Spring is finally here, with a new normal emerging. We believe that the best marketing strategy is informed by a thorough understanding of market conditions, the emerging technology landscape, and evolving consumer preferences.

Below are the pieces that we have found most helpful, and we hope that they do the same for you.

01 | Fast Company

➤ The 10 most innovative architecture companies of 2021
Studio Gang, SGA, Gensler, Forensic Architecture, and more are addressing today’s pressing needs and anticipating tomorrow’s.

• Architecture practices spent 2020 responding to the pandemic, adapting and building new skillsets for changing needs, and bringing future thinking for developments and placemaking endeavors that will be completed years, even decades from now.

• Studio Gang successfully made the case for more vertical height for affordable housing for MIRA in San Francisco. Turenscape’s “landscape diplomacy” in China creates a statement of harmony between the land and people. Los Angeles-based LA Más brings elevated design to efficient backyard houses and community-driven streetscape improvements. Blackspace advocates for Black voices and perspectives in the built environment/MASS Design Group’s collective’s not-for-profit model has led to adapting hospital designs for increased patient flow.

02 | Curbed

➤ Would You Want to Live in an Office Tower on East 38th Street?
Curbed asked an architecture firm to do a (theoretical) office to residential conversion.

• Class A office buildings will take some to recover, yet will remain desirable. What of Class B and C buildings, who have had to work harder before the pandemic? They will need new options, one an obvious solution: convert them to apartments, which are typically scarce in denser locales.

• Justin Davidson and the Curbed Team went to a New York firm, Architecture Research Office, to ask how they would approach this challenge. Principals Stephen Cassell, Kim Yao, and Adam Yarinsky chose 260 Madison Avenue, defined by Davidson as “a bad building by an architect who had once been good.” To provide a check on the developer side, David McCarty, an executive at Alloy Development was asked if the numbers worked. His answer was that their idea“…made a surprising amount of sense.”

03 | Bloomberg Wealth

➤ The Tactics People Are Using to Get Their Money Out of China
Finding ways around the rules is something of a national pastime.

• Moving money around the world and diversifying investment types is a tactic to protect and hedge family fortunes. People in China have been moving money out of the country for years; they’re just having to get more creative these days.

• Luxury development’s dependence on the ultra-wealthy global buyer is well documented in San Francisco to New York to London. The highly-desired “Asian buyer” (often hoped for in the form of an all-cash deal) is a highly-targeted demographic. If moving capital out of China (or elsewhere globally) becomes highly scrutinized or near to impossible, we can expect to see shifts in those markets.

04 | Atlanta Magazine

➤ At Atlanta’s first food forest, you can forage for mushrooms and pick medicinal herbs
From a government-designated food desert to a community-driven food forest.

• This is how a food desert becomes a Food Forest, and a case study for ways in which Placemaking can be enhanced to benefit a greater community. Originally planned as a condominium development, The Conservation Fund purchased the land in 2016 to transform the space to feed, educate, and engage the community.

• Beehives, flowers, healing herbs, fruits, vegetables, even mushroom beds provide additional educational opportunities in this total approach to holistic health and well-being. “For many of these kids, it’s their first time interacting with a fruit or vegetable in the ground,” says Michael McCord, the food forest’s ranger and Founder of Community Foodscapes.

05 | CNN

➤ High ground, high prices
How climate change is speeding gentrification in some of America’s most flooding-vulnerable cities

• Wealthier people are leaving or choosing to avoid climate-unstable locales, spurring increased housing prices and aggressive gentrification in areas with higher elevation. The result is often that lower-income Black and predominately minority communities are disproportionately affected.

• Casey Tolan describes how the trend will be partially-driven by retirees leaving properties or locales that become costlier and more difficult to maintain; it’s not only hipsters that drive gentrification. What can real estate development expect? More questions about flood zones, elevations, and climate risks, and a greater expectation of the public and private sectors to do the right thing for the communities most affected.

06 | gestalten

➤ Henning Larsen: Will The Pandemic Change Architecture?
Two architects from the Danish practice explore the future of design and reshaping urban spaces for the next generation.

• Are we participants in the next Industrial Revolution? As we return to work, particularly in urban locales, which is the quality of life that we expect? How do we want to interact with the buildings and built environments that we will live and work in?

• Lead Design Architect Franck Fdida and architect Kasia Piekarczyk share what has changed, is changing, and will change. Migration trends could spell troubling times for certain cities and their infrastructure, but they could also promise new opportunities and possibilities to others who are quick to react.

07 | Hoyne

➤ Reframing the Office as the Engine Room
Working from home may have some employee benefits but what we’re not talking about is its negative impact on innovation, delegation, and empowerment. 

• How do we make the office a more compelling and joyful destination that draws people back, and builds a resilience-focused strategy for commercial districts? This is a pivotal moment to reframe how we think about the physical environment that we work in. Hoyne just celebrated 30 years in the business of placemaking and place visioning, they are one of our favorite global collaborators to follow for inspiration.

• After a year at home wearing no shoes, what we will welcome most other than getting dressed up for work is the energy that comes with amplified inspiration, a focus on well-being, and great food - the Financial Times recently focused on Why food is on the menu for new office design.

