecture. So tools that they use. Revit Things like that. You should probably take some classes so that you understand how the tools are used in the current field of architecture, which has changed since I went to school. I was hand drawing and no computers at the time. I also said to him that the reality was, once you have your resume and you are out looking for jobs, yes, experience and education are the two biggest things that architecture firms are looking for. But we're also looking for people who are intelligent, can think on their feet, are creative, and an architecture firm that isn't business oriented. They could be incredible designers, but if every project they lost money, they won't be around very long. So there's a lot to it. Once someone started and had experience, I ever asked them about their school again or, you know, other than from interest standpoint, you know, where was it you went to school? Oh, I had some friends that did that and, you know, right at that place. But other than that, yeah, that's not important in the field anymore. It's how you perform and how you do things. I think what we were talking about was in the design side of things in school, we were given, I will say, a program. It might be limited, it might talk about the size or site, different things about the project, but it really was 100%, especially if you were not part of a team, if it was an individual project where you would sit there and come up with ideas. And they, as they told us back then, concepts. How do you come up with a concept or who you were designing it for? You know, so what was strange about it was I always felt like I was having a concept that something that I created for myself while the projects theoretically were not at all for me, none of the projects I ever did in the real world or projects I was doing for myself other than one. And that that's my home and my client was my wife. I'm hoping the schools have changed and they provide more information. It would be I would love it if they would do things like have you meet with the group that you're going to be ultimately presenting to at the very end of your project, where you meet with them to understand what the project goals are and what they're really looking for. Before you come up with creating design ideas and your project and then getting to a point to present to somebody who's never seen what you're presenting, nor do you understand what those people, the jury members or even like and dislike them. So it's awkward looking back and going, I don't know. It was teaching me how to think, but it wasn't teach me how to think for projects in real life. I didn't think right when looking at, you know, I was thinking about if there is some kind of I don't know if Gensler had some kind of student interaction working with schools or something like that. But I'd have to look that up. Probably just have to Google that and see what kind of interaction they've had over the years. We did do some summer intern programs and really that was created by people in the different offices who felt strongly connected, whether they had gone to a particular school or they wanted it to be local. But every year we would look for three or four candidates. They were paid. It was not like back when I first started, internships meant you were you were footing the bill and you got experience here. You got experience in that. I think that's I think what I would tell everyone in school get a little experience. Even when you're in school, you would hate to spend 5 to 6 years of school to go through it and think, this is exactly what you want to do. This this area of expertize or location or whatever it is, without really getting out and seeing what the firms do, what the clients do, what the city officials do to really hone in on what you really like and dislike. And you may surprise yourself that you may fine tune where you want to go. So if you can get three months, four months for a summer internship somewhere, I would recommend it. Usually we would use the people. They are not going to be doing domain presentations on a project to a very important client. It was a means where we could teach them how we go through a process of design, how you really come up with a project from beginning to end. Now, three months. You don't do that. You don't go from beginning to end. So hopefully we would get them involved at different phases of a project so they get a glimpse of it. And many times we would then bring those people back once they would graduate and bring them back. And it didn't have to go back to the office that we were where they were trained in, but they could go to any office again. So it was at hey quick pause. Workspace design can feel overwhelming, right? Requirements, considerations and costs aren't always clear, and sometimes you're left guessing about what to prioritize. At Novel Link, we endeavor to help cut through that noise with a product and a process featuring the team that offers experience, knowledge and step by step guidance. It just makes the whole journey easier. If that's the kind of support you're looking for, click the QR code or see the link in the show notes. Now back to the conversation. So when you're doing the approach to the design, you know when you have a project. It was interesting, you mentioned city officials. All the things that you don't you don't think about. You're thinking, Oh, what colors do I like and what layout do I like? You know, do I want organic lines or what style of materials am I using? Yeah. So I think that's what people think of. But you know, what's the reality? Well, the reality is a good architect will take all the information and disseminate how it's going to go together and reach all the goals that everyone's thrown at you as city as they've got the building department, the fire departments, the planning departments. They have all these different groups