Rafael Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli | Brookfield Place in New York City | Rethinking the World Trade Center
Transcript
Announcer 00:06
What goes into making an iconic building in America? What are the stories and who are the people behind the next generation of architecture? If your work touches the real estate industry in any way, or you're just curious about what goes into one of a kind cities and towns all across our country, join us on the American building podcast. In season two, we learn about everything from skyscrapers to single family homes from the famous and soon to be famous designers and developers responsible for them. This season focuses particularly on the pandemic and how our buildings will change in response. Our sponsor is the iconic design firm Michael Graves architecture and design. And now your host award winning architect turned entrepreneur, Atif Qadir, AIA
Atif Qadir 01:04
This is American building, and I'm your host, Atif Qadir. We are recording from the historic home of world renowned architect, Michael Graves in Princeton, New Jersey. Check out this amazing space for yourself at the Michael Graves architecture and design YouTube channel. Now let's build something. today. Our guest is architect Rafael Pelli. Raphael is a partner at Pelli Clarke Pelli, a world renowned design firm started by his father Cesar Pelli. He leads the New York City office of La Clarke Pelli, which was established in 2000. While there he has worked on major high rise residential buildings, including and battery park city in Manhattan, and on teaching and research facilities for major universities, including Princeton and rice. He was inducted into the college of fellows of the American Institute of Architects, an honor reserved for our nation's greatest architects. Today, we will be talking about Brookfield Place located at the World Trade Center in New York City. This building is like none other with gorgeous tree like structural columns. It was designed by Cesar Pelli on 911. It's images we're seeing around the world. It's gorgeous glass barrel vaulted roof had collapsed and its entrance was blocked by a mountain of debris from neighboring buildings at the Trade Center. Recently, the firm reimagined what the building entrance could be restoring key parts and changing others to deliver a more innovative, sustainable building at this iconic location. Thank you so much for being here with us on American building.
Rafael Pelli 02:42
Thank you, Atif. I'm delighted to be here.
Atif Qadir 02:45
Excellent. So let's dive right in. Many of our listeners could imagine that your path into architecture was preordained because of your father being a famous architect. Was that true?
Rafael Pelli 02:57
Well, I certainly was exposed to it, I think I was determined not to have anything to do with it growing up in Los Angeles in the in the 60s, I was in my sort of teenage years and early high school years in the early 70s. And there was such a generation gap. That was the phrase of the day that we all rebelled against our parents and what they did. And I never really actively rebelled. But I certainly never imagined myself doing what my father did. Now, having said that, looking back, I do see ways in which my upbringing formed me that I love to draw. And I love to make things with my hands. And as a family. Whenever we would travel, we were always talking about what we were seeing and what was interesting about what we were seeing things we found beautiful and why questions I grew up in a visual family and a visual environment. And it wasn't until after college that I had to sort of rethink what I wanted to do, because I knew I never wanted to write another paper in my life. I know the research I you know, and I knew I'd always love to draw. So I worked for a graphic designer. I worked for a photographer for a while. And in between a couple of those things. My father had just opened his office in Connecticut had an office of about eight people, just beginning and he said if you want to make a little extra money between in the six weeks you have between jobs, and you want to come here and help out and I thought okay, sure, I'll make a little money. That was my first real kind of stepping into the world of architecture. And I clearly was hooked very quickly, I think, you know, I love the environment of it. It just suited all of my interests in this drawing and making things and looking at things rationally visually. So I got very interested and I still went off to do other things but I And then ended up coming back and worked for another couple of years. So I took three years off after college before choosing to go off to graduate school. So it wasn't preordained in a direct way. But certainly there were ways in which I was exposed to things that made me predisposed.
Atif Qadir 05:18
So in those years before you went on to grad school and focused in architecture, what would you say were the big takeaways or the lessons that you took with you as you went into architecture,
Rafael Pelli 05:31
the thing that I found fascinating about architecture is how much we continue to grow and learn at every point in our careers. It's so complex, it's so multi layered, that the your first perception of it is rather superficial, but you don't have a depth of understanding of all of the factors that influence what a building could be or what it should be. And so those things come later in life, it takes a long time to assimilate all of the factors that go into making buildings and making good buildings, it's not just about being able to draw something that's beautiful. It's understanding such a host of considerations from construction technology to the knowing how to spend money wisely on the key things that interest you, and not because there's no such thing as an unlimited budget, but you have to be kind of really strategic about what you're going to spend money and how that's important about understanding, sort of the moment in time that you're living in understanding how a building is part of a context, whether it's a campus or a city, and it's so heavily influenced, that needs to be influenced, and in turn, help influence the environment around it. So there's so many factors, I think it takes a level of maturity, it takes the time to fully understand.
