Thomas Dougherty: Lessons on Designing & Entitling Infill Urban Neighborhoods & Human Scaled Suburban Development

Austin Tunnell

The insides of our blocks are just waiting to be developed into some really exciting cool places, just like we're doing at Telson. We're being thoughtful about the way things are interconnected and trying to prioritize the pedestrian. And I think people respond to that deep aspect. know, it touches people deeply when they go to these places and they think, I feel at home here.

Austin Tunnell

Today I've got Thomas Doherty on, who's a friend and our lead urban designer at Building Culture. And we get into specifically a couple of the projects we're working on. So two kind of different scale projects. We're working on one, a little bit over an acre infill project near Oklahoma City. And then we're also working on an 80 acre master plan in kind of a more rural area. So we get into very specifically what we're doing, how we're thinking about it, how we're solving problems from utilities and fire, et cetera. And hope it's a really practical episode. Of course, some philosophy and stuff too about how we think about things and why we think about things, but also trying to be really practical for any architects out there, urban planners, urban designers, engineers, developers, investors who are wanting to do more of this kind of development. Hope it's helpful for all of you and thanks so much for listening. My name is Austin Tanel and this is the Building Culture Podcast. I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsors of the podcast, Sierra Pacific Windows, who when they reached out to me recently, I was glad to say yes, because we at Building Culture use their windows on about 90 % of our projects. The whole team loves them and really thankful to have them sponsoring the podcast. also want to thank One Source Windows, who if you are in the state of Oklahoma, it doesn't just matter about the window manufacturer. but also about the distributor and the installer and the people you're working with. And we've used one source windows who sells Sierra Pacific and several other great lines for also about 90 % of our projects. All right, onto the podcast. So I've got Tom on here today, our lead urban designer and building culture. And just wanted to have a conversation, filling you guys in about a couple of the projects we're working on that have some interesting learnings, guess, to them that could be applicable outside of what we're doing here and takeaways and just explaining some of our reasoning behind what we're doing both in terms of infill development. So we're working on a one acre, a little bit over a one acre infill lot with about 25 townhouses, live works and some small commercial buildings. And then we also just wrapped up an 80 acre more rural master plan.

Austin Tunnell

in a greenfield setting. And so I wanted to just invite Tom on and have a conversation about these projects. Thanks, Austin. Good to be back. Yeah, no, it'll be fun. So first, you know, I think it's fun. Let's start with Townsend. With Townsend is this little over an acre, 49 ,000 square foot piece of dirt in downtown Edmond near Oklahoma City. It's suburb about 20 minutes north of Oklahoma City. And it's got this old main street downtown. So we've got an acre and a really prime location here. And one of the things that you bid been big on Tom from the beginning, and you're kind of known for this, is Interblock. And you've really had a huge effect on the way how I think in terms of this idea of Interblock development. So can you just kind of give a background and description of what we mean by Interblock? And I'll probably interject with a few things. Sure, yeah. Well, I think your development in Carlton mining is a great example of it. Essentially the ability to create your own civic space and the term, know, interwalk makes more sense in the United States than it might in other places because only inside of an existing, at least in urban setting, only inside of an existing block could you create the kind of fine scaled urbanism and human scale places that you and I are trying to create with new development. So that inner block space is an opportunity to step outside of the wide streets, the car dominated scale that has set the tone for all our cities in the United States for the last 150 years. Right. And a block is, you know, I mean, just to be really specific. Blocks tend to be what 300 feet by 300 feet 300 feet by 400 feet in the US? Depending on where you are Yeah, I mean there's a big variety, but yeah, I mean yeah, there are a lot that are like that and so 300 feet by let's just take 300 feet by 400 feet which I think is one of the some of the ones we've seen in a Coleman City and probably anyone listening has blocks of similar size like that's a that's a really big scale and So if you just line that block with buildings facing the street

Austin Tunnell

that's a really big space. And you also have to control what's on the other side of the street. If you really want to create that urban experience. And maybe if you are lucky enough to, to own an entire fate, your block facing a street and also another block facing a street, you might be able to create one 300 foot strip of like beautiful buildings, but that's a ton of development. That's a ton of architecture and it's still at a large scale. And that's what you've really helped me see where The example that you've shown multiple times is in Palm Beach, Florida. So if you imagine, anyone listening, imagine a 300 foot by 400 foot block. So imagine the perimeter of that rectangle. And there's big buildings facing those streets. And it's some of the highest end retail in Palm Beach, the Gucci, the Prada, stuff like that. But those shops are not located along the perimeter of the block. They're actually located on the interior. There's like a little, pedestrian pathway cut through the middle of the block and these shops are facing onto that and it's got all these little courtyards and openings and the buildings, you know, interior might be what 12 feet face to face or something like that. And what's so cool about it is if you take a picture of the exterior of the outside of the block, you're looking at these big, you know, four story buildings and they're nice and stuff like that, but it just feels the scale is big. But the moment you walk inside the block and you're taking pictures, you've got all these buildings, 12 foot to 12 feet. You've got this brick. pavers, you've got this landscaping coming up and you can like touch the walls. And it's a very human scale and human experience. Yeah, I think one of the messages of like the inner walk in the United States is that most projects that a developer is going to be working on, basically any, any, any developer, most incremental developer projects have the potential to be the most interesting, exciting, highest grossing real estate in whatever town or city that you're developing. Because as you're pointing out, so much can happen on an acre. And we know this because we can point to precedent around the world and in our country as well.

Austin Tunnell

thousands of people can go through this, Lysenry, we're just talking about Palm Beach, right? That is the most valuable retail real estate down there. And it is all inside the block. And yet that does not stop thousands and thousands of people from walking through there. So a huge amount can happen, a lot of economic activity can happen on a small scale. And pretty much any development project can be that. really exciting human scale place that we really don't have very much of at all in this country. Right. And it really opens it up to small developers to be able to get an acre. And what's crazy, and we're going to post this because we're going to talk about the actual site plan from Townsend. We're going to talk about it as if you're not looking at it. But I'm going to put a link to the site plan in the show notes. You can actually pull it up and see exactly what we are talking about because, you know, the I'm calling it over an acre, but Tom, the part we're working on right now is actually less than an acre. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's probably like 40, a little under, it might be like 38 ,000 square feet. within that, you know, on that block, we've got 12, we've got 19 buildings. And most of them are townhouses and live work units and a few commercial spaces. Well, most people are just historically and frankly, if I were to just done this myself without your help, I would have just kind of like lined the streets with townhouses facing the street, know, garage is off the back alley and it could have been nice. But the way we've done it is if you imagine kind of a square and if you're looking at that square, you see a brick wall and a moon gate, this circular gate and, and you see houses flanking on each side, but they're not facing it's kind of the side of the house and it's still beautiful, but there's not a front door. So you're looking from the street, you're standing on the street, looking at this moon gate, looking at houses on each side. If you walk through that moon gate, you kind of walk into this garden. And then on each of the other three walls, you know, the three walls of the square, if we're looking kind of like, imagine a square, there's townhouses. So there's townhouses. When you walk through the main gate, you see a couple, three townhouses on your left kind of facing you. A few townhouses on your right facing you. Directly in front of you, there is this kind of like raised planter and garden area and then three houses in the background facing you. So there's three faces of the brick are townhouses facing that inner courtyard.

