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’s guests are architect Andrew Herdeg, Partner at Lake Flato, and David Meaney, a faculty member of biomedical engineering, a Senior Associate Dean, and the Vice Provost for Research at the University of Pennsylvania. Lake Flato is a practice known for warm, contextual, human-centered architecture that prioritizes craft and sustainability. Andrew brings deep experience designing buildings that read as part of the landscape while delivering modern performance. David represents Penn’s planning and facilities interests, guiding project goals around technology and community for this major research university. Today we’re talking about Amy Gutmann Hall, a mass-timber academic building on Penn’s campus that was designed to bring warmth and human scale to a technical program. We’ll cover why Penn chose mass timber, the challenges during construction, the human experience the design aims to create, and what this building signals about the future of campus architecture. Thanks so much for being here, Andrew and David.
Andrew Herdeg 01:41
Thank you, Atif.
Dave Meaney 01:43
Thank you for joining.
Atif Z. Qadir 01:44
Of course. So, Andrew, walk us through your path as an architect, and highlight a few of the projects along the way that shaped your values as a designer.
Andrew Herdeg 01:56
Yeah, I grew up in southern Pennsylvania. Actually, our firm is based in Texas, but I grew up about 40 minutes south of Penn, out in the country near Chad's Ford, Pennsylvania. I think growing up out in the country, spending hours wandering in the woods, riding, I just developed an affinity for being in nature, and so as I started my professional practice, I really looked for firms and projects that allowed me to explore the relationship between the built environment and the natural environment, and it's what Lake Flato has been doing for, you know, since its inception, 40 years ago or so. My early projects were a combination of environmental visitor centers, some residences, and I slowly, kind of worked my way up in scale to these complex University and research facilities like at Penn. And so I've been able to stretch some of that sensibility into projects or kind of a market that typically doesn't, maybe explore those ideas. And so it's been fun bringing some of those fresh ideas to these larger, complex research facilities.
Atif Z. Qadir 03:07
So that's from the book ending of what you're talking about, from what you started with, what you're working on now. There is nothing more human scale than a home and then being able to bring those qualities, I'm guessing, that's detail, materiality, the way that people move through a space that's akin to a home, into a research and a work and a student environment, is that the kind of the thesis that you're talking about?
Andrew Herdeg 03:31
I think that's a lot of it Atif, yes, I think just knowing the range of experiences that people want to have in their in their life, in their day, and to create relationships as intimate spaces. So a lot of what we were doing with Dave was trying to quote the institutionalize a really important institutional building, but yes, lend some of the residential scale and experiences to Dave's daily life and all of his colleagues.
Atif Z. Qadir 04:00
So contextualize this within the context of the portfolio work that your firm has done overall. So we know from what described your national firm, you've done projects of a lot of scales, but give us like the sweet spot of what you guys really have done in the past and continue to do.
Andrew Herdeg 04:16
Yeah. So we are really broad based. I think we're more diverse than most firms are we work from very small scale of private residential and very small environmental visitor centers and education centers up through K through 12, private schools, higher education. We do planning work at an urban scale, so in urban development, and it tends to look all fairly unique, because we're always designing to context, to place, to environmental context. And it's the thread that kind of ties all that work together is the notion that architecture can be a tool to connect people. Place into the natural environment. And so you know when you're in a lake Plato building because of the sensibility of it, but it may not look anything like another one.
Atif Z. Qadir 05:09
So Dave, on your side, you began your career at Penn on the academic side in biomedical engineering as a faculty member. And then you have the dual role in terms of administrative responsibilities. So tell us more about your background within academia and how you made that transition, and your interest within real estate and buildings overall at the university.
Dave Meaney 05:35
Yeah. So one of the things that you realized in academia is that as you become a professor, and you start your career, you really focus on two things, building your own original research program, and then teaching the classes that allow you to really understand a lot of the concepts that you're using in your research program. And then over time, you think a bit more, at least in my case, about how does a university work, and what does it mean when we start building a community of researchers that exist at the university? And to maybe echo a little bit on Andrew's comments, you can almost think of a university as a neighborhood homes, and those homes have different styles. They have different sizes. And in fact, in each of the homes, they might have a different constellation of rooms.