Atif Qadir 07:01
And then you went to Harvard GSD for grad school, how are you years there? How would you describe them?
Rafael Pelli 07:08
Intense as graduate school, almost universally, is anyone will say lots of very long hours and days learned an enormous amount just at a basic level of skills to a level of depth of understanding of how to shape space, how to organize a set of ideas. And I think, what is anything I think what a graduate school teaches you is the intellectual rigor of thinking through a problem and how, through the many steps of that process, you need to be very clear on your purpose, and your intentions. Besides just solving a problem, what is it you're aspiring to, and having those ideas clear in your mind, so that they can govern the hundreds and 1000s of decisions you're making as you're producing a design. And that's something that became kind of really clear to me through that process of school, that that's where you learn how to think that starts in school, but those are skills that remain throughout the rest of your career.
Atif Qadir 08:20
Okay, and then talking about the role that your dad played in your development as an architect once you returned from graduate school? Well,
Rafael Pelli 08:32
every architect is a little bit different. My father came out of a culture that he greatly admired. In his first work experience, which is working for Arrow sarin. And an arrow sans office was a really interesting place. Lots of credibly talented people and arrow was really quite sort of famous for attracting very diverse set of talented people, and then letting them all contribute and be part of the process. And so it was an interesting place to be at that time, my father was surrounded by a lot of other people. But he also learned from that just the nature of collaboration of having ideas, but also listening to other people's ideas, and ultimately seeing how arrow could direct the work but take input from a lot of people. And let all of those people really have a voice and a hand in what was the final project and something that guided him throughout his career in his office. So how he was with me, I think, was not so dissimilar, than with many other people in the office. He taught me how to think I would say first and foremost, and he invited ideas and wanted me to have my own opinions. It wasn't about me executing his ideas. It's like he this is what I want to do. Here's why I think it's important. And he wanted people to tell him no, he but what about you could do this? What if you could do that, but that wasn't unique to me. He that was true for all of the people in the office, many of whom have been there for 40 years now are the principals in the firm HFT always love to be surrounded by people with offer themselves.
Atif Qadir 10:11
So it's interesting because you had mentioned when you were younger that the a lot of this like this skill of observation, and the focus on discussion and understanding of design from both your mother's perspective and your father's perspective, doesn't seem that dissimilar from the experience that you describe in the way that your father ran the firm. After your father passed away, what changes would you say I happened at the firm fit,
Rafael Pelli 10:37
I would say, largely because of the way he had grown up himself in architecture, its earnings firm and the way he structured his own firm. This had been a very, very natural transition over time. And he'd given giving even he died at 92, he was active until he was nine years old. But even for the 20 or more years prior to that, he was given greater and greater autonomy to the senior people who had spent time with him and who, you know, he trusted and respected, to develop the work. So what's happened really was not an abrupt change at all other than the fact that Caesar can't walk into the room to meet a client who wants to beat him. But as a way of working, it's a very natural organic transition to the people who've been running the firm for quite some time, and who share these basic core values and all through their own particular lenses, including me. So I've been running on New York office for the last 20 plus years. And I would bounce things off of my father from time to time, but really, for the last 10 plus years, they would be in frequent critiques. And he would come in and just provide some fresh eyes and perspective. But really, the way we're working now is pretty much the same way we've been working for quite some time, I want to talk
Atif Qadir 12:07
a little about Brookfield Place. So Brookfield Place is the project that we'll be focusing on. So it's an unusual project for you in many regards, because the starting point wasn't an empty lot, or a historic building that had to be renovated. Talk more about your personal experience, your personal understanding of the building, you are part of the competition process for the original commission.