Austin Tunnell

And what's crazy in this 38, that's just one of the courtyards. We actually have in total six separate courtyards within this interblock development. And I don't mean private courtyards. Everyone also has their own private courtyards out the back and some parking. There's actually six separate public spaces to wander through. And we talk about how it's so cool because it's one of those where if you were to enter into it the first time and walk through it, you would actually be slightly lost. Probably where you were like wait hold on did I come this way you know and I don't mean in some extreme way But but just enough to create some magic I think with the urbanism of it Yeah, exactly And I think the other thing it does is create interest in privacy to it's really dynamic spaces. And, know, I was talking about having this inner garden as in the center of the square where all these townhouses are, or at least nine of the townhouses are kind of facing towards the center square, the moon gate on the other side. We were originally thinking about putting just kind of like, pavers or even grass or something like that out in front. We even talked about maybe even putting a fire pit in the middle, right? Like, Hey, let's create this community space. But I remember, I mean, this took us quite a while to get to, you know, and this is what's cool about these projects is they really evolve over time. The exterior, all of the spaces become just as important as say the interior floor plans. I mean, it's all planned out, like every piece of pavement, every little brick paver. is really planned out. But the reason we ended up putting this kind of raised garden, which if you open up these plans, you'll see, is we really wanted to balance that idea of privacy to like, what is it? What is this going to be used for? Yes, you could walk out your front door and if you leave it just pavers, I suppose some kids can run out there and, you know, throw a ball or something like that. But we also have a three acre park, like a four minute walk away.

Austin Tunnell

And so the idea of like walking out your front door and kind of into a garden with circulation around it and creates kind of like barriers to the other house is actually a really, really beautiful and lovely feature. And it took me a little bit of time to not feel like we had to use that space. Like, we've got to use it so people can gather around a fire pit so people can, know, kids can play tag or something like that. And I think we've arrived at something so much more interesting. Yeah, and really deep to the human condition. I think when you're inside of that space, you've described, you know, walking through the moon gate and being that and that central or that are the main, the largest of the courtyards. Your experience is going to be completely controlled and contained by the development. You're not really responding to any other aspect of Edmund at that point. And that's a very traditional, you know, historical experience of the human condition that if you walk through traditional towns and cities across Europe and even some of early months in the East and West Coast. settlements were developed as spaces. And so the courtyard is its own room. And when you're in one of the courtyards of Townsend, you're not experiencing, you might be experiencing one other courtyard kind of in the periphery, right? They're linked together kind of like, know, pearls on a necklace. As you said, you'd kind of get lost for a second and not quite know, okay, which courtyard, but each one is a hole. It's a center, it's complete. like that, if you were to step out, now you're on the main street or you're on the other street or whatever, where you're experiencing the street of Edmond, but once you're inside, you're completely controlled by the environment which you're creating and you're creating at this human scale. And so it's, I think, tying back to a deep aspect of who we are as persons and that for

Austin Tunnell

a very long time, we have not been living in an environment which reflects our scale as human beings, the speed at which we walk, the 60 degree cone of vision, the way that, know, Jean -Gal talks about the fact that we are face finding, we're a face finding, face focused species, right? From the earliest, right after we're born, Even when our eyesight's really fuzzy, we're looking for faces and our eyes can only take in the information we're looking for at certain distances and scales. And so if you're on one side of littler and you're looking across traffic, forget about the traffic, if you're looking across at the other sidewalk, we're actually far enough away that I'm not getting nearly as much. I can probably recognize you, but how much of communication is verbal and how how much of communication is visual. I'm not picking up on so much of the other points of communication, but when you can get, when you are engaging in these Courtyard Scales and some of the scales that we're creating in Townstead, there is a human connection which is possible there that reflects the basis, the base hardware of what it is to be human. I totally agree. And one thing I think about, and I talked to Frankly, when I'm talking to both investors for this deal and also potential eventual buyers of this deal, one of the things I talk about is there's a lot of people out there and that we talked to just in Oklahoma City and Edmond in their 50s, their kids are moving out of the house. And it's pretty typical for people here to live in 4 ,000 plus square foot houses. And they live off in a suburban subdivision.

Austin Tunnell

And when their kids leave the house and they're like, you know what, don't want a 4 ,000 square foot house anymore. I don't want a two acre yard anymore to take care of. I want something simple and nice. But then they're looking for a smaller house that's nice and they can't find something that's actually nice. But then they, on top of that, if they're like, hey, I'd like to live in a more urban environment. Literally the only other option is suburban subdivision and then it's like condo building in midtown. or a multifamily building. And you're like, well, I don't want to rent, so I'm not going to do multifamily. And then I don't want to do a condo building with structured parking and an elevator and live on a flat. Like that's a completely different experience than the idea of an urban neighborhood. And so that idea of having a coherent identity, I of contrast it with, we're not just building big buildings off of streets where you walk out your front door and you're like startling like on an urban street or something like that. It's like you walk out your front door into a garden. And then can walk around through these courtyards, through these gardens, this controlled contained space where you do know the people living there. And at least loosely, right? You're not going to be best friends with everyone, but like, you know who your neighbors are. And then you kind of, then you walk outside the moon gate and you're like, you know, and there's Edmund. And what I love about it is we talk about this a lot, but Christopher Alexander talks about centers and this idea of having as many centers as possible. so within towns, Townsend itself is a center. And I would say downtown Edmond, this one square mile of downtown Edmond, which is in the central business district. And you've got all these budding residential projects and commercial projects like downtown Edmond is its own center. And then you zoom in and Townsend is its own center. And you zoom into Townsend even further and you've got all these centers within Townsend of different courtyards. And it's hard to define center. Like I think even Christopher Alexander doesn't really define it. He just keeps talking about it until you understand what it means. And like now it just feels very intuitive to me to talk about this idea of centers. It's like this recognizable thing that you experience, that you feel that's worthy of attention. It's identifiable. think that's a key aspect to a center. And identifiable meets delineation. And delineation is spatial. And so I think that's definitely an aspect of the center. Absolutely. That's a good point.

Austin Tunnell

If you've been enjoying the Building Culture podcast and are listening on Apple or Spotify, could you pause for just a moment and leave a five star review? My goal is to get to a hundred reviews. And if you do take a screenshot and email it to playbook at building culture .com playbook, P L A Y B O O K at building culture .com. And when we hit a hundred, I'll randomly pick five winners and send them a building culture hat that looks just like this. I appreciate it and back to the show. Yeah, I love that it's to go over the wine. think it'll be interesting for anyone looking that's interested in this stuff to look at the actual site plan. But it is contained. It is controlled. We have, for example, an HOA. And know a lot of people, I don't know, worry about HOAs. But I think it's important to have the main... I think a lot of people have this idea that wouldn't it be nice if just everyone could take care of the gardens themselves and have this really nice kumbaya. thing going on. And don't get me wrong, I think that could be really cool. And I think that could still sprout up naturally. And the way it doesn't prevent that, but just from an actual business perspective and understanding buyers, like you want those garden areas to be taken care of and something really cool that we were doing today. We were really, we were with a landscape architect talking specifically about each and every plant and like, hey, here's our vision for this area right here. And what do we want that experience walking through the Minga? Okay, we want these things flanking each side and then kind of, you know, create this canopy over it. And then you walk into this central garden. want like something, trees that are kind of tall, but also allows us lots of flowers and color below and really talking about each and every plant from someone really experienced this in Oklahoma while it's not just telling us, yeah, that'll grow here, but also what will it look like in 30 years? What will it look like in 40 years? And I thought that was, really helpful and mean, just so helpful. And it was also really fun. But one of the coolest things that he brought up is not doing irrigation. Like, which was, it's like unheard of, but not doing automatic irrigation. He was like, it always fails. It always fails. You end up hiring someone to take care of it full time. You end up paying more money. It's constantly breaking. People kind of set on automatic and forget and it actually doesn't work. And he was like, what you need to do is go find, you know,

