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on me well thanks um maybe you'd like to drink to finding your people my mother wouldn't approve of that how would you know after all this time [Music] [Music] if you love listening to this show please consider giving a rating and a review on amazon alexa or wherever you listen we want to continue bringing you this amazing content and part of our ability to do that means that we need a big audience they may not seem like much but rating and reviewing the show will help more people find us just like how you found this show simply on any podcast platform search for a show scroll down to the bottom and push 5 stars it's that easy thanks for supporting the show [Music] today i'm joined by patrick mclamey who is the ceo emirates at hok and chairman at building smart international welcome to the show thank you very much scott for having me wow i am so impressed and i was very excited to speak with you i mean you have really kind of helped grow the hok organization you were there for 50 years and it is of course now one of the largest and most prominent architecture and engineering firm that's out there now of course things have changed since uh you know you were at the helm um but i'm curious to know you know over that span and and even after kind of your retirement there um how your industry has changed in these decades yes that's a great question and i think the answer is we have changed of course we've gotten digital but we still have a long way to go i'm fond of comparing the building industry to the manufacturing industry which are both roughly the same size in a in a developed economy like here in the us and the the productivity of manufacturing has that has steadily grown which means that it puts manufactured goods within the reach of ordinary people making an ordinary income so we all can drive a car we can all have a smartphone and so on and buildings the world of buildings the productivity has actually declined since i started in the practice more than 50 years ago and at midpoint in my career 25 years in well for many years i began to ask why why is this happening and why are we stuck in this old-fashioned way of working and and why aren't we more like manufacturers and the usual answer is well architects do one-of-a-kind buildings and manufacturers of automobiles let's say or smartphones design them once and for and produce millions and that's true but i didn't accept that that buildings are now not made by piling up one stone on another or one rock on another they're made by trucks bringing manufactured building products to a job site and the contractor is more like henry ford was in 1900 as learning how to assemble a building from parts that are brought to the site so if we're making buildings out of different pieces and parts that can all be made by manufacturers why haven't we benefited in the same way that manufacturing is why aren't our buildings steadily getting less expensive instead of more and why do we still have quality issues and uh scott it's a long story but it led me to co-found the organization i still chair called building smart and building smart was uh different from the professional societies that i was a member of like the american institute of architects aia in the in the building world the architects are in one corner in their professional society talking with each other the engineers are in their corner contractors are in theirs we needed to talk together and figure out what was going on with the information flow because at the end of the day designing and building a building is not too much different than designing and building an automobile or an airplane but are the players in that in that process are so spread out and separate separate companies uh who often think of the other as not as a partner in getting something accomplished but as an opponent somebody with a different set of values and so building smart was set up as a as a forum a place where enlightened architects engineers contractors building owners and building equipment manufacturers and the people who regulate buildings the building codes people and many others could all be at one table and work to with the new digital age work to find digital ways of working together so building smart is still quite active and getting great great traction now around the world building smart is basically a non-profit that helps develop digital standards for design construction and operation of buildings and more recent years infrastructure things like railroads and power grids pipelines and so on so i want to come back to this uh this notion of kind of misalignment uh in just a kind of a few minutes but um you know i think again not exactly perfect example but when we think about renewable energy because ultimately when you're you know building large solar pv farms it's still nonetheless a building project it may not require as much architecture but certainly engineering but if you look at the cost structure the total cost so much of that is really soft cost that's really you know eating up the the margin so to speak um but you know this notion of a line unified methodology-driven synergistic approach that's multi-disciplinary you know it really it's it's about orchestrating using best practices you know i think you mentioned some of the frameworks as well and and in that process you basically not only make the process of building cheaper but also you know it's about the outcome base so we'll talk about the outcome base in just a second as well um i want to ask you um you know you were doing sustainable design and architecture long before we had these you know kind of passe labels such as you know you know you end sustainable development goals and of course elite standards you know the rigor of that can you briefly share um a talk that was given by dr peter raven who at that time was the director of the missouri botanical gardens back in 1991 and the impact that of that speech that it had on you personally but also the organization yes peter raven who's still living by the way he's a brilliant man and uh he was a botanist but who who took a who developed a very broad world view of being a relationship between nature and man our board of directors met in st louis missouri where the firm was founded back in the early 