08 | CityMonitor

➤ Why you’ll be hearing a lot less about ‘smart cities’
A growing backlash against big technology companies, combined with the pandemic, has led to diminishing enthusiasm for a term that once dominated the conversation around the future of cities.

• Smart Cities are here to stay, the nomenclature of “smart cities” is likely not. What does a ‘smart city’ really mean, what types of technology does a city need to truly advance, and what amount of transparency about data is needed for communities to get on board?

• Sommer Mathis and Alexandra Kanik, dive into what has happened and what may happen when the public sector meets the private sector’s pace of innovation and technology. On a sad note, we will miss CityMonitorAI’s perspective on real estate development; they were shuttered a few weeks ago.

09 | Los Angeles Times

➤ Rancho Mirage lands the country’s first 3-D-printed housing community
The desert city dotted with resorts and golf courses is about to get a jolt into the 21st century

• Oakland-based Mighty Buildings will be developing the United States’s first 3-D printed multifamily development of 15 homes over 5 acres in the Coachella Valley community by Palari, a developer and builder focused on sustainable homes and communities in California.

• Jack Flemming takes us through the presale campaign, which debuted in late February, buyers put down a 1K deposit to reserve a spot, cryptocurrency was accepted for the deposits, (two buyers paid in bitcoin), and pricing of the three-bedroom homes from $595,000.

10 | The Architect’s Newspaper

➤ Insert “Blank” Here
Harvard GSD’s Jennifer Bonner and engineer Hanif Kara talk timber futures

• Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) “blanks” are structural sheets composed of three-ply, five-ply, and seven-ply CLT panels. In 2020 Jennifer Bonner and Hasif Kara of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design organized a mass timber studio at the GSD around the “blank,” with students constructing everything from villas to high-rises.

• Samuel Media discusses with Bonner and Kara why CLT has more credibility than many sustainability-focused building products, how there is a danger of losing good design to the sustainability narrative, ultimately raising the question of whether architecture is “carving space or making space.”

11 | Bloomberg CityLab

➤ How Data Can Create Racial Equity
To address systemic racism, U.S. city leaders need to stop looking at their data in aggregate and start asking questions.

• What makes a city or a locale lauded as the “best place?” Often, it is not equally best for all people. What if we could use data to drive equity and social impact investments where they are needed most?

• KA Dilday takes us through how we can (and should) translate data to reflect the needs of all people. FUSE Corps has identified some of the factors that data should be aggregated across to measure equity namely Funding for Business Owners, Better Outcomes for Youth, and History Matters.

12 | Bisnow

➤ Picking Up The Pieces: Pandemic Inequities Pile More Pressure On To Female CRE Professionals

• Our founder Meghna Krishna Bondili spoke to Patrick Sisson about how the pandemic didn’t create inequity for women in real estate development, it simply amplified and multiplied the ones that were always there. Savills Executive Vice President Rebecca Humphrey said that last year, was an “exhausting, challenging balancing act,” especially for women who have felt the need to overperform and prove their status in a male-dominated industry.

• We must normalize these conversations, construct new approaches that work for women in the workforce, and provide a framework where they can thrive (whether they are mothers or not) so that they don't feel like their only option is complete exhaustion or to leave the workplace entirely.

13 | NPR

➤ 2021 Pritzker Prize Goes To French Architects Who 'Work With Kindness'

• Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, winners of 2021’s Pritzker Prize, are atypical winners of the most prestigious award in architecture, with their work applying the credo: "Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!" to their work on old urban buildings.

• Lacaton would rather rebuild spaces than destroy them; they look at demolition and displacement of people as an absolute last resort. They were asked to redesign a typical public housing bloc in Bordeaux in 2017, with residents not wanting to move but desiring bigger units. The solution, devised with fellow architects Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin, was to encase the building in large outdoor terraces, adding sliding glass doors to each unit, remaking the exterior from concrete to something gleaming, modern, and alive.

14 | Harvard Business Review

➤ So, You Think You’re Not Creative?
The work that will never be able to be replaced by artificial intelligence requires inherently human traits like creativity, curiosity, and imagination.

• Duncan Wardle shares ideas on how to push yourself to become more creative - “Run an energizer.” (get into a relaxed brain state). Ask, “Where else” (has this thing been done successfully?).“Reframe tasks.”(give yourself permission to think differently). Most importantly, ask “How might we eliminate a major pain point for customers?”

• That last question has driven our success. Launching Butterfly Voyage right into a pandemic, we had to become creative and iterate quickly with limited resources. In year two, we cross-pollinate our marketing expertise across real estate developers, real estate development & placemaking, and technology.

We will continue to curate, discover, and share. If you found this helpful, please forward it to a colleague or friend.

Butterfly Voyage offers Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) services to elevate the marketing strategy for real estate developers and new developments. Please reach out to meg@butterflyvoyage.com to begin the conversation.

A thank you to our Butterfly Voyage industry insiders and contributors. Their perspectives, insights discussion, and support were a key part of making every piece come to life.