Austin Tunnell

a student or an arborist or something like that that loves this kind of stuff and basically have like a garden, a gardener tending the garden. And we all kind of responded so positively. And this is not a lot of space and recognizing, we could go hire a professional landscape company or we could hire like an individual or a couple individuals that really know this stuff that are coming by once a week to do the watering, to tend the plants, to actually observe what's going on, to respond to what's going on. And I think that's such a more, you you immediately said it Thomas, just such a more of a human experience. if you're, that's part of, that person is part of your neighborhood, not just some big landscape company that's coming by and like messing with the automatic sprinklers. I thought that was a really cool addition that we've added. Yeah, absolutely. I think Chris Alexander would recognize that the irrigation is kind of undermining the center there. One of the things you talked about a second ago was, the courtyard and not opening up directly onto a littler from your individual home. And I just wanted to, just like from a historical point of view, point out that the single family home is kind of a historical anomaly, just from a deep historical perspective. And one of the places that we're looking for precedent and vision for this development is the Netherlands. the townhouses there, the courtyards there, the human scale that we find there. And the historian Vitold Rubchinsky talks about the fact that the birth of, in his book Home, the birth of the single family, yeah, the individual family, the nuclear family home, or nuclear maybe with multigenerational, but the family home is born in the Netherlands. And at the same time before that, you're seeing.

Austin Tunnell

Homes that have different hierarchies and definitely the people that are living there, it spans beyond blood relations. there's not a clear distinction between business and home. And almost always they're built around different courtyards. And I think the courtyard plays a really key, an essential role in like the... and the movement of people in the private to public spectrum of movement, know, if you're moving from the public realm to the private realm. So it's this really wonderful thing that we had when the Dutch start to that, those building types apart and they're saying, actually, I'm going to build my own home here. They keep an aspect of the courtyard in the semi. So let's say that, you know, if you're in in the Mediterranean climate and there's the public realm and there's the private realm and then there's the semi -public in the courtyard. The Dutch keep that alive by building their townhomes around these very quiet residential streets, around the fire residential courtyards. And so you still have that semi -public, semi -private feel and Townsend will have that where anybody can wander through off of Litler, but there's a sense of, and I think about but say your development in Carlton Landing. I'm sure you have people really valuing the moon gate, even though they don't live there. And maybe they even walk through and maybe they walk through and realize, actually, I probably shouldn't be here. It was nice to pop my head in, but I'm gonna keep walking. But there's this sense of semi -public, semi -private. It's an invitation, but it's an invitation with a certain set of expectations. And I think that Townsend, you know, brings that back to life. It's something that we don't have in the United States. We didn't develop like that, but some of the precedent we're looking at does have that. And I think, you know, really captured that with the design. think, I think you're right. Really did. I'm excited to get going on it here soon. Just to touch on a couple of other kind of practical things that we've had to work through that, you know, anyone doing

Austin Tunnell

anything like this in development or architecture or urban design has to contend with. So utilities and fire are big deals when it comes to interblock development. Probably that comes top of mind to anyone that has any experience here. So we already had kind of zoning taken care of just because it was in the central business district. So we had no height restrictions. We could go zero lot lines, stuff like that. Now, fire, we do have an alley, but really ultimately what we had to do to make fire work is we had to sprinkle everything. because I forget what is the hose race go to? you remember the exact does it go to 125 to 175 or something like that? you sprinkle it. 150. Okay. But what is it without sprinklers? Do you remember? It depends on the, it depends on different aspects. Okay. anyway, here like townhouses, they're, they're an IRC building, you know, so we don't actually have to sprinkle any of them, but we chose to sprinkle them so that we could get that longer hose reach and then we could actually create this space. And then the fire truck basically with the longer hose reach can meet you either from the main road or from the alley connects to access everything it needs. And so that was really key. And of course still being IRC buildings, we're able to do that. I think it's called the 13R fire sprinklers. And there's two big deals about that, you know, is that they can use the same meter, water meter. They don't have to have a separate tap into the main. which is can be extremely expensive. Our John Anderson was writing about this recently. If you have to do a separate water tap into the main. And then secondly, you're able to use a PVC or, my gosh, you just blanked on the, the some kind of packs red and yeah. And, and that saves a lot of money over steel. So it's really not adding that much to the build is adding maybe like 4 ,000, 4 ,000, maybe 5 ,000 bucks to each building. And it's totally worth it. And by the way, it's sprinkled, which I'm not, you know, I'm great with that. When you are building dense urbanism. The other thing was utilities. And this is someone that gets, will get a lot of people, especially in Midwest cities. You know, if you're, I don't know, in the coastal cities where some, sometimes you can stack utilities vertically. your sewer and water and electric or whatever you can stack vertically. Here we have to have like,

Austin Tunnell

10 foot easements between all, I can't remember exactly what it is. They're all a little bit different, but it's very wide easements between all of the different utilities, which literally made this impossible right off the bat. Now, one way to overcome this is to go just a straight condo. But then you're building everything's kind of, everything's condoized. And that's, is a way to go, but it's still not ideal in my opinion, and I don't think it's ideal in frankly, Oklahoma and... in a lot of these Midwest cities because people want to feel like they own their house. So the way around it is we actually got in touch with the, I probably won't say her name because I'm trying to retire, but one of the women that helped write some of Seaside's condo and HOA documents, and she pointed us to the idea of a land condo. And so rather than having like a plat with all these different lots, we actually have one big giant lot and that And then it's broken up into a land condo where the building city, you own, you own the building on top of the land and you actually control your townhouse. yes, you've got sheer party walls. And so that's, you know, just kind of based on a townhouse and how that's managed. But you, you, you control your roof. You control your HVET unit. You control the facade of your house. Like you buy your house. But what the land condo allowed us to do is to create meter banks for water and electrical and then run private lines throughout the site. And so that's how we were able to solve it while still building IRC buildings and really doing the best of both worlds. That was one way we got around it. And I thought it was a really cool solution. It actually doesn't complicate anything. It's just a little bit different way of setting it up. I think the other thing too is that unlike so another development that's similar in some ways is cul -de -sac in Tempe, Arizona by Opticos and it's car free neighborhood, but their complexity of blocks are deep enough. Let's say that you're built, so you just talked about Townsend being bounded on two sides by public streets and on two sides by alleys.

