Rebuilding Smarter: David Sellers and the Architecture of Necessity

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. My guest today is David Sellars, founder of Hawaii Off Grid Architecture and Engineering and Surf Block two ventures, reshaping how we think about sustainable design, materials and self sufficiency. David's journey is anything but conventional. From working as a mechanic in Texas to fishing boats in Alaska to studying architecture in the Netherlands, every chapter has fueled his fascination with systems that sustain themselves.

A That fascination eventually led him to Hawaii, where he's built a multidisciplinary practice focused on net zero and off grid projects, but rooted in necessity and respect for place. We'll talk about how Hawaii Off Grid has become synonymous with climate responsive architecture, what it means to design in the extinction capital of the world, and how Surf Block, a startup born from surfboard foam waste, is turning environmental challenges into innovation for rebuilding communities like Lahaina. David's story is a reminder that Architect's next frontier may not be about bigger buildings, but smarter systems. And that sustainability starts by designing within our limits. Hi, David. Welcome to Practice Disrupted.

B Thank you, Evelyn. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, it's great.

A So I gave a little bit of an intro at the beginning, but I'd love to kind of hear in your own words, the quickest narrative you can get about your career path. And you can make it a little longer too, if any. You have quite the unique path.

B Non traditional.

A Yes. Yeah.

B Unconventional. Necessity a part of it. But, you know, I. I started out my career in building in, I guess, high school. I worked for a general contractor, and that's basically how I got into architecture. I originally went to college thinking I was going to play Division 1 soccer. And then I decided that the last minute that, no, that was not a good idea. And so I thought, well, what else am I going to do with my life? And I said, well, maybe I'll be a journalist, because I really like to read and I like.

B I like to tell stories or be involved in storytelling. And then I also like to build houses or I thought about building houses. And so I ended up going to Texas A and M University, ended up going to the College of Architecture because they have one of the largest construction science departments. I don't remember the guy's name. He was another student. I went into the advisor's office and I said, hey, I want to do construction science, I think. And he said, you think? Why, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to design and build houses. And I thought I'd move back to my hometown and settle into this little life.

B And he said, well, you should get into architecture. And I said, oh no, that's too hard. I knew a couple people that were in landscape architecture and an architecture program. I was like, that's, that's crazy. No way. He's like, well, why don't you just try it and then if you don't like it, those classes will be applicable to construction science. And I was like, okay, great. And so then that was it.

B After my first semester, I was hooked. I had a great professor, Duchampon from Austria and he taught me the design fundamentals. And the next thing I knew, I just was in love with, obsessed with and just all I wanted to think about and do was design. And I just saw design so many different things. It was, and here I am today.

A And here you are today. But you don't have a very straight path necessarily until you, you know, from, from Texas to Hawaii either. So do you want to talk a little bit about that evolution?

B Sure. It has to do with the evolution of my bank account. So I ended up working as a mechanic in college. That's how I worked my way through undergrad. And so I work, busting tires, changing oil, you know, basic maintenance. I ended up moving up. I ended up working for a BMW dealership which was fantastic. So it's much nicer than working for Firestone.

B But it allowed me the flexibility to work on the weekends and work almost full time as I was going to school. That gave me the sort of skill set that propelled me and made, made some interesting decisions happen. I got tired of working in hot auto shops in Texas. So if you can imagine, it's like 108 degrees there right now in Texas. And an engine in a car if it's been running is like 200 degrees. So you ambient air, thermal mass, it's not a good place to be. A good friend of mine said, you know, you could go to Alaska and work on like fishing boats and make good money as a mechanic. And I was like, really? And I was, I was at a crossroads.

B You go to school? I grew up in, you know, small, mid, mid sized town, very little cultural background or educational Background, first generation to go to college. And I was not happy with the, what I was learning and what I was seeing around me culturally and, and I was like, you know, I got, I gotta get out of here. I mean, God bless Texas, but I love it, but I can't live there sort of thing. So anyways, I bought a plane ticket, first time on a commercial airline, and bought it on a credit card, which I can't believe they gave me a credit card, which is probably problematic, but flew to, to Alaska, flew to Anchorage, hitchhiked to Valdez, got a job at a cannery because they would give me boarding. So I met some other college students from Thailand and I made these great connections. Like the first time I made these international connections and cross cultural connections. I had been reading about Buddhism and they had been Buddhist monks. I love spicy food.

