Going Fully Virtual in Architecture: How TEAL Architects Shut Their Studio, Saved Tens of Thousands, and Built a Better Team | Tom Emodi

0:03Welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. I'm your host Daniel Arsenault. On today's episode we have Tom Emodi, president and owner of TEAL. We'll be talking about transitioning to a virtual studio during the pandemic, design challenges, modern income housing, and much more. Hope you enjoy. Welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Today I have with me Tom Emodi, the founder and owner of TEAL Architects. Tom's the former dean of architecture at — Tom is also a professor for 20 years at Dalhousie, formerly the Technical University of Nova Scotia.

0:43Tom's also the dean of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada College of Fellows since 2018. Thanks for being here, Tom — it's great to have you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks, Tom. We have some really interesting topics today. I know we're going to dive into the challenges over the last year transferring your office operations to a full virtual studio with — I think seven home offices. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. We have a total of seven of us. Two of us are students — we always have

1:18students working with us, but we have five full-time and two students. Yes. And also on the agenda for today is the challenges of pleasure design for income housing, which I know is a hot topic, and we'll dive into that as well. Do you want to give us some background, Tom, on TEAL Architecture and your vision behind that — sort of when you started it and your motivation for engaging students within TEAL? So I started TEAL in roughly 2010, 2011.

1:58So we're about 10 years old. And after I spent some time in Toronto working with a quite large firm that in the end was purchased by an even larger firm — so the bigger the purchaser and the smaller the purchasee, the bigger the disconnect between the two cultures. So eventually I became disenchanted with being part of a 3,500-member firm that was international with dozens and dozens of offices. By the way, that was not unlike the Technical University merger also, where there was a

2:39— when did that merger occur? It was in 1997, roughly. It happened over — but there again there was a 10 to 1 ratio in size, right? And usually the larger university, or the larger company, imposes its protocols and disciplines on the smaller one.

3:02Having had that in the Dalhousie/TUNS merger and then having had it again in a Young and Wright / IBI Group merger, I thought that I would leave and start a small company which was nimble and easy to manage, easy to direct, and consistently high quality. And focus on a number of things that we can talk about in a moment. But we've always had, ever since — at least one co-op student from the Dalhousie program. And it's sort of a mandate that I

3:44— professionals have, is to help the younger members of the profession come through and become good at what they do. So we do that all the time. And possibly just your interest in students from your time as a professor, your time as a dean at Dalhousie — who would have that, right? That's great, Tom. Just to continue with a little bit of the history of TEAL — maybe just on a couple of recent projects that you guys have done that are kind of stand-outs to you.

4:18I know you've recently completed the East Hants Aquatic Centre. I think that was — yes, yeah. Do you want to speak on that? So we teamed up with a company in Toronto, MJMA Architecture & Design. One of their directors at the time was actually someone I knew from Nova Scotia — David Miller. And they had become, and are still probably, the leading community pool designers in Canada and maybe internationally, and they have done dozens and dozens of outstanding architectural pieces that are community buildings, community pools,

5:04community recreation centers. And they've won lots of awards. What are some of the basic elements, for listeners that are not architecturally savvy, that would go into an aquatic center — just from a basic standpoint? Well, the largest thing to get right really is the atmosphere in the building, because with aquatic centers of course there's chlorine. And trying to minimize, or in fact eliminate, the chlorine from the air that you breathe, and to get the temperature and the humidity constant and

5:39comfortable everywhere in the building is the biggest challenge really. And if there are many pools — you know, different pools — they have sort of slightly different concentrations of different things. So the mechanical systems in a swimming pool and the electrical controls of all the mechanical systems — you'd be surprised if you go in the mechanical room, it looks like a — yeah. And it's not only a challenge design-wise to kind of make all that go away so you don't see it, but also to make sure that it

6:17operates in a seamless fashion so the owner-operator has the least amount of — just kind of controlling that whole environment. So that's the biggest challenge. I think there are a couple of elaborate skylights in that one as well, is there not? We had skylights in that, but in the end they — they were not — they got eliminated during the value engineering. Right. But we had some lovely skylights that were supposed to be icebergs. Sorry to bring that up, Tom — that's one of the sorrows of that one.

6:49But it turned out well even without those, right? Yeah. What about — you guys do a lot of work in Nova Scotia, yeah, but other provinces as well. I know recently the George Street Bar in Newfoundland — is that correct? What was that — 2016? 2016–17, I think. Yeah. We did a number of projects. We had a client in St. John's and he was building restaurants and bars, and we ended up with the George Street Bar. And I actually went to a couple of concerts there after it opened.

7:25Right. That's a pretty successful space. Yeah, I've seen some photos. It looked like there was lots of architectural millwork and woodwork — looked amazing. Well, the whole thing is one big wood cave, really. Yeah, yeah, it's really — yeah. I'd like to bring up one more thing before we dive into our main topics, just because I know we're going to have some great discussion there and we could talk on those things. TEAL is the recent winner of Atlantic Architect of the Year 2016. Yeah.

