For decades, we've designed architecture to be about a finished product. And we've measured it the same way. Today, construction ends. We continuously ask ourselves, how do we build better spaces? I'm here today to tell you that's the wrong question. And the next phase of architecture isn't about being a finished product at all. It's about a connected system of components that acts as a platform and participates in how we live, work, learn, and change. The start of this story begins with the origin of the wall. Meet
Augustine Sacket. Mr. Sackett patented the first version of drywall sacket board in 1894. Think about that. 1894. A material that was invented before the airplane still shapes the room you're sitting in today. A little bit crazy, right? Now, it's not that we haven't tried to invent new ways to build spaces. It's just that nothing's really stick stuck and eventually we go back to drywall. Got a couple of examples for you. From 1908 to 1940, you could actually order a house out of a catalog. About 70,000
of these sold. Many of them are still standing today, possibly in our own community, maybe even my own house. Catalogdriven design at scale over a century ago. Where did that go? Why did we lose sight of it? My second example takes place after the Second World War. Same line of thought, just a little bit different approach. The Lustron Corporation started to sell kiddart homes that were all built out of porcelain enamel steel. I love this picture. Shows you everything you need to put your house together.
Right this time, the market only found need for about 2500. A lot of them are still standing, but I can't really imagine what the user experience would be if you were in a bedroom or a living room where all four walls in a ceiling were made out of porcel porcelain enamel tiles. So, two radical attempts at trying to industrialize spacem, but neither one really stuck. And we go back to the drawing board and we ask, man, how do we build better spaces? Well, if that question
isn't moving the needle, maybe we need to ask a different question all entirely. Let's try this. How do we listen to our spaces and what they're telling us? How do we take our spaces and make sure that they can continue to deliver value as they age? In theater, the fourth wall is essentially an invisible boundary between the performer and the audience. Today, I'm here to tell you that architecture has a fourth wall. Also, we come up with an idea, we design to solve the need, we
build it, and then the space just sits there in the background while people experience it. That's a problem, you guys. We need to get around that. What if space can't be a backdrop anymore? What if space actually starts to participate with those that are using it? The way we overcome that is by turning noise into signal and rethinking about how space is a static container and actually an ongoing capability. In keeping with my theater metaphor, I've got four acts for you today. The first one is
sometimes one of the harder ones to hear. Remember that date 198, sorry, 1894. Much different. It's a long time for things to not really change. I'm sure many of you have done a home project or been involved in a construction site where the picture that's on screen is very reminiscent of what the experience was while it was being de developed. Drywall is messy. Drywall takes forever. Drywall requires a bunch of different components to come together to be successful. and quality. Not only that, if you want
to change drywall, you have to start all over again. It's not an easy process and oftentimes it prevents you from even trying to do anything different. So, I feel like drywall is a dead end. I think something has to change. This idea is not just philosophically wasteful, it's measurably wasteful. Each year, 600 million tons of construction debris from demolition and new installs ends up in the landfill. That's staggering. That's over twice the amount of trash that comes out of our households. Add to that 20 to
70 billion, that's a B worth of medical and health care costs associated with hazardous indoor air quality. That essentially translates to los lost productivity or long-term health issues. These are things we can do better at. We have to make a change. So where do we start? Oftentimes in construction, designers think, I have to specify smarter materials. I have to do more sustainable decision-m in the beginning. Absolutely true. But it's not just about the materials that we pick. What if instead of thinking about construction as traditional
construction, we start to think about construction as a modular component, a system of parts, things that can fit together. and maybe even things that can change when the business need or the use case changes. So if change is the motivator, let's dig into that in our second act. Change in design is often thought of as the enemy of architecture. It's not something a designer wants to talk about, something that ruins their idea. It essentially disrupts the design. Today I want to propose that we rethink that
and that design can actually adapt change as one of the most influential decision makers. Before you can decide on a basis of design that's going to allow for change, you have to understand the system of parts and components that essentially are going to help shape your space. And you might even need to rethink how they work. This is an example of a room that's been designed to go together and come apart. I mentioned in my beginning that it was going to be a system of parts