Rafael Pelli 12:30
It's a project that carries with it a lot of our firm's history and my personal history. And it's a kind of collaboration across time with my father on the project. It was a project that initiated in 1980, and a competition. At that time, the office, my father's office was maybe 12 people, I was out of college and helping out making models. And then I went off before the competition was settled or announced, I went off to graduate school. And that project became a successfully one competition and then a building was completed like 1985 1986. By that time, I'd gone to graduate school and I came to move to New York. And I worked for a good firm here in the city called Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer for a few years, but sort of would watch that project getting built. So it's what really launched the office into a different level of visibility. And it went from being 12 people to being 40 people in order to do that project. And it's something that I got to know and love as I lived in the city. When I came down to New York in 2000, to open up our office at that time, we didn't have much involvement in the project anymore. It was completed and it was running. Well, the ownership had changed from Olympia in New York with the original developers to Brookfield, and then we had 911. And the project and the took a very directly across the street, the World Trade Center was very badly damaged physically, fortunately, the people are all evacuated safely. But there was an enormous amount of physical damage to the buildings from the following of the buildings across the street. And we were called in to help with the renovation efforts. We actually sort of had a few people working down there, we just created a site office, we have to do things so quickly. They wanted to reopen it within a year of the event. So by September 11 2002, they really wanted to open and operational again, so there's a lot of immediate work to just get it to work again. But one of the big problems and making it work was that it had always been primarily entered on the second floor, because people would come through this major subway hub underneath the World Trade Center up escalators and then come across Bridge over West Street is very busy highway. So very few people actually came at grade level, people would come mostly on the second floor with our bridges destroyed. So what we've been replaced with a below grade conquer. So we had to create a whole new kind of entrance sequence and a whole new front door to the project and a way of getting into and through the project. And there was then another set of phenomena factors that influenced that, which is, as I said, the project was mostly built in a 1985 86. And a lot of these big tenants that moved in had 25 year leases. So those were coming up in 2010 2011. Shortly after we completed just the immediate repair work for the project to be opened again, Brookfield is reimagining what do we have to do to release up to 4 million square feet of space? And well, they were trying to reconceived what the project should be. And it's interesting because it the city around it had changed dramatically. Battery Park City had grown up. So all these new residential buildings were in the neighborhood, there was a residential kind of demographic that didn't exist when the project was first built. It was an interesting project in and of itself, but it also had this history of being something that we were picking up that our own office had done and recounted renovating our own building, which is a rare thing that within one architect lifetime, and in trying to look at something critical, sympathetically but critically, something that was designed in the mid 80s, which looked like something from the mid 80s, and trying to think what things would make it feel more contemporary more appropriate to this moment.
Atif Qadir 16:46
So this being a major repositioning project, you mentioned, a number of things that I'll just emphasize, one was this idea of circulation and how people came through that particular buildings at the as the entrance of this larger complex owned by Brookfield. Another one was how at ground level, versus other levels, how the building was perceived by people that were walking by around the building as well. And I think that there, you mentioned is also the symbolic idea of this building as the regeneration and the return of New York to something that existed before before 911 happened. What were some of the more specific scope items that were requested of the firm? In terms of entrance in the context of these goals? Was it specifically like certain types of curtain wall or certain materials are meant to be used? Like, what was the prompt that you had when the initial urgent repairs were finished,
Rafael Pelli 17:42
there was a convergence of differences in the neighborhood around the project and how this could relate to the neighborhood in a different way. With changes in technology, and which allowed us to do things in a different way than we would have been able to back then, you know, at the time, it was built in this area of landfill that was created off of the western edge of the tip of Manhattan. It was something of an island unto itself. He was across this major highway. It had there was one other apartment building there, but there are no other there was no, there was a lot of empty land there. So although there were entrances on the sidewalk, there was no life on the sidewalks to speak of. On that side of the highway. No, there was rarely any pedestrians, it was a difficult thing to design for because it wasn't yet urban the environment. It's sad, and it connected to, to lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center, but it was something of an entity unto its own. And with time, all of that's changed around it. Now there's close to 3 million square feet of building, there's many, you know, 40 plus residential buildings in the area. So it's a really thriving active dance neighborhood with a lot of public spaces. And then to with the destruction of the World Trade Center, it became more central to the rest of Downtown in a sense, because you wouldn't often see the royal financial center now called Brookfield Place with all the changes. You wouldn't see it from downtown because it was hidden by behind the podium of the World Trade Center. So you were barely even aware it