Dave Meaney 06:28
They might have some common features. But in the end, a campus is really a collection of research homes, if you will. And what I really became attracted to was the notion of, how do we plan these neighborhoods around themes that are not limited to, say, one academic department or even one school for that matter, but are more themes that can connect to campus together. And one of the things that was really intriguing about this whole process was, when we first started it, we knew the area that the building was going to be representing the research area it was data science and later artificial intelligence. But what we really wanted to do was to find a partner that could help make that a really interesting and inviting home of data science and AI for the rest of campus. And that was, really, was part of the thing that both drew me to the position and was the most enjoyable part of the whole process.
Atif Z. Qadir 07:34
So overall, when you when you look at Penn's perspective in terms of place making and reinvention, expansion of the campus. What are some of the values that you hope that your work elicits and the and kind of encourages?
Dave Meaney 07:48
Yeah, we really think about three things when we think about these spaces. We think first about the people, and we think about the people from a very community standpoint. We want people from different academic backgrounds to feel comfortable with each other, to feel comfortable enough so that they can challenge each other, so that a good idea becomes a really outstanding idea, and we really think about our spaces to promote that type of collaborative effort. Penn is a very collaborative place. We have 12 schools, and for as many years as I've been here, I can't name a single instance where I was denied collaborating with someone. Everybody is very open about it, regardless of the school that they come from. We also think about proximity. We're a compact, urban campus. We have some interesting features as a campus. For example, we're an urban Arboretum. We have more than 3000 species of trees on our campus. So what it provides is this wonderful stroll through campus where you can visit any of your collaborators on campus within a 10 minute walk, and you can enjoy the walk on a way.
Dave Meaney 09:02
So the fact that we have each of us close to each other is a really both catalyzing part of that collaborative spirit, but it's also, I think, a key part of something that we want to bring into each of our buildings. And then the last part that we often talk about is how much of the work that we do on campus affects all of the world outside of campus. This notion of impact, and when you think about research at higher education, for decades now, there's been so many discoveries that have been sparked by that chance encounter at either the coffee machine, or, in our case, at the copy machine. There's a famous story of Drew Weissman and Katie Carrico, former colleagues here that won the Nobel Prize for their work on mRNA based vaccines, and they met at the copy machine copying articles, and they just struck up a conversation, and they create the technology that has saved millions of lives and is transforming medicine as we know it. So we we hold those types of stories very close. We wonder, could we build our buildings today so that we're creating at some point in the future, that copy machine moment that's already happened on campus, and that was part of what was interesting to me.
Atif Z. Qadir 10:27
So there's this lovely through line between Andrew, the way you described your work and your firm's work, and Dave, the way you describe those values that pen holds in in terms of the buildings that it wants to encourage this idea of home and community and this tie of the natural environment into the physical environment. So that said, Dave, tell me about the brief that was prepared for this project, and what were the key elements that were a part of that brief.
Dave Meaney 10:58
One of the things that we do when we consider building a building is we first think about the area. And as I mentioned before, at the time, data science and AI were really starting to gather some momentum.
Atif Z. Qadir 11:13
How long ago was this?
Dave Meaney 11:14
This was about eight years ago, okay? And just to give you some window into that process, we were having a lot of ideation discussions. Our current Engineering Dean, Vijay Kuhmar, had just been appointed Dean, and he was traveling and listening to a lot of people who were connected to the school in some way, and also talking to our faculty. And largely the question was, what is that next big thing that's just coming around the corner. And we started to hear narratives from people across all areas, including, say, medicine and material science and chemistry. And they were saying, you know, the science and the application of that science, and it feels like medicine was so reliant on these high resolution imaging microscopes that were now coming online in material science, the electronic health record and all of the other information, like genomic information, was becoming part of the clinical sciences.
Dave Meaney 12:18
So the amount of data was doubling at a rate we had never seen before in history. And we had some studies that we looked at, for instance, that if you looked in the 90s, the amount of data in the entire world would double on the order of once every decade, and we were in a time where it was doubling every 18 months. And so the the reality of data being data surrounding us and also informing the decision making that we have in all of these science areas, that was really the focus of our building. So we had to first think of the focus, and we had identified that.
Dave Meaney 13:00
The second part was we had to identify where we could build this building. And being a compact, urban campus, there were some sites available, but when we thought about the proximity factor that I just mentioned before, we wanted to make sure that we were close to the rest of the school, and the site that we selected certainly achieved that. And then finally, we thought about the community that we could create within a building. And Amy Gutmann Hall for us is what we call a mixed use building. We have classes in the building, we have labs in the building, we have research in the building, and we have communal spaces for study. So this mixed use building, the fact that you could do almost everything that you would imagine you'd want to do on a college campus in a single building, was also a real driving thematic input for the design.
