{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 207 - de Oliveira on World Domination

Carlos de Oliveira is a structural engineer, inventor, designer and entrepreneur. Carlos is the co-founder of Cast Connex and is a foremost expert in the design and use of steel castings in building and bridge construction.

I wanted to interview Carlos because he does great work and exemplifies what it means to choose an area of expertise where there are few competitors and develop products or services that lead one to dominate a narrow niche market.

There are literally no competitors that do what Carlos does and the story of Cast Connex is a fascinating one.

Here are a couple of awesome quotes gleaned from the interview:

"Specialization can be an incredible tool for success"

"I think of the status quo as being our biggest competitor"

Listen to it below.

Owning being a pro

When facing a difficult challenge, it's not uncommon to look for external factors to blame for our predicament. It's easy and costs very little, but also does nothing to solve the challenge. Sometimes, in doing so, we make grandiose statements and use extreme metaphors to make a point, but at times, that grandiose language goes too far describes a situation that has nothing to do with the challenge at hand.

Let's do a little experiment, go read this (very short) post on LinkedIn and see how it resonates with you. Go ahead, I'll wait for you here.

The military language in this post goes too far because it attempts to reframe a problem (challenges architects face while marketing their firm) into a disaster of such epic proportions that the profession doesn't know how to deal with it, the so-called "silent war".

It is misguided on several levels. The first assumption is that architects have no control over their predicament, which couldn't be further from the truth. If anything, the profession as a whole is primarily responsible for many of the challenges it faces, some of which are described in the post. But there are also many examples of firms who don't let circumstances dictate their future and have successfully broken free from many of the common architecture ailments.

It also implies that Architects are due respect like the other professionals they mention, such as doctors and lawyers, but the problem with this idea is that it implies these other professions earn some kind of due respect because of who they are. I'm pretty sure lawyers earn respect because, as expensive as they may be, most of them still offer invaluable expertise, but also aren’t shy to charge what they think they're worth and doggedly fight for that ridiculously high hourly rate. The same goes for doctors, they will walk away from tire kickers and low-ballers.

So no, this so-called war is not a cabal of mean-spirited people trying to take down architects. The respect they think they deserve has to be earned. Anyone claiming otherwise is peddling bullshit.

The truth is, to come out of this vicious circle takes tremendous courage and effort, but it's not rocket science. There are many precedents of firms who have claimed narrowly specialized expertise and have done very well as a result, the reason why we don't see more of those is that taking the first step is terrifying, so much so that most people don't want to face it.

But the prospect of sinking ever deeper into the commoditization spiral, its attendant low fees and lack of respect should realistically be a more terrifying prospect.

Chef

While reading this blog you might that I have a knack for picking anachronistic cultural references to talk about: comedians from the 70s, dead artists, etc. The truth is that I don't follow the news at all, so a lot of my cultural references come from my serendipitous curiosity rather than from the latest, trendy things.

My latest discovery is the movie "Chef" from 2014 (as you see I'm improving). This is a movie that John Favreau wrote and directed between behemoths blockbusters that he's better known for. While I've always liked Favreau's work, this movie is my favourite of his, primarily because superhero movies make me want to puke.

Snarky commentary aside, it's a beautiful story of a Chef at a fancy restaurant who finds himself in a creative rut and quits his job to start a food truck, while in the midst of twitter flame war with a food critic who thinks he's not as good as he used to be.

What made this movie so relatable is that it explores themes that every creative can relate to, particularly that of being comfortable in a routine that often leads to a creative desert. The plot is decent, but it's the relationship between the characters that are the most interesting as the synopsis doesn't turn the characters into clichés and exposes their flaws and qualities alike.

It's a film that feels human, is engaging and is a treat for foodies. It will literally make you salivate.

Kubrick's children

I'll be the first to admit that I can write stuff that's serious and intense at times. Therefore, on Fridays I'll be featuring something more lighthearted, fun or creative, so we can all end the week on a high note. Have a great weekend!

A few months ago, a strange monolith, not unlike those of Kubrick's cult movie 2001: A Space Odyssey's artifacts appeared in the middle of the Utah desert, only to be removed shortly thereafter under equally mysterious circumstances.

