This week’s interview is with Sébastien Lucas, Co-Founder and CEO of Bricks.

Sébastien has been working an architect for 7 years before he started as an entrepreneur and self-taught web developer. His goal was always to make architecture a collaborative practice. He first developed Openbricks, a platform to share and find open source architectural projects and designs.

Then, inspired by GitHub, he developed Bricks. Bricks is an app for architects that focusses on providing collaborative solutions for architectural design. The public beta of Bricks will be launched this month.

Continue to read to learn more about SaaS, business models for open source and of course about Bricks and how it could help your practice.

Enjoy the interview!

What made you decide to found Bricks? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

Since the beginning of my entrepreneur journey back in 2006, when I was still working as an architect for agence TER, a well-known French landscape architecture studio, my motivation is to improve the way architects collaborate.

I developed Archiref in 2010, a platform to share images of architecture,  and then Openbricks in 2014 to make it easier to find open source elements for architecture.

Those two projects seek to encourage architects to share their library of inspiration and projects. In order to save time, build a community, and communicate their work in a way that is useful for everyone. With Bricks, I was also at the design side of the development.

Software developers have GitHub, where most open source software are built and shared. Github is both a working tool and a huge library. Inspired by GitHub, I was motivated to develop an app for architects that can be useful daily and help in making the design process collaborative, in essence, the GitHub for architects.

I met my two associates about a year ago. One of them, François Muzard is a BIM manager. He introduced me to the BIM world and the fact that the BIM ecosystem needs apps to help efficient communication among project stakeholders, task sharing, and even discussions…

All Bricks associates have experienced agile methods in the fields of web development and BIM collaboration. So the idea arose to quickly build an app that would integrate not only all the benefits of Agile Methods, but also adapt to AEC and closely integrate to the growing BIM ecosystem.

You have just launched Bricks app. Could you give us some examples of how the tool is used and how it helps architectural practices?

Architects lose a lot of time for external and internal communication. After a meeting, everyone seems to be all clear on what needs to be done. But how to track progress and answer questions before the next meeting? How to keep the project momentum and maintain flawless communication day after day, and keep everyone involved motivated and informed?

Communication is usually a mix of emails, phone calls, and maybe some paperwork… but it takes time and never provides a clear state of the work to be done.

With Bricks, we propose a shared platform to communicate and exchange ideas about tasks before and after the meeting.

You can then:

• plan tasks for the next meeting
• assign them to your team or external collaborators
• discuss the tasks in greater detail
• follow their progress and hierarchize them with a kanban board

We will release a new meeting module soon. It will allow you to invite meeting attendees assigned to specific tasks. It also generates a report to send out automatically to all the attendees.

Compared with other architecture project management tools, Bricks is based on Agile approach. More than just tracking tasks, we also aim to give everyone a clear idea of what how far along they are on the project.

Of course, you can manage privacy too, thanks to our group feature. It allows creating separate project groups where you can share specific topics to just your engineers, the client, or to everyone on the project.

In which development phase is your app?

The public beta of Bricks will be launched this month. This version is the result of nearly one year of development and iteration on the product. We have decided on a clear roadmap, giving priority to the ease of use and simplicity along with specific attention to the quality of the user interface.

Though BIM and 3D model integration are important, we have decided to orient our first product on task management, as it is at the core of agile methods. Also often the simple, such as sharing comments and images, is more efficient than the complicated, like discussing a complex 3D model. Indeed the 3D model environment could be overwhelming for many people and not accessible under bad internet connection contexts.

We will make a demo of the app at Web summit, the biggest startup event in Europe, held in Lisbon this November. We will animate a few specific user workshops in our network of innovative architectural practices. Our objective is to gather as many feedbacks as possible to improve the app for its next iteration.

The next feature we will develop is a new module that handles meetings efficiently and integrates with task management seamlessly. We expect to launch it before the end of the year.

After which, we will launch the final v1 version and payment plans at the beginning of 2018.

How did you finance it?

Since the end of 2016 and until now, we have financed the Bricks app project out of our own pockets. We are looking for public and private funding to move with the project even faster. As in the startup world, completion speed  is a key factor to success!

Further I wanted to ask you about a project you launched earlier, Openbricks. Could you tell us a little about it?

Openbricks is a platform to share and find open source architectural projects and designs. These past few years have seen open source architecture gaining momentum, with a community like the Wikihouse and the Pritzker prize Alejandro Aravena who shared four of his social housing designs under the Creative Commons license.

I have the chance to be both an architect and a web developer, so I know very clearly how open source contributes in development – it simply revolutionizes everything!

While big tech names like Google and Facebook also contribute to open source framework, a software collaboratively developed by a community of people can eventually get bigger and more powerful than the software developed by powerful companies. It is a way to democratize the knowledge.