Atif Z. Qadir 13:56
And then when you put that brief together, how did you choose the designers, the design teams that you wanted to approach with this brief?
Dave Meaney 14:03
Yeah, this was my first competition, so I came into my role at a time when we had put together the brief, we had talked about the scope of the building, we had talked about the site of the building, and we just had a small aspirational paragraph or two on what we wanted to achieve. And I learned that the process is that we put this out as a solicitation. Firms can respond to that solicitation. They come with these formal, written proposals and then these formal presentations. I felt a bit like a fish out of water in that, you know, I never done this before. But what was amazing to me is we had eight firms that was in the final round that we're choosing from.
Dave Meaney 14:49
They each interpreted what we put in our prospectus in a very different way. And it was remarkable to see all of the different ideas that were. Front of us, I was halfway through the process a bit concerned myself, because I loved every idea that I saw. And then, of course, Lake Flato appeared and just blew us away with the vision that they had for the building. So it was very clear to us that, you know, they really had our vision, and they could actually sharpen our vision and build our vision as a partner. And that started the process of eventually constructing Amy Gutmann Hall.
Atif Z. Qadir 15:32
So Andrew, from your perspective, when you saw that brief that Dave described what stood out for you and what was the initial framework for the design response that you gave to the competition brief?
Andrew Herdeg 15:43
Yeah, so I think our first read was just based on my personal experience, and not going back to where I started, but my recent experience, which was at the time we were working at Cornell, we were interviewing and had been visiting other campuses and consistently, what I experienced on other campuses were buildings that were dedicated to technology, whether that was stem of any sort or data science, but especially data and computer science, buildings that were designed to celebrate technology. And they were very futuristic, and we saw a really interesting kind of juxtaposition of the role of nature and technology and human experience that led us to a place that was about thinking about this building as celebrating the human experience, but housing technology.
Andrew Herdeg 16:46
And so we also knew that Penn was very committed to sustainability. They had a very clear and aspirational carbon reduction plan for their campus. The way Penn does it and many institutions like Penn is it's a multi round process where you submit a preliminary you talk about your firm, you do a secondary, answer some questions, and then there's an interview. And we had a kind of a consistent message from the very beginning was, which was let's think about this building in terms of human experience, how we connect people to the natural environment while celebrating the technology that is amazing, technology that's within the building. And we started to move the conversation to, I think mass timber is a solution that will impact lots of touch points within your value system. And the last round was interview, and we went into the interview and showed them two different designs. And the point was, mass timber is part of this, but in there are lots of ways to kind of solve your problem. And we wanted to give them options to see how we would think. And we talked about connecting to natural daylight and scales of spaces and how mass timber would impact the experience, but also impact their carbon goals.
Andrew Herdeg 18:07
And I think they were very interested, intrigued from the beginning, and it was a pretty big challenge, because there had not been a large mass timber building in Philadelphia. This was the first of its kind in urban Philadelphia, Penn had used parts of mass timber on other buildings, some glue lands, or some, you know, some wood decking, but a full mass timber building, they had not so there was a regulatory challenge. There was, you know, a kind of a cultural shift, and there's also a process shift. We felt very concerned that we needed to rethink the procurement process, the approvals and procurement process, in order to be successful. And to Penn's credit, to Dave's credit, and you know, Vijay Kumar's credit, they were very good. They were trusting, and we collaborated really well with the contractor, Gilbane. And I have to say that we had a partner firm involved, who was KSS, and KSS and Lake Flato started from the very beginning in this process, and they were integral throughout, and they were integral to the success of the building in general.
Atif Z. Qadir 19:21
So from the big picture perspective, what were the key elements that needed to be included in the in the building from a program perspective?
Andrew Herdeg 19:32
So from a programmatic standpoint, the building is about 45% academic space. So as Dave mentioned earlier, general classrooms, auditorium, gathering space, electrical labs in various teaching labs, and then the remainder was primarily research labs and offices, and we organized the building in a way that put the. Classrooms and student oriented spaces on the first couple floors to make it accessible and and kind of create a critical mass of energy of student energy on those lower floors. And then we put the research zones on the upper three and a half floors to give them a little bit of privacy, but also give them some of the best views. They're the ones spending 1012, hours in these research labs, and so they really deserve to get the very best experience. So that's how it's that's organized, generally.
