Short form

work

Current - Founder and CEO of The Canoa Supply Co.

2015-2019 - Head of Design @ WeWork

2008-2015 - Founder and Head of Projects Group @ CASE Inc. (acquired by WeWork)

2004 - 2008 - SHoP Architects

education

Parsons School of Design, 2004 (Master of Architecture)

University of Illinois, 2002 (Bs. Architectural Sciences)

life

childhood home: Uruguay

home today: Brooklyn, New York

Long form

(In reverse chronological order)

500 WeWork Locations

2015-2019

In June of 2015 WeWork acquired CASE, a design and technology consulting company I founded together with David Fano and Steve Sanderson.

Our team of 60+ architects, engineers and software developers and us merged with the internal WeWork team, and got started on figuring out how to scale a physical product.

At the time, WeWork had about 35 buildings in the New York, Boston, Washington DC, London and Tel Aviv. The whole design team was no more than 12 people.

Needless to say, the opportunity to take a product like WeWork’s and define how the Design team would structure itself, what technologies we would implement or invent, and how we would train and support our teams in order to scale has been incredible.

Most exciting was the opportunity to implement a product development process onto an architectural product. Architecture’s traditional model of delivery is by its very nature, non-iterative. As such, it lacks the intelligence of a feedback loop from end-users to designers and back again. One is supposed to get the product right on the first try - a ridiculous expectation more apt to the artist instead of the designer.

Over the next 4 years we grew our team from one mainly focused on interior schematics and project management to a multidisciplinary team including graphic artists, interior designers, architects, sustainability specialists, mechanical engineers, lighting designers, AV/IT designers, electrical engineers, manufacturing specialists, visualization artists, construction technologists, post occupancy researchers, data scientists and more across 12 offices in 5 continents comprising more than 400 team members.

This team would go on to deliver hundreds of locations (several million square feet) of highly adaptable workspaces across dozens of cities over these four years - all the while reducing costs by more than half and vastly improving product quality.

Much will be said about this way of delivering spaces, I’m sure. One thing I will say now, even as we’re still in the middle of it is that the efficiency gains of a vertically integrated model are vast. Tied with the ability to iterate on a discrete range of products based on real user feedback allowed us to move orders of magnitude faster.

A highly controlled process allows for the development of highly intelligent technologies that can help designers make better decisions. From real-time, portfolio-wide space planning insights, to predictive product suggestions for specifiers, to cutting steps in design-to-procurement processes, to learning whether a particular color was well received in one region versus another, the product-delivery process we developed opened up tremendous opportunity.

There is still much to fix and improve upon, but I can already say that this process is several orders of magnitude more efficient at delivering on schedule, cost and quality objectives than traditional methods of delivery.

‘sameness’ has many advantages after all.

The acquisition

2015

In 2015, after having had the privilege of working with WeWork for almost 3 years as consultants, the opportunity presented itself for us to join forces and help them reach the scale objectives.

As any founder will tell you, these types of decisions are never easy. We had a phenomenal team and a great and fun culture, not to mention a list of clients that included Apple, Estee Lauder, Disney, Autodesk, and a host of highly regarded architects, construction companies, fabricators and universities.

Our brand was known as a trusted and strategic adviser to anyone that designed, built or managed real estate.

We started the company in the lowest point of the Great Recession at the end of 2008, a time when most of the industry was in dire shape and real estate tech startups or investing were few and far between.

Over the next 7 years we grew the company to more than 60 specialists in everything from software engineering to data-driven design, robotics and structural engineering analysis.

We helped our clients develop business and management strategies to better leverage technology. In some cases, we went as far as to design completely bespoke platforms like the retail roll-out management portals we completed for Apple and WeWork, or the project-specific tools we built for Disney Imagineering or the Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame.

The company was split into 4 main groups.

1. A strategy group which focused on high level management consulting engagements that helped clients envision and commit to multi-year business transformation plans designed to help them integrate new technologies to achieve their business goals.

2. An implementation group which focused on helping clients implement these new technologies through education, hands on training, knowledge management and thought leadership.

