A Case Study for Practice: Stayner Architects

A This episode is sponsored by Monograph and Arc IT. You'll hear more about them later on in the episode. I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain.

B We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

A Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to Practice Disrupted. Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

B Hey, Evelyn. Hey, disruptors.

A This season, we were hoping to bring in more practitioners that are creating interesting business models around their practices. So we are really excited to have Christian Steiner from Steiner Architects on today to talk about everything from architecture, but also hospitality and food systems.

B We're excited because Christian's thinking about the way he's designing his practice a little bit differently than the traditional architecture practice model. So welcome, Christian, to the podcast. We like to kick it off by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about themselves. So, tell us about your background and Stayner Architects.

C Sure. Thank you so much for the introduction and and having me. So, yeah, I'm I'm an architect, and I have an architectural practice, in Los Angeles called Steiner Architects. We're in the EchoPark neighborhood just sort of to the north of downtown LA, And much of the work that we have in our practice, as you mentioned, focuses on architecture, sort of in and around food systems, so the spaces that food is consumed and grown and distributed and produced, and specifically, this is for nonprofit educational and cultural institutions as well as, a couple of food service related, and and architect and actually operator of. So we are sort of unusual model for, architecture practice, and I can talk a little bit later about sort of where that came about and and why we have migrated in in that direction of of practicing architecture. But the projects that we do for clients, tend to well, right now include, we have a ground up, dining hall for a local arts college. We're working on a performance, space and and, headquarters for a long running music education program that's, based in Los Angeles. We have a a multifamily residential project for faculty, a workforce housing, development project that's underway, and a number of other sort of more conventional architecture projects in which there is a, an external third party client, to us.

C And then we also have our in house development projects. So right now, we have a wine bar and wine shop, that focuses on production of California, natural wines called Tilda, which we developed and operate and designed everything from the interiors and the entitlements through to the graphics and, branding and and web. And then we have a a Roman Italian restaurant called Pacetti and then a couple of other projects that are at different stages in the pipeline. So about 3 right now.

B So I wanna pause because I'm I'm really curious, like, to know how did you get into hospitality and food systems as your path in architecture. That's kind of a distinct path, and I'm very curious also to hear about like, during the pandemic, I'm sure that this has been an area of, work that's been majorly disrupted. So I I hope you can speak to that also.

C Yes. Disruptive or disrupted is, it's an appropriate, term. It actually came out of the the previous disruption that was, let's say, more impacted architects, and that was back in 2008. I finished grad school at the GSD in, I guess, May or June of that of that year. And by, I don't know, earlier, mid September, Lehman Brothers had collapsed, and subprime mortgage prices unfolded right as I was going into into practice, and I just actually started practicing on my own at that time, and ended up in academia with a lot of my my peers, because that was the one place that you could get employment. And so that experience of of going through the the subprime mortgage crisis and its impact in architecture made me acutely aware of sort of the cyclical nature of the of the practice. And my my father's, also an architect, and so I'd seen that firsthand over my my upbringing, how tied architecture was to, especially in Southern California, the boom and bust cycles of the real estate markets. So from that, I wanted to find something that would allow for me to practice that was more stable than architecture, but that was also, affiliated in some way with the work that we could do so we could support ourselves not with client based work solely and also to be able to work with with clients that were not extracted in their nature.

C So we weren't there simply to make value for, for for other people. But if we were gonna make value, that was gonna be for, you know, organizations, predominantly nonprofits or for profit entities that were in some ways contributing to the communities they were in or advancing the mission rather than just there to maximize their bottom line and get out. So from within academia, the the my my research was really around the geography of natural resources and natural resource extraction. And I was teaching first in Los Angeles, and then I was recruited senior track faculty member at the University of Michigan in which I was commuting back and forth between Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, trying to run a practice in LA and trying to Oh, wow. Well, and teaching in in Michigan, which was was great, and then eventually ended up at at ASU for a short period of time before returning to to practice full time, but my research was really around, like, mining and quarries and, effectively, the raw material that's used in the production of buildings. And the fact that within the profession and within academia or within the discipline, we're so focused on the the site at which the building is realized that we we overlook these sort of invisible geographies beyond that location that are that are impacted greatly by the aggregate that gets pulled out of the ground and the humans that are involved in the manufacturing of nails and screws and and so forth. So I this is a long explanation, but I became very interested in the sort of invisible aspects of architecture, the, like, non nonvisual sensorial experiences of, of space and, went very deep into to olfaction and and smell with a friend and and practice partner, Jennifer Bonner, who teaches at at the GSD right now. And from that investigation, I became very involved in wine and in food, so I started teaching courses at Michigan around that.