of people who have requirements, and those are deal breakers. If you don't accommodate those things, you don't get to go forward. And they're generally like compliance issues, like safety items. And most of it, I mean, the building department is predominately based associated to safety. So as fire as well, planning department is a little bit more subjective elements but but at the same time very objective like the zoning for projects, there's a city plan. They want things in different areas. You just don't put a gas station in the middle of a residential area without it being zoned properly. So you can make changes to all of these things going through processes. No guarantees that it will happen, but it will slow your project down. So if your client's goal is is one of their big items, is speed to market. Well, that would be a challenge to say, well, we're going to we may have to slow things down six months to a year before we will even know if you can do something like that. Maybe it's better to find a different property, you know, that this doesn't have that risk. But the building officials are one of those things. I always wanted to go to different cities, find out who the people were that I was going to be dealing with, talk to them about the project before we even started the project to confirm codes. Talk to them about the project type in some cases, like in critical facilities. When I was doing projects in a lot of jurisdictions, they didn't even know what I was talking about. I mean, they had no idea what a switch center was or a data center was. They had never been in one. They had never seen one. They didn't know how it how it the code, the codes, there's nothing written specifically for them. So a lot of times you had to go and educate them. And I remember a time we were up in Kent, Washington, and we were looking at doing a about a million square feet of renovations to existing Boeing buildings, warehouses and the city. We had had an early meeting with them, and in this project from the design side was being led by the mechanical electrical engineers and we are consultant to them. They were presenting to the city officials and they're using their engineering speak. And I could see that the building officials had no idea what they were talking about. So when we started talking about things like, well, what are the requirements for parking or setbacks or this, that and the other thing, the responses they were getting were completely off the rails, right? So I happened to bring images of what the end result of a project is here. Are these generators here or these fuel tanks here? Are these mechanical units that are those elements themselves are larger than a locomotive trains inside. There are not people or not. This is not a space designed specifically for people, not designed for people, because there are critical facility projects that have a lot of people in it. But you go through it and by the time they got done, they were, oh, you know, that's more like an industrial. Yes, it is. It is more like an industrial space. But the way that the code reads, it says it's a B occupancy, and B occupancy is, you know, associated to office buildings and those kinds of places. So right there, Koch didn't even know how to address it. The architect had to be brought in to try to coordinate things, to get the answers that you really wanted to get on the projects. That's interesting. Well, let's talk about the two projects that we did together on those projects. No link. You also had another name in there later on. Yeah, it always had to do with the URLs because no income was taken. You know, by the time that we were building a website, I secured it down the line. But at first we were looking at what are we going to call ourselves? Because you want your brand to be able to be your domain name as well. And so we said, okay, well we've got and I'll know the link. Okay, so we got that one. And then there was for patent reasons, trademarking novel anchors, you know, there's a million now novel links out there, you know, and so to differentiate us kind of like your rain in the middle of your name, you need to differentiate. I'm this Michael Downey, not that Michael Downey suddenly became novel link parametric contract furniture to define us that much more than we became and I'll PKF for short. So we've played around with different renditions of the name but kind of back to novel and now I'll just use Nova Link in general the working with you on those projects. The first project was the Junior Gas Operations Center, which was based off the need for that project was based off of a gas explosion that took place in the peninsula in the San Francisco Bay area, where quite a few people were killed. It was near SFO airport. At first. Reports were coming in on TV and you could see these flames that were huge. They thought it was a plane crash. And as soon as I saw it, I could see it was a very constant burn. And it was, you know, 150 feet in the air. And it wasn't going okay. It wasn't dissipating, it wasn't changing, it was just shooting. And it was about an hour into it before PGE, which is the the gas and electrical provider here in in our area, realized it was the airlines. Now, someone probably knew something earlier on, but before it was announced that there was a gas leak there and it was a high I think it was bringing fuel down to the airport. The state government said that they needed to create the gas operations center where they were all in one place where they could communicate better. So we ended up putting these groups together and I think in both projects, Pjanic Gas Operations Center and New York Power Authority, ISOC projects, they weren't just a command center or critical facility or location. They were also workplace related. There were, I would say, in each of those locations, maybe a third of the project was critical facility and the