Building Aboard the World's Largest Residential Yacht
Transcript
Atif Z. Qadir 00:00
Welcome to American Building. I'm your host Atif Qadir. Join me as we explore the skylines and strip malls, the crosswalks and rail crossings, the balconies, the buildings and the boroughs shaping the next generation of real estate. Let's build common ground.
Atif Z. Qadir 00:22
Today, our guest is architect Michael Chen, who's a principal at MKCA. Michael started down his path of being an architect at the University of California, at Berkeley. After graduating from the undergraduate program, he worked as a designer in the Bay Area and then went to Columbia for the Masters of Architecture program. He then joined Polshek Partnership in New York and taught and then practiced design under the name normal projects. He launched MKCA in 2011 and also launched a nonprofit organization Design Advocates in 2020. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Curbed and Architectural Digest. MKCA is a New York-based architecture and design firm working at an array of skills and sectors, from interior design to civic projects. We'll be talking about the Pied-à-mer project, which is the renovation of a 600 square foot apartment on a large yacht. More broadly, we will learn about the methods and materials needed to build at sea. So thank you so much for being here with us, Michael.
Michael Chen 01:29
Thanks for having me
Atif Z. Qadir 01:30
Absolutely. So let's start from the start. Tell me about how you knew that you wanted to pursue architecture.
Michael Chen 01:37
You know, being an architect is one of those professions that I think a child can understand and decide to engage in. For me, it was a choice between zoo keeper and architect when I was about six, I'm horribly allergic to every creature, and so I think architecture was just the path, but I chose for myself, it was kind of the way that I imagined everything when I was a kid growing up, you know, drawing houses, that was just my favorite activity. And when I decided to apply for school, it just seemed like the thing to do.
Atif Z. Qadir 02:11
So mine, my kindergarten drawing was one side was race car driver and the other was Judge, when I was prompted of what I wanted to be, and I think that probably is very telling about my personality, even now. So you mentioned Zookeeper, and I know that you are a prolific drawer at a young age. Did those two ever overlap in terms of what were you drawing?
Michael Chen 02:33
I was drawing a lot of houses and buildings and cities, but you're right. There were some crossover moments. There was one drawing in particular, I think maybe I was eight or nine. I wallpapered my bedroom in computer paper from my mother's office, and I spent about three months drawing this really meticulous raccoon civilization. You know, the raccoons had cities and outfits, and they had a space agency, like, kind of a really elaborate world making exercise, but they have hands and stylish stripes, tails and opposable thumbs. Yeah, 100% so I was the first clients.
Atif Z. Qadir 03:20
Clients, as an architect certainly are wild, and I'm guessing raccoons were no different. So you continued on, and you landed at Berkeley. You studied there, and your first job in San Francisco was with Allied architecture and design. And then later on, your first job in New York was with pulse check partnership. So tell me what you learned at both of those places.
Michael Chen 03:43
You know, my very, very first job was working with someone who had been a professor of mine as an undergraduate. And first of all, just that idea of having one foot in the academy and one foot in the world of practice was something that was incredibly alluring to me, even as a very young designer. And so I really wanted to learn what that was about. The practice was very much concentrated on commercial spaces, in particular restaurants in San Francisco, sort of in that era just before the first.com boom. And what I learned in that environment was how to design very, very quickly, but also how to sort of thread these really complex systems into existing buildings. And so in San Francisco there were, obviously, there were seismic concerns, and there was also, kind of all the guts, and then also the visual environment of a restaurant. And so just really, I think learning what all of the parts of building are and how they can mean different things to different people like that, was an incredible experience as a as a young designer. I think in the two years that I was there, I think I worked on 13 projects, kind of super fast. Some extensive some, some less so.
Michael Chen 05:01
But just kind of cutting your teeth as a young designer was really, in that way, it was really incredible at post struck. What I learned was how to build a dramatic and institutional scale and, in a way, the polar opposite kind of project, very, very long, very complex client structures, very, very intricate programs, but also kind of incredibly, also very much public facing institutional projects, you know, educational buildings, museum buildings, and just to understand, again, sort of the complexity of what goes into a building like that, and how it works within the city, and also kind of drawing on that experience of as being a younger architect, you know, working on similar things at a smaller scale. I think that was, was also just an incredible learning experience. I was very fortunate at post rock, because the main project that I worked on during my time there was, it was a very, very small team. It was a museum project in Washington, DC in its very, very early stages.