was there with the changes now that the site of the World Trade Center is a major destination for the memorials for the museum and the World Financial Center. Now Brookfield Place looks onto it. So it became a place people would go to to kind of observe and memorialize and remember the World Trade Center site. So there was a reimagining of the uses within the podium and much more sort of destination retail but much to a bigger kind of food, a big food court area, a lot of people in the neighborhood would come there people who would come home tourists downtown would come over there to eat there. But we want it to strengthen these connections to the sidewalk and to the city and make the building more really fully integrated with a neighborhood that's now created around it. And that dovetails with the changes in technology, because we had these very glassy, front entrance pieces, all of the buildings that were designed in the 80s. But they were mostly spandrel glass, that is to say they were opaque. Because at that time, glass had big energy consequence. And the way you controlled the heat gain through glass is primarily by tinting it or making it reflective, or times making it opaque so that you can express something that's glass, but some of it actually allows light through some of its opaque. So we're able to do replace the opaque glass with clear glass, we're able to bring a lot more daylight in we're able from the exterior, you can see into the project much more you can see into lobbies, you can see into these new retail destination areas, which are these sort of very publicly accessible areas and intended to be to be used by a large, larger segment of the audience of the public in the area around it. So we're trying to open up the building, make it more porous and make it more integral and integrated into this neighborhood around it, which is much more vital. So it's a much more of an urban center. And we really see it as an urban center for a much broader population beyond the people who just worked there than it ever really served before. So it
Atif Qadir 21:51
sounds like a curtain wall that you chose. And the design of it was a real critical piece of this re imagination of this building around a city that had changed very much. So over the decades since. So the finishes were a huge part of this transformation as well. So what was the process for choosing new finishes for the interiors of this space,
Rafael Pelli 22:14
we're looking to make it feel fresher and more contemporary. And a lot of IT related also to the light. And then I mentioned before the changes to these select pieces of exterior wall, primarily around the podium, we're all about bringing light in and views in and out. And so the materials were often selected to try to diffuse that light bounce that light in when we were north facing we would do very light floors and surfaces and wall material so that you could really reflect the light around but that's an indirect light, when it's south facing, we would temper that floor color. So that's not a bright glare condition of bringing bright southern light onto a white floor, for example, that can be blinding, but we will try to cap very light wall material so that your kind of reflecting light within it. We was all columns, which were strongly expressed throughout the base of the building were painted black, a high gloss black before we painted them white. And we replace skylights with again, Hammar highly visible transmittable light. And then we were looking to more of a uniform treatment of material less patterning, there was a lot more patterning in the in the in the initial building. So now we were looking for materials that were equally rich as in their beauty, but how, you know, variety of textures creating a field of one color rather than strong patterns, which we'd had before.
Atif Qadir 23:50
Okay, so it sounds like the materials or the facade and the materials that were chosen for the interior work together in order to fulfill the different goals that we had mentioned earlier. So when you consider how stunning the building is, in daytime, I think both of us have been there a number of times in nighttime as well. And it's also quite beautiful. Then, could you talk about the lighting strategy for the interior to really make this a space that functions well both during the daytime and the nighttime as well.
Rafael Pelli 24:22
Sure that the lighting was crucial to sort of how one perceive the space and worked very carefully with the lighting designers to make sure that we achieve the effects we wanted. And again, this is sort of very consistent with an attitude towards how we bring natural light deep into the space. A lot of the materials are selected to be materials with diffused light well, and in certain cases. One very unique piece of this challenge of this redesign effort was creating a new front door, which was a space of about 50 1000 square feet but had to accept six escalators going down to the concourse below which goes off to the subway. So it was a big kind of transportation vestibule in a sense. But it had symbolically to kind of be recognized as a front door to the complex and had meant multiple doors also at Great that you could come in and out of, and those that we create a very sheer outer envelope of glass, it was all about these two very sculptural columns, these basket columns, that woven steel, metal columns, which were painted white, and then really lit. So in that case, we were trying to light those two objects. There, they formed this kind of gateway, this entranceway into the complex.
Atif Qadir 25:47
What's really amazing is we talked about this project as the entrance to a larger building. But as you just mentioned, that project itself is 50,000 square feet with tons of things happening within this space that is an entrance, I would imagine that's unique challenge on its own. I'm gonna take a break here and I want to mention that one of our season one guests, John Picard, our Chilton, I used to work for Redfield was a colleague of Raphael's you can check out his interview where he talks about an innovative office tower that he recently completed in Seattle at the American building podcast website. So we're gonna go a little bit bigger picture beyond this specific project fulfill place Raphael? So sustainability bears have a lot of there's a lot of importance in your work. Why is that for you?