B I thought I loved spicy food. They made real spicy food. So they used to make, make food and then slide it over the galley table and just watch as I started to just sweat. But it was, it was incredible. It opened up my mind culturally. And then here I am, I go from the cannery and I got a job on a fishing boat because of my friends from, from Thailand. One one had a friend who worked on a boat. They said, you're a diesel mechanic.

B So my dad was a mechanic. Ended up working in auto shop in college or my first year. And so my second year in college, I went up to Alaska in the summer, got a job on the fishing boat. And then I find myself out in the middle of the ocean. I have wheel watch. So three to four hours at a time. You're sitting just watching a beautiful landscape. If it's daylight, which usually in Alaska it is.

B And I'm thinking about the boat. I'm checking on the systems, the, the generator, the water system, the refrigeration system, the main engine battery system. And I was like, you know what this is? Like, it's got everything you need. Everything you need for a house is in this boat. And then I see on the horizon this beautiful silhouetted sailboat. And I was like, wow, look at that. It's so beautiful. Just majestic, moving, just clean.

B Just. I mean, just like it was floating. Later that day, we pull into the harbor. And this boat pulls into the harbor next to us. And it's a French couple, a little family. They had two kids, two young kids. The guy comes over and he starts asking us about where to go and like navigational, like recommendations. And I just was obsessed.

B I was like, that, that boat works off of the wind. It's got a little solar panel, it's got a little wind turbine, it's got a water maker. You know, your everything is there. So I thought, well, I'm going to go back to school and I'm going to design this stuff into buildings. And so that's where that off grid started. 19 years old and I already had this, like, hey, I can do this. And so in school I just started kind of focusing on that. And then, you know, I ended up getting a job.

B After college, I got approached by a neighbor who worked for this big construction company, International Construction Company. It's a. I need somebody who knows how to work in remote locations, who can draft, who understands structural build stuff. Growing up as a mechanic, I'm also a welder and a fabricator. And so I was like, okay, well you know, how much does it, does it pay? And he's like, oh, it's, you know, this much money. And it was like, that's more money than I've ever heard of, you know, or thought thought I would make. Right. So that, that set me on another trajectory where I started traveling around the world building out infrastructure and buildings.

B I learned how to use theodolites and survey and do optical geometry for steel structures, cryogenics, like crazy refrigeration systems. It's all remote and, and I'm 12 hours away from the main office. And so yeah, I got to go to Europe and travel in Germany and Austria and Belgium, Middle East. So, you know, it's like one thing after the other, it just built upon itself. So it just was opportunities out of necessity. You know, I needed to take the opportunity because I had a necessity. I needed to pay rent, I needed to pay for school. I was going to school on Pell Grants.

B It just necessity. And that's been the story of my life ever since, I guess. And you know, I think that part of our architecture practice is rooted in necessity. I feel like there's a necessity for us to have climate responsive design, whether that's, you know, fully off grid carbon sequestering, you know, whether that's just making buildings that are sort of responding to its environment with low energy usage and dealing with climate change because we're seeing a shift in vernacular architecture or climate based regionalist architecture where used to we didn't need air conditioned buildings, now we do, right. So thinking about all of these things, but it's necessity and being open to opportunities.

A I definitely want to dig into off grid. But how did you end up in Hawaii?

B So ultimately I ended up Doing my master's at Technical University Delft in the Netherlands. And it was amazing. Two and a half years. It was a master's in architecture, urbanism and building science. I went to the Y factory there I was still obsessed with off grid, of course. And I, you know, just was focusing on that and kind of finding that path. I graduated, was completely exhausted. I looked like, you know, I had been sick for a year.

B So I finished my thesis. I thought I was going to take six months off, travel Europe, take, take time off. I had an opportunity to work at mvrdv. I thought that's an easy path. That sounds great. Vinnie Moss was my professor and mentor at the Y factory. And I was just in the middle of this, this like architecture, like heaven. A friend of mine called me randomly and said, hey, I was just looking at these job postings and there's this job posting and I thought about you.