Atif Z. Qadir 20:32
And then in terms of the collaboration and those interactions at the copier, or today's version of that, what did you see as those opportunities within the program that you described where those interactions could occur?
Andrew Herdeg 20:48
So a couple of things were going on at this time. We were designing just before and during covid, and the marketplace was changing. So what we try to do in our buildings is, in some ways, celebrate the banal. And what I mean by that is everyday things that people have to do, like copying or getting a cup of coffee or taking a break and listening to some music. We try to make that a communal experience, and we try to put it in places where it offers opportunities for people to engage. And so every floor has a little what we call the hospitality station, rather than the break room being behind a wall and down the hall, it's right out in the middle and invite it invites you to sit, have a cup of coffee, have a snack and talk, and it's visually accessible from your research zone, so you don't feel like you have to wander too far, and you see your friend having a seat, and you think, Okay, now it's time to go take a break, and you go join them for a cup of coffee or something.
Andrew Herdeg 21:55
And so the same thing for copiers and other things, we try to make them easily accessible. But what we learned during covid really impacted the research environment, because the data science researchers, in my experience, are super heads down people. They get in a zone they're working on their project, and if they're easily disturbed, it's really problematic for their process. What we heard was, if someone takes me out of my zone, it takes me 15 minutes to get back in. So every interruption is a real risk to my making good progress. So we had to rethink things like copiers and coffee stations and all that, relative to the workplace and things like what we're doing right now on Zoom, they're actually quite disruptive. So how do we support a work environment that is really trying to find a level of privacy and concentration and focus, but make all of those needs and amenities immediately accessible. So that was one of the big challenges we had with the research zones. And it was a fun challenge working with Dave and all of his team, kind of testing ideas and testing the scale of spaces and and all of that.
Dave Meaney 23:19
And I can add, remember these sessions, especially during the pandemic, where we knew at the beginning this was a community of scientists, that most of them could easily stay home and do their work and maybe come to campus a day a week or two days a week. And at the beginning of the process, just before the pandemic, we were talking about how to make this a destination building, a building that you'd want to come to and sit in for more than a day or two a week. And then, of course, the health and safety concerns in the midst of the pandemic were really challenging some of our design considerations. So for instance, if you had a community of students and trainees in a very large room because you wanted this open environment, was it safe?
Dave Meaney 24:09
I remember these times, and thankfully, with Lake Flato's help, we really navigated through some community conversations about how these spaces could look Andrew's point, how big can they be, so that they still feel intimate and that they don't feel like a warehouse. And I think we found the right balance, and I think we also incorporated things that were becoming more commonplace then, but you can see them every day now, phone booths, for instance, so people can have these private conversations instead of stepping out into the hallway where you think it's private, but there's four other people having a conversation in the hallway. I mean, that's the imperfect nature of some of these historic spaces that we have around us. So we could really design around that. I think that helped quite a bit.
Atif Z. Qadir 27:52
So you're talking about the ways of encouraging people to come together through their programming as a key aspect of that, the human scale, and the ability to make a space feel very welcoming on an even smaller scale, in terms of material choices, what was the beginning point and where did you end up in the materials and some of the architectural details to help deliver that sense of place with the interiors?
Dave Meaney 28:18
One of the things that we Did when Lake Flato presented us with the ideas when they were a finalist, they took us through a process, and I would call it a due diligence, to compare a mass timber building and the cost of the mass timber to construct it versus a standard steel and concrete and our buildings at Penn are supported significantly by our donors. They help us build these buildings. So as part of their stewardship, we want to make sure that we're getting the value from this. And it was remarkable to me, the difference was incredibly small between mass timber and steel and concrete. I think it was less than a million dollars on $130 million project. And of course, the environmental benefits were tremendous using mass timber compared to the standard steel and concrete. So we cleared that hurdle early in the process.
Dave Meaney 29:18
And what was interesting to me, as I learned through Andrew and his colleagues, what does it mean when you design mass timber in terms of the structure, so how much of a free span can you have on the interiors before you need to have a post, and if you compare that to traditional buildings that were being built at that time. What does that mean for the interior? What does it feel like? And ultimately, I think this is one of the benefits of mass timber, in that it creates a more intimate space, not just because of the material itself, but because of the structure that's created. Andrew knows the dimensions of the span and whatnot. But I have to say that they really educated us on on those parts of the design as well.
