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Could you tell us a little about your background?

I was born in New York City in Manhattan and spent a lot of my childhood in the suburbs. At a very early age, I was particularly fond of construction and gardening. I came at the profession basically through the construction trade.

From a young age I was working in construction building homes and I ran my own landscape crews—my own company—when I was 18 until I was 24. That was through university and graduate school, to the point where I had my first major client with a $1 million-plus construction project when I was 25.

I love designing a public environment. I felt, and I still feel, that one of the biggest needs of our generation is to provide high-quality public space, affordable living, and alternative mobility in cities. I started to migrate towards this, mostly at the beginning, for environmental purposes. I thought that cities needed to be greener, and so my work was focused on that, originally. I also felt that we needed higher quality public spaces in cities.

Through graduate school, I started to work almost exclusively on urban brownfields as a landscape architect under my mentor Barbara Wilks, the founder of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture in New York City. We worked mostly on brownfield redevelopment projects on the waterfront in New York City. I took on international projects, where I worked in about 12 other countries. I was working in the United States, Canada, Asia, the Middle East, and on some pro-bono projects in Haiti. Some of my projects have even been built in Europe, as well.

Over eight to nine years in New York City out of W Architecture, I was running quite large projects for Barbara. Our largest, or maybe the happiest project that I had, was in Canada, which was a 12-hectare waterfront park in the center of Calgary. This was the centerpiece park in a $350 million redevelopment project that was completed in 2015 and has since earned dozens of international awards.

You also founded reSITE, a global non-profit acting to improve the urban environment. What is the reSITE idea, mission and story?

Yes, in 2012, I started the nonprofit reSITE, which is focused on making cities greener and more livable through high-quality design and collaborative thinking. We focus on improving the public life of the city.

When I first came to Prague in 2012 as a Fulbright Fellow, the idea was to broaden the horizons of people working in architecture in Central Europe, to think about the kind of work that I was doing abroad, which focused on redevelopment of landscapes in the centers of highly dense environments that needed green, open space designed by landscape architects.

The original mission was to talk about that. Since then we’ve expanded rapidly beyond the initial idea, focusing on all topics that have an impact on quality of life in the city from the sharing economy to transportation, civic architecture and mobility. The latest topic we investigated was housing.

We’re now pushing new boundaries and horizons. In 2018 and now 2019, we’re working in San Francisco at the intersection of sound in architecture. We’ve now migrated through the various topics that we think improve quality of life.

We do this mostly through events and media. We have organized 160 events over the last 6 years, ranging from bike rides and film festivals to these large flagship conferences that we run under our own brand. We’ve also created and produced hundreds of video interviews and lectures, many of which are on our YouTube page.

We’ve done most of this work in Prague and we’re now in Lisbon, Berlin, and the United States on reSITE topics, media and events.
Since 2015, this has been my full-time job. I spend my time between reSITE and Manifesto Market as the Chief Creative Guy and CEO.

Why did you start your business in Prague?

It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, to leave my beloved Brooklyn and hometown of New York City. That was a really traumatic time for me. In 2015, I left my apartment in Brooklyn. I left a partnership offer at W Architecture on the table after we just finished the large park in Calgary. I actually finished three projects in Calgary at that time, and the largest of which had since won over 20 design awards.

You might consider this a new peak in my career, at 35 years old. I just up-and-left a great thing – what I thought might be the top. It was a hard thing to do, to shift gears and fully focus on reSITE. From the fast-paced New York City to a smaller, quieter Prague, almost overnight. It was like someone turned the lights out and I had to start over. It was me who turned them off.

The idea was to come from what was a kind of nights-and-weekends job for me and full-time for my team, to what’s become the focus of my life. I moved halfway across the world to work on a nonprofit. I spun Manifesto Market out of the nonprofit, because the kind of work was changing. The things that we were doing were changing. Some of them needed a sustainable and self-sufficient funding and revenue model.

You said that you were growing tired of what is known as a classic architecture, landscape or urban design firm before starting reSITE. Could you elaborate on that?

Yeah. That definition, it’s still true, but maybe the way I think about it has changed a little bit. I wanted to do something different, originally, I wanted to try to get away from strictly client-based work.

I had about 17 projects on my plate that I was actively managing and working on. There was one client, which constituted two or three projects, which I liked. In architecture, you have to take on projects just to keep the office running, and I think every architect experiences this.

Regardless, I wanted to see if we could redefine the work that we did to be more civic and to have more public good in mind. A more kind of social architecture firm that spends time on education. The core of reSITE is about educating people about the ways in which we could build the city differently. I wanted to see if we could build a firm with this kind of approach as the centerpiece of the work. We’re an events and experience design company as much as we’re a physical design company. We are inventors of experiences.

We’re an events and experience design company as much as we’re a physical design company. We are inventors of experiences.

I think that’s what needed to change for me, and I loved the idea to create experiences for people. When I look back at the work I did in landscape architecture, it was all about designing an experience with physical space and using the highest quality materials that we could afford or we could find and the most interesting furnishing arrangements to create social spaces and private spaces at once, and environmentally conscious public spaces.

All of this is about an experience and also a kind of light impact.
There’s a part of my younger self that thinks this is a betrayal of my training and the path that some of my idols or mentors have taken. But then, I squint, and I think about the fact that I don’t want that prototypical path. I struggle with what’s expected of one in the profession versus what I’ve wanted for myself.

I’m happy with the way it’s gone. But, at the same time, I still have this part of me that’s saying like, “Well, you should run a classic architecture practice.” “You should be, you know, just putting your head down and working on the things that everyone trained you to work on.” I mean by this, there’s this kind of paradox.

Why did you start reSITE as a nonprofit?

That’s a good question. I started as a nonprofit because I wanted to do work based on education and events mostly that wasn’t profit-driven. I wanted to focus on the content and not do expos and this kind of activities to fund it. I was able to attract cultural funding and social innovation funding to help educate the decision makers in the private, public, and civic sector. And so, there was a nonprofit mission, and there still is this mission.

I developed it based on models that we have in the United States for nonprofits in this kind of field, between culture and policy. In Europe, this model doesn’t really work. Because in the U.S., particularly in New York, there is a high level of philanthropy funding and private benefactors that like to support these kinds of initiatives. So, I realized this after a few years that individuals are not supporting the nonprofit sector.