Austin Tunnell

And so when you're working inside of that, and let's say that each, hypothetically, like each building touches that exterior, it would be a little bit easier to make sure that you can get utilities and fire to everything. It's when you start having these buildings inside of that area that don't touch the exterior, that things become more complicated, in cul -de -sac. But I think for lot of incremental developers out there, you can group create an amazing courtyard interlock development and still have every single one of those structures touching the perimeter of your lot and public streets with public utilities. And so that is definitely a way to, on a smaller site, to make sure that you can kind of do it in a more conventional way, even like trash and stuff like that. But if you have, let's say two or three lots that are connecting, you can just be really thoughtful about how you develop those homes. They're both being respectful of the street and the public right of way. And tapping into, we're gonna talk about grids, I think in a little bit here. And I think one of the values that the grid did in the United States is that these real needs that we have like utilities, like fire, like Amazon delivery, you know, first responders, we need wide public right of ways for our infrastructure. You know, right now infrastructure, it is like kind of back of house, I think for new urbanists, you know, it's this similar concept of your cavity walls. I'm just going to throw everything inside of my framing and then cover it up with sheetrock. And here, you know, with new urbanists, like, we're just going to put in the alley. and the cars, which take up a lot of space, are going to go in there. Everything's just going to go on the alley. And then you have this big wide public right of way, which is the street, which is the public realm, which we're trying to ennoble. Well, if you can invert that a little bit and say, actually, we need the big public right of way for all of these things. But the human person is at this more diminutive scale. Actually, the scale that we want to be at is inside the block. And so I think that one of the beauties that the grid did

Austin Tunnell

set us up for is that, you know, the next frontier of, you know, of human scale development or the frontier of the United States, I think right now is inside of all the blocks that we already have. We can get utilities everywhere. We can get first responders everywhere. And I'm talking about infill conditions, but the insides of our blocks are just waiting to be developed into some really exciting, cool places. Just like we're doing at Telson. Absolutely. You brought up a couple of things that made me want to clarify. Add another kind of like practical points of how we're dealing with things. You mentioned trash. How we're dealing with trash. This is a tight urban site. We're actually doing a single compactor. And rather than everyone have their own little trash cans, you got these inner blocks. And then we're going to do concierge pickup because it's pretty easy to manage with the HOA. And so single compactor that concentrates trash into a single area. The other thing about all this kind of like more tighter urbanism and HVAC units is we're planning on geothermal, which we've always done at Build and Culture. I think we've done geothermal on, my gosh, think all of our builds or almost all of our builds today. What I love about it is you don't have that exterior condenser that turns on and makes a bunch of noise. And when you're in these small areas, that actually makes a big difference. If you've got 19 of those going in this 38 ,000 square feet. That's a lot of things turning on. And by the way, just with the current tax credits that are, I think they're 30 % now, we can do it for the same price as conventional HVAC. And it's an amazing system. Geothermal is just super cool because you're using the earth's temperature to heat and cool your house. For anyone that doesn't know about it, I recommend looking into it. But make sure to find someone that actually knows what they're doing there and not just someone that's willing to do it. That's such a great point, Austin, that geothermal and deal with that backup house in that much quieter and out of the way way. It's so tuned to the human experience of those courtyards. Because you're right, if we had to deal with all those condensers, that would be really hard. It really would. It makes a huge difference. And by the way, we just actually drill underneath in the courtyard and probably one underneath the slab of the house.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, that's what we've done in Wheeler district and that's what they do in Wheeler district, which is a very successful T and D here in Oklahoma city. and I think it's a really great solution that's underutilized across the country. Yeah. You're like one of the only people I know who doesn't. And then last kind of point of interesting thing before we move on to kind of that 80 acre is I think was an interesting solution and granted we haven't built this yet. So, you know, we'll do another episode after we built this and tell you how it all worked. But imagine you've got townhouses. So say you're looking at three townhouses in a row and obviously has light off the front of them, the front windows and the front door and stuff. And then the back, well, where does parking go? And because they back up to an alley, we do have parking off the back. And we really went around on this a long time. Do we do a garage off the back? Do you do a second story deck that you can pull your car under and then on the second story you can walk out on? where we landed is if you imagine this courtyard that's deep enough for a car and then add six or eight feet. What we're doing is we're paving... Imagine the courtyard walls are brick walls. So you walk outside the back door of your townhouse and on each side you're flanked by brick walls. And then rather than some kind of wood deck or something like that, we're doing an awning system attached to the brick walls. And there's a few different options we can do. We're either going to do... You can do either we're either going to do translucent, like clear roof spanning, not all the way to the house. We're going to leave like a six to eight foot gap between the house or kind of these louvered roof systems that we've seen. You can just kind of turn them. They can be solid because we get some hail in Oklahoma. So it's important to be able to cover your car or you can kind of turn them open and let a bunch of light through or even kind of a retractable awning. And we want to obviously look at the long -term maintenance of these. So we were choosing something very durable for people. The whole point is, and then the ground is brick pavers. And the reason is, is it's really important to let light inside the back of the house. Otherwise you only have on the first story, at least if you put a garage out the back, you're only getting light in the front. And boy, that's going to be a dark downstairs. So that's why we've kind of done this quarter where we detached the, the covering and it's going to be able to, what we imagine is say it's on a weekend, you're throwing a party, a soiree or something. You can pull your car out, park it on the street.

Austin Tunnell

And you've got this beautiful courtyard, these big sliding doors, back doors out onto this courtyard, brick pavers, brick walls. And it can be a beautiful setup. And you could have it covered, you could have it uncovered, you could have heaters, you could have a fan in there. I so kind of a dual use. And I think that kind of creativity is really important in these urban environments to be able to think about that. But the biggest thing is we need light off the back of the house. We're not willing to put a garage.

Austin Tunnell

Yep. And also we talked about the importance of trying to ennoble the coming and going, like the liminal nature of like almost everybody is still going to be coming and going from this with their car. And so trying to make sure that that's not an afterthought. think two things that new urbanist developments often don't do well are shoving cars into an alley as if it was like, you know, plumbing inside of your wall. And just kind of like, we're just going to shove it there and not think about it. But people experience that every single day. Every time they come and go from your development, they're coming and going via that. And if you look at say Charleston or others, they've got these great examples, Charleston, the Netherlands, Philadelphia. of the courtyard that's also a place to park the car. And when the car is not there, like you said, it's, and so that was one. And I think the other one is that very often private, the private realm is overlooked for the public realm. And so I think that those two have to be balanced. And when I say, I'm thinking about the exterior, like in the, in the outside, like, so that it's not simply your new urbanist townhouse with the courier and out front, which is the place where you're expected to do your grilling, your hanging out, your drinking your beer, watching a football game or whatever. A lot of new urban developments we see are trying to do that. They're trying to create this common, know, place for you to let your hair down, to get intimate. But I think that very often we need more to the spectrum of public to private. And so what these little court, one of the things these little courtyards are doing is doing, it's actually what you said, if you're going to be hosting something, you're not doing it in a public realm with the courtyard and the garden where you might not know the people that are living next to you or two doors down. Or if you know, you know them, but maybe you don't know them super well. You guys don't talk about politics. Maybe they'll talk about religion. Maybe, you know,

