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 00:26
Today, our guests are architect Joseph Chase, Principal at Skidmore Owings & Merrill and engineer Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo of Jaros Baum & Bolles. The project we’re discussing is the Walt Disney Company’s new New York City headquarters, the Robert A. Iger Building at 7 Hudson Square. It is a full-block, 19-story, roughly 1.2 million-square-foot vertical campus that brings Disney’s news, production, streaming, and corporate teams together in Manhattan. This building is notable not just for its program, including studios, double-height production volumes, and a large central “Great Room”, but because SOM and the team delivered it as an all-electric, high-performance building with on-site solar readiness, high-efficiency outdoor air systems, heat pumps, waste-heat recovery, and a high-performance terracotta facade that anchors it in the Hudson Square context. The project also responds directly to NYC’s Local Law 97 emissions requirements. So thank you so much for joining us, Joe and Max.
Joseph Chase 01:36
Great to be here.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 01:37
Happy to be here.
Atif Z. Qadir 01:39
First for Joe, you've run complex, highly technical projects at scale at som. So before we dive into the Disney headquarters, tell us about the projects that you've worked on before, and how you think they've prepared you to take on this, this master project.
Joseph Chase 01:58
Yeah, so you know, my career at SOM has really been focused around New York City and really large scale mixed use in New York City. So, you know, I've had the opportunity and the benefit to work on some of the bigger projects made over the last, you know, 15 years here in New York. You know, one of the projects that I really worked on for a long time was the Manhattan West development on the far west side. You know, max here also worked on that project. I think the other sort of big project for many years that I worked on was 35 Hudson Yards residential project, also on the far west side. And then, you know, we, you know, we're going to talk about Disney today. And I think the Disney project is really, you know, following the West Side downtown with another large scale building, and I would say each of those projects over the course of time have shown consistent changes as the city has changed and as technology changed, and how the city approaches the requirements are on energy.
Atif Z. Qadir 02:57
So similarly, Max you are responsible for mechanical and other systems work on incredibly demanding projects like this one. So tell us about your start as a engineer in this industry and the type of projects that you've worked on at JB&B before starting on the Disney headquarters.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 03:17
Yeah. So actually, similar background to Joe in terms of some of the market sectors that I've had a chance to work on throughout my career, a lot of commercial development, some higher ed and so a lot of infrastructure upgrades. And I think that combination of market sectors really, and it's also sort of how JB as a company is structured, and that we we give all of our employees an opportunity to work through all market sectors. I think that gives you a real great chance to sort of mine innovation from each of those those market sectors, and kind of take all those lessons to whatever it is you happen to be working on. But you know, additionally, as a company, we have a proven track record and a long standing reputation for delivering quality design, progressive design, in a cutting edge marketplace. But also, you know, learning our licks a bit from some events in the past. You know, Superstorm Sandy had a major impact to New York City and thinking about ways that we redesigned resiliency into our systems. But generally, you know, I think we've really embraced here at JB&B, an approach of progressive design ideas, but with a pragmatic approach that are able to be built, and the folks who are going to operate these facilities are going to be able to do so comfortably that really lended itself nicely to a perfect teaming with Joe's team on this project.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:30
So tell us a bit about some of the projects you've worked on together as well both JB&B and SOM together.
Joseph Chase 04:37
Yeah. I mean, we work with JB&B a lot, and you know, our relationship with JMB goes back a long time. You know, JB&B worked on Chase Manhattan Plaza, the, you know, the Gordon Bunshaft building in Manhattan. So SOM and JB&B has a long history of collaboration on projects. I think, you know, within recent history, you know, we were. Work with JB&B at Manhattan West, as I mentioned earlier, which resulted in a great collaboration across multiple buildings on that sort of super block. We worked with JB&B at 35 Hudson Yards. Again, that's another project where, again, the JB&B team was innovative with a super tall residential but also mixed use projects. And then galaxy, you know, we work with JB&B from the beginning to really develop the systems that, you know, represent some of these changes associated with local law 97. You know, I could, I could talk your ear off a million projects because we worked with JB&B so much so it's a long collaboration for many years that we've contributed.
Atif Z. Qadir 05:42
That makes a lot of sense,
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 05:43
And to add to that too, across other cities as well. So Joe, before mine, in yours time, right? A lot of collaboration in Chicago on Sears, Mel Willis Tower right at SOM's headquarters. So there's, there's been a long standing relationship between our offices together.
Joseph Chase 05:55
Yeah, and just imagine Chase Manhattan is right behind me.
Atif Z. Qadir 06:01
Well placed for folks that are viewing this episode, as opposed to just listening. And that makes a ton of sense, because SOM and JB&B are part of the OG crew of design firms that do buildings again and again and again, for example, like LERA is another really great one, Robert Silman on the engineering side. So that makes a ton of sense. Okay, so the Disney headquarters project, so Mickey and Minnie come up to you and they have a design brief, what they're looking for on their new project. So okay, so more seriously, tell us about the how the project came to be, who got the first call and what like the initial thought process was, because when I think Disney, I think of Florida and California and streaming. I don't think of New York City, but Disney actually has a long history in New York so tell us about some of that, the origin stuff as the project was getting started.
Joseph Chase 06:52
Yeah, I mean, Disney has a very long history in New York City. It dates to the beginning of their company, a lot of their operations around ABC, around ESPN, because Disney is a big umbrella for multiple companies, right? It's not just the Disney that you know from the movies. You know, it's Marvel, it's ESPN, it's ABC, all of these entities are under that umbrella. And really the motivation for the Disney headquarters was really to consolidate those entities and to sort of position them as a media company for the future. And a lot of what you see, just in general, the Hudson Square district that the building is located, is really becoming a Center for media, tech and a lot of the creative class, or the creative industry moving to, you know, Google is just down the street and, you know, and there's plans for even, even more development around tech and media in that neighborhood.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 07:53
I think I'll add too. I remember Joe during early, you know, early project kickoff and concept, right? When we were sort of surveying and walking through and interviewing facilities operators of the existing facility that the campus that they previously housed on the Upper West Side, you know that they knew that they were going to set out to create this new headquarters and house all of those umbrella companies into one state of the art facility. And every individual we spoke to was really kind of chomping at the bit to improve system, and you know, where their home was going to be. You kind of had the tour walking through these facilities. It was kind of multiple buildings on a super block, very disjointed, right? And they were really making do with what they had available to them. And just like the energy from the beginning of this was so great with how they were, they couldn't wait to get going. And because they, you know, they've been cramming a lot of different unique programs, which we're going to talk more about, into facilities that were that were outdated. So everyone was excited to get going.
