My name is Federico.
I’m an architect and designer. I split my time between Brooklyn, NY and Manantiales, Uruguay.
This is a low-maintenance site I use to highlight meaningful moments in my career. I’ve spent most of that career in and around design, architecture, cities, the building sciences, and construction technologies.
Timeline
work
2020 - Current - Founder of Canoa
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
Work
Improving FF&E Tooling For All
One of the bigger lessons of scaling WeWork was the general lack of software innovation in the ff&e space.
After almost 2 decades of working on design tooling in AEC it was striking to me how little innovation is focused on the interiors of our buildings. Interior designers are particularly left out of much of the investment in the field. Almost comically, Autodesk doesn’t even acknowledge interior designers as a user group on their website as of this writing.
We saw an opportunity to build something simple, yet powerful that would be representative of our world in the 2020s. We focused on the early stages of the design process where inspiration, product research and discovery and early design often come together in the form of pinups, decks, presentations and other highly graphical artifacts.
Since the pandemic, much of this work was happening online in tools like Miro, Mural and PowerPoint.
We decided then to build something that took the best features of those tools but also added some critical things we felt were missing. We validated those assumptions against our core user base and built alongside with them. The foundational basis for this new tool became:
It must be connected to the internet’s vast product and image ecosystem
It must be vertical specific—meaning it must understand architectural scale, areas, or an ff&e schedule
It must be fun, vast, unstructured.
Building a CAD tool in the browser is of course a big challenge. We needed to integrate Canoa with the rest of the designer’s tool stack. We needed to improve that tool stack and augment it while carefully making sure not to build ‘yet another tool’ that has to be implemented and instead of simplifying a workflow, one paradoxically ends up increasing its complexity.
A screenshot of the canvas. The canvas is an semi infinite design space that lives in the browser. It allows designers to collaboratively put together initial design inspiration, images and layouts in a simple, highly graphical user interface.
Canoa is semantic. What that means is that in addition to the canvas, it has a backed data architecture that is custom built for FF&E. This allows us the system to “understand” when a chair is a chair or a sofa is a sofa. This backed gave us the ability to directly tie into brand catalogs and stream them directly into the designers’ workspace for the to drag and drop into their designs.
Finally, because the canvas is correctly scaled and the system is semantic, Canoa is able to produce real product lists of any layout or design. Any area in the design seems to “know” what is inside of it and is able to automatically calculate critical project budget information.
Turning Parking Lots Into Parks
The early days of Canoa were hard for our cities.
The pandemic was in full swing, vaccines were years away, and lockdowns were in full effect. These were the days when, every evening at 6 o’clock, neighbors on our Brooklyn street would open their windows and clap for a few moments in appreciation of healthcare workers.
It was a time when a core organizing principle of our cities—the mobility of our citizens—was flipped. Suddenly, everyday needs had to find their way to us, instead of us to them. Instead of going to school, school came to us. Instead of going to work, work came to us. And instead of shopping for food, food had to come to us.
It was at this time that REEF, a large parking management company, reached out to us to help them turn some of their parking lots into urban logistics centers that would support a last mile ecosystem starting with Covid testing centers and so called dark kitchens—commercial kitchen facilities that operated solely via food apps like Grubhub. Given their strength in parking lot management, REEF was uniquely positioned to strategically position these pop-up distribution centers and potentially improve the yield of those locations by charging logistics or even retail rent prices instead of parking lot prices.
Our task then was to create a design system for these parking lots that would be able to adjust to different lot sizes, curb cuts, and geometry. Canoa’s early value focus was on large scale retail and workplace companies that managed a single design standard applied across many locations. The idea was to have an online platform that would tie design, procurement and asset management together with a single data flow and companies like REEF were perfect candidates for us to partner as we built out our tech.
An initial sketch of a single exposure parking lot. Single exposure meant that only one side of the lot had street access and truck traffic would have to be able to enter, load or unload, and leave without having to turn around.
For larger lots in key urban locations, the system would allow for the public to enter and meander as they would a park. This would create a park-like amenity with lots of modular space for retail, food and beverage would would monetize the location.
An even larger example proves how the design system could scale. Here we see a 20,000 sf lot being turned into a park with retail, food and beverage and other community amenities like coworking spaces, hair salon, laundromat and more.
Scaling WeWork to 500 Locations Worldwide
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.
At our global summit in New York in 2018 holding a round table alongside Granit Gjonbalaj (Chief Development Officer) and some of the team in front of the whole 800 people Design & Development department.
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.
An example of iterative product improvement. Nate Clark who ran our furniture team at the time collaborated with the geniuses at the Danish furniture company HAY to develop these new desks. The main optimization was the removal of any mechanical fasteners. By using a series of specially designed clamps, we were able to drastically reduce the installation time and completely eliminate the use of hand tools.
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.
A subset of the Design group at one of our many off-sites discussing lessons learned and improvements necessary for the next wave of product (buildings).
25th street building in Manhattan, New York
Our first flagship location in Shanghai. The Wei-hai Lu location was a huge undertaking for us but remains to this day as one of the more striking spaces in the portfolio.