C I I taught a a food studies prog course within the liberal arts college. I taught some seminars around food and architecture, and eventually taught a traveling studio in which we looked at landscapes of agriculture and food production sort of from a conservation perspective in Italy and, Croatia and California that became the basis for the first hospitality project that we did, Tilda Wine. So that's a a long series of of explanations of how, you know, the the projects of initially, an intellectual project became a sort of applied research project into a business.

B It's interesting to hear you talk about the recession impacting your navigation towards this path to find a little bit of stability in this cyclical cycle of architecture. And now, you know, the next major disruption that we're facing with the pandemic, it's certainly you know, I think food supply is definitely something that people are talking about and, certainly, the impact on the hospitality industry and people that are engaged in taking care of our communities through food. So I'm curious how have you seen that disruption impacting your practice, or are the types of clients that you're trying to support still able to move forward with their vision?

C Yeah. That's a really good question. We're actually we've been working for the past maybe 6 or 8 months on a resource that's available off our website called tools and utensils in which we've been trying to look at best practices for developing food systems related projects, specifically within educational and cultural settings. So teaching, spaces that that connect to, like, stem learning or, like, on-site dining facilities, for, smaller college colleges and and, universities that are integrated with some of the academic work that's taking place. A lot of schools have have started to put together multidisciplinary food studies, ecology, sustainability programs with an awareness that these are it's an it's a it's a very narrow focus for us to take as architects. I wouldn't say it's a specialization. Like, it's it's really this sort of really a a passion from the experience of how do you design for something that is so specific, as an architect, but also from the experience of running and and seeing these larger systems at work from an operator's perspective. And so the, yeah, tools and intangibles, which is is our sort of attempt to disseminate some of that information.

C I think what's what's also really sort of important and that the pandemic opened up in in many ways is, there's the place that architects are often involved in in food related work, which is restaurants and hospitality real type projects, But there's a huge world of where most of our food comes from that is not really looked at by architects, such as everything from grocery stores to agricultural sites, which are increasingly happening inside buildings. I mean, a few years ago, it seemed every other architect was running after cannabis related projects because of the vast amounts of money that were available as that was being, quasi legalized. But a lot of other agriculture is going into inside spaces. And and just food security, nutrition as a as a public health consideration, There's a lot of these different spaces that we're trying to to work within, and and, surprisingly, the typologies become very broad even as the the the focus and the goal becomes quite narrow and specific.

A I'm wondering if we can back it up a little bit because you guys are doing so much. I'd like to just understand kind of the makeup of your team, and how do you then build a team that kind of can help support that that practice? And then and my follow-up question is probably gonna be to, like, what extent do you even use your your own projects to further explore and prototype and test what then you might implement on behalf of your clients. But but let's start about hearing a little bit more about Stainer.

C Absolutely. I I think we're still figuring we're still figuring that out. It's been a long process to figure out how to build the infrastructure to be able to practice atypically. And, you know, that that infrastructure is both the people we have in the office, but also the consultants and the advisers and other other people that are involved. And so we have our architecture practice is is quite small. There's usually between 7 and 9, people in in dedicated within our architecture office, and and they're involved in food studies or food food program related work. They're also we have a a a small sort of branch or identity of our practice that's focused on hillside residences called sum of all parts. So a few people are sort of actively involved in in those sort of smaller scale projects, and there's surprisingly a lot of overlap in the domestic sphere of, you know, a domestic kitchen to understanding sort of how that fits within within larger, more institutional commercial projects.

C And we we also build a few of our projects. So we have a general contractor's license. We have another entity, a couple of staff members right now, 2 to 3 full time people that are in involved in construction, maintenance, management of of the facilities. And then we have a hospitality sort of division. It's technically outside of our office, but, we have a chef and general managers and beverage director and, sous chefs and stuff that that exist there and and operate and are responsible for, with my partner who's involved in that as well, the the hospitality sort of activities. So we actually share a lot of the same physical spaces, but they're sort of discrete activities, and they do overlap and and enforce one another. So when we're working on a project for clients, maybe it's a institutional project, we'll pull in, know, people from an operational side that are in house to to give advice on how best to, you know, arrange a space or deal with flow or think about the sort of operational side of of it and not design in a vacuum for that.