Rafael Pelli 26:33
It's a way of looking at the world and looking at buildings that is always interested me and always been central to a lot of the ways I approach things. And I am partially a generational, I guess. But I attribute a lot of it to growing up in Los Angeles, those of us who grew up at a certain time in the 60s, early 70s, we were all accustomed to something that you get if you were running around too much on the playground, or elsewhere, you get smoke, you'd call it. And that means that your lungs hurt, you couldn't breathe very deeply. And you'd have to sit out for a while because you'd have to take very shallow breaths, because it would hurt too much to breathe deeply.
Atif Qadir 27:18
And that was like a common problem. I feel really, it was like
Rafael Pelli 27:21
a common thing. It's like having a headache. And wow, I just assumed that was the way life was you get small. And so a lot of our interests in the environment can often be abstract. So it's hard to feel it in a visceral way that something's going to happen. 30 years from now is going to affect you. It's hard to feel it tangibly immediately. But boy, when your lungs hurt, and you can't ride your bike to school, or you can't run around in the playground, because your lungs hurt, that's really tangible. And it was shortly after that time that they really, they had the Clean Air Act in California. And post catalytic converters to the cars have made a huge difference. But it was very tangible. And I it just really stuck with me is that shit, this stuff, we got to pay attention to this because it's affecting us. And that's only in the way that I could perceive. There are many other things that are affecting us in ways that are less easily perceived. But it gave me a core belief in the environmental impacts of buildings. And it's something that's keenly interested in shaping my career. And my first open the office in New York in 2000. Our first commission was to design a residential building under these new set of green guidelines down to battery park city building that came to be known as the sullair. And we did research into 1000s of things, a lot of which didn't necessarily lead anywhere but did lead to gray water treatment plants and better insulating the walls and doing energy modeling for doing energy modeling in an apartment buildings kind of unheard of. It's something that you might do for an office building, but not for an apartment goal. Apartment Building Construction tends to be very, very standardized construction, brick and block construction. And so to really try to pull that apart and optimize it. The owner, Albany's organization, commissioned wind tunnel studies to find how the air infiltration through a typical brick and block wall P asset leaks like a sieve. And so it was a fascinating deep dive into understanding the performance aspects of buildings and what makes them tick. I'm never so humble as when I'm trying to get into these issues because it requires a kind of a cross disciplinary understanding that really one can't do by oneself. It's been a big learning curve, and it's shaped a lot of the buildings we've done. And it's also been kind of humbling and that the more you know, the more you realize there is to do and looking. However good a new building could be coming back to or Brookfield Place project, you realize that the buildings that we're going to be living with in 2050 are mostly 70 to 80%, maybe more the buildings that exist today. And so we can't just be looking at doing the coolest, greatest new buildings. I mean, that's, we should be doing that. But in terms of really moving the needle and measurable impact on performance, what we do with older buildings is essential.
Atif Qadir 30:31
What you described is so fascinating, because it all started with a set personal story. I think that story that you mentioned, being a kid on a playground is often the first spark that sets something down that path of moving towards actual written change. And what's so fascinating is, it's actually fellow California and Richard Nixon was the president that had presented the idea, the Environmental Protection Agency, and through executive order, created it and then push the House and the Senate to actually pass it under his administration, knowing that, especially because of the awareness, the advocacy and these demands for legislative changes, particularly from people in California, so it was a big drive. I know, there's a lot of parts of history that aren't so kind to Richard Nixon. But I think that that particular one is is one that's it's incredibly important in this move towards greater sustainability in the built environment. So you talked about the greater public and the larger public awareness of this issue. So the deal is this in our industry, I'm a real estate developer. And I know that many people like me can't really think beyond a five to seven year financial pro forma, and like to imagine that when they sell their building their responsibility is over when you're able to talk to a very powerful, very capable developers, what are some of those conversations that you have with them to encourage to push them to incorporate and pay for many of these things that they might balk about early on?
