People and Perspectives | Architecture as Art: Empowering People and Places Through Design

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Can architecture empower people and places? In this episode, UpSpring’s Caroline Saba chats with Jared Bradley, President and Founder of The Bradley Projects, where he shares his perspective on what it means to be an architect and how the role of the architect has changed over time. Listen in as we discuss the importance of placemaking through design and the power architecture has to transform how we feel in a space.

The Design Board, by UpSpring, is a proud member of SANDOW Design Group’s  SURROUND Podcast Network, home to the architecture and design industry’s premier shows.

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The Design Board is a proud member of the SURROUND Podcast Network from SANDOW Design Group. The SURROUND Podcast Network is home to the architecture and design industry’s most notable shows. Check it out at surroundpodcasts.com.

Caroline Saba:

Welcome, everyone. We are excited to kick off an episode at The Design Board today. The Design Board is a podcast by UpSpring that focuses on design, development, and everything in between. We host innovators in our industry and explore topics that support your growth in every way. Today, I’m joined by Jared Bradley. Hey, Jared.

Jared Bradley:

Hey, how are you doing?

Caroline Saba:

Good. Jared is the founder of The Bradley Projects, Certified Construction Services, and the Bradley Development Group. He has devoted his architectural career to advancing the profession of architecture by positioning the architect in the center of leadership in the combined fields of development, architecture, and construction. He has championed the importance both in practice and the built environment, all while creating boundary pushing concepts that remind others that architecture is art in a permanent built form for living and working. Jared, I’m so glad you’re able to join me today. Thanks for having this conversation.

Jared Bradley:

Thanks, Caroline.

Caroline Saba:

Today, Jared and I are going to chat about how architecture can directly impact the human experience. So Jared, let’s start with the basics to give our listeners a little background into your professional experience. Can you tell us a little bit about your role as the architect, developer, and general contractor?

Jared Bradley:

Yeah. I think it’s an ever evolving process, and I think that the role itself is always changing and it’s interrelated. What’s great about the way we do our work is that there’s never any finger pointing. I think in the industry, what I think architects are fearful of has always been getting blamed for something by the contractor or the owner. And what the contractor’s fearful of is losing margin in the construction budget and getting fingers pointed at mistakes. And what the developers always worried about is failure or liability.

So everyone’s always pointing fingers at each other. But as the role itself and the way that we work is… and from a business leadership perspective, the three roles that we play, I think in the industry, are seen as completely separate roles, but they’re really not. We’re all on the same side of the table and our whole purpose is the success of the project, which is on the other side of the table. When you bring everybody under one umbrella… I mean, it was maddening at first of course, but now what I’m seeing is our architects just really hanging out with the contractor guys and the contractor guys really talking to the finance guys.

Everybody has input as we evolve processes, the projects. What’s amazing is when I see the construction guys wearing the architecture guy’s shirts and the architecture guys are wearing our company’s construction team shirts. It’s fun.

Caroline Saba:

I love that. Okay, great. That gives our listeners just a better understanding of how those layer onto one another. You mentioned how the role of the architect has changed. Can you walk us through that a little bit? How has that role evolved over time?

Jared Bradley:

For me, I think about the past 25 years that I’ve been in this industry. Of course, you can think back even earlier than that, all the way back to ancient Greece and even earlier. I mean, the comparisons are almost comical the further you go back to where it is now. Our industry is gotten as watered down and as empty as some of our built environments in our country. I mean, the United States, almost every city has got this entire flavor of mediocrity going through them. I think that it correlates a lot with the evolution of the architect and the architect’s place in every project.

I feel strongly that in my career in the past 25 years, I’ve seen the architect even fall even further down in terms of crucialness to a project, at least from the project leadership side, to the point where the developer has really pushed the architect into a very simple line item that’s obligatory in their performer. So when you do that and you take the architect out of that position of making a place for people and actually caring about the built environment, it’s no wonder what we’re seeing and what people are complaining about mostly about.

This could be anywhere, USA has gotten worse and worse because we keep suppressing the architect’s talents. At the same time, the architects, I mean, they’re equally guilty. They’ve allowed it to happen as well. I think as a profession, we’ve been very complacent as leaders in our communities. And the majority, I think, of the developers have really helped play that out even more. Look, I fully understand the roles that everyone plays because we play all the roles. So I’m not saying one role’s better than the other, but what I am saying is that each role needs to be rightsized.