A Which one of your projects came first? So you've mentioned Tilda and I wanna is it Basetti? Am I saying that right?

C Bacetti. Bacetti. Yes. It means, little little kisses

A in Bacetti. Uh-huh. But then you I I don't think we've actually ever even touched on the Desert Wave House, which is which is another kind of extension of what Stayner has been doing. So so talk to us, like, kind of about maybe in chronological order, like how how those became a part of of the operations and of the practice?

C Yeah. I mean, in in in parallel with this this sort of, conceptualized develop design operate model that we've we have is, we we have a, hospita small hospitality project, in the Coachella Valley called the Desert Wave, which is a experimental modernist house from 1954, 55 by a somewhat lesser known, architect, who is very influential in the the development of desert modernism in Southern California called Walter s White. And this was effectively a one off experimental project that subsequently was put on the national register of historic places and was slated to be demolished, when the state of California ended their redevelopment agency program in the city, had had purchased the property and had been sitting on it for a couple of decades. And so we purchased it from the city, with the intent of developing it into an event space and sort of larger hospitality complex. We restored the building according to the national register requirements, and we worked with the city to come up with, entitlements and sort of the, economic feasibility for the project to be made publicly accessible. So that we opened also sort of February, January, February of 2020, and we're just now starting to do the sort of second phase of of the, the development of the roughly 3rd of an acre site to host events and and other activities. And it's I mean, one of the really fun things about hospitality and food related stuff, I was talking to a colleague of mine couple days ago as we were coming back from a site visit and realized that the number of people that we're gonna go, you know, probably experience one of the the projects that we did for a private client was gonna be equal to the number of people that might come through one of our more sort of hospitality projects within the course of just one week. You know? So just the the difference between a private project and a public project in terms of how much engagement it has, is is really quite dramatic.

C And we actually have in in process, to start construction next next month. We're a an equity partner in a, small 25 key hotel that is in the Eastern Sierras in a a drive to market. And so we have a partner. In that case, that is a sort of up and coming hotel developer that's coming from hotel finance side of things. And we're engaged not just in interiors and and, construction management and and permitting and all of that, but also in working through a bunch of the financing as a little bit of partner for for that project.

B I definitely wanna dive further into this quesadilla, and Tilda, because I think that that kinda is I think that that's a significant project in your portfolio that demonstrates kind of the innovation and the, you know, unique path that you guys are trying to bridge between these two worlds of architecture and food. So let's talk about the model for that and how you guys got there in terms of developing that project.

C Yeah. It's it's funny because it's actually a very small project, but I think in in terms of, like, floor area, I think it's it's roughly 5 or 600 square feet, all told. But the the fact that maybe the the the pandemic happening when it did happen in relation to the to to that particular business was a really interesting model because I think we had to, obviously, like, any any restaurant adapt to the circumstances, but I think we had maybe an extra benefit as architects to be able to come in and think spatially about how to make that adaptation and really keep it part of the experience of moving from a from a from a a wine bar with with food and on-site consumption and effectively sort of, like, party every night to being separated from our clientele either through Internet sales or or behind glass and and how to keep the experience of, certainly in the depths of the pandemic, like leaving your house to go buy something and then screw it back to your house because of the atmosphere of unknown at that moment. We did a bunch of different pivots, I'd say, sort of earlier than a lot of people to figure out ways to to keep personal connection between our staff and, and our customers. And so for instance, we set up all of the merchandise and and retail behind glass windows that we had and, you know, did phone call, ordering in which people could actually stand and face another person and not be, you know, in another Zoom arrangement, but still not share the same atmospheric space. I think we were probably earlier on in realizing that, you know, a a virus that was communicated through people's lungs was gonna be an issue with airflow and keeping people in separate spaces. And so we made it through the pre vaccine pandemic without, you know, any of our staff getting sick, which was pretty amazing by keeping everyone in different spaces and, you know, improving airflow and all of those things.