In the Czech Republic, the average donation from an individual citizen to the nonprofit sector in a fiscal year is about €2.50 per year. And the grant funding from government institutions and municipal institutions is so low, particularly in the Czech Republic, that it’s nearly impossible to create a revenue split like I wanted. Our revenue split today is basically 40% to 45% private funding sponsorships, 40% grant funding, and 15% to 20% is coming from ticketing from our main event. And it’s not enough. I really wanted it to be 70% private funding and 20% granting and 10% independent sources of revenue like ticketing.

And it’s almost impossible to get there with the level of private philanthropy in Europe. So, I’m starting to think about whether we need to change the model.

What do you think drove you to create these new aspects and businesses within the field of architecture?

I think there’s no right path in architecture. I think that it’s important that we start to make our own projects.

But people like me, we also love to create our own work. That’s one of the reasons why I’m becoming more involved in property development. I found that it was easier for me to get what I wanted out of a project by building it myself than it is to just find a client to do it and to rely on others to do it.

I wanted to create a practice, which is focused on experience and experience design and creating new kinds of places for people to engage the city in exciting ways. What does that mean? Now, it means that we’re designing events through reSITE. We’re designing physical places and digital communities with Manifesto. We’re doing branding and real estate consultancy with another company I have, called City Crew.

There’s no right path in architecture.

I’m combining my ideas based on my educational background. I have a degree in history, which I didn’t mention. I have a degree in business, and I also have a master’s in landscape architecture. I feel like I’m doing my best to try to combine these skill sets and put them together to wholly understand the world in which we’re working and trying to design environments that are responding to that. That’s exciting for me.

I’m spending more and more time now on Manifesto and not just the market that you see online or in the papers. But Manifesto as an idea and as an experiential development company. Manifesto’s turning into a kind of a proptech company, and I think there’s a lot of ways the work that we’re doing at Manifesto can help modernize the property industry, particularly the hospitality and food and beverage industry at large.

The Manifesto Market is the first brainchild of reSITE. There you have also acted as an urban developer. What is the project’s background? How did you manage to start, complete and finance the project?

I had the idea to create this kind of place in 2013 when reSITE was basically a year old. I pitched my idea to do a café and co-working spaces in containers, to a couple of companies and no one was interested. They thought it was stupid and crazy. At that time, it wasn’t a full-time job. When reSITE became full-time, I started to pick up this idea again. We really didn’t know what we were doing. Looking back, it was kind of crazy.

I knew that we wanted to create a place that had a food and beverage central focus and some opportunities for co-working. Using the container is, for someone that’s not a real estate developer, a cost-efficient and flexible unit. It is relatively cheap to build a development out of containers, and they’re flexible, and they’re considered temporary. You can do it a bit quicker and more affordably.

So, how did we do it? We started with an idea that we wanted to do this. We got the land basically by scraping or scouring my network of real estate developers in the city, which is pretty extensive. We spent some time in Karlin, an up-and-coming district in Prague, because we really wanted to be there, but the developers didn’t want us. They didn’t understand it, and they’d rather see their sites just be empty or be parking lots.

After six months of waiting, we had a deadline by the end of the week. I think it was like January or February of 2017 because we wanted to use the project and a ­concrete site as the centerpiece of a student architecture competition. I made a phone call to one of our partners at reSITE, who’s actually our main sponsor. They had this site in Prague, and they decided within 24 hours that they would give it to us for this project.

So, it really took less than a day to decide where it was going to be, and we got permission to use it for the competition and also for the whole project.
After the student competition, we selected three finalists. We interviewed all three, we chose the second-place finalists which were a student group of two young women who were finishing their studies in Prague. They then became the architectural consultants for the project. From the competition to the date we opened it took roughly nine months, and they redesigned and redeveloped the project based on our need to expand it.

I found the financing privately. I had some seed funding contributed by a friend. He contributed some seed capital to start and to pay for consultancies and stuff like this. Then, once the project got going and we entered a contract for fabrication of the containers, I had two private loans that allowed us to finance the construction.

These are loans by local businessmen in real estate and in culture, actually. We’re combining cultural funding and real estate funding. We didn’t get any public subsidies, and that was intentional. We didn’t want any support from the city or from the state. We wanted to do this fully independently.
We got some support from the landowner who gave us a friendly lease. It was a way for them to attract attention and to build some positive action on the site before they have construction. It’s a free development site. The final project will be built by the developers of Zaha Hadid’s project, a quite high-profile site.

Finally, we had support from Mastercard. That’s why I wanted to focus on digital payments. Ultimately, we decided on a cashless project, meaning only credit cards or digital payments are accepted. Mastercard supported us through the technology and also with some funding for cultural projects like music and films.

Today, I’ve been asked to speak a lot about Manifesto. Everyone wants to know how we’ve been nominated for the best retail project in the country after only 6 months of operations. We won the best customer experience award in 2018 against giant brands such as IKEA. Everyone in property and real estate wants to know how it became so successful. My answer is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. So, that’s why it’s successful.

The site is awaiting its permanent redevelopment by Zaha Hadid Architects? What will happen to Manifesto Market when the project receives permission?

We have a two-year lease with an extension option. If they don’t get the permissions to build the planned Zaha project, then we would stay longer. This is the advantage for such temporary projects in working in the cities that have a long approvals process. Basically, in Prague, the approvals process is about seven years, so you have a lot of sites that are laying empty for six or seven years.

What is the business model of the Manifesto Market?

We have 24 tenants in my 27 containers, and they have a lease with me. It’s a typical real estate model in that sense. They pay a flat fee plus services that we offer to keep the place running. We have a turnover rent model as well, in which we take a percentage of what they make. It is a bit like a shopping center lease.

The other revenue streams are pretty straightforward. It is one of the most popular places in Prague right now and a lot of companies want to do events there. So, we’re lining up a lot of events for 2019 already.

This year our revenue model gets more complicated. There is a combination of financial technology revenue sources and a classic real estate and events model. We’re doing food tours in 2019 because we have 20 really good restaurants. These will be special market tours starting in the spring. We will also have some revenue coming from financial technology that we’re developing this year.