I think the role of the developer has become way too huge and everybody wants to be a developer. The bar of entry to be a developer, anybody on this podcast right here could wake up tomorrow and say, “I’m going to be a developer.” The bar is so low, you just do that. You just say, “I’m a developer,” one day. So when you put all that into place, the people that are really making some of the bigger decisions are usually the people that don’t have the skillsets to do that. My big push has not been to put the architect on some sort of pedestal.

I think that the architect should take a lot more leadership, like what happened back in Frank Lloyd Wright’s days and even earlier when they were considered the clerks of the work, which meant there was a bank, there was a commissioning client, and there was the architect. The architect was intimately involved with the contractor, the architect who was intimately involved with the details on the site, the architect was intimately involved with running the budgets, balancing the budgets, making big decisions.

I think post ’50s, ’60s, we started cranking out all these CEOs and all these MBA degrees from all these business schools, and all of a sudden, real estate became actually a big time commodity. Then as you see that progress, you actually start seeing the architect taking less and less and less of a role. Again, I’m not suggesting that the position of architect should be the top guy of any pyramid. What I’m suggesting is that it’s a flattened line that everyone serves on, and that the architect leads the discussions about how to create space for people, how to create our built environment, and how to create architecture as art again, because again, no one thinks of it that way anymore. It’s quite frustrating.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I think that’s great. I was just going to ask too, that you often refer to architecture as art. It sounds like that’s how this perspective was formed, right?

Jared Bradley:

That’s right. Yeah. You and I have talked about this a lot, Caroline. I used to teach the Graduate School of Architecture in San Diego at the NewSchool and it was one of those things that I used to always insist on, that you have to be dreaming the entire time, right? I get that part of it. But you also have to have some grounding to that, you can’t stay in the clouds all the time. A colleague professor that I worked with, Alan Rosenblum, would always say to the students that you have to have one foot in the sky and one foot on the ground.

Caroline Saba:

I love that.

Jared Bradley:

That’s just one of those things that has stuck with us because that’s actually ironically… coming from academia to this, that’s actually the fundamental principle of what we do. We have to have one foot in the sky and one foot on the ground. Otherwise, you get both in the… well, you can imagine what would happen. But I think the other thing about it is that when we’re all in architecture school, I think as designers, we come out of architecture school, just we are full of creativity, we are full of passion, we are full of lighting the world on fire.

Then what actually happens is we get dropped into the world where we get our teeth kicked in over and over again, and then we go through a process of de-creativity. We’re taking creativity out. It’s because we’re told by the world standards that we have to conform. All of a sudden, I see architect after architect after architect coming out of school disenchanted and depressed and hating their job. The reason for that is because it’s such a juxtaposition leaving architecture school.

So when I think about architecture as art, I did the same thing. I got out of architecture school, I immediately was told, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that. That’s not how it works. You need to sit over there and do what we tell you to do.” I’ve got to tell you, my whole life, I’ve been a little more edgy. I mean, I’m an avid skateboarder, I’m punk rock at heart, I love punk rock music, and I love sticking it to the man. And when you put me in the corner, I’m only going to last a few years before I say, “This is not the way I’m going to live my life.”

That’s how it started for me. But I’m going to tell you that art and architecture, and architecture is art, it really came to me in architecture school, it left me for about 18 years. I met a guy in Nashville when we relocated in Nashville who’s a developer. He’s so much like Larry David, a great friend of mine, Scott Chambers. He is so passionate about architecture and he’s not an architect, he’s a developer. He gets so frustrated, and just like Larry David, he will just go off on like, “What is this? I don’t understand this. Why is this way?”

And he goes, “Don’t these guys understand architecture is art?” And it was that one day he said that, it just clicked everything back into focus. What am I doing? Where I’m going is going this direction by building this vertically integrated practice, but the foundation of it is serving others in architecture is art. That’s where that whole cycle has come and gone.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think even within the past two years, we’ve seen such a movement towards people really wanting to understand how architecture and design is really impacting the built environment. So I’d love to hear from your perspective too what that looks like. How does architecture impact the human experience?

Jared Bradley:

Without being overly dramatic… well, actually to be overly dramatic, I guess-

Caroline Saba:

I’ll take it.

Jared Bradley:

Yeah. I think there are really two primary things that really impact the human experience. I think one is how you see yourself in this world and the other is the space that you encompass every day and every moment. I think the first one is really all about spirituality, but I think the second one is all about consciousness. I could pontificate on both for days, but I do think that the second one, as it relates to architecture, it’s a personal, unique thing that about how your body takes up space and the space that you’re in.