Atif Z. Qadir 30:05
And Andrew, did you want to weigh in as well?
Andrew Herdeg 30:09
Yeah. I mean, from the beginning, as I mentioned, this idea of bringing nature, natural, tactile materials into the environment would help frame a warmth and reinforce the experience that I think people were looking for and with mass timber, once you invest in that system, you really want to celebrate it. But there's this kind of interesting rule of thumb, which is, while you want to expose as much of the mass timber as you can. So Columns, Beams, ceiling, deck, which is the CLT, all of that is exposed. You also want to contrast it with other materials to help the wood have its presence and its its character. If everything is wood, it it becomes ubiquitous, and it loses its special.
Andrew Herdeg 31:03
So the palette was one of contrast, and it played into the color scheme as well, that while the wood is exposed, we contrast it with kind of dark felt panels, dark green, dark charcoal. And that contrast between the light wood and the rich, dark materials, wall panels, acoustic panels, some steel detailing. It really allows the wood to sing. And so I think playing in that contrast was really great. The other thing that played into it was the color scheme. And again, we thought about hospitality spaces rather than institutional spaces. And so bringing in a fresh color palette, there's some, you know, natural greens, there's some roses and some pinks, some blues, some really pleasing colors that you typically don't see and in research or institutional environments, but again, that was a really nice combination with the natural wood, and it felt very rich in a way, and really allowed the wood to come forward as as a character defining element within The experience or spaces.
Atif Z. Qadir 32:20
So the wood, both as a structural element and as an interior finish, plays into the environmental footprint of the building. So Dave and Andrew, could you talk to me about what Penn's sustainability goals were for the building and how the material choices and say, MEP systems played into into that?
Dave Meaney 32:47
I can give you the perspective that we were aspiring to at the beginning of the project, when maybe some of the steps that we had to take any new building on Penn's campus in general, we want to achieve the highest level of sustainability possible. We're also balancing budget constraints. Again, we want to be responsible stewards of the support. But at the same time, we want to be responsible stewards of the environment as well. So you know, with the lead status, which I was only mildly familiar with, we were seeking the highest lead status possible. And in the end, we made some changes during the pandemic that were for the benefit of the occupants of the building, which meant that we had to slightly upgrade the HVAC systems a bit, just to ensure that, especially in the height of the pandemic, we have the safest environment possible, and that, if we just we're just shy of the lead platinum designation. And I think we're now lead gold, if I'm not mistaken, Andrew and but we took every step possible, and we're actually quite proud of the product that came of it.
Atif Z. Qadir 34:03
So one of those elements that I really want to focus on is mass timber. So Andrew, earlier on, you mentioned that that was one of the key elements in the proposal that you gave to Dave and his team during the competition phase. Could you talk about how you landed on mass timber as opposed to a more traditional concrete or steel framing for such a type of institutional building, and where they went from there.
Andrew Herdeg 34:29
Yeah. So it started with this juxtaposition of technology and the natural environment and sustainability and the most cost effective way to get to a building that was warm, tactile, inviting, all the characteristics we understood that they are looking for was to use a mass timber structural system. It was an integrated approach. So rather than a steel structure, a concrete structure that you then clad, or you pay for wall panels. And wood ceiling panels and soffits just use the systems that are integrated into the building and are critical or necessary make those out of wood. And so that was the trajectory. And in doing so, part of the sustainability was not just that wood is a sustainable carbon sequestering material, but it is that we were eliminating extraneous materials. So we no longer needed to cover walls or some walls with chipboard. We didn't need to put in lay in ceilings. We didn't need to cover the steel with paint. So it allowed us to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the building by the elimination of extraneous and the end result was there are different ways of measuring carbon reduction, and the Amy Gutmann Hall is somewhere between 52% and 70% reduction in embodied carbon for the building and the building process, which is a really, really strong metric. I think in general, we're seeing about a 50% reduction across the board in embodied carbon, in embodied carbon, yeah.
Andrew Herdeg 36:17
And we do our own life cycle analyzes on all of our projects, we're measuring that early on in the process. And As Dave said, the cost analysis was really important. So we were building cost models with Gilbane and our estimators very early on, and that was part of the success of the project, as I mentioned earlier, because we front loaded so many of these conversations, as well as the design, it enabled Penn to make the decision to move forward with mass timber, basically at the beginning of schematic design, and it's that point when we started to engage with the market. So at the end of schematic design, we were then able to go to the market to start to procure the mass timber.
