Atif Z. Qadir 00:03
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 burrows shaping the next generation of real estate. Let's build common ground.
Atif Z. Qadir 00:22
Today, our guests are Jordan Rogove and Wayne Norbeck, the co-founders of Liv-Connected. The two met at Virginia Tech. Jordan trained at Lucien Lagrange and Morris Adjmi. Wayne began his path at TEN Arquitectos and Gluckman Mayner. They together launched DXA Studio, a practice known for thoughtful adaptive reuse, civic projects, and high-design interventions in difficult contexts. Over 14 years together, they’ve won competitions, weathered market turbulence, and built a reputation for design craft across scales. From DXA grew Liv-Connected, which is a design-led, modular housing initiative focused on rapid, dignified shelter for disaster response and long-term, affordable housing solutions. Most recently, LIV Connected was tapped to design and help deliver modular units for communities affected by the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaiʻi; the work involved tight timelines, constrained labor markets, and partnerships with a dozen manufacturers to scale production. Today we’ll talk about that Lahaina work, the tradeoffs of modular versus traditional construction, the realities of supply chains and manufacturing partnerships, and how design can preserve dignity in urgent housing responses. Thank you so much for being here, Jordan and Wayne.
Jordan Rogove 01:59
Thanks for having us. It's great to be here.
Wayne Norbeck 02:01
Yeah, pleasure to be here.
Atif Z. Qadir 02:02
Virginia Tech. You guys met there, and you ended up building your careers and starting your careers at different firms before you started DXA. So tell us how you guys met at Virginia Tech.
Wayne Norbeck 02:17
We had several sort of overlapping classes, and one was Virginia Tech does this amazing thing, which is a travel studio to Europe the whole semester, where you go from the UK down the whole way through Italy and spend the semester. So we had a lot of time with that. And then we also worked on a case study project our fourth year, where we went up and did an analysis of the Seiji Ozawa concert hall up at Tanglewood. And then, I think, fifth year, we kind of went our own ways. And then, you know, kind of started our careers in different locations, and came back together in New York City several years later.
Jordan Rogove 02:52
Yeah, I was, I was lounging in Union Square over a lunch break, and saw Wayne walk by, and we started talking, hanging out. Then we started kind of moonlighting from our respective jobs, doing competitions, and then we started winning most of them, and said, Oh, there's actually a, there's a pretty good synergy here. There's, you know, I think we made our we made each other better designers, pushing the envelope and really challenging one another, and said, Hey, this is a good foundation further collaboration in the form of a studio.
Atif Z. Qadir 03:28
Union Square, I feel is like a crossroads of everybody and everything. I think I've met, particularly in your 20s. I met so many high school friends. I met so many college friends at that point, so I'm not surprised that that was the place that you guys met as well.
Jordan Rogove 03:44
Yeah, two really quick stories about Union Square, because I think it captures one of the essence of New York City, where, like, anything and everything can happen. I ran into Barack Obama and met him briefly, I think, a week after the democratic national convention speech that kind of launched him. He came to Barnes and Noble to give a presentation of his book about his father. And so that was amazing. And another that virgin record store that used to be there, I went in to buy a spoon album the day it was released, and spoon was in there playing the album. It's just, you know, it's, it's New York City, it's a, it's a great place to live, absolutely.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:30
And that Dream of my Father, right? That's the book that you
Jordan Rogove 04:33
Yes, yeah, exactly. Yep.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:35
So the time that you guys spent at Virginia Tech, so I'm a huge basketball fan, and Virginia Tech always feels like they could have done better at least the past, past five years, 10 years. So what's were you guys fans? You commiserate over sports stuff while you were there?
Wayne Norbeck 04:52
Yeah, when we were there, the football team turned around and it was really incredible. You know, they were going to all the bowl games and, you know, competing. The National Championship and so forth. And now it's flipped where basketball is kind of like the main focus of the school. So it was really cool to be part of that moment where the the team, just like took off. And it was really fun to be there.
Jordan Rogove 05:14
I remember the basketball team was still pretty good, but they they won the NIT tournament while we were there, and people took to the streets, and we're going crazy. I was like, What are you guys doing? We won the NIT. That means we're number 65. Why are you freaking out? But the football team did go to the national championship right there towards the end. Michael Vick was there our our final year of school, and that was pretty cool, although we didn't win it, going to national championship was pretty awesome.
