How many people are in your firm?
4 and looking to hire this Summer. We also have a formal Association with a second larger architectural firm.
What motivated you to start your own practice?
An innate desire to create, to be author and editor, to contribute, disdain for being told what to do, fear of burying my head in the pedantic sand, fear of mortality, and coming of age in the D.I.Y. socio-political punk movement of the eighties.
That said, it took several decades of planning and mentoring before I fully pulled the trigger. My most notable mentors have been artists Amy Sillman and Sue Rees and Architects Patrick Beale, Nader Tehrani, Jared Della Valle (who has particularly helped foster Ten to One), Andrew Bernheimer, Liz Diller, Charles Renfro, Ben Gilmartin, and Doug Jones, dad, who was mentored by his dad. I now try to mentor my employees to enable their own independence.
In just 6 years since starting the firm, Ten to One has worked on 85 projects. Can you talk about how you have built up such a large portfolio over such a short amount of time?
First, one of our primary goals is to widen the audience of architecture, particularly bringing design equity to underserved communities. Second, Ten to One is a business with mouths to feed and no silver spoons. We meld these two drivers into a business model that necessitates a high volume of projects across a diverse range of project budgets, scales and types.
Design equity for us is a force for positive change that encourages better design and is good for business. Design equity opens the studio to a wider audience, stake-holders, team members, influences, greater empathy, and new theoretical and formal frameworks. More than just a large portfolio, we also benefit from a diverse portfolio, rapid cross-fertilization and gestation of ideas across projects, and allows employees to quickly sharpen their teeth.
The greater Brooklyn community, where we work and live, has provided us with a relatively broad clientele and spectrum of work. Our 91 projects thus far – up from the 85 noted on our website – range from small private apartments to big grass roots urban designs, with the farthest ends of the spectrum attending mostly to our business model. We manage the office and relationships with clients, contractors and consultants such that fees and services are scalable depending on project budget and scope. We therefore take on small and large low fee or pro bono projects as positive drivers in our business model.
You work across an array of project types, in terms of both scale and discipline. What does “building” mean for you guys right now?
Building means everything, nothing and another thing. We have 46 built projects, 11 currently in construction, 12 in progress, and 22 designs completed. We desire to have all projects built, but it is also important for us to work on projects which might not be built – though which should be built. Building can also be thought of as a long term endeavor, like the building of a better City or social network, like a longer term conversation of what gets built.
We work on speculative projects. We do not typically work on competitions unless they are in line with our studio’s goals and fit within our business model. Some of our speculative projects are future phases of private residential projects, to be built over a protracted expanse of time and financing. Others are developed with clients, often non-profits and other community organizations, first as conceptual visualization to help project development, community support and capital investment. Thus far we have had a library / workshop in Philadelphia and soon should have the first phase of a public school interior in East Flatbush Brooklyn built in part with fund-raising and approvals aided by our design visualization. Our Community Innovation Campus in Bed Stuy Brooklyn slowly inches towards realization with each stake-holder and financier meeting. Another of our speculative projects is a bath house / event space sited under an elevated rail line which is heated and cooled by latent geothermal energy from the sewer system with electric power from a solar canopy above the rail line. This project will not get built, but perhaps someday some such project will.
Your website states that 15% if your work is done pro bono. Firstly, why is this important to the firm? And, secondly, how do you incorporate that into your business model?
Pro bono is a necessary means by which we can deliver on our goal of design equity, and to expand our work beyond that which is most easily prescribed. We have a studio policy to invest a minimum of 10% - we are currently at 15%, on average - of our resources to equitable civic engagement, sustainability and pro bono projects. Our studio has always worked pro bono, though I codified the policy and others in the studio’s mission after the 2016 election.
I manage the business like Robin Hood. 100% of our assets come from one set of our clients, while we only spend 85% of our time on their projects. We invest the other 15% on pro bono projects. I hope our clients don’t read this. Just kidding. Counter-intuitively, this is a good business model that our clients appreciate and benefit from. Clients are rewarded as co-contributors in social investment, as well as being brought value to their projects from the research and development made through this wider range of work. Our studio also benefits from the R&D and garners a more diverse portfolio of projects we desire to work on.
How do you help foster an inclusive work environment both in terms of how you recruit new employees, but also in regards to making sure everyone is supported once they are a part of the team?
We have a hiring policy to have a majority of employees be women, minority, or LGBTQ - we have always been at 100% excluding me. This is another positive driver to our business model as our employees come with a superior overall skill set for our studio’s goals.
I tell employees when they start that they can have as much as they prove they can take on, from design to management. Licensure is supported financially. If employees wish for an equity stake in Ten to One, they can have it if set goals are met.
While we have happily had key employees stay through much of our six years, it is also a re-invigorating testament to our studio’s spirit of empowerment that many have gone on to start their own studios, namely JengCHoi, HDS, Sizl Studio and Braasch Architecture.
You are a Certified B Corporation, which recognizes businesses for x, y, and z. Why was this certification important for you to obtain?
[Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. B Corps are accelerating a global culture shift to redefine success in business and build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.]
The 2016 election was an impetus for me to make the studio a more vocal and visible force for social progress. Initially I saw B Corp certification as a marketing tool. The B Corp certification process is wide ranging and extremely rigorous, and through this process I realized it could also be a tool for better business management and visioning. Through the process I was made to enact all sorts of standards such as financial transparency, employee review and growth, minimizing the carbon footprint of our studio and our projects, and there is plenty more to improve upon.
"Where do you guys see yourself in 5 years?"
We will continue to work on the timeless puzzle of urban domesticity, at a variety of scales.
We steadfastly push toward bringing our civic work to fruition, so we hope to be building equitable institutional projects and having this be a revenue-generating mainstay of the studio.
We will then develop our next wave of pro bono strategic development projects, finding design opportunities on new civic and sustainability fronts. Our “future” projects are urban natures, habitable domestic and civic infrastructures which are actors in the urban environment. Our Bathysphere and Mulletowning projects best represent this next frontier. They posit wild social frameworks; bath houses, adventure way stations, off-roading, street parties and micro-ownership stakes. They occupy previously unoccupied sites over streets and waterways and under elevated trains, stitch urban voids and create renewable energy networks from sewage systems and the elements.