Austin Tunnell

It's not the intimacy that you often have in a dinner or a party or a gathering. And so it's giving that courtyard for that more intimate gathering that each person can be hosting without hosting it in the public courtyard where this person is hosting their watch party with beers over here, but the person over here, that's just not their expectation. I think that's really important. I think it's a good one to... to wrap up on the inner block, but to add on to what you're saying, because this was a conversation. And like I mentioned in that inner first courtyard, we talked about a fire pit, we talked about a pizza, we talked about an outdoor kitchen kind of in the shared space, because that's just so common. see that like, hey, you're doing a neighborhood and you're doing a master clean community, you've got to have the HOA building and then the common area where people go and gather. And you're like, sometimes those work out, but more often than not, they don't. And it's like if one person's using it, no one else can use it because once again, maybe you don't feel comfortable, whatever. And it's like, maybe there's a few neighbors that love like, hey, let's have dinner together every Thursday night at the common area table. That happens sometimes, but it's not super often. And frankly, we actually have what we realized is because we've got one of the courtyards is kind of three commercial buildings and it's kind of contained from the rest of the site. like, you know, that's really the courtyard we want to activate with, know, bistro tables outside. And so not just one giant table, but Beaster tables. And if enough people together and they want to push them together, great. But one of the things that I see mistakes, not just New Arbitrary communities, but master plan communities trying to like force community. And this idea of community is H -O -A dinners on Thursday nights or something like that. And those can be a part of community and they can be a successful part of the HOA, but that's not what makes a community. I don't think. And I think it can often feel awkward too for a lot of people because they're like, well, maybe you don't want to do. that maybe you want to like know your neighbors and be able to be like, Hey, how's it going? And then you walk into your house and that's okay. It doesn't mean it's a shallow relationship. It just means it's, I don't know what a good word is. Just kind of like a, low friction relationship. Talks about that. Jane J. Jane Jacobs, for example, and we all know this be, intuitively true, which is why I think it is awkward, you know, with these forced things. You know, she talks about the relationships that are possible when you don't.

Austin Tunnell

start talking about politics when you don't need to know certain aspects of people's lives and preferences that we can all live together socially. We can all live and we have shared values and lots of things in common. And when we start to become intimate, we can think, we're really different on these different levels. And we don't we can't become close to people or feels for us. But when when you have that public space, these courtyards that are public, but we don't have to become quite as intimate. then we can actually become, I think, close and we can form relationships that are only possible because of those spaces. think that, I personally think that, think that relationships are in part a reflection of the places where we can meet people. And so if it's among that you're at, or I'm in your living room. And if it's a one bedroom apartment, know, so that we're av or I'm like basically in your bedroom, like there's like, there's no like separation of like the kind of conversations and the kind of things you wear, the kind of movement you have and all this and things. And so I think that that's actually a real act that we have as a country and that we don't have these, you know, people talk about like the third places or whatever. And I think that's a really interesting insight. And I think similarly, have, OptiGhost talks about missing middle building types. spend a whole long time talking about that, know, these building types that are set up for different stages of life, let's say, and different stages of financing and development and stuff like that. And we stopped building them, but they were, they existed in every town and city and they were really important as starter homes and as financing mechanisms and as attainable housing. Well, similarly, we have missing public spaces in the United States. We have this space that's left over between private land, which we call streets. And every once in a while there's a park. But if you were to go back to, you know, 300, 400 years ago in the human condition, or even just like 150 years ago, there was a much more, were a greater number of types of public spaces and the kind of relationship and engagement people had in those spaces were different, you know, different realms of

Austin Tunnell

semi -public, semi -private, different levels of appropriateness. And you see that in the traditional settlements. And I think people... respond to that deep aspects, know, it touches people deeply when they go to these places and they think, I feel at home here. Who's the cognitive psychologist who talks about that? Ken Sussman. Ken Sussman. You know, she talks about being a college student and walking through France and being in towns and cities where she felt more at home than she ever felt growing up. And I think I had, most of us would have that experience. I definitely felt aspects of that as a college student spending time in Germany and Austria, you know, walking through these towns and villages, feeling myself reflected in the buildings, the facades, the durability and the different spaces. Yeah, it's it is critical because it reminds me when you're talking Tom of like, sometimes getting to know someone more hurts the relationship. Like if you don't have enough in common with someone and you actually get to know that person more than kind of that loose interaction, maybe you buy coffee from them every day or maybe it's the mailman or maybe whatever. And then you go to dinner together and you realize, wow, we disagree on so many things. Like I actually don't like this person very much anymore. Are they annoying me? And then like literally your relationship is forever different after that. I remember this experience I had at the farmer's market this time ago over a decade. There was this farmer's market I always bought my grass fed beef from. It like a decade ago. Love the guy. I find my beef, chatted up all the time, and then I went to volunteer at the farm when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life while I was at KPMG. And we ended up hanging out more. He would drive me to the farm, completely ruin the relationship. I was like, I never wanted to see that dude again. He's like a crazy person, frankly. it was like, and then it was like too much force together, and then it broke the relationship versus, once again, that ability when you're talking with these different types of public spaces where

Austin Tunnell

You don't have to get into all that, the stuff that can actually drive people away. You're just seeing each other as human. You just have these small experiences together and those, those actually are what create that sense of, I think belonging of known and being known in a place that's really powerful. Yeah, that, that, that would be like own long conversation, but like one last little tidbit on that when you think about like, what does make community And I think that there's probably a certain amount of reliance on each other. Like, what do you bring to the table? What do you bring to the table? And like in a time of need, in a time when you need to rely on that person, I think we intuitively recognize that Jane Jacobs talks about the eyes on the street, for example. You don't need to know the person really well to, you know, I'm looking out of my street and... You just notice things after a while. know that's a dangerous intersection here. You can see the way people move and things like that. So her version of eyes on the earth, and she's talking about eyes on the street, she's talking about caring for children in the city and the town. Well, you don't need to know people very well to have enough shared values that each, you can all participate in keeping an eye out for the children. around town. And that's, that's a really essential aspect of community. You're on each other for that. Well, different levels of community, you're relying on family members in different ways, and you're relying on, you know, the neighbor a block down, you know, helping to watch after your child. And so I guessing that we all just know that. And so as you, you know, drive up to the farm with the crazy farmer, you intuitively realize like, we're not, we wouldn't be relying on each other. You know, right? Like this is like, pushed this relationship too far in some ways because we don't have the basis for community. Like we have it on some level because we're both bringing certain, you know, like we're exchanging the farmers market. We share a lot of things, but there's certain, it's, good to have, you know, spaces for different kinds of relationships. Absolutely. And architecture can facilitate that.