Atif Z. Qadir 08:44
So talk a bit more about that existing footprint within the city of New York, as you mentioned, it was disjointed. It wasn't connected with the needs of Disney as a company as it currently is, which is an amalgam of many, many other companies. So what were they working with currently, before they started visioning something new,
Joseph Chase 09:04
Yeah, they were up on the Upper West Side, and they had a block that was a full block. A lot of the broadcast within that building was associated with the ABC broadcast component of their business. They had other broadcast components in Times Square and other parts of the city with a lot of the broadcast work. A lot of this is built around the lifecycle of equipment, right? You have to upgrade create equipment at a certain point in time, and you've got budgets around upgrading that equipment, right? So there's a sort of life cycle aspect to just that technology and for Disney, I think all of this sort of came together at the same time, so looking for a new location to both sort of meet the next technology around broadcast, consolidate some of these other divisions, all within a single building, and then also. Just positioning it within a neighborhood and a part of New York City where there is sort of energy and excitement around, you know, the kind of staff that Disney was trying to recruit, the type of sort of creative class employee that they wanted to attract to their to their facility and to their organization, all of that sort of like, came together to help influence them consolidate into this location, and to try to get everybody located in this, let's call it hive of activity for, you know, everybody to come together.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 10:37
That's a little anecdote to add to that. I think I remember during some of the early interviews, or, you know, sidewalks that, uh, actually the facility that the much of the broadcast set, when ABC News would kind of build a set for, you know, say, electric coverage, was actually a building that used to be an old horse stable from, I don't know what year, but, I mean, they were their facilities. Team was really doing an amazing job turning the existing facilities into what we kind of knew, as you know, what they were able to deliver for broadcast facility. So I couldn't believe it when I heard it, but boy, have they gotten an upgrade here with the new building.
Atif Z. Qadir 11:12
And for folks that may be aware of just a few of the companies that Disney owns, there are, it's an incredible array, from Marvel to Pixar to Lucasfilm to ABC, to ABC, as Joe mentioned, to 21st Century Fox to ESPN, and I believe there's a recent Hulu acquisition as well. So a lot going on in terms of recording and staffing needs. So what you're describing makes a ton of sense. The site itself, which is in Hudson Square is a challenging urban site, so talk to us about the particularities of this site itself that helped to inform what you ended up designing and building later.
Joseph Chase 11:51
Yeah, the site was Hudson Square, for those that don't know, is a newly created neighborhood. It's sort of west of Soho. So it's adjacent to Soho. It has all the streets of Soho, like spring. It's sort of everything west of Varick Street. And the neighborhood, I think, has a fairly contemporary special zoning district associated with it, and in the rezoning of the neighborhood or the special district that was applied to that area, this particular site, as part of the discussions of the rezoning was like one of the lots earmarked for bigger development, right? So as part of the the city's strategy around zoning, you know, this was one of the sites that was seen as really an opportunity to do something new. With any of the kind of special district requirements they're grounded within the kind of context of the existing buildings. That neighborhood traditionally was like the printers neighborhood within New York City. That's where all the printing facilities are. So from mass and zoning and bulk requirements, the footprints allowed within that district, you know, result in really big floor plans. Okay? So, like, that's how these printing facilities, traditional, you know, in the neighborhood in its traditional times, operated big, big floor plates for all the printing equipment, storage of paper, you know, et cetera.
Joseph Chase 13:25
So it's a really great neighborhood because of that historical context and how that context influenced the zoning requirements to result in really big footprints. You know, when you talk of any media or tech client, they're looking for big footprints. They're looking for something bigger than your typical office tenant. The site that, you know, Disney selected really allows for these really large, 80,000 square foot floor plates, which allow for high density, allows for big studio spaces, allow or, you know, news functionality. And that big floor plate is really what drives, you know, even companies like Google, who are just down the street with with a massive floor plates that that neighborhood allows within the within the zoning. The one caveat is that the floor plates are big, but it's not like Midtown, where you can have a super tall building, right? It's really more of like a horizontal building instead of a vertical building. So even though the building is 1.2 million gross square feet, it's all within these really comprised of these really big floor plates that yield that number
Atif Z. Qadir 14:34
When you talk about the other projects that were around there, for example, the Google headquarters. What were some of the others that you took as president or as inspiration as you were getting started in the design process for this project?
Joseph Chase 14:48
So I think when it comes to the existing precedents, you know, when we started the Disney project, you know, Google had not been built at that time, and the zoning Tech. X was fairly new, right? So really, a lot of our discussions around precedent were really molded around what the underlining lying zoning required in terms of the floor plate size, the bulk, and how that related to the context, right? To try to be a good neighbor with how the building sits on the street. A lot of the discussion was really about, how do we fit the large density of people within the building, right? You know, with these limits on height, really comes with, like, a constraint, with trying to get all of this, you know, zoning area in the limit, right? Which, you know, was, was a real, you know, a real task to try to get all the, what's called the clay of a project under the height and setback requirements, yep. And then, of course, you know, you know, in addition to kind of trying to be a good neighbor and trying to have a building that responds to the context, we of course, looked at precedents outside of New York City, precedents from around the world, projects like Bloomberg and London. We looked at projects like in on the West Coast. Not all of those are applicable to like a New York environment when you talk about density, code, building systems. So all of this sort of gets presented holistically, and you try to take the pieces from all of these other projects and synthesize them into an approach that fits within the local context. And that's really, you know, I would say that kind of idea about locality, you know, really influenced the project. We were trying to stand out by fitting in. That was a term we used a lot on the project, you know, which influenced everything from the selection of the green terracotta to decisions around facade expression and you know, the building's organization.