But now to get back to architecture, the open source movement face several roadblocks that prevent its viral development :

• A clarification of licenses
• A clarification of responsibility for the design
• A simple way to find and participate in open source design
• A business model to share the benefits to contributors
• …

With Openbricks, we wanted to solve the problem of the fragmentation of open source architecture projects to create a standard that facilitates discovery like GitHub did in its time.

We, of course, want to advance in a better model and improve the tool. But for the moment, the development of Bricks is our current priority.

Open Source means that knowledge is shared at no costs. What is the business model for Openbricks?

Openbricks is completely free!

Open source platforms can have several business models. Let’s take two examples. First is the Noun project, a platform of quality design icons shared by the designer community. They offer free license of the icons they share, all within the Creative Commons framework. Most people don’t pay, but the professionals do and contribute for the others.

Secondly GitHub, the hub for open source development projects. It is free for open source projects and does have paying plans for companies that want to use the same tools (code versioning, project management, etc) to manage their private projects.

In our case, Openbricks is a library of architectural elements that could be, at some point, integrated with Bricks app. Openbricks will remain free and what people will pay for is to use the Bricks app as a monthly subscription. This, in turn, will go to the services, formation, integration, and customisation that could be needed for architects to set up the app internally.

Do you have any advice for Archipreneurs who want to start and build their own business?

Don’t be afraid to study your project idea. We are all constantly overwhelmed by announcements of new apps, new startups. You may feel discouraged to launch your own project in such a competitive and dynamic world.

But do it :

• start small
• focus on one specific problem to solve, one that you experienced personally
• choose the right people to build and complete your team
• don’t be afraid to talk about your idea to anyone you meet
• show the product early for feedbacks and do not hesitate to change your initial idea

Experience has proven that ideas that seemed very similar at first can create a whole new experience and with continuous improvement, differentiate itself from the rest and find its target market.

Think about Instagram, who would have imagined that an image sharing app with a few filters could end up being so popular!

About Sébastien Lucas

Sébastien Lucas is co-founder and CEO of Bricks, a SaaS application focused on providing collaborative solutions for architectural design. Sébastien is an architect by profession and for 7 years worked for award-winning French architecture and landscape architecture companies.

In 2009, passionate about the web and with the idea to make architecture a collaborative practice, he developed several projects: Archiref, Openbricks and then, the Bricks app. He became, as a result, an entrepreneur and self-taught web developer with a specialization in javascript and frontend technologies.

He then worked 5 years as a freelance web developer to create web applications for other startups, media and web agencies. In 2013, he organized three Future Architecture Night events, a conference cycle inspired by TED’s or Pecha Kucha and offered the opportunity for more than 30 startups and architects to talked about their innovations related to architecture.

The post Design Together with Bricks: Collaborative Solutions for Architects appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Jeremy McLeod, Founder of Melbourne based company Breathe Architecture and the Nightingale Model.

Fed up with property developers, off-shore investors and low-quality, expensive housing, Jeremy and six other architects joined financial forces to develop their project The Commons. Its goal was to deliver livable, sustainable, and affordable apartments.

The Commons survived the recent financial crisis and a change in investment to become a success story. It became the prototype for the Nightingale Housing movement, a not-for-profit social enterprise that supports, promotes and advocates high-quality housing that is ecologically, socially and financially sustainable.

Today, Nightingale Housing has a number of houses in development, not only by Breathe Architecture but also by other architects who have been licensed the Nightingale model.

Keep on reading to learn from an architect who believes that collaboration can drive real and positive change in our cities.

Enjoy the interview!

Could you tell us a little about your background? What made you decide to found Breathe Architecture?

My parents were activists and I grew up in a family environment of protests. My parents moved around a lot so I went to lots of different schools. The things they taught me were, responsibility and the idea of sustainability.

I remember that my dad took me to the Old Parliament House in Canberra, which was 1,000 kilometers away. He took me there in a bus with a bunch of people to protest. We pitched a tent city on the lawn in front of Old Parliament House to protest around housing affordability in Melbourne back in the 1980s. So it’s ironic, right?

And then when I went to study architecture I studied an undergraduate in environmental design in Tasmania. Tasmania has this incredible nature and landscape. It’s very connected to the environment. Anyway, then I came to Melbourne with an architecture degree and an undergraduate in environmental design with a passion for sustainability, and I worked in a big practice in Melbourne. I worked there for four years under a great architect.

When I started at the practice, there were eight architects. It was a great studio environment. And when I left we were working on Melbourne’s – in fact the southern hemisphere’s – tallest residential building. The practice had grown to 50 architects. It seemed like the buildings we were doing were disconnected from nature or from the environment. The last project that I was working on in that practice was a car park for that building.