Austin Tunnell

I mean, it actually has to facilitate that in a lot of ways. There's nothing else. I mean, it's literally creating spaces and that's and humans exist in space. I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsors of our podcast for Sierra Pacific Windows. We use their windows on the majority of our builds at Building Culture and one of our go -to products is their H3 casement window. We love casements because they open sideways, they open all the way, they kind of have this classic window feel. And I really like that you don't have that horizontal bar when looking from the exterior. And to get really nerdy on you, we really love their 5 '8's putty profile on the window, which kind of feels updated, but still a very classic detail. Also, Sierra Pacific windows. If you are in the state of Oklahoma, Sierra Pacific has a showroom in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. And we actually purchase our Sierra Pacific windows through them. Because it doesn't just matter the window manufacturer, it matters who you're buying your window from, who's putting that order together, who's installing it, who's warranting it. And we work with both of these people at Building Culture and I was very happy to say yes when they asked to sponsor the podcast. All right, back to the show. Well, let's move on since let's spend just 15 minutes. We'll go a little bit quicker on this. The kind of our 80 acre Rural and we'll kind of keep exactly where it is not we won't talk about that besides just to say it's you know 30 minutes or so outside of Oklahoma City Pretty rural area. There's some building around there, but it's a lot of what former farmland I would probably say So it's this 80 acre green field There's quite a bit of actually grade to it. It drops what like 25 30 percent over the whole thing? It's a 50 foot drop across the side. So it's still a good drop And in there, so we're not doing, we've done a few things differently and that I think are pretty interesting. First of all, we've got lots that are for 1200 square foot houses, maybe a little smaller up to frankly, 4000 square foot estate lots that are larger. And these smaller lots have, they still have a garage in them. They've got a small side yard in that 1200 square foot house, maybe a two bedroom, two bath or three bedroom, two and a half bath. And then we've got larger estate lots and then lots in between that. We've also got,

Austin Tunnell

areas of kind of like four plex courtyards and this could end up being six plexes or something else but the idea is having some smaller unit rentals and then towards the center of town we also have some elderly living specifically like elderly living areas based on hafia houses and then we also have kind of a village center now this is rural Oklahoma right or i don't know if you would call it rural suburban at least And so no, it's not some giant commercial center with these big shops and a grocery store. Don't get me wrong. I'd love it if we could put a grocery store. But we've got three main commercial buildings and then some kind of like live works and even a couple like townhouses leading up to that village center. though even though it's very small, it's a huge impact on the development. And if you were to look at the pictures of it, I mean, it really brings so much to development and the developers are committed to putting some kind of third space, whether it's a coffee shop or something else in there, even though they're going to run it, even if it's a loss leader. It can be small. It's just a place for people in the neighborhood to gather. And by the way, people outside of the neighborhood to gather. So just kind giving you a little backdrop for the actual thing that we've done. Tom, something I think interesting... this is not going to be one of these high end new urbanist communities where, you know, it's going to be some of the most expensive square footage in the state, you know, because of where it's located. It actually is trying to hit a lower price point. One of the things that I thought was really interesting that you did, and you've talked about this a long time is what is the function of alleys historically and what are those functions today? And, know, and basically all in the urban circles, it's like, Allies, alleys, alleys, alleys. And by the way, those can be great. I see them in Wheeler District works great. Here, we actually didn't do alleys, or at least there's very few alleys. Can you talk about that and the why? Sure. So similar to the inner walk concept we were just talking about, we need these wider public right of ways so that we can get the services that we depend on today to our homes.

Austin Tunnell

But this concept of front and back, we've had in the New York, know, we used to have alleys in the United States because the infrastructure we needed for our homes required a whole lot of space. We're talking about coal, we're talking about latrines, we're talking about emptying those latrines, talking about like the milkman out back, all kinds of things that we needed that big space for. And then we... we left that space back in about 1910, 1920. And so you see for maybe 50 years, almost no alleys were developed. So during the suburbanization up through World War II, post -World War II until the new urbanists came along, we really weren't developing alleys because you didn't need them, right? Your cars, well, in their minds, you didn't need them. You also get these houses that are the front is two garage doors or three garage doors, whatever, right? And so the new urbanists came along and they said, hey, we have to reclaim the public realm. We've abandoned the public realm. have no streets. Streets are so important. I went over to, you know, Charleston or Philadelphia or Boston, whatever. They've got great streets. I wanna build great streets. And so what they did was say, okay, we're gonna resurrect. this alley and we're going to put cars back there. And it was really as a way to get cars. But then your infrastructure also gets split. So it's like, okay, we're going to throw some infrastructure in the alley. We're going to throw some infrastructure out front, utility to me. And the alley is going to be, it's got big enough for, you know, car storage and parking and all that. But your front still has to be big enough for all your first responders, all your trash, all the other things. And the human person really is looking for tighter streets, narrower streets than what we have for our public streets. Even in a nice, no -revenced development, you're gonna be mandated to do really wide streets from a utility point of view. Like you just said, if you're doing 10 -foot easements for each of your utilities, you have to have these massive turning radiuses for your fire trucks and so on. So what we've done in this development that we're talking about right now, essentially have a double -fronted home where every home

Austin Tunnell

or most of these homes, open onto a green, a village green. So the concept was really inspired by the developers. And the developers were not looking to build a high -end development, right? They were looking for market rate, smaller homes. They were looking to build for their community. And they were inspired by, you when we were talking about villages and the kind of things that families might want free range children and things like that. And so we were looking at that precedent, helping them think through what does village infrastructure look like? What are the key components of a village? And one of those is that village green with the pedestrian, you know, access point to the home, the children. We're really designing around children. And if the home opens onto a green, well, you could call the street that the car comes and approach the house and alley, but we weren't designing alleys and it really has to be a wider than that because it has to accommodate your fire truck and your new urbanist development, the fire truck and the UPS truck or whatever, they're all in the front. Well, we basically said, hey, we're gonna make the nicest streets that we can that will accommodate all the infrastructure, all these comings and goings. And so it's going to vote. the home from one side, we'll make sure that our garages are detached, that the doors don't look open directly onto that street, that they form motor courts. I think it would also be really valuable to make sure that the homes have a front door which looks onto that street, so that that street actually just feels like a tree -lined street with a door that's looking out onto it. But on the other side of that is the village green. It's such a traditional layout. mean, my wife is from the Netherlands and the house that she grew up there is exactly like that. So when we were looking at this and thinking about villages, the precedent that's in my head, you know, we're not coming up with anything new. We're just saying, well, let's look at other places where this has worked out really well. And village after village over there, you have that, right? You're not going to have two different streets that are going to order this property. You have one and you have a common village green or, you know, something else of these homes.

Austin Tunnell

you know open onto it. Yeah, I think it was really, you know, from a developer perspective and an infrastructure perspective. mean, any new urbanist developer I talked to will tell you how expensive alleys are. They're very expensive. mean, they eat up a lot of land. mean, the alleys are at least 20 feet wide and you've got, you know, at least kind of three foot easements on each side. So they're a minimum, I think, 26 feet and oftentimes end up being 32 feet or wider. And if you're talking about expensive land, that's a lot of land. And then of course, actually the concrete and stuff like that. So alleys eat up a lot. And it's not that they're bad. We've done things with alleys. I'm so glad there's an alley on Townsend. So it's not saying a hard and fast rule alleys are bad or good or whatever. It's just saying we're approaching this one differently. And I love how it's turned out. And you one of the things you've done, Tom, is if you imagine these lots off the street and the street is, I think it's 24 feet wide to make room for the fire trucks and everything like that. and utilities, the main streets. And most places it's usually a bit wider, Because the streets follow the topography. So there's a lot of curve, you know, that they're not very straight. And for other reasons, yeah, I mean, that would be the narrowest. But yes. And one of the things you've done is I think there's a two different, like the neighborhood I live in, my house is in front. I live in a hundred year old historic neighborhood. My house is kind of in front towards the street. And then my garage, where I'm sitting now for my podcast, for anyone that can see, this is my garage that I turned into my office and it's detached kind of behind my house. But between the houses in my neighborhood, there's only like.