Atif Z. Qadir 05:44
I feel like it's basically you guys won the national championships for the JV. So, yeah, exactly. And also I feel like being a member of the ACC is so strange now, because it was first all the Big East teams that came to the ACC, and now it's the PAC 12 team, so Berkeley's in your conference, which is just different. I think this might be the makings of another podcast, which is architects talk about basketball. So might consider that one. But okay, so you guys worked at excellent firms, and talk to me about how each of you developed your approach, your specific approach to design at those rooms.
Wayne Norbeck 06:24
Yeah, I mean, both of the offices that I worked at there was, you know, sort of lessons learned that I think we brought into DXA studio, and that involved, like, you know, sort of a deep research into the place, into the type of project, and really trying to create sort of transformative work, whether it was sort of museums or residential projects or, you know, hotels or different things. And that's something that, you know, I think we from the very get go every single project, no matter what it is, no matter how small and kind of insignificant it might seem, we try to really push the envelope and come up with concepts that are just really going to be amazing spaces for people to participate in.
Jordan Rogove 07:05
Yeah, I think my experience with Lucien in Chicago one of the one of the kind of the indelible impacts that had was that Lucien really loved the carbide and carbon building, which is like a just a major piece of the Chicago skyline. And so that building was imperiled, because it was sort of antiquated with really terrible floor layouts. It had been an office tower for a lot of years, but had columns, in some cases, between 12 and 14 feet by like 14 and 16 feet, so there's not a whole lot you could do with it. And so there was legitimate conversation about demolishing this building. And so Lucien took action and and had us draw out what can this be? And we identified that actually, those modules work perfectly for hotel. So we drew a series of plans and shopped around and actually found a developer and facilitated the landmarking of the building and essentially saved the building.
Jordan Rogove 08:15
And so this idea of adaptive reuse and architect as activist really was such a big impact, first major project for me to work on. And then that continued when I came to New York City and finishing the body of Aldo Rossi's work with Morris of Aldo's partner having a small hand in the Scholastic building. And that client kind of came with us when we started DXA, and just seeing that an architect could do more than sit back and wait for clients to come to him or come to them, they can kind of roll up their sleeves and, like, make opportunities happen. And so like for the very first project to be something like that, I think has shaped how Wayne and I practice that. Let us be the activist. Let us make some noise and try to make the world a better place through that activism.
Atif Z. Qadir 09:07
So that approach to being as a designer, being proactive and having your values associated with the work that you do, is something that Vishaan Chakrabarti talked about in his episode earlier in this podcast a lifetime. And I really liked hearing that, because that means that there is more to architecture than being the lapdog of the rich.
Jordan Rogove 09:33
And I love his palimpsest for Madison Square Garden and Penn Station recreation. That is the ultimate example of, like, making some noise. Hey, like, this city can be enriched. It can be a lot better. He put that out in the world, I believe, unsolicited, to try to move the needle and increase the quality of experience for New Yorkers. And that is, that is a prime example of that sort of approach.
Atif Z. Qadir 09:58
Excellent. And we're gonna have his partner Ruchika podcast later this evening, so we're excited to talk about her perspective about their work too. So you guys started winning competitions, and think you mentioned earlier, a little bit unexpectedly, you were winning these competitions. How would you define the approach that you took to those early competitions and that secret sauce that allowed you to win things, perhaps relatively earlier than than you would imagine?
Wayne Norbeck 10:24
One thing was like assembling a really great team. When we worked on the Haiti project, we had Atelier 10. Was sustainability consultant Patrick Cullina, who was the VP of horticulture for the High Line, joined our team, and I think we had Silman and a number of other really interesting consultants that all came together, almost do kind of like a think tank approach, and to kind of re imagine the project and think about like what a kind of ideal solution would be. And so we created a, you know, a really wonderful design that responded well to the whole context. But in addition to that, we created a whole, almost like a system approach, where all of these different components work together to create a really thoughtful and meaningful place for the folks there.