What are the next steps and ideas for Manifesto in 2019?

The goal is to develop more. We’re now very close to a growth-
series round of funding to reinvest in the market and reinvest in the ideas so we can build digital technology for a better customer experience. The idea is to invest in new technology and to build new sites, including another one in Prague and one in Lisbon by the end of 2020.

In 2019, we’re becoming more of a PropTech company, because we realized that there’s a lot of management that goes into maintaining the site. We started to look for property management tools to do that. The property industry is super outdated but quite simple to modernize. There are no modern tools, other than an Excel spreadsheet to do property management. We’re now developing some digital tools that will help the hospitality industry better manage their projects. And you will be able to find some things in the physical space that can disconnect you to digital spaces.

We’re also developing the front-end system for the community of Manifesto, the customers that are coming, just to better inform them about what we’re doing and to help them find out about the cultural program, for example.

Then we’re developing an integration of new digital payment tools. The market is completely cashless, which means we have the opportunity to employ some new digital payment methods that aren’t being used in many places in Europe. We are the first cashless place in the Czech Republic and one of the fully cashless places in Europe. Now, we develop the tools so we will have our own easy payment method for Manifesto.

Do you have any advice for people who are interested in starting their own project or company within the build environment?

One thing I would like to mention is to never underestimate the value of being collaborative and opening new doors. I spent a lot of time meeting people and seeing if there are ways in which we can collaborate, intersect and offload some value to them, and they could offer the same to me. As an entrepreneur, you have to create a good network. We all need to help other people and we need to be helped ourselves, so I always try to help people if they’re asking for it.

My second advice is that you have to remain positive. I could have quit reSITE and Manifesto over a hundred times probably. There’s so much bad news when you start your own ventures. Just because one thing doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. If you keep your eye on the horizon and on the goal, it just means you have to find a new avenue to get there.

In “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, he says that brick walls are built only for us to figure out how to get over them, not to stop us from achieving our dreams. It’s a little bit cheesy, but I really believe that. You’ve to find a way over the wall, if you really want it.

We’re talking about a lot of different things, but everything is design-driven. You can utilize this architectural background and knowledge, which is basically about how to understand people. Our work is how to understand people and how to create spaces that people can enjoy and which will improve their lives. That’s central to our work.

What are your thoughts on the future of the built environment? What are the major opportunities? How can it improve, and what continues to inspire you?

I always say, the future of the city looks a lot like the past, which is more dense urban environments and more physically networked places. I think we’re going to focus more and more on alternative mobility, mobility is probably one of the core issues of our generation. This is an old argument, but transit-oriented development in the United States will become a necessity, as it’s been in Europe.

We have to stop using automobiles to get between places. Now, it’s taken something like 50, 60 years, 70 years, but the effect on cities will take at least as long to unwind. In the UK, for example, 100% of college-educated millennials want to live within 5 kilometers of the central business district. I think 50% of those between the ages of 25 and 34, in the United States, want to also live within 5 kilometers of the central business district.

We want to live in the heart of the city. We want to work, live, and play in the same place. That’s only possible if we can rethink how we live, which focuses on the house and what our home looks like. I think we need to start living in smaller urban spaces, as we’re already seeing.

The work that we’ve done on sharing indicates that we’re willing to share more, in order to have some of the conveniences of living in a denser urban environment. It means we’re willing to share transportation. We’re even more willing to share space, to some extent. We’ve got to rethink the way that we’re designing housing, both at this kind of affordable scale and the luxury scale. I think housing is really going to be central to a lot of the changes that we see in how we live in the city. —

About Martin Barry

Founder & CEO
Manifesto & reSITE

Martin Barry is the Founder & CEO of Manifesto Market, and Founder & Chairman of reSITE. His work has been published widely in The New York Times, The Atlantic Citylab, Monocle Magazine, Dezeen, Designboom, among dozens of others.

As a landscape architect, Martin has led multi-disciplinary teams on complex urban projects in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He is the 2016 recipient of the President’s Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and his projects at W Architecture have received dozens of design awards in North America. He is a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow with the Design Trust for Public Space in New York.

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Guest article By Edgar Gonzales

On a sunny afternoon in 1952, Thomas J. Watson Jr., the recently appointed president of IBM, was walking along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and found himself increasingly amazed by the brightly colored and impeccably designed, sleek typewriters in the Olivetti shop. They shared space with sculptures and paintings in an airy, theatrically lit, well designed, modern showroom, in sharp contrast to the boring products and dull experience that characterized IBM’s retail outlets at that time.

Some years later, when Watson became CEO, he defined the strategy for the future of the company, declaring: “I will put my stamp on IBM though modern design.” To help him fulfill this task, he hired Eliot Noyes, architect and industrial designer, to serve as design consultant for the company. He was charged with creating a corporate design program that hasn’t been matched since. Noyes oversaw everything, from the creation of IBM products, logos and marketing material, to the design of its buildings. Noyes strategized an underlying design philosophy and brought in many of the most talented designers of the day: artists and architects like Ray and Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rand and Isamu Noguchi. “Good Design is Good Business” insisted Thomas J. Watson Jr. in a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, some years later in 1973.

The complexity, unpredictability and fast pace of change in today’s world is familiar to all, and the situation will not become easier. So, we need to face it and learn how to operate in it. In every aspect of contemporary life, we have outgrown a reality where problems were (more or less) simple, knowable, and independent, to one where the complexity, fuzziness and interdependency of the challenges we face are more and more difficult to frame, let alone solve them.

Corporations are not immune to this either. Two months ago, the McKinsey Quarterly, the consultancy firm’s prestigious publication, was dedicated to the Business Value of Design, conducting one of the most ambitious surveys ever made. More than 300 companies were contacted over the course of five years and their design decisions tracked, along with financial data, in order to measure what the McKinsey Design Index (MDI).

The consultancy intends to publish the data soon, along with a tool that can be used to measure your company’s MDI and compare it to others. Each of the indicators at the MDI shows that design is one of the best investments a company can make today.