90s just the board and we had a very nice board dinner at a private club in suburban st louis and dr raven we had done some work for the missouri botanical garden to develop a new building or to design a new building for them to store seeds as a seed bank and dr raven was our invited guest we all had a nice dinner and then after dinner dr raven stood up and at our invitation made a few remarks and without notes and without referring to anything else just what was in his mind he he painted this very broad picture that here we are as humans living on this little thin layer on the surface of the earth just a few miles up and a few miles down it's all of living things he said over millions of years plants and animals learn to live symbiotically we need each other and that humanity people now have become so-called civilized and we've begun to break down that barrier and uh we're disrupting this normal process that nature has very carefully built over these years and we're literally putting ourselves in our planet at risk and then he i mean you could have heard a pin drop when that man was speaking then he challenged us he said okay now it's my privilege to talk to you because you're leading architects you're responsible for what gets built out there what are you doing about it why aren't you building buildings that are as efficient with their use of the energy that they get from the sun as the plants why aren't you building buildings that like plants or animals have a natural way to recycle to be renewed into something else and uh why are your buildings fighting against nature why we have most buildings have four sides why are the four sides of a building the same when we all know that the sun is the strongest on one side and as non-existent on the fourth side so he began to to challenge us and after that meeting we were so uh struck by this that we passed a resolution of our board that said this is going to be our number one design driver as a company because we believe in it and we also believe that we can persuade our clients that sustainable design and i'm not talking about just a slogan here real sustainable design buildings that sip energy they don't gobble it buildings that actually do have parts and pieces that can be recycled and not do bad things to the environment and we started that process in the early 90s and realized fairly soon that in order to make a real success of it we needed to have digital technology the computations to find out as we're designing how many windows should we be putting on one side of a building so that we can have the proper amount of light but not too much solar gain so we don't have to spend so much on cooling the building and so on and so technology and sustainability became partners and every project at hok from that moment on we've gotten better at this but every project is now scrutinized for its sustainability we have a little rule at hok that's still in place uh except we keep upping the ending no building will be designed nhk no project will be designed even if it's an interiors of a building or a plan for a subdivision or a city without having a lead rating and lead as you you and your listeners probably know is a is a sustainability rating and a lead rating is simply the first step and where hok and i think others must go is zero net energy and zero net carbon buildings and uh we've actually accomplished that a couple of times before i stepped down from hok the other thing that you can ask but i'll answer it first if i may is well gee doesn't that cost a lot of money if you're clever and if you're intelligent about the choices you make early in the design process we can develop sustainable buildings that begin to approach zero net energy and zero carbon with nominal changes in price maybe actually price savings and certainly after the first five or six years more than pay for themselves i really uh am really enjoying this and i i think uh just to kind of reinforce but also to add some additional perspective is that when we talk about climate change i think people naturally think about the things that they see right it's the cars it's the um you know oil and gas as an example but these buildings that are quietly just standing there are actually one of the worst carbon footprint generators out there right yeah yes you talk about one of the big no-nos um in terms of common practices that you see which has to do with track homes can you talk about why that's such an issue and why do we keep on still seeing it yes oh my gosh one of the things about our industry is that the architect is not always present in the in the process developers of track subdivisions have found they can buy pre-made architectural plans they hire a civil engineer to lay out some curving streets on a piece of land and and then they bench the land so that each lot is flat and plop these houses down and the houses have no relationship to the sun or the wind or whatever else nature the view it's a and each house is an element in itself poorly made uh most developers of subdivisions know how to build sustainably but they they've gotten into this mindset that the first lowest cost is the most important a few developers are now changing beginning to change but i think the customer the end user the buyer has to be the one to actually drive this you know if you have a cell phone you expect that next year's model will be better it'll be faster and better features and so on with homes that's not necessarily true so until we get that mentality as consumers of of buildings of people that use them uh we won't actually be anywhere and the the the architect uh is not the customer the architect is the midwife of creating something from an idea and so developers developers can be held accountable we can have laws about sustainability i think we're coming to that and in my simple way of looking at things if we had a carbon tax and it ratcheted up each year that would transform the building industry because people wouldn't be able to do would get get away with what they're doing um so that we have a long way to go and uh at hok we don't actually design houses we designed big complicated buildings but but designing homes for people to live in is probably the most noble of design professions it just needs to step up to being green and being sustainable and