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C Okay. Yeah. It's funny because, I guess, we haven't thought of it in in such in an in intentional way. It's sort of made sense to like, you know, we're gonna spend 3 hours arguing with the contractor, trying to get that person to to to get what we want out of the the project, why don't we just do it ourselves? Why don't we spend those 3 hours and the risk that's involved with, you know, hiring someone and the profit that we can keep and invest back into the to the business. And so whether it's, you know, whether it's constructing it or whether it's operating it, you know, to have a tenant is is a risk and and in a sort of relationship of, you know, blind trust that the tenant is going to operate a portion of your building in a in a good way, and it's gonna be solvent, and it's gonna have the cash flow and wherewithal to to to keep the rent payments coming in. And so a lot of this has just been, in a sense, sort of a a risk management, and that's not necessarily just like, insurance related risk. But, also, like, there's an opportunity as for us to learn something, and so we dive in and, you know, learn portion of lighting design. And, also, in the course of of that, learn that maybe we're not best suited to be doing food service consulting, or that we can, but it's not the best use of our time.

C Or, you know, we at least we know what the requirements are. And so when we then do bring in outside consultants who can do that work more efficiently or because we don't have the staff to do it or we don't want to do it, we're at least sort of holistically aware of what the demands are on other people, and so we can then manage their work more effectively. So I think we've moved from sort of this attitude of, like, we just have to do everything in house and ourselves in order to minimize the expense upfront of effectively building, you know, variety of start up businesses, architecture, and and then the businesses that that operate as well. And we're maturing, hopefully, towards, having more people to to take those demands and and really be looking at it from a a much higher level perspective in which we're not so sort of in the in the trenches ourselves.

A Obviously, from your your background and your teaching, there was a focus on food systems. But, like listening to everything that you're talking about, starting a whole bunch of other businesses, being an equity partner in the development of a hotel like a hotel in the future, like that in order for you to be able to do what passionate about, you have to kind of take on and learn a lot of other things, too. So how have you like, 1, how do you find the time? And then 2, like, how do you make those judgments? Maybe diving a little bit in in the risk, but I I don't think a lot of architects first pivot to, like, fighting with a john general contractor is we need to get our general contractor's license, and let's do this ourselves either. So why do you think you kind of take things on the way you do?

C Good question. So there's a couple of questions in there. Right? The first being, let's say, the the experience gaps or or having to learn sort of by doing. And and I will say that this has been the last couple of years has been very, very challenging for for restaurants, just as an example of one thing they've been involved in, and we've we've been able to get through it. Luckily, I think we're gonna make it through the rest of the the the the remaining bumps in the road that that are certainly still to come. But I will say that architecture is so much more challenging. I mean, just as a profession to to figure out from a from a financial perspective, it's than than restaurants, and you hear all the sort of, you know, thin labor margins and the percentage of restaurants that go belly up within the 1st year and so forth. But architecture just from a business perspective is a really challenging service business like ours is especially in a moment in which we you know, the the people who who financially are the the masters of our social universe are able to scale their activities in a way that architects just have no potential of doing.

C You know, you're like, we're the tech world, and the architecture world could not be more different in terms of how you can, say, license or multiply the the effort that goes into what potential outcomes come come come out. And so part of it has been trying to figure out how how not to leave architectural practice entirely, but to, adapt the the practice model in order for it to be more reasonable to the risk and the effort and the demands that that that the the profession has, and we haven't been able to figure out how to, like, remove those. It's still a very demanding, very sort of risk involved profession. I guess in terms of my own sort of impact or, like, why why I've been more willing to to take this on, I, after grad school, sort of decided whether I was gonna move to Europe and take a conventional job in a fancy office that was doing big institutional work, wondering sort of when, you know, I would be able to break off on my own either with a project or try to claw my way up into to partnership, or I could take a leap right when I had the least number of sort of obligations on on myself right out of school, and so I I did the latter. And maybe that, as a result, that sort of fighting instinct has continued on in the 12 years since since I've been out of school. Yeah. I think I think that I think as gay man in architecture, it's you're used in some ways to be on the per the sort of fringes or periphery and and figure out how to adapt there, especially in construction, something that hasn't evolved with the rest of society. And so just I think I think there is also an attitude sort of internally of, like, trying to you know, being being okay with being on on the edges and not being the sort of typical typical practice model.

