Transcript: Intelligent Buildings: The Future of a Less Stressful & More Collaborative Urban Society

what type of spaces, what type of organizational systems optimize and work best for people and allow them to create the exchange of ideas that are so needed to drive new economies. So if the buildings can be designed quite less hierarchically but much more allowing for flexibility of movement and the free exchange of ideas, then you have different type of ecosystem of design. You have people who are looking first and asking first what is best for the employee in order that we can retain them and all that effort and money that we put into their training can then find fruition five to ten to fifteen years down the line as they become leadership of some sort.

The buildings and the design are really fundamental. Incorporating natural space into these buildings is really essential only because it allows people to perform better in terms of their thinking, they relax better. We really want something of the 21st century to solve what is now going to become an ecological cataclysm caused in many ways by older technology but also older manufacturing processes. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it, episode number 59. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly exceed your end user's desires. Last week we spoke with Ron Backer, founding partner at PLP Architecture. Ron was involved with designing the world's most sustainable office building known as The Edge. We discussed the different elements of the building life cycle from design to occupancy and operations, including over 30,000 sensors collecting data on a moment by moment basis. We go into a journey of really revealing the lessons learned of the design and how the occupants are affected in their work life.

So we discussed how their experiences were enhanced through the integration of technology. So that was an incredible discussion. Check out that interview if you haven't listened to it yet at constructor.com slash EP 58. Today we're speaking with Kevin Flanagan, also partner at PLP Architecture. Kevin is going to be speaking with us about the Oakwood Timber Tower Feasibility Study that demonstrates the viability of building a timber tower high rise constructed with cross laminated timber in downtown London.

So we cover some of the drivers of design innovation regarding technology. From his perspective, I know you'll enjoy this interview. So let's get into it. Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Yes, thank you very much for inviting me.

It's a wonderful opportunity to speak about a lot of the wonderful things we're doing at PLP Architecture. Yeah. So you're one of the partners at PLP Architecture and you've been involved with designing The Edge for Deloitte, which is the world's most sustainable office building. And you have been part of the feasibility study demonstrating the viability of building a timber tower constructed with cross laminated timbers in downtown London. And I would love to dig into the Oakwood Tower and the benefits of using timber with you.

But before we get into that, could you give us a little bit about your background and how you became an architect and decided to influence this space? As a fellow coming out of high school, we needed to determine where we were going to go in terms of profession. I was interested actually in art and I wanted to be a painter, but I also had a tremendous facility as it turned out with physics. I was not so terribly bad in math, so I loved art. But I found out through the course that I was taking that I was a genius level in physics.

And it occurred to me that I needed to somehow bind together these two talents. Our family had a lot of art background. Washington Quarter was actually designed by my great uncle. And art and science, and there was a science relation as well. They're a former editor of Scientific America, was a great, great uncle, a distant relation.

So we had a lot of these things that were around the house. My father was inspired to become a civil engineer through his readings of Benjamin Franklin. So there are these very strong roots to enlightenment in my past. And architecture seemed to be where you could have an experience of lifetime learning and constantly be challenged by new norms and new social pressures and challenges. And that seemed very interesting.

I'm quite shy by character, but I'm very interested in social patterns and in the way that people interact. And all those things dovetail into the type of work that I do and how I see buildings. I don't see them as physical objects that represent symbols. I see them as working, living, the dynamic places, venues for new ideas. And so there's a very strong symbiotic relationship that I see between buildings, what they can do and how they can act to promote and extend people's abilities.

So we do have, and very often in the projects I do, we try to create social spaces, whether they be restaurants or overlooks or stairs that have a dramatic appeal that allow people to come together and talk about the ideas that they have. A lot of the things that I was interested in as a young person and sort of brought to the fore, for architects it's very often the case that after a certain age you become quite good at what you do because there's a skill set that needs to be developed, but also a certain level of maturity that you need.

And so I think I've reached that level of age anyway. I don't know about the maturity, but interesting. That's lovely. I really appreciate the connection between the built space and how that affects the people who live and work through them as well. And we definitely talk about the owner's perspective.