The World Economic Forum predicts that vision, creativity and critical thinking will be the top three skills for 2020 for the ongoing, so-called, Fourth Industrial Revolution. Every company wants to be at the forefront and on the cutting edge of innovation, and to achieve that, yours will need highly creative employees.

Creativity is a much sought-after quality, and not one that can typically be achieved through training. It takes time to develop a proper creative attitude, and it doesn’t come alone: working comfortably with ambiguity, uncertainties, asking for disruptive innovative solutions, keeping a critical state of mind, willingness to alter the status quo and inventiveness are just some of the other aptitudes required by successful creative practitioners.

Nevertheless, there are professions where creativity is at the very core of their practices. Designers and architects, whose work depends largely on applied creativity and critical thinking to bring innovation to their everyday work, have been practicing each of those skills since time immemorial.

By definition, design is intrinsically innovative. What is the point of designing something that already exists? So, when hungry for innovation, there is a clear choice for professionals to look at: good design!

About

Edgar González
Director, Bachelor in Design, IE School of Architecture and Design

Based in Madrid, Edgar González leads the Bachelor in Design program at IE School of Architecture and Design. He founded EGD Edgar González Design, a Strategic Design Agency, where he serves clients as a strategic consultant specialised in applying design processes to complex problems and narratives. As, Editor-in-chief of edgargonzalez.com since 2002, one of the main reference websites about architecture and design in the Spanish speaking world, he is tuned in to news and trends in architecture and design throughout the world. HE Holds a Bachelor in Architecture ( ITESO University, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1996) and a M.A. in Complex Architecture (Alicante University, Alicante, Spain, 2007).

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In its beginnings, Atelier MEL embarked on a deep study of artisan glass techniques to create a set of modular collections of three dimensional illuminated mosaics. This was the first step towards developing conceptualizing, designing and building customized art pieces in a great variety of different materials.

As pioneers of parametric design, Atelier MEL have created design tools which make it easier to work with interior designers and architects and shorten the process chain that can link a complex art concept to its materialization. This has allowed them to reach new heights of creativity, efficiency, and quality.

Could you tell us a little about your background?

I have an architecture and design background, having completed my studies in architecture in 2008. I worked while in university and continued working as an architect for several years after I graduated, but the economic situation in Spain became very difficult. Despite having a good job, the prospects for growth weren’t encouraging.

That was my reason for starting a Master in Architectural Management and Design at IE School of Architecture and Design with a focus on marketing and business administration. The program was targeted at architects and design professionals in order bridge the gap between business and design, and I was enrolled in their founding year. The program was mainly online and partially in Madrid and one month in London.

It was a good opportunity to meet professionals from all around the world. There were fellow students from the US, Mexico, Spain and Germany which I found really enriching. Before the Masters program, I really lacked business knowledge because we weren’t taught anything about business in architecture school. In business school, I learned how some of the architecture studios I had worked for were run inefficiently, and I would talk with a very good friend about doing something together someday. That was the start of Atelier MEL, almost five years ago already.

Were you always interested in creating an architectural product? Are you still practicing traditional architecture next to running your own company?

I never really made a conscious decision to create an architectural product, but I was always more interested in small-scale projects mainly because of the speed.

When I worked for architecture offices on huge projects like hospitals or high-rise buildings, I rarely saw a project from start to finish because the duration of the project cycles was so long. Since I preferred small-scale projects, and I was also really interested in lighting when I was working as an architect, the transition into this field of products felt natural.

Geometry and architectural drawing were also my favorite subjects in university, and these are essential skills for product design. Product design typically involves working with much more complex shapes than architecture, and it can train your brain geometrically, which I really enjoy.

How did you come up with the idea of creating artistic glass lighting modules and create the company Atelier MEL from this?

I was always working on the design side of architecture, and I had a really good friend with a consulting company for architects and engineers. We often talked about the idea of working together, but I always felt I needed to work closly to the design itself, not as an consultant.

One day, we saw an opportunity. One of our mutual friends owns a glass workshop in Cartagena. We visited and saw skilled glass artisans who were our age working in a very traditional craft in the traditional way. They were repeating what their great grandfathers had been doing for decades. They weren’t innovating and they were struggling to sell the products they produced.

Roberto, my friend, had a company specializing in high-end technologies of digital production and parametric design. Seeing these glass craftspeople who are really well trained but struggled with their product and market fit, as a designer I felt uniquely positioned with the ability to connect technology with craft. Since I am really interested in crafts and also working in small scale, Roberto and I saw an opportunity to work together with the skills and experience of his company.

The idea was to combine these two things together, with me as designer and manager working together with Roberto’s team. We said, “Let’s try it, let’s get crazy,” because it was a really crazy idea. We literally had no experience in the product design process and no experience at all in lighting design, as well as very little experience in glass craft, but that was a thing we could learn from our friends.

This is how we founded Atelier MEL. Today, we produce a wide range of products and sculptures made of glass and other materials. We recently introduced dynamic lighting, which enables us to do dynamic lightning installations.

That is very inspiring. Can you tell us more about the process of creating your first glass product from scratch? What steps did you take?

In the beginning we traveled to the workshop in Cartagena. This was in the second week after our first brainstorming session. I had read a bit about glass production techniques before and when I arrived there, I started asking the craftsmen “How do you do this?” and “How do you do that?” The craftsmen recently confessed that they thought that I was crazy, wondering “Why does this woman want to know all these things?”

I wanted to learn what we were able to do with the material. We knew from the beginning that we had to target the high-end market with our glass products, since glass is an expensive material which is hard to produce at a low cost due to the hand-made fabrication process. I wanted to understand its potential.

I wanted to learn what we were able to do with the
material… I wanted to understand its potential.

From the outset our idea was to produce something modular, like a jigsaw puzzle, that each architect or interior designer could adapt to their project. We started designing and prototyping and we launched two modular collections called DUNA and LOTO. The DUNA system is composed by softly curved rounded glass pieces assembled following a triangular pattern. The LOTO system is composed by flower-shaped glass pieces assembled on a square grid.

We were really lucky that the first products were successful quite early, which allowed us to continue pursuing new products and projects. Today we have built up a portfolio of many different products.

How did you go about finding clients at first?

