Steve Mouzon: Catching Up with an OG in the New Urbanist Movement

Austin Tunnell

If you do this, you'll preserve almost all of the character of the land. You will spend a whole lot less money on infrastructure, and the place will be incredibly beautiful as opposed to completely ordinary. We as urbanists need to be generalists. Impossible stuff is what actually energizes a bunch of us. When somebody says that can't be done, you say, just watch.

Austin Tunnell

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. I interview leading change makers, architects, developers, builders, engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and more. I also share my own journey as the founder of Building Culture as we grow a holistic real estate development company from the ground up. Together, we can explore a new vision for city building in the 21st century. one that puts people at the center. If you enjoyed this podcast or find value in what we're doing, please leave a five-star review, share it with your friends, and drop us a note. Thanks for listening. I want to take a moment to thank the sponsors of our podcast, Sierra Pacific Windows. They are a national window and door manufacturer, some really high-quality windows and doors. We use them regularly in our building culture projects. So if you've got a renovation or new construction, I highly recommend you talk to your local distributor and check them out. Also, OneSource windows and doors. doesn't just matter the manufacturer, it matters who you're buying your windows from. And if you're in the state of Oklahoma, OneSource windows and doors, they've got a showroom in Oklahoma City and in Tulsa, and they service the entire state. We work with them regularly to purchase our Sierra Pacific windows. So if you're in the state of Oklahoma, check them out. Sierra Pacific windows and one source of windows and doors. If you're in the state of Oklahoma. Well, Steve, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to have you on today and to talk to you. Well, great to great to be here. I really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to it as well. Awesome. I was, I wanted to wait till I was at least 20 episodes in before I say calling in the big guns, asking, asking you to come on someone who's well known as yourself. I don't know if this statistic is true, but I heard this from Chris Williamson that only 1 % of podcasts make it to episode 20. So when I started this, I was like, I will make it to episode 20. And then when I make it to episode 20, I'll start asking some more important people than myself to come up and talk. that's the, I'm honored then. Well, could you start off? Cause not everyone is going to know who you are. So could you start off by talking a little bit about your background, some of the major projects and things you've been involved with?

Austin Tunnell

and kind of a fun thing. What are some of the things you're most proud of that you've been involved with? Sure. I am technically an architect, although I have I've not done I've not practiced as a radio architect for my what eight years now, something like that. And because what happened was is I ran a full service firm in Huntsville, Alabama, years ago. throughout most of the 90s. So I actually was 91 through really 03 was when we moved to Miami Beach. And on April Fool's Day of 02, DPZ came to Huntsville to design the Village of Providence. And they'd been heroes of mine ever since school. I graduated all the way back in 1983. And I'd followed them. you know, since my school years. And so when they showed up, I said, well, hey, my office, which at that time was about a dozen people, they can run themselves for a week. I'm going to just go down and volunteer and see if I can help out. so I said, hey, you got anything I can do? And they said, sure, come on in. And so we got, we really hit it off. And soon after that, they started inviting me to shreds all over the place. And after I'd been working with him for, I don't know, about a year, always as a consultant, never as an employee. But after about a year, Andres asked me, said, Steve, if you move to South Beach, I will get clients for you from all around the world that will never come to Huntsville, Alabama, because they assume if you're from a small southern town, you're no good. But If you live in South Beach, you'll believe anything I tell him. And he has been good to his word. mean, he has been prime ministers and kings and all these kinds of folks and such. I even spent the night in one of the, several times in the home of one of the presidential candidates this year, won't say who, but anyhow, it's a, but so that it,

Austin Tunnell

There's all sorts of things happen as result of going to Miami. That would have never happened had we ever stayed in Huntsville. But it wasn't too long after getting down there that, and it took several years to kind of finally just break the bond, you might say. But with all the cool stuff that they had going on, you can either run a full service architectural firm, or you can do all that cool stuff, but you can't do both. And it took me several years to say, gee, I just got to decide one way or the other. And of course, obviously I chose the cool stuff. what we do, and right at this point in time, it's Wanda and I, we had some other folks with us for a number of years. And I was a partner early on with placemakers and had a... Two of my sisters, Susan Henderson and Hazel Boris, were two of the partners there, and there were several others as well. then Susan was the chair of the board at CNU for several years. Her term just expired. Matt Lambert took over. Hazel is now the planning director of Winnipeg in Canada. And so I'm kind of like the family slacker, you know. But then my younger son, David, was a co-author on a book and people said, well, isn't that nepotism? I said, no, man, you call that the family business, you know? So anyhow, we've had a lot of involvement. Now it's just a mom and pop business, just Wanda and I. And we set out years ago to have a mission of trying to find needs that aren't being met and try to fill those needs. which means that the stuff that we're trying to do is stuff that nobody else is doing. And so that automatically makes us the best on earth and also the worst on earth, because nobody else is doing it. And some of those things have failed miserably. And then others have actually done well for us. so it's been a very interesting ride over the years since

Austin Tunnell

April Fool's Day of 02. So what's that? 22 years ago now. But yeah, that's kind of the, that's my, what, three-meta version of who we are and what we do. know, so hopefully that at least gives some notion to the folks who might be watching. And you, you know, play a lot of different roles and a lot of different projects. I think that's part of your point of like, kind of gave up being an architecture firm so that I could do more of what you love, I think. one of those things is you are involved a lot of charrettes from the beginning to really kind of conceptualize a place. But then you've also been town architect on, I mean, at least a number of projects, right? Like I forget, I'm blanking on the one in. my gosh, in South America somewhere. Well, there was actually, was a town architect for a little while on one of the Bahamas. I also am town architect at Beachtown in Galveston and then some in the Southeastern US, several actually in Alabama nearby. I've been on a couple of shreds in South America, but I've never been actually a town architect anywhere in South America. I think it must be the Bahamas when I'm thinking of where you were showing pictures of even like stud cavity walls exposed. yeah. yeah. No, that one was actually in central America. That's Mahogany Bay village. I was like, could not think of the name. Okay. What's your involvement there? Well, there were three of us. I don't know if you know Julie Sanford or Eric Moser, either one. Eric Moser. Yeah. two are just my greatest friends in the profession. And we decided back in quite a dozen years ago, I guess, was to to kind of team up and work on several. We've never actually made a firm that we work entirely within that firm. It's only when a really special project comes up, we say, well, hey, this might

Austin Tunnell

this might actually be a Studio Sky job. That's the name of the company. And it began with the fact that Julie was the town founder of a place called Sky in the Florida Pan Metal that came out of the ground, or was going to come out of the ground at exactly the wrong time, which is the fall of 2008. And of course we all know what happened then. But anyhow, but there's a tremendous number of great ideas that come out of that. And so we tried to say, well, hey, if it's a project that is significant enough, let's try to do it with the three of us and kind of fold in all these great ideas into the place that we're working in. So Mahogany Bay was one such place that actually all sorts of stuff that isn't supposed to be possible, we were able to do there. Including the fact that they're in the and all of the cottages there, there is not one stitch of drywall anywhere. Because drywall is a product that so long as you keep it dry, you have a wall. But if it gets wet or even moist, then it turns into a moldy, mildewy, gloppy mess. And you have to take it off and start all over again. What we did is we said, hey, what would happen if you're in Belize where they have, basically there was a bunch of Mennonites that came down from Canada in the late 1800s and started doing some very interesting craft out of the Belize, Belizean mahogany. And there's several different varieties of that. And they also do a very sustainable forest farming. with the Belizean mahogany. But at the time that we got involved, they kind of lost the markets for all of their high craft things. And we said, you know, it'd be wonderful if we could get involved in that and kind of create markets whereby they can actually sell stuff again that is better than just, you know, lap siding or whatever. And I mean, lap siding is fine, but I mean, they were capable of so much more than that.

Austin Tunnell

And so that was trying to tap into both local materials or regional materials and regional craft. That's always been a big part of what we've talked about wanting to do. And so it was an opportunity to do it there. then the buildings were, because we did them, now they only have mini splits, small mini splits, but because of the way they were designed, They're basically designed for all except the most extreme days of the year to be, you know, to not need conditioning. Essentially what you do is in the evening, open up the louvers in the buildings and the cool air blows in, you know, the ocean breezes and so it cools off really nice. And then about nine or 10 in the morning, close the louvers and cut all the ceiling fans and it has You know, the roof is corrugated metal and it's just a mill finish galvalume. And so it reflects like 92 % of the sun seat back up before it even gets the end of the building. And then with the ceiling fan, you know, I've been in there working on quite a number of days and have never had to flip the mini split on. other than one time and that was one time that Wanda and I were down there and it rained at night so we couldn't open up the livers. And so because we couldn't cool it off in the evening and we had to cut all the way to split the next morning and kind of, you know, knock the warmth off and get a little bit of the moisture out. And so, but yeah, other than that, you know, you can just work in 100 degree outside air. And it's a lot cooler than that inside. And of course, with the ceiling fan, you're comfortable 10 degrees cooler than what you would be if it were dead air. And so there are just so many things like that. And also the town founder, was a woman from Washington, D.C., Beth Clifford, who, her primary business, she's a developer and she builds a lot of office parks around the Beltway in D.C.

Austin Tunnell

But she's brilliant because she's smart enough to know what she doesn't know. And so she's always asking questions. You know, because sometimes the developer might think that they kind of know kind of everything they need to and they keep doing the same old thing, you know. but so one of the things she asked was she says, Steve, are the first buildings we should do? So, well, really the best thing you need to do in the beginning, you need to build Two buildings right on the first neighborhood square. And one of them should be your sales office with a condo upstairs or apartment or whatever. And the second one should be a third place with also another unit upstairs. So basically it's two live work buildings that were tiny. They were 14 feet by 24 feet plus the back porches. So basically like a Katrina cottage or something like that. And the third place, she calls it the rum and bean. It's a rum bar by night. The bean is a coffee bean for in the morning. So it's coffee shop in the morning, rum bar at night with some light fare that they serve for small meals and stuff. But at this point, my, they've got probably 30 different businesses that they have cultivated. And, you know, so it's a legitimate town. It's not just a, you know, resort or something. And so the ability to do supposedly impossible stuff, that's, to me, that's really, really exciting. And there's another one, like, for example, a very different place called the Village of Providence in Huntsville, Alabama, that about two hours north of where I am right now in Tuscaloosa. And it does a whole bunch of other supposedly impossible stuff. Like, for example, they were originally entitled for, I think it was about 750 units total in the place. But they did such a great job from the very beginning. Well, I'll take that back. That was the project I went down to help DPC out with.