That's who we're focused on speaking to in the podcast. But I did want to talk about the different benefits that timber has provided to the frontline, right? We have steel, we have concrete as structural components. These have been used for many years and timber has been used as well, but not for high rises, but it's coming back onto the scene. Why do you think that is?

Well it's a new material really created in Europe, in Austria I believe. And it really hasn't come to the fore until about 2005. So it really is a 21st century material. Somebody was asking me the difference between these sort of cross laminated engineered timber panels and methodology and regular wood. And the difference is sort of the difference between a block of black coal and sort of a diamond.

One has been transformed through pressure, through a process to create a totally new material that's harder, let's say and more transparent. In the case of cross laminated timber, engineered timber, you go through a method by which the members are very small sections of wood, are brought together, they're glue laminated but in a cross rotated at 90 degrees. And it's a similar sort of process to the way that wings are created on airplanes now with carbon fiber filaments. Carbon fiber is very strong in one direction along its long length, but these ribbons that they use are very weak along their narrow dimension.

And in order to get the proper structural benefit from the strength of the material, they laminate it in layers in a crosswise fashion by rotating each of these filaments one against the other. And that's the same as they do with the cross lamination of the timber. And so you get a material that's very, very strong. It's more robust, it's brought under pressure, not quite like a diamond, and it changes its characteristics in terms of fire. And these members are typically are quite large, at least in the columns that we're using for the Barbican oakwood timber tower in London.

They are at the base about two and a half meters by two and a half meters. So the fire resistance is very great for them. What are the different structural components? Obviously, you described what the cross laminated approaches, right? But how does it respond differently from a structural perspective than say steel or concrete?

By weight, this cross laminated timber is stronger than a steel or concrete. So it's exceptionally light and exceptionally strong for its weight. Steel typically is much heavier and as is concrete. And the lightness of the timber, if it's in an urban setting allows you to move the members around quite quickly. Therefore, the speed of construction is about 20% less by comparison to other materials.

The lightness also allows much less of it by weight. And there's much less waste. It creates 40% less waste than other construction materials, concrete as an example. So it has a lot of benefits. One of the things that should be understood with steel, particularly concrete, is that because the material is so heavy, a lot of the material actually is simply holding itself up.

It's a bit like having a very heavy cousin on the couch. A lot of the structure is really being used simply to maintain the equilibrium of itself. But with the timber, you have something that's very light and now can be very highly precision cut. So that can be stacked like a set of cards or Lincoln logs as an analogy that's been used. And it's quite stable because it's interlocking.

So the material can come up very quickly. It's inexpensive. In Canada, they build out of this material at 10% less cost than they would out of concrete. In the UK, they've shown that things can be built 20% faster. So if in a city you're limited, let's say to three months of construction period, which is sometimes the case, the neighbors decide that you only have three months to build the primary structure.

This cross-laminated timber, you can build 10 stories versus only eight stories out of concrete with far fewer people. So the benefit in construction is that it's a high precision material. It also sequesters a phenomenal amount of CO2. So for the very large oakwood timber tower in the Barbican, it sequesters and is a replacement for about 10,000 lifetimes, human lifetimes of CO2 that would normally be created. So if you can use this product over a large scale, where its benefits can become quite clear because you're bringing component parts that are interchangeable and pre-manufactured and very light, and you can bring components, very large components, and build using a robotic platform to assemble, you can really build very, very quickly, very inexpensively and create a living space that we understand may be even more helpful by virtue of the fact that the timber has some psychological benefit as well.

Yes, please tell us about some of the psychological benefits. I know I heard you particularly talk about someone doing a study of how it can reduce stress. Could you talk about that? What seems to be happening is that there's a lot of now anecdotal evidence and science evidence as well from studies that including timber finishes internal to classrooms for students who have learning disabilities. They do better on tests.