Andrew Herdeg 37:03
And what we call in the industry, which is shifting left, we're shifting the procurement and the contractor engagement left or to the beginning of the schedule. It was a major contributor to getting a very highly integrated building and getting the subs comfortable. So you're in the process, you're basically de risking the project, because the subs, the contractors, the suppliers, are engaging earlier. So by the time they're asked to offer a GMP, they really get it. They understand how it's going to work. You've been able to incorporate, or we've been able to incorporate their concerns or their recommendations, and it's why the building, at time of bid, came in significantly under budget. It eventually got right back to budget, because we added some things back in, and a variety of things, which is all good, that's what you want, is you want to maximize value. But it was that kind of shifting left that afforded us that opportunity.
Atif Z. Qadir 38:07
So you mentioned the savings in terms of the coverings for the structure. So not needing fireproof prior for painting and domestic paint, no need for interconnections, like flanges and other ways of connecting systems together. Could you talk like take a step back? Could you talk about what exactly mass timber is and how it's built for any folks that may not be aware?
Andrew Herdeg 38:31
Yeah, so mass timber is highly engineered, laminated wood, and there are a variety of species you can use, and depending on the region from which is being harvested, there are factories in the southeast that use Southern Yellow Pine. They're, you know, factories production the Northwest, where they use a lot of Doug Fir. We ended up using a group out of central Canada, out of Quebec, that uses a lot of Black Spruce and Pine. And one of the advantages of mass timber is, rather than harvesting large old growth trees to use as structure, you're harvesting very small trees that can grow and re harvest on a very fast pace, and so they're constantly harvesting planting. And you then laminate all the members together to get a really strong structural member, and it's used for columns and beams and even floor plates.
Andrew Herdeg 39:41
And the floor plates are there lots of different versions. There's NLT, which is nail laminated timber. There's DLT, dowl laminated timber, which uses more traditional two by members that are stacked up and then laminated all into a plank. What we used was cross laminated timber, which is basically two by members that are laminated together in different crisscrossing layers. And you can do a three layer of 579, and so the thickness then translates to the span capabilities and the fire rating and, okay, most of your carbon is actually in that CLT is in the floor plank. So finding that sweet spot between structural Bay and span and thickness of CLT is really the important equation to drive down your carbon and also the pulp. You know, the wood, less wood you use, the less cost it is. And so there's an important equation, and there are softwares now, and even engineering firms that have software that kind of use AI to quickly test different configurations and allows you to get to an optimum sizing pretty quickly. There's a site called generate that is, that's what they do. I mean, they it's, it really has increased efficiency, sped up the design process using softwares like generate.
Atif Z. Qadir 41:21
And the reason for that software is to optimize how the piece of wood is cut, to maximize strength and minimize waste, is that the concept?
Andrew Herdeg 41:32
It's really about the sizing of the laminations. You can take a three ply panel, kind of off the shelf. They're made every day, or a five panel. But if you can figure out that base spacing that allows you to use that three ply panel that works with your fire rating and works with your base spacing for the spaces, as Dave said, that's how you're going to save money, make it cost effective, but also drive down the carbon.
Atif Z. Qadir 42:01
So Gilbain was involved early in terms of pricing. Your subs were involved early, I guess those were the structural erection subs. What was the procurement process like, overall, for mass timber? Where is it coming from? How is it getting to site?
Andrew Herdeg 42:18
Yeah, oftentimes projects, especially under a CMR, construction manager at risk, which is the typical procurement process for institutions like Penn, you wait until construction documents. So you wait until you're 60% of the way through, or even 100% through, and you go to market and you get a bid. And what we knew we needed to do, because of the how new this was to this market, and some of the anxiety around the product was we needed to accelerate that procurement. So our process looked like getting pen approval on the system on mass timber. By the time we started schematic design, we then started to go to the market, talk to mass timber fabricators about systems and costs, things like that, through Gilbane, and then we went to the market at the end of schematic design with a design package that was structural MEP architecture, full schematic package, and we asked mass timber fabricators to bid on it. Okay? And that was the end of schematic. They came back at the 50% DD and offered numbers. And then we brought them on fully at the end of design development, but they were engaged to a large extent during DD, and it allowed us to really begin to integrate mechanical systems, plumbing, electrical, structural systems, acoustics. Each of the manufacturers has slightly different sizing, whether they're domestic or international, and so identifying who you're working with, getting the fabrication team engaged and involved in the design process, identifying exactly what your member sizes are really reduces ambiguity and allows you to kind of move much more quickly.