Austin Tunnell

And so that was the one they were designing. so in the at the very beginning, we were looking right at the studio was right downtown and walking around downtown. The historic town center of Huntsville is like one to three stories. And so was a pretty small, with the exception of like two buildings that were they were eight or nine stories tall. But other than those two, everything else was was. very low scale. And so we designed the Providence Town Center to be at that scale as well. But the developers, the town founders did such a great job from the very beginning that the first three buildings they built, one was three stories, one was four and one was five in the town center. And they have grown into the building they most recently completed is It's an entire block and it looks like several different buildings making up the block. Kind of the early 20th century industrial stuff. For the most part, there's some, this more art deco, one on the corner. But anyhow, that one is like a half a million square feet and it's five to seven stories. in that building, I don't know exactly how this happened. I don't know the backstory, but they have 450 apartments in that building for which they were not entitled, you know, at the beginning. so basically, there's so many things that they've done in recent times there that the city has said, essentially, I don't know word for word what was said, but I know that, you know, kind of the proofs in the pudding as they say in the deep South. what it essentially amounts to is, hey, you have a track record, we trust you, go ahead. I don't know if the city uttered those words, but that's what the end result was on so many of these things. Like there was one project that I approved it as just a house on a corner lot that was right across from the town hall.

Austin Tunnell

in one of the earlier parts of actually, I guess the second phase. anyhow, and I came back three months later, I do a lot of reviews for that place remotely. And so they'll send me PDFs and I'll just mark them up on my iPad and send it back. But I would get up there several times a year. The first time after I had approved this house, I came and it's like, wait a minute now. there's on the side street, there's one, two, that's three storefronts there. So you mean you have, you actually have three shops in this house that are opening to the side street and then the owner says, yes, but I also have two apartments upstairs, one behind my house and the other one over the garage. And so that, that was actually a six unit building. Now this is in a city where The fellow who was the de facto mayor for several decades was actually the city planner. And in the 60s, he said, nothing in the southeast corner, well, southeast for me, I guess I should turn it this way, anyhow, nothing in the southeast quadrant of the city of Huntsville will ever be anything other than just single family homes. That's it. No mix of uses, no commercial, nothing like that. other than schools and churches, which you can have in Huntsville, you can have those in single-family residential zones. And then so those were accepted. But so to to let somebody who went in and got a permit for for a house to end up with a three unit house and three shops in it was just that was utterly unthinkable just 20 something years ago. And then the other thing, too, is and I asked a at one of the town founders, he and his brother and his wife are the three town founders. And I asked him, said, several years ago, this is probably 2018. And I said, Dave, you got a ton of folks working here. How many jobs are there actually in Providence? He said, well, I don't know now. He said, I think he said it was like three years before that, which had been 2015, give or take, that he had actually founded. And at that point,

Austin Tunnell

in time there were about two and a half thousand people employed there. he said, I don't know, it could be 4,000 now and that was in 2018 and it's only continued to grow. So I don't know how many thousands of jobs that they have there, but with 750 units originally entitled plus 450 apartments, that's 1200 units that they have. But the jobs outnumber the units. you know, several times, you know, they may have five or 6,000 jobs there for all I know. And, and so, you know, I mean, that could be four or five times as much as the, the, as the number of units. And, and so it's a major employment center and, and they have, they're finishing their fourth hotel now, the first three hotels that they have, because the place is so cool when all the business travelers come in, Huntsville is a, a big space sciences place. It's Marshall Space Flight Center is there in the Army Missile Command is there. So was a rocket city USA for years. Now it's a lot of biotech as well. So a lot of people traveling in and everybody wants to stay at Providence. So the three hotels have been operating for quite a long time now. All three of those are the top occupancy for each of their flags in the entire region. When I say the region, I mean, east as far as Atlanta, north as far as Nashville, south as far as Birmingham, and then west basically to the Quad Cities. And so in that entire area, those three, there's not a one of their flag that has higher occupancy because they're basically full all the time. so, I mean, it's just all sorts of stuff that they have done. this impossible and it or supposedly impossible. So I just thrive on the supposedly impossible. Well, that's a good place to be. Definitely the most interesting place to be. Yeah. The full hotels just go to show the power of creating a place and how attractive that is for people. So recently, maybe it was like a month ago or two months ago or something, you made a tweet that said you were on a task force.

Austin Tunnell

on hurdles to build better places. And you made the point that it's more complicated than just regulations bad, build, build, build. And you created six buckets of concepts that you identified about barriers to build better places and things we need to work on. And I've got them some jotted down, but can you walk through, actually would like to spend a little bit of time on this, but if you can walk through those six different buckets and the things that go into those buckets, and then we can start breaking some of those down a little bit. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I am a small player in that task force. I only show up occasionally. Nathan Norris started the whole thing off. And then let's see, there's, there's John Anderson, Edward Erfurt. And then Kevin Klinkenberg or there are other members and I don't think I've missed anybody. But let me just look real quick and see if I can pull up that email because I can't, I can tell you what the number one bucket is. I can actually read, I wrote them down. perfect. Cause we can talk. So number, I'll just kind of read through them and then we can go back and talk about each one. But number one, administrative process and culture. Number two, zoning and development standards. Number three, building codes, number four, street standards, number five, finance and tax law, and number six, utility and infrastructure standards. And I'll start off by saying, I read this and it was like, I saved it because I was like, y'all nailed so much of this. I mean, this is really well thought out and it's so true in my experience. I'm still young getting into all this, but I've hit all of these things. But maybe to start off with the administrative and process. Can you talk a little bit about, about that bucket? Yes. And actually the informal title for that bucket is the leadership bucket. Because if you don't have someone that is providing major leadership in a municipality or could be somebody in the Chamber of Commerce, doesn't have to be a mayor or a council person or whatever. Like, for example, the

Austin Tunnell

the city planner in Huntsville that was for all those years saying no single family in this entire quarter of the city. know, he was a strong leader, whether you like what he was leading towards or not is a different story. But he basically counted around the city. Now, I don't know. I was not there for the actual conversation of what happened, but. I can tell you the net effect of a more recent leadership story from Huntsville. And that is that at the very beginning of Providence during the shred, we told them, said, there was a five lane arterial that was running right through the middle of the site. And so we told the city, we need the outer two lanes back as parking lanes, and we need the center lane for you to give that to us as a landscape median. So you actually have two travel lanes. And they said, yeah, fine, we'll do that. Well, the the parking lanes were easy. That happened in just in the first year, just as we were kind of getting the construction going with the place. But the I don't know if it was the fire chief or the fire marshal. I don't even know what the guy's name was or he is or whatever. And and so My knowledge here is sketchy at best, but someone in the fire department, it kind of stonewalled that for a lot of years. And so it was designed in 2002, 2016, there was a mayoral election and a really strong mayor got in. And I don't know what he said to the person in the fire department. But the net effect And I don't want to speculate on a podcast as to what he said, but the net effect is the fact that within a period of, I think maybe less than a month, a very short period of time, however long it was, that they were tearing out that middle turn lane and putting in the landscape median that the city had promised all those years before. It's basically 14 years earlier they had promised that.

Austin Tunnell

And, but he was simply because of the, of the mayor taking a strong stand and saying, we are going to, we're going to honor the commit what we made back in 2002. And, and so if you have someone like that, you know, he might turn into kind of a Joe Riley from Charleston or something after, after a lot of years, I don't know. Or he might retire next term. knows? I don't know the guy we never met, but. Anyhow, it's, but yeah, that leadership bucket is crucial because if you don't have that, then nothing else matters. I'm with you on that. Just from personal experience, you really do have to have someone to kind of rally the troops and really ultimately I think about it as setting a vision of what you're actually trying to do, what you're actually trying to accomplish, because otherwise you just have a bunch of isolated people, industry bureaucrats, public works, engineers, fire departments, utility departments, trash, all of it, making decisions based on, and a lot of ways, I don't mean this in there being malicious about it, but essentially like, do I make my job the easiest? My job's the easiest just to make the tent that the easement is 10 feet wide between the water and the sewer and electrical because then it's easy. not recognizing the actual downstream impacts of that and not caring, frankly. So I definitely agree with you on the leadership. Well, you know, in some of the categories that you just mentioned of the various specialists, there's some things that are that are not law. You can't get you won't get arrested for it, but it's kind of the. standard practice of a particular discipline. And I remember one years ago that there was a place called The Waters near Montgomery, Alabama. It's now in a town, the town is incorporated, it's called the town of Pike Road near Montgomery, it's east of Montgomery, the incorporated because of The Waters. But in the beginning, there was a, our civil engineer in the first, the village, which is the first phase,

Austin Tunnell

We had, there was, well actually I'm gonna go back a notch. the developer had called us in, Nathan and I, and we were with Place Frankes at the time, and he called us in to interview us about doing the architectural pattern book, which we ended up doing. But we couldn't shut up about how bad the previous plan had been. There was actually, There was a great plan for the site that was originally done by DPZ. And then the two partners that had commissioned that, they kind of went separate ways. then a second group got it and hired a conventional planner who did cul-de-sacs and all this and really kind of ignored a lot of the assets of the site. One of the assets being there was a, right in the middle of this first village, there had been a fence row right down the middle of the village. And that it had been there for over a hundred years. And the trees, for whatever reason, the seeds that dropped were acorns. So you have this tree line. The fence road turned into a tree line of great oaks that had been there for a hundred years. And the previous plan just kind of ignored all that bulldozed all through there, flattened everything out. You know, the way that development normally goes where you, you know, you're trying to just make things just flat and ordinary. And we said, you know, If you save those trees and we put one lane of an avenue on each side of that and make it the Avenue of the Oaks, then it will make the place look as if it's been here for hundred years, because that's how long the trees have actually been there. And so we're riding around in the town's founders four wheelers. And then he pointed over to a bit in the distance and he said,