8:03And I know that wood design — you have a huge ambition for wood construction, and I know that's going to open the door for lots of talk. But maybe just, as brief as you can, just talk about what's behind that — because I think TEAL was first to apply for a building permit for a six-story wood structure. We did apply — yes. In the end that particular project did not go forward for a number of other

8:40reasons, but we did apply. Well, we got the wood award when we were doing a CMHC project in which CMHC had awarded the owner an innovation fund, and we were experimenting with modular wood. And the sort of summary of how that was going to go forward was that we would be combining and integrating three-dimensional modules — they were like complete cubes, if you like, right — with single modular panels in a sequence that would minimize construction time and also optimize construction cost.

9:28Now there's a lot of interesting background to the cost part of this. So if you build three-dimensional finished modules in factories — which is what, for example, Kent Homes does — then the competition on site for all of the trades is just for, for example, drywalling or electrical work or all of the different trades. That competition is reduced to, if not eliminated, because all of that goes into that factory environment. Everything gets wired and plumbed and drywalled and painted in the factory. So the best cost that you can achieve is

10:09when you have bidding with competitive tenderers for all the trades on site and not a dedicated crew in a factory. On the other hand, you can really minimize time, because if the three-dimensional modules arrive on site and they form part of the structure, then you're not there framing out in the winter — which was one of the things that we were trying to eliminate — all the framing time and framing costs associated with scheduled benefits. That's right. So there's a big savings on time,

10:44and then we were trying to find that optimum line where we could save enough on time but also save enough on the competitive bidding for all of the trades on site. And so that was a very interesting learning exercise where we gathered a lot of knowledge from different trades and different contractors, and then some research that we did on our own. Yes. But the other part of that wood passion we expressed in the roof deck at

11:22the East Hants Aquatic Centre. So the East Hants Aquatic Centre pool hall — a major room with all the different pools and a big water slide in it — has a nail-laminated roof deck. And so we were able to work with Bird Construction, a contractor who put together a local, small, young team of carpenters led by one of their most experienced carpenters, and made these wood panels that would be handleable by four men — could kind of lift them — and they were 17-foot-wide panels in the end.

12:02Of the day. And they're all two-by laminated by nails, basically. And so they built a jig — they built several jigs actually. They made these and we saved somewhere in the realm of about three weeks, we think, in just getting the roof together by doing this. But not only did we do that, we were able to help some young — you know, achieve some of their goals and do some really precise work, and that would be very exciting for them. Yeah. That must be

12:43quite unique too. I would think there wouldn't be many commercial roofs — reasonably unique, yeah. I mean, the thing to know a little bit about that is that there are many forms of laminating wood. There's glue lamination and cross-lamination of different sorts, and LVLs and so on. And the nail-laminated version is the one that you would leave exposed — it's the least industrial. So you can do it basically by hand, and with carefully designed nails that you have to be exact and

13:15precise. And there's no adhesive involved — when you assemble it, right? So they're not gluing up two-by-fours on site and clamping them. Right, next to the — yeah. Not only is there no adhesive involved, there's no — in the end there were no stains or any other applications to the panels. And these are panels that are in a really humid, warm environment in the pool hall. So it's locally grown wood, locally milled, locally put together by young carpenters. It's

13:49all local economy, which was one of the nicest things about the whole thing. Wow, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. I guess we should dive in to the topic of transferring your office operations during this past year into a full studio environment with all of your employees from home, and just the challenges of — I'm interested to hear how long that shift took, and obviously with the initial realization of the impact of COVID, you know, when that decision needed to be made, and then from that point,

14:31how long was it before things were kind of efficient with communication? Because with an architecture studio you're dealing with creativity, communicating that — it's not as simple as messaging and even video conference calls. So I know that you've come a long way with that and you're really happy with how things are going. I think even our listeners outside of the construction industry — certainly anyone with a company in an office atmosphere — would love to hear how that went for you and how that kind of played

15:07out. So well — I guess the lead-in story is: COVID hit in, whatever, March 2020. We had a lease that was in a downtown office building until the end of July. So we had all those months — we had to shut the office, we had to shut the studio down, everyone went home. And we had a room of, you know, 1,500 to 1,600 square feet of studio where nobody went for all those months, from March to July. And then the lease was up and we thought, what could we do given the circumstances?

15:50You know, see whether the landlord — since we had paid all this anyway and not really used anything — whether we could get some kind of a favorable rent going forward. And of course that didn't happen. So we looked around, we couldn't find anything that was better, or less expensive, or better and less. So we took the decision to basically take everything in that studio, put it all into a 12-foot by 24-foot storage unit, save tens of thousands of dollars a year in

16:30rent, and everybody worked from home. So in the beginning it was very odd, because the social aspects of this — just for example, when you're all together and you're having coffee, or you go to the kitchen and you make, you know, a sandwich or whatever you're doing, and somebody else pops up next to you doing something — you know, you get a lot of those side interactions which are social, which are often humorous, which lead into a conversation about a project, and then the creativity

17:06spark happens. So the spontaneity of these design discussions — that kind of unpredicted and unscheduled — was lost. And so I was very concerned that working from home, people would be, number one, lonely; people would be, number two, uninspired in a way, you know, by not seeing everybody around them work, and so on. And would miss this kind of spontaneity of discussion that we often had in the studio, especially those occurrences like sparking the creativity. Yeah — sometimes the best stuff can come from