It's thought that it's because they're able to concentrate better, their heart rate goes down, their stress goes down. And a corollary to that is that people are thinking now that because of this reduction in stress, allowing people to reside in buildings that have this timber, that they may in turn become more sociable because they're less stressed. The urban environment is very stressful and you probably know that populations will increase over the next 30 years, probably about double for about 145, 143 major cities of the world.

So you're going to have a huge increase in population that requires new residents. At the same time, there's going to be a move to make fuller use of the existing infrastructure of transport. And that can be done through augmented movement in different types of car and travel. But what we're looking at is that if nothing is done and we continue to use the typical materials, we'll have a problem firstly with CO2, but at the same time, you're going to have this sort of congestion and any of the world's aggravations that exist because of people living too closely together will be exacerbated.

So if you can find a building material that reduces the CO2, but at the same time has the potential of creating more sociable settings for people to live in an ever more condensed condition, then I think you have a material that has a lot of benefits, not simply ecological, but also social. The other thing that was anecdotal that was mentioned is that in hospitals in Scandinavia, they found that hospitals with the timber using this timber construction method, particularly people recuperate better. I'm not clear why that is, but it could be that the stress levels are reduced as well and that helps people recover more quickly.

I think that it was about 10% more quickly or something. So it's a very interesting material, not simply because of its ease of construction, its lightness, the fact that it really will promote the use of computer cutting and precision applications, but it has the ability to transform our cities and urban life and make that better. We don't all have the ability to create new parks and major city centers, but maybe the material that is used for the buildings themselves can be strongly associated with adjacent park lands and create the sense of still being sort of out of doors and that we live in tree houses as opposed to concrete or steel industrial buildings, which is the case presently.

Cities are very hard and if it's possible to create a softer atmosphere, softer materials that have a stronger association to nature, that can't be anything but good, I think. Absolutely, and I've spoken with the author of The Healthy Workplace, Lee Stringer. She talks about biophilia, just the benefits of having nature in your space or surrounding your space and and how that automatically just makes people happier, which I think is pretty incredible. Science has moved a little bit towards the study of nature and learning about responses, trying to determine how nature has responded over millions of years to particular forces and challenges.

I keep thinking of there's, they looked at the fluke of a whale and saw these little ridge and bumps on the blue and determined that that helped the hydrodynamic of the whale and the speed improved greatly, the speed at which it could swim. And those same kind of fluke ridges are now found on a lot of the designs that you'll see for any type of wing assembly, wind farms, you'll see a lot of the blades have these kinds of flukes. So I think in some ways the observation of nature is an important component in contemporary and future manufacture.

We should really understand that there's a lot that can be learned through proper observation of ourselves, firstly, and this is why well is quite an interesting avenue for designers to understand better how people honestly react to new spaces, whether they're stressed, because if you have people that are always constantly stressed in ever more stressful environments, in the end, they stop functioning as they should, they really should be more relaxed. And the spaces themselves should afford that sense of relaxation. You mentioned the edge and that's one of the things that we found, particularly for millennials, was that that central social space is being used primarily by millennials.

They prefer not to sit at their desk in assigned seating, even though it's somewhat chosen for them. But they prefer to be an environment that seems to be an outdoors environment. They like to congregate together and work collegially together in a space that they can be seen, certainly, and they can be audited, but their work flows much more easily when they're relaxed. And I think that's a lesson that we probably already knew. But it's interesting to realize that there are certainly the adoption of new norms and methods, depending now, I think, more so on the rising population of millennials and the desire for employers to try to capture them and retain them, mentor them through a process without having breaking their creative spirit and sense of self, natural capacities of curiosity.

I was just at Cambridge University yesterday, and there was quite a long discussion about how their architectural and structural program may, in some ways, merge. And it was interesting that there were two schools of thought. One was to allow the students the opportunity and freedom to find their own way through the subject, and also grant them the opportunity to fail, not try to provide them such immediate strictures that the creativity and natural sort of affectations of people's design sensibility is taken away from them through too strict curriculum that was too time-bound.