The first thing we did was that we subscribed to a design competition for young designers of “Maison et Objet”, the large trade show in Paris. It was not a win-or-lose competition, but young designers could be selected for a free fair stand at the show, and we were selected with our first DUNA and LOTO designs. We got a fair space at the young designer’s corner which was sponsored by the trade show itself, and we displayed our first product selection and showed our work which got us some attention.

Looking back, the young designer’s corner was not the best place for us to exhibit, because we have a high-end product and didn’t reach our target audience there. We should have been in the luxury section of the fair, but of course we couldn’t afford this at that time.

During this time Roberto, my business partner, was already working with consultant clients in Doha, Qatar. He had some knowledge about the market, which is open to very exclusive products. That is way we developed a strategy to target the middle east market with our first products.

I also started to travel to the Middle East, without knowing anyone, knocking on doors and presenting our first designs. At some point I got to know the owners of a famous shop for modern furniture in Doha. They were interested and bought a LOTO installation. That was our first sale.

Who are your target customers today and what projects are you working on mainly?

The hospitality industry is our core market. We do a lot of work for exclusive hotels, like four and five-star hotels and also for restaurants. We also work for private clients with residential projects a lot.

Retail shops are a growing field, too. Lately, we have done quite a lot of work for company headquarters, like an installation for a pharmaceutic company headquarter in India or another lightning installation for a new bank in Qatar.

Each of our light installations is unique since the cost of the designs are quite high.

How did you develop your acquisition strategy and process? What have been the challenges and how do you reach your target customers today?

In the beginning we started replicating the sales approach of Roberto’s consulting business: literally going door-to-door visiting clients and presenting our products to them. But that turned out not to be very successful because our clients are spread around the world. Since our installations are quite exclusive, the decision process is typically long and clients are usually not repeat customers within a short time span. Clients won’t buy one piece per month — they might buy one piece per year — so we need a lot of clients to keep the business running.

Today, we acquire most of our clients from social networks like Pinterest and Instagram

At one point, almost by chance, we were getting published in the press by the American Interior Design magazine. This was a huge boost for our success in the in the US. We had never travelled to the US for sales before that article, but we sold ten projects from that single article. That was a lucky break and it opened the US market for us, which nowadays is our most successful market.

Today, we acquire most of our clients from social networks like Pinterest and Instagram. We have an in-house team member dedicated to social media marketing and social networks. 90% of the time we are contacted by architects, interior architects or designers who discover our work through these channels and who want to implement our products into their projects. They will specify our product or recommend us to their clients, but then we wait until the day the construction is finished because our product is the last piece to be bought and installed. This time gap is very long, and for a young company with a small team it can be very difficult to manage this from a cash-flow perspective.

That is why we have started to work with art consultants recently. This isn’t a common job profile in Spain at all, but it is quite popular in the United States and in China, and it is becoming more common in the Middle East and in the UK. It benefits us to connect with art consultants because they are typically involved only in the last phase of construction for a project. An art consultant would receive concepts from interior designers and look for artists, firms or products to realize these concepts.

This is ideal for us, because we love the challenge of turning concepts into a real object. Since we have a modular product collection, we are able to solve complex shapes and geometries. We are able to offer a very wide variety of options in a very short time.

These skills are not so common among interior designers; perhaps it’s a little bit more with architects. Interior designers usually struggle to work with complex shapes, so we partner with help them to improve the concept. It is a win-win relationship because we enjoy that process and they are very happy to have our help elevating their concept and bringing it to life.

How much does an Atelier MEL installation usually cost?

A small installation usually starts at €3,000. The most expensive installation we have ever sold was around €300,000. This was a huge installation for a big hotel.

What is your future plan with Atelier MEL. How would you like to develop the company?

Since we are all designers and architects, we are likely to focus on the design and service side of our business. We cannot be so competitive on the production side, because we are a new firm and there are huge competitors in the lamp and furniture market. Our whole fabrication process is carried out in Spain currently.

We are at a point where we could choose to develop the venture more into a product company or more into a service company, and we find it more comfortable to strengthen our profile as a service company. That is why we are focusing more on doing unique artworks and installations of any type since this is our core strength.

We call this section of our business “Bespoke Designs” as you can see on our website. The projects are usually large and unique. They are a lot of fun because it’s always a new challenge which we start from scratch. We do a wide variety of different projects within this field.

The second part of our company is called the Modular Collection. These are modular glass products which are already pre-designed and can be produced in a couple of weeks. If we wanted to grow our business on the Modular Collection side, we would need to build a factory with our own production. A factory could speed up the production process and would also let us store material, but considerable investment would be required to build this into a holistic product company.

It is leaner for us to develop our service arm and outsource production. However, we are starting to talk to potential partners like large lighting companies who could take our modular collection into production. Our clients would then be able to use the digital composer to design their own shapes, select colors and their location and place an order. We think this could work well with the right partners, but you never know, perhaps in a couple of years we will manage the production ourselves. For now, we are focusing on the service side.

Do you have any advice for Archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own company in the built environment?

Oftentimes we limit ourselves. Try to develop an attitude of thinking and believing that when you are brave, and you persevere, you can reach much further than what you would initially expect.

Surround yourself with those who complement you and those who can help make a project grow. The team is much more important than the idea, as the team is who is going to do the difficult part of implementing the idea.
In the beginning of our startup I really trusted my friend when he encouraged me to start this venture with him.

I couldn’t imagine that we would find clients in Doha without knowing anybody there. I thought this was impossible, but now we are in Doha, and we have even sold a lamp to the queen, the Sheikh. Nothing is impossible. Be brave.

Surround yourself with those who complement you and those who can help make a project grow. The team is much more important than the idea

What are your thoughts on the future of the built environment? How can it improve, and what continues to inspire you?

I would say is that the future is absolutely based on technology. We should all embrace it and start changing our brains to be much more parametric, much more systematized, much more efficient. In the beginning of my career I was the typical architect, much more interested on the design side of architecture than on the technical side of architecture.

By working together with this team of consultants, I really learned how powerful you can become as a designer mastering the use of technology. Before I considered design and technology as two different things, but now I see how powerful they are in combination.