Rafael Pelli 32:00
As you can imagine, these conversations I've had a lot. And every developer is different. And I would say, almost everyone I speak to is, is interested at some level. And the question is, how does that translate implementation because as you say, I think the model for building buildings on borrowed money, and then kind of turning it over at a certain, you know, after limited period of time, doesn't recognize that the returns on upfront investment necessarily well enough, and the whole sort of life cycle cost evaluation model, which a university can more naturally take, for example. But having said that, there are several other factors, one of them is simply governmental. It is a setting of standards and goals. The reason we did the first green building and Battery Park City was because there was a state initiative to explore doing greener buildings and Battery Park City what to do the state authority implemented these green design guidelines for all new buildings. And so it became a requirement and we exceeded their requirements. But there was kind of a base level of requirement and expectation which set a model for how we worked. So that's one way and that's increasingly widespread. And through different mechanisms, New York's actually passed very ambitious energy guideline laws and local law 97. Were measuring energy performance of buildings trying to get at greenhouse gas emissions, California has been implementing some very aggressive new standards for new buildings. Sometimes it's simply through electrical codes, energy codes, and the electrical code. Because the energy codes have gotten dramatically more stringent, even absent any other municipal guidelines, and simply meeting those requires a much more energy efficient building that we would have done 10 years ago. Part of that is just this setting of standards by governing authorities. And that sets some basic parameters for how buildings should be built that influence everyone. We found that there was a strong market interest that also affected how our clients and owners would see the value of doing certain things that there was increasingly sophisticated tenants or looking for certain standards for buildings, whether it would be LEED rating, whether it would be a more detailed kind of extensive energy, kind of proforma, whether it was kind of a well building standard having to do with sort of health and wellness. There are various different criteria which can be applied to buildings but There is clearly from the tenant world in commercial buildings, more and more demand for a certain higher level of standards. And owners feel like they can rent their buildings more quickly, they can rent them at a better price. So that's a very direct kind of tangible assessment of value and doing these things. And a lot of these things I have to say, are not necessarily high cost items that you know, there's a lot of low hanging fruit in trying to do good efficient buildings and just thinking about how you design a building in the residential market. That's been true to and the interestingly, I saw our first green building the solar battery park city, it opened shortly it was paused the construction because of 911 began, it was only three blocks away. And it didn't open until about nine months after 911. They picked up the construction again after a few months. And so it came onto the market at a time when there are a lot of empty apartments in that area, a lot of people had left the city. And so there are a lot of empty apartments are being rented a big discount, and are building rented immediately. As soon as as apartments came online, it fully rented out. And it rented it out at a premium above the neighboring the neighboring buildings. So there was a market demand there. And I think we I think part of the effect of 911 that made people aware of things like air quality, more profoundly. So those are all contributing kind of ideas and arguments for why building should be done to a higher standard.
Atif Qadir 36:40
So it sounds like the initial cynicism may have existed in our industry about the idea that lead or other standards were just a means to an end of some sort of recognition. And actually not something that was moving the needle considerably. What I found interesting is with other guests as well, that these notions of building towards standards has become much more holistic in the way that you've described about thinking more broadly about the building, as opposed to a sum of a checklist of different things that you're supposed to be doing. And I think that approach is one that from a development perspective, I think developers are becoming much more attuned to hearing and understanding because of all the market reasons that you mentioned, higher rent, higher sales prices faster, Lisa greater demand all of those translate into money right away. Are you finding that this change happening across our industry,
Rafael Pelli 37:33
it's remarkable. And there's still work to do when we did our first green building a better Park City again, that's just over 20 years ago. And LEED is only just released as a pilot thing. There was a lot of skepticism about the extra costs and the marketability of these projects. And many people we went on to shortly thereafter, do a building at University of Illinois where they were still studying LEED, they didn't know if they wanted to do it. And we kind of convinced them to at least do a feasibility study into it. We ended up doing with no requirements whatsoever, we ended up doing a LEED platinum building, because they just saw the logic of it. And interestingly, some of their building facilities, people got really interested into the benefits from a central plant standpoint. But these things were really exotic 20 years ago, and were just emerging. And yes, the checklist and had its limitations lead had its limitations initially, and there were always people who maybe didn't look at it as holistically as others. But it did set a standard for a way of working, which has permeated the industry, no architect worth their salt doesn't know about lead anymore. It doesn't know how to do LEED building because you better know how to do a LEED building that's kind of expected to be a standard of the industry. Now, if you don't know how to do you better get out. So it's changed dramatically. There's still work to do. We're looking at buildings, increasingly in depth, and trying to understand there's such a focus on the operational kind of aspects of resource efficiency from primarily energy, but also water and how we use air how we filter. But we're also now looking at embodied energy and how much energy is it does it take to actually just produce the products and transport them and put them up? And what does that really then represent when you're thinking about building a new building versus renovating an old building? So we're increasingly getting a bigger understanding and a broader understanding of how to think about a whole system. So all of those things are pushing us to the next level beyond what we've been doing. But I think it's been a remarkable change in the last 20 years. And I'm encouraged by the change I've seen.