rest of it was workplace environments. Plus, you also had to realize that this was a facility that could be manned by three or four people with things being remote in a non critical environment to one something had gone really wrong and everyone is in and there needing to be in the command centers where the entire place is filled and you needed places for that so people could be there for seven by 24 for multiple days, they could be staying there. You need a kitchens to cook just like you would if you were living here. So I thought the two projects were a great fusion between workplace and critical facilities, and I think that's why that to me, they were some of the best projects we did because it wasn't just for equipment and it wasn't just for people, but it was a hybrid in one place. Both of the projects were placed into existing buildings, so it wasn't something that we were designing from scratch. You have different drivers in those, but in these cases we were going into existing facilities. No link was not involved at first on the gas operations center. It wasn't until PPG was requiring us to go out and select a command center desk manufacturer for the project. There weren't that many. There were providers, but a lot of them. First of all, they're very expensive pieces of equipment and there's a lot of technical information that you need to go through. And by the time we got into it, we need to know how many monitors, what sizes were they, what kind of equipment was going to be in the desk versus what was going to be remotely located? What are they trying to view? What are they viewing on their desk? What are they viewing on screens? How many do you need? How big is your location? And once you know how many you need and you know all those other parameters of how many monitors, what size monitors, what you're looking at, all of a sudden you start to you don't have an infinite amount of space. So how many could you even fit in here? A lot of times they were making decisions based on the way their existing facilities might have been, which was old technology. So we said it would be better if we narrowed down who the manufacturer for the tests will be by, because they wanted to build things out. We said you don't have the time to go through this process to find out. You might get the less expensive choice if that's what your drive for is and how you're going to decide what it's going to be. But you're going to go through it and you're still down. Going to have to refine your design to be very, very specific to what the client ultimately wants to have and the drivers of cost and how long it takes to manufacture these elements and how many you're going to do is going to change by providers. So I think we just said, how much would you charge to a basically design assist on the projects? And I think we recommended no link based on the quality of what we saw, the flexibility of the different equipment. I don't think there was any guarantee piece that you were going to get the ultimate project. But but we heavily weighed and I said we would fight if your product is high in reasonably cost or you don't have to be the lowest, you don't have to, you know, whatever it is, but we used novel ink as a means to be the experts in the field of a desk. In this case, and we're not talking just a little desk. It is a working desk. And when you went into, you know, well, what's the range of, you know, where you know, what's the height of people, you know, setting? How low do you want the desk go? How do you want it to go where they're standing? What's the tallest people? And you would first get these clients? Well, I always got a guy who's like seven foot two and we've got another woman who's like, she's three foot one. And you're like, well, you can accommodate that. But once you get to a certain level, a lot of other things don't work, or it changes your cost or it changes your delivery date. Is there anything else you can do to accommodate those people? Can you raise a platform for a person in a location or lower the platform where a person was going to stand? When it's at the high point, you know, there's things you can do. So we used your company to help us get there and that process went so well. The next opportunity Gensler was brought in to the project up in White Plains, New York, where they were using a software program that they had training for the project out here in California. I happen to be the project manager for the project that did that project, and I got a call and they said they would like to hire us to do their data center or their command center. And I said, Well, we could definitely help you. I originally said they could talk to this person in our New York office or this person in our New Jersey office, and I said, No, we want to hire you. So we went back. And first of all, we all we did was meet with the client and talk about the project. They had another architect that was on the project at the time, but they didn't feel that they were they were getting what they were looking for and we walked to site and I had seen some drawings that they, the other architects had done and where they had kind of located this command center on the floor and started put that information in my in my brain at the same time, I think I called you up or your father. I don't remember which I was on a on a a taxi back to JFK and I said, I found out they're wanting to do more than 14 desks, eight desks I can't recall. And they don't know the size that it needs to be. But these are three monitors that they're going to have on the desk. These are the sizes. They're going to have a small phone and a couple other things here, and they're going to have a CPU underneath the desk I listed out. I said if you could do a drawing, a drawing to show an example of what the size would be, the configuration of it, just knowing nothing more than I just told you. I said, all