It's illegal to install structures of any kind on the federal lands that this monolith was on, but as a piece of art designed to generate buzz and the corresponding controversy, it worked, since getting into the story is addictive and if you don't find yourself furiously searching for additional information after reading the article, then you have supreme self-control.

Architecture's Drake Equation

The SETI program has been monitoring the skies for the better part of the last 4 decades. Their mission is to point radio telescopes at distant regions of the sky in the hopes of finding signs of alien civilizations, in the form of unequivocally alien and intelligent radio signals. They basically scan through a myriad of radio frequencies in the hopes of finding a signal that does not sound like interstellar noise, much like we used to turn our pre-digital radio dials to find a station that would play crystal-clear Johnny Cash songs while road-tripping across the continent.

Based on the Drake equation, there was hope that within the Milky Way alone, there would have been a myriad of alien civilizations likely to broadcast signals our way, meaning that we should logically tune in to such a manufactured signal eventually. What SETI is not doing is searching for signs of alien intelligence closer to home, in the form of spacecrafts or probes that would have been sent to explore the galaxy.

In marketing professional services, there is generally a lot of effort spent trying to tune into the noise in the hopes of finding the ideal client. While the success rate of marketing your firm this way is thankfully far better than that of SETI's likelihood of finding proof of alien intelligence, it is a very time-consuming endeavour and doesn't always connect you with the proverbial ideal clients, let alone makes it harder to sell your services because you are not standing out in a sea of businesses all using the same tactic.

Instead, single-mindedly searching for the proverbial "alien probes", i.e. those clients that are looking to engage someone like you might feel more like looking for a needle in a haystack, but when you do find those people they will be primed for hiring someone like you to solve their problem and the sale will be easier. The more targeted tactics one can employ are too numerous to list here, but they should be adapted to your goals, as not every tactic will work in every situation. It will also be easier to stand out with this approach, because the niche market you're operating in has fewer competitors by virtue of being smaller and more specialized.

Casting a wide net can have its benefits, but a highly targeted approach will yield more profitable work with more engaged clients in the long term.

Where do you think you should spend your energy searching for the alien probes?

Approximation is the death of culture

Most of us are familiar with how GPS navigation works. You enter a precise address and the system gives you turn-by-turn real-time instructions on how to get there while hopefully calculating the fastest route to get there. It works because it's accurate, will get you to your destination without error every time and allows drivers to focus on the road instead of mentally calculating the best route or worse, looking at paper maps while driving, both enough of a distraction to make driving significantly more dangerous.

We would not tolerate a GPS that takes you close to your destination, but stops within 1km of your journey's end, leaving you to find the precise location on your own. Yet, that's precisely what's happening with the journalistic standards of online architecture and design publications that routinely post articles rife with errors, misinterpretations and sometimes even downright deception.

Take this piece on a recent project by a reputable local firm, described as a house in a suburban context. While it's technically true that the neighbourhood it is in was once a far suburb of the downtown core, that was 100 years ago and the locale has since long been absorbed within the growing city. It is now considered to be part of Old Toronto, a part of the city that is denser and more urban than any other part of the GTA.

While this is a minor infraction, it was committed by a supposedly serious publication, one serious enough to have a print version and be considered somewhat of a reference in the design world. Many times, it is much worse, the worst of all being publications that copy text verbatim from others and/or publish articles that are barely written in intelligible English.

I'm picking on this one to make a point, but this is so prevalent in the industry that I wonder if we'll eventually only get crappy publications, putting out crappy articles and the design journalism that is not very critical to begin with will just devolve into websites one browses only for the pretty pictures.

If you do any kind of work that is good enough to be taken seriously, run away from these fourth-rate blogs and demand from other "serious" publications a certain degree of accuracy when describing your work.

Clear language requires clear thinking and clear thinking is predicated on having clear ideas. These take time and effort to form, so don't let someone else bastardize your ideas in the name of expediency. Accurate language is a reflection of that thought process that leads you to painstakingly design that building you're trying so hard to get published.