Austin Tunnell

10 or 12 feet between the house and that driveway passes just through to get into that back garage. And what it does is when you drive through my neighborhood, it's beautiful because all you see was the front of the houses and then, you 12 feet between the houses, my garage is off the back and then the garage creates a privacy for my yard to the other house. And I'm kind of like, when I'm in my backyard, I'm between my garage and the other person's garage. So it feels super private. I love it. I love it. It's great. And so that's one way to handle the, you know, not doing alleys that Well doing and then another one that you showed Tom that I thought was really interesting is you actually brought the garage to the front of the house. So you detached the garage, brought the, brought the garage towards the front, hugging the road to really shape that space of the road. But rather than just being like those two garage doors off the face of the street, you turned it sideways so that this little garage, you could see this little gable end or something off the street and you could be these really pretty little buildings. And then you would turn in. And then like you said, it kind of a courtyard parking, go on the side and maybe there's an office right off the street, a small office or something. And then your, your house is a little bit behind that looking out into the street. And then it also creates a side yard kind of behind your garage and next to your house and this really amazing little court. then behind that kind of behind your house is this village green and all this almost like park space. That's really just wonderful to wander through. And I mean, an amazing place for kids and families. So I think it's really, really interesting. some of the stuff that you've come up with and that we've come up with together in this plan. Yeah, and I think so much of it reflects everything we were talking about earlier with Townsend too, and way of, and if you were to pick up like, Choice or Fate by Leon Kreer, it's just like thumbing through his drawings and like, what's applicable? Holding the perimeter of the lot, a typical development mandated by zoning, not blaming the developer. everything is already decided for you and everything is height massing setbacks. Your building is within the center of your lot. it's basically the value of your lot is a reflection of how much land you have. So if you have more land, then you can be further away from people. But it's this constant isolation. I'm further and further based on my setbacks or whatever. And this other concept, Austin Tunnell (01:01:58.765) is really about forming space at centers like Chris Alexander. And you just described the layouts that we've been playing with and we've been calling them the village courtyard lot. And the kind of base model of that is a 60 foot by 60 foot lot. It's quite small lot. But if you put a 12 square foot home, two story home, not directly in the part, you can hold it off the property lines, but just a little bit. And then let's say a detached garage in the other and that home that could be on the street or that could be on the green. You could see that that 60 by 60 lot being developed in a bunch of different ways, but following the same generative rules, know, prioritizing privacy of your neighbors, prioritizing views, holding the perimeter of the lot. You could see having a motor court or not having motor court, having a side yard that is a beautiful garden. or a side yard that's a pool, there's a lot that could happen on a 60 by 60 lot. And I think there are efficiencies there too. Anyway, we're saying, we're really hoping this is not gonna be a high -end development. It's kind of a market rate development. think one of the beauties of townsend, you're talking about the elderly, people wanting to downsize and it's really hard to find a place. Well, even when you do like around here, I'll see like new... townhouses being built, will they have enough grass in front of their home that they need to have a mower? And I hate, once you build up to, okay, I need a push mower or whatever, well, now you need that place to put that push mower and the gas cans and like all this. So you're thinking about, well, how do I maintain this? And if I think about, you know, like the house that my wife brought up in the Netherlands, who has a push mower out there? That's not, that's just not even how they think of Where if you do, you're on a different kind of lot or you're, the buildings are arranged differently, but it's not an expectation for the front, especially not for an efficient or downsized home, know, a courtyard like so in Townsend, the maintenance is going to be, I'm going to carefully water my pots of plants and I can get different sized pots of plants or the little green circle, whatever, you know, make sure that I'm to go out there and my favorite tree gets enough water, let's say. And in a 60 by 60 lot, similarly, you know, you can Austin Tunnell (01:04:20.471) picture, I'm going to put my building in the center surrounded by grass or own a develop around the outside. I'm going to create these courtyards and that can be a pool with hardskeeping. That can be a motor court. That can be different things, but it's not going to be just an expectation of just like it's grassy or in half the mo probably any maintenance you have on there is going to be a couple of hand tools. Maybe it's a battery powered, you know, we trimmer as, as part of that, but it's going to be much smaller. The maintenance isn't going to take as much room. It's not going to be a mower that you to park in a garage. Yeah, I think that's a really, really good and helpful point. And just to point out too, not all the lots are 60 by 60. There's bigger ones than that too. Like I said, we've got estate lots that are well over 7 ,000 square feet. I can't remember how big and that was kind of important as you're driving in. is kind of in the middle, it feels like farmland a little bit. It's all of a highway, but we didn't want to like... drive into density, know, it's like driving into these kind of bigger lots where the houses are pushed back some, and then it, you you weave your way through. And I think, you know, going back to the really the inspiration for this was that idea of the village, which in my mind, and I think in our mind, that really is what the suburbs could be. It's not like, it's not like everything has to be urban or something. We should only be doing urban infill or something. It's just how do you actually build places? And how do you shape space even in a suburban setting? Suburban, know, it's just a little bit farther out from the city and you know, we use Pejas we pull garages that we use the landscape and there's so many ways to shape spaces that it's not like, hey, we're in a downtown area with like row houses. That's right for certain contexts, but not here. And so that's what we're thinking about. feel like like the really suburbs outside Philadelphia are lovely. They're great. They are little villages for kids. And so I think that we can look to our own history, our own even suburban history and find really great models for a lot of this. Yeah. Well, I want to just end with just talking about kind of the, you know, I posted this perspective that JJ Zanetta had done for us of the plan to Twitter and posted one of the VILD center got really great feedback, posted kind of an aerial looking down. And of course it looks suburban, like it's not like townhouses everywhere. Austin Tunnell (01:06:42.797) largely very positive feedback. But then there was this whole little thread that I couldn't find. I don't know if it got deleted or something about people critiquing who were clearly urbanists. Like they kind of had a lot of the language and stuff, but basically critiquing that it wasn't this like grit that, then like how, like clearly you all are an urbanist or whatever because it's not a grid. And yeah, I just want to hand that over to you, Tom, to kind of talk about your thinking, how you respond to that. Yeah. I think that, I think in the urbanist circles, rightfully, it's recognized that when we left developing grids, which is about the same time we stopped doing alleys, which 1910, 1920, so we're talking about about a hundred years ago, until the urbanist came along. But so from let's say 1910 to like 1980, 1970s, 80s, we were developing in ways that are critiqued by Leon, by D. Roo and others where you see the cul -de -sacs or Chuck Morrone, strong towns, the collector roads where everything is off with these big roads and then you get all the congestions, you're coming down. So there are some really solid critiques of suburban development and traditional grids handle certain things like connectivity so much better than those suburban. development. So grids are very often, I mean, a different size grids, like obviously, like, or, famously Salt Lake has massive blocks. Over here, my town, just depends on where you are in the town or downtown blocks are quite small. You know, you radiate out a little bit and they get quite a bit bigger. But grids are usually more dense, they're more efficient, and utilities and connectivity work. better with them. So you see people critiquing developments that are not gridded under the assumption that they're necessarily less efficient and part of the kind of engineered suburban development, know, suburban development really run by traffic rules about like here as you get your one curb cut and then your cul -de -sac is going to go this way and it's going to connect to this one, this one, this one. Austin Tunnell (01:09:06.805) And every it all has to feed into the big artery road, which then feeds into the highway, which then feeds into, the the office part where everybody's working over there. But. That's that's that's a valuable critique, but. That misses. aspects of just what are the kind of developments that people want to be in. So our design for this development that we're talking about, this 80 acres, we'll look at the topography