right, there are late tonight, tomorrow morning, if you could get me something midday your time, I'll throw it back to the client. Say, how about something like this? You guys turned it around and let alone. Did you just do a plan? I think you did a little elevation and you showed how high and low it would go. And I think you even threw out an idea of cost timeframe to get something like that manufactured. And they were absolutely blown away that, you know, whatever they were using in the plans was probably only based on something that they ever had. And they were light years away from what we were providing them. So that that itself sold the project right there. Now, it didn't help design the project by any means, but it gave us a starting point and actually gave us we knew that you guys were going to be the ones doing it. Luckily, we didn't beat that out. I mean, yes, if you had the criteria, we fine tuned it as we went along. But that stuff had to be finalized before we could finalize the design of the project anyway. So we were happy. It's a win win for everybody. It was win win for you guys. You know, you had the job. We knew what we were going to get. It wasn't a guess. It wasn't going to be a curve ball is going to be thrown at the last minute going, well, we're not going to go with that. We're going to go with something different shape and and that changes the entire planning exercise. I remember when we got the call and I was talking to my dad and it was now we're going to spin this around as fast as we can and give him everything because he just doesn't instinct me. He says he knows what he's doing. So give him what he needs and he's going to do, you know, retires has the other side it's who do you know and it's like, you know, if you had a Rolodex it'd be sales like spinning through it. And this is the person I need to talk to. They, you know, who are the experts in everything you've got. Clearly, it's not going to be me having the knowledge to do all these things. But if I surround myself with the right people, it usually works out well. So architects in general, half the time it could be from engineers or it could just be the way that they're portrayed in shows. Either there are people who are designing these projects that are just light years ahead of where most people are and when they get done, they're expensive. They took too long to build, designed it for themselves. The reality is there are very few good architects that design that way. Good architects don't design projects for themselves. They are design art for their clients, the ones who are paying the money by hiring us to do the projects and every project can be sliced and diced so many different ways. The way they're organized, it relates contractually, you know, we could have a relationship where we are direct to the client and we hold all the consultants behind us. That's a traditional architectural contract clients, and that's usually called design bid build in that you go out and you select a general contractor who then bids out and you have multiple general contractors that they bid out drawings. There's good things about it and there's bad things about it. That tends to be the way things were done in my lifetime. More East Coast, Central states, West Coast tended to go, more design assist, okay? And in some cases, design build those sound different, but they are different. To do any of those two options, you have to have a lot of trust in everyone that you're working with. I felt like the design bid build was more about a process protecting yourself from people you don't trust. Where you bid it out to these firms. They're looking at the drawings. You know, people are looking at the drawings you're trying to find possible in it where they can say, Well, that wasn't in the drawings. You hired us, but that wasn't in the drawings. That's a change. Or the criteria that you gave me wasn't accurate to what you have. And you always left us kind of in limbo. So going to something like design build, the client would go direct to the general contractor. The general contractor had the agreement and the general contractor would bring in the design consultants under them. So in my case, in a design build project, I did not have a direct contract with the client. I'm not protecting the client from the contractors who might have malicious ideas of how to treat them being an architect. So we very rarely, we always want to make sure the client was in the loop and protected and we would be telling the general contractor, you need to let them know that stuff, you know. So yes. So in those cases, though, I always said if you can't trust, you don't have any faith in general contractors or design teams or whatever, then you want to have a contractor, one group and let them that group, the architect in this case, protect you. But otherwise there's better ways to do it. You might have a better schedule, you may better have a better cost so long as you provide them correct information about what your desire is for schedule and cost. Both design, build and design assist will help immensely in reducing the chances for unexpected costs show up or delays in the project. In my mind now, going into a project and you start a project, as I mentioned when I said we went back to New York to go meet with a client, we did meet with a client, tried to understand what they did as a company, see their space to understand where they were, what they were coming from, and tried to understand how they were organized. Who were the people who were going to be calling their shots? Is it one person? Is it a group of people? Are there multiple groups? There could be more than just a client. It could be somebody who's, you know, maybe they're the ones footing the bill to the project or partly providing moneys for the project. So you need to understand who they were. Also, we had to see the site without any