Michael Chen 06:07
And it was a team that was led by Jim polcek himself, and, you know, relatively small kind of group of designers. And I was one of those recent graduates who was really facile digitally. And so was tasked with kind of an extraordinary responsibility of of helping the team to kind of integrate all of that information into into models and into into rendered images that are kind of the way that we work now. But in 2003 when I was doing that work, it was still not fully integrated into the way that architects kind of think about building and how they communicate about building, and so that was something that was very new, even to a firm like that. And so just the incredible agency of being young and able with new tools, it's all kind of an extraordinary learning experience.
Atif Z. Qadir 07:00
So when you talked about the learning process in terms of doing lots of projects with the first firm that you worked at in San Francisco, and then integrating technology and taking on a lot of responsibility at a relatively young age with bolshek, I think both seem to be incorporating this idea of continual learning. And then you spent some time teaching at Pratt in Brooklyn, you also previously had teaching experiences at Berkeley and Cornell. So tell me about the process of teaching and doing your own projects along the way, and the breaks that really got you going to move towards starting your own firm.
Michael Chen 07:48
I think that the extraordinary privilege to work with students and to work in community with just an incredible group of designers architects who are who are also sort of moving in and out of academia. Was just an enormously enriching experience. There are a number of things that were key takeaways from my academic experience. One of them was really just learning what it is to make a project. I was given a responsibility to run a thesis, seminar and studios. I was working with students for a year from the very beginning of my teaching career, working with, you know, the same group of students for over the course of entire year to develop a research agenda, to articulate how that might translate into a design project, and then to implement that project and that arc of thinking about problem definition, and then kind of finding ways for design thinking to have impact and also agency and kind of disciplinary significance, like in context of a of a thesis project like that, kind of thinking is extraordinary, and I think the experience of this is why so many architects, I think, love their thesis year, or kind of think about how much they learned in their thesis year. I had 12 of them in that time.
Michael Chen 09:11
And so just the sharpening one's ability to kind of scan the landscape of the world, identify problems that are that maybe don't seem to be problems of architecture, but are maybe adjacent to are relevant to architecture in some way, and then trying to construct pathways to explore those issues in real projects like that exercise, I think, is something that I I draw upon that experience daily now as a practitioner, the other thing that was really extraordinary about teaching is that it's so much about producing a community around you. And so as I transitioned from basically in effect, full time academic to full time practitioner, maybe the first. Least six or eight people who ever worked with me in my firm were people that I knew from before, either through teaching or through kind of other relationships. And I think that to be able to build a practice with people that you already know, that you already trust, that you already kind of share common culture with it was so valuable. And so many of those people are still with me, you know, a decade hence and so like that was an incredible benefit of teaching that in a way I hadn't really expected, even though my early professional experience was exactly that, you know, it was sort of like a trusted and dear professor, a kind of incredible professor, teacher and student relationship that became a professional relationship. It hadn't really occurred to me that that would be the way that one could begin to practice, and when it happened, it was extraordinary.
Atif Z. Qadir 10:53
You mentioned being able to get the benefits of a dozen theses at the same time, when you're in the role of being a teacher as opposed to being the person producing the thesis. What are some of those that really stood out for you that you recall very, very clearly even now?
Michael Chen 11:10
Well, the thesis studio that I ran was kind of concentrated around ideas of the near future city, and so we spent a lot of time thinking about things like sustainable infrastructure, climate change logistics, the supply chain, you know, drone delivery. But this was, I mean, there was an incredible drone delivery project that we had in the studio. No students graduated, I want to say in 2017 so, you know, it was kind of like when it was a pipe dream. We sort of said, like, Okay, well, this is an interesting this was an interesting thing to think about. What might its impact be on, on the city, and you can see these little kernels of our present reality kind of manifesting now, around around things like that. We did a number of projects around that were kind of location specific. We did a studio that was all about the future of the Bronx, and, you know, just identifying like where the places in the Bronx that we think are sort of subject to gentrification pressure or infrastructure pressure, or might be downstream of, sort of the most negative impacts of climate change, and then trying to think about what that might mean for the development of housing or the food supply in New York City, which all comes to the Bronx.
