Blog Posts By Author: Jason Van Bruaene

About a year ago I saw a short movie made by someone who travels a lot for his work. Inspired by what I saw, I decided to make my own to show my family what it's like on one of our trips. Last November I had a long trip to Vietnam & China which seemed like a good opportunity to make a movie. This is the result.

One of the best parts about my job as an architect designing hospitality projects around the world is the opportunity to visit many of our projects' destinations to experience, and learn from, our client's competition in a given locale. There are moments of inspiration and wonder. There are (I can admit) moments of envy at not having thought of something first. And then there are moments of…?

On a recent trip to Vietnam, one resort, in particular, stood out amongst the crowd. I recall briefly glancing at a few online images prior to booking our rooms and seeing advertisements for the resort in the in-flight magazine, where I noted the opening date of January 2010 (a full 18 months prior to my arrival, the importance of which will soon be clear). It boasted a large infinity-edge pool, great guestrooms and other standard accoutrements for a tropical beach resort of its type. In short, I was looking forward to the stay and to documenting it for future reference.

Little did I know at the time that my documentation would be of quite a different sort. Things started off promising; the lobby was fantastically large and the guestroom palette spoke of elegance and sophistication. I liked it. Then I stepped onto the balcony echoing with the sounds of circular saws slicing through stone. Eighteen months after opening, I could see construction underway around the pool, the fitness center, what I assume will be a specialty restaurant, and nearly an entire wing of guestrooms. It was curious, but I didn't give it much thought. Low season I told myself, some minor tune-ups, not a big deal. The more I explored, however, the more I came to realize I'd arrived at a textbook example of how not to run a hotel.

Throughout  my short stay I kept my camera in hand, ready for the next photo-op of what-not-to-do. What sort of things did I stumble upon? For instance, the hotel staff was kind enough to leave a variety of vertical-chase doors open for me to investigate. The route to the emergency stairs was a virtual wonderland of half-conceived retrofits, dangling wires and accessible, unused roof terraces. The hotel directory helpfully informed me that the spa was located on the second floor; but when the elevator doors opened, I was greeted by a dark vestibule covered in dirt and construction debris with a stack of mattresses two meters high. I wish I could say I took the responsible course of action and alerted the hotel staff to their potentially dangerous oversight, but instead I snapped a picture, tweeted it, and rushed off to tell my colleagues about my discovery before our next appointment.

My experience at this particular resort -- while entertaining for someone who uses every stay as a chance to explore and learn -- spoke of the importance of taking great care in making a choice about who will design, operate and maintain your hotel. Guests don’t want to spend their holiday at a construction site. They don't even want to see a back-of-house corridor. It is up to us as designers and our clients as developers and operators to ensure that doesn't happen.

Also, I never did find the spa.

WATG's Seattle office recently had an old project come back to life with a new client and modified program. To kick things off, the project team flew to Oman for a charrette before filling an egregious hole in some of the team members' travel history: Dubai.

While we were all familiar with the record breaking feats of engineering and design built in the last 10+ years, some of which WATG has been a part of, seeing them in a photo does not compare to seeing them in person. Additionally, our experience has been that in the Middle East comparisons are often drawn to what has been built in Dubai; and, therefore, we should take the time to acquaint ourselves with some of the highlights (or low-lights, depending on your point of view).

Here are a few of our (including Cynthia Jacobs, Michael Brown, and Shannon Suess) observations and notes from Oman and the UAE:

1.  In checking out the Omani competition before the charrette we toured Muscat Hills, Jebel Sifah, WATG-designed Shangri-La's Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa, as well as The Wave Muscat. Each development includes components and features that our team wanted to investigate during the initial stages of design because they're also part of our project.

2.  Our colleague Colin Wild took us on a tour of the WATG-designed Royal Opera House currently under construction in Muscat. Yes, we walked inside the organ-what a magnificent project!

3.  Our final meeting in Oman was canceled, which gave us the chance to visit the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque's immaculately maintained grounds and prayer hall with its enormous hand-woven carpet and immense chandelier.

4. We'll go ahead and admit it-we weren't expecting to like The Burj Kalifa (big, unnecessary, ostentatious, empty)...but after a few days in Dubai, we were smitten. It's a stunning building with elegant proportions and a cladding that reflects the light and color around it. Fun fact: the tower is visible from 60 miles away.