or a platform that participates. So, think of these structural components, glass and doors, solid walls, ceiling assemblies, all being things that can work together in concert with each other but are held together by the glue, electrical components, HVAC, and especially technology. Then when the time comes, you can redesign. You don't even have to get anything new. You just take the parts and pieces apart and you reshape the space. A room that can reconfigure is pretty useful. I hope everybody's nodding. But a room that knows when
it's time to reconfigure is something else entirely. That's where the digital side of this comes in. A digital twin is a living model of a physical space. Digital twins can be informative. They can be descriptive. They can be predictive. And eventually, I think digital twins will actually be autonomous. Kind of wild thinking. You could use digital twins to fix a process. You could use digital twins to catalog a facility. You could also use them to optimize operational efficiency. Whatever your focus is, the point isn't the
technology. The point is that you're actually using a connected workflow that takes information from the real world and feeds it to information in the digital world and reduces redundancies and helps optimize the spaces to work throughout their life cycle. All right, I'm not going to dig too much deeper into the information side. Promise I'll get back to it. But before we do that, I want to talk about something far more human and far more unspoken. >> [clears throat] >> You first judge a space with your
eyes. You see it. You see the material. You see the size. You see the proportion. You see where the light's coming in. But you first evaluate a space with your ears. You hear it. And then you feel it. So let's take sound serious for a minute. Noise is actually not an annoyance. Noise is just a sign that the function of the room is out of alignment with what's supposed to happen in there. Both speech attenuation and speech privacy boil down to one thing, the signal to
noise ratio. By definition, signal to noise ratio is the difference between the attenuated speech sound, so what I'm saying, and the background sound mixed in with the position of the talker. So, it's all about volume, spatial relationships, and how many people are contributing to that sound. So, on the people note, how does this science or the physics translate to how users use space? Project after project, uh, space type after space type, region after region, the results all come in the same. User satisfaction for speech privacy
and noise always rank at the bottom. That issue is compounded when you think about how space is organized. If you're in open space, it's not uncommon for 50% of the people using that space to be unhappy with the way that it's performing. If you shift to an enclosed space model, it's a little bit easier to control sound, but you still get about 18% of the users to be dissatisfied. Sometimes that can be frustrating, but I think it's cool because this means this is designable. Sound can
be fixed through design. It's kind of a fun example. This is a space that's actually downtown Holland where the architecture was beautiful and but they realized they were out of sync with what was going to happen in this space. They needed a way to bring bring different program and more function into the center of the space. Can you imagine if this space would have used traditional construction to do so? It would have totally changed the user experience, the aesthetics, the light. I'm really happy that this
is the direction space can go nowadays. And I think that it's cool to think about the fact that silence is one of the most human things buildings can bring. Act four, my last one. So, if we're not thinking about architecture as a finished product anymore, we need to have new measures of how to determine whether we're successful. I'll offer three. The first one, functional value. Does it work? Second, performance. Um, is it going to acoustically perform the way we want it to? Do I need a
digital twin to help me monitor if it's working and if I need to make changes? The last one would be financial value. And before I get into some of the statistics around financial space planning, I just want to pause and say the most important shift happening in architecture isn't necessarily financial. It's also not necessarily technological. It's philosophical. Hopefully, that's what the tone of what you're taking away from my time with you today is it's a mind shift. And space is evolving from an asset to a
capability. An asset is something that you own and you can depreciate. It's very literal. A capability is something that makes you better at what you do. What if the spaces that you inhabited actually made you better at what you were doing inside of them? Once you realize that space can be a capability, the cost contract construct changes completely. You think about cost totally differently. Operationally, time and time again, the cost of space is about 10% of operating cost compared to 90% for the people that are
inside. If you build a space that elevates people's performance, you're going to get your return on investment every time.