17:50— absolutely, yeah. Somebody would say, oh, gee, I don't know what to do — what do you think I should do here? And then, you know, put a drawing on the wall, or people gather around a screen, and: why don't you try this, why don't you try this, what about if we did this? And you know, all the best sort of moments like that lead to some of the best design, right? So I was very concerned that we had lost some core, some essential dynamic that would stifle not only our

18:22creativity but also our productivity. Well, so far it's been the reverse, interestingly. Wow. We have a number of strategies that I think mitigate this. So I could talk a little bit about the things that we do day by day that try to resurrect that atmosphere, and then some of the things that we haven't been able to do and we're still trying to do. So what we do every day is at 9:30 in the morning we're all online for somewhere between half an hour and sometimes more like an

19:06hour, maybe even longer, depending on the day. That discussion is at the forefront — going down the list of projects and everyone chimes in about what's happening and what needs to be resolved that day or in the next short time. And that's kind of interspersed with background discussions on other projects that are coming, or things that are not mission-critical today but they are. And so even most recently we've had a discussion about, well, how do you make those discussions not — efficient — which is what some people — in other

19:53conversations I've had with others — is that, well, it's not efficient to have a discussion an hour a day. But we make a big distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. So you can be really efficient but you're not effective. And effectiveness includes all those qualitative things about team-building, team spirit, people knowing about all the nooks and crannies in the practice that affect what they're doing day by day. But if they don't know why something needs to be done and the way

20:29it needs to be done — the background information — then it's not as good for them to do it, because they don't know the context. So you're having these video meetings every morning? Yeah, or almost every morning — every morning, every morning, every morning. So it's not only to stay organized in that sense but to keep people engaged with each other as they're working from home. That's right. And fill them in on — yeah. So everyone gets involved more than we had before. Like, people know about our

21:02legal contract issues if there are any, or they know about some of the other organizational matters — insurances, registrations — all of those things more than they did before. So I think everyone has a bigger and more detailed picture of the — now I should put a caveat to this: if you had a practice of 40 people you couldn't do this. You would have to do it in smaller groups, right? Going back to the beginning when I introduced sort of the genesis of TEAL, I

21:42wanted to always keep it small and nimble and manageable, and so we always had about eight people as the kind of maximum, and maybe 10 at the very most. So I think you can do it in these smaller groups much, much more easily than you could if you had a firm much larger. Yeah. But I think there's something to be said for that from a business standpoint. Even though yes, the size of the company needs to be small for that to happen, you might think once a week is enough, and you

22:15don't want to have too many meetings — you want people to be efficient, that's an hour of time they could be working on something else. But yeah, maybe you're tapping into the psychology of not being present with each other every day, and by starting the day that way — yeah, yeah. There could be something to be said for that. And on that regard too — well, I actually think that the team spirit has become better, which is something completely different than what I was expecting. And people have commented in

22:45preparation for this podcast that, you know, it's a social opportunity of the day to crack a new joke you heard, or you know, tease someone about something or whatever. And that's all very nice — there's some really nice human exchanges going on. Yeah. The other thing that we've done and are getting better at is we've got an all-day chat room for every project. So if, say, you and I were on one project, we would have a chat room running.

23:23And if a couple of other people were on another project, they would have their own running. And on my screen I see them all. So I've learned to sort of try and keep an eye on these chats. And people organize one-on-one or small group online discussions as needed, and it's very easy to do with all of these platforms that are now around. Yeah. So we might have three on one online discussion doing something, we have two other people on another one, and so on. Yeah, happens all day. You refer to them as

23:59chat rooms — they'd be breakout rooms, or yeah, where it's just small groups of people, and the technology's there throughout the day for them to jump on. That's right. They usually do it textually, or we do it textually. There's a conversation that goes back and forth, and say, well, hey, let's look at your drawing. And then somebody sends somebody an invite and we jump on whatever — GoToMeeting or Zoom or whatever. That's right. And then we can share screens and share cursor control, and point to things and so on.

24:31So GoToMeeting and Zoom. And then when you're in those rooms and you want to be collaborating creatively with sketches and drawings, you can allow — I mean, everyone knows about screen share at this point, a pretty common term these days. But you can also give them control to draw, yeah — move the cursor, communicate that way too. Yeah. Drawing is common yet in our team and we're trying to work on that more. And there are other platforms that allow drawing more easily than

25:02GoToMeeting, for example. But cursor control is easy, switching back and forth between your image, my image, the next person's image is easy. Screenshots of the images — with, you know, you can certainly mark up your own drawing and then take a screenshot. So that happens a lot. And they're marking that up — they're not sketching, scanning it in? No, like they're marking that up with the program online. Yeah. So we're doing all of that. And it's interesting because some people in a

25:39small company have family obligations, so they love working from home because they have to look after children, or, you know, one of our team members is a very high-level member of an athletic team — a rowing team — and trains every single day. And the training schedule changes with seasons and so on. But she's training four or five hours a day, so she can arrange her workday around her training schedule, as long as we have this

26:15right. And given other responsibilities — both professional, family, or other — working from home works really well for some people. Much better than — for example, another member of our team that drove in every day to be in the studio and spent an hour and a half driving each way. So her efficiency, if you like, has incredibly improved now. I think that's such an interesting point that you brought up, because I think — and I'll ask about this later — but for people that haven't had that freedom before, where