Austin Tunnell

You see that pile of dirt over there? I said, you mean the hill? He said, yeah, okay, the hill, whatever. He said the previous planter who he had already fired because he didn't like what he was doing. And he said the previous planter had said that we need to find somewhere to waste all that dirt. I He yeah, need, where would you put it on the site? I said, I'd leave it exactly where it is. I would line a street up with it, put a wedding chapel on the top of the hill, call it Chapel Hill Street, and it'll be the money shot for the whole neighborhood. And so we did, and so it is, you know? But then the only avenue of the Oaks, it's actually, it was kind of hilly lands, it's going up and down. So the civil engineer told me, said, you know, according to engineering standard practice, we've got to all these intersections must be flat. You must have only, you know, a very slight slope on any side of the intersection. So you know what that means, right? It's what are you talking about? Well, if you're doing all that grading, all these trees will be gone. And so one of the greatest creators of value of this place, you're going to get rid of it. I said, is this a law? He said, no, it's just standard practice. I said, so I won't get arrested if I get you to do it the way it ought to be. And so we went back around, running around for three or four months or two, three months of kind of headbutting. But eventually he saw the light. so that kind of led to what I say now. said, great as if you only had a wheelbarrow. If you do this, you'll preserve almost all of the character of the land. You will spend a whole lot less money on infrastructure in the place will be incredibly beautiful as opposed to completely ordinary. Why do you want to spend more money to be ordinary? know? And so we had very little in the way of storm sewer inlets, of underground piping, all of this, but there was almost

Austin Tunnell

Almost none really. And so it looked the way that an old town would have looked because caterpillars didn't exist in Alabama in 1895. It just was interesting that limitations can actually just lead to such better outcomes than where the wealthiest country... I just think of this a lot as where the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And when you look at what we build, you know, it's just, and you compare that to be what was being built a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago. And you're just going, my God. that's what's great. What gives me hope though about that is the idea that we're so much, we're so capable now financially, technologically, that the barriers to building all these amazing places are literally self-imposed. They're not physical limitations. Getting to space is hard. flying a rocket to Mars, that's hard. That has to be invented. All of this stuff has been done before and done with way simpler tools. I forget how fast the, my gosh, the famous building in downtown New York, my gosh, I just forgot what it's called. The Empire State Building. Yeah, it was built in 18 months or something? Yes, it was designed in four months or five months. The total time from beginning of design to the ribbon cutting was like 22 months and some of the days. is mean, it's really, I don't even know. It takes us two years to build a really nice custom house, you know? my, yeah, exactly. you know, it's so much stuff that, well, there was a project that I was working with DPC on back in, well, 10 years ago now, 2014. And in that project, there was, There had been three developers of the land. It was near San Diego. And the first two developers of the land, they'd been working on it. At that time, was like working on it for 27 years. And now it's been 37 years since it started. And at the time that the Charette was, the first two developers had already died.

Austin Tunnell

And so the third developer was saying, I would really love to get this place started while I'm still alive. And, but you know, the impediments would put out to, to getting anything going. It's just, but I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what I found. And that is that you can often have the best luck in places, the best success in places, not just luck, in places that not that many people care about. For example, 30A, know, it was before Seaside, was known as the Redneck Riviera. know, it basically was a bunch of just, you know, kind of cheap. Actually, they had what they call the Gulf Coast Shuffle, where instead of lining all the condos up like this, they kind of did a sawtooth thing, you know, going down the beach. And that was the latest architectural innovation because you had a little bit of privacy in the near little corner of the sawtooth. But it just was boring beyond all sensibility. so nobody cared. And so actually, Reverend Darrell Davis had to come in and actually get Walton County to start a planning department. They didn't have one at the time because due to the size of Seaside, was got a... it needed a DRI certificate, Development of Regional Impact, I think is what that means. And so without the planning department, they couldn't do that. And so they couldn't get started. then just as soon as they were working on the second project there, which is Rosemary Beach, there was a lot of things that did the seaside, that the planning department that they upstarted with the guy that they brought in to be the planning director, to, you can't do that now. You know, these connections, we can't let you connect. Why not? We did it at Seaside. Well, that's against standard practice. You know, so all these standard practice things that are not actually laws on the books, but are, you know, just what is convenient for each of these disciplines. Those are some of the things that are really causing us the greatest problems in terms of building

Austin Tunnell

places people up. What's the, have you experienced, what's the best way to approach those types of things that you found where you see people actually get past the move around them? it bringing facts, data, a story showing people bringing someone more important to, know, to try to overrule them with authority or something? How do you handle that? Cause I know exactly what you're talking about. I have some things in mind in my own experience. The most important thing is the three letter word. bus. get the leaders on a bus and take them around and show them stuff nearby that, and ask them, how many people have been killed here? we don't think, I don't think anybody's been killed here. Well, if nobody's been killed here in your entire lifetime, then you're telling us that it's too dangerous and we can't do this sort of a thing. Or like, for example, in Huntsville, when We were doing the Village of Providence, and one day one of the meetings was the Board of Education. And so they all came in, the superintendent and the whole crew. And we wanted to have a K through eight school at the edge of Providence. And they took one look at plan and said, you can't do that. Why is that? Well, the state of Alabama says that to have K through eight you have to have like, I think it was 12, 14 acres or whatever of stack lanes. And, you know, for parents to stack waiting to pick up their kids at, you know, an afternoon. And. And I said, no, you don't. It's state law. What do you mean? No, you don't. I said, well, there is a school you might be familiar with that is

Austin Tunnell

design like this at the edge of a neighborhood. And it's called Huntsville High School. I'm pretty sure you're familiar with it. And I said, because of the fact that what happens is because it's embedded at the edge of the neighborhood at 3 p.m. everybody's working. So the parents they stack on the neighborhood streets doesn't cause a problem to anybody. And then when the bell rings, they pick up the kids and it's Well, I guess you're right that that works, doesn't it? Yeah. And so they went to the state and they said, based on this, we think that this works. And so they got the state to, I don't know the details of how it worked, but basically the state did not impose that regulation on the Providence School. And like I say, the sausage making, I'm making a lot of assumptions as to what must have happened. But I know that that law wasn't enforced as a result of that. But that brings up a point, and that is that all of these regulatory things, the reason I have hope about all of those buckets is the fact that in the beginning, everything that the New Urbanists did was either impossible or illegal or some combination thereof. Like I say, impossible stuff is what actually energizes a bunch of us. When somebody says it can't be done, we say, just watch. I think that's kind of the purpose of life in a lot of ways. That's where the meaning is found, is doing things that haven't been done before, doing the impossible. That's what creativity is and what it most means, I think, to the most purest expression of what it means to be human, in my opinion. Everyone's got their own role in that, but. Yeah, that's great. I really like the bus idea. Do you offer to pay for it? What do you do? Do you just say, let's go? How do you get people on the bus? And that's actually, that's Nathan's idea. And he always manages the way to kind of finagle a bus and get all the city council people and the mayor and all this. So, the, you know, the heads of departments and so forth on the bus. Amazing. He's gotten all those people on the bus. Yeah. Incredible. Yes. Yeah. But I mean, but he says it's essential in

Austin Tunnell

You know, because here's the thing. Theory is one thing. Books are one thing. And videos are something else. But to take people and get their feet on the ground in a place near them, ideally that they're familiar with, ideally in their own town, you know, the best trips are those on foot. Or if you're, you know, if the shred site is downtown or whatever, let's go for a walk. You know? this stuff's been under your nose. You don't want to say it that way. But the fact of the matter is, there's a lot of stuff that's been right under their noses for years and that they've never seen them. Matter of fact, I was working with the Prince's foundation, now the King's foundation, Prince Charles's or King Charles's group, who after Katrina said, we would like to help with the rebuilding and because we... done a lot for years with training, craft apprentices, we would like to do that here as well. And so my role in one of the classes was to take them out and have them, it was a pattern hunting expedition. And where you look around for things that are happening over and over, if you see something just once, that's an instance, and that's not a pattern. But if you see it happening three, four, five, 10 times or whatever, it's like, wait a minute now. The old folks, and when I say old folks, I really mean dead folks, previous generations, they did that. I wonder why. And so once you kind of document it, then you ask yourself, well, why did the old folks or dead folks or whatever do it? And then that reason, does that apply to the living today? Because what you're hoping to do is write a book of the living, not a book of the dead, you know, in terms of a pattern book. And so, but if it doesn't apply to the living today, might there be another reason why the living today would want to do it? And for example, there would, like say with window panes, in the old days, would, architectural historians would tell you that the panes sizes and proportions were based on

Austin Tunnell

class-making technology at the time. And of course, everybody, other than historian, you know, their eyes just kind of glaze over and they fall asleep or whatever, know, it is boring. But if you tell them the story of the living, which is that when you have a mutants in a window dividing the window up into multiple gains, those mutants, they diffuse the light coming in. so that diffused light makes everything in the room more beautiful, including the humans. Now that gets interesting to the living, but then you compound that by saying, look, if you, the best diffusion counts when you have a whole bunch of mutants and really small pains. And so then everything is very, very soft light, but that costs more money. so the least you have like in this window, I have, and in that door, I have a couple of mutants in each and you can't hardly see it because of glare. And so I didn't want to spend that much money Also, it's a bungalow and so that's particular to a bungalow. And so you have a choice of do I want more beauty, spending more money or don't wanna save some money and not have quite as much beauty. And then that's something that people living today can get into. Then they can make a rational decision for themselves. But there was this one craft apprentice and I remember her name all my life, it's Marybeth Allhart. And she was all hard, you know? But she said, you know, when she was presenting her stuff at the end of the day, she said, I have lived in New Orleans all my life, but I've just discovered that I have never truly seen New Orleans. Because this has opened my eyes, you have given me a new city to live in. Thank you so much for that. And so Going back to the same point, it's the very same thing with the city officials. They may be having stuff that is literally just a walk away from their office that has been under their noses all their lives. And they have not seen the significance of it. so the best things to show are the things that are only a walk away. The second best things to show are those that are a short bus ride away. know, we're, gee.