Atif Z. Qadir 16:43
So both in terms of that fitting in by standing out, as well as that local context, local law 97 played a very large process in the design of the building, in terms of what is inside the building and serving the interior environments as well as what's outside the building as well. So talk to me about local law 97 what it entails for building owners and building occupants, and what were some of the points that you started with as you were going down the process of an all electric building.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 17:17
So we knew at the onset of the project that the timing that we were going to be delivering this project, the local law 97 was going to apply to us and our project team was going to need to work through what this meant and determine how, with multiple driving missions from our client, right, set them ahead of their peer in terms of sustainability, resiliency, comply with this law that was still very in its infancy, right? Still being written. We were still learning how the terms of the reporting periods were actually going to how the fines were really going to be structured, and all along deliver, you know, a resilient, progressive, energy efficient design. The beauty of what local law 97 was going to do, in the spirit of what Joe was just talking about, by standing out by fitting in, is that local 197 is a carbon reduction Effort, Right? And so by way of us endeavoring to create an all electric building, we are, by nature, improving emissions from at the building level for the neighborhood, so for the occupants of the building and our neighbors, right? There's no adverse building emissions from the burning of fossil fuels or products of combustion, just inherently in this design. So that was kind of like a great kill two birds with one stone right off the bat, right? And that was going to really kind of like kick off on the right grip the right foot, with fitting into to our neighbors. I like to kind of talk about the approach to compliance with local law 97 like I said, right is a is a carbon reduction strategy, and what that really means for us as the designers is to figure out a way to electrify these building systems.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 18:49
And electrification, decarbonization, sometimes are used, you know, synonymously. But what it really means is that in our climate zone, here in the Northeast of the United States, we have all four seasons, right? And we have, we have hot and humid summers, and we have cold winters. And the existing technologies out there today commercially available for what building operators are familiar with. The thinking used to be kind of separate systems for your heating season than they are separate systems from your your cooling season. And heating season used to be burning of a fossil fuel with a gas fire boiler. Or, you know, we have, we have an opportunity here in New York City, and that we have a local utility that provides district steam to us. A lot of the buildings and the existing building stock in New York have Con Ed steam that was available, actually to some of the existing buildings on the site of the project. But we knew from the get go that we were not we did not want to utilize those systems. We wanted to jump right to full electrification and knowing the program that was going to be brought into the building, as Joe outlined right all these, all these subsidiary companies, but those are very different program types. We have commercial office space, executive office space. We have broadcast news facility. We have a. Live audience broadcast facility. There's data center right? So there's many program types on site that had a very unique load profile for the building.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 20:08
So right off the get go, we thought that there was going to be a great opportunity to electrify this building's design. And the mantra we like to follow, to start out with this approach, is, reduce, recover, then electrify. What to explain? What I mean by that is you can't just jump to straight electrification by putting in certain pieces of equipment and do things business as usual. That is not a sustainable approach to this. The systematic way we went through, how to get here, in a comfortable way for all parties involved and all stakeholders, was starting off with reduce. And what I mean by reduce is, think about these program types that are coming into the building. And, you know, sometimes in New York City here, driven by certain market sector or sort of a marketability for spaces, we over design. And I'll say it, I'm an engineer, we over design things oftentimes, right.
Atif Z. Qadir 21:01
And by over design, you mean let's provide more equipment, or more capacity than is actually likely going to be necessary.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 21:09
Exactly. We provide more hardware to accommodate a hypothetical load that may not actually be manifested, but the occupants and the end user get a sense of comfort knowing that, you know, they have a lot of oomph behind them at the machine room level that can drive them through these, right these, what if scenarios, is very over designed, and at the advent of energy modeling and now metering of existing facilities, of a lot of our current projects, with owners who will share that data with us, we have the ability to right size those and those predictive loads, so we can interview our end users, understand these program types, and instead of put the kind of old fashioned high internal heat gain load densities as the input to our load calculations, we can get that more appropriately sized from the get go. And when we can reduce those loads, they become easier to achieve with all electric means. And I think that was that was a really interesting journey.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 22:07
We set out with early on where Disney, you know, very sophisticated institution, and there was a lot of great trended data from their existing facilities that we were able to look at their actual utility bills and their usage on various sites to determine what is the right number we should assume for how much, how much heat is produced in these spaces. And it was a collaborative design across their whole facilities team and all the designers. And it really helped us get to the right inputs, which was like step one of the whole conversation, after kind of reducing your loads, you know, and rethinking that, what do it? What is it? Do I need in order to achieve my my space use type. We move on to the next word, which is recover. And that's where I get to have a lot of fun. And we start to specify mechanical systems. That another nerdy mantra, which I'll give you is, don't let a BTU escape the building.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 22:59
And so what I mean by that is heating is precious. Heating energy is precious in this facility, because the more difficult aspect of building electrification is the winter time and the heating season. That's what is the most unique for those of us who are getting who are new to building electrification. And so the old fashioned way to design mechanical systems was in the cooling systems pull heat out of a space and they reject, them to the out of doors. Heating systems, you know, generate heat by burning with fossil fuel. Well, why are we going to waste any heat? Why let any of that heat escape? Let's retain that heat. And we can do that through a couple ways, with some, you know, some complicated mechanical systems, but through the fluids that move through the building with waterside systems and air side systems. We really threw the kitchen sink at the hardware that we installed in the building to recover all that heat as much as humanly possible. And the final step was electrify so those loads that were left over after we we reduced the initial loads. We recovered heat that was already there and realize it in a different way. The remaining load that we had to heat was much easier, much more palatable to electrify that really, that got us across the finish line with this design approach.
Atif Z. Qadir 24:11
So essentially, it's not a one to one of this is the way we're going to do the building. This way we would have done it, and then we're just going to electrify everything. It's actually thinking through, how do you optimize the needs before you actually size the equipment for the electrification?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 24:27
It's imperative. Yeah, exactly correct. Yeah.
Joseph Chase 24:29
And I think that that's, you know, a lot of that's tied to what that data acquisition really has to do about right sizing, right the one thing I would say, what the point is, and I think that Max was making about oversizing equipment isn't out of some like idea that we just need to put a lot of equipment in a building, right? You know, the idea is we oversize it because we don't know, right? We want a building that's that's future proof, that doesn't suddenly not have what's necessary for a project, right? So this, this process of right sizing, is. Really built around getting to a level of efficiency. And you can imagine in, you know, in New York City, where, you know, real estate, you know, is under constant pressure, right? The cost per square foot of a piece of real estate in New York City is so high, right, every square inch associated with mechanical, you know, is an impact on the, you know, the economic viability of a building.