26:56there's a workday from eight to five and that's your routine — all of a sudden to have that flexibility, where you're not necessarily — even if they weren't micromanaged in the first place — if they now have the flexibility to wake up and do their family thing, check in on a meeting, and then throughout the day do what they need to get done on their time, whether it's in a totally different fashion than the next — yeah. But just to have that freedom of managing your days

27:29like a freelance — looking for the right term — but yeah, that maybe has something to do with your productivity really improving over COVID. Do you think? Because now all of a sudden seven employees have that — that workday as opposed to what it was before. And they're under that freedom? No, they are. We have one rule, which is that we do set — and we absolutely meet — deadlines. So that if you know that you cannot meet a deadline, you let everybody else know ahead of

28:09time so that others can chime in and help you. But it doesn't matter whether you're working at ten o'clock at night or at five o'clock in the morning or whenever you want. So the deadlines don't change, but the journey — everyone can do their own journey — as long as there's some kind of, you know, almost incontrovertible moments where we are together, and that has to — yeah. And I think, you know, there's been research done recently about what people prefer now

28:46for a workday. And I think a lot of people want to keep that work-from-home arrangement moving forward, even as the pandemic slowly subsides. Yeah. But they also do want to have one or two days a week where they can come in to an office or be together in person. Yeah. Sort of the best of both worlds. But I think a lot of companies are shifting to that template where people are going to be able to work from home and

29:17continue — because production hasn't gone down, if anything it's gone up — but they don't want to work from home all month. Yeah, you want to have some contact throughout the week, whether it's one — and that's right. I mean, the other reaction that we have from people who don't have other responsibilities throughout the day — like the two people that I mentioned — is that, you know, I live alone anyway and I'm home alone anyway and I'm working alone at home anyway, so that social dimension of

29:47work I have to replace in some other way. And so I have to go out and do other things, do classes, or meet people in different ways. But it's a very interesting — opposite end of the spectrum. You know, some people who are living alone and working from home sort of have to add to their social life. And some people who are living with family and have family responsibilities — they have to find a space in their

30:21home where they can actually be relatively private. That's one of the most interesting sidebar observations — take me, for example. My home office is the bay window of our bedroom. We don't have any other space right now in where we are. So it's a lovely little bay window and it sits right on the street, and I can see everybody coming and going. It's fitted out beautifully and I'm very comfortable. But when the camera comes on I don't want people to see that there's

30:54a bed in the background. So we talked a lot about — well, how do you — not only for our internal discussions but for the external discussions with clients, consultants — you have a TEAL logo in the background. So we're very conscious of trying to make it professional. Just, you know, making sure that people realize that it's a professional

31:20setting. Yeah. So we have this constant chat room running, we have the ability to jump online anytime we want, we have the discipline — I think — of trying to run those meetings where we focus on the mission-critical things first and then people can peel away if they have to. So that's something that more recently we've been talking about — is that sometimes these meetings run on. But the first thing we ask is: who's got a mission-critical thing that has to be solved right this day, today, critical path? And somebody

31:56will say, well, I need to know something about XYZ. So we deal with that and then the rest of the meeting is less mission-critical for today, but maybe important. So there's that whole other distinction that I make between effectiveness and efficiency, but also urgent and important. And so most organizations I've found focus on urgent and efficient rather than effective — which includes qualitative dimensions — and the important. So we're trying to make time for the important, and

32:37rather than always the efficient and urgent, right. So far so good. Would we change this? Here are the things that are very hard to replace. One of the things I loved about our studio is we had big walls — you've been in our studio with big walls. So when it came time to make a submission of a construction drawing set or a report, we would put all of the pages on the wall and then you'd be able to walk along and read

33:12everything and mark up every sheet, and look from sheet 1 to sheet 30 and kind of compare the discrepancies or the inconsistencies that you found. I find — and maybe that's a generational thing — that's impossible to do screen by screen. When you go through a 30-page document and edit it as thoroughly and effectively, it's just page by page by page reading. So we don't have that — we don't have the display wall where we put everything up and mark it up.

33:50And I haven't found a replacement for physical modeling. Sometimes we do physical modeling — you know, building actual physical models. In our practice that's become less important because we do everything in three-dimensional models — everything from color choices and texture choices and building form decisions, and every single thing down to the last detail is reviewed. In digital models. And when we get online, whoever is working on a building has the three-dimensional model and is turning it from different angles and discussing. So they have the model — it's

34:34not done on paper — it is a digital model. We're using a digital modeling system all the time, right from the first design moves to the last detail. So the loss of the physical model space hasn't been as big of an issue as I thought it would be. The other big one, which came up even today, is that we had a library of samples and manuals and all those things that you need to refer to when you're choosing things, right.