About Maria Ruiz Pardo

Director at Atelier MEL

After earning her architecture degree in Barcelona, Maria Ruiz Pardo practiced in Spanish studios for several years before pivoting to pursue a career in product design and business management.

After earning a Master in Architectural Management and Design at IE School of Architecture and Design in Madrid and the Royal College of Art in London, Maria founded Atelier MEL in 2013 where she works as director and lead designer.

At Atelier MEL, Maria has assembled a multidisciplinary team of design professionals who work at the intersection of artistry and digital design technology to create exclusive art installations.

Based in Barcelona and Cartagena, Atelier MEL are now developing projects which juxtapose cutting-edge design tools with a rich understanding of traditional craftsmanship worldwide.

The post Traditional Crafts In the Digital Age: Dazzling Artworks by Atelier MEL appeared first on Archipreneur.

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Why did you decide to found CO-Office?

There are two reasons why we started CO-Office that are interconnected.
My business partner, Simon, and I both worked for very well known, established design firms prior to starting our company, and in our previous work experiences, we both found that our engagement with the client and particularly with the end user was sorely lacking.

I think this was a condition of the traditional architectural design process, in that it’s not really there to engage the client and end users in a truly meaningful or productive way. As a designer, you’re more often than not stuck in a kind of endless design optioneering cycle, where the process isn’t there to intelligently gather insights, take feedback from clients and end users, and make it useful.

Both because we wanted solve this missing piece of the puzzle, and because we thought we could make the process of design in architecture more efficient and effective, we decided to go off on our own to test these ideas.

Why did you name your company CO-Office?

It’s about working collaboratively. That’s where the CO comes from. We are very open to working, often joint-venturing with other designers and professionals on projects. Being in New York City, and part of an ecosystem where many people are also starting up their own practice and going through the same pains and challenges, it made sense to partner up rather than work in silos in order to share expertise, minds and talents.

I would say, in general, people who are starting businesses right now are very open to this idea of working. This wasn’t always the case, but I think people are more open to it now because of the increasing competition in the city, and also because the nature of creative practice necessitates this way of working together. You can’t deny the collaborative and the productive value of having other minds think about the same problem. We found it can only achieve better results.

At CO-Office, you practice “UX Design for space.” What does that mean?

We had an intuitive idea that to have a successfully designed space you have to first understand how the end user is going to use it. Whereas traditional design typically started at program and form, we were instead interested in starting at human behavior.

We didn’t have a sense at the start of how this could necessarily translate to a business idea, but it was more of a sensibility towards the way that we wanted to design and practice.

For one of our first projects, we were approached by a real estate broker who wanted us to design an office space in New York City. We conducted an intensive period of research with him and his real estate agents and found out that on average, they only used their office space about 15% of the time during the work week. When we presented this finding to the client, he was shocked and then the question became, what can we do about the other 85% of time when the space wasn’t being used?

We proposed to turn the office space into a co-working space that is able to generate additional revenue. Then we discovered that our client was also very involved in the art world and that Harlem has an increasing population of artists but only limited space to show their work, so we decided that rather than having a dull reception space which nobody would have used anyways, to turn that into an art gallery instead.

“I think this project is a good example of how a different design process can positively affect the end product, and how understanding human behavior and patterns, can create opportunities for smart design.”

To this day, we have had over a dozen shows and have featured over 50 artists. The space has become a destination in the community and coincidentally, if you can afford to buy art, you can also afford to buy a townhouse so it has also supported the real estate business. As for the co-working space, we actually decided to move in shortly after construction, along with a developer and real estate attorney. By joining the client and his brokerage team, there is now this eco-system that didn’t exist before, which was only possible through our early discovery. I think this project is a good example of how a different design process can positively affect the end product, and how understanding human behavior and patterns, can create opportunities for smart design.

When you compare the design processes of UX designers and architects, what do you think the architecture world could learn from the UX world, or vice versa?

Architecture and UX design processes are similar in the sense that they both end with human engagement. The difference is that UX design also fundamentally starts with human engagement as well, utilizing a more lean and agile, bottom-up approach, whereas the traditional architecture design process works the other way around where you start with a set of master-planning principles, then develop that into program and massing ideas and so on.

The problem is that in this top down approach, the end-user typically gets lost in the process or is often completely left out altogether. After a lot of the formal characteristics of a building get baked in, typically there’s no longer the opportunity to understand how the design of a space can positively support or create new opportunities for the people who will use it.

I think architects can learn from the UX world by taking on more of its human-centered design principles: let human behavior and patterns dictate form and interface, be more agile and open to unforeseen possibilities, and develop leaner design processes that can quickly gather information and convey results.

After a building is completed, how can user data be fed back into an architectural design refinement process?

That’s both the challenge and the opportunity. UX design processes are developed for digital products which will never involve the amount of materials and professional services required compared to a building, therefore the ability to gather feedback, prototype, and then re-deploy is possible at a much faster rate. But, that’s also an opportunity for the building industry to learn from the tech world. It does however require a fundamental re-thinking about how we design, but maybe more importantly, about how our buildings are built.

How do you integrate user data into your work?

We recently finished a project for a flagship optical retail and medical office in New York where we found out during our early ­discovery process that patients were waiting 45 minutes on average for every appointment. That’s crazy when you think about what the customer satisfaction level must be like. We also discovered that a doctor’s insurance payout for each patient visit is in part directly based on value-based metrics, with customer satisfaction being one of those key metrics. Additionally, the lack of focus on patient experience also had a negative impact on the retail side of the eyewear business, and furthermore in attracting new patients.

When we discovered this, we knew we couldn’t just ignore it. The question was then how can we design something that is beautiful and improves on the user experience and bottom line of the business? In our pre-occupancy analysis, we found out that a large part of the problem had to do with the way the existing reception space was set up: uncomfortable plastic chairs, fluorescent lighting, packed and inaccessible display cases, and a general lack of flow and circulation. Staff sat behind large kiosks which further distanced human-to-human interaction.

Knowing that we had to solve the reception space before anything else, we focused our efforts and came up with a concept to transform the waiting room to a kind of living room, opening up space around a central lounge area and creating a series of recessed arcades along the perimeter of the room for the eyewear displays. We then carried this design language through to the rest of medical office and staff spaces, and carefully selected finishes and lighting that would create a comfortable yet elevated experience.