Austin Tunnell

I've seen this so many times, but I didn't know what it meant. And I like the stack lanes, for example. It's like Huntsville High, come on. You're Huntsville City Schools, you should know Huntsville High. That's great. 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 100 reviews. And if you do, take a screenshot and email it to Playbook. at buildingculture.com, playbook, P-L-A-Y-B-O-O-K at buildingculture.com. And when we hit 100, 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. So yeah, we've got the administrative process culture. We've got the zoning and development standards and those are pretty common to most people. think like we need to fix parking minimums and setbacks and zoning and uses and stuff like that. Another one that was building codes that you mentioned, know, IBC versus IRC and point at like egress and sprinklers. Can you talk just a little bit about that? And I think you've also got ADA and FHA in there as well. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean here about what needs, you know, could be reformed? Yes. Well, you know, there's a big reform movement around the U.S. and Canada today on the single stair. egress for buildings so that you can, so you don't have to load everything up with quarters all over. IBC in particular, and IRC is supposedly the light version of IBC for only just like single family and townhouses and just residential. But in the IBC, the International Building Code, basically you have to have two means of egress out of anything. except a three-story walk-up. can have a single stair in a three-story walk-up and that's it. But what that does, that burdens you with having to have quarters in which obviously have to be double loaded. So the building gets twice as wide, a little over twice as wide. You have to condition the quarters, you have to maintain them in perpetuity. So it bloats the building and then the units get

Austin Tunnell

only like half as much light, really less than half as much light because the fact you only have one wall out of which you actually have windows and that's just whatever fronts on the street and your party walls don't and your quarter wall doesn't. really depending on the proportion of the units, you might have 20 % of the, you might have 15 % of the perimeter of your unit that would actually have the ability to have windows. And the other 85 % may not, if it's a long and deep unit. And so then what also happens, so when you get to that point, then you say, well, let's get the best use out of these quarters and the stairways. And so let's go up higher. And then of course you need elevators when you do that. And so the cost of all this just gets incredibly bloated. And one thing that John Anderson has been really good about doing, and I didn't mention, but yeah, he's one of the other ones on the task force as well. And I probably have missed another person or two, but anyhow, it's a good group. I say, I'm the slacker there too, just like Alan and my family, anyhow, compared to Susan and Hazel. But yeah, so there's a lot of things like that for bi-weed burden buildings. And I will say this. We were in New York City in, what was it, 2019, I guess, was when they had the blackout. We were staying at kind of the southern edge of the Times Square area. And so our hotel was one of the last ones that was hit by the blackout. Just across the street, they had power. But anyhow, so we were on like the 14th floor, and it took a little while to walk down the elevator, excuse me, The stairways were small and kind of cranky from the 1920s or whatever. And so we got down, but then there were two elderly women that we saw actually, we were eating and they were as well at our brunch or breakfast, guess it was. anyhow, they said, we're on the 32nd floor and it took us two and a half hours to get down.

Austin Tunnell

They weren't highly mobile and you know, they'd have to stop every four or so and rest a while, you know, and that's getting down. Now they have to go back up, you know. So there are, there are reasonable limits to how far you should be able to go up. I don't have a magic number in mind. I will say this, we don't want another Greenfield tower, you know, in the U S you know, that's the one in London. that it was a single stair tower. what was it? Somewhere around 100 people died in that fire, I think, that was four or five years ago. So there needs to be... some reasonable number of stories. And I've said that somewhere in the five to seven story vicinity, know, mean, Paris was built on that. And it's not like you had just, you know, terrible numbers of deaths that I'm aware of at any point in time since Haussmann remade the city, you know, at about that scale. you know, so I'm not, I'm not satisfied yet that there is a good number. am completely satisfied that it should not be unlimited. Right. Yeah, that makes sense to me. mean, I think that the regulations around elevators, think that one's coming up more. I've seen a couple of articles and stuff even about like how absurdly expensive elevators are because of our requirements that they have to be these massive things in, you know, a not very big building. You know, that, that really a small elevator should suffice not only size wise, but just cost wise, you know, when it costs 150 K to put it in the elevator. I mean, that is really expensive. I forgot what it costs in Europe. they were doing a comparison. mean, it's like a third of the price as it is here. Well, yeah, I mean, 150 K, you could build a small house for that in some places, you know, obviously not in California or not in, you know, especially not around the Silicon Valley or anything. I mean, those.

Austin Tunnell

That'd a million dollar house there, or multi-millions or whatever. yeah, mean, the fact that an elevator is the cost of a starter home is just, I mean, that's kind of an unthinkable thing, but true. Yeah. So what are you guys, this kind of the task force, I know it's not super efficient, I'll move on from it after this, but you know, we've got a couple other things about street standards, which I completely agree with after kind of dealing with municipalities that have blanket street standards for the entire massive city and it's basically all suburban street standards. And it's really crazy minimum 12 foot drive lanes and tree wells that are 115 square feet, know, I mean, just really, really kind of, crazy stuff. and then, you know, mentioned finance, tax laws and utility and infrastructure standards. What are you guys trying to do with that task force? Just put something together that's a document that people can understand. What's kind of the ultimate goal there? The ultimate goal isn't just to have a polemical piece, but is to because we're already talking about, who are the people that we need to put on this task, you know, to actually make change and. and who are the others that can take care of this other thing? Or then what are the tools that we need to build for these people to be able to have success with the change that they're hoping to make? And, you know, there's a lot of stuff, you know, for example, the, you know, with the getting rid of offsite parking requirements. mean, that's something a lot of people are working on that already. And so we simply need to have toolkits for going to towns that aren't already doing that. and pointing out, look at these folks, what they're doing. They're doing really good work. Here's the tools in the toolbox for getting this work done. Same thing with the single stair situation. There's a lot of folks working on that already. some of these, and here's the thing.