35:14And that's all in a storage room now, and no one at home has the time or the space to assemble another library of materials, material samples — it's not the same as looking at the datasheet. Exactly. So that's lost, and that's hard to replace, right. There are things that, you know, as great as some of these software programs and software that they offer — Consume, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams — I mean, it's great, it's very advanced

35:49with all the things that they can do. But there are some things that you just can never emulate. Yeah, touching things is really important. You know, touching the sample to see what it really feels like when you put it on a wall or whatever. So that is very difficult to reproduce, unless you have small groupings of samples just for a project — and we're doing that a little bit, but it's not the same. But the benefits are huge. I mean, there's a reduced

36:19environmental impact because people are not driving. There's much better flexibility, like we talked about, for people to spend their time taking care of family business or other things. And there's a — I think the potential to do this in such a way that you get the best of both worlds. So our next steps are likely to be to try to find a meeting room only — just a meeting room — maybe share that with another studio. And that would be our venue for getting together face to face.

37:00But most of the time the actual work would be done at home, but the meetings would happen face to face as needed. And that's the direction — that's the kind of hybrid model. Yeah. So it's safe to say TEAL's not going to return to the old model even after the pandemic — probably, yeah. Are in that same boat, yeah — same forward thinking. Yeah. And it's funny, you know — now when people call me up, it's almost an apology to say, well, you know, we don't

37:34have a studio. But I've stopped being embarrassed by it, because I think it's going to be more and more the norm. We thought — you saw in my notes — one of our people suggested having a mobile studio, or a mobile meeting room. They're referring to the Breaking Bad RV. Yeah, that's right. You're a fan of that show, Tom? Yeah. But you know, we have a little RV — it's not big enough. So yeah. That's great. It's amazing to hear how

38:08that's transpired and it's also amazing to hear how well it's gone from that transition. And I should probably as a footnote add that, you know, the personalities that you have in your firm would probably be part of the success. We've managed over time to get together a team that really respects each other for each other's strengths, and really like each other, and get on as friends as well. Has that happened all organically, or is that partly in the hiring

38:47process? Or how does that transpire? Because I think that's a pretty important — it's essential, yeah. It's happened more organically than not. I mean, we've always been very aware of it. But the team that we have now is probably by far the most collaborative, productive, positive group that we've ever had. It's great. So what would you say as the owner and visionary of the company — is there any key elements that you've had front and center of mind

39:30for that to happen the way it has, as far as affirming each other and just the positive attitude and creating that work environment? Because that's an important thing in a lot of people's lives — their work life just isn't where it should be. And a third of your life you're — yeah, one-third you're asleep, or more, and you get some personal time in there. But if work life is not going well — well, we've always focused on — not sure how to put this in the best

40:06possible way — but people who are really good at what they do but haven't yet reached their maximum potential. So whenever we're trying to get new team members, we want someone who's really good at what they do — somebody who's got the sort of quality of experience that really demonstrates that they're going to make a contribution pretty quickly — but also somebody who's got ambitions to go way, way beyond, and we can sense the capacity for that person to grow way beyond. And the whole management philosophy

40:47is to try to make every door open for everyone to reach their maximum capability. You know, in what they do. And — never train them well enough so that they can leave your company, but treat them well enough so that they won't — well, train them so they can own your company. And so that's been my hope — that we find this team that is going to basically end up owning the firm and I can do less and less, because I'm not the youngest. And that's

41:19the model as well, right? Yeah, everyone that's working with — yeah, that's the hope and the model — yes, that everyone will end up owning this company. And I do less and less and they do more. And in the end of the day I'm almost twice as old as some of the people in my team, right? Yeah. But there's no better way to incentivize and keep the motivation up, and also feel included, feel part of the team. Everyone's very aware of their role — yeah,

41:53all those things. Yeah. So we're on it — it's a work in progress, as always. This silver lining in this terrible pandemic — and it's just a terrible pandemic and it's wrought havoc everywhere it's appeared — but the silver lining in that is, I think, it's speeded up a cultural process of working at a distance and being able to do that really well and not lose any quality in doing that, right. Yeah, right. Let's dive in, Tom, to our main topic number two — with TEAL's long-term

42:34commitment, mandates, your mission, to bring the highest quality of design to a very difficult arena — in modest-cost housing. Yes. That's a big topic. Obviously with the government involvement, and we're going to see — when we have seen — a lot of things happening in that realm for modest income housing. You've been part of maybe five or six over the last five years. You just finished one or starting a new one soon? We finished a couple and we're starting

43:16more than one — a number of new ones. Yeah, yeah. It's just a huge challenge, right? You have the budget, you have the — it's private, you have the government involved with the funding, and then it's up to you as the architect to design these buildings that are going to be comfortable in so many different ways — so many different variables to take into perspective. So I will just open the door because I know you have lots to say. Well, we do. I mean, some of our work is

43:46modest-cost housing, modest-income housing — it's completely private sector with no government support, no funding from government. Some of our work is a combination of private sector and some government support. And some of our work is more heavily supported by government grants of different kinds. Like, for example, we do work for Nova Scotia Housing and most of that is government support — federal as well as provincial — and different kinds of support. Some of it is energy-related support, some of it is

44:29just basically financial support. I think a little bit of the back story to this is that I think architects in North America — and certainly in Canada, and certainly in eastern Canada — are working in a cultural and social context in which design is really not valued, not valued in the way that I think it should be. And so if you compare, for example, the stature — if I want to call it that — of architects in, say, Europe, in countries like Germany or Scandinavian countries,