I'll leave you with this quote from Nicolas Boileau, one of my favourite of all time: "Whatever we conceive well, we express clearly, and words flow with ease."

That means no more archispeak.

The cultural significance of deadly roads

There is a worrying trend in the US that has seen motor vehicle deaths spiking by 24% in 2020, despite a sharp decrease in miles driven due to the pandemic.

This article does a good job of explaining why this is an issue and some potential remedies to address the problem. However, I take issue with its blaming most of our driving woes on regulators. While it's true that a few reference documents (detailed in the article) are used to design most streets, it fails to address the fact that most drivers probably don't want to drive one street with lowered speed limits. Nobody, when behind the wheel wants to suffer from delays in getting from point A to point B, it's just human nature.

In Toronto, we've seen a decrease in the speed limit on most surface streets from 50 to 40 km/h recently, but based on my casual-empirical observations, this hasn't stopped anyone from speeding. It may get you a ticket more easily, but that's not solving the problem, just addressing one of its symptoms.

There are many precedents for safer street designs that take into consideration the safety of all users and have proven to be effective. Things like chicanes and design features that block the drivers' line of sight naturally force people to slow down. Surprise, surprise, we tend to not speed when we can't see where we're going.

Instead of clamouring for more regulations and ever-more restrictive speed limits, which is just another top-down, one size fits all way of solving the problem, a cultural shift is required. We can always wish for politicians to have more balls and make the necessary changes, but that won't happen either, as they're too scared of being booted out in the next election cycle.

I think the most effective and timely way to achieve this is to employ guerrilla tactics. Just get together with your neighbours and reclaim your street. Maybe you can shut it down for a day and allow your kids to finally play ball hockey on the street. The residents of Cowan avenue in Parkdale hold a street-wide garage sale every year, called Cowanation. Street festivals routinely take over various neighbourhoods every summer, what's stopping us from doing more of that with a focus on the street and the neighbourhood instead of drunken bros?

That would make the city safer, but more importantly more interesting as well and reinforce the local community bonds in the process. Win-win.

How to make buildings that last longer?

The lifespan of buildings and the life-cycle cost of the built environment is primarily influenced by short-term financial concerns that rarely account for the life of a building past its amortization period. As a result, we have a tendency to demolish buildings because they're considered worthless in 50 years or less after construction.

Archneura is attempting to single-handedly change that with their Building Quality Index, an innovative method of considering all aspects of a building and aimed at increasing the quality of construction to create buildings that have value well into the future.

I have an interview coming up with the co-founder of Archneura, so we'll have more on the topic soon, but if you believe in what they're offering, you have an opportunity to invest in their initial fundraising round that if successful, will enable them to officially launch and acquire their first clients.

I think it's brilliant as it addresses many shortcomings of the building industry in one clever methodology.

Full disclosure: I have skin in the game, in the form of a modest sum invested in their venture.

Regulatory note: If you live in some Canadian provinces, like Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, your provincial government is barring you from investing in their fundraising platform, but that shouldn't stop us from spreading the word of this innovative idea.

"more-or-less Bolivians"

I'll be the first to admit that I can write stuff that's serious and intense at times. Therefore, on Fridays I'll be featuring something more lighthearted, fun or creative, so we can all end the week on a high note. Have a great weekend!

In the linked article, Salvador Dali, never a stranger to controversy, explains why there has been a tendency for the Mona Lisa to attract attention and vandalism throughout the years.

I'll let you read this short and hilarious essay and his description of Vandals as "more-or-less Bolivians".

Dancing in the mind field

Kary Mullis was the 1993 recipient of the Nobel prize in chemistry, for his invention of the PCR, a seminal method of DNA duplication that revolutionized the biochemistry industry and that you probably know as one of the tests widely administered for COVID testing.

Mullis, who passed away in 2019, was a chemistry wizard and highly original thinker who had a very interesting life. He synthesized psychedelics in the 60s during the golden age of experimenting with drugs, before their widespread prohibition and then went on to have a highly successful career as a corporate chemist.