So it was an interesting discussion, how should we teach the future generations in structures and architecture? What are the courses that are the most viable for the future? I think people are needing to be much more sociable than they have been in the past. You were brought up probably, and so many other students, as you're quite young in a group setting. My kids, certainly, they went to school and they had five or six people at one table, and they shared the work and they worked together on tasks.

And that wasn't the case when I was young. So I think that collegial working together has been turned into a terrific benefit because of the new communication ability of 4G networks. And of course, those 4G networks are soon going to be 5G networks in a cloud. So the exponential ability, capability of our systems guided by phones and other devices is going to be very influential and permeates it in a way we have yet to quite understand. 5G that somebody who is blind can walk through or jog through the city of London without need of sight.

And so the responsiveness of that newer network, broader communications with greater accuracy is going to really have profound changes on the way that we see ourselves, how we connect and communicate. Actually, I think we have lots of discussions about the millennial generation here on the podcast, simply because I am of the millennial generation here. But I do think it's something that people are really taking a good look at it just simply because of what you mentioned. The generation is the largest thus far, surpassing the baby boomer generation and the focus on allowing for people to work and live in the way that they're best productive and most efficient really will contribute to the bottom line of different companies and or improve the health and improve the overall feeling of recognition and feeling of happiness and work life balance in your life.

I think that's something that provided any generation was given the opportunity that they would be happy. That's just my perspective. I think that's perfectly true even from my writing and from observation of my own two girls that, you know, when we got our first job, and that was a quite a strong driver because it allowed you to maintain a certain level of comfort and all these other responsibilities that you have. Once those though are satisfied, what we found is that certainly millennials need less things, so they're buying less things.

They're not part of the consumer culture in the same way. Getting a paycheck dependent on it is very coercive because it tends to create like-minded people who don't look to their own happiness necessarily. They're working for a greater company ethos and trying constantly to fit in. But I think the millennials, when I speak with my daughters, they're saying, well, I want to make a contribution to society. And for them, it doesn't necessarily matter where or how they do this, but it's that contribution, desire to feel good in themselves, but also to progress and make a benefit for society at large that seems to me in any case to be the driver.

And so that priority determines so much else because if you give somebody at an office a task that they're ill-suited for and don't find pleasure in, then if I'm a millennium, I'm thinking, well, maybe I should just go to another company. So the retention of these people is not difficult. It's a different challenge. But if you can tap into their creativity, their natural creativity and curiosity, and their very strong desire to do good, to improve their life and the lives of their fellows, you could find different type of architecture, a different type of space that's particular to this goal.

So I think it's somewhat of an inversion of people talk about American dream going dead. I think it's just the reverse. You've got a whole group of new people who are highly motivated not to earn tremendous monies, which they certainly will in their lifetimes, I'm sure, but are motivated by something completely different. It's going to be a very interesting case, what type of design will best suit them and they'll best respond to. So again, the Edge is a very good model, that central atrium where it's an open space.

It feels open. There's natural air that's flowing through. It's a very low carbon, in fact, zero carbon, and also has enough solar panels to provide energy back to the grid. So it's sort of this very ethical kind of concept for a new building. And the public space or that central atrium space, the semi-public space, is certainly the one that seems to have caught the imaginations of young people and is the model now of so many other companies.

We have Google and Apple visited and Amazon visited just to understand not simply the systems within the building, which with its 30,000 monitors and sensors, but really how that public social space works. And why is it that millennials really love to be there and why the retention rate is two and a half times what it is in other buildings. So it's an interesting case. And I think you were asking about Timber Tower. And I think Timber Tower is intended to be sort of micro housing for young urban professionals or non-professionals who come into the city looking for intellectual exchange.

And the type of idea is exchange that you should get when you're younger coming right out of university or high school. We do have another project for ProVast, which is a developer in the Netherlands on the similar theme in a city in the Netherlands. And that's not a thousand feet. It's lesser. It's 300 feet.

Nonetheless, that's going through its early schematic design stages. So we're not just doing one of these Timber Towers. We're actually involved in two. And there'll be an exhibition in February in London that will illustrate a lot of these new types of buildings. So if anybody's interested in London at that time between February and July of 2018, that would be a good to visit to see and see the state of the art globally of this type of technology.