Atif Z. Qadir 44:23
Okay, so you mentioned sourcing, both domestically and internationally, about 80% of the software that's used for structure within the United States comes from Canada, which has had a roller coaster of tariffs this year. Could you talk about any considerations that you had to balance in terms of, say, newness of suppliers or other issues that added to the complexity of the procuring process, knowing that the tariffs were probably after the fact, since you guys were done already by then?
Andrew Herdeg 44:58
Yeah, so I think the biggest concern relative for Penn was it was a Union City, and the ambiguity that creates is because it was new and union, it was unclear whether or not the steel union or the woodworking woodworkers would try to take that contract or, you know, want to bid on it. In fact, of all the conversations we had, we probably talked about unions more than we talked about, you know, fireproofing for that matter. But we work with an industry trade group called Woodworks. They work with Gilbane, and they did training programs with both unions. So it allowed them to get involved, understand, train personnel, and it kind of reduced anxiety and got people engaged early on. So that was the biggest risk.
Andrew Herdeg 45:55
The other risk, or just concern, was how to bring it in. Bringing in product from Europe into the port of Philadelphia was seen as a challenge, and so bringing it in on rail or truck was really the preferred so in some ways that you know, made the European providers out of Austria and Germany. It created some risk there. There are also new plants at the time, just coming online in the southeast, in Arkansas and that area. And they were super cost competitive, very aggressive, but there was real concern that they really hadn't produced anything. It was really a futures contract, in a way. And so we ended up going with a group out of central Canada called Nordic, or Nordic, and they were fantastic collaborators. They have a beautiful product, very light blonde wood, and they're just a very experienced and one of the best things about Nordique is they're vertically integrated, so they manage their own forests, they produce their own product, and then they're part of the delivery installation. So it's a really for Penn, it was a very good fit, simply because of the integration. It eliminated ambiguity and reduce risk for Gilbane and for Penn.
Atif Z. Qadir 47:24
So for the union perspective, is the logic that the size and scale of these members are more akin to steel, and the process of putting into place is more akin to steel, yet the tools that are necessary for working with this material is more akin to the Woodworkers. And is that why there's this ambiguity?
Andrew Herdeg 47:42
Yeah, generally, the erection process is most like steel, right? You're picking up members using your crane and dropping them in and bolting them into place. So yes, this steel team would understand it, but yeah, it's wood, and so the woodworkers felt an affinity to it. So at the end of the day, Nordic brought in kind of a skeleton team, and then Gilbane brought in a team. And so it was a good collaboration. The unions were not a barrier in any way. It all worked out, but it was just working through that process that was critical.
Atif Z. Qadir 48:16
Amazing. So the building is built. It's occupied. Dave, could you walk us through the experience of entering through the building and going through it for listeners who hopefully will come and visit the building in the future?
Dave Meaney 48:31
Yeah, the building has an interesting dimensionality to it. It's a long, thin building, and it has a southern exposure. This is was an interesting part of a plot plan, and it was optimized by Lake Flato and the design, that's the primary glass facade of a building. I mentioned that because the first thing that you see when you walk in is daylight, and as Andrew mentioned, it was really meant to be a very public collaborative space on the ground floor of the building. We have an auditorium. We teach classes there, but there's also, you might think of it as an expanded living room. There's couches or comfortable seating. There's living wall that's there, so you're greeted by not just the timber, but the ambience of a comfortable space. And it's a very bright space.
Dave Meaney 49:30
It's also interesting, even on overcast days, of course, you get the in REC light, and that still illuminates the space. So the luminescent lighting that you have is really not noticed at all in the daytime. It's necessary at night. And then as you spiral up the building, the main staircase is immediately to your left. As you enter the building, you walk up, and because the purpose of the building becomes less classroom focused and now laboratory focused, and then research lab focused. You enter different spaces that are each communal in their own right. They're populated with group study rooms, so to have this collaborative learning space. But as you elevate up in the building and you walk into the areas that have the southern facade, you actually get a very different perspective of campus as you start moving up.