Jordan Rogove 11:11
The other thing we did is we looked past this idea of delivering a solution to housing down there that was, you know, essentially made in the United States and dropped down there in favor of an approach where we actually flew down to Haiti and met with the community and locally sourced all of the materials with the goal of the endeavor of building that housing found its way directly back into that economy, and that the response to what we did was in line with the cultural values, and it was kind of a more meaningful delivery of architecture than like a spaceship landing there with no benefits beyond just being a shelter. And that resonated, that landed, and that experience of that kind of community engagement, and kind of going beyond just thinking about the design and think about all the stuff that goes into design, and how that is a huge part of the opportunity of being an architect, that you can deliver a lot more than than just a built thing, that the whole process can be beneficial from start to finish.
Atif Z. Qadir 12:24
Amazing. So walk me through the conversations that started happening between the two, I'm guessing, as you were winning competitions, to start thinking about, when does moonlighting become, become a firm on its own, becomes DXA connected? Like? What was a DXA studio? What does that? What was that like?
Jordan Rogove 12:44
Yeah, so it was almost like we didn't have a choice. It was like, So, I mean, you know, it's a conversation we get asked that by a lot of our students down at Virginia Tech, like, how did you guys know when it was time to go? And, yeah, it was just kind of served to us on a silver platter, in terms of, like, we obviously hustled and spent a lot of sleepless nights, you know, grinding to get the competition stuff out in the world. But then when the press started popping up, we had this, like a two week period where, like, at least three or four clients asked one of us to go out to lunch and propose, hey, we know your true role at the firm that you are, that you're currently located. Why don't you know we're considering this project? Would you consider jumping ship and doing this?
Jordan Rogove 13:37
And so to have this, like built in kind of network and these, these people that wanted us to step away and deliver for them, they saw an opportunity to to get, like a high quality product at a low cost, because they saw stars in our eyes, right? They knew that we wanted to kind of explore things, maybe a little bit differently, not to say anything negative about the firms that we were at. I think we both loved the places that we were working, but we saw having a little bit more ownership or authorship of of the kind of work that we were doing, perhaps a little bit more freedom. And so we were able to really start the practice with, you know, a couple really substantial projects just ready to go, hand delivered, as it were.
Wayne Norbeck 14:27
Yeah, the timing was fortunate, because, you know, we were kind of at the last remnants of the 2008 recession too. And so a lot of the clients, they wanted the kind of higher end design, but they didn't want to pay the more established architects, you know the prices needed to be more in line. So it was a perfect moment for us, because we could come out and engage at that point, give them a really great product, and just really took off from there.
Atif Z. Qadir 14:58
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Atif Z. Qadir 15:52
So what was the path from DXA studio to Liv-Connected?
Jordan Rogove 16:04
So there are a couple of things. The first one is that I grew up in a family of doctors, my grandfather, my father, their cousins, all physicians. I don't really know how that happened, but, but you know, my brother and I kind of went in the more artistic direction. He's a musician. I'm obviously an architect. But the conversations that I had with family and my dad in particular, really focused on, how is it an opportunity for those two worlds to kind of come together, in particular with some of the nascent technologies that were being developed. And my dad was very involved in the development of telemedicine, and so for the first decade of his endeavors, we just kind of chuckled and said, Who wants to talk to a doctor on a on like a TV screen? That's crazy, but man, he called it.
Jordan Rogove 16:58
And so he had a lot of success in that realm and and then with all the technologies that were kind of a part of that, biometric monitoring devices like the Apple Watch that can monitoring your well being and just kind of keep an eye on you, like, can we get more sophisticated technology like that that's not in a little gadget that you can or might not put on each day. Can the house just be kind of can where you live be keeping an eye on you? And so that really started a conversation. And at the same time, Wayne and I teaching at Virginia Tech, the professor that we taught with who's a partner at Liv-Connected, Joe Wheeler, is just a savant when it comes to modular. And so it was a real quick correlation there that the ability to put all these new technologies into a home, it makes a ton of sense to do that in a controlled environment through like modular is the vehicle, rather than trying to wire like the stick built approach that that has all kinds of obvious perils, but then you could essentially take the savings from building in a factory and include those technologies so that it kind of balances out right, like the additional investment in that would not represent a cost increase for users, and you could deliver a higher quality product. So it was kind of a short, short leap from the conversation about health integration to using modular as the device to get there.
Atif Z. Qadir 18:31
And then I think that might be a good segue for us to start talking about the Lahaina deployment itself. So talk to me about the brief from FEMA, and how did you get involved in that?