Atif Z. Qadir 25:24
The leasable square footage.
Joseph Chase 25:25
That's absolutely right. And I think, like when you talk about electrification, it comes with, really, it's a focus on real estate. It's a focus on what is the net area of this building compared to the gross area of this building, right? If I put another piece of equipment on a mechanical floor that's maybe real, less desks that I can have for an individual that are part of my workforce, right? So, you know, part of this process of electrification in New York City has to do with reestablishing, what are the benchmarks that we're designing buildings around, right? What, what is the amount of clay that we need to design a building and getting to the bottom of the the amount of that so that, you know, we're building the right amount of area necessary to get the job done.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 26:08
To that point, Joe too, you were talking previously about our our zoning limitations on the site, right? So that the shape of the building is is unique, and that Joe is explaining, right? It's kind of a building on its side, which would make you think that there is a lot of roof area, but that's not actually the case. There's the building attributes provide a really beautiful set of amenities with, you know, an open skylight in the center of kind of two towers that rise up through and the roof space available on the tops of the two shorter towers were very valuable real estate for the mechanical systems in the building, and we, Joe and I got to play, you know, a great balancing act between delivering on, you know, the beautiful esthetic that it is, and making sure it could house all of that mechanical equipment that needed to achieve this electric design. Because one major component of the all electric design are air source heat pumps, which is a piece of equipment that utilizes the ambient air as a source or sink, and that equipment needs to sit outside and breathe a lot of air. And so making sure that we were able to place enough of these on our building's roof and conceal them in such a way that, you know, they kind of didn't subtract away from the esthetic, was a unique challenge for us with the zoning limitations on site, but it came together beautifully.
Atif Z. Qadir 27:20
So the equipment that you described, those are part of the entire package of equipment that's necessary in order to electrify a building from a mechanical, electrical and plumbing perspective, which I think is super fascinating, understand the pieces that go into the end result of actually making it an electric building. Tell us about the other main tools or equipment that were necessary in order to execute on that goal?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 27:46
Yeah, sure. So actually, to answer that question, I'm going to kind of explain how one big charge we had from our client was that the infrastructure for this building's plant really needs to look and feel familiar to what their operations team are used to. And so this was not able to be a complete reinvention of how one thinks about the heating and cooling systems for.
Atif Z. Qadir 28:09
Because somebody actually has to maintain it.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 28:11
Someone we have to hand over the keys for this facility at the end of the day. And they, you know those, those folks need to be comfortable and know how to, how to manage this building, through all the variable seasons and all the variable events within the building that come through. So actually, when we knew that we were going to be approaching an all electric design and the team knew that we were going to be using some technologies that were somewhat new to the marketplace to kind of counter balance that level of discomfort, we needed to do everything possible to make sure the rest of the systems in place were as familiar as possible. So a moment ago, when I was kind of describing heat recovery systems a very traditional way that we make, you know, a central chiller plant and facilities like this is a water cooled refrigeration plant. So we have cooling towers on the roof and big refrigeration machines and a machine room for the facility that makes chilled water. That chilled water is what gets sent throughout the facility for demitification and cooling loads at many different end devices, I like to think and explain to people, air conditioning really should be thought of as not bringing cooling to a space, but rather removing heat from a space.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 29:17
So when you think of it that way, all these end devices in your space move heat all the way back through the machine room, and then ultimately send that heat out through the cooling tower on the roof. Like I said, before, we want to recover that heat. So the central systems for this building used very traditional water cooled chillers with cooling towers. But we added a component. We added what we call condenser water source heat pumps for heat recovery. And those devices, it's the same exact technology as they water cooled chiller that makes chill water, but it's actually connected, in reverse, to the system, and we use that machine. Its sole purpose is to make hot water for the building, and it draws from the source of the heat that would otherwise be rejected to the cooling tower.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 30:01
So we keep those BTUs in the building with a traditional water cooled refrigeration machine, and we pair that in parallel with this equipment on the roof. I described the air source heat pump. So essentially, there's two sources of heat for the facility. There's a water cooled source and an air cooled source. Those two in parallel at varying stages of you know, on off are what satisfy the building's load profile, and it was really important that we we help make the transition between both of those heating sources be as clear as possible to our operating staff, because otherwise, these multiple sources and a building temperature control system that you can't quite follow could really, really become complex and get get away from the operators. So that was that was a very fundamental aspect to our design approach.
Atif Z. Qadir 30:49
So I totally hear you on making this as streamlined of a equipment package as possible, and also making it something that is actually maintainable by staff that may be familiar with older systems of heating and cooling buildings and ventilating buildings, given that the heat loads and the cooling on buildings or the cold in New York City has gotten more and More extreme with climate change, how does that play into the design of this system? Because as more extreme weather events become more common, the upsizing becomes likely more and more important, because those events aren't so unusual. How is that incorporated in the sizing of what you're doing?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 31:39
That's a great question, and I think the answer to it, there's a lot of levers you can pull to satisfy that requirement. And what I mean by that is that there are many design approaches and technologies available to make sure that we are providing a system design that is going to be successful throughout the future. And what climate change brings to us right polar vortices that have extended during, you know, days in a row of really cold temperatures that are abnormal for our climate zone. These are a reality that we had to think about and design this building to withstand in the future. And the way it can be achieved is striking the right balance of installing quantity of equipment, right the amount of hardware you have installed, making sure there's enough space to satisfy the duty, and there's a level of redundancy. So when we talk about the water cooled plant and the air cooled plant, the installed capacity of both of those together, the sum of the two exceeds the expected load of the building. So we have inherent redundancy built in to the amount of hardware installed.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 32:43
And what's been kind of really fascinating over the first season and a half of the facilities operating under full load is that the machines have not been taxed very heavily because the design approach for the heat recovery that I was describing the building is becoming very is a very cooling dominant building. The low profile in the building is, you know, there's a lot of folks reporting to work every day or doing a lot of things in those spaces. There's a lot of heat to recover. So maybe some of the systems that the operating staff weren't as familiar with haven't had to turn on for many hours of the year, even in the dead of winter, which has been a really like great light bulb that has gone off for the whole team. So the whole staff feels very comfortable about the kit of parts that are installed in the facility. Riding have, we have a lot of levers of pull to ride us through a lot of different scenarios. And, you know, the goal that we set out on to take advantage of that free heat is really proven to be, you know, it's just, it's working swimmingly, which is, which is very cool.