I left that practice and I started Breathe Architecture in 2001. And the reason it’s called Breathe Architecture and not Jeremy McLeod Architects was that that tower that I was working on had no windows that opened above level 30. So from level 30 to level 88 there were no windows that opened because the wind speed in Melbourne was so great that there was a fear from the wind engineer that it would suck furniture out of the building. So all of those apartments had to be cooled by air conditioning even though Melbourne has quite a temperate climate.

“So when I started Breathe Architecture the simple idea was that everything that I designed, everything that I worked on, needed to have a window that people could open so that they could breathe.”

Could you tell us about the beginning of the Nightingale Model?

As architects we gained knowledge along the way. We’d been frustrated dealing with property developers. Most of Melbourne… in fact, since the ’80s all the housing provisions in Melbourne are provided through the private market through property developers, building speculative developments generally for sale to investors.

85% of apartments in Melbourne are sold to investors, usually off-shore in Asia, so it leads to substandard design qualities. It’s a race to the bottom to build cheaply and to sell as expensive as possible. And we were quite frustrated and disillusioned with that. So in 2007 we built the prototype building for Nightingale called The Commons.

Melbourne, again, has a history of architectural activism. In the 1950s there was a group of Melbourne architects that ran a project called the Small Home Service, trying to deliver architecturally designed homes to the general population not just to the rich people.

In the 1970s there were two architects that established a company called Merchant Builders. Merchant Builders was about delivering design to a mass market, trying to improve the quality of design through mass-market building. But since the 70’s there has been not much movement from Melbourne architects.

When we started The Commons in 2007, I got together with six other architects, and we put together all of our money, borrowed against our houses, borrowed from other people and we raised about a million dollars. We started work on our own project.

It took us a very long time to complete The Commons, until 2013. It took us six years start to finish, because in the middle of that project there was the global financial crisis, which took our funding away from us. And so we had to change funding models halfway through and get funded by an impact investment group or an ethical funder called Small Giants. We finished that project in 2013 and in 2014, we started work on the first Nightingale project, which was the second iteration of The Commons.

We learned from The Commons and changed the financial model. Instead of having six architects, we had 25 ethical shareholders putting in $100,000 each, all borrowing against their homes. Melbournians that cared about the future of our city and the housing crisis facing our city currently, were happy to invest in a project that had a capped profit at 15%, a lot of risk associated with it, and some social return as well.

And looking back now, is the business model working out?

The reason that we decided to do this was out of necessity for our city, not because we wanted to take financial risk, not because we’re entrepreneurial by nature, but we thought it was necessary.

When we finished the 24 apartments of The Commons people liked it a lot. I think that it showed that there were people in Melbourne that wanted to live in something that was triple bottom line. Something that was livable, sustainable, and affordable. People started writing to us saying, “If you do another one of these can you let us know because we’d be interested in buying one.” When we finished The Commons we had 11 people on a waiting list to start work on the next project. The waiting list is now 2,300 something people.

We currently have 20 apartments buildings under construction. So there is lots of interest, there’s lots of demand, but we as a single practice can’t deliver on the needs of our city. So we established Nightingale Housing, which is a not-for-profit social enterprise.

The role of Nightingale housing is to share our intellectual property with other architects in Melbourne and other cities around the country to help them establish their own Nightingale projects and to help deliver the housing that people so desperately need here.

So we got corporate sponsorship. We raised about $500,000 from Cross Laminated Timber Suppliers, from sustainable appliance manufacturers. With that we could employ a CEO. We put together a skills based board. We employed a resource officer who could help other architects understand how to do the model. And then we put together a licensing committee. The chair of the licensing committee is the Victorian Government architect so the government pays her but she sits on our licensing committee making sure that only the best Australian architects can lead Nightingale projects.

Can every architect apply to work with the Nightingale model?

Yes, every architect can apply but not every architect gets a license, only the best ones do. And by the best I don’t mean the biggest. I mean the architects that have a proven history of doing quality work at any scale, that have a proven track record of not doing anything that they should be ashamed of, that have shown a commitment to either the profession of architecture or the broader community or society. So it’s a particular breed of architects that Nightingale Housing grants licenses to.

Further you created The Nightingale Night School. I read about a twelve-week semester during which students can learn about the philosophy and practice of the Nightingale Model. Who is the focus group of the school?

Ideally it would be to other Nightingale architects, but at the moment it has been run once to Masters of Architecture thesis students at Melbourne University second semester 2016. We plan to run it again this year and than hopefully every year.

Do you have any advice for Archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

I guess you have two choices:

You can sit there and wait for the phone to ring, for a property developer or someone with a lot of money to call you and ask you to build the project that you were born to do. Or you can take some financial risk and do the project that you were born to do.

And you would recommend the latter?

It totally depends on you. Some people just don’t have the stomach for it.