B I feel like we're asking you questions that maybe you haven't slowed down to think about because you're so busy being the entrepreneur, trying to build this towards the vision that you have that it's not unintentional. It's just subconscious, like, what your pursuit is perhaps and that it's behind this greater vision that you have. But it what what stood out to us and the reason that we really wanted to talk to you is just the tenacity that you have to try to do something different. Most people don't take risks like that, let alone in architecture. It's really rare to find practices out there that want to do things so differently and that will follow through on that to realize it through built projects and actually continue their growth of their practice?

C Yeah. I think that maybe something that I didn't realize on the outset is just how much effort goes into establishing the foundations that are needed in order to even try to start doing this. It's just, you know, architecture is a very slow moving pursuit. Restaurants are almost the the complete opposite, and that sort of from one night to the next, it's it's a new opportunity to sort of reinvent what you're doing or make adjustments. And I think that there's not a lot of models to look to. I mean, alloy in New York is is amazing as a as a architect embedded within a a development, company. They have a lot of financial resources in order to do that. We haven't been as, you know, as as well financed as that.

C We've had to to be very scrappy, about it, but, yeah, it's been it's part of the challenge has actually been one of communication and something we've been working very actively on in terms of when there isn't a model that you can point to that matches you 1 to 1, how do you explain what you're doing to to clients? How do you not confuse them? I think we still very much do confuse our clients or or prospective clients, about sort of what what we're doing and and how to to make sense of us in a in a sound bite.

A So let's go a little bit deeper on that and and talk about maybe one of the projects that you're working on. I know Haley mentioned the Deep Springs College, but, we can circle back to anything that is most top of mind for you. It's interesting to to me that in all of your pursuits that you've actually stayed so close to practice and you actually have kind of a traditional practice model in your firm. So one, what keeps that kind of passion? And maybe maybe it's a second generation, like, commitment to architecture and the built environment. I don't I don't know. But, like, what, you know, what keeps that passion going, and then what project are you most excited about

C right now? Absolutely. Yeah. So we're, in some ways, very I mean, we're a very traditional architecture practice in in the way that we're structured. We do comprehensive architectural services. We, you know, we do all of our CDs in house, and we write our own specs. And we're on-site sites even if we're not the general contractor, quite often in doing construction management or observations. And often because of our clients are nonprofit organizations that are on the smaller side, they rely heavily on us as do our our private clients for residential work on sort of additional construction management and and support because of our experience in that. The project that we're we've been working on and and to to say it's a a long running project, I think it's maybe year 4 or 5 no.

C 5 or 6 at this point. Specifically, one for for Deep Springs College is a a dining hall for their campus, which is located to a small liberal arts college, 26 students, coeducational, not a religious organization. It was founded in 1917 by a very wealthy industrialist who made a huge amount of money in, west. And he he purchased a ranch, just north of Death Valley in a very, very remote location and started an experimental college there to to train, students for sort of public service broadly defined. So a number of of students go on to be, in academia, but also, public service, such as ambassadors or serving congress or our firefighters or, like, very, very, sort of, open interpretation of what it means to to give back to the community. So we're we've designed, working with, this very, democratic organization of students and faculty members and, administrators and trustees and and donors, a new dining hall facility, which is really the sort of center of community life on the campus. The students all live on campus. The the faculty all live in campus.

C The nearest town, which has about 3,000 people, is is about an hour's drive, over a high mountain pass. They're very, very remote, very intentional community in which the students are involved in all of their faculty hiring and and student admissions and day to day operations at the college, which is also on a ranch. So they produce a huge amount of really all of the food that they produce on, that they consume either on on campus. And we've designed a facility that allows for them to to preserve a lot of that food, to process, you know, dairy products, eggs and milk they have on on-site, store it, for the rest of the year. They they grow a lot of alfalfa for the cattle that they have, so a lot of meat and pork and and other, products that they they slaughter on-site and then, break down within that facility. So it's about halfway through rough framing. We have we're we're doing a construction management advising for that, and there's a general contractor who's local, and it should be completed, the next 4 to 5 months.

A Exciting. So I know you kind of mentioned what's next for Stayner, but do you have any thoughts beyond or other pivots that you're thinking of of making in the near future?