B And I was like, really? What'd you see? He's like, well there's this island and they need somebody who knows like how to scuba dive, has is a boat captain, knows how to operate heavy equipment, knows about airplanes, knows how to do construction, design buildings. And it's off grid out in the middle of the ocean. And I was like, really little connection to that when I looked at it. And I kind of just did a little quick little Google, like what is that? I learned that it was an island that was built during World War II or just right before World War II by the Navy Seabees. My grandfather was a Seabee in the, in World War II. So it's the Naval Construction Battalion, all going to come back around later. And so I thought, well, huh. And so I sent in my resume and two days later I got a call, did a quick little interview.

B It's nighttime where I'm at daytime in Hawaii. And they said, well, you have a really unique cv. Would you be interested in coming out to Hawaii? We'll fly you down to Palmyra. It'll take one week because flights are very difficult, all expenses paid. We want you to come out here and see if you like it. I look out the window, it's dark, it's like 50 degrees, spitting rain. You know, I've never been to Hawaii and I'm like, all expenses paid trip to Hawaii, sure, no problem. So I did that topped on a flight, landed in Honolulu, super jet lagged.

B They called me up, say we're picking you up, we're going to go to the private terminal. We hopped on this old propeller plane. It's like Indiana Jones kind of thing. We fly four hours over the ocean and we land in this tropical paradise. I got to see everything, meet everybody. They took me out, you know, went diving, and it's like, amazing. And I just, I was like, I can do this for a little bit, right? So it was a fork in the road that I wasn't expecting, the road less traveled. And I thought, this is a great life experience.

B Let's do it. My wife also happened to be a professional surfer. I don't really surf. And so she was like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. We weren't married at the time, but yeah, she was like, I can get behind that. So I ended up in Hawaii.

A You obviously have so many different types of experiences. I would say more than most architects I know. When did you decide to finally start your own company then, after all of this?

B Well, so I won a competition when I was going to Texas A and M. I call it the Poor kids exchange program. I always wanted to go to Italy. I had a semester long exchange program in Italy. It was. I couldn't afford it. Like, it's just. There's no way for me to work at the same time and pay for that trip.

B They had an exchange program with Virginia Tech, the Washington Alexandria Architecture Consortium. It's in Alexandria, Virginia, which is right across the river from Washington, D.C. it's on King Street. It's in a 100-year-old historical building. I lived in, like the attic of a church that was 120 years old or 150 years old and. But it was affordable and I was able to work because I was in the US and, and so I went and did that, and that opened up a lot of opportunities for me. And, you know, I knew from, from being there, I learned about design. I really, really learned about design.

B And they pushed me because they knew I could build things. So I was in the furniture design build program. And so we had a little wood shop and we designed and built furniture. I designed and built a piece of furniture. And I did. I did something that I always do to this day. They said, hey, here's your material, palette. You got some aluminum, you've got plywood, you've got hardwood, you've got.

B Here's these different things. Make something from this. And so I wanted to make a chaise lounge. And so the way that I start was I took a piece of museum board and I cut it to scale 4, 4 foot by 8 foot. And I just started pragmatically the way I think about architecture to this day. And I started you know, sketching. Okay, the seat needs to be about this size. I want it to be my size.

B So I'm, I'm six foot six. So I made it a little bit longer and I started drawing it on the, on the pieces of plywood because I realized, well, I can't have a ten foot piece of something because I have an eight foot piece of plywood. And so I sketched it out on this little 2 scale 4x8 sheet of museum board. And I started realizing, I was like, hey, I could maybe get all the pieces for this Shades lounge from this one 4x8 sheet of plywood. I was like, you know what? I don't think I need any hardware because I could, like, I could, I could dado and slip fit these things together without having any screws or glue. And so I ended up staying up all night and making several little models. And the next day, no sleep, you know, crazy hair and bloodshot eyes, pale skin. And I show this to my class and it was just like, yeah, that is good.