45:23or even Latin America — vastly different than North America, vastly different, vastly different. Melbourne is where I had my earlier years — some of them. Yes, he worked in Australia, right? Yeah, I did. And you know, it became like the design capital for — I don't know — a number of years around the turn of the millennium, around 2000 or so. And so everything that you look at, just an ordinary developer-funded apartment building, has that kind of design sense and design composition and attention to detail and layout and

46:00building form that you see here in the luxury buildings, right. And it's just natural — and people demand it. And so in Melbourne, if you're selling a condo or an apartment building, it's got who the architect was on it. And that brings some kind of stature to the whole profession, not just the individual, right. So we're missing that almost entirely. Well, it's funny because I have such a huge passion for this too, and any time I've been in Europe it's just so amazing — it's like a

46:34different world. Yeah. And it's — I don't want to go off on too big of a tangent — but the arena of monetizing creativity: from a standpoint of, you know, we don't have the money to put this much effort into such extravagant designs, yet if that happens, your tourism and your reputation draws people in, right? There's no metrics, there's no data to pull from to measure this. So it's — I know that's a big door to open, but

47:18well, it plays into the topic, though. It plays into the topic in this way: architects are involved in designing this kind of modest-cost, typically low-rise — or very rarely more than low-rise, mid-rise — buildings by owners who reluctantly — because they're forced to — hire an architect. If they could do without an architect they would, yeah, because they think they could probably do just as good a job without any of the background that architects go through. I mean, the architectural education program —

47:58to become a professional architect is about an eight to nine year journey. Not only that, probably one of the most time-consuming subjects that you can take — you can be a brain surgeon quicker than you can become an architect. And that's because it's very broad and very complex, because you have to know many things at a level of sufficiency that you can integrate them in the service of an idea. And then, you know, hanging on to that while everything gets priced and

48:34constructed and occupied and all of that — hanging onto this idea all through the journey, which is often years through the planning process and all of that — takes all kinds of different skills. Not only the creativity to imagine it and draw it, but also to develop the documentation for it so people can build it accurately, and to develop the management skills that bring all this together. So I would take it someone like yourself would — because that's so vast — to take up an art form like architecture as an

49:10expression of self, have your vision, and then have so many outside parties along the way from point A to point B with a thousand points in between. Yeah. So you must struggle with: when do I let go of this piece of art on my end, and the contractors are involved and all — yeah, hundreds of parties that are involved. And it may be that there are elements that have had to be adjusted, but still the main premise of what you envisioned is there.

49:43It's still a satisfying feeling. Well, the idea has to be simple enough and strong enough to withstand all this, right? Because everybody — from the planner who doesn't want to approve it because it doesn't quite meet the planning regulations, to the building inspector who finds reasons because you haven't met this code requirement or that code requirement — which you have to meet because of life safety — to the financier who doesn't want to finance it because of different financial models — right down the end of the

50:17line to the carpenter who wants to put the frame together differently because that's the way he's always done it — and so on. And all of those are legitimate, right? All of those reasons have legitimacy in this process. So it's the most complex form of art — it's the social form of art. And as we were just saying, the idea has to be simple enough and strong enough to withstand all of this buffeting on the way. Yeah. That whole ability to do that —

50:52come up with something really simple, really strong, and — as you put it in the beginning — have the ability to give pleasure day to day, just comfort, to people who otherwise cannot afford this design input. That's the sort of driving passion behind this arm of our work. So typically the people who live in these modest-income apartment buildings would never in their wildest dreams be able to imagine employing an architect. So we are like surrogates that go in there and try to

51:40give them the absolute most practical and yet pleasurable living experience. So all of our design is based on putting ourselves into the shoes of all the people who use this building, right. Who uses — that's experiential, right? It's driven through experience. Human experience. Human experience. So let's talk a little bit about those details for a project — yeah — similar to, well, view, lighting, use of every square inch, energy efficiency — just the practical. Yeah, just take us through some of the

52:25main points. Well, it depends usually on our buildings because they are modest cost and they're often in a kind of suburban environment. So there's surface parking rather than underground parking. Often they have a combination. But the journey begins before you enter the building — like, how do you arrive? When you slam the door of your car and you get to the building, what is that? And then all the way into the lobby and all the way through the hallways and all

52:58the way to your front door in your apartment. So if that journey is good — and we have proven this to a client, actually; one of our earlier clients is still a client, by the way — we had big debates because we put windows into the hallways on every level to get light and view into every home continuously. Yeah. So at the end of each hallway — so you know, you come out of the elevator, you'd look one way you could see out, you could see the view, and look the other way you

53:30could see out, you could see the view. It was a light-filled corridor. And we had a big battle to keep those windows in there, because that is space that we could have put into the end of the corridor — space that we could have put into the units, right. And said, well, you know, the rentable space we could increase it by 10 square feet or 20 square feet. So: no, don't do that, because part of your profitability is that everybody who comes through this door will want to rent an apartment.

