This week, we’re taking a break from talking about housing affordability and the missing middle. My guest is Walker McKinley, founder of McKinley Studios and we’re talking about his integrated practice model called the “Black Chamber” which is set up to promote collaboration across disciplines and foster innovation.
Listen in to hear him speak about this practice model and learn how it works.
About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.
Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd
Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity .
RVLTR:
Walker McKinley is the founder of McKinley Studios, a firm operating in the fields of strategy architecture, interiors, branding, art, and furniture based in Western Canada. The firm operates on a unique studio model, the Black Chamber, that aims at giving designers more agency over their work through a collaboration between creative disciplines, which is what we're here to talk about today. So, can you start by telling us who you are and what you do in your own words in three sentences or less?
Walker McKinley (WM):
I'm Walker McKinley, Founder of McKinley Studios. I'm a architect by education, but I'm involved in, I guess, six different creative studios, as well as some manufacturing companies mostly based in Vancouver and Calgary.
RVLTR:
That was short and sweet. So, let's get right into it and what the hell is the Black Chamber?
WM:
So in our architecture and interiors practice, we were increasingly asked questions by clients that we felt weren't really answerable by architecting and required research and collaboration and outside voices. We decided to both monetize that activity, and also by taking on that work for our clients, it was a way to be at the table at the very beginning of projects when we think a lot of really important decisions are made that designers are sort of left out of when they come in in the standard practice of later.
So we're doing research, we're bringing in artists and top chefs and economists and other data professionals and working on ... it changes with every project. Sometimes it's positioning of a real estate project, sometimes it's programming, sometimes it's uncovering assets that a client has that they may not understand. Then often it works for us as a business development tool, because it leads to design.
RVLTR:
So if I understand correctly, design is not always the answer to those challenges.
WM:
Design is ultimately the answer, but we think that designers have often been left out of that critical first step, which in my mind, design thinking is what is needed for so many of these challenges. Yet pro-forma thinking and legal thinking, and political thinking ends up taking over and designers are handed a kind of half-baked agenda.
RVLTR:
So, how long have you been operating on that model then?
WM:
The firm is 20-some years old as a kind of pure architecture and interiors firm. Black Chamber came about I would say five years ago-ish, and has really in the last three years taken on real flash that's got a team and really a process.
RVLTR:
So I think to help me visualize and I think the audience as well, can you maybe speak to a couple of significant or typical projects that have come out of this collaborative process?
WM:
Sure. I'll be speaking today about a couple of them here at IDS. The very first project where we really catalyzed this was Simons department store, which we had done work for them. They have 125,000 square foot department stores. They work for them, unlike most retailers these days, but they could not get that kind of real estate in downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver, so they came to us and said, "You know our program, what would a 10,000 or a 30,000 square foot Simons look like?"
So we knew that that wasn't just shrinking the store, that it wouldn't be sensical and needed a completely different idea of what shopping is. So the day that I would talk to Peter Simons about that project, I was that evening watching a documentary about a group in World War II that cracked the Japanese code during the war. They were called Black Chamber. I was kind of half deliriously asleep on the couch, and I was like, "Hey, I think that's what we're being asked to do is crack cultural codes and consumer behavior codes, and figure out how the web could replace 120,000 square feet in mixed with a 30,000 square feet, and what that would look like and what it would need to do."
So, then the store became about community and being a sort of ambassador, generating web traffic, shopping takes on a whole other sort of look.
RVLTR:
So, are you directly responsible for bringing Simons to Toronto?
WM:
I am not.
RVLTR:
No?
WM:
We have not done any of that work yet. We've started in on the work and I've done a number of their department stores, none here.
RVLTR:
I see. So, what do you aim to accomplish for this new model? What's your purpose or your long-term vision?
WM:
For us, Black Chamber, I mean, it's a powerful way ... how do I say this? It's at once new for us, but really it's old. It's what architects have always known their job was to think and to be design thinkers. I feel like recently developers and project managers and all kinds of other related professionals have taken away a lot of the sort of agency of the designer. So for us, partly it just gives it back.
It gets us at the table right away, it lets us help make big important programming decisions. It's worked so well for our projects where we've done it separately as a project, that now every project we have starts with a mini Black Chamber. It's sort of our pre-design process and it's opening doors for us. Sometimes people are interested in that thinking more than necessarily they already have a designer or an architect, but we'll still do the thinking and then it leads to more of the more traditional work that we do.
RVLTR:
So are you still taking on the traditional architecture interior's work, or are you solely operating from that Black Chamber model now?
WM:
We definitely still do architecture and interiors, but Black Chamber's now sort of the foundation of how we work.
RVLTR:
That's very interesting. So you have your fingers in many figurative pies, architecture interiors, graphic design, art, products even. I think those glasses you're wearing are your design. How do you keep track of everything and prevent the whole thing from losing steam or get lost?
WM:
Falling apart?
RVLTR:
Yeah.