To reduce patient wait times, we worked with our client to implement organization and behavioral change in two different ways: one was to eliminate any behind the desk interaction so that patients engage with staff face-to-face without a physical obstruction. In this sense, the patients were thought of as guests and the staff as hosts. To make this type of interaction possible without it being a logistical nightmare, we also helped the staff transition to a mobile booking and POS system. This way, the staff no longer needed to be stationary in order to do their jobs.

Since the office reopened, our client has reported astonishing results: eyewear sales were up about 30% in just the first month, the practice has started to attract younger patients (20’s – 30’s) while retaining its core patients (30+), and most importantly, the staff have reported that patients in general feel happier and more satisfied with their experience. We’re still waiting on the results of how this will eventually impact the insurance payouts, but that will be part of a larger post-occupancy study we will do 6 months later.

What projects are you working on currently?

We’re working on a multi-phase office design for a super cool cybersecurity company that’s been backed by the CIA and the Department of Defense.

We’re working on a hotel in Chicago with our amazing hospitality partner, John Perez, who’s based in Miami.

We’re working with a developer to draw tenants to a very beautiful and historic building in a tough neighborhood.

We also have three townhouse projects in New York in various stages of design and construction, and we are about to start on two mixed use projects in New York City.

How do use VR technology in your design process? Is this service being specifically requested by your clients or is it a preferred tool for your practice?

VR is something that clients don’t typically ask for, and party because they don’t know it will be useful for them as it’s still a relatively new technology. The way that VR became a core aspect of our design practice was actually by sheer coincidence. We thought it was a really cool thing when it first came out, so Simon and I got the DK2, the development kit for the first Oculus Rift and we just started playing with it.

We didn’t really intend to use it as a design tool, but we found that it was incredibly helpful in communicating ideas and experiencing our designs at scale. So, we started to test it with some of our earlier clients and it was really impactful in the sense that it helped them make decisions much faster and it got us away from having to do design options in the sense that we could have the client inhabit our designs in real time.

Part of the job of architects during the design phase is to convey the experience of the space as well as possible, right? It’s always very difficult to do that through two-dimensional means. Not ­everybody understands a plan or a detail or a section, but everybody understands the experience of space, so the ability to immerse somebody immediately into that allows them to tap into the design process in a way that was never before possible. Now VR is part of our core design process. We use it internally as much as we use it with our clients and at this point it’s pretty ingrained.

What technology or programs are you using for VR?

This depends on a couple of different use cases. We use every­thing from the Google Cardboard for an experience that’s much faster and more agile, to the HTC Vive, which currently offers the most immersive experience. We’ve been working with IrisVR since they were a very young company and they’ve now grown into a very successful one, so they’ve been really good to us and we continue to use their software. We also do more customized experiences depending on what the client may want, but whether the intent is to move the design to the next stage, or for marketing purposes, I think VR is invaluable to the design process.

How does the VR software integrate with your 3D modeling?

IrisVR actually plugs directly into our modeling software. We use BIM (Building Information Modelling) in all of our designs. With BIM, the concept is that you’re able to embed construction metadata into your design, modelling, and drawing process, so it’s very useful and efficient going directly from that kind of design process into VR because it allows you to connect the construction experience to the design experience.

What advice do you have for architects who may be reluctant to use VR?

I see VR as a different way to think about your design and design process that is completely liberating. When you create a 2D rendering, as a designer you have a lot of control over the image. Often times, architects can get too caught up in creating a perfect image. In a 2D image, you can’t turn around and see what’s behind you, you can’t look up and you can’t look down. In VR, everything is exposed, so there’s this degree of transparency that a lot of architects may be uncomfortable with, but we see it as a productive aspect because it allows a complete understanding of the project.

This is the case not only from the client side but also with our consultants, engineers and contractors. It’s really a tool that in some ways levels the playing field and allows everybody to speak the same language. We really embrace it, knowing that once you turn around, something may not necessarily be completely resolved, but that’s okay. In our experience, clients are okay with it as well. They appreciate the transparency and it actually makes for a more productive design conversation.

How should more quantitative information be used during the initial design process, before there is a completed building or product?

Simon and I once did a study with our long-time collaborator George Valdes where we asked a really simple question: can something as mundane as the height of a ceiling affect the way that somebody thinks in a space?”

In looking to see if anyone had done a similar study, we found a 2007 paper from Rice University where two researchers had built two test environments: one with a taller ceiling height, one with a lower ceiling height and they tested different cognitive responses. They found that the space with the lower ceiling height was more conducive to analytical, item-specific thinking, while the space with the higher ceiling height was much more conducive to relational and creative thinking.

However, we weren’t completely satisfied with the qualitative way the researchers had approached these experiments and so we wanted to see whether or not we could prove this through more quantitative means. We turned to BCI technology, which is short for brain-computer interface.

We conducted a very similar type of experiment, but all through simulation. Our subjects were hooked up to a BCI computer which measured their brainwaves. We were using a piece of technology called NeuroSky, which was one of the few kinds of commercially available BCI technologies available at the time. NeuroSky essentially measures the alpha, beta, theta, and delta waves of your brain and it categorizes them into two pools, one which is attention, the other which is meditation. The meditative brainwaves (alpha, theta, delta) correspond to creative thinking processes, whereas the attentive brainwaves (low to high beta) correspond to more analytical thinking.

I wish I could see design and business together in a sentence more often.

Our test subjects went through a process where they were asked to solve a difficult problem in two different virtual environments, one with a lower ceiling height, one with a higher ceiling height. We were then able to measure their brain waves during this process, and to our surprise, we found that the data actually correlated with the Rice study! When people were in the taller space, we saw higher readings of meditative brain states whereas in the shorter space, the attentive states took over. In the debrief sessions afterwards, subjects were asked to share their thinking in each scenario and almost all said that while they resorted to more item-specific methods such as counting in the shorter space, they were able to come up with much more creative solutions in the taller space.