Well, that sounds lovely. Thanks for the invitation. And if there's any information about that that I can post in the show notes, I'll be happy to do so. Let's talk a little bit about sourcing the timber. I wanted to learn a little bit more about the positives.

I'm imagining there are lots of people who are thinking, you know, you're cutting down forest or killing trees, but that's not so. There are companies that are primed and ready to support the timber industry, aren't there? A bit of a long story. You know that pulp and paper industries have been in decline for at least 30 years, partly because of the circulation of newspapers been reduced, but even more recently, because of tablets and the introduction of a type of paper that actually doesn't use pulp primarily, you have got a very significant decline over the past few years of a material that's created through managed forests.

So that's an important understanding to have. In Canada, virtually, I'm just going to make an exaggerated statement, but virtually every teenager goes out Western Canada and plants trees or works on the rail line. Planting trees in Canada is almost a national mythic adventure for most kids. So the idea of having this forestry industry that has very little impact on natural surroundings and wildlife is something that's ingrained into a lot of societies. In Sweden, about 20% of their GDP is based on timber industry proper.

So we were approached by the Swedish government and to find out how this new material might create a new industry that can take all of that benefit that they have of their material growing from year to year and put it to better use. And so what we've done with Chalmers University is created a PhD program called Digital Wood. And we're going to take over what was a formerly a concrete lab with all its testing facilities. And that will allow us to integrate production analysis with new adhesives and new cutting methodology so that we can really supercharge this newer industry.

Again, the material really wasn't in use prior to 2005. So it's only been about 12 years that it really has come to the fore. And we're still at a very nascent stage in understanding a lot of the aspects of the material and improving it for a consumer market. Nonetheless, at this testing stage, it shows a tremendous amount of promise. And I think I've mentioned this earlier as a quote that's been quoted, but there are no showstoppers as yet fires a concern, but in some ways, a fire stair core that is encased in timber actually performs a little bit better.

It's been found because of the insulative of the timber, the air temperature within a stairwell as people are descending is much cooler. And because of the thickness of the walls and the members that are used, the timber doesn't fall or tends to char for about an inch around, protects itself with a carbon layer of black material, which is the carbon residual. So it's a wonderful new adventure in materials and it should be understood to the concrete was invented by the Greeks, perfected to a great degree by the Romans 2,500 years ago.

The material is a very old one, particularly for concrete and the methodology by which it's used and procured and the types of formwork and all those other methodologies are 2000 years old. We really want something of the 21st century to solve what is now going to become an ecological cataclysm caused in many ways by older technology, but also older manufacturing processes consider the impact of global use of material. So I think it's good that it's being studied and it's a wonderful thing to be looking at.

For an architect, we have to create new designs, a new language of architecture because the material is so different. It reacts differently in seismic conditions. It's actually quite good in seismic conditions because it's so light, very much heavier materials like steel and concrete and basically shake themselves to destruction. Whereas the timber is quite light and pliant. So there's a lot of interest in Japan in using this material.

I just believe all of it is very fascinating and I'm very happy that we are investigating the utilization of a new technology, cross-laminated timber. I think the question has always been for people, how can we continue to use timber, but they never recognize obviously the technology around it. I did want to ask you a little bit more about innovation on a whole. What do you believe some of the drivers of design innovation might be in the next 15 to 20 years? Coming off the discussion that we've had with Cambridge University, I think that of course, technology monitoring of how people move through space, their desires and uses, their movement paths, what makes people really happy in a space?

Because if you have people, and this is where this idea is much like the Enlightenment idea that you have, that was the creator really of the national spirit coming out of France to the United States that the founding fathers were trying to capture, that if you could create a free people, if you can create freedom of movement within the space, if you can make people happy, then they can perform to their utmost and you gain also the potential of working more collegially together. I think that what is going to happen is that we're going to better understand the industry, what architects and designers will better understand what type of spaces, what type of organizational systems optimize and work best for people, allow them to exchange of ideas that are so needed to drive new economies.