first. And there's a fair amount of topography on the site. And our street and block layouts follow the topography. And there's an efficiency to doing that, right? That we're not bulldozing everything. If we just made it great across that, as they would have done, across the country, that's a real failure that the grid, because our towns in the United States were not really designed, they were platted by surveyors. So go to Chicago, the grid is just interrupted by rivers, by mountains. It was platted on paper far away from the site. And that worked out relatively well for lots of places. Oklahoma City was already relatively flat, so the grid kind of works there, but we wanted to be thoughtful about the context and about the nature that was there and the person and the human condition we long for nature. And so the streets that we're designing are heavily connected and not only are they connected from a roadway, but also all the internal greens are connected. And so I would argue that our site is actually far more connected because unlike a grid where if you want to get point A to point B, it's going to be the same amount of time no matter what, right? Like I can make a left or a right, but I'm, you know, the next one, you know, like if we walk through our town, my kids will say like, is this a fast way? And it's like, well, we can choose whichever way because everything's at 90 degree angles, but we're developing with the topography and the sites that are key centers or interest points aren't always going to be following that grid. So they could be clustered here. So Serenby, for example, so Austin Tunnell (01:11:24.045) as a good example of this, where the roads, it might take you three or four minutes to drive from point A to point B, right around this way. But there might actually be a pedestrian connection, which connects point A to point B much more quickly, because maybe there's like a little bridge that crosses the ravine. And we have an example of that in the development. We're talking about where it would take probably a minute, it'll take the same amount of time to drive as it would take to walk. And if you're driving, you're going, you know, 10 times as far because we're being thoughtful about the way things are interconnected and, and try to prioritize the pedestrian. So that's. One distinction. I think it's really helpful because once again, I actually really like grid. It's not really trying to critique that as a bad thing. It's just a not always thing. And there is something very like humanly imposed on a grid. It's very organized and it is very like, let us impose this grid on the land. There's really nothing natural about that. And there's areas for it. think there's ways to blend it. But what I like about this is it's really responding to the environment, responding to topography, responding to that grade, responding to, you know, whatever you would call it, the gorge kind of running through it and not just kind of like fill it in or something. And personally, and I'm sure people will disagree with me because I hear that Barcelona is, you know, people's, a lot of people's favorite city. And it's been a long time since I've been there. And there's just utterly incredible things about it. It's where I was first inspired back in 2012 about just urbanism and architecture and design. But looking back, I mean, it's a super block city, you know, in like that infinite sight line. It's just like all these super blocks in a row and you can see forever in a lot of these areas. And that is one of the greatest things that I've kind of like changed where I really prefer. I don't mind the grid as long as it can be interrupted and you don't have these infinite sight lines and you do have terminated vistas. And there was this comment that I'm going to read from Twitter that I just thought was really nice and probably Austin Tunnell (01:13:27.657) way to wrap up and we can say a couple more things. But we were talking when he was responding to the people critiquing, saying that it's not a grid. And he said, it's so important. I have family in North America, many of them living in cities which don't have the densities of Montreal or New York. And the thought of walking anywhere in these places is demoralizing. I found that it is less due to the lack of density than it is the infinite line of sight. You can see where you're meant to be walking from two miles away because everything is on a straight grid. It means you aren't surprised or delighted by anything. Your attention isn't held. You aren't drawn anywhere. You're simply bludgeoned and taunted by the site of where you are going and how unbelievably slow you're going. Compare this with a European city like Siena or London and you're drawn around corners, invited to explore, always stumbling across the next great place you want to show your friends. I thought that was like a beautifully written comment. about it and Leon describes that really well in his graphics. would say our the developers of the project that we're talking about traveled to Serenby for inspiration. And I think that more than anything else is what they talked about when they got back that the invitation of the next opening, the invitation of like not being able to see quite to the end of of going down the passage and then seeing the object and then turning and look, it's opening up this way. Kind of like Talentsin, it's gonna lead you through these sequence of spaces. And yet that is the way that we experience nature. If you walk through the woods, it's the way that we've developed for as far back as we can see up until, know, industrial size development. And so we're stepping back into that by... allowing the topography to lead us. That's great. And just for anyone listening to, know, as we talk about these things, I just want to be clear. I don't know how clear it is when you're listening, but we really approach this from a humble perspective. We're not trying to critique the things that are out there that have been, I mean, we're fine critiquing things, but we're really standing on the shoulder of giants in a lot of ways, you know, and frankly, the CNU movement, I would say. Austin Tunnell (01:15:45.181) starting that in the eighties and there's other groups and parties at that time that have broken off from that that are just amazing and we're sitting here having these conversations because of the work that has been done ahead of us. And I think the way we think about building culture is we're continuing that work. The work's not done. There's continual ever like evolution of this. And that's what's so cool about it. It's not all figured out. It's not, Hey, rinse and repeat, do this forever more. It's we've gotten a lot of things right. And it's like, what, how do we keep, evolving for, because remember back to what is the why, like facilitating human flourishing. And so we're just in the back of our heads, we're always asking that question. And it's not change for change sake or to be different. It's how do we serve people the absolute best that we possibly can? I just, Steve Jobs just always strikes me when I think about this, because in the 80s when the computer revolution is happening and all these engineers are creating computers by engineers for engineers, He completely throws a wrench in that and says, you can't start with the hardware. You have to start with the end user. You have to start with the human experience and then back into the hardware. You have to inform the hardware based on the human experience and the user experience. And, you know, he was really famous for blending the art and the science of it in service of people. And that's how we think about building an architecture is building culture is facilitating human flourishing, facilitating relationships and positive neighborly connections and, you know, sustainable living in a way, but not in just climate change and carbon, I guess is the only way like different patterns of living that are actually better for humans in so many ways. So just wanted to throw that in. Tom, did you have anything else? No, just with that. Human flourishing, had a mic drop in an email maybe a week ago or something. said, was it multigenerational human flourishing? Yeah. And I just thought that that's so, it captures an aspect, an essential aspect of that, which I think can be overlooked or I could spend a long time trying to like describe it, that like you capture it with that multigenerational human flourishing and that there's an aspect of durability that's essential. There's an aspect in which Austin Tunnell (01:18:11.159) because you were talking about we stand on the shoulders of giants that we're part of this continuing human story of trying to build a home. And we've inherited and we're responding to the people that came before us and the people working with now. And we're thinking about our kids and the people in the future that are gonna inherit this. And so I think That's such a key aspect. I was just, when you say human foraging in the back of my mind, I'm thinking multi -generational because you said it the other day. Yeah, that's actually, we're kind of landing on it's been, mean, gosh, what in building culture. 2017 is when building culture officially started. started printing before that, kind of the mission statement where mission statement we're landing on is cultivating generational human flourishing through restoring community culture in the built environment. That might change. I don't know, but that feels. pretty good for it to me right now. I love it. Well, that's a great place to end. Tom, thanks for coming on and we'll do this again as we move along with our Townsend project and our other plans. Thank you, Austin. I hope you found this episode useful and if you've been enjoying this podcast or found it useful, I'd really appreciate if you liked, subscribed and shared with a friend. And also if you're on Apple or Spotify, you don't mind, leave us a five star review. It really helps us out. Thanks so much and catch you on the next episode.