making good use of the land our cities are all sprawled out and it makes it just more difficult for people to live a noble life or more like rats going along instead of people living well and living uh living you know cities should be places for people to have a good beautiful existence not places to survive so i want to go back to the intention and purpose of why building smart international was founded in the first place which goes back to that kind of misalignment you talk about how many architects feel that you know some of the buildings that they're perhaps maybe working on are inefficient or even uninspiring um do you feel that there's you know i think you mentioned it before but is there a true fundamental misalignment between the you know the the architects the engineers and essentially the property developers or the property owners and how do we start to address some of those kind of economic disincentives or misalignments yes well i think first of all we architects have to get a lot better explaining what the true purpose of an architect is i think a lot of architects and a lot of the general public you know if i meet somebody on the street or at a party or something i'm an architect what do you do uh do you design houses what styles do you like and it's not about styles it's about making things work better the style comes out of making things work better houses need to and any building needs to work a whole lot better than we've made them traditionally so we architects have a job to do and architects have gotten caught up in this as well if you look at the trade press that serves the design professions uh in building design architecture they're all filled with the latest nifty uh i'm gonna say design feature or style everyone's looking for a style and good design is like a good person you go from the inside to the out and i think many architects have lost track of that developers need to see dollars and cents they need to understand oh and there are some now if you if you design sustainable buildings there is a growing market people will buy these houses and these buildings they'll want to live in them i have a developer in our community here who's designing now and proposing all electric town homes with all the energy generated on the rooftops uh with with tesla batteries in the garages so that every appliance in the house is electric the house basically generates what it needs they're still hooked up to the to the electric grid but basically the the power cost is nil and you know they use heat pumps instead of furnaces and air conditioning there's no gas lines connected to the houses so those are the kinds of things that need to become commonplace i had a long discussion with him i said well gee those are all wonderful things but you're still using wood construction two by fours and he said yes he wants to go to uh more and what is a sustainable product but what burns and wood rots and and termites like to eat wood so there are alternatives to wood that are manufactured products and he still hasn't been able to hit the price point where he can afford those but there are people out there now that are seeing a business case for building green and people willing to pay for that they're not willing to pay double or anything but they're willing to pay five or ten percent more and he sees that market and i think that that is going to only grow and i think that's a great point is that that premium that represents our value that we assign to sustainability it comes down to the end user or the end consumer their willingness and i think it's there and we're starting to see that and good comment about the tax credi you know frankly if it doesn't hurt people are not going to change their behavior and last question and we only have a couple of minutes remaining is around the some of the big changes that's coming so if you could opine about cities big city centers in particularly yeah uh in the context of not only covet and postcode but also because of things like autonomous vehicles the recognition that you know a lot of the parking lots will have to become multi-purpose and have to change and i think more and more cities are looking to change their city center so that it's more public transportation more walkable and bikable versus you know mass transit i mean i mean versus a single single passenger drivers as an example what do you see as being the future of cities that are sustainable yes well first of all i think the whole world is still gravitating towards city life developed countries developing countries all around the world people are migrating to cities why because that's where opportunity is jobs education and so on um so i don't think that'll stop and what our job is is to make cities not just barely function but really livable what if you could take with autonomous vehicles what if you could take all the parking lots in every city this is a just a mind game turn them into a park or a plaza where people fill it with people instead of cars what would that do so i'm i think that a future of a city is is a combination of things but it's certainly giving people breathing room room to be outdoors and not not be at the mercy of the automobile automobiles will have their place i think as autonomous vehicles but once it takes me to its destination to my destination i wanted to go find itself a nice place to park in a tight grid with the other ones probably a stacking arrangement and stay out of my life until i need it again public transit i think is definitely an important piece of this um uh big cities need public transit there's no other real way to accomplish uh the movement of people but i'd love to see in the densest part of our cities the space for the cars be taken be taken away from the cars and given back to people pedestrians or outdoor life so that people have that that possibility of living in a in an urban garden instead of an urban jungle well on that we have been inspired by patrick mclamey ceo emeritus and eight of hok and chairman at building smart international thank you for joining today thank you very much i've enjoyed it if you've enjoyed this episode take a moment to rate our show on any podcast platform that you listen to scroll down to the bottom and push 5 stars it's that easy and as always thanks for listening [Music] you