Atif Z. Qadir 33:42
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Joseph Chase 34:41
Yeah, and I would, I would jump in just to say, too, this is, I think, a little bit where architecture also contributes to this process, right? I think that totally the high performance facade of the project. Let's talk about that, the beautiful skin around the building, yeah. I mean, that's sort of like the fundamental thing about reuse, right? Like, you know, Max talk. Talks about like taking the energy that's within the building and putting it to use, right? The principal way that you go about doing that is designing a facade that has a performance level that can retain that heat. You know, the facade itself is a terracotta facade. It's a unitized facade, which I think is unique in New York City, a lot of the terracotta that you see on the market is a handset product, just due to the brittle nature of Terra Cotta. You know, the project for Disney was under a lot of time constraints. We had to build very quickly. So a unitized approach was fundamental to being able to sort of build the project at speed that we needed to make the project work.
Atif Z. Qadir 35:43
Explain a bit, when you say unitized, what that particularly means in terms of production installation.
Joseph Chase 35:47
Yeah, so unitized really means that the facade is built in a factory, right? So, like, you know, the traditional masonry, terracotta, you know, you can think of the, you know, projects in Chicago, Chicago school type projects where there they are, sort of handset approaches for Disney. We needed to do something faster, something that was built in a factory, had a level of precision, but also, more importantly, most importantly, is had a level of performance. And with unitized facades, you know, there is considerations around the way, you detail unitized facades to get them as high of performing as rain screen handset approaches, you know, you have to detail the joints in very specific ways with thermal breaks. You have to sort of carefully select the performance of the glass. You have to weigh the window to to wall ratio and balance the, you know, the performance of the glass locations with the locations that are terracotta and opaque, right? So, you know, it's a very beautiful terracotta facade. But there's an immense amount of thinking around, let's just call it the the chassis of the the frame, the aluminum frames, to really detail the thermal breaks that are part of those systems, and to get the performance of this facade at a level where we could both retain and reuse the heat, but meet all the ambitions around energy performance and a lot of the local energy code requirements around facade performance. So, I mean, that was really, you know, fundamental to why we ended up with largely a building that was, let's call it more opaque than your you typically see in New York City, you know, it's not a Hudson Yards building which is very glassy. It is a Hudson Square building which is very opaque.
Atif Z. Qadir 37:41
To any non New York City people, those are two completely different parts of Manhattan, Hudson Square and Hudson Yards.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 37:47
So in kind of full circle, you know, like the requirements around performance really worked well with our desire to design a building that stood out by fitting in right and was very contextual in its approach to the design. Totally agree. Joe's facade was instrumental in making this the whole electrification be pulled off. And one also thing I will add, we were again talking about the shape of the building and the large footprint with a deep lease band. That was actually a grade ratio for the low profile that the building ended up seeing, because there's not as much skin as there is compared to total area. So all this internal heat gain was able to be recovered and sent back out to the perimeter, and the high performance facade that Joe was just describing allowed us to heat this building with a very low temperature hot water that wasn't, you know, that's a feature of the electrification. When we say hot water, I mean 100 degree Fahrenheit water is what the heating water temperature is that's distributed around to all devices where the, you know, Legacy type facilities could be upwards of 140 280 degrees. So that was another kind of, one of the big things with the operating staff. That's like, kind of the biggest shock value when it comes to the electrified design. But it is imperative, and it is is only achievable when the facade is as high performing as it was specified by SOM.
Atif Z. Qadir 39:00
And that ties right into what you had talked about earlier in terms of the approach of reduce, recover and then electrify. So in this instance, similarly, not just the internal systems, the MEP, the external as well. Thinking through that process as well is super fascinating, and I want to make sure I heard what you had said a little bit earlier, Max, make sure I heard that correctly. Is the idea is, when you are designing systems for an all electric building, incorporating the actual uses of what are happening on the inside is a critical part. So in this case, where there's going to be production equipment that gives off an insane amount of heat in certain short bursts, the ability to be able to utilize that at the times and they're used means that the most extreme events may not necessarily be as extreme as as one would imagine, because the two are mixed together?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 39:52
Exactly. And what's kind of like a reverse way you want to think about it is that when, when we're sizing our systems and calculating. Leading those loads. You, of course, want to take credit for that heat that's available to you, but the way you want to be conservative and not overdo it, right is, it's kind of a nuance to the special sauce with all this is that if you overestimate those internal heat gains, and you overestimate how much heat can be recovered, you could, in fact, you know, perhaps, get into a little bit of trouble with having not as much remaining infrastructure available to carry you through. So it's, it's a balance, right? And and that's why we that's why we build an energy model. We model it so we can check sensitivity of these. If the internal heat gains are such, and I can recover it. What does the rest of my size system need to be if we're humming along at full capacity? You know, those systems look smaller, but you pick the right number in between. That's a great point that you picked up on, and it's important to you know. And we were fully transparent with our client group on Open Books with the calculations and what that all meant, to make sure that folks were comfortable with what you know, what event could take place, and what does that mean?
Atif Z. Qadir 40:56
So we talked about local law 97 and that is one of the main design guidelines that was necessary to consider as you're going through the design process. Disney has its own corporate sustainability requirements. Tell us about that and how those influenced the building design itself.
Joseph Chase 41:17
Yeah. So I think, you know Disney, you know, really wanted to, you know, as part of the process, I should say, of determining the sustainability approach. Disney has, you know, global standards that we started as a base with the process. And again, these standards span across all of their holdings around around the world, you know. And we do this with every client you know, we develop, let's call it a reinterpretation of those to the local conditions, right? And I think we knew we had to sort of build up a sustainability strategy and a certification strategy. I think in our case, based off of what this building was, how it operated, we zeroed in on the LEED Platinum certification, which we, you know, we successfully acquired for the project within the last year. So we are a LEED platinum building, and the LEED Platinum approach really framed a lot of the conversations, you know, outside of these code drivers, right?