Austin Tunnell

What I've noticed is that there's a lot of groups that will get really hyper-focused on one thing or two things or whatever and do good work on those things, but then kind of ignoring everything else. And so if we're really interested in building a place that people love and that they can afford to be there, you know, then it's not just one thing, no matter what kind of a silver bullet that is. You know, it really is kind of the way it all meshes together. that's what we're trying to do more than anything else is to say. And that's something that the new urbanism has been doing for a very long time. You know, within the Charter, it was always looking at kind of everything from the, from the region down to the scale of building. And, and so, you know, that's our goal with these, with these regulatory impediments is, is to say, you know, we need to be, we need to be able to tell the story of how all of this stuff affects everything else about all of this. For example, I did a, and I started off with, with kind of modest intentions on this. what, three or four years ago, I did a, what's the title of it? It's something about the broad virtuous cycles of street trees. And yeah, it was about street trees. And once I really started digging into it, man, street trees by themselves affect so many things about, you know, about environmental health, about the economic health of the place. and about public health. You know, it makes everything healthier in so many ways that you never would have thought of. And that post went on for, my, it is probably, I forget how many words it is, but you know, there's just so much stuff there that we just need to have a broader view. know, Andres has always since very beginning said that we as urbanists need to be generalists. Austin Tunnell (01:01:36.544) If we get, if we go down a rabbit hole or get in silo or whatever, then we're not going to be able to build a place that is truly thriving and is full of abundance. We have to be thinking in broader terms than that. And that would be my, I guess the thing about which I would encourage all these other groups that are working on their things to just broaden their view. Like we need to constantly be broadening our view as well. And so that's the purpose of the buckets is to be saying on the regulatory side or the other, you know, you might just say that the bureaucratic stuff in general. what are the stories that need to be told for each of these disciplines is to how not, it can't be just, here's what you do at a wrong and what you know best. You know, cause it's like, no, we're not, you know, and you'll never win that. if it's how, you know, what are all the other ripple effects of what you're you know, and then, when people consider that, if they're considering it thoughtfully, and it's like, wow, I never thought of that. And so it just really, there is nothing, there should be nothing more important to a dedicated urbanist than looking at all of those interconnected things that will either lead to... lead to thriving or lead to failure of a place. know, there are ghost towns for a reason. I could not agree more strongly with you about that idea of, don't know, urbanists should be generalists or whatever. Just how you said that there because in a lot of way that that hyper specialized, isolated siloed thinking is literally what got us in this mess. Right. And then it's interesting because a lot of this in my mind goes back to education. mean, there's a lot chicken or the egg. It's hard to say, but it's like, Austin Tunnell (01:03:57.324) In education, we have programs that train people specifically for their hyper siloed industry. So literally starting from college, when they're learning how to be a structural engineer or civil engineer or an architect, an urban planner, a landscape architect, do they learn a little bit about the other stuff? I mean, maybe a landscape architect, you know, they're not learning. And by the way, shouldn't all of these people be learning? I don't know, psychology and humanities and what creates human flourishing to begin with so you actually know the actual purposes at the end of it. And boy, I just really, really agree with that because I see people in the profession where it's like, I am an architect, you know, and just think of yourself so purely as an architect when really you have much broader perspective, which is another argument I think too for. diverse experiences, that's something I'm glad I did. I felt behind, you I mentioned I'm 35 and for a long time I felt behind all my peers because I hadn't landed on what I was doing. I started off in 2011 as an accountant at KPMG, you know, and then I'm off in the jungles of Panama, which is by the way where I met Clay Chapman in 2013. And then I was off doing the Peace Corps for two years because I thought I was gonna be in the foreign service. And the jungle is Panama. You weren't at color yellow. Were you? Yeah. Yeah. That's where I was. And I know you were involved with that. I didn't know. I didn't know you didn't. Yeah. Yeah. So I was there in 2013. That's when I quit KPMG and just like moved out there, sold my car, 20K in my account. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but that was literally where I was introduced to new urbanism. There I was interested and I grew up in the suburbs of Houston. So I was there learning about, you know, traditional T and D's and traditional neighborhood design. And I read suburban nation. And that is literally what sent me down this entire path. know, we're a little bit 11 years later now and that, that book is the aha moment. I'm going like the veil was lifted. Finally like understood what was going on. And it's, it's interesting because like you grew up being taught America is at the pinnacle of all human civilization, you know, and when you don't know any better, when you've never been anywhere else, why wouldn't it be, you know, and, and then Austin Tunnell (01:06:09.528) From Panama and I got to travel backpack in Spain and Portugal for a little bit too for a few months just by myself. But I remember thinking, my gosh, we have lost some things. We are missing some things. Yes, we're very technologically advanced. Yes, we've got a lot of wealth. Yes, there's a lot of amazing miracles about the modern world. turn on a faucet and hot water comes out, right? Some great things. I don't mean to denigrate that. But the actual day to day life is so full of ugliness and inhumanity, it's actually hard to wrap your head around once your eyes are open to it. Yeah. Well, you know, I mentioned a couple of things earlier. I don't know if you remember, but very early on I mentioned something about the Sky Method with Studio Sky that Julie had been the town founder of the place. And actually, Jimmy Stice with Caliello had heard about that and hired us. so actually, Julie and Eric and I, I think we've been down there twice doing work at Caliello. The idea of how do you start literally with tents and then the pavilions with a straw roof over head. And then how do you let that actually evolve over time into a into a complete town. so yeah, that's kind of connecting a couple of dots. That's funny. Yeah. I'd actually forgotten when I mentioned that, that you were involved, but I remember it was mole and polyzoids and you, I remember seeing you on there. And then when I was reading books, I was like connecting it back to you, which is quite funny. I had not been to CNU. I didn't know what CNU was at the time. My first CNU was Savannah. think whenever that year that was, cool. Yeah, that was a good year. Yeah, that was a good year. going back to siloing of professions and stuff, and a lot of this starting with education, a lot of this stuff, it's not that it's only the architect's role to facilitate a great built world. I think there's a lot of hands, a ton of hands that are involved, but at the same time, the ideal would be to have architects kind of at the center of that, being like the vision casters and the leaders and the people bringing people together about what we're trying to accomplish. Austin Tunnell (01:08:32.812) And why are we building? Why are we building? We're not building for our values. That is not the purpose of architecture. What's your experience with architecture schools today? I don't have that many connections to them from the few people that I talked to, I mean, how would you describe the state of architecture schools in the US, generally speaking? Obviously there are some great schools out there, but. In general, know, a lot of what is taught has to do with, you know, feeding what comes out of the industrial development complex, which, for example, in the industrial development complex, there is you and Clay and others are mythological characters that never actually lived. You know, you're just a figment of some romantic construct that some people have about the way things ought to be built, but now that's impossible. You can't do it. Well, I can certify for you all, because I've laid brick with clay. Okay, I know that he's actually real. I know you're real, because we're talking and you're not AI. So, but yeah, mean, there's the everything that can be manufactured and sold in quantity. The whole narrative of modern construction is built around that. And I will actually maintain to you that a lot of people are called builders today. They should actually be called assemblers because what they're doing is not so much building, is assembling. a factory-made components that you just kind of put together and then it becomes this assemblage in which you live or work or do whatever it is you're doing or teach kids or whatever. to say what should we be doing now, Austin Tunnell (01:10:54.19) I would suggest actually stepping that backwards to what did we once do. Because it wasn't that long ago, was less than 200 years ago, more like 150, when for all except the most heroic buildings in the country, then, and for that it would be more like 200, but you essentially had what we now call a master builder that would show up with a crew and do most of the work to, you know, actually building the building. Clay was the first person I've ever seen in my lifetime that was a true master builder in the modern world. And there just so many good things that happen when you go back to, and everybody has to be a generalist if you're on a crew with a master builder. You know, if you're part of that team, you have to be a generalist because you have to know how to do more than just one thing. You're not just sitting there doing this one thing like on an assembly line all day long and nothing else. so really the ideal of the highly interconnected sets of disciplines is something that we can get a better picture of that. before everything bifurcated so much. If you think about it, you you went, first of all, the, I think that probably, I'm not even sure if it were, if it was, it probably was the first division from the master builder. actually this I know the first division was between those on the design side and those on the building side. Okay. That was the first big schism. and then on the design side, Of course, it split again, and I'm not sure which of the ones split off first, but it was either, it was architects, planners, and landscape architects. And so the first and second just split off, I'm not sure which, they kind of came at about the same time in the late 19th century. But then today, if you look at it, in landscape architecture, you know, you have, Austin Tunnell (01:13:17.918) sub sub disciplines there. Where, for example, one sub sub discipline is, is the landscape lighting specialist. You know, and the problem is every time you have another bifurcation or another schism, then those people don't just take what they what they had known from before the split and just focus on that. No, they got to have their raison d'etre, otherwise they don't get paid, is you have to add, you know, have to have some value added, which means more complexity added, which means that, you know, the landscape lighting consultant, as an architect, what they're saying almost sounds like a foreign language to me because there's so much stuff about the specialties of their discipline or sub sub discipline or whatever that that is that I can't know. And so at this point on the design side, the architects actually just within the cone of architecture, not thinking about the planners and the landscape architects because those are kind of the first big three splits on the design side. But the but just within the cone of architecture, it's gone enough levels deep now that there's very little about what the people at the most specialized levels, I wouldn't have even a clue as to what they're talking about, what the documents are, what the sources are, what the manufacturers, none of that stuff, what I know anything about because it is just simply a, You know, it's, it's, going too deep. and because of the necessity of each new discipline, making their own, new territory of stuff that, the people above can't know. And, and so that, so basically we're, we're essentially almost up to here with, with stuff that we can't know. We're almost at the strangling point. You know, if you think about, Austin Tunnell (01:15:32.654) Well, what is it? MSDS is or material safety data sheets. Those things didn't even exist 20 years ago. I don't believe or maybe 25 years. long. Yeah. I remember in Huntsville, I could go in on a relatively small suite in an office building and I could do the space planning, do the working drawings and in a day, I could go into the building department and I could get a building permit in 10 to 15 minutes. That was when I was working for a developer. And so I was the guy getting the permits. And then just as soon as they brought in, you know, the computer system to check all of the permitting. So it basically ran the permitting. It instantly went from 10 to 15 minutes to basically two weeks until you get your permit. You know, it just... you know, the hyper specialization is just, ruining us on so many counts that it just really is very important to, that's why it's increasingly more important for all of us to be true generalists, you know, as opposed to just knowing a thing or two. We don't need to be, it doesn't need to be, you know, just a trigger pursuit or something like that. You know, it needs to be, Well, I'll put it this way. was one time I at the new town of St. Charles. was a DPC chariot, St. Charles, Missouri, near St. Louis. And Andres took the architects and had them do transportation engineering. He took the transportation engineers, had them do landscape architecture, and he took the landscape architects and had them do architecture. because he said, we all must know what the other is doing. And as it turned out, my role in that turned into the public works manual for context sensitive places. But I knew nothing about it until that Shrek. But the necessity of us all to have a broader view is absolutely essential if you want to build a place. Austin Tunnell (01:17:59.0) that people will love and be able to thrive in. 