WM:
Do I? No, I mean, I've got a great team. Each of the studios has a director and associates and a team. My job is to make sure they're collaborating and working as an interdisciplinary whole. I'm sort of a mascot for a fair amount of it and very high-level within it, and then the team really does the work.
RVLTR:
So, it's all about people.
WM:
Absolutely, and collaboration. We're extremely collaborative.
RVLTR:
That's very interesting. So, there's another architect who's been working hard at bringing agency back into the fold of architecture. That's Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX New York. He's really big on doing that by designing in a way that gives him and his firm more agency, and he does so by designing buildings that basically cannot be modified without being completely destroyed.
WM:
Right.
RVLTR:
There's a famous example of one of those ubiquitous high-rise towers in Seoul that he was asked to design, and his solution was to make the elevator core the facade so that it couldn't be changed. It had to be what it was, otherwise the structure would not stand. So that's more, to me, a tactical approach to bringing agency back into the fold of the architect. It seems you have more of a strategic approach to the problem. Can you speak more about that?
WM:
Yeah, I think through Black Chamber, our approach is to, as I say, have a seat at the table right from the beginning and to be really involved in the decisions that would lead to decisions that would lead to value engineering. So, we are helping set the overall values of the project and why the project exists and setting a North Star for all decisions that are made within a project, from how it's communicated to the public, to how it's negotiated with the municipalities, to what it looks like, to how it's sold. So by being a part of that, I feel like we're able to really define where the project goes.
RVLTR:
So when you do that, do you find that it's harder to value engineer, because you have your fingers in all those aspects of the project?
WM:
Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily see value engineering as an evil even. I think if it's value engineering, and truly I think what we are trying to work on in Black Chamber are the values. So I think if the values are strongly set, yes, you can make decisions about do we spend on this or that, but they're made around values. So yeah, I think it is a way to control quality or at least encourage quality, which I think is also what fighting value engineering is also obviously trying to do.
RVLTR:
So, have you noticed any tangible or noticeable differences in quality between maybe your older more traditional architecture and what you do now?
WM:
Yes, for sure. I mean, we're seeing great success in some of the really large projects that we're involved in like multi-building urban fabric kind of projects. We're able to tell a story and bring a narrative based on setting up values all the way through the project, so that different architects can be working on different parts of it, we can be working on parts of it. We can be helping to bring in the right kind of tenants, we can be helping to set how the tenants communicate with each other, how the branding is done.
So, we've gone from maybe we're doing the architecture of a building or the interiors in a building to really helping engineer the entire vision of the place and how all parts of it come together with us and other people.
RVLTR:
So again, just to maybe paint a picture in the listener's mind and in my own mind too, because it helps me, a visual person. Say if you did a condo for a developer, what you can do basically is everything from the pro forma and the initial studies down to the marketing and the selling. Can you do all of that in-house?
WM:
Not all of it. So, a lot of it. So currently, of course Vancouver is like Toronto, a lot of the work is developer condo buildings. So, we would typically get involved with Black Chamber early on in terms of helping envision the sort of positioning of a product and a building, who it's going to sell to. We do consumer behavior research, we do that kind of market analysis, but we do it from a design point of view. We would do the architecture, we would do the interiors, we would do the branding, we would do strategy around marketing, not sales certainly.
RVLTR:
I see. So, what kind of response has that model generated, both from the clients and maybe from the users or consumers or the general public? What kind of response have you seen to it?
WM:
I'd say generally it's been really, really positive. In a way, it empowers clients who don't always have the tools to do design thinking. They come from a real estate background or a financial background, and so you become another part of their organization and help them think in a way that they'd rather do good things, and you help them set values for a project that are more noble perhaps than just the pro forma, and yet you're also responsive to the pro forma. So I think clients have reacted really well, I think the product is generally better that we've been doing.
Some of my favorite work we've done in Black Chamber has been just for ourselves. We've done a big study on housing and construction processes for single family homes, which has led to us being partners in a manufacturing company on a sort of innovative housing platform, prefabricated magnesium panel homes that we're rolling out called Commonplace. So, that started as us asking ourselves is there another way for housing and turned into a company and a platform. We're building our first prototypes now and we're in conversations with people in the US to do 400 homes.
RVLTR:
Oh, that's amazing. So, it sounds like it's almost your own and also your clients' R&D departments basically.
WM:
Yeah. Yeah, really. We started out calling it R&D and it morphs. Sometimes it's visioning, market positioning. The best of it is, I think, R&D.
RVLTR:
That's interesting. So, you mentioned this one personal project that led to a whole other business. Are there any other self-initiated projects or research topics that you're very interested in that have yielded extraordinary results?
WM:
Well, they haven't yielded companies mostly, but we're all over the place. We're doing a study on street fashion and how luxury as an idea has been changed by marginalized groups through street fashion, and what that means for architecture is a study I'm really excited about right now. We've been doing studies for clients on a deep understanding of wellness for architecture, what we're calling wholeness. A really, really holistic idea of wellness and what that literally will mean for buildings and cities.
RVLTR:
That's interesting.