So if the buildings can be designed quite less hierarchically, but much more allowing for flexibility of movement and the free exchange of ideas, then you have different type of ecosystem of design. You have people who are looking first and asking first, what is best for the patient if it were a hospital? What is best for the employee in order that we can retain them? And all that effort and money that we put into their training can then find fruition five to 10 to 15 years down the line as they become leadership of some sort.

The buildings and the design are really fundamental. Incorporating natural space into these buildings is really essential only because it allows people to perform better in terms of their thinking, they relax better. I think it was Seneca that said his greatest thinking was done while he was strolling his garden. And I think that's still true. People will gravitate towards spaces where they feel a sense of freedom and can breathe in the air and feel energized.

In those places, people congregate naturally. You can create spaces that are quite significantly different from what we're thinking now. Talking with a group that are recasting the notion about their hospital, and one of the things that's interesting now is that very often the design of hospitals were based 10 years ago on the doctors, how to make best use of the time of the doctor. So the patients were important, but they weren't singularly important. And now there's a move towards making sure that patient comfort is important because if you can make a patient feel better, they spend less time in hospital and that is a good thing for their health.

So the hospitals are no longer places where the doctors maintain guiding force for the design of the hospital, but also now greater consideration is given to the patient. And wouldn't you think that was important? Because you don't want people in hospital because it's been shown the longer you stay in a hospital, as a patient, your prognosis is not necessarily improved. It's a good thing. You sort of want outpatient movement.

And of course, it's going to be facilitated quite greatly by your phone, your headset with its cameras, and then subsequently by computing that will allow the doctors the gift of much more precise diagnosis of patients. So the world is really going to change fundamentally what spaces really are, what buildings should be, what they should symbolize, I think is going to change quite a bit. And I tend to think that we're going to have this sort of new international style where the buildings will be welcoming. They're all going to be particularly important to make people feel as if they're participating in the building's activities as they visit and that they're full members of society instead of being secondary citizens.

And again, I do think this could be certainly the product of new technology that this promotion of the idea of freedom and happiness of the individual, much more collective kind of state. It's going to be a very interesting time of the next 25 years. So just as my career is ending, we're going to find the fruition of all these wonderful things in coalescing. And I'm very pleased to be part of this movement towards a new social system and new buildings that represent that new social system.

It is an exciting time. I wanted to ask you about specific technologies. You talked about the correlation there, obviously, between the motivation now between technology and buildings being more welcoming and they're being more purposeful to speak to the actual goals and desires of the reasons for the built environment in the first place. I know that you guys are investigating CardTube and SkyPod and I wanted you to talk a little bit about that. The intention really there is to look at new technology.

A lot of these systems use a form of artificial intelligence and also mapping. What we're finding now is that people are developing autonomous cars, but the roadway system and the logic behind a lot of the transport systems is very antiquated. If you think of a rail system where you have individual stations and a very large, very often below grade tunnel that is absolutely massive, that's allowing for the facility of a train devised in the 18th century to go from one station to another, it's extraordinarily inflexible because it doesn't allow the city to grow in a natural way towards a speciality.

You basically fix lock the positioning of all of your stations and the load capacity of each of those stations prior to knowing really what type of work and where the centers of excellence will be in the city proper. So you could end up after 20 years of progress having stations that are not in their proper place. Of course, there's planning involved in modern cities. Why is it that we don't have a car and transport system that allows you to go where you want from one place to another in the city in the most direct route without the need of making station stops, which are somewhat exchange stations?

It's funny when I travel quite late at night in London to get home, it takes me about 15 to 20 minutes during the day, not simply a matter of congestion, but there's an accumulated loss of time because of the way that the system works. So it takes me 55 minutes to sometimes an hour and a bit to get home, but the distance is not so great. So why is it that I cannot just get into some kind of conveyance vehicle that allow me to get from A to B in the most direct path and clear path?