Joseph Chase 42:16
So, like, you know, we talked a lot about local law 97 that's really driven by the local New York market. But there's, you know, there's lots of other items built around sustainability, right, from water use to things that are intangible and design related, like access to green spaces and to transit systems. And, you know, with with any design process, they're built around standards, right, like we look at whether it's code standards or program briefs, or any of the number of like industry wide benchmarks that are published. And for this project, I think you know, Disney, SOM, JB&B, a 10, who was our environmental consultant, I think we molded the decision making around the framework of the LEED Platinum certification.
Joseph Chase 43:04
And one of the benefits of like the New York market, with all this local law 97 requirements, is we're already way above on the energy use categories within the LEED Platinum certification, or we're already there by meeting code to push us at a level of certification that in other jurisdictions people have to work really hard to get to. You know, in New York, we're going to see a sea change of many, many platinum buildings just because, you know, the local laws require so much of these energy performance requirements that we're already in the ballpark of getting these higher level certifications that, you know, 10 years ago, there was less of an appetite because they cost more money and they were more difficult to achieve.
Atif Z. Qadir 43:47
And now, I'm guessing, because there has been a body of work already done in terms of buildings that are increasingly high performance, and then within that subset, electrification, that the process of doing so has gotten smarter and smarter and more efficient as well. That allows for an increased number of buildings that that comply with these rules. So that that makes a ton of sense. I want to dive into some of the other key technical aspects of the building. So we talked about recording studios being a key element of the building. So they are the equipment produce a lot of heat, but also those environments have a necessity for sound control. Tell me, from the architectural perspective, from the engineering perspective, how you were able to achieve the acoustic requirements, and I know you worked with the team at ceramic and Associates. So tell us about that, that process as well.
Joseph Chase 44:46
Yeah. I mean, the acoustical requirements were big on the site. There was quite a few underlying constraints. We are right next to the one train the red line in Manhattan, right? So we've got MTA on the east property line of the site. So the train comes by, you know, every five minutes, right? Every 510 minutes. So the sound associated with the trains and the vibration, maybe more importantly, was, was high, a big concern for Disney, right? Because they, they've had previous assets in the past, where they had to kind of correct for train noise, correct for transit noise. So we really needed to find a strategy where we could isolate the acoustics for the building knowing that we were directly adjacent to the train, the train line. So we worked with ceramic to come up with a very specific approach where, basically, we use a sound isolation pad and coated the entire cellar with this material, right? This is basically, it's a kind of neoprene, like spongy material that really deadens the sound of the train as it passes. This material basically just like insulation or waterproofing that you put on any foundation really covers the entire foundation like a bathtub.
Joseph Chase 46:06
And what's unique about this particular product is that it has, you know, structural capacity, so you can put it under the building too, or you can put it under the foundations. So this process of sort of fine tuning the acoustical material allowed us to really spread the material around evenly and get the Noise Criteria at the level necessary for broadcast, right? So that was kind of step one with the acoustical process. Step two is what we call box in box construction, right? So, like, you put studios within a room, within the larger structure of the room, right? So, like you literally depress a floor slab and then set a floor on springs, right? So the floor sits on springs, and then the walls for those studios are then supported by the floor that's supported by springs. And then you put a ceiling within that box that's also isolated by springs.
Joseph Chase 47:05
So from an architectural perspective, between the use of a sound isolation mat and this what we call box and box construction, you create a soundproof environment where the external environment does not come into the space. And then, in addition to those architectural elements, you know, there's a whole cadre of mechanical strategies that Max can talk about related to insulating ducts and sort of modulating the equipment that's selected. So I'll let him talk about that.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 47:37
And Joe, just to add to your point too, also flanking us to the south right is the entrance of the Holland Tunnel. So there's a vehicular traffic outside of the foundation wall too. So lot of acoustical or vibration constraints outside of the site. And Joe teed it up nicely for, I guess, you know, the mechanical systems a little bit addressing a little bit closer to the source of, you know, where the end user is, inside the space, inside those broadcast studios. And, you know, working very closely with the architecture team and the acoustics team, traditional methods for making sure that those NC criteria are maintained in the spaces really results in, you know, furring out of walls using lagging material or sound absorption material. And really what it means on the on the air conditioning side, is much larger duct work than would normally be used to serve the space, to slow the air down to very low velocities, and that's a major space implication.
Atif Z. Qadir 48:31
So lower velocity means less noisy?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 48:33
That's correct, yeah, so slowing the air inside the duct down is what helps reduce breakout noise and radiated noise into the space. And that, as you can imagine, in a below grade area where the broadcast and live audience studios are, space starts to get used up pretty quickly. And so that was a major challenge with making sure that ductwork can be as large as required, to maintain these criteria and coordinate through the architectural ceiling and the structural beams and columns and deliver the air to the space.
Joseph Chase 49:05
Yeah. And we're talking primarily about the below grade, right? Because of, like, the trains and the so that's where the majority of the production studios are located. But there is quite a few above grade too, right? And the site is max noted next the Holland Tunnel entry. And if anybody who is from New York knows that Varick is like a traffic jam, right? So there's blazing horns on Varick every day at around three o'clock, people heading sirens and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. So the, you know, as part The city also had sort of put an E designation on the site, which is basically a noise constraint. So in the selection of our, you know, our glass and this whole conversation about facade performance, we're also in a place where we need to design a facade where it performed acoustically, right? So we built, you know, nine acoustical mock ups as part of the projects, you know, in the facade design and tested those facade mockup. Ups with an ASTM based test that showed how well they would perform at an STC level or an oitc level. And all of that testing, you know, really resulted in the fine tuned detailing of the system right that the curtain wall manufacturer provided, and that, you know, that advanced testing, you know, led to, you know, glass makeups that improve the, you know, the sound of the on the floor, right, like on the typical office floor, which also had sort of broadcast elements on those floors. So, you know, between, you know, below grade, where we had the concern for the train, and then above grade we had the concern for the Holland Tunnel and Varick Street. You know, acoustics really drove so much of the design and the performance of the building.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 50:46
And I'll add one more, Joe, right? We have the building is fully backed up on emergency power by way of generator. And the generators happen to be located on the top of one of the towers. And immediately below the generators are some of the executive office floors. So sort of to our own doing, we introduced sound and vibration to the site, but mitigated it with a really elaborate architectural and structural solution of a floating slab to mitigate sound going from top down into the uppermost office floors. So we really had it from all directions.