C We've spent a lot of time getting a lot of these structural pieces in place in order to to then start to scale. So that's been not necessarily scaled architecture practice. I think that we'll try to remain small or relatively small, but to to be able to scale the the work that we do and, to scale the the number of outlets that we have for sort of on an operational side. And, you know, one of the the real challenges, I think, you alluded to it is how do you how do you actually be doing how how is it possible to do architecture while also keeping track of all of the other components? I mean, just just the business side of architecture practice is sort of an incursion into actually being involved in design and construction and all of those things. When you layer onto that, you know, the the extra number of insurance policies that have to be deal dealt with and, you know, attorneys for specialized food service and and other, you know, construction. And then on top of that, the the the payrolls that have to be run and the, HR related stuff that that you have to do. Part of the challenge of architecture practice right now as well as really any any other type of of small businesses, how do you get to a scale at which you can share those demands and resources, like, across other people. And so we're really trying to figure out how how the architectural practice fits within some shared shared resources whether I mean, this is very very banal, but maybe gives a impact or, like, gives a a background into the demands that are required in order to do the fun stuff or the, like, the visual stuff that that get photographed and put on websites and and so

B forth. We do wanna, like, ask one really important last question, which is, you know, we we are trying to kinda explore change in the industry through a lot of different angles. And so we wanted to hear your main idea or lesson on change that you think is needed in the practice of architecture that could be passed forward to architects, emerging professionals, and industry instructors who are listening to the show and looking for ideas on change? You know, it's a big question.

C You know, one one of the things that that I discovered well, I guess there's 2 things. 1, in sort of the experience in academia, there were 2 takeaways that imprinted themselves in me from from my time teaching, which I absolutely loved. One of them was just there was a generational difference between me and my peers coming into academia and a previous generation that had been there, and the opportunities and the sort of finances of the academy were so different between those 2 generations. And I I think that's probably true as well as as a second generation practitioner. The world that my father, you know, experienced as a as an architect is a very different one than the one that we live in now as as someone, you know, effectively starting a relatively new practice. I think the other half of it was, especially at at ASU, I became very aware of just how academia was being to change. The the financial model that, existed was was really being impacted by management consulting, and all that came with it. And I think architecture has been very resistant to the fact that in the end, you know, you have to have money to keep the lights on and keep payroll paid, and that's something that is a struggle, I'm sure, for every practice at one way or another.

C And so, really, how do you not make changes the way you practice? Because the the existing model that's taught in proprac courses, that's sort of the default, the one size fits all, It actually doesn't work. I mean, it's people keep doing it, but it doesn't work, and I don't think that there's the possibility of of matching what was maybe feasible 30 years ago in setting up a practice to today. And and there's probably a reason that a lot of the architecture practices that are, becoming more and more visible in the US are actually not run by architects or whether it's the large multidisciplinary, multinational, consulting companies with lots of acronyms or it's artists who have moved into the architecture domain and are, you know, getting the projects that would typically go to to to architects because they are approaching it. The the art world has been aware of money and the powers of money and, like, not not for greed or anything like that, but just that that's that is part of the the element of what it means to to have a business and and be practicing. So I think the the takeaway that I would have is that you have to come up with new ways new models for practicing because there's really not another option, unfortunately. And so it would be really fun to see more diversity within architecture practice models, and I think that's probably gonna come through more diversity within the profession overall as it hopefully forces people to rethink the the default modes of practice.

B I love that response. That's so great. I totally agree. And I think that I I'm following that line from teaching all the way into practice into entrepreneurship. And I think that's definitely spoken with some true experience on both sides.

C Yeah. It's scary. There's no question about that. But, I mean, isn't isn't the thrill of doing architecture and part of part of what we do is not know what the outcome is gonna be. I mean, we try to control it as much as possible and maybe obsessively. But in the end, like, we are one of the few professions that don't have a direct creation of what we produce. You know, attorneys write their their attorney work product, and accountants do the numbers behind their tax filings, and artists, you know, used to squeeze the paint onto the canvas. Maybe now they have a full sort of army of people who produce the work for them.

C But we have so many different sort of layers apart from what we do that from from the start, we are engaging in some thrilling undertaking of not knowing how the end result is gonna be and trying to trying to negotiate and and manage it towards what what we hope it will be.

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A Thank you for joining us on Practice Disrupted, a podcast by Practice of Architecture. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.