WM:
Yeah, so we're all over the place.
RVLTR:
So, maybe you can help me clarify. I never understood the brand Supreme, and I think it's right up that alley of street fashion as luxury. Is that something you can explain to me? Because this is still a mystery.
WM:
I think Supreme's a mystery to most people. I mean, what excites me about that space is that people like Virgil Abloh literally opened the doors of a very homogenous luxury world and brought in designers of colour. The first students were sitting in the front rows of fashion shows, he was the first black designer to be in the LVMH stable. When he did that, what he did for say Louis Vuitton, I think, changes design.
RVLTR:
So I'm familiar with him, because I actually went to the same school he did.
WM:
Oh yeah?
RVLTR:
Yeah, we both studied at IIT and I know he passed away recently, so rest in peace, but I'm not too familiar with his fashion work. What, in your mind, has he done to open the doors to a whole new market or type of fashion that didn't exist before?
WM:
I mean, he did a lot of things. To me, the exciting stuff was what he was doing at Louis Vuitton, where he was taking this generations-old, very stable, very traditional brand, and really ironically and sometimes sarcastically even warping it, morphing it, changing it, often with a marginalized audience in mind.
So, he sort of inserted this code into the traditional French luxury market that we can never go back on now. Yet, the computer was still running Louis Vuitton and now there was this rogue code in it.
RVLTR:
It's amazing that they let him do it in the first place. What do you think pushed them to do such a 180? Because it doesn't sound like they ran away from their existing brand, but to let it be co-opted by someone who you would never thought as being part of that brand to begin with.
WM:
I mean, I don't know the exact story. I should look into the genesis story of when that happened, but it was phenomenally successful, right? I think Baby Steps saw that this was a world that was going to financially be so successful for these brands, that it was sort of impossible to not allow it. Those brands had a long history of artistic respect and freedom, but within a pretty narrow band until people like him came along.
RVLTR:
Yeah.
WM:
Of course, now it works so well that there's an almost cynical version of it going on where everybody needs a Virgil Abloh, and there's not that many Virgil Ablohs to go around.
RVLTR:
Yeah. Yeah, well, there was probably only one.
WM:
Exactly.
RVLTR:
So, that's interesting. I mean, that's an interesting tangent, but it shows how broadly you're thinking and I think that's much needed in this industry. What has gotten you excited maybe in the last little while of things that you're thinking about working on or you started working on, but ideas you haven't fully formed yet, or things that you think are going to happen in the future that would be worth looking at?
WM:
I mean, off the cuff, our housing project is very exciting to me right now. It feels like it answers so many issues that are in front of us with housing, from affordability to fireproofing, to sustainability and recycling. Whether our product will be one that makes it within the masses of product or not, we'll see, but I'm really excited about where the world's heading in terms of new technologies and ways of thinking about housing.
RVLTR:
So, you said that's a prefab product, right?
WM:
Yeah.
RVLTR:
So, can you maybe give us a little more detail about what that is and how that's going to come to market? Or is it already being sold?
WM:
It's not being sold yet, it's in prototype. We're building our first prototype homes. So we went out to find a better way to construct a home, and at the same time, we're designing what we call the essential home. So on the heels of people like Dieter Rams, less, but better. Not less, not minimal, but essential.
RVLTR:
Yeah.
WM:
So, we were designing what we thought could be a home that answered to that ambition that I think a lot of people have right now. Especially younger generations are not interested in being anchored to their home. They want exceptional lives that include all kinds of other things, but would also love to own a home. So, there was a lot of these things in our minds. Then we went out to try and find the right technology to help us produce something that could answer to some of the technical problems that we saw in wood frame construction, and we ended up partnering with a manufacturer.
So, the product is a magnesium and hemp and recycled plastic panel. It's factory made. We're able to ship these homes with cabling and plumbing within the walls. Because the walls are magnesium, we're working on them being able to be a battery basically. So if you're off the grid, you could store energy in the walls. So, they're not instantaneous, but you would build a home pretty much anywhere that you could ship to within two to three months instead of a year and a half. They would be more affordable, they would be recyclable. These panels, you can mulch them up and make a new panel, unlike wood frame construction, which has nails in it, which makes it very hard to recycle.
RVLTR:
That's interesting. They're also structural panels?
WM:
They are.
RVLTR:
So it's basically a, traditional might not be the right word, but a kind of conventional home, but it's designed and built in a whole new way.
WM:
Yes.
RVLTR:
You have to reinvent the way they're constructed basically.
WM:
Yes, the technology of the construction is what's truly new.
RVLTR:
That's fascinating. I think I ran out of all my questions for you, but is there anything else you want to add or share with the audience that's really exciting to you, or a message you want to pass on or anything else?
WM:
Gosh, I don't know. Thanks for having me. I could talk all day about all this stuff.
RVLTR:
Well, you don't have to have an answer, no sometimes is acceptable. I want to thank you very much for your time. It was great, short and sweet. Hopefully it's first of many conversations.
WM:
Thank you very much, appreciate it.