Atif Z. Qadir 51:20
I am noting a number of similarities between the requirements in terms of temperature control and also sound control with data centers. So the past couple of weeks, I've been learning a ton about data centers, and in the not too distant future. We'll have some guests on the podcast that talk about data centers and how they're transforming the built environment in this country. But what you're laying out as the challenges and your solutions have corollaries within this other use case as well, which I found interesting.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 51:56
Yeah, definitely.
Atif Z. Qadir 51:58
So let's take this big picture. So the idea of moving from a gas based, fossil fuel based heating system, cooling system is one that probably is unfamiliar, and it's scares building owners and building developers, where our industry is often built on certainty and reliability and predictability, as opposed to innovation and change. So could you talk about the key aspects of electrification that may go unnoticed or may be like the selling points that you would give to someone that is a client that's reluctant to move away from a traditional MEP system.
Joseph Chase 52:41
Yeah, I can start with that, because I think a lot of the benefits are architectural, you know, I mentioned earlier about building efficiencies, right? Like, at the end of the day, buildings are measured in, you know, rentable area, like how a building performs in terms of its efficiency, right? So when a client or a tenant thinks about, like, how much real estate they need to hold. You know, every every inch counts towards their performer, like it's related to how many people they can fit in a building, right? So these systems are much more efficient at the level of the planning, right? So you can imagine, you know, when I started as an architect in New York City, we all the all the buildings we designed had a local fan room on the floor. You had, like a DX system. It sat on every floor that then sort of conditioned air, and that hot or cold air was in a massive duct that ran around or and provided the heating and cooling. Right? It was simple system. It took a big, you know, resulted in a big core took up a lot of space on the floor.
Joseph Chase 53:44
These new systems that we're talking about, sort of shift where the mechanical equipment is located, right? It's no longer on the floor in a room. It's in a it's on a mechanical floor. It's localized to the roof. It's localized to spaces that don't impact the planning. And all the equipment is in the ceiling. Now it's not in like a space on the floor. So you know what we've been starting to do, and we're working with a, JB&B and Max on projects that are more in a developer contexts, in a context where you may not know the end user, where we're using the same strategies within that context, within that developer context. And we're showing that these buildings are just more efficient, right? And we are arguing and showing that, you know, the loss factor, this is like a real estate metric that measures efficiency for determining area should go up like that. Really a building, and landowner who has these systems has a more efficient building and therefore has more area dedicated to the tenant that they can actually use, right?
Joseph Chase 54:45
So what you see is that efficiency that's gained from the decision to do this equipment really yields more area and makes for a better, more flexible product for the tenants, right? So like. You know that that's directly equated to, you know, money, right? You know that's independent of, you know, the the fact that in New York City you have to pay a fine with local on 97 this is applicable to any city in the country when you're talking about trying to have an efficient building. So, like, one of the major selling points when you talk about these systems is, like, you just get more space back. You just get more space to put stuff that, you know, people want to use, you know, per program.
Atif Z. Qadir 55:26
That's probably the most cogent pitch that I've heard for electrification. So that on its own, is such a beautiful nugget. So thank you for sharing that. As the the cynical developer, though, what I would say is the benefits that you described are over the operations of the building, and the presumption that I would have would be the costs associated with it are upfront. So tell me about the cost premiums. Say five years ago, three years ago now, and what you see going forward for someone that is making that choice to electrification. Is there actually an upfront premium, or are they neutral, or even, potentially, maybe even savings down the road?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 56:07
It's a very important question. And I think I'll start out by saying that here in New York City, local law 97 is a law, and it is. It's in place. And we're approaching, you know, the we're at the first reporting period now, and this is a reality for all of us. And there's kind of two mindsets that any, any building owner in New York City could approach this with. You could kind of moan and groan and say, oh my gosh, this is this is unfair. How can we fight this? Can I be exempt? I, you know this, I can't. I can't accommodate this at the moment, or you could jump in and see it as an opportunity to improve your asset. And that's exactly what Joe just helped describe. And there are so many amazing opportunities, low hanging fruit. We're here talking about a brand new building out of the ground construction where we got, you know, we had an opportunity to kind of set the stage for exactly what we want to do from the beginning, but this, this law applies to the tire stuff existing buildings in New York City too, but there are so many lower hanging fruit energy conservation measures that can help you incrementally move towards beneficial electrification that aren't as huge as ripping off the band aid of saying re skin your whole building, or kick out all of your tenants and Do something because you have to change out your perimeter heating solution.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 57:24
Joe and I are super excited to partner with anybody who's looking for the felt process on those little incremental steps, and depending on kind of what your kit of parts are that you're approaching this, there could be capital costs. You know, if you're comparing an existing building retrofit versus a new building. There's so many variations on how you kind of answer the question on capex and life cycle payout. But the reality is that the law is designed and written such that if you do nothing, if you elect to do nothing, the penalties increase exponentially at the later reporting periods. And it is designed to make it so that nobody does nothing, because the fines greatly outweigh any life cycle cost analysis within a reasonable reporting period, especially at the 2050 reporting period, that doing nothing is really not an option here, so the payout is always worth it to get going now.
Joseph Chase 58:18
Yeah, and I would add to that too, they, you know, even outside of the context of, you know, New York, right? You know, there's, there's many ways to approach these systems, right? Like it, it's not necessarily like the same system for every application, right? Like to Max's point. There's a lot of values related to the life cycle, how you plan to operate it. I think even just like, how much are you going to build into, like, your first cost versus what you're going to pay for as part of a tenant, ti, right? Like a lot of the developers have tis where you really a lot of this, we're talking about shifting costs from, you know, into ti buckets and the base bucket, right? So at the end of the day, how you you balance all those levers, that's a complex equation, you know, and you know based on what a client needs.