Well, there is a way of doing it and that's to create a distributed system of transport that has a series of grid irons allowing movements east and west and also movements that are linked north and south in a grid that exists below grade in very small board tunnels that would allow something like an autonomous vehicle to carry me from one place to another. And that's the notion of car tube. It would then allow the ground plane not to have quite so many cars. Certainly the safety would be greatly improved, but we see the advantage is that the whole of waterfronts along the city areas where transport is not necessarily so terribly needed, those could be park lands.

And therefore you're grading sort of this green lung along the river's edge where nature can exist. By virtue of the fact that you're taking so many of the car movements and dealing with them in a completely different way, really now using and understanding much better how transport systems really should be changed to adapt to the new technology. Now this technology is not going to go away. With 5G it's going to get even more profound and also the algorithms that are used to predict movement. I as a person have quite stayed patterns of movement from day to day on the weekends.

And you know, I go to the park at 1130 to read my book and I read my book for an hour and then hour and a half I have a coffee and then I read another book. I have very well patterned movement systems that anybody could see and understand just by looking at my phone. Oh, they're over here, they're over there. And if you can manage to create an algorithm that can predict where people are going to be, you have a wonderful new city plan that is not dependent on stations.

These stations were created for a completely different purpose. The rail systems were created to move coal, not people. We've adapted it for people. Now with newer technology we can actually do what we should have done, just try to create a more freer system pattern of movement. But it can be done now.

So this is part of CarTube and also this notion of SkyPod trying to integrate vertically all of these lateral below grade movements in a traffic interchange and drive them vertically through the tower. And apparently DayMAC is using that principle and adopted it, SkyPod, a tower that we designed. They've taken the notion and they're investigating it for a tower in Dubai, I've heard. So these notions are certainly for people who are very future oriented and see a commercial benefit or looking at these quite seriously, speaking to the elevator lifting people in the coming weeks to see whether that SkyPod idea of distributed movement through a tower can be interlaced with horizontal movement in a much larger setting.

And that may be adapted for the Google headquarters in Toronto. The technology allows and affords a freedom. There are certainly some dis-benefits, but it's not just that I'm an optimist. I think bright people and imagined creative people, if you can provide them even greater freedom and allow them to understand that their creativity is something that's respected and they bear the responsibility of trusting others, then you're going to get a society where these new ideas find value, form a beneficial sort of ethic that will include also privacy and all these other measures that people find somewhat dis-benefit thus far in our society.

This has been a wonderful time I've been spending with you and learning about so many things. With that, I'd like to ask, do you have any other thoughts that you'd like to leave for the audience? For all of you wonderful architects, designers and engineers out there, the world is going to be transformed within your lifetime. Your children are going to live in a world quite different than the one that you can imagine at present. And if you can find yourself in a place where you love the things that you're doing, you can make a significant benefit to your life and the life of future generations.

So, Kevin, what's the best way for people to either reach out to you or learn more about what you're doing? They can email me at kflanagan, all one word, at plparchitecture.com and I'll respond to any questions. And if you have any advice, I'd be happy to pass it along. I'm associated with two groups. One is the AIA, American Institute of Architects in the UK, and also with the Royal Architectural Institute in Canada.

I'm a fellow there presently. So anything that you send along, I can certainly use these other groups as a means of distributing your ideas and finding their way into their newsletters and such. I'd be happy to act as a conduit for people's notions and ideas, certainly. Thank you so much for doing this interview with me today. Thank you very much.

Thank you for speaking. It's really fun. Thanks. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. That's Brittany, B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at constructRRR.com.

So next week, we'll be speaking with Karl Pivl, Vice President of Strategic Platforms at TM Forum, and he's developed the City of a Platform Manifesto. We discussed the 10 common principles driving smart city success. He says that with these business model principles, cities can become regional or global knowledge hubs and innovation centers. We also talk about how the built environment drives a better open data economy. We can start impacting cities by doing simple, efficient efforts just to simplify lives for people.

So look for that podcast next week. And if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, and iArtGradient. You can find replays on Periscope if you're connected with me on Twitter. So please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.

you