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. 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. Cause it doesn't just matter the window manufacturer. matters who you're buying your window from, who's putting that order together, who is 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. think that's really well said and such an important point that special specialization ultimately leads to complexity and in complexity. It's just not always a good thing. You know, I'm not saying, you know, some things are complex and that's, you know, a car is complex in some ways. well, in a lot of ways, but, but too much complexity and, know, you, you kind of lose humanity. think you lose affordability. think you lose sustainability even and longevity, which kind of dovetails nicely into something I wanted to talk to you about, which is, know, that the concept of the original green and, know, you wrote a whole book about it and it's been a long time. So I read it. read it a decade ago. But that's something I think about a lot with say building codes. Every three years they come out and guess what happens? They get more complex, more rules to do. We just did a really, a very simple example was now our electrical has to have arc fault breakers behind the fridges and whatever the heck that means, I'm not an electrical expert. Austin Tunnell (01:20:15.278) Whatever it means, I know it it trips half the time and you ask any electrician and I got a call from our, you know, nearly million dollar house saying our fridge is going out. We lost all our food because we came back. We were gone and people are mad and I'm going, my gosh. We, know, I take responsibility even though I didn't run the wire. And then I find out the electricians like, yeah, that happens a lot. The motor kicks on foot trips it, but they're required by code. and of course they cost more money. And this is a known problem. If you ask any electrician, any homeowner, The homeowner wants to replace it back, but then the builder is afraid to because of liability. Plus you got to put it in for, for, so all sorts of ways, the complexity is counter to productivity and the actual true outcomes that we want. How many houses are actually kind of catching fire today because fridges, you know, whatever. and sorry, getting back to my point, rambled there just a little bit about sustainability because our current primary building method, which is stick framing and I live in a hundred year old stick frame house with a brick veneer on it and it could go another hundred years if it was taken care of. And the reason is even though it's stick frame, it's using these two old growth two by fours. The exterior sheathing is this one old growth one by 12 on the diagonal. Then it's brick veneer and then on the interior it's just lath and plaster. There's no insulation. You know, and so there's, there's a simplicity to that. Water gets in the cavity, the wood holds up better and it also dries out. The moment you introduce insulation, I'm not advocating for not introducing insulation. I'm just kind of pointing out. Suddenly it's, no, the water gets in and then gets trapped. And then it's, no, we need to air seal because then you've got moisture coming in, even if it's humidity. And then we've got these air sensitive materials like drywall. So we've got to keep our houses at a perfect 50 % or below moisture content, and we're going to have major mold issues. And we just keep. doubling down. you can't cross-late and you can't, you know, it just goes right down the list. mean, of all the stuff. Right. We just keep, it's like keep doubling down the complexity. So it's high complexity with a highly vulnerable system, which is like the worst combination of like high complexity with a highly vulnerable system in a, you know, you're not manufacturing homes or buildings in a plant, like a car, you're doing it out in the open over nine months to 12 months where it's raining and hundreds of people are involved. Austin Tunnell (01:22:35.586) And I can't help but wonder when it comes to sustainability. Including many whose first language is not your first language. And you can't have oversight all the time 24 seven because if you did housing would be too expensive and it already is too expensive. And so people are really obsessed with energy efficiency and the codes are all obsessed with energy efficiency and every three years they get more strict. You know, that's just the way the world and I can't help but wonder, you know, we figured out how to insulate our brick buildings and stuff like that. like, How much better off would we be by just building a simple, uninsulated, triple-width brick building? I'm not saying everywhere. I'm not saying in California or in Canada where it's super cold, but climate zone three and below. Literally just building uninsulated brick buildings and yeah, they might vary in temperature inside 10 degrees throughout the year, but there's a simplicity to them. They can be neglected for decades of low maintenance and still be fine. And how much better off we'd be even from a carbon footprint standpoint than the obsession over energy efficiency. Well, you know, in Huntsville years ago, I bought the back end of an attorney's office and it had been a hardware store in the back end was their warehouse. And it was triple wise brick and two stories. And so we made that our office and didn't do anything to the walls at all. Now the windows had been in there for a hundred years and they were starting to rot. And so we replaced the stashes, but not the frames. The frames were fine. And we had, I don't want to have the utility builds anymore, but they were amazingly low for the volume of the building. And also the fact that there was no insulation between the inside brick and the outside brick. It was just a brick all the way through. so yeah, that's... It reminds me of a time I was speaking, my first time to speak about the original rain in England. was at that time, was the British Foundation. so it was over there. And one of the, it was a symposium and one of the speakers from England said, you know, look at this building, look at the wall over here. That wall, you see it's brick on the inside. And as you know, from when you came in, it's brick on the outside. And he said, Austin Tunnell (01:25:00.096) There is nothing between the brick on the inside and the brick on the outside than more brick. And he said, contrary to what you foreigners might think, it doesn't actually rain here all the time. Yeah. So what happens is, is when it starts raining, the water slowly starts seeping into the brick. But then when it quits raining, then it slowly starts drying out. And he said, in all the hundreds of years that this building has been here, we're not aware of a single time. when the water got all the way to the inside surface before it started to drown out again. And he said, as a result of that, all of the flashings and reglets and the joints and such that you have in modern construction is just unnecessary. It's a simple system that does many things well. you know, over a very long period of time, as opposed to something that is... And here's the problem with complexity. And you touched on it a minute ago. Complexity leads directly to fragility. You know, like for example, you can't open up a window, so we're told, in a building where there's, you know, where you have the... multi-layer stud sandwiches that you might have eight or nine or 10 things in there that if any one of those fails, then everything else starts to mold and mildew or fail in some way and you have problems. And there are groups out there, even if I could remember the name of this one group, I wouldn't say it because they'd probably sue me, but that they promote the idea of what they call the modern sandwich wall or whatever, I forget the exact term. And people that have challenged them on that, they literally take them to court and say, no, this is the best way of building. If you dare to debate us on this publicly, you're going to pay. You know, but that's that's the whole narrative of the industrial development complex is complexity is good because what it does is spins off all sorts of other sub sub sub disciplines. And and there's. Austin Tunnell (01:27:20.992) a lot more money involved. it just, I don't know, there's seeing things in a simpler, more natural way is, that should be a high ideal that we all pursue to open our vision to. things that are anti-fragile to use to live through. And that, you know, that we can, I've defined the original ring is this way. And that is it's keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future. And if you do, you cannot do that with ever replicating or ever expanding complexity. and every spanning fragility, it just doesn't work. and, and because, you know, one thing goes wrong and all of sudden it's like, well, now that, that part fell off this collapse, this failed. then you 10 specialists to fix it all. That's right. They were all expensive. Where do you think, you know, and I'm not really plugged into seeing you like I would like to be just because I'm busy running building culture and I've, you know, haven't made it to all the groups, you know, I keep up with people and, big. huge supporters of just the work that has been done, right? Like I think we're all kind of, I'm having this conversation today because CNU started doing, you know, in the eighties and the nineties, right? So kind of standing on the shoulder of giants there kind of thing. But you know, I noticed in Oklahoma City, the CNU in Oklahoma City, was that two years ago, 2022? Yeah, that's right, yeah. So, you know, Climate is becoming a really big narrative in the CNU. of course, I'm, not of course, I am quite the environmentalist in terms of very concerned about our environment. And I remember the debate, there was a debate with Andreas Duani and another guy on one of the last nights about, they were both kind of presenting the CNU's future vision for climate. Doug Farrar. Doug Farrar, yes, right. Two very competing visions. And after they debated, some guy got up and was, Austin Tunnell (01:29:39.264) accusing them both of being old and how dare they be up there even talking, which I thought was the most absurd thing. And I stood up and said, so I don't know if you were there. Actually, I was in a room right across the hall with a bunch of folks from Carlton Landing. We were having our own little sidebar discussion and missed it. Well, we got the first 15 minutes or so of the debate and then we said, let's go talk about this. Got it. Got it. Okay. Well, that was probably a I really resonate and I can't really remember it very well now, but with Andreas's vision of it, which is really about being that idea of adaptability and simplicity and kind of getting back to in some ways like first principles of new urbanism is building communities for people that are there. I say they're simple. They're also really complex in like a Chuck Morrone way, like, cause humans are complex. Where do you see But it seems like there's definitely competing vision there in seeing you. And I don't know, but it certainly seems like there are a lot of people that are like, we need to low carbon buildings and energy efficient buildings. And I'm not saying that that is wrong or bad. just, for me, it's a secondary concern to building human flourishing long-term in my definition of sustainability. How do you see that conversation going? Where are things going? Is it young versus old? it? I don't know. Is there even a competing vision or is that just my perception of it? There is a, there's not that much competition. by that, mean it's, it's, undressing a few others that are, or, or, advocates for the simpler view. And then pretty much it's, it's 80 20, maybe, I don't know, something like that. 20 being Andreas in that viewpoint and 80 being the other. Okay, that's the perception I got. And I was trying to be kind of like just open-minded, but that's what it seems like to me. And it was a bit of a disappointment to kind of see how strongly it was swinging that way. Well, here's the thing. Again, the industrial development complex narrative. I keep talking about that because it's a serious big deal. Austin Tunnell (01:32:00.316) is so professionally put together and is so compelling that you really have to be a little bit Okay, this term is taking on new meaning in the last couple of weeks. And so I'm kind of debating whether I should use the term now. But I've said for years that 90 % of the time I'm the weirdest guy in the room. And so you almost have to be a little bit weird to not just simply take the prevailing narrative book line and sinker and say, I'm gonna... I'm gonna think and I'm gonna consider these things. Like for example, when I was first trying to organize, the whole, all the foundations of the original green. You know, I realized very quickly that it was going to be, it would be very easily, easy to make it just an apology for the new urbanism. I say apology in the literary sense, not the, excuse me, sense, you know? And, and so then I asked myself, and it was clear to me that there were foundations of sustainable places and foundations of sustainable buildings. So was like urbanism and architecture that those two meta categories were clear, but what were the most important things? So what's the most important thing about a place? Well, in that uncertain future that I mentioned earlier, you know, keeping things going the healthy way long into an uncertain future. Austin Tunnell (01:33:54.664) in an uncertain future where you can't ship stuff from halfway around the world. If you can't eat there, you can't live there. You know, so the first foundation of a sustainable place must be that it must be nourishable. That sure, we're going to be able to get spices and stuff from halfway around the world. mean, Marco Polo did that, you know, what six, hundred years ago, however long it's been. But they are light and are easy to carry. But the main ingredients of the things that keep us alive they should be coming from the fields and the waters upon which we can look out of a town and see. And actually, if you look at a bunch of the old maps, like the Nollimap of Rome, for example, or the big famous London map, or all these other maps of the great cities and towns, they always have not just the city itself, but they're showing all the farms around the city, and they're showing the rivers. that might be running through it or whatever, or the ocean, if it's a coastal town. And so that was as natural a part of the city as the city itself. And that is the places that you get food from with which you nourish the people. But I remember even a Congress on my 15, 20 years ago, something like that. And one of the founders, And this is what used to be on Sunday at a Congress. And now, of course, it's travel day. But it used to be that was when the actual Congress part occurred, where people actually debated and so forth. And I brought up that point, and I wasn't addressing anybody, particularly, you you just get up to the podium and say what you thought was and that you're wanted to bring to everybody's attention or whatever. Austin Tunnell (01:36:01.46) But one of the founders just, this was about nourishable places and man, he just jumped up and just eviscerated me. you know, because he bought in to the industrial developer complex and about everything even food wise and no, we must be able to trade all the way around the world. Well now of course, what that means is that when you go from the raw materials to the finished product, a lot of stuff crosses the Pacific four or five times before it gets to us, you know? And in no universe can you call that sustainable in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future. You know, we during COVID what happens when things just get a little, a little messed up. I did and nearly put me out of business. That is the worst years of my life professionally. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was for a lot of us, like, well, what do we do now? And, but sorry, go ahead. No, no, I'm just interested. I didn't realize it was that strong, the 80, 20. How do you guys, like, cause I'm assuming you kind of put yourself in the 20. How do you guys think of that? Is it like an active thing that you're trying to, wins not the right word, right? But at the same time, seeing you, yes, it's an organization, is it not an organization, is it a movement? You know, it's kind of hard to define. And I think that's part of its strength too. But how do you guys keep showing up at seeing you, right? Like Andreas seems to go every year and you go every year and you seem to, you know, think it's important. So like, how are you taking on those ideologies as you guys are kind of nearing the, you know, the end of your careers and handing this off to new generations? How are you thinking about that and what do you want to see happen next? What are your goals? I can't speak about goals of seeing you as a whole because I've kind of always stayed off to the side. Now, whereas Susan was, she's been on the board for a lot of years, my sister, and she was chair of the board in the most recent term. mentioned that already. But so even within our family, we kind of take different approaches. Austin Tunnell (01:38:17.512) and his switches probably. I think I might've been emailing her on the Oklahoma city one. I think I was emailing Susan about anyway. Yeah, probably so. But yeah. And so I found it. I guess the question I've asked myself, even when I got around to saying that I will no longer be a full service architect, I will do these other cool things and not that. And I finally made that final break in 2016 after a job with just wonderful clients. And I quoted them like $56,000 on the job and it took me like... 160,000 worth of time. And of course, I'll have built on the 56. I've always felt like that I'm freer to think if I'm not at the center of an organization, know, one and a half kind of always regarded or what we do, we're kind of a skunkworks, you know, that we're trying to figure stuff out that needs to be figured out. But if I... to the company line on anything from, you know, carbon imprint to, you know, I mean, I could just go right down the list of things that people are concerned about. And it's a very long list. but it's a better thing for me anyway, to be able to just simply for one, did I have to be able to think on our own. and so we stay engaged because we don't want to totally lose track of what, you know, what the stories are, what the narratives are. But we don't want to get kind of shackled to the narrative of the day and not be able to think for ourselves. so, we put some distance between us in the orthodoxy, you might say, of the movement. Got it, got it. I understood. What do you see as kind of the new frontier of, you know, outside of, say, Austin Tunnell (01:40:29.28) seeing you not talking about organization, but just next generation of people, me, what do you kind of see as, you you guys have been doing this for 40, 50 years, kind of laying the groundwork, right? Like starting with Seaside and have made a ton of progress. Like, what do you see as that next kind of big generational, because you even mentioned at the beginning, it was literally impossible slash illegal at first. I remember, I I don't think I'm misquoting this, but something about the alleys had to be called running lanes at Seaside to get them through because of the legal situation. What do you kind of see as the next 50 years? Well, I'll tell you what we're doing in the guild because I do have more of a hand in that. Nathan and I co-founded it in 2001. what we've done the last several years here recently, in the last five years really, is tried to really build up the apprentice program of the guild because what we're trying to do is, know, because there's young folks that are coming in that know things that we don't know now because, you know, I mean, I'll be 65 in December. I was born with three days left in the 50s. So I've been alive in eight different decades now. But the thought is they know some things we don't know. And then of course, we know some things that would be good for them to know as well. so that's something that I think we're doing a better job of in the guild than CNU is doing as a whole. think that Chuck Marrone in Strong Towns are doing a wonderful job of bringing in a different cohort. I mean, if you look at Strong Towns day, you know, in the last couple of years, the median age of the crowd on Wednesday, it's probably 10, 15 years less than the meeting age of the crowd of the CNU members. so being able to pass things down and to learn things up to us, we're learning stuff that they know that we don't already. Then that intergenerational exchange is, think, Austin Tunnell (01:42:56.288) one of the most important things we can do. And it just, it's huge. And so that's why I'm happy that we're having some success with it. That's great. I'm pivoting a little bit to development. What are some of the most developments that have either recently been completed or are still literally under construction? Whether in the U S I'd say both, both the U S and abroad that for anyone in the industry, their urban designers, their developers, their engineers, city officials, whatever that are interested, you know, what are those places like, man, you really need to go see this. You know, I've mentioned some already. Obviously, Providence is one that a lot of people need to see because of it doing so many impossible things. And of course, Mahogany Bay, we've talked about that already and the impossible things that they're doing there. I think that there's obviously, Carlton Landing is doing a lot of things that are supposedly impossible and they're actually making it happen. And then also another one, South Main in Colorado. Jed and Katie Selby are doing some amazing things there in terms of craft. More the kind of the art and craft side as opposed to, well actually they're doing some amazing things with construction as well. But that's another must see place. And those are some of the ones that really are kind of tops on my list of places that everyone should go and see. And then there's all the old places, Seaside, Rosemary, Alice Beach, all of this on the Gulf Coast. You've got your Carolina's places, Ion and Habersham. there's a lot of cool other places. But the one place that there's no great heroic projects there, but it is probably more of a Austin Tunnell (01:45:03.904) There's more of a culture of innovation there than any place I've ever seen by new urbanists. And that is, of all places, it's Northwest Arkansas. I can't even tell you a town. know, I mean, it's a lot of the towns in the state, know, Fayetteville and so forth. But I mean, there's no single city, like, where you can't say, you got to go see Seaside. It's like, well, go see Fayetteville. What do I see in Fayetteville? know, because a lot of it is incremental development stuff. The incremental development people are stronger there than probably anywhere else in the country. Yeah, I know Matthew Petty and stuff are doing some pretty cool stuff there just from even like a policy side and pre-approved plans and some really innovative stuff. Ali, of course, is doing some amazing things. super impressed by her. Yeah, and of course, Davis is... I mean, the list is long of people who are doing stuff there. If you want to talk about building culture as a term, which obviously that term means something to you, is, Northwest Arkansas is a great place to see a thriving building culture that may not mean exactly what it means to you, but it would enrich what that term means to you by going there and spending a few days. So, but it's unique in that way, cause it's not just one project. It's not like you can say, no, that's an interesting point. Do you, know, all these places and they're all different, the places you brought up and there's, and there's a whole list of others too, that are great that we haven't necessarily said out loud, but you know, you've been involved with many of these, you've kind of, whether from kind of a higher level or pretty up close to. Are there any common patterns that you see among successful ones? I don't necessarily mean urban patterns. I just mean like, what are some of the ingredients for success that have led to successful projects versus mediocre to less successful projects? Is it the team? Is it the vision? Is it the financing? Is it the municipality? Is it, you know, I don't know what it is, but have you identified any common threads among successful places? The most common thread. Austin Tunnell (01:47:30.816) is the one that I mentioned earlier, and that is places that people care less about. Like when Seaside was started, know, Robert Darrow, which is those two crazy people out on 30A, they were trying to get you to pull in and buy some seafood from them, and then also buy into the dream, you know, but they were, you know, they were literally the crazy people on 30A until some of the other places started, and then they became the pioneers and the heroes. You you share that flip. Honestly, Oklahoma is a bit like that for me. I was planning on Carlton landing and I'll get out of here and move to Austin or Nashville where it's happening. And then ended up in Oklahoma city and kind of gone, man, I think we kind of are in Austin 30 years before Austin became Austin. And then realizing how much potential we have to shape what it becomes. And you don't have to be a multi, you know, 10, you know, millionaire to be able to do so. So I think Oklahoma's our home and that's part of the reason. Yeah, no, that's great. But speaking of the building culture, I think it's a great term that we all need to dig more deeply into. If you do the Northwest Arkansas thing and have a lot of folks, when it gets to a certain tipping point in a region like that has, then all sorts of things happen in the cross-fertilization between the people that are not too far from each other. mean, literally, you can get on a bike and you can go from Fayetteville to... gee, the name of the Walmart headquarters is escaping my mind for some reason, the town, but yeah, I mean, can be on a bike, you can be there in 30 minutes, you know? so, they have a great bike trail. What is it? The Razorback trail or Hog Trail or something like that. anyhow, but yeah, having people in a place that are Austin Tunnell (01:49:49.056) not only willing to share wisdom that they have, but are anxious to learn from what other people have. What gets done as a result in that area gets better and better over time, you know, as opposed to... And I'll tell you one thing that I did back in, what was it, 2017. I took all of the... the list I could find that people have put together. LJ Auerbach was one that did. Dianne Dornie did another one. Hazel Boris, my other sister, did another one. And there's, think I had one or two others as well of list of New Urbanist places. And I was trying to, actually I did it on a Google map and was trying to do kind of the master list of every known New Urbanist place that I could find. And you know, and the stories behind them that I could find. and it was really sad because it was, there was a number of places that it was just like a mom and pop operation or whatever. You know, the two town founders and, they were out there on their own and they did not have a 38. They did not have a Northwest Arkansas. You know, they did not have another place like that where the, where the culture of of building places people have evolved and they eventually failed. And the stories of the failures are just really sad because they were all out there on their own. And so I think that the building of such a culture is one of the most important things in a region, you know, where you're close together. You don't have to drive three hours, you know, but you're You can actually go have dinner with a bunch of people in this other town or whatever. And that really is huge. The ability to have colleagues within a reasonable distance that care about some of the stuff you care about and that also infuriates you on a few things that you're not quite settled on yet. And there needs to be that too. can't be just a love fest. It needs to be, you Austin Tunnell (01:52:11.934) is from the beginning that urbanism was number one, about generosity, but number two, about challenging long-held beliefs. Like I say, can't do stuff that was either illegal or impossible in the beginning without challenging long-held beliefs. And like for example, when Seaside got to a certain point, and other people wanted to say, come and say, how'd you do this? I mean, Robert Darrow would bring them in, they'd put them up. in one of the cottages, they'd feed them. And then they would open their books and say, not the books they were reading, but financial books and saying, here's how we actually turned a profit on this piece. Here's our cost, here's our income, you know, and they showed them everything. know, it's like, because the thing is, is if you're If you're just the crazy person out there, you remain the crazy person as long as you hold everything close to the vest. But if you're generous and willing to share, then all of a sudden you go from not all of a sudden, but over time, you go from being the crazy couple on 30A to being these internationally known heroes that started an entire movement by being generous. so, yes, we must be able to challenge