But our profession has been manipulated by property developers, project managers, real estate agents, marketing teams and lawyers in this country in the way that architects take all the risk but they receive very, very little of the financial reward associated with the project.

And often we’re asked to do things that we would be ashamed of. What good architects do is refuse the commission or resign the commission.

If you’re going to take all that risk to do a project that you’re not going to be proud of, wouldn’t you just take that risk and do the project that you will be proud of and that is beneficial to society and profession of architecture?

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

I think that technology has changed everything. I think that as a profession we need to think of ourselves as more entrepreneurial, whether we’re driving our own projects or whether we’re doing product design or whether we’re communicating directly with the residents. I mean, if you think about Baugruppen projects [joint building venture projects], it’s about an architect driving a project from the ground up and attracting residents based on their reputation: who they are, what they’ve done before, and what they can bring to the project.

I think that the future for architects, it’s adapt, it’s evolve, or die. The choice is one of survival.

We need to be adapting with the times rather than clinging to a 19th century idea of an old Englishman sitting in his manor drawing his beautiful plans for his rich friends.

About Jeremy McLeod

Jeremy is the founding Director of Breathe Architecture, a team of dedicated architects that have built a reputation for delivering high quality design and sustainable architecture for all scale projects.

Breathe Architecture has been focusing on sustainable urbanisation and in particular have been investigating how to deliver more affordable urban housing to Melbournians.

Breathe were the instigators of The Commons housing project in Brunswick, Melbourne, and now are collaborating with other Melbourne Architects to deliver the Nightingale Model. Nightingale Model is intended to be an open source-housing model led by architects.

Jeremy believes that architects, through collaboration, can drive real positive change in this city we call home.

The post The Nightingale Model: A Collaborative Movement for Sustainable, Affordable Housing in the City appeared first on Archipreneur.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if I could help him with the design of a small vacation house. His family has a plot of land with an old, ruinous house on it which he wants to replace with a small modern home. It´s size should be around 60 qm (which equals 645 sq ft) and the budget is 60.000 € (64.000 $).

Mmh, great I thought…

…typical tasks and struggle every architect has to face quite to often in working life. But I liked the challenge and the minimal approach and started to browse for some references. It did not take me very long until I stumbled upon a solid answer:

The WikiHouse – A project developed by London-based design group 00:/.

Since I founded Archipreneur.com I am always looking around for great ideas, start-ups and entrepreneurs in the context of design, architecture and city planning. This is why I was very excited and fascinated when I first discovery this open source start-up. So let’s see how it works…

How does WikiHouse work?

The WikiHouse is an open source building system which allows you to access and download a freely shared library of 3D models in SketchUp. This is smart because SketchUp is free and really easy to use. You can adapt the models to design your own house and generate a set of cutting files of it. The WikiHouse founders developed an unique SketchUp plugin for that.

The next step is to print out the parts from your house using a CNC machine. They recommend to use a standard sheet material like plywood for that. They are numbering all the parts which are going together without any bolts because the system uses wedge and peg connections.

A team of about two or three people without any traditional constructions skills and power tools will be able to build a small house in about a day. Onto the basis classic of a WikiHouse you can then apply systems like windows, cladding, insulation and services.

The proof of concept is already done. For the London Design Festival 2014, WikiHouse co-founders 00 partnered with ARUP engineers and The Building Centre to develop and build the WikiHouse 4.0 in central London. 4.0 was the world’s first digitally manufactured, open source house to be built. 4.0 was the first two storey house for WikiHouse, showcasing the reality of using the WikiHouse system for house building. The structure was built in ten days with a team of around eight volunteers.

The following video with Alastair Parvin, co-founder of WikiHouse will be really interesting for you to better understand the concept.

What are the next steps for the product?

In the moment the WikiHouse Foundation is working on a catalogue of different house designs. Anyone can download or buy those products under the license of Creative Commons from an online platform.

The Foundation is also in the process of establishing WikiHouse trademark badges. In conclusion, these badges will include WikiHouse Designer, WikiHouse Manufacturer, WikiHouse Certifier, WikiHouse builder and give individuals or groups certifications of their service.

The Founders are writing: “WikiHouse is a product of three massive trends: open design, automation and digital manufacturing – catalysts for the third industrial revolution.”

If the relevance for society will arrive depends on weather the proclaimed changes in planning and production processes of housing developments will be implemented. If so, the WikiHouse and its community could be a contribution to the change of existing production methods.

The future will show us and the potential is visible. I am excited what their next steps will be. Therefore, here are some links for further readings:

– Ted Talk with Alastair Parvin

– Architecture 00

– Space Craft Systems

What´s your opinion on the WikiHouse?

The post Social Archipreneurship: How WikiHouse is Making Housing Affordable appeared first on Archipreneur.