His memoir "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" is a highly entertaining account of his life up to the late 1990s and details his Nobel-winning invention as well as his life as a corporate hippie: a highly original and creative scientist who also enjoyed the finer things in life.

While by today's revisionist standards he would likely be considered an unadulterated asshole and had a few contrarian and controversial views regarding HIV, climate change as well as astrology that have to be taken with a grain of salt. In his book, he details some of those misguided views and shows that he genuinely cared about the scientific method as an epistemological means to understand the world. He was horribly wrong about a few things and definitely ruffled some feathers, but who has never been wrong about anything?

His account of an encounter with a glowing alien raccoon alone makes it worth checking out.

{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 206 - Fashina on Hospitality Design

Dyonne Fashina is the Founder and Principal Designer at Denizens Of Design, an Interior Design Studio specializing in hospitality and branded environments. Recently, Dyonne has focused on research in design strategy - the business value that good design thinking brings to a project, and the focus of our conversation.

Listen to it below.

London's two-up, two down

For the past year, Bloomberg has been running a series of articles on the various housing typologies that make our cities unique.

The first installment explores London's "two-up, two-down" traditional layout that has formed the bulk of the UK's housing for centuries. What's most interesting is to see how this layout has been adapted to a variety of eras and forms the basis of all housing, from the most modest to the most opulent and serves all kinds of demographics in the process, from the most modest to the wealthiest.

Photography and the representation of reality

You can tell most Hollywood actors from normal people by their tendency to engage in surgical physical enhancements. I've casually observed that past their 20s (and often earlier), many celebrities' appearance start to subtly but noticeably change. Wrinkles disappear overnight, a nose gets a little thinner and straighter or in extreme cases they end up looking like this (warning: disturbing content).

One could say that one surgical procedure is an acceptable variation of reality, but that many alter reality so much that they're no longer human.

The same goes for architectural representation and specifically photography. I wrote about renders in a recent piece, which prompted to follow-up with this one.

The same way one can mess up a pretty face with one too many procedures and arguably create a different physical person in the process, one can also alter the representation of architecture so much, that it doesn't represent reality anymore.

Architectural photography is meant to showcase a design in its best light. As such, I believe it is acceptable to stage a photoshoot and rid it of all the things that are not an essential part of the design intent and tend to visually distract the scene. It's the architecture equivalent to cleaning up your home before you receive guests for dinner.

I think it's important to draw a line, because the images that are being created to represent a project then go to be used for media coverage, award submissions and business development. If in the course of these activities, one knowingly conveys a distorted image of their creation, wouldn't that amount to intentional misrepresentation?

I am aware that this is a fine line we're walking here, but I think it's an important distinction to make. I've seen too many examples of projects that were manipulated either during a photoshoot with additional lighting that doesn't actually exist as well as photographed with ultra-wide lenses that make the building look more dramatic and imposing, or in post-production where award winning buildings have entire components removed to make them look more appealing.

Ultimately, if images are being used for commercial purposes, e.g. used to promote a business with the clear intent to generate more business as a result, there is a moral obligation on the producer of these images to be at least somewhat deferent to the truth.

If the images are strictly artistic, then the representation of reality is irrelevant, but that's another topic altogether.

Do you have interesting stories on the matter? I'd love to share those as examples.

Storm King Art Center

I'll be the first to admit that I can write stuff that's serious and intense at times. Therefore, on Fridays I'll be featuring something more lighthearted, fun or creative, so we can all end the week on a high note. Have a great weekend!

Two of the things that contribute to mental health in a big way, art and nature are available in spades at the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York.

Watching this brief video makes me want to go. Let's hope the border opens up again soon.

You can bring a little bit of the center to your zoom calls with these backgrounds.

Why is lumber so expensive?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've heard many first-hand accounts about the prices of construction materials skyrocketing and specifically the prices of lumber more or less doubling. I've also experienced the shortage of lumber when looking a for pieces of landscaping lumber for a backyard project.

While the lumber market has certainly been messed-up by the disruptions in the supply chain, I looked into the Canada-US lumber trade and it didn't take long to find out that there's been an ongoing dispute about lumber between the two countries for as long as I've been alive.

Who knew?