Michael Chen 12:34
So those kinds of projects, I think, I think about them, but all the time. I mean, they were really incredible things to kind of participate in. There was also an aspect of those thesis projects that is kind of a dimension of storytelling and really trying to think about how architects draw, how architects speak, what they put at stake in the design work that is aligned, or that reinforces these ideas that are being developed in the studio. And so just thinking about, you know, different kinds of drawing, you know, we used a lot of sort of models from, almost from kind of, like Asian art, like they were, you know, a lot of times we were talking about scenario planning, or we were talking about kind of making big drawings that were almost kind of narrative landscape drawings, you know, where activities are sort of unfolding, kind of like the Raccoon City activities unfolding, kind of over, over a great big drawing like, those are devices that we still use in our office today.
Atif Z. Qadir 13:36
I think that aspect of the narrative as part of the design process is really important, because the the physical product that you build is the stage for the stories that people tell when they they live there, they work there, and they occupy those spaces. So that's a great anecdote to share. So MKCA stands for Michael K. Chen Architectures. This is your firm, so tell me about what you're focusing on there right now.
Michael Chen 14:03
So we do a mix of different types of projects in many different locales. Much of our work is residential. But because we work with so many clients who are either actors in the cultural sphere or sort of behind the scenes in the cultural sphere, we work with a lot of writers and architects and artists, other designers and then people, kind of in industries that are adjacent to those kinds of cultural activities. I think we tend to have a lot of crossover. So we think about art spaces, we think about kind of food spaces. But I think that the at the heart of what we are doing is to create environments for people exactly as you say. They're kind of settings for for contemporary life to unfold. Many of our work has historically been in sort of the historic precincts of New York City. That's a little bit the way that. Came up, but now increasingly, we're making buildings, new buildings in places like upstate New York. We have projects also all over the world. We designed houses in Hawaii. We have projects in Paris, working on a villa in the south of France, as well as kind of smaller community oriented projects, libraries, community centers, that sort of health centers, up that sort of thing.
Atif Z. Qadir 15:24
So one of the areas, in terms of geography that you didn't mention in that list is out at sea. So let's focus on the Pied-à-mer Project. So it's an apartment that you renovated at sea, and it's the renovation of a 600 square foot condominium, and that's aboard a ship that's at sea for three years at a go, you have to tell us what this is all about, what this boat's deal is, what the vibes in the space were like. So just tell us everything.
Michael Chen 15:58
So I've been sworn to secrecy about sort of mass packs this, of this vessel. You can Google it. It's findable, but that is a little bit the premise it is. In maybe the easiest way to talk about it is that it's a kind of a floating condominium building, and so it is a fairly small as cruise ships go, like ship with, let's say, like, six levels of apartments. I think I want to say that it has, there are about 200 apartments aboard the ship, all owner occupied. And the premise is really that it's a vessel because it goes it, because it is at sea, 365, days a year, and kind of the schedule is published three years in advance. It's a way for owners to organize their holiday time based on the itinerary of the ship. They sort of fly to where the ship is, they get on board, they exit where the ship is when it's time to go. And it's not something that I knew about the clients for that particular project had seen some very early work that we had done in the office. Some of the very first projects that I worked on were kind of small New York City apartments, mostly for friends, often with some degree of transformation or motion, that were kind of highly multi functional.
Michael Chen 17:20
And I think that those clients saw that and felt like that was something that would that might really work well on aboard their new their new apartment. So we, we started working together. They weren't people that we knew from before, but we've now subsequently done a number of projects with them. They came to us with sort of this extraordinary thing, like, hi, we have sort of an odd fall request, you know, we have this apartment aboard a ship. We like this multi functional work that you've been doing, would you consider and that set into motion like a two year adventure where we had to learn very quickly, what to make, how to make it, and how to translate some of the things that we were doing, which were really kind of scrappy, almost DIY, kinds of moving elements, you know, how to translate that into, into something that could be installed aboard a moving vessel that you know was going to be tossed in the sea and subject to all the different kinds of performance requirements and safety requirements and fire requirements that one finds on the on like a, yeah, like on a on a ship.