knowledge. That's tough to do. So our next step was to begin design after we had a contract in place, we went back and what we did was a visioning session. Visioning session to me is the very, very beginning of a true project in that the client brings the people who are going to make decisions on the project. Usually they don't bring everybody if they brought everybody, you will hear too many comments and you don't know who to listen to. And we always tell them only people that you want to have a say in this project, not just to say, but a say in this project, because everything you're providing us is criteria that we're going to use to come up with our design, right? Yeah. We also needed to know how their approval process was going to take place. Do we you know, or are we going to go traditional? Are we going to go through a schematic design, design, development and construction drawing phases? And we approve along the way? Or is some some other means? Then we start talking about the project itself in this visioning and it usually is talking about two different types of things. Summit of A is very objective, like you got ten widgets versus something that is very subjective. Like I like crate design. You'll hear people say, I don't know what I like, but I know I like that. Okay, so we have to then as architects try to pull this out of everyone because words are really hard that you say something means something completely different to me and most of the people I'm dealing with are not trained as an architect to communicate in architectural words. So let's talk about the objective elements. The objective elements are, of course, budget. What how much are you wanting to spend on this project? And it's not like I really want to spend $10 million, but I want to tell them we're going to spend five because I know they're going to come back and it's going to be ten at the end. No, again, good design is going to meet the criteria you tell us. So tell us what you want it to be. Tell us if we aren't at that level, what happens to the project. We need to understand that because we have means and mechanisms to put some heat on people, you know, because they're you're going out to contractors and subs and so forth and say, look, I don't think you're going to have a chance to even be in this if you aren't in this range for this element or something. But but you tell us what it is. The schedule is important. Again, what are the drivers to that? Do you have a lease expiring? You have to be out of the space and you need to be up and running this space. I need three months to set up the i.t. Requirements within the building to make sure it's tested and ready to go. Okay, so we now have a schedule and then we need to know what they usually calls the program. What kind of spaces do you need roughly, how much square footage are they? What are the relationships of those spaces to each other? In a simple project, if it's an office building, you've got workstations, you have conference rooms, you have private offices, you have a break room, you have a reception area, you have storage rooms, simple offices. You kind of know how things normally run. But sometimes you need to understand what are adjacencies and understand that and only from a volumes standpoint, you know, we need 80 workstations, we need ten private offices, you know, those kinds of things. That is the information on the objective side predominately. Then you've got the subjective side and that's where it gets a little bit different from the norm, because you need to get into things like what is the culture of the client you're working with? Hey, who are your competitors? What makes your company better than them? So you're almost like an advertising agency because you're helping them with their brand. It's their brand and their brand could be colors too, or images. So you're trying to get all that information out of them. You're trying to understand their likes, their dislikes and prejudices and prejudices is such a big word. You take a prejudice. This is you know, you're talking about race, color, whatever it is, it is anything where you have a reaction. While you still don't know anything about the element that you're discussing. So trying to get those things out and usually what we would do, they would say, you know, what do you want the space to look like? And I said, okay, let's walk around in your existing space and you point out things you like and you just like in your space, you know? And all of a sudden it's most of the time it's the things they don't like. You know, there's a few things, Oh, I like this. And you're like, What do you like about that? And they're like, I don't know. It just feels right. Is a color, is it? The shape is the form itself, is it the functionality, you know? So you're going through this process to pull all that information out of the client and you take that and other things. And the objective side are the coach and her requirements of the city and limitations of a site. Let's say you're doing a building. The site itself is how do you get into the site? How large is it? What kind of soils does it have? What's the terrain? You know, elevations and changes, what's the foundation and all that stuff. You also have to worry about risks. Is it a tornado areas in a seismic zone than a flood zone? Is it near a freeway? Is it near an airport? Is it whatever it is, environmental concerns. So all those things go into it. If it's an existing building that they're going to go into different tanks. You want to know what are the columns, spacings? Is it regular or irregular? What views do you have? Where are your windows? Where are the elevator? In the circulation elements. Stairs, elevators, shafts, things like that. What's the floor loading capacity? What's the floor to the bottom? A structure height what's the floor to floor height? Who and what is above you or below you in