Atif Qadir 39:45
Excellent and it sounds like the Brookfield Place project is just one of many of the projects that you've done, that are working towards that are working in that direction, which is excellent. So many of our listeners are in rock Extra school, what would you say are the keys to success at a firm like yours for new hires?
Rafael Pelli 40:08
Well, some of them are pretty universal work hard, I think big key for young architects is you're out of school, but there's so much to learn is the ability to kind of keep learning over time over an extended period of time, but there's just so much to absorb. And that goes beyond the specific project assignments beyond what it is you're being asked to do. You learn by just walking around and seeing what other people are doing. And we make an effort to kind of constantly have the in house kind of sharing of stories just to kind of look at what's going on this project, look what's going on in that project, let's bring in people from the outside to teach us about certain technologies and products and ideas, because it's even for me, and I'm 65. Now, I mean, the amount there is to know and to learn, it's just mind boggling. And you have to keep getting exposed to new ideas. And being able to kind of continue to grow and learn is essential as a young architect, but the skill that you may or may not learn in school, but is an essential quality is that ability to communicate, and it's communicating just to your colleagues, it's communicating in house when young people are presenting their designs. To me, it's you know, could they express why they did what they did? What's the idea that behind it, um, some of these are qualities that I talked about earlier that I think that's what school is really important to try to form, but you really need to develop those skills as you go on. But the role of an architect, it's buildings are increasingly incredibly complex organisms. And the architect is at the center of, particularly for larger buildings, a vast array of people, from disciplines, lighting engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, you have landscape architects, you have owners, you have contractors, there might be 100, people who are all somehow and the architect is sort of the hub of that wheel. And it is essential to be able to understand all of the input from different directions, synthesize it, and communicate, because everybody does a better job of their understanding why they're doing what they're doing, and not to be siloed into just, you know, just send me the drawings when they're ready kind of thing. But for the mechanical engineer to understand what the structural engineers do, and those that comes down, just basic communication as, as, as you then get to greater levels of responsibility to do that, in terms of a client, you can have a client understand, and that goes beyond just sort of a factual level of communication, but it's an understanding a vision, a set of ideas and aspiration. But those communication skills are really important, and I think oftentimes underappreciated in terms of the importance within the profession and people's growth within the profession.
Atif Qadir 43:09
Is the firm currently hiring. I wish
Rafael Pelli 43:11
we were at, but we are not currently it has. As with so many, in our industry, things have slowed down a lot. And we haven't been hit as hard as some, but we're not as busy as we used to be. And we were still waiting for a day when we can hire again. And looking forward to that.
Atif Qadir 43:29
Excellent. And if the any of our listeners want to learn more about the firm, would you suggest if all the form on Instagram or some other way?
Rafael Pelli 43:35
Yes, I think and then you can go to the website and see the various links to different social media accounts. But yes, we have various active kind of communication vehicles, but the website is kind of the central repository for directing you to those.
Atif Qadir 43:49
Excellent. So thank you so much for joining us today on the American building podcast. If you want to hear the behind the scenes stories of how iconic buildings in our country were designed and built, subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Google, or wherever it is that you'd like to listen, we all know that real estate is a tough industry to make it. So how can professionals stand out and make a name for themselves in today's world? You're for me, the team at Michael Graves and many of our spectacular guests like Raphael on what we did to make it where we are. Grab our exclusive guide seven tips on how to stand out in our field at American building. podcast.com. Finally, we live in the richest country in the history of humankind. We must reach out beyond the boundaries we see and the boundaries we create in order to help build homes and communities for others. Today, Raphael and I have made donations to the amazing charity urban green, which provides a forum to conduct research, share ideas and advocate for green building in the built environment. I encourage you our listeners to support their worthwhile work as well. My name is out there other and this has been American building by Michael Graves