B I was like, wow, I can do this. And my professor at the time, Joe Wheeler, who's a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, he submitted it for architecture competition or a furniture competition. And I won. I placed. I can't remember if it was which, where it was, but I was like, oh my God. And they put it in a magazine. So when they still had magazines and it was a big deal, I was like, wow. So it just propelled me and, you know, said, okay, whatever I just did, just keep doing more of that.

B So from that, I go back to Texas A and M after that, that year at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Consortium. And everybody was excited because I'd won that competition. And the dean of the school, Tom Reagan, he ended up becoming my mentor. He was like, we like it when you build stuff. Like, go build things. And so I ended up becoming the manager of the wood shop. We had a fabrication lab in the College of Architecture. It's mostly wood.

B But ended up becoming the manager of the wood shop my senior year and ended up working at the College of Architecture for two years after as a staff instructor in the wood shop. So kids would come in and they would want to build a model, a piece of furniture. They'd have to consult with me. I'd give them safety courses, talk about tools, teach them how to do things. From that, I started getting commissions to build furniture, mostly for the faculty. And so I said, well, maybe I'll just, you know, I'll do this full time, like the dot com bubble 2001 recession kind of happened and things were getting slow. The wood shop was going to close down because the whole college of architecture was getting a renovation. Wood shop was getting moved and two or three people said, why don't you build me a piece of furniture? I said, okay, well, I'll charge you very little money.

B And that my first business started. And I started from that making my own line of furniture, which I called the single panel series, which I took the same thing, a four by sheet of plywood. And I just made all these designs of furniture and I started selling them. And somebody said, hey, you should go to the international Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. And I was like, I've never been to New York. That sounds fun. So I loaded up my truck and I drove or I got accepted to be in the fair. And I drove up there.

B And that was my first business des furniture or sellers designs. And I learned pretty quickly. I had sold furniture to everyone who was an architecture nerd that was interested that kind of furniture. I had exhausted that market with about 20 people. And I realized that people don't buy furniture very often, especially not from some kid like from who knows where. And so I started building things. I got a commission to build a greenhouse, which I fabricated out of Cyprus that was harvested locally, and aluminum that I welded up and polycarbonate. And so it just, it kind of did that for a while.

B And that's when I got approached to, to go work all over the world doing construction. And so it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. But that was like my first, like, design business. I wasn't scared to start my own business because I'd already started my own business in high school with two of my good friends. It was more, I don't know about. We needed, we needed to work. We needed to pay for cars and, you know, clothes and doing stuff and gasoline and all that good things. But I wasn't afraid to start my own business because we had started a firewood business where we go cut firewood and sell it to people so they could heat their homes.

B And it was a lot of fun. And we were able to make it work, worked on our own schedule, got paid in cash, didn't pay any taxes on it, which is probably not good. But so it. I knew that it could happen. And so when I got the opportunity to build furniture, I did it. The furniture wasn't a complete success. I mean, it was helped me. But I learned that having a business, running a business is very difficult.

B You got to be Strategic about it. You can't be that starving artist. I enjoyed being the starving artist for, you know, three or four or five years. But to be sustainable. So I realized that I should instead, as I sort of mature from furniture making to architecture, I should probably try to acquire somebody else's business. And so I knew from my like early mid-20s, I was like, I should find an architect who is about to retire and I can take over their business. So I'll have some, some work and then I can morph that into what I actually want it to be. Which already had this off grid idea in my head.

B And so for 10 years I was looking for that architect. I did have some mentors back in Texas that I ended up meeting and getting to work with my friends. First architect ever met when I was in ninth grade, he designed my high school. Still a very good friend to this day. I was texting with him yesterday. He's, he's retired. Of course I thought about taking over their business. I just didn't want to be in Texas anymore.

B So fast forward, I'm down on Palmyra. I needed to rebuild the Runway. That was the primary goal. The reason that I was hired because I knew how to operate heavy equipment, I knew how to survey, I knew how to build things, I knew how to draft. And so I ended up sailing down to Palmyra. My second trip to Palmyra, I sailed down with a theodolite or total station to survey the Runway that was originally built by the CBs in World War II. I needed to understand what was going on with the topography and the shape of the Runway. When I did that, I had to rent that piece of equipment.