Jordan Rogove 18:46
So the big thing is, when we establish Liv-Connected, we thought of it in terms, you know, Wayne and I have this vibrant practice in New York City. Can we integrate this into like multifamily in the city? And as we were developing this idea of kind of integrated cartridges that could be kind of clicked together on site in existing buildings or build new corn shell buildings and plug this stuff in, there were just dozens of impediments. And we saw kind of a lengthy, you know, maybe five or 10 year lobbying effort for adaptation to building codes, and in some circumstances, even zoning. And knew the kind of capital investment necessary to take that on and the kind of deferred profitability and said, Let's pivot. Let's go into single family housing, which has kind of a more forgiving set of codes and considerations so that we can at least get some some money back into the company and grow it, and then have the resources to take on the multifamily angle.
Jordan Rogove 19:53
So we started by building a prototype with a manufacturing partner in Pennsylvania, and. And that prototype got a ton of attention and got us kind of an invitation to participate in a RFP for the state of Texas and the General Land Office there, which was really thinking into the future for future disasters. I think the state of Texas knows that climate change is going to hit them probably the hardest, the fastest, and so they're kind of planning for the future. What is a alternative housing solution that's rapidly deployable and much higher quality than the standard FEMA trailer that we can give to the Texans that are in greatest need following a disaster. So so that RFP basically looked at all of the available modular solutions out there, and did an extensive year and a half review of all of them, and weighed them by all sorts of metrics, like the cost how quickly they could be deployed, how easily they could be stored, kind of aggregated in locations and then deployed as necessary. And then qualitative things like, how well are they built? How long will they last? How good do they look? How do they positively or negatively impact the lives of the people living in there? So really, really thoughtful in depth review, and to our delight, the at the end of that, we were registered in the top three of all the companies having done positively nothing to that point other than built this prototype.
Jordan Rogove 21:38
So anyway, that tone that Texas produced. We're in line for an award from the state, but it's a very slow moving process. So while we haven't had the order from the state of Texas, that book has had major impact to other states experiencing disasters, and it landed in Hawaiʻi and got us some attention to the point where we were at the International builder show in Vegas with one of our houses, and a large cadre of the top decision makers from FEMA came in, introduced themselves and and said, just so you know, next month, this was in February of '24 next month, we'll be issuing an RFP. We expect to see you submitting for it, and it was pretty clear there was an opportunity there, I think in large part because the state of Hawaiʻi said no to the FEMA trailer.
Jordan Rogove 22:29
The states, despite all of the political talk about FEMA, FEMA does not pounce on a disaster in a state without being invited by that state to provide assistance. So Hawaiʻi and its governor Josh Green, who we met through the process, was adamant that his constituents and the survivors of Lahaina fire needed something better than the FEMA trailer and FEMA let us know that we were better, something that we were trying to tell them. So through that process, we assembled a pretty significant team of a prime contractor in a group called Dynamic based out of Baton Rouge, an excellent contracting team, and identified manufacturing partners for our concept, and it was a formidable team, and they were excellent through the interview process and in their capabilities to deliver. And so I think the state mandate was that there'd be three different manufacturers selected, and we were awarded the maximum number, which is about two thirds of the contract and asked to deliver 109 homes and manufacture them in less than two months time. So the rest is history.
Atif Z. Qadir 23:49
I want to understand the particular reasons why the state of Hawaiʻi had said no to FEMA trailers. The New York Times article that'll be in the show notes that describes that goes through a lot of the issues. But I want to hear from the horse's mouth, what did you hear from them as to why they said, peace, no?
Wayne Norbeck 24:09
I think in part was that the FEMA trailers, the sort of concept of the FEMA trailer is that it's only an 18 month solution, and then what you're seeing in places like, you know, with Hurricane Katrina, that people are living them for like, 10 plus years, and there's mold and formaldehyde issues, and they just very quickly outlive their useful life. And in the state of Hawaiʻi, the intent was, you know, we're going to be shipping these homes over. They need to be able to be, continue to be used in a sort of permanent way. So it was a really great position for the governor to take that this is going to become permanent housing, rather than a temporary solution that then ultimately often becomes permanent and has a lot of issues surrounding it. So the design of the house became really important in terms of being able to become a regular house, essentially just that it was able to be shipped to the site, and then people could live in them for a long period of time.