I think it’s different for everyone, but at the same time, there’s a lot of commonalities because we’re all human beings, and so we all share a lot of feelings about this. Again, I go back to graduate school when I was teaching there and we had… from the University of California, San Diego, UCSD, we had a neurologist come in, a professor, and lead us through this whole process of what’s called eurythmy, which is how we move. It was so bizarre. It was almost like really hippie yoga, but insanely weird. At that time, I was thinking, “Well, only in Southern California am I going to get some of this.”

But as you go through that, the whole class, I mean, instructors, all of us, cleared out a room and we all closed our eyes and this neurologist led us through this guided process of getting in tune with our bodies and what it means to be in your body. It got so deep and we were moving around the room in these weird movements and motions, and then we would lay down and then he would just guide us through breathing and thinking through where the center point of our body is and where… All of a sudden, I just got lost in this stuff and it was like… This human experience, it got deep into our souls about who we are. It was so bizarre.

I don’t want to get too far off on a tangent, but I will say, what that taught me was that understanding how our body takes up space and the space that we’re in is all about architecture. Every single moment of everybody’s life, we are dealing with architecture. The problem is that we have so much bad architecture that doesn’t even address the human body. I mean, every space I go into every single day is a box, almost every single one. You’re probably in a box right now. I’m actually in a box. I don’t understand where the box became the standard. It became the standard because it’s the easiest thing to properly build.

But at the same time, what do we do as architects? We need to lean into understanding what the human experience is. If you don’t understand your own experience and what it means to yourself as an architect, you’re not going to be able to help others with that. I think we have a responsibility, at least in my company as a developer, to keep pushing this and figuring out how we can change the paradigm of the livability issues that we all deal with since probably the early 1800s. I mean, even before that when we started building boxes.

I don’t know, I could go on and on about living in a box, but I do think that architecture is really one of the only things that can affect the human experience immediately right now besides spirituality.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, absolutely. I think too, outside of the human experience, taking it one step further about how architecture can impact communities at large, especially creating a sense of place for people. Do you have insight into what that looks like too when you’re helping create these communities?

Jared Bradley:

Yeah. A word that’s been resonating with me for quite some time now is just the word awareness. I think coming out of the pandemic and people are like, “Oh, how’s COVID-19 going to change the industry?” At first I was like, “Oh, okay, well, I got to have some good answers for this.” The truth is, we don’t know until you live past it a little bit. As we’ve lived past it, I’ve realized that this word awareness keeps coming up to me and my team, because it’s all about context, but that context is all about listening and that listening is at the community level.

I’m talking about neighbors in the neighborhood where you’re doing work, leaders in that neighborhood, the people, the mom and pops have had stores there forever, really talking to them and listening to them about what their fears are, what they’re fearful of losing, the neighborhood character, all of these things. For me personally, coming out of the pandemic… Which I know you didn’t ask a pandemic question. But everyone asked me the pandemic question at least once in every interview, so I thought I’d-

Caroline Saba:

Throw it in there.

Jared Bradley:

Yeah, throw it in there. But this awareness is about it, just engaging and responsing to people and serving people. So every project we do, we have to ask the right questions as architects, developers, and builders. What’s the right thing to do here? What belongs here? What needs to be here? What would help impact this community in a way that nothing else can do? And it’s different every time. So making a place for communities is at the core of who we are as… That’s who we are as architects. We just forget it.

Our industry has stripped that, literally stripped that concern out of us and has filled it with economic gain, yield, metrics, all the buzzwords that are all about the bottom line. What I tell people all the time is that if you put all that aside… because you know you’re not going to do a project that is negative, you’re not going to do a project that is not going to be successful. But if you put it aside for a second, I can promise you that if everyone shifts their focus back to providing a sense of community for people, that you don’t have to worry about money because it will be there and people will engage with the architecture, the building, the “revenue side of every project”.

It will be there because you’re not trying so hard. You’re not trying so hard to make the money, you’re just making great places for people. So that’s how we think about making a place in communities.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I love that. That starts to touch on one of my next questions too, about how architecture and design can fuel greater social culture and economic good for these communities.

Jared Bradley:

Again, I go back to saying that’s our entire purpose as architects, it should be our entire purpose. I always ask people about our projects and as what we’re doing as developers, what is our higher purpose? Because if you can answer that and it’s not about money and it’s not about returns, because… If you can