that, but we almost also must have the generosity to share the things that we've learned that is useful. know, and like Juan and I, we test a lot of things to say, this should be useful, let's try. And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But that's a perpetual thing for us of saying, let's test this, you know, and be willing to be okay with failure. We've had plenty of that, that's for sure. But enough stuff actually works out that we're still here. Yeah, I really like those. mean, the generosity and challenging long held beliefs and the other one that I pick up from that you're saying is a sense of humility that comes from just that idea of exploring, like, let me try and see. I think this is going to work, but like just taking that open mindset, if you're actually trying to learn is really, really, really Austin Tunnell (01:54:36.28) important. One thing that growing up in Huntsville, and as I mentioned, Rocket City, USA, and actually in elementary and middle school, most of my classmates, and this was very gender specific back then, but most of their fathers, because women didn't get into rocket science that much back then, most of them were rocket scientists. My dad was a cabinet maker, and so I was kind of the weird one of the bunch even back then. But growing up in a city of scientists, I discovered that there is something today that I call scientism, which is where someone will take a bit of scientific fact here and fact there and use those facts to support their belief about something else entirely that has nothing to do with science. You it could be... everything from politics to religion or very many other things. And scientism leads you very certain about a lot of things, mainly because it supports your beliefs. But real scientists, I've noticed, you're always saying or thinking, I might be wrong about this. And if you talk to somebody who is a real scientist, and they'll tell you that their most important work. It came as a result probably of an experiment or something they were trying and expecting a certain result and got some very different. It's like, huh, that's funny. Why is that? Which is where most significant discoveries actually begin. But it takes humility to be able to say, I might be wrong about this and to just see where that pony goes. I I've mentioned quite a long time ago, because you just don't know if you're really seeking to discover things. Yeah, I'd say I've been punched in the face by life quite a bit over the past 10 years. I think I probably needed it, because there's a lot more humility than I used to have in my early 20s. Austin Tunnell (01:57:01.226) from experience of things not working out, you I've got some just, they're not necessarily rapid fire, but some kind of, as we wrap up some more personal questions, just thoughts. What have you become more convinced about over time? Austin Tunnell (01:57:26.196) The things I've become more convinced about are not so much design techniques or development principles or whatever, but are the more broad picture things like the things we've just talked about that, for example, generosity will serve you very well in so many ways that you can't even anticipate them. Or that if you're confronted with something that you just can't explain, that might be the door into something that you find very useful for the rest of your life. And, you know, the ability to, I mean, I'm just repeating what we talked about for the last 20, 30 minutes. You know, the... the building of a culture in a place where you have colleagues. All those things that we talked about that are the bigger picture stuff, the little detail stuff springs from all that and all sorts of, from all of those in ways that you can't even anticipate right now. And that's okay. And like you mentioned that 2020 had been one of the worst years of your life. And I think a lot of folks felt the same way. But I will say this, in a time period that was longer than that, And that is from the meltdown in October of 08 until 2012 or 13 or whatever it was, a lot of people really started to recover. If you think about it, before that time, before 08, New Urbanist projects were kind of the big projects that had the town center and they were 80 to 200 to 300 acres or sometimes bigger, whatever. And that was kind of what people did for the most part. But if you look at all the stuff that began when we couldn't pay our bills, you know, beginning in October of 2008, you know, when the meltdown came, you know, I can go right down the list. Actually, made a address was kind of challenging us in this one of these little groups that he puts together in email just the other day about Austin Tunnell (01:59:46.272) this is so stifling. It's like, nobody's thinking of anything new since, you know, in the new millennium. Said, Andres, would you like a list? He said, well, sure. He's always open to stuff. And so I had this list of like 40 items or whatever that people have begun and continued to develop, you know, like tactical urbanism. That didn't exist in 1999. You know, you go right down, I there's a ton of stuff. that just simply wasn't there in the last millennium. And so it turns out that those years were, I mean, I remember one time that one of my New Urbanist colleagues that called up literally crying because he thought that the end was near for He thought he was going to have to close up and lose everything and become homeless and such. And it's like, what do I do? And so in times as desperate as that, they actually spawned more innovation than it ever happened in the entire previous history of the urbanism from 1980 to 2008, 28 years. mean, that's two thirds. both in neuro-medicine until now, give or take. so in that last one-third, there's been more great stuff developed than in the previous two-thirds. And so... And in my own experience, some of the things that look like the worst possible things that could happen, you know, it turned out to be some of the best, you know, and it just, you know, so I haven't said this specifically, but to... Austin Tunnell (02:01:53.546) Don't ever waste strong pain. If there's strong pain, that's precious. Don't just try to get over it and take a painkiller or whatever and hope you forget it. No, let strong pain cause change. And I don't know what that means for you, but I know what it's meant for me on a number of occasions and that has never failed me. Yeah, I think it took me some... It was really, you wouldn't know about this, but I was in a car accident a few years ago. That wasn't my fault. A city bus ran a red light. But anyway, seemed like a really minor accident because I just hurt my foot, but I still, I'm on my fifth surgery, about to get my sixth, and I really can't walk. Like I can go like maybe two blocks. Every step is incredibly painful. And the process of going through five surgeries is not fun. These are painful surgeries. It's been three years. I got two kids, can't run around with them. But it really has, and I think it's been what, I've been probably needing to learn for over a decade, that idea, trying to like power through the pain versus like letting the suffering teach you something, you know? Right. And this was one of those things I just couldn't power through, you know, where you're like almost forced to change because there really isn't another option to see that that or like, I don't know, just, just explode and rage and kill myself, you know, and I'm whatever, just, Austin Tunnell (02:03:31.276) so I completely agree having more recently been through this, probably the worst years of my life. I've come through with a different perspective and actually that perspective, comes back to a lot of what you were talking about in terms of generosity and other people too, because what got me through the time, there was a lot of things that I don't want to get into it right now. but, the people that I had around me, over these past, and really over this past decade, because building culture has been very difficult, nine years, guess. It's been a very difficult thing to do. And it's the people around me, not that many people, but those key relationships. And I'm going, man, if I was mid, I don't know, mid 40s and divorced or didn't have anyone that shared my vision or values, there's no way I could have done all this. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's the same with Wanda. mean, we've been, she's been my muse since we got married after my first year in architecture school. And she's asked all the impossible questions. we were, when we got married after the first year, it wasn't too long, and she would come to the studio, help me work on models and stuff. She'd come to all of the juries and, you know, see what all, you know, what the critique was and all this. And so it wasn't too far into second year that we'd gone to bed one night and about to fall asleep. And all of she sat right up in bed and she says, Steve, why is it that you refuse to design anything that anyone else I love would love? I said, do I? She said, well, yeah. I said, well, how do you know? She said, well, have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture? Wow. Our professors tell us we should educate the client. She said, well, if you'd ever shut up and listen, you might actually learn a lot of things that you don't know now. And four years after that, I graduated from architecture school realizing full well that I had no idea how to design anything that anyone else I knew would love other than the architects. I could make the professors happy, you know, and get good grades and all that. But regular people Austin Tunnell (02:05:55.378) No, I was clueless. It took me well over a, well actually it took 11 years of self-education until I finally came across a group called the, at the time it was the ICA, Institute of Classical Architecture. I thought, I literally thought for those 11 years that I was, because, know, in that time there was no internet, you know, no connectivity. And I thought that I might be the last person left alive that actually cared about designing buildings that regular humans would love, that my grandmother would love, for example, you know, that kind of a thing. And then I found the ICA and of course they were a tremendous resource. And so that kind of sped up the self-education process. yeah, she has been, I mean, well, you can't see it, but there's a chair right over here on the corner. That's the jury chair. She comes in here and sits here. and critiques all sorts of stuff that I'm doing. And so we're really kind of a team that way, but she has always asked the impossible questions that some of which have taken years or even decades to be able to finally answer those questions. so having colleagues or friends or family or whoever they are that share some part of your passion, if not the whole thing, it's huge. I will, in addition to what I mentioned, know, all the things were mentioned over the course of the last while, there was a, one of the things that are dead when there was no architecture to be done at all was, was a book. was a, it's actually an ebook called new media for designers and builders. And it was kind of a, you know, how you can, now that you don't have anything to do to make money with, here's how you can do something useful in in the meantime, in the, you know, the three prime virtues of industry of which you can only have two at most in one time is better, faster, cheaper. We, you know, we all know that. I mean, you can be fast and cheap, but you can't be better. you can, know, so two, if you're, if you're really good, pick only one, if you're ordinary, which nobody can do three. But the, so the, Austin Tunnell (02:08:19.956) The three prime virtues that I kind of settled on of what we should be focused on, you know, when we're trying to kind of reinvent ourselves and like when the world's changing and we don't know where it's going, was patience and generosity and connectedness. Of course, the generosity part we talked about already, but, know, some of this stuff doesn't just, you know, pop out of the ground and, you know, overnight, it's not bamboo. growing 40 feet in a week or whatever. But the building culture and the place, your colleagues that share some of the same passions, I really think that those are, that's just different words of saying some of the same things we've been saying for this whole podcast so far. But anyhow, it's helpful to have different ways of framing a similar idea or the same idea, because it opens doors into what somebody called it, philosopher, I forget who was. But they talk about doors into the adjacent possible. Like Charles Babbage in the mid 1800s essentially invented the modern computer. But because there was no electricity then, he couldn't open a door into the adjacent possible. Every door he opened was into the adjacent impossible. 100 years later before, you know, IBM and some of the other early pioneers actually kind of rediscovered him as, my goodness, what if we do this and this and that? wow. Look what we can do now, you know? And but yeah, so that that idea of the colleagues that are accessible to you, you know, that's the connectedness that can make a whole lot of stuff serve you well over time if you're patient enough to actually you know, hanging in there. That's a, I think that's a great way to end the conversation. How can people best follow you and keep up with what you're doing? I know you're obviously on X. Definitely on X. I've just joined one called Blue Sky that is very similar to X and Look and Feel. and, but you don't have Austin Tunnell (02:10:47.36) I haven't seen much in the way of politics on there. I haven't seen much in the way of, you know, just screaming matches and that sort of thing. Of course, I've only been on it for just a few days. But I'm starting to think about trying to put stuff there. I'm starting to put a little bit of stuff onto threads and also onto Instagram. But the kind of the mothership, if you will, is the RejahReen.org. And that's a site that I've... I've been working on the site since 2008. what's that? What 16 years, something like that. yeah, it's, it was a lot of, it's, it's heavy on usefulness or at least it tries to be, which means there's a lot of content that, that hopefully some people will say, Hey, I can do something with that. Steve, thanks so much for coming on and I really admire all the work that you've done over the years and look forward to seeing you again, hopefully at CNU or somewhere. Yes, looking forward to it. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five-star review and take a screenshot, send it to playbook at buildingculture.com and when we reach a hundred reviews, I'm going to send out a 10 building culture hats like up there behind my head. If you're watching video, and I'll send it to your house. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.