Atif Z. Qadir 25:04
So it sounds like the government within Hawaiʻi had been there, done that. They knew what happens when a FEMA trailer is used far beyond its usability, and they just didn't want to go down that path.
Jordan Rogove 25:14
Yeah, I would say also that the governor, Josh Green is a physician, and he immediately understood that providing a more dignified response, even at that, at just that level, forget about performance and the longevity of the solution that our kind of basic concept, that dignified housing solution allows recovery to happen faster. It produces better health outcomes. And so to have a key decision maker that's on the same page, I think push FEMA to a position of innovation rather than status quo, right? Every state responds differently. I think we, we really wanted to jump in with the state of North Carolina, you know, after the flooding last year, but their response was, we want the trailers. So every RFP that's come out of North Carolina has been like, what kind of trailer can you give us? What kind of siding? Will it have vinyl siding, or will it have metal siding? And it was just like there was no room for innovation there. It was a status quo thing. So to in order to elevate this, it's not just the federal thing. It's a states got to have to step up and push the envelope, like the state of Hawaiʻi did.
Atif Z. Qadir 25:15
So what were the trade offs that you were making in this process? So we know that Hawaiʻi is not part of the continental United States, so its ability to have advantages all the supply chain and materials here, that's a big issue there. Like the intent that you have is a really great one, which is to take a temporary shelter, make it permanent housing, but, and have it be beautiful and dignified, but as you were doing this, what were the trade offs that your constraints that you are working with?
Jordan Rogove 25:33
Yeah, I mean, one was, I mean, obviously there's always sort of budget issues that come up and cost cutting that needs to happen on almost every project. In this case, we had designed the home originally with a system that we we call the Click System, which we really prefer because it's, it's that ability to flat pack the house and, you know, assemble it out of pieces that includes sort of a separate bathroom, a separate kitchen, the walls and the floors and the roof. The advantage with that approach is that we were able on the same flatbed truck, same size to ship without, you know, an oversized load, a single house that, when it's assembled on site, could expand and become much bigger. We could be 14 feet wide, 14 foot tall, with a great ceiling height, and this much more sort of dignified design. So that the design that that we had there. The other thinking is that that can be stockpiled. You know, we can have the different components ready to go in sort of disaster situations. Because the timeframe was so limited here, we quickly had to find factories that were able to produce this many houses, and they were already tooled up to do a sort of volumetric approach was, which was a single house at the time, so that that was a big shift, and we had to, you know, quickly adapt the drawings. But that what was good was that even through having to do that in a very compressed period of time, we were able to keep the spirit of the design intact. In the end, the houses have have a very similar effect that we would have had with the other design solution.
Jordan Rogove 28:39
Yeah, I think one of the other challenges is the you know, the experience working with FEMA was excellent. They were supercharged to raise the bar and provide a much higher quality response, in particular in the face of some of the unfortunate results of the you know, the response in particular, to Katrina that had outcomes that included people living in those trailers for 15 plus years, when those trailers were not equipped to last that long. In fact, they're called three season trailers for a reason. They're not meant to be permanent, long term, and there were issues with health, like formaldehyde, mold, all of those things. And so while FEMA was super excited to do this, there were still layers of leadership and decision making, and there were a number of opportunities that we think we could have improved parts of the design, including the way the units were heated and cooled, small things like how we handle ADA considerations.
Jordan Rogove 29:56
There were a number of things that we offered and tried to push for. That just logistically were impossible with this seven layer system where each one of those decisions would have to go and be reviewed by all of these different parties, to the point where people just said, No, we're not changing this. And there was kind of a, you know, unnecessarily expensive or ineffective part of the overall package just by virtue of the complexity of the organization of FEMA. But again, that's not that's not a criticism as much as as it is just an opportunity that if the current administration's position is that FEMA needs to be restructured in some way. There is an opportunity to restructure it in a way that I think gives it greater agility to be able to capitalize on these things and to improve quality, reduce cost by allowing those opportunities to be explored and quickly decided upon, rather than just immediately dismissed. So I think that that's one element to it, in addition to the kind of volumetric consideration that Wayne spoke to.
Atif Z. Qadir 31:13
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 can solve our way out of a crisis at americanbuilding podcast.com.