B There's one survey supply shop in Honolulu that rents equipment like that. I rented it. Sailing down to Palmyra, which is a thousand miles from Honolulu, takes about five days. So five days down, five days back, depending on the weather conditions. And then I needed a few days to one, recover from the sailing down there and two to survey a 5,000 foot Runway. Surveyed the Runway come back, it took 19 days. Usually a total station is like a $50,000 piece of equipment. The owner of the survey supply company, when I brought it back, said, he's like, wow, there's going to be some happy people that this piece of equipment is back.

B And I was like, oh really? And he's like, yeah, there's a civil engineer that really needed this. He's from Maui and he does a lot of work on Oahu and he likes to rent equipment instead of bringing his equipment over when they do surveying for, for certain projects, he said. He gave me his card. When I told him where the, where the, where the survey equipment was, he wasn't as upset. And he said, if you ever need anything to give him a call. And I was like, oh, okay, all right, well, great. And I walked out of there. I go home.

B I'm trying to crunch all the data and plan a construction project that's going to happen in three months, which is a thousand miles away. I'm lining up heavy equipment and operators and all this stuff. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm not going to be able to do this. And so I was like, oh, wait, that guy, that card picked up the phone, call this guy, really, really nice guy. He says, well, I'll come over from Maui to Oahu. Let's have lunch and let's talk about it. He flies over, we have lunch. Next day, he says, what do you need? How can I help you? He's really into conservation.

B I'm really into conservation. And he said, well, I'll come down to Palmyra, I'll bring some of my guys and we'll rebuild the Runway. It sounds easy, but you have to sail down there. You tear up the Runway. Now you have no emergency evacuation. You have to rebuild the Runway in order to get medevaced out or to go home. So it was a really good opportunity for us to spend three months together in a remote place and become very good friends. So there's a drink limit on, on Palmyra, you can only have two drinks a day.

B So we cherish these two beers at the end of the day. We're sitting one evening and he says, you know, what are you, what are you doing here? He's like, you went to these, this fancy school. Like, you're sketching in your sketchbook. And like, you're obviously, you know, you're, you're, you're an architect, like, but you, you are designing and you're doing some construction, but you're not really being an architect. And I was like, well, I'm learning a lot about the stuff I want to learn about, which is off grid, remote location stuff. He said, well, what do you want to do? I was like, well, my, my goal is to find an architect that's at the end of his sort of career, has a sole practitionership or a small firm, wants to sell it. I want to buy that and then turn it into the architecture firm that I kind of have envisioned. He said, I think I got a guy for you.

B I was like, really? He said, yeah. So we get back to Hawaii and I go over to Maui to hang out with my friend Jake, that's my civil engineer. And he introduces me to this gentleman named Rick McGovern. Rick McGovern had an architecture firm in Tacoma for 35 years. He sold it, moved to Hawaii, thought he would retire, realized he was a workaholic, opened up a kind of a sole practitionership out of necessity to help out friends and neighbors. And he was ready for his second retirement. And so I talked to him, I said, hey, if you ever want to sell your business, let me know. It went in one ear, went out the other.

B It didn't seem like he even heard me. I didn't want to be rude, but I did need to do some, some other projects down on Paul Myra. And then I was doing some side work. And so he was licensed, he a structural engineer. And so I started working with him. We were friends. I never brought it up again. Randomly, out of the blue, four years later, he calls me up and he says, hey, you remember what we talked about four years ago? And I was like, yeah.

B He said, let's do it. And I got married. I just had a baby. Not me personally, but we had had a baby. And I said, okay. I knew I couldn't keep working in Palmyra a thousand miles away. It's a five day commute. Like, I've got to do something different, go over.

B We sketched out what we're going to do, signed it, signed a piece of paper together, shook hands. And so that civil engineer ended up becoming my partner as well as Rick. And we started Hawaii Off Grid Architecture and Engineering. So basically we, we had a structural engineer that was working as well. And so we were already a multidisciplinary firm between civil, structural and architectural. And then I got licensed in Hawaii and here we are.