Atif Z. Qadir 18:33
So let's dive into that. Just as an aside, the Instagram for MS The World, the name of the boat, is pretty epic, so I encourage listeners to check it out. So you touched on it right at the end there. What were the problems and the opportunities that you saw with this particular design brief?
Michael Chen 18:53
I mean, the main problem with designing on a ship that is constantly at sea is getting access to the ship. So the way that this works on the world is that the ship goes into kind of a relatively generous dry dock period for major projects once every three years. That period is only about a month, which is really not enough time to gut renovate a space, especially one that needs to be made to the standards of the ship, you know, like everything has to be welded, for example. So we were working with a partner, which is called list, and it's a family run ship building company based in Vienna, to design and fabricate the majority of the elements that that we implemented in the in the apartment. So that was really one of our first real encounters with pre fabrication, kind of at a very, very, very detailed scale. Yeah. So we were working inside of of lists factory and outside of Vienna to design and develop. So these elements that could be implemented relatively quickly and in this fairly brief dry dock period, and that could also be serviced in the subsequent periods when, when workers were permitted to kind of board the ship as they were, as if they were owners, kind of while it's at while it's at sea.
Michael Chen 20:19
So those are the, those are sort of the two different contact points that are designated by the ship for construction. So we needed to kind of fit a pretty substantial project into these very little windows and try to figure out how to design for that. There's another complexity, of course, which is that on a moving vessel, you need to design to standards that work for, you know, seafaring standards in terms of materials, but also every single thing has to be able to be C saved, you know, you need to be able to kind of batten down the hatches, literally, yeah, literally. But when you're also designing an apartment where, literally, every single thing moves, you know, those two things are in a little bit of conflict with each other, so just having to design this is a way that we kind of leaned into our past history. You know, where, like there's always a flirtation here, skirting around the edges of architecture and interior design and product design. Like we, we tend to design somewhat fluidly between those disciplines, and so really just thinking about finding the right partners to fabricate certain elements, and then thinking in really novel ways about how to secure every single last moving thing, but in a way that is that wasn't utilitarian, but was actually just really elegant that was very challenging.
Michael Chen 21:42
I'll give you an example. There's a dining table in the apartment, but it folds down from the wall. It's quite an elegant dining table. It's made of bronze and aluminum. And so it's massively heavy. And so we developed this piston system so that it would lower very gently and also be able to be lifted very gently with just one person. And at the same time, there was a leg that kind of swung down as the table comes down, there's a leg that that swings down, and that leg was engineered to be a lever, because when the table is up and the leg is down. It throws a stainless steel pin into the metal frame that is around the opening, and that is what kind of locks the table into place. And so it needed to both move in a really simple and lovely way, but it also needed to have this very heavy duty mechanism that would kind of hold it into place if the sea is if the sea is rough and the ship is getting moved around, those are the kinds of things that we had to sometimes design around, or simply kind of engineer in order to in order to make these things work.
Atif Z. Qadir 22:53
Okay, so you're talking about the motion of the boat, the logistics of being able to do construction while at sea with relatively small windows of time. You are at sea, and there's large windows on this vessel. So talk to me about UV rays. Talk to me about it's a small space. It's 600 square feet for a two bedroom, so limited space to do things. What were some of the other challenges that you found in the in the in looking at this particular project?
Michael Chen 23:18
Some of the spatial challenges of working in a small space are just that that it's small, and so you're trying to find ways to both incorporate all of the elements that the clients are asking for, but also trying to do it in a way where maybe you don't give away the whole space all at once. And so the design of the interior is really bound up in that, and kind of its intersection with kind of how we made it. There is a bit of a pod like language, yeah, there are two volumes that are that are clad in aluminum ribs that were inserted into the middle of the into the middle of a rectangular space. And the way that you move around. The way that you access the various spaces of the apartment is to move around that was very deliberate. Dimensionally. It was very deliberate because we needed to find a way to get these elements into the space and spatially it means that you can be two people. Can be right next to one another, but their path of travel is somewhat distant, so you begin to feel as if the space is more expansive than it actually is. These are some little spatial tricks, you know, sleight of hand that that we've learned over the years just working in New York City and thinking about how to plan space intelligently.