3. A software development group which focused on developing plug-ins, scripts, integrations and stand-alone web-based platforms to support unique business workflows for our clients.

4. A projects group which played a critical role in complex projects by becoming part of the team, rolling up their sleeves and helping to solve difficult problems by implementing or developing software and processes specifically designed for the task at hand.

Starting a company from scratch is incredibly difficult, but also incredibly fulfilling. Seeing that company grow and be successful was one of the more exciting things to happen in my career.

That said, we had started the company because we believed that the real estate, design and construction industry was fundamentally flawed and outdated, and we needed a bigger platform to be able to have the impact we wanted to have.

Joining WeWork gave us the chance to jump into the driver’s seat and test many of our ideas on how to make good design and construction more accessible and effective.

Building a building only robots could build

2011-13

One example of the type of project that we would undertake at CASE was the new Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame, designed by the talented Trahan Architects in Baton Rouge, LA.

The museum was located in Natchitoches, Lousiana and although beautiful, it was incredibly complex. Many questioned whether it could be built at all, given its sweeping interior surfaces - there are no strait walls in any of the public areas of the museum.

Beyond the geometric complexity, the building was state funded and going to bid at a time when the worst of the recession was not yet over. Contractors needed to keep their teams busy, but after several years of a bad economy they had incredibly tight constraints. Any mistake could cripple one of the many small companies involved and could cause a domino effect, grinding the project to a halt.

Trahan, the designer of the project and a CASE client, urged us to join the team and help them get it built. The task would require us not only to design the correct 3D engineering and BIM workflows for this particular team, but also to implement and lead those efforts.

We brought on to the team our good friends at Method Design in New York to help with the structural design. They, in turn, brought on David Stasiuk, one of their old students who was then pursuing a Phd at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts (now with Proving Ground, a data-driven tech startup run by another friend and ex-CASE associate partner Nate Miller) to help with the software programming necessary to automate the thousands of connectors that would be necessary to hold up the panels. The actual fabrication of the molds and the panels would be done by local experts in nearby Texas.

Given schedule constraints, the tight budget (it was a state funded project that legally had to select the lowest bid) and the difficulty of the design, the only feasible way to build this building was to use new technologies, mainly automation and CNC-based fabrication.

The potential for human error was too great, and frankly, we just didn’t have the time to do it by hand.

We wrote standalone tools that would automatically generate shop drawings, name panels and their embeds, produce critical dimensions, quality control panel clearances as well as structural ones, and more.

Multi-axis CNC mills would take care of milling the complex forms the panels needed to be produced. The milling code was generated directly from the 3D engineered STP models that we provided.

In the end, after more than 18 months of 3D engineering, BIM, fabrication and installation, the museum was completed to great fanfare.

Out of more than 1000 unique pieces, each weighing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds, we had less than 5 panels that needed to be modified in the field - a 0.5% error score that we were incredibly proud of, considering we only had one chance to get it right.

Some incredibly smart people developed incredibly smart tools to make this building and it worked. What if we applied those same smarts to simpler spaces? What gains could be had in terms of budget, schedule or quality? These questions begged for an answer.

Figuring out mass customization

2004-2008

After my graduation from Parsons, I began my career in New York working for SHoP Architects, a fantastic office that was just taking off due to the huge success of their PS1 installation which brought the term ‘mass customization’ into the architectural mainstream, making real use of robotic-fabrication techniques and 3D engineering processes.

Between 2004 and 2006 I had the opportunity to work on countless projects, all challenging the traditional model of the hyper risk-averse architect. SHoP was getting a reputation of being risk-takers as they would push to drive the manufacturing of critical elements of their buildings. As young designers, we couldn’t be more excited to be a part of it.

Many of us had gone into architecture because it provided the opportunity to build. Instead we found an industry so risk-averse, it had completely divorced itself from the making process.

SHoP was a breadth of fresh air for those of us who saw designing and making as parts of the same whole, and not as distinctly separate processes.

In 2006 I got the opportunity to join the team that would design and build the 290 Mulberry condominium in SoHo, New York.