5.  The Madinat Jumeirah served as a great size and scale reference for part of our current project.

6.  We took one for the team while investigating Dubai's water park offerings as a point of reference for our project by spending an afternoon at the WATG-designed Atlantis, The Palm's water park – Aquaventure. Someone had to do it!

7.  We arrived in the UAE just as the new Ferrari World opened in Abu Dhabi, a must-see for anyone interested in world-class entertainment venues. It's a great family destination with plenty of growth opportunity (which is a nice way of saying it's a bit devoid of entertainment at the moment). We also questioned its long term viability (if you aren't into cars it gets old fast). However, no expense was spared-from the marble counter tops in the restrooms to the high quality cutlery at the Italian (of course) cafeteria. We'd like to say more but are still catching our breath and gathering our wits about us after that rollercoaster ride!

8.  After our afternoon of driving Ferrari simulators around the Yas Marina Circuit we checked out the real thing adjacent to the Yas Hotel. Our favorite aspects of the hotel were the clean lines and smooth curves mimicking the layout of an F1 circuit: the walls, the roof, and the inlaid steel channels careening around corners and down hallways on the floor, reminiscent of the toy race tracks we had as kids.

9.  Big...and bigger: we paid a visit to both Mall of the Emirates and Dubai Mall. Ski Dubai is everything we thought it would be (complete with mountain lodge and fake fireplace) while Dubai Mall is just staggering – the fountain, the aquarium, the ice rink, and ohhh, that bookstore!

I recently read about a new program Microsoft has developed called Photosynth . Intrigued, I gave it a test run on Halloween to explore what possibilities it holds for use in presentations. Click on the image and follow the instructions through the quick and simple installation process to view the results of the experiment. Once finished, click the play button to watch the show or experiment with the other features currently available.

If you haven't seen this before, my ‘synth' may seem pretty cool but spend a few minutes at the Photosynth website and you'll see far better examples than mine. I may be biased but I think this works best for architecture and capturing the essence of large public spaces.

The first lesson learned is that you need a lot of photos and they must overlap consistently (mine don't). In layman's terms, the program reads each image and matches geometries to put them into a collage of sorts, which it then automates. If your photos don't overlap, the ‘synth' becomes more of a slide show and much less interesting. I will say it is incredibly easy to use, all I did was click to upload 30+ images and Photosynth did the rest in about 2 minutes.

I hope to see Microsoft open up the options for Photosynth so it's easier to save a copy and use it offline. I would love to use this in presentations.

Continue visiting our blog as I suspect you'll see new (and improved) ‘synths'  in the coming weeks!

Attention Millenials: Aloft Hotels are opening everywhere because no one under 30 would be caught dead in a played-out W Hotel these days. Hotel Chatter reviews a new Aloft hotel by Starwood in Rancho Cucamonga, California. I’ll summarize Hotel Chatter’s review: Meh, but free Wifi! The images on Starwood’s own website, however, are much more appealing.

On Sunday The New York Times guilt tripped western architects for daring to work with countries whose human rights records leave a bit to be desired. As I’ve said before, I come down on the side of engagement not isolation. Daniel Libeskind may refuse to work in China but I wonder if he’d let me check the tags of his clothes to see where they’re made.

Stumbling toward the Olympics -- after being called out by Mr. Libeskind in Sunday’s New York Times, China receives more bad PR on Monday from the Guardian. Chinese hotels are offering reporters money in return for favorable reviews following the Olympics. The hotels must be getting desperate due to the fact that the Olympics don’t appear to be shaping up as the financial bonanza many had expected.

I recently stumbled onto this post at BLDGBLOG noting a current photography exhibit at Architekturzentrum in Vienna. The exhibit is of abandoned hotel projects on the Sinai Peninsula. Scrolling through the images is a bit like taking a tour of the film set for Star Wars.

The exhibition reminded me of an unfinished hotel that sets the standard for architectural and development overreach. If you’re unfamiliar with the building, allow me to introduce to you the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. For a closer look, check out this YouTube video someone managed to smuggle out of the country. Esquire Magazine may have dubbed the building “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind,” but I happen to have a soft spot for this, er, monstrosity. It’s a bit like watching a car accident: I can’t pull myself away from the political and economic traffic accident that this building has come to represent.

In early February, WATG's Seattle office is participating in a two-day retreat designed to establish short- and medium-term goals for the development of both the individual staff members and the office as a whole. The group of individuals tasked with leading the various sessions has, among other things, sought ways to walk away from the retreat with a specific to-do list as opposed to a we-should-do (read: someone-else-should-do) list.