Michael Chen 24:39
From a materials standpoint, you're right, the environment is is fairly harsh, and this is just something that we kind of leaned into. So some of the materials are very performance driven, and some of them are actually envisioned or meant to change over time, or they're meant to patina. They're meant to oxidize. Part of their esthetic proposition from the word go, and that was really about kind of embracing both the presence of live finishes, but also kind of thinking about the presence of the environment. And in a way, the fingerprint of the of the travel of the vessel begins to be present in the space. We thought that that was a really beautiful and romantic idea that in many ways softened what was kind of a fairly hard set of materials that ultimately we had to use, and a fairly hard modernist language that the clients were interested in. So that presence of these materials that would just show where, gradually, over time and kind of change with subsequent visits. Like we loved this idea that somehow it's the apartment is kind of growing and changing with with the owners.
Atif Z. Qadir 25:56
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Atif Z. Qadir 26:55
You touched on modernist design and modernism in general had a fascination with the industrial objects and even cruise ships. So talk to me more about the design inspiration that you drew from when you were developing the design strategy for the space.
Michael Chen 27:13
The cruise ship lives large in the modernist imaginary. It's something that that the early modernists were very, very interested in, both because it was collapsing the world and in a really interesting way, but also, I think, because of the language of streamline and of industrial materials, that's something that we were very, very interested in implementing, partly out of necessity, although not purely that. The design of that apartment is it leans into machine. You know, more than is strictly necessary from a performance standpoint. It's it's it. That's an esthetic decision about kind of recognizing the the significance of these kinds of vessels and in the language that we're drawing on for much of our architectural work. So, you know, we had many, many conversations with the clients about that history. That's not something that they necessarily knew about directly, but they were very interested in learning about and we picked furnishings and other details that very deliberately referenced that era, but are not necessarily from that era.
Michael Chen 28:23
So we had made a decision early on that the expression esthetically, both from the architecture as well as the interior design, would be contemporary. It would that we would draw heavily from the work of contemporary makers and contemporary designers, but we wanted to do that in a way that would recognize sort of those modernist origins. And so there are shapes that are familiar. You know, there's the presence of a metal frame. There are some vintage pieces, but they're not the recognizable vintage pieces. They're just pieces from that era, from the early 60s, or pieces that refer back to the 20s as part of the language of the interior. And those are, again, this layering of the narrative, right? Like the design is equal parts, sort of the setting for the future, the life that is lived in in the space. But it's also a product of these many layers of registration that that are happening, that some of which are we're grabbing from the past and trying to kind of move into the present, so that quality of patina oxidation in the material is also present in the fact that We're using furnishings from different eras that feel collected and feel like they've been accumulated over time in this in this brand new environment
Atif Z. Qadir 29:46
I see, as opposed to, say, a time machine back to a certain design period. I think that's very thoughtful. So you've described the initial challenges and the solutions that you. Put together to address those challenges, walk us through visually. If listeners were staying in this space, in this beautiful condo, as they open the door, what are the things that they're seeing as they move through this space? So they can visually imagine what you're saying.
Michael Chen 30:12
So as you walk into the apartment, you are greeted with a very generous little foyer space, and in that space is a place to take your coat off or to kind of put your shoes away often, because the nature of travel on a vessel is that you've been on some adventure when you come back to the apartment, and you might have the evidence of that adventure on your body. So so there's a place to there's laundry, there's coats, there's shoes, there's there's a moment of stone floor. And there's also kind of a couple of mechanisms that are there for because you can get room service in these apartments. And so there's a there's a little fold down table that where you can leave the tray of breakfast or what have you for the staff to take away, and then you're presented with sort of a long, relatively narrow passageway that is directly facing the glazed wall of the apartment. And that is to sort of attenuate your experience, to sort of, you know, you can see, you can see the view, but you don't have full access to the width of the apartment. That's just a little trick of design, but it's also sort of the space between the two pods that we've added that have bathrooms and the kitchen and Closet Storage Spaces loaded into them.