the building? Some of the times we put critical facilities into a high rise building. There may be reasons why it needs to be there, but some of the things that you go do in a critical facility environment is you have to worry about fire suppression. Every building has to have fire suppression. Or if you don't have fire suppression systems in your building, codes usually restrict the amount sizes of things dramatically. So almost always, if you're going to have a real normal sized project that you would like to do, you'll want to have fire suppression. Well, water in a environment where it is rows and rows of electrical equipment is not good. So you'll go through this effort of having pre-action systems or other maybe gas suppression systems that you put into your facility and you spend that money to do it thinking, well, if we had something happen, it's not going to be in this location without some checks and balances before systems go off. And then right above them, they've got a shower for a locker room that has a lot of water or they have regular sprinkler heads and they did a renovation and accidentally hit a head while they're in a construction and that water all goes down and right into your space and you spend all your money to make sure water is out of it, but you didn't deal with it. So that's why you have to think in a lot of different ways about it. After all those things are gone through, that's where we as architects then start and we start to pull all this information and we try to then have the client still in this visioning session, which could be between 4 hours to 8 hours by time, it may be a full day with them is to okay now tell me most important, the least important or at least get them in a range of where you think they are of the drivers that we've now created, which ones most important? What's the number one? If this this project will fail if you don't do this and then secondary this this this down and then the you understand the priority, priority is of the clients thinking now we can start to design. Now we're getting to where I get to where I said in college what I felt was lacking was the fact that they want you right off the bat. You had a little bit of information come up with some design, some criteria, or what's your concept for your projects? And usually you kind of want to have different ideas, three or four different options, maybe four or five. At first you start to narrow down to two or three strongest options, but you take that and you're weighing it against all the prior decisions that the client has made of the things that they would need to have in this project. And you then, before you even present to them, go through it so that you say, here's the advantages and the disadvantages for each of these options. If I came with one option and the client goes through it and goes, I don't like it, we're going to be still in schematic design. I'm not going to get paid because we're not done. It's bad. So you give them options and that will start the process of design through the project going on. And that's usually where you step down and you go into design, development and refinement of that design a little further. Imagine that if I'm retired, I don't have to do anything. It. So that's the way I see the design process and that's the way probably most architecture firms will think. And if the students think in that manner and you have reasons for the design that you come up with, not that you thought it looked good. That's not a reason, because it looking good is a very personal response, not something that has any intelligence behind it other than it look nice. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your time and the approach to things. I mean, even for me, I've done these working on projects now, but it's nice to get your perspective on things from a designer standpoint and say, how do we fit in and how can we be that much more of a partner too to the whole team? Well, it doesn't happen very often that it goes the way it should go, in my opinion, the way I think it should go. There's a lot of projects, there's a lot of egos, there's a lot of people put into positions that they weren't trained, they became president or CEO or whatever it was, but that they weren't good at making decisions on how to do a project of design because they're the most important person in the company. They're embarrassed to sit there and say, Well, I need to bring myself and surround me with people who really understand this process to help me make decisions because I do want to provide direction, but I don't know what I'm doing. And you'll get two or three people not knowing what they're doing, but they're very intelligent people. Sometimes they you go down the project and the next thing you know you're in for permit or they're in construction and they are like, Well, that's not what I was thinking. And you've already shown them drawings. Some people don't read drawings, some people can't. It doesn't mean they're not intelligent. It just means they can't think three dimensionally. And that's something that's really hard to teach you. Either you do or you don't. And I. I think you could practice, but if you don't get it, you don't get it. It's like some people are really good at math and some people aren't. You might get better, but you might not be ever as good as you need to be to be making important decisions. Well, I'm sure lots of people are. A lot of students and people learning this stuff are going to appreciate all this. So thank you again and wishing you a good rest of your day. Whatever you've got planned to work you to do list. There you go. And the weather is perfect again. So I'll probably just how good do something later tonight. Wonderful. All right. Well, until next time. It was a pleasure to see you. Thanks for checking out Workspace Design Lab. 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