The reason for this is obvious—we’ve all been there—lots of great ideas written on a dry erase board with no plan for carrying out the idea. Twelve months later, everyone sits down for another session and (surprise!) the same ideas are tossed out again because no one followed through last time.

So it was a pleasant surprise to read an article in February’s Fast Company addressing this very problem. It differentiates between New Year's resolutions which are doomed to fail within weeks with no negative consequences (no, I did not work out more in 2007, nor do I care that I didn't), and goals that at least come with a sense of failure when not met (my architecture license is a work in progress and hangs over my head daily).

Adding publicity and accountability turns a resolution into a goal, say the authors. A little peer pressure doesn't hurt either:

"Add publicity and accountability to a resolution, and you get a goal. At Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), for instance, employees set ambitious goals for themselves each year, called "commitments," that are created in consultation with their peers and supervisors and later made public. Peer pressure, or even just peer awareness, is a powerful motivating factor."

Much of the conversation for our upcoming retreat has been about how to facilitate the creation of something along the lines of Microsoft's "commitments." The challenge is how to not only brainstorm, discuss, and debate, but to also walk away with a set of benchmarks, solutions, and goals.

So how will we do?

Ask me next January.

I was reminded of this fact of architectural-life while reading a feature in Fast Company on Yves Behar and his industrial design firm Fuseproject. Behar is becoming an industrial design rock star, winning the second most International Design Excellence Awards, behind only Ideo, over the last five years. The article touches on the relatively recent awakening of corporate America to the importance of design and their related struggles due to the amount of commitment top to bottom it involves. Architects inherently understand this, but Behar spends a lot of time convincing companies that sell a product that design matters and he’s got the numbers to back it up:

A three-year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by the research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin from 2000 to 2005.

Additionally, Behar says, and any architect can tell you, good design isn’t easy. 

WATG continually works at producing the best design solutions it can for its clients. We understand that good design works hand in hand with the bottom line for both our clients and our company. Good design is hard work. It requires a willingness to take risks and test new ideas, to look for inspiration and new ways of working. Following from that, I found the “Seven Axioms of Yves” to be an excellent example of the sort of dialog we regularly have when assessing our own work. 

1. "Design is how you treat your customers. If you treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you're probably doing good design."

2. "Design must be integrated throughout the organization. Design-driven businesses foster creativity and innovation at their core and reward factions typically at odds (marketing and operations or engineering) for working together."

3. "Design is not a short-term fix. It's a long-term engagement that requires you to think about how design affects everything that touches the consumer--from product to packaging to marketing to retail to the take-home experience."

4. "As in marketing or operations, you must be willing to fail at the design level."

5. "Design must be driven from the top. CEOs in most industries today must have a true relationship with, and understanding of, the creative side of the business."

6. "With design, the solution to a problem will be different every time. Doing what your competitors are doing is not the answer. The connection to your customer has to be unique, not formulaic."

7. "Never ask the consumer about the future. You can ask them what their aspirations are, but you will not get an answer about what you should do. Design will bring those stories to life."

The August 2007 issue of Architectural Record highlights a rarely discussed fact of working overseas: the treatment of laborers on the construction sites of the buildings we design. The article focuses on the increasing rate at which migrant workers protest working conditions and lack of pay on job sites in Dubai, a city in which WATG has designed several projects, and the resulting improvements in treatment those protests are beginning to yield.

However, the author of a study done by Human Rights Watch on the abuse of workers in Dubai suggests that architects are complicit in the abuses and should therefore address the issue. Daniel Hajjar of HOK hints at the positive impacts western design firms can have on the areas in which they work:

"We're a small component in the equation, and I don't have control over how other people operate," says Daniel Hajjar, regional manager for its Gulf operations. "But I do know how we operate: We operate [in Dubai] as we would if we were in the United States. We don't engage in any activities that would put us at risk with the Department of Labor." He adds that the same goes for firms with whom HOK works on jobs. "The contractors here have really raised the bar in terms of how they work."

WATG's presence, and by association our job safety requirements and workers' rights, can influence the treatment of people doing the construction work locally, much like the foreign investment by manufacturing firms of developed countries that directly helps raise the standard pay and working conditions of a developing economy.

Few, if any, architecture firms individually have the resources to devote to workers' rights in dozens of countries around the world. But if their presence around the world affects positive change through their influence and increased investment and development, then it’s something to be encouraged rather than questioned.

For more information, go to:

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/03/28/uae13090.htm

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002890149_dubai26.html

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=967