54:01It doesn't feel closed in the hallways, it doesn't feel dark, doesn't feel somewhat claustrophobic. And that is a higher priority — yeah, from one point of view — than the others. That's right. So we convinced the developer, yeah. And, you know, bless that client, because he's still a client. He listened, and we try to get that into every project where we possibly can. Even if there's a stairway at the end of the hallway, we try to make sure that we put light

54:32through the stairway so the doors have some light, and the exterior has some light — we can get some light and view at the end. So those are some simpler ways. Whenever you're boxed in and you have tight boundaries for creativity, there's a sort of database in your mind that you go to: we can still accomplish some pleasure aspects here. Yeah. It's a human thing — humans move to the light. So when you enter your apartment door, you should be on a line of movement that takes you

55:10straight through this dwelling to a window and out. And that is a principle in every single room. So when you enter your bedroom, you should be able to open that door and be aligned to a view outside. It makes every room feel bigger, even though they're tiny rooms. Sometimes they're tiny — as you know, the bedrooms are so tiny you can hardly get to bed — but it should feel — yeah. That's funny — I was going to bring up one of the things that you're lacking

55:38now at the virtual studio — you don't have the nice view, which is similar to the view we have here now, right? Because that's also psychologically kind of — it is. You know, your work day, and you're able to look out and you're not boxed in. I've always found when I've been in offices that have a nice view — yeah, just a little bit more clear-minded. Yeah. And mental health factors in with all that stuff as well. Absolutely. So that's one thing — making sure that there's the generosity

56:04of space that's maximized, and the light and the view if they can get the view. So I was just working before I came in — we're doing this kind of big suburban apartment building complex and we have to have surface parking because there's just not enough space to put it all underground and not enough money to build several underground stories of parking. So how do you make a big parking lot of a hundred and more — 150 cars — that's out of the view, that you're not going to be looking at and

56:36you have the acreage on the lot to work with. Well, in this case we happen to find we have just enough. But, you know, we always find ways of tucking that stuff away so it's not the first thing you look at. It might be in your view at the side, but it's not the main thing. So you have to organize the site in such a way that the experience from the bedroom is as important as the experience from the highway, from anywhere. Yeah. The

57:04other thing, of course, in very tight spaces — and these are almost always very tight because of the economies that are involved — is storage. So how do you maximize, as you were just saying, every square inch of space, yet keep it open, yet keep it light-filled, yet keep it generous? So we're pretty good at doing that, and we're pretty good at trying to find flexibility. So, you know, that kind of second bedroom that you often find that has no windows — we avoid that

57:37if at all possible. So, you know, that second room which could become a bedroom or a dining room or an office or a guest room or whatever — that has to be really well located to ensure privacy for everything else, to ensure that it gets some light as well, even though it may not be right on the exterior. To make sure that it's got access to things like the washroom and other private functions without disturbing the entire household, if it wants to be a guest room.

58:09Those kinds of things. We pay a lot of attention to the experience of the guest, the experience of the child who might be — so, you know, two-bedroom units, just as an example, have two fundamental ways of being done: one where the bedrooms are all together, where the acoustics are more difficult to control, and one where the bedrooms are separated by the main gathering room. And so we try to mix that up so that, you know, if a couple has a teenage son or a teenage daughter — or some

58:42teenage children — then they can be on different sides of the apartment, because there are more acoustic and other privacy concerns usually in those families. As you're talking I'm thinking about the statement you made earlier about how architecture is the toughest art form to execute because it's so social and there are so many different — yeah. It's — I think as you delve into it, it's hard for some people to appreciate how difficult that would be, yeah, not being in your shoes. Yeah. And

59:15that's the joy of it. I mean, I love the complexity, and being able to try to find a simple line through it that guides everything else. So yeah. And on top of all that — with all the human experience and the design for that — you're thinking of things as well like healthy materials and energy savings, sustainability, carbon footprints. Yeah, all that stuff. And I mean, that's becoming more and more — I wouldn't say normal or typical — but it's certainly more and more demanded

59:48even by the code, by the building code and by the energy code, and by other regulatory — you know, access for disabled people, just for example — it's built into the Nova Scotia Building Code now in much bigger ways than ever before. So those moderate-income housing projects that you have worked on and are working on — high specs for accessibility, absolutely beyond what the minima are, right? Yeah, so we think about all that. And you know, there's a lot of issues around

60:26security. Privacy, security — that's a big one now, with all kinds of digital ways of making sure that buildings are secure. So when you're doing buildings that have — we know a lot of our buildings — we have one building that we're doing actually that has three or four different functions. So there's a floor that's a hotel, there's another floor that's for small — very small units, another floor — kind of more not modest income but much higher income, another floor at the base for commercial. And so everyone's using the same

61:05elevators and everyone's using the same lobbies and so on. So how do you design the security? How do you swipe in, swipe out, or coding, code out — all those kinds of — yeah, all of that stuff — thinking all that through. And even your options in the rooms for pocket doors, barn or sliding doors — anything that takes away that swing eating up square footage. Yeah, we're big fans of non-swing doors, right? Yeah. And so the — last thing I want to mention, which

61:45is probably one of the biggest things — is we try to achieve slim, elegant building forms. You know, not fat, low, clunky building forms. Reminds me of the rendering of the one you've done in Dartmouth. Yeah. And so that's a good example. What's the name of that again? Bryony House — that's right. Yeah. That's just under construction, just being finished. Yeah. Which is the shelter building for women and children escaping domestic violence. And we have this passion for memorability — like, you should be able to remember a building