Michael Chen 31:32
So as you pass through that passageway, the space opens up until you get the full width of the glazed facade. And that was the other thing, is we wanted to incorporate sort of a reach, you know, the largest, most panoramic expression that you can get, or experience that you can get in the apartment is then made available to you as you enter the living room. There are two bedrooms, if you will. There are Murphy beds that fold down at the end of each pod, and then there's a series of sliding screens that disappear into the pods that partition the spaces into two bedrooms. When you need those building beds, they were made by an Austrian company called laden Stein. And the amazing thing about those beds is that they're engineered so that they don't have a foot at the end. They're cantilevered, and so they're facing the glazing, so that you can kind of experience the view, but they have no structure underneath them. They're all supported from the pod beyond, and they are kit out to feel like bedrooms, you know.
Michael Chen 32:29
So they the niche that they're in is really generous. It's lined in mohair and lacquer, and it's really intended to impart a luxurious and sort of sumptuous experience. And that's because, literally, every other surface is metal. The walls are steel that are painted the kind of the edges of the pods are lacquered aluminum bars, you know, kind of laminated, laminate to a fiberglass substrate. You know, the floor is wood, but there's not a lot of softness in in the environment. So really, the sleeping spaces become these very cozy, sumptuous, quiet spaces. They have a lot of padding and a lot of dense fabric in them, and it does actually begin to dampen, sort of the hum of the machine that you're aboard. And then in the living room space, it's just off to the side. It's very similar. The materials are, are very, very tactile and rich, marble, oxidized steel, mohair, you know, materials that will hold up to the environment, but that are natural, and that will kind of show where over time.
Atif Z. Qadir 33:36
So this is an amazing project, and you've learned a ton about it. I want to bring this a bit bigger picture, and I want to ask you about the choice of the materials that you described and how they connect to other projects that you're working on, or the way that you think about designing overall.
Michael Chen 33:55
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that our approach to materials is never exclusively visual, and it's never exclusively performance driven. It is about accessing that narrative quality that materials have, but also thinking about sort of the narratives that are embedded in them. So we approached many of these material choices through a historic lens. In this particular project. Other times, we might approach a material from more of a sustainability lens or a labor lens or an exploitation lens or, you know, just really thinking about how the elective choices that we make as designers are linked to larger value systems that we hold and that the clients also subscribe to, I think that that's something that we're very, very interested in, and it doesn't have to necessarily be about pursuing a sustainability agenda, although that's something that we're extremely interested in, you know, but not necessarily thinking about that agenda. By itself, in isolation, with other things, and actually expensive, other dimensions of the experience of a project. I think it really is about activating that landscape of the world that we occupy and that we that we have influence in even though I think architects sometimes aren't aware of or they're not wielding that influence in a way that is very, very effective, you know. And I think that our specifying power is kind of immense.
Michael Chen 35:27
There are real ways to kind of produce, I think, bigger impacts through the choices that we're making. And there are also ways to produce kind of concentrated, poignant experiences through the decisions that we're making. And sometimes those things are linked to each other, which I think is a really interesting thing. So in this particular project, for example, much of the sourcing of materials is a little bit defined by the performance criteria that we had to live with, but our choice of collaborators to produce certain elements, whether it's furnishings or whether that's built in elements or whether that's lighting. That choice was really about straddling this kind of historic esthetic, kind of, you know, updating a modernist language for the present day. And it was also about making sure that independent voices, that, you know, diverse voices operating in the in the world of design, how to had a presence in the project, because that was something that was important to us. Those things are not either our propositions. They were just, they were just kind of, we were able to weave them together in a single project.
Atif Z. Qadir 36:35
And then similarly, you talked about construction detailing that you used throughout the project, and tell me about some of the corollaries you may have on your design strategy overall, in terms of detailing of projects you work on.