Own your platforms

I'm not the only one to recommend owning the content you produce in the course of your business development activities. Fred Wilson is also of that opinion.

While people with very large followers (say Joe Rogan) can move to any platform and take along with them the majority of their fans, most people who aren't major celebrities cannot. While social media platform can be great tools in their own right, you are too dependent on someone else's whims if that's your only way to communicate.

This is especially important for people for whom reaching their audience is a critical part of their business model. I cringe when I see Youtubers with large followings and only one platform as the source of their revenue. If, for any reason, they get the boot, they're screwed, losing all their hard work in the process.

To this I say: get on social media as much or as little as you're comfortable with, but always try to use these platforms as funnel to a property you own, not as the main source of content and interaction. If one disappears, your content will still be available and your marketing ecosystem will be much more robust.

It's even more critical in times when everything online is made political and where hordes of rabid, thoughtless trolls will try to cancel you for merely expressing an opinion. When you own your platform, you become uncancellable.

Profit First

In a recent post, I mentioned Mike Michalowicz's book "Profit First" primarily aimed at entrepreneurs, professing the value of running a profitable business to lead a healthy, fulfilling life. The author posits that a business should serve its owner and not the other way around.

As the title suggests, Michalowicz recommends earmarking profit before any expense is made as a tactic to ensure constant profitability, resting his argument on a modified version of Parkinson's Law stating that a business will siphon all available resources if they're not clearly allocated and safeguarded prior to being made available for general expenses.

In traditional accounting, profit is generally accepted as the following formula:

Sales - Expenses = Profits

That means that profit is not deliberately reserved as such, but rather is whatever is left after everything else is paid for, if you're lucky.

In this book, the author flips the formula on its head and defines profit as follows:

Sales - Profit = Expenses

While mathematically, this is the same thing as the first formula, there is a big difference between the two. The latter takes advantage of human psychology (hence the aforementioned Parkinson's law) to make a business profitable from the get-go.

It forces one to learn how to make do with fewer resources and breeds creativity. While on the surface, it may seem like yet another version of the envelope budgeting method that has been a popular budgeting strategy for a long time, it is a bit more complex and is specifically designed for businesses.

If you're looking to have a better grasp of your business' finances and perhaps even looking for ways to get out of the red, this won't fix your problems overnight, but is a very valuable long-term cash flow management system.

I am personally in the process of implementing new strategies and while the results have yet to come, I can say that it transformed the way I look at the corporation's finances and make business accounting a lot less scary than it was even just a short while ago.

Architectural representation vs. truth

I've learned long ago that the renders of unbuilt buildings we're all accustomed to seeing almost daily are never to be taken at face value. It takes only one disappointment in the form of a finished building not looking nearly as sexy as its pre-construction renders to accomplish.

There are way too many variables in the design and construction processes to be able to confidently claim that a building will turn out exactly like its renders since the laws of physics don't apply to 3D imagery.

Renders are indeed a very useful tool for many reasons and I think very effective most of the time, but it's when architectural illustrators take liberties with reality that it becomes a problem

The B1M has an interesting video on the subject and I think they are right on the money.

That's not to say that other forms of representations cannot be deceitful, but they're harder to fake, owing to the representational constraints (blueprints have to be to scale) or the laws of physics (photography can deceive but only to a point).

Have you ever been bitten in the ass by a rendering that pushed the limits too far?

"Help, help I'm being repressed"

I'll be the first to admit that I can write stuff that's serious and intense at times. Therefore, on Fridays I'll be featuring something more lighthearted, fun or creative, so we can all end the week on a high note. Have a great weekend!

The class struggle is real. True humour is timeless because it speaks to issues relating to the human condition.

If this were written today, it would be just as relevant and way funnier than the pests of cancel culture going around throwing tantrums about... nothing.

New York Architecture and Jazz

NYC and Jazz intrinsically linked together. It was the epicenter of the post-war Jazz world and contemporary jazz musicians are still being drawn to the big apple today.

As a result, it wasn't much of a stretch to accompany this short video of the Lever House with some jazz to resurrect a bit of the 1950s ethos, when this building was completed.