I would spend the next 2 years working out how to build a contextual brick facade using pre-fabricated concrete panels, using a 3D surface pattern we designed to take advantage of a zoning rule that allowed buildings to break the zoning envelope at specific intervals.

Working tirelessly with manufacturers in Pennsylvania and Montreal, we collaborated in the fabrication of high density foam molds (positives) to make rubber liners (negatives) that would hold the bricks in their exact placement during the casting process.

This project was a turning point in my understanding of design. I was becoming intimately familiar with the power we had at our fingertips to do things that would have been impossible, or at least cost prohibitive, just years earlier.

That said, the traditional model of project delivery in our industry was still outdated and was not keeping up with new tools we had at our disposal.

This outdated model was founded on the concept of risk mitigation. Through a process of ‘decomposition’, a project’s scope would divided into smaller and smaller tasks across dozens of different companies, none of which could be wholly responsible for any one error, or so it is thought. It’s effectiveness in dispersing risk is only as successful as its effectiveness in creating bureaucracy. It pits team members against each other, separated by contractual and insurance asymmetries large enough to swiftly kill any suggestions for process improvement.

Technology had arrived, but the industry wasn’t ready for it.

A recent example of this is BIM. Though successful in bringing technology to the mainstream conversation of architecture and construction, BIM and its supporting technologies has failed to become transformational. I used to think this was due to poor technology. I later realized that any technology used to optimize a bad process will never have a real chance.

Given all of this, I knew then that the traditional model of practice was not for me, and a seed was planted in my mind that to this day drives my career decisions.

Hurricane Katrina and disaster response

2005-2006

While working on a competition for a new building for Tulane University, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf states, devastating coastal communities from Louisiana to Mississippi.

My friend Reese Campbell and I volunteered to represent SHoP in flying to the region, specifically DeLisle, Mississippi to help with initial response.

The devastation we saw when we arrived is hard to describe. Much of it has been said about it, so I won’t go into it here but suffice to say it was disarming.

Martha Murphy, the main donor sponsoring the competition at Tulane happened to be from DeLisle. She called us for help in New York, mainly because everyone in the area was dealing with their own families and communities.

I will always be grateful to SHoP for giving us this opportunity. Together with Reese, and Andrew Coats of Buro Happold (at the time), we spent the next few weeks and months building a much needed community center in a plot of land donated by Martha Murphy to the cause.

In a place where everyone homes, cars, workplaces, shops, churches and schools were ruined, we all had to make due with what we had. We got our hands on a car trailer which doubled as our hotel as well as our office.

From here, lead by Reese and his field expertise, we designed the community center at the same time that we started to build it. The foundations were calculated by hand one day, the next day we were excavating. Four days later, the rebar had been set and foundations poured.

Everything worked this way. We made a design decision, we built it. It was the second time that I was involved in a project where there was no bureaucratic divide between the design and construction phases of a project, and I loved it. Being able to apply your expertise to help people in a way that can provide instant relief is incredibly fulfilling, and a power I believe many architects aren’t aware they possess.

Learning to make with our hands

2003

One of the main draws of Parsons for anyone interested in craft and ‘making’ was the Design Workshop studio run during the second year of the graduate program.

The studio combines the real-life constraints of traditional architecture practice by requiring students to work together to come up with a single design proposal, for a real client, for a real site within a real budget.

Our project was one of the first to be ground up. It was a fieldhouse, or storage facility for a High School in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

We both designed and built (yes, ourselves) the structure through the spring and summer terms of 2003, opening just as the new year was beginning in the fall.

Forensic Architecture in Greece

2000

While in undergrad at the University of Illinois in Urbana, I took the opportunity to go study architectural Renaissance History through Syracuse University’s program in Florence, Italy.

It was there that I met a Belgian architect name Pieter Broucke who worked in the classics department at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Pieter ran, alongside archaeologist Fred Cooper, the excavation of a Greek temple site in ancient Messenia, near the modern town of Mavromati, Greece.

For two straight summers I was lucky enough to work full time at the excavation alongside other students in Classics and Archaeology departments, digging, cleaning, cataloging parts of a 2000-year old temple.