Michael Chen 36:47
I mean, it's really important to us that projects are made beautifully, that they work well. Those are top level concerns for us, and I think that that really speaks to our commitment to craft, yeah, just at the highest possible level, you know. And I think that's a commitment that many architects share. That idea for us is something that we think extends beyond the details and the material kind of that we're manipulating at any given time. And it really does extend to kind of a larger, more sort of social ways of being in the world realm, you know. So we're really thinking about when we're talking about having to devise a process to be able to build the project on a moving vessel, you know, and working in partnership with expert builders who are familiar with that, and adapting the design as accordingly like that, to me, is also craft when we're talking about selecting materials that have a kind of historic resonance, but that will also show traces of use and and kind of the romance of of Being able to to visit them as they change over over time, like this is a dimension of crop, just as the care of workers and stewardship of the climate are aspects of what we do.
Michael Chen 38:11
And you know, these are, these are dimensions of craft as well. So I think the details are in many ways about where the rubber meets the road. It's, kind of like making a choice that might produce a linkage. You know, we think about details almost as like portals between universes. The choice to allow for motion is about choosing to overlay two uses that might not belong in the same place on top of one another. Like, that's usually what that detail is about it's about a transaction between one state to another state, or the exchange of use from one use to another. And I think that those kinds of scripts, in a way, those narrative devices, are about understanding the way that people are ultimately going to live, and how they're going to transition from one activity to another, and that is what drives the detail. It's not necessarily about us being kind of gear headed about wanting to make something move or trying to fashion some sort of gizmo that is novel for the sake of of novelty. It really is about understanding the ebb and flow of activity over the course of the day into the evening and into the next day, and trying to find ways to facilitate those transitions in a manner that requires the least amount of effort or the simplest gesture. And so that kind of refinement is also something that is about our material refinement, but it's also about understanding the role that the architecture is playing in the life of the people who live in it.
Atif Z. Qadir 39:46
So the words that you use in that description, beauty, simplicity, transformation, a lot of that makes so much sense in terms of the values that you have for your firm and also where your firm began with projects. Like unfolding apartment and other micro projects, because that is exactly the way that you create a successful project at such a small scale, is focusing on those things. So definitely appreciate your responses. So in terms of the small space that we're talking about today that Pierre mayor, an additional question is, how did permitting and inspections work on a project that was moving around the world like what was the jurisdiction that was even responsible for this?
Michael Chen 40:29
The first jurisdiction is the ship itself in this case. And there are international standards that are published, and, you know, for fire safety, and there are also rules of thumb that are acknowledged, like the sea saving aspect, there are tricky things. You know, fortunately, the ship uses American power standards, and so, you know, we could buy appliances that were the right thing, lighting that was the right thing. That's all very learnable. It's maybe a little bit unique to this particular situation, but we are in construction in an apartment in Paris right now, and in Paris, there are rules spoken and unspoken that you know you need to know about and need to respect. I think that is about doing the homework, and it's also about working with the right partners, so that you have the benefit as an architect, of working with people who really know the rules of the road where you're working, and that's something that we always try to make room for in our process. We want to be excellent collaborators. We want to work with people who are excellent collaborators, the way that we as a relatively small team, you know earlier, as a relatively young office, maybe not so young anymore, but but still relatively small, the way that we're able to have kind of a global presence, the way that we're able to do projects that are very, very much, much, much, much larger than this one. Now much more complexity is to create collaborative working relationships with the right kinds of people, you know?
Michael Chen 41:55
So it's a way of us being able to concentrate on what we're really good at, and also learn from these different kinds of building experiences. You know, it's like, I don't know, the next time that we will make a project on a ship, you know, then the next one will go much, much faster, much more smoother. So there any listeners out there who have, you know, nautical projects, give us a call sometime, like we know what we're doing now. We've learned a lot, but also that that learning is transportable to many, many other kinds of environments, you know, where it's sort of part of because of the way that that this firm came up, you know, as a as a firm in New York City. You know, New York is a challenging place to work, even on small and relatively simple projects. It's it's political, it's technical, it's expensive, you know, it's materials, it's logistics, it's all of it's all of those things. And so as a result, I think we are a firm that is extremely comfortable with a difficult proposition. And as you say, the thing that we're after, of course, is to produce an environment that is refined, that is elegant, that is easy, that is comfortable, that you know, that that doesn't really show the sweat of the blood, the tears that went in, that went into it, the process, yeah, like, you know, nobody's know about that. Like we nobody wants to know about that. They just want to know that. They want to know that they are working with an architect who has the capabilities to to manage a difficult situation and to deliver. And so that's something that we've just had to learn how to do for ourselves. And that's not something that we just own. You know, it's like we work with people who help us and who can help us to deliver in the right in the right way. I think the bigger takeaway from the code question is tricky, but it's also it's also a lot of fun.
