The Voyage Brief | August 2020 | Thomson Reuters, Madame Architect, Treehugger, Accenture, MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab x EY, Strong Towns, And Monocle
Challenging moments offer companies + industries the opportunity to evolve and thrive. To do so in residential real estate development, we must challenge our current thinking, expand our knowledge base + actively seek out new perspectives to make decisions about existing and new assets.
The pieces below provided us with valuable strategic perspectives this month. We hope that they do the same for you.
01 | Thomson Reuters Foundation
➤ Sliding walls, hideable offices: How pandemic could change home design
Our San Francisco home was not designed to be the most used product of 2020. We have made the best of it; launching BV in 2020 from our living room, with an omnipresent three-year-old toddler (tiny human snack machine) punted from one working parent to another.
Sophie Davies discusses how city-dwellers around the globe are rethinking how they want to live, and what their expectations will be from the places that they call home in the future.
Floor plan design at scale brings the challenge of how to utilize square footage in the most efficient yet desirable + liveable manner; we need to be creative (and budget-conscious) than ever. There is no return to the office for our two-career family in the near future; long-term we know it won’t be the same. The big question is, what will the must-haves of our next home be?
02 | Madame Architect
➤ Gehry Partners' Dana McKinney on Designing Environments to Empower
For her Harvard GSD thesis, Dana McKinney focused on incarceration, one of the most powerful tools to disenfranchise communities of color. (keep reading, we know this is uncomfortable).
Per McKinney "My thesis transcended a design project, paper, or grade. It was my love letter to each environment that shaped me, the Black community and all who suffers at the hands of poor design."
Given our deep network within development, we’ve been asked “how” to incorporate Black collaborators. Simple. We must actively seek out Black perspectives; discovering them won’t happen via osmosis.
03 | Treehugger
➤ The 15-Minute City Is Having a Moment
How wonderful would it be if almost everything you needed in your daily life was within 15-minutes or less? Originally conceived for urban locales à la Jane Jacobs, Lloyd Alter takes this revisited concept even further by combining historical thinking with current consumer needs.
Alter points out that we are now in the middle of the Third Industrial Revolution (digital-focused), and how it will reshape the places in which we live, work, and experience for decades to come.
We believe that all development teams, including those in suburban locales, can benefit from this thinking as we explore what the customer journey + user experience of residential, mixed-use, and commercial development looks and feels like in the future.
04 | Accenture
➤ The Future Home in the 5G Era | ➤ Executive Excerpt
We live at home; we live in our cars, we are almost always fully connected in almost every aspect of our daily lives. 2020 has taught us that trying to seamlessly manage all of the technologies involved in our daily life experiences can be exhausting.
The “Future Home” concept as defined by Jefferson Wang, George Nazi, Boris Maurer, and Amol Phadke advocates that the traditional notion of home as a static shelter will soon be entirely replaced by the new consumer mindset that “at home is everywhere.”
How can we think about our customer journeys as we design the developments + places of the future? We are all supported by digital services in our daily lives, and are only going to lean on them more in the future. As our work and everyday lives continue to meld together, they give us insights into how to build future homes and adapt current ones.
05 | MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab x EY
➤ Automation in Real Estate: Automation, Healthy Buildings and the Future of Work
Healthy buildings are just that - good for you, good for the environment, and viable for a development’s bottom line. “In modern times, however, the average American spends up to 90% of their time indoors, be it in an office, a school, or a home. It is during this time indoors that they are exposed to the largest amount of pollutants.”
EY Partner and Global Real Estate Innovation Leader Selina Short leads the discussion about the rising challenge of health in the built environment, and how automation can help augment and assist with making buildings a healthier environment for all.
Sustainability is not a “nice to have,” it is a must have for every human; one that current and future generations recognize value and the need to invest in. They will pay a premium as they move through their daily lives in various built environments whether for work, play, or to live. They will be most demanding of places that they live in.
06 | Strong Towns
➤ It's Time for Cities to Build "Lovable" Again
This piece challenged us to think differently about what makes BV hold Building X, or Development Team Y paramount. Too often we find ourselves complaining about yet another glass tower or suburban tract that has no personality. A lack of looks or personality is not the problem - it is that they are not lovable.
DJ Sullivan discusses what makes a locale or building lovable; whether a building is judged by our human eyes to be deemed worthy of efforts at upkeep and finding new uses as opposed to tearing it down and carting the pieces off to a landfill. “What’s great about lovability is its simplicity: no amount of reading or education can overrule what your eyes innately tell you about a building.”
We need to build more places + developments that are lovable. Places that are worth remembering, protecting, and saving in challenging times. COVID-19 is laying bare which buildings are easiest to abandon. We need to ask why.
06 | Monocle On Design (podcast)
➤ Architecture: a laughing matter?
Buildings make us feel safe, provide shelter, and environments to (mostly) help us thrive. How can they make the people that inhabit them smile, encourage laughter, and spark joy? Particularly at a time when preserving our mental health is a priority.
Guided by Deputy Editor Josh Fehnert, the very accomplished Angela Brady, Kate Wagner (if you don’t know McMansion Hell you need to), and Owen Hopkins discuss ways in which we can elicit smiles from end-users of the built environment. This German kindergarten built in the shape of a cat, and the Hyderabad National Fisheries Board built in the shape of a fish, are two bold examples of mimetic architecture.
In austere times, we instinctively gravitate towards things that are safe; the act of building a design can be such a challenge to just get it done. Yet, if we can’t change the exteriors (especially with legacy real estate), how can we have a bit of fun with the interior to give places an identity; to make a piece of the built environment lovable.
Butterfly Voyage hopes that these pieces inform, inspire, + educate you about ways in which to navigate the adventure that 2020 is proving to be. We will continue to curate, discover, and share.
We would love to discuss any of the opportunity areas with you and your team; we want to be a strategic, and execution-based partner with your team as we all embark on The Big Reset. Please reach out to Meghna Krishna Bondili if you would like to begin the conversation.