Joseph Chase 59:08
I mean, we can even look at strategies that are, you know, less elaborate than what you know Disney did, still achieve these results, but maybe come with other ways to think about how to plan the floor plate, right? Like we're, we're doing a project right now in Midtown. It's a spec developer office building where we're trying to do all electric off of a localized VRF system, right, which just puts VRF like, in a behind a louver on every floor, right? Like this is like, a more bare bones way to do this, you know that's tight, very specific size limitations and floor plate sizes. And there's other things about the constraints around the coolants that are used in those systems. There's ways to like work through it, other ways. But really it's just about like, balancing really a lot. Of those interests based on what the client needs and how they plan to operate the building.
Atif Z. Qadir 1:00:03
And for anyone that may not know what VRF is, could you just briefly explain what that is?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 1:00:10
VRF is is variable refrigerant flow. So it's another commercially available means for heating and cooling that essentially uses the kind of the same Carno refrigeration cycle, but it's basically a very split refrigeration system where you get to take advantage of a piece of device that's rejecting heat to the out of doors in one location, and then refrigerant piping is piped between the two components that ultimately provide the cooling or heating to the space. It's a cost effective way to minimize it minimizes duct work. It's a great for retrofit solution, because you can the refrigerant piping is much smaller than a duct emanating out from a central location. So it's a, it's often an approach used in the residential marketplace and some of the other smaller commercial areas. So it's a, it's got its benefits in unique ways. And it's a, that's a it's a good approach for the project Joe is describing.
Joseph Chase 1:01:01
Yeah, it's tied to scale, right? Like, a lot of this stuff, like any building, right is, like, you got to balance the scale of the building and what's, what's the right system for that size of a building, right? You always got to say is, is the system, you know, right sized for this, this particular client, particular approach.
Atif Z. Qadir 1:01:18
So energy efficiency notification in general, and from what we learned is it's a continuum of strategies where it's not like I'm doing it and I'm or I'm not doing it, and local law 97 in particular applies to buildings that are 25,000 square feet. And over a significant amount of the million or so buildings in the city of New York are under 25,000 square feet, so they wouldn't be subject to the fines that you're describing, so those owners would likely have the ability to wait and do that monetary calculus, as opposed to having to also consider in increasing fines when deciding what to do or how to improve their buildings. Do you have any tips, or you mentioned like low hanging fruits for, say, owners that fall below that local law 97 threshold to get quick wins in terms of energy efficiency?
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 1:02:07
Yeah, I think maybe the first one roughly off the bat right is, is envelope tightening your envelope, right where the energy usage is always you know, where energy is escaping is through. You know, window seals and doors and what have right? So any way you can button up and insulate and tighten your envelope, that's right off the bat. And you know, we heard a lot in the residential marketplace. This below 25,000 is a lot of multifamily here in New York City, some smaller buildings. But heat pumps is something we hear a lot about in the residential marketplace, and many of them on the marketplace. A lot of manufacturers the refrigerants being used are have low global warming, right? So in terms of, like, everyone's stewardship to kind of what the general mission is of reducing carbon emissions, there's plenty of solutions in that, that smaller building scale, between envelope, window, ceiling and coming off of fossil fuel gas, if you have a, you know, an oil furnace or a natural gas furnace and converting to a heat pump. It's all over the place in the residential marketplace.
Joseph Chase 1:03:05
Yeah, I would also add to you know, the city is doing a lot to encourage it's not just, you know, trying to provide penalties, even for us, let's call it small developers doing smaller work. There is incentives now built into the zoning code that allow you to deduct, you know, 5% of your floor area you choose to upgrade your existing building into electrification, right? So they they've also just sort of provided incentives for people who take this on, right? If you, if you are someone less than 25,000 square feet, and you are currently not electrified, you could go electrified, and you can build 5% more area, right? That's another potential tenant you can get on a building, on a penthouse or something, right, or a unit in the back, right? Like there's, there's ways that this is also incentivizing, sort of smaller developers, smaller people in the city, to be able to help add square footage. And we're, we are talking largely about residential buildings, right? So like that helps add more residential units to a city that's desperately in need of, you know, residential housing.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 1:04:10
Right. There's, as Joe mentioned, there's, there's so many incentive programs that are opening on a rolling basis with a lot of money to be given out that either can cover the soft cost of consulting fees to kind of help with the design approach, or even the acquisition of the equipment that you're going to install and do some of the work. NYSERDA has a lot of programs. There's constantly something out there. And, you know, managing the landscape of what's available there. There's plenty of monies available to help guide developers to start, begin taking these approaches.
Atif Z. Qadir 1:04:39
Those are really great points for building owners and developers of all scales, for folks that are listening, that are developers, that are owners that want to explore the process of electrification for existing buildings or newer buildings that they're working on, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you guys?
Joseph Chase 1:04:56
Well, I think you know, like you know. Just reach out. I mean, I think all Max and I both have, you know, a presence on the Internet, right? Like, I think, yeah, you can go to som.com and sort of, like, sort of get our contact information there. I mean, I think, you know, between, you know, SOM and JB&B, we do a lot of just feasibility studies for developers who don't know what they want to do, right? Like where we would just sit down and help them program a strategy that, you know, they may choose or not choose to execute, right? So I think those kind of services, I think, you know, we offer those kind of, what's called consultancy services that don't necessarily need to be part of a project. So I think just reach out and we can talk about a game plan to try to get, you know, the city more electrified. Because, you know, we're, we're dedicated, you know, at som to try to push this forward. I mean, I think we've got, you know, a strong ethical drive to make things happen beyond just the meeting of the code requirements, right? So, like we're very much interested in trying to get the city electrified.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 1:05:59
I will completely echo what Joe said, and I think our our firms are culturally aligned with that approach. And, you know, we feel the same way reach out, you know, navigating the landscape of those incentive monies that are available, we have some, some in house expertise for that. So all the above exactly what Joe said, completely agree, amazing.
Atif Z. Qadir 1:06:16
So thank you so much for your time today, Joe and Max really appreciate learning about the Disney headquarters and the process of electrification, so thank you again.
Maxwell Hatfield-Biondo 1:06:27
Yeah, great conversation.
Joseph Chase 1:06:29
Yeah. Thank you for having us. This was a blast.
Atif Z. Qadir 1:06:33
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 americanbuildingpodcast.com.