Atif Z. Qadir 43:48
So for potential collaborators and potential clients who want you to redesign their yachts, what's the best way for people to learn more about you and get in touch with you and your practice.
Michael Chen 44:02
We Instagram at MKCarchitecture, and our website is mkca.com. We are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on those two platforms. Otherwise, we are in New York during regular business hours, and you're welcome to give us a call.
Atif Z. Qadir 44:21
One additional question. Early on in the interview I mentioned Design Advocates. Tell the listeners a little bit about that, how it came to be, and what you're doing with that.
Michael Chen 44:31
Absolutely. So Design Advocates was born of the pandemic. It was an organization that we co founded with a small group of four other offices in March of 2020. Right as the pandemic shutdown kind of took hold in New York City. It began as a information and resourcing sharing platform conversation among small design firms, and very quickly transitioned into a. A design aid based organization in the sort of the depths of the pandemic. So beginning in April or June of 2020 we decided to try to use our fallow staff, or kind of our access time, to do pro bono projects for organizations and communities of need, kind of working in primarily concentrated in in New York City, but really increasingly, kind of, all over the nation. So that was a really extraordinary experience. About 250 firms and volunteers participated in design advocates in the first couple of years, we did about 100 projects and engagements in that time, all as small collaborative teams between offices, which I think was really an extraordinary opportunity.
Michael Chen 45:53
We have a lot of community among architects and designers, but not that many opportunities to actually collaborate with one another. So just the ability to kind of roll up your sleeves, with your friends, with your peers, and do something meaningful to help people directly or to help people who were going to help a lot of other people, was really extraordinary. In the last couple of years, we've transitioned da to more of a leaner organization that's still operating without value system. We are still very much concentrated on working on the intersection of equality and the built environment, but through sort of more substantial, longer term projects, often with municipalities or with larger organizations, and kind of really working at that intersection between community engagement and visioning and design, which is a space that was maybe a little under resourced. So really just using our experience working directly with communities to develop design thinking that serves sort of the needs of those communities.
Michael Chen 47:04
So we're working on a variety of different kinds of projects, one of which is a series of public open spaces in suburban Washington, DC, with the local government there in montgomery county. We're working on a couple of other longer term, simmering projects. We're about actually this weekend to install a enclosure for a community refrigerator at a public housing development on the Upper East Side. That's a partnership with a nonprofit called grassroots grocery. So we're still kind of many of these, like longer term projects that were construction intensive are now coming to to fruition over a long period of time. And I think we're, we're excited about keeping this as an organization that you know moves into the future. So that is also something that we're actively taking inquiries from, from interested parties, you know, who have, who have maybe an unusual project that might fall outside of what conventional architectural practices can help them with.
Atif Z. Qadir 48:05
That's amazing. So listeners, please consider donating to design advocates, and or actually can people donate to it?
Michael Chen 48:13
People can donate, but we issue very specific calls around individual projects, and so usually we'll we don't take donations to or we have not historically taken donations as an organization. We've usually tried to funnel any giving into directly into into projects and the nonprofits that kind of for their floor.
Atif Z. Qadir 48:33
That's perfect. So donate in that particular way to design advocates, if it interests you, and then the link to the organization will be in the show notes, along with the images and links to things that we referenced in the interview.
Michael Chen 48:47
And we're on Instagram at design advocates, and our website is designadvocates.org.
Atif Z. Qadir 48:54
Excellent. So we appreciate your time today, Michael, so thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Michael Chen 48:58
Thank you so much.
Atif Z. Qadir 49:02
I'm Atif Qadir, and thanks for joining me on American Building. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite listing app and leave a rating and review. America's housing crisis is one of our greatest challenges. But what are the real solutions? Hear from the developers and other industry experts driving meaningful change. Get our exclusive guide housing in America eight ways we could. Solve our way out of a crisis at americanbuildingpodcast.com.