The acquisition
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.
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.
An implementation group which focused on helping clients implement these new technologies through education, hands on training, knowledge management and thought leadership.
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.
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.
A screenshot of our website from 2014.
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.
2014, at one of our yearly off-sites in Miami with the whole team.
Building a building only robots could build
Nachitchokes, Louisiana sits on the banks of a branch of the Mississippi River. The relationship with the river defines life in many ways in this part of the South - a relationship celebrated by Trahan Architects in their design for the museum.
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.
A small section of the building construction model in CATIA with supporting substructure and superstructure. The green labels demonstrate the type of ‘proximity analysis’ required to properly place structural elements with the correct spacing for installation and structural connectors.
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.
A sample shop ticket for one of the hundreds of panels. Oddly enough, the paper tickets were only needed for humans to recognize individual pieces, not for fabricating them. Computer code took care of that.
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.
A panel on the main staircase being lifted into place is an example of the careful sequence of installation that had to be followed to prevent ‘lock out’ moments throughout the structure.
A view looking up at the central skylight, showcasing the embedded custom light fixtures that had to be fabricated from the model to perfectly align inside their respective openings.
An expert fabricator confirming the fidelity of the form after CNC milling. The form would go on to receive a spray finish that would harden the foam and make it structurally capable of receiving the cast stone material (which is applied with a pneumatic punch).
A four-part mold for one of the more complex pieces in the building. These pieces had to be geometrically accurate on both the finished side and the back side as the structural connectors depended on precisely located embeds.
A detail image of the level of tolerance in the project where seams swept across in multiple axes and creating a situation where any deviation from the designed location of a panel would create a conflict elsewhere. Panels were not able to be cut or adjusted on site as cast stone does not lend itself well to that type of process.
One of the first mock-ups to go up being inspected by the installation team.
A shot looking back at the main entrance showing the finished condition of the panels underneath the main skylight of the building. Several hundred panels came together in a very specific sequence to make this shape.
Figuring out mass customization
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.
A late night with my friend Yongmoo setting up the first round of workstations at the (then) new SHoP offices at 11 Park Place in downtown Manhattan
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.
A screenshot of the model prepared by the fabricator to use in the CNC milling of the mold. Instead of exchanging models back and forth, we wrote a step by step procedure that could be used by anyone to recreate the exact form of the master panel. This allowed us to guarantee the fidelity of the form across several software platforms that would be used by different parties in the manufacturing process.
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.
A short video showing the milling of the mold ‘positive’ which would be used to create the rubber liners, or ‘negatives’.
A close up shot sent to us by the fabricator of the fit-test of the brick into the rubber liner. Once the friction hold was confirmed, liners would be produced for every panel type in the building and would be shipped to Canada for use in the final pre-cast panels.
A photo of the full size liners standing in an a-frame trailer ready for their trip to Montreal for use in 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.
A photo of the shop floor in Montreal sent to us by the fabricator. The liners had been dropped into the molds and workers were hand placing each brick into their individual slots. Concrete would be poured behind the bricks. Once cured, the panels would be lifted out of the molds, retaining their geometry and ready for shipment to New York’s SoHo / NoLiTa neighborhood.
A close up of the panels, once installed and interconnected on the facade of the building.
The facade panels installed in their final location with glazing waiting in tow. The diamond-shaped pattern being highlighted by the sun’s angle in the early morning.
Hurricane Katrina and disaster response
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.
Image courtesy Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina )
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.
Remains of a local church in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Photo credit: Reese Campbell
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.
My friend Reese working away in our trailer. You can see the inflatable mattresses in the back against the wall. We lived and worked in this trailer for weeks.
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.
From left to right: Bill Sharples, myself, Martha Murphy, Reese Campbell in a feature by Dwell magazine in their June 2007 issue highlighting the work done to reconstruct basic services in this community after the storm.
Reese and I would spend the day in the field, since there was a great labor shortage in the area, and at night we would go back to the office to prepare drawings for the next day or week.
A 3D model developed in CATIA of canopy’s structure. In a place surrounded by destruction, a main objective of the project was to provide a gathering place, covered by a simple yet ingenious structure that would provide much needed shade and rain cover for dozens of people.
A contractor following a schedule of lengths we produced. Instead of drawings, data sheets were much more effective in communicating design intent in this case.
View of the new community center in DeLisle, Mississippi that we were able to build in the months after the storm. The complex was actually two buildings that were small and very simple, joined by a sweeping roof and deck that would act as a much-needed gathering space for the community. In a move uncommon to the area at the time, we located the structure near the main roads and put the parking lot in the rear of the complex, allowing passers-by a better view into what was happening at the community center and drawing more visitors.
Learning to make with our hands
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.
The day of the opening ceremony after a long 9 months of planning and field work, working to complete the fieldhouse prior to the beginning of the school year.
Forensic Architecture in Greece
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.
Doing our best to prevent glare from the strong summer sun in the Peloponnese while we photographed findings and sketched scarp drawings for record.
Thanks.