Dave Meaney 50:27
So, for example, the top floor of the building, it's thematically focused on data science and AI and health, and it's the only floor of the building which has an elevation high enough so that you can see the health system, you can see the medical school, and we think that's actually quite symbolic because of the focus of the floor itself. There's other areas on another floor. We have what's called the Knight Center for Media, Technology and Democracy. It understands how social media, traditional media, come together and form not just our opinions, but maybe even our voting styles. It's a fascinating data science driven interdisciplinary center. It looks across and it has the best view of the Law School, which happens to be its partner school in forming that. So you can look down campus. You can see the Wharton School.
Dave Meaney 51:23
And you also see the campus itself and the foliage of campus. So you can imagine now we're recording in the fall. We have this nice yellow and orange hue on campus. I was just in Amy Gutmann Hall this morning, primarily because I wanted to go into the student collaboration space on the third floor, because they have this beautiful vista just above the trees where you can see all the fall colors, and you can look down the street and you can see it all. Not surprisingly, it was filled with students. So the other thing that you get is what Andrew and his team imagined at the beginning. This is a vibrant people filled space, and you see people talking, collaborating in the study rooms. We learned that when we first planned the space, we thought it would be about 60% full when we opened the doors, the study spaces soon became 100% full within a month. But that's a good problem to have.
Atif Z. Qadir 52:24
That's a great problem to have.
Dave Meaney 52:26
Yeah, the students vote with their fee. And not only were engineering students looking to use those spaces, but students from all parts of campus were looking to use the space.
Atif Z. Qadir 52:38
So as you look at the strategy for Penn in terms of campus reinvention, campus expansion. Do you see a place for mass timber and other kind of unusual materiality around innovative buildings having a role in future projects that it'll be coming down the pipe?
Dave Meaney 52:59
Yeah, I do think that it really has reset the standard not just in how the building was constructed, in the careful and thoughtful way that we it was a very cost effective building, but also the way in which we think of our buildings to be much more in harmony with our environment, rather than standing in contrast with the environment. I think that's a lesson that we that's a lesson that we've learned from the building. We're at a point now of where we don't have a lot of large building projects that we're imagining for the near future, but you know, like any campus, we will always have a sense of renewal about ourselves, and especially with such an historic campus. One of the things we're mindful of is that we try to preserve a lot of the original architecture, but also keep in mind the new architecture. And maybe we could be one of those points where we could showcase some of the new architecture. And I think that's what mass temper for us represents. It's certainly a look towards the future.
Atif Z. Qadir 54:01
Excellent. One thing I did forget to ask you is, is there any particular ask that you have of listeners, in terms of any types of people that should reach out to you, in the case of Andrew, potential clients, or anything you want to to ask listeners at the end?
Andrew Herdeg 54:17
I think the big ask is just an open mind. I think there's lot of hesitancy. I can appreciate that when you build 120,000 square foot six story urban building, or even larger, that contemplating all timber wood structure is counterintuitive to some, but our technology, our science, our design capabilities, it's not only the right thing to do because of carbon reduction, because of human experience, because of you know, advancing technologies. Just ask people to keep an open mind and explore. It's a huge responsibility to design and build our urban environment, our built environment, especially for universities that build for 100 years or more, and we need to take that responsibility really seriously and and put in the effort to know we're doing the right thing. And I think mass timber can play a big role in that.
Atif Z. Qadir 55:24
Amazing. How about you, Dave, any any folks that should reach out to you or type people you want to connect with?
Dave Meaney 55:30
Yeah, certainly we're an open campus. So for anyone that's interested in seeing Amy Gutmann Hall, they could certainly take advantage of that. The other thing that it's a bit more philosophical in this day and age when we think about technology and the implications of technology, to me, one of the features of Amy Gutmann Hall that resonates with me is here's a building where we really tried to bring nature and community into what might be considered a very aseptic domain technology, you know, technology is not often viewed as, you know, intersecting or collaborative with the environment, and it's a very different feel. And I think that's it's going to imbue the kind of work that's being done in that space. I mentioned this center for media, technology and democracy. So to think about how these fields touch on every part of society, maybe the environment that Amy Gutmann Hall provides gives
Atif Z. Qadir 56:35
That's a terrific prompt for folks to imagine the spaces that they are in, and then imagine what those could be in the future as well. So thank you so much for your time today, Andrew and Dave, and I really enjoyed learning about Amy Gutmann Hall.
Andrew Herdeg 56:52
Thank you, Atif.
Atif Z. Qadir 56:53
Absolutely.
Atif Z. Qadir 56:57
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.