62:26somehow in a simple two or three word phrase: it's the building with whatever. And so we always try to put some kind of a design theme into a building that's memorable. Even though the materials are not expensive and everything else about it is kind of modest. It's kind of like finding that analogy — you know, the best-dressed person has a black suit with one jewel, one piece of jewelry, right. So what's that jewel in this thing that we'll remember, that everybody

63:04will remember. Yeah. Nice. So that's the way we go about it. And we've been very lucky in some ways because we've got repeat clients in many of these projects. So something that we're doing has worked for them as well. And they're in there primarily to, you know, make money — that's their ambition — have the building completely rented and make money. Yeah. And modest income housing is a service to the community and to those individuals, but it's still

63:38very much a business. Yeah. It's a business and they have to make money — otherwise they can't do the next building. And so are you more heavily involved with these modest-income housing designs — like, you've done many of them in the past and you're working on this one that's just finishing up and there'll be more down the road? So this is front and center? We have one client that's now got sufficient projects in the pipeline that — you know, this particular client wants to build two

64:05buildings a year for the forthcoming — I don't know how many years — but at least two, three, four years. So we've got a reasonably well-defined project stream from just this one client, but we have others as well. That's beneficial, I assume, too, in itself, because you can learn — your ability to — yeah, certain ideas that will work with that client for the future. Yeah. And it gives you the stability to build a team and to make sure that no one has any

64:36worries about not enough work, and so on. Yeah. That's really very important. Well, Tom — yeah. As we wrap up, is there anything else you want to touch on for current projects for TEAL, or any thoughts on the heavy use of natural wood at the new arts center, just anything at all that's on your mind these days currently? Well, the wood is one — I mean, we're really passionate

65:13about using wood, and using wood well, and using wood in a way that's not only because it's wood, but because it's the right thing to use. So what we learned, for example, about a six-story wood-frame building is that unfortunately, by the time you get the structural systems working well enough at six stories, you're really moving from frame construction probably to heavy timber construction. And heavy timber construction is not — at the moment, anyway — surprisingly, in a province that grows wood all the time and mills wood all the time,

65:58heavy timber construction is unfortunately not as — as other forms of —

66:06Germany and other European countries are experimenting with 10-, 12-, even higher-storey wood-frame buildings, wood structures. We found there's a barrier somewhere in that four to five storey range where, if you get into the six-storey wood frame, the bottom two stories have so much wood in them in order to support the other stories that you might as well be building in another material — at least in the current construction economy here in Nova Scotia. Now that might change, right. But we would love to be in an

66:42environment where wood is the choice. And the climate in Atlantic Canada — does that pose issues? I don't think it's the climate. I mean, most bigger, medium-to-large contractors have learned to build throughout the year, and modularizing and prefabricating their wood panels takes a lot of their on-site work out of that, right? And still leaves, like I said earlier, on-site trades to be competitive on electrical, mechanical, plumbing, all those other finishing things. So if you can get the construction — if you

67:24can get the structure up and weathertight, then — and that could be in wood. And the barrier right now that I can see is twofold. In wood: one is that threshold that you pass once you get through about four stories, five stories — that you're using so much framing on the bottom stories that it becomes uneconomical — number one. And number two: the financial and the insurance industry do not fund or insure wood structures in the same way as they fund and insure concrete and steel structures,

68:06strictly on fire rating — strictly on what is really not well supported in terms of data. I mean, the data don't show that wood buildings are less safe. And the experiments that we're aware of show that if you have good sprinkler systems — which you have to have above about four stories, or about three stories anyway — if you have really good sprinkler systems, then whether it's a wood building or a steel building, it's not really any bigger risk. What about moisture in Atlantic Canada as opposed to another

68:46landlocked province or area? In you mean in the wood, as far as shrinkage and movement — is that a factor? I mean, the industry is pretty good at working that out and getting it right, yeah. For sure. But the image of wood construction — well, softwood moisture content is like five percent or not — yeah, I mean, you can get it controlled. You can get it controlled, as long as you keep it controlled while you're constructing too. But the image of

69:16wood structures in the financial world and the insurance world has to be addressed. And that was one of the things that was a big factor in our — so that's the biggest barrier then, for these builders? It is one of the biggest barriers. It's not that wood is any less of a material, or the actual product to buy — although two-by-fours now I think are four times the cost compared to pre-COVID days. Yeah. I mean, it is one of the biggest barriers — is that

69:46financing a wood structure and insuring a wood structure is more difficult than financing other materials. That's very interesting. Yeah. And we've talked about this to the Wood Council, we've talked about this at different conferences and so on. And everyone agrees, but convincing the banks and convincing the insurance companies is a long process. Oh, there's that contrast between the monetary and the artistic. That's right, that's right. Well, as we wrap up, Tom — where can people find you online? Well, we have a website that's

70:26unfortunately, like most websites, a little bit out of date. But we're online: www.tealarchitects.com. And we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter a little bit — not as much. We have a Facebook page. So if you put TEAL Architects into the search you'll find us — it's not difficult. That's great. Yeah, that's great, Tom. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and really appreciate your — we've loved the opportunity, and thanks for inviting us. Thank you.