I think the implication of our study is that wherein traditionally a designer or an architect might say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great for this conference room to have a 15-foot ceiling?”, now we can actually prove that having a 15-foot ceiling in a creative meeting setting would be productive for the type of activity that’s happening there. From a design perspective, understanding the data around how people use space can only make design better and it’s not at the sacrifice of design really, rather it’s something that can help to support and enhance it.

The challenge here is that we don’t have the tools yet to collect all of the data we want, so increasingly architects also need to expand their skill sets, and look for tools outside of the industry.

Do you think the title “architect” limits the scope of architectural work today?

I think that’s a very relevant and important question. I’m not sure if I have a great answer for that. I do think that calling somebody an architect does have certain limitations and I think those limitations are set by the industry and also by the profession in that there’s a traditional expectation of what architects can and should do. And then there’s also the legal requirements around licensing and professional certification which are meant to protect the profession. It’s hard to divorce that association with what an architect does which goes beyond those responsibilities.

Perhaps the idea is not to reinvent the title of “architect”, but to change the perception around its associations. The title itself is quite broad when you think of it in relation to the tech world, but I think within our industry’s perspective, it’s actually quite narrow. Maybe the way to change the perspective is through the process of design and its impact on the product or the building. If your process is different enough that it takes you outside of your typical professional roles and responsibilities and you are able to produce a better product at the end, then you can take that and say, “look, I did this totally new thing and it created something meaningful and better than what it would have been otherwise”.

Is good design good business?

Absolutely. For us, good design isn’t just about beauty and ­function. It’s also about creating meaningful experiences. People often talk about their Return on Investment, but we always like to ask what about your Return on Culture?

To break that down, I like to think of Return on Culture as the net productive social capital gained from the operationalizing of an organization’s core values. Social capital is therefore human-centric by nature and can be measured through things like: personal and collective happiness, individual and team productivity, and social and economic resiliency. These factors are often left out of the traditional architectural design process and so what happens? Businesses fail because they can’t diversify their products and services, and companies lose employees and clients because they’re dissatisfied. Once you’re here, it doesn’t matter how much money you have spent on your space because it might not stick around with you.

I wish I could see design and business together in a sentence more often.
What advice do you have for other designers who want to start out?

Take a business course. There’s a lot about starting a business that’s not so exciting that they don’t teach you at architecture school and that’s a persistent problem in the U.S. You could also work at a firm like ours which gives you exposure to the business side of the practice. Or, if you’re working at a larger firm, I would ask your project leader or the administrative partner directly to get some business experience.

I would also speak to everybody you know who has personal experience starting a company. There’s always a lot of trial and error, but there’s never a point in making the same mistake twice if you can avoid it.

What does the future of architecture look like?

When I think about the future, I inevitably think about the past. If you look at the ‘60s to the ‘80’s, the transition from hand drawing to CAD technology led to the liberation of the architect from the means of production which was huge because for the first time, we had more time focus on the thing that produces the most value: design. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was computational design, and Frank Gehry is the perfect example here along with the design of Guggenheim Bilbao, which I visited recently. It’s amazing to go there and see this building as something that was built the ‘90s. What made this building possible was Gehry’s use of Catia, which at the time was primarily a design tool for aerospace engineers. By adopting this technology, Gehry and other designers like him set the precedent for all of computational design today. Then of course we get to the 2000’s which was the advent of BIM technology, which a large majority of the industry has now adopted and which is still continuing to grow in intelligence and complexity.

I think architecture has always benefited from the evolution of technology which have allowed architects to focus more on the things that they like to do, but it’s also allowed them to better connect with other professionals: computational design with engineers, and BIM with construction managers. I see VR and AR (augmented reality) as technologies in this lineage that are helping architects, engineers, and other professionals connect more closely with the client and end-user, and I think technology has and will continue to have a really important role for architecture.

From the building perspective, sensory technology is starting to play a big role. The ability to gather and analyze user data in order to modulate the building environment, and to create feedback loops between the user, designer, and the building will be huge for how we think about design. I think we will increasingly rely less on anecdotal or qualitative answers to answer questions and more so on quantitative data.

“For now, design is still very much a human-centric process, and we as designers should celebrate that.”

The biggest challenge I see facing architects and other professions as well is our increasing move towards automation. There are many aspects of an architect’s role that can both benefit from and be completely upheaved by automation. How much of our current roles and responsibilities we will eventually retain or will ultimately be automated remains to be seen, but one thing I do know is that at least for now, design is still very much a human-centric process, and we as designers should celebrate that. —

About

David Zhai

David Zhai is a co-founder and the Director of Design and User Experience at CO-Office, a spatial design consultancy based in New York City working at the intersection of live, work, and play. David leads research, strategy, and design for collaborative work environments, experiential retail, hospitality, and community-driven residential projects.

Prior to this role, David was the BIM and computational technologies lead for the design of World Trade Tower 2 at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), where he also led research and development in virtual reality.

David is a recipient of the Graham Foundation grant on his research into company and organizational culture and its effects on workplace environments, domestic life, and urban transformation.

David holds a Master’s of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP, where he was the recipient of the Kinne Fellowship Award, the Lowenfish Memorial Award, and the Design Excellence Award, and where he has taught in the Master’s program since 2012.

Simon McGown

Simon McGown is a co-founder and the Director of Design & Development at CO-Office. Simon leads acquisitions, new business, and project management by combining user-centered design with business development and real estate expertise.

Simon is also a licensed real estate agent with Compass focused on developing joint venture and investment opportunities that benefit the social bottom line in the New York City region.

Prior to cofounding CO-Office, Simon was a project designer for the Bloomberg Center for Cornell University’s new Roosevelt Island campus and for the Bill & Melinda Gates Hall for Cornell University’s Ithaca campus at Pritzker Prize award winning architecture studio, Morphosis Architects in New York City.

Simon is a recipient of the Graham Foundation grant on his research into company and organizational culture and its effects on workplace environments, domestic life, and urban transformation.

Simon holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP, where he was the recipient of the Kinne Fellowship Award and the prestigious Housing Studio teaching assistantship. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Texas Tech University where he graduated summa cum laude with Honors and was the valedictorian of his class. He currently teaches as an adjunct instructor at NJIT’s School of Architecture and Design Fifth Year Architecture Studios and is a guest critic at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Texas Tech University.

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