A But there's also another component to what Hawaii Off Grid does, and that goes back to that wonderful sailboat that you talked about. And we alluded to earlier kind of the necessity or the limitations of resources in Hawaii. So you want to talk a little bit more about that last component?

B For sure. Well, so you know what drew me to Hawaii, So I'm living in the Netherlands. You know, it was a contentious time in the world after, after 9, 11, 2001, being an American abroad, you know, like I was looking back at the United States. I had already like kind of left the United States once to go to Alaska to kind of separate myself and have some, you know, cultural perspective. I'm looking back the United States. And I'm like, what am I going to do? You know, am I going to stay in the eu? Is that going to be my path? Am I going to be an architect? Am I going to go back to the United States? You know, my home? There's mixed feelings there. But I said, where can I live? California. I've been there.

B It's beautiful. I'd never been to Hawaii. When Hawaii came up, I started researching Hawaii. They, I saw that they were the, they had just announced that they were the first state in the United States to commit to being 100% fossil fuel free by 2045. I saw that they had the highest penetration of rooftop photovoltaics in the United States, like per capita. They were starting a rail, light rail in Honolulu to cut down on vehicle use. That different story. But it was aspirational.

B And then I started learning about the Hawaiian culture, about their sort of dependence on the environment, the how they care for the land, you know, and how important the environment is within the culture. So it's just, it's, it's part of everything. And I said, I want to be part of that. That sounds great. Like these are the people that I connect with. And so that's when I decided to make that move. And once I got here, it was totally different. Everywhere I've lived in the world is totally different culturally and the way that things work.

B But you start to see that Hawaii is the extinction capital of the world. You pay the most for electricity, you pay the most for, for goods and services, most for materials.

A Did you just say the extinction capital of the world?

B Extinction capital of the world? Yeah. The most species have that are extinct in one place is Hawaii. And, and you know what's so amazing? We were having a meeting yesterday, but we're, because we're trying to, as architects, we're helping fight extinction of some of our native birds here on Maui. With a avian. Malaria is a big contribution to the extinction of endemic birds. And so there's new program that we're assisting with where we're building an off grid laboratory high up in the mountains where they are modifying or they're injecting a bacteria into male mosquitoes, then dropping those mosquitoes from drones high up in the tree canopy in the alpine sort of forest on the side of Haleakala in order to save some of our local birds that are real susceptible to avian malaria. As climate changes, the thermocline or the temperature at elevation, it keeps getting hotter at higher elevations. So a lot of those native bird species have been protected by the colder weather at higher elevations.

B But as the world warms and the ocean around us warms, that thermocline, or that elevation at which that temperature is high enough for mosquitoes to propagate and live, keeps raising. So it's killing those birds that have been safe for the last, you know, hundred years or so since we had all of the mosquitoes and everything introduced to Hawaii. If you can be efficient with architecture, which is beautiful, like efficiency and design, I think is absolutely amazing. But if you can save money, if you can make projects more practical and you can do all of that while you're supporting sort of your values towards the environment, you could do that where you're battling climate change, then that's what's really important. So Hawaii and practicing architecture here has really influenced me. I couldn't do this anywhere else. You know, 10, 15 years ago, you, I mean, even now you go to some states and you try to put solar panels on a building, it's the first thing that gets ve right. Like here I can give you a value proposition.

B I can say, listen, here's how much it's going to cost you to put in a solar system. It's going to be your capital expenditure, but it's going to save you 200 to $300,000 over the course of its lifetime. So you don't have to pay for. Right now we're at 45 cents a kilowatt hour. The average in the mainland is like 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour. So I have a value proposition, a business reason why I can do these things that are good for the environment, good for resiliency, whether that's in your community or in your, your own family, like having access to, you know, backed up power supply, Especially now with the, you know, extreme weather that we're having. There's just not a lot of places in the world that I could actually do that and be successful.

A Tell us about, or talk to us about how off grid has become synonymous with the expectations of what you all are bringing to a project and how many of your projects are indeed off grid.

B Well, so let's start off with how many of our projects. So in 2020 is when Hawaii off grid really matured and we made a stand and said any new building that we build has to be net zero at a minimum. Ideally it'll be off grid. And then our highest level, it'll be carbon sequestering as well. So any new building, the only thing that we have done recently where we have deviated from that a little bit is when we're working with on a pro bono project for the rebuilding of Lahaina. We're not pushing that. You, if you don't have the money to do it, we're going to set you up for it. We're going to make it easy for you in the future.

B We're not going to hold you to that standard. This is an emergency. We need to get you back in a house. So most of our projects are off grid, but all of them have a renewable energy component where they're net zero.

A That's amazing.

B Well, it's, it's a niche market too. And so the Hawaii off grid, the name Hawaii Off Grid is strategic. One Hawaii is amazing. Off grid is, you know, somewhat Trendy or was 15 years ago. And it's a statement. It doesn't, it's not David Seller's office of Architecture. Like I hope that it's something. It's a, it's a set of values, it's a strategy, it's a philosophy that I hope will be cultivated by our studio.

B 25 people in this office and it'll live beyond me. So it's not going to die with me. It'll be propelled into whatever the next generation thinks it should be. But it's not just one person's design outlook.

A So we talked a little bit about how you find these opportunities for businesses and pursue them. Tell us a little bit about surf block.

B Surf block. My, my, my little baby. Sometimes it's crying uncontrollably and sometimes it's the best thing ever. Surf block. So 10 years ago, our office is in the Palola cannery on the north shore of Maui which used to be a pineapple cannery. It was built in 1926 and now where I'm sitting in my office was where Decline Sporting goods started in 1979. Once the cannery closed in the 60s, it set vacant for a little while. Maui is a mecca for windsurfing and surfing.

B Decline was kind of one of the first ones. And then there were a couple other surfboard manufacturers, surfboard equipment that, you know, found this delinquent vacant building and started using it as a hub of creativity. And so when we got our office, I would take the trash out to the dumpster and I started realizing that twice a week I like need to time when I take the trash out because twice a week two of the six yard dumpsters are just full of eps, Styrofoam, These, these chunks of Styrofoam, like oh man, this is from the. The surfboard manufacturers. They're like, twice a week they throw out their. Their scraps. And I'm like, gosh, this is so much material. And it's.

B It's really a high performance, valuable material. It's a petroleum product. This is about to go to our landfill, which we live on a very finite piece of land. The landfill is finite, too. We've had issues with the landfill being overcapacity, having to, you know, imminent domain, make it bigger. This shouldn't be going to the landfill. We could. We should be able to do something with this material.

B All the materials we. We ship in are more expensive. So it just makes sense. It's got to be some kind of business opportunity. There's got to be some kind of community opportunity. There's got to be some kind of environmental opportunity. A few years prior to that, a very good friend of mine in Washington state, who is an environmental scientist, he lived way up in the mountains at a research station. And I helped him build a house.

B And he found out about these insulated composite concrete forms. And I'd never heard of them before. I heard of icf, but I'd never heard of these things. And so I helped him build his house. We stacked all these blocks and built a, you know, really beautiful house. And so when I saw the Styrofoam, I put two and two together. I was like, hey, I could make those ICCF blocks out of this stuff. And, you know, I started running through the how, you know, what are the pros and cons like? Well, it's hurricane resistant because it's concrete.

B It's high performance as far as its. Its r value. It's resistant to mold and mildew, which is something that we deal with in the tropics. The other thing we deal with in the tropics that just kills buildings is termites. So it's resistant to termites, mold, mildew can resist earthquakes, hurricanes. It's high performance. So you don't need to pump in a lot of air conditioning and spend a lot of money on. On either a solar system or, you know, electricity.

B And so that's. That's how it was born. So I started looking for, well, who can I find that can, like, sell me the equipment? Who's doing this? There's one or two people doing this, and there I. I couldn't get, like, off the shelf. Like, here's how you take that material and make it into something. So we just started playing with it in. In house. And then I was asked to be on a climate action resiliency committee for the county council.

B And so for a couple years I was an advisor on that. We talked about climate action and resiliency. I learned a lot about local climate change. And through that process, one of the people on the board was trying to get more sustainable building materials made in Maui. So they had heard that I was playing with this material and they're like, hey, you should try to make that here. And I was like, yeah, I should, but I'm very busy and it's, you know, aspirational. I don't think it'll happen. And then somebody called me from the county, said, hey, we've got this little grant for our, you know, our waste management division for our landfill.

B We heard you're, you've been playing with this stuff. Would you be interested in. And I'd never gotten a grant before. I was like, oh, you're going to give me some money to do this? Okay, great. Well, I learned that it'd probably be better to not take a grant, just make more money in the private sector than having to do all the reporting. And that was too much. But it really propelled us. So in 2023, early 2023, we were wrapping up this grant.

B So we were quantifying how much EPS goes in the landfill, how much our local manufacturing sector for, for surfing was, was producing, tried to break down how much, like retail, sort of online shipping, you know, of, of products, how much EPS was coming to Hawaii and then just going into landfill. And how much was that costing us? One of the things we, I learned that was crazy is we measure municipal waste in weight tons. This stuff doesn't weigh anything, but it takes up a huge volume. So we looked at the volume and the landfill doesn't care. Like it doesn't care how much it weighs. You know, like it's the volume. That's what we're worried about because that's what takes up all the area. So we made this little, you know, we made some surf blocks from it.

B We did the report fast forward about nine months and you know, we were kind of on a trajectory to continue that, that pace of developing the product. And then the fires in Lahaina and upcountry Kula happened. It put everything on hold, just kind of shelved everything. It just sat dormant in a, in our office. And then after we kind of gathered ourselves and, and felt like the community was, you know, back on track, we were done working on sort of our pro bono, large scale temporary housing projects. And we were like, hey, you know we're going to need to build 15,000 houses in the next little bit. 5,000 probably in Lahaina, where we've got a housing crisis already. You know that we were already 10,000 houses behind before the fire.

B This is a material that could help with that. It could, it could be lower cost, it could be higher performance. It will address climate change. And we're just going to have a bottleneck of getting materials here fast enough to rebuild efficiently. And so we said, okay, let's, let's put the pedal to the metal and let's make it happen. So now we have a 4,500 square foot little factory. We were able to get more space in the cannery here. And now we have four houses that we're about to fabricate blocks for.

B We're finishing up our third house, which is just outside of Lahaina, and everybody's really excited about it. And it's like, wow, this is great, because I've been excited about it for a really long time. So. Yeah.

A So just kind of a last question, especially as we come here to close. What is the future for both companies? You mentioned how obviously, you know, you didn't name it. David Sellers Architects. So I think there's a legacy that you hope the companies for you to leave behind and others, others to kind of carry that torch forward. What is your hope for the future of the companies?

B My hope for the future of the company is that, that, you know, one of the greatest compliments is when people copy you. Right? So my, my greatest hope is that people see what we're doing and they, they are inspired by it and motivated to do something similar. Find that niche that has, you know, quadruple bottom lines. Right? We're serving the community. We're serving the, the global community. We're doing things for the environment and we're making positive progress within our career, within architecture itself. So my hope is that people look at surf block and not that they necessarily say, well, I'm going to make those blocks too. That's great.

B We'll tell you how we do it. What I hope is that you see the opportunity in your own backyard to do something similar, that you innovate and we inspire you to innovate and you see an example of, okay, you, you can do it if you're just crazy enough and you go for it. Like, that's all it takes, you know, motivation and discipline. You know, 90, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration and a tad bit of talent. So that's the same thing. With, with YF grid, we've developed a secession plan where, you know, I'm not gonna be around forever, but I want to already bring in, you know, principles and sort of cultivate that next generation. And every year we do strategic planning and we re, you know, kind of establish our values, our morals and what we want to be. You know, like this Saturday, we're going to go do a Habitat for Humanity work day for one of the houses that we designed in line.

B We just going to keep cultivating that. That's what I hope that other people will instigate. So as the younger folks in the office, I hope that they'll take what we've done already and they'll just propel that even further.

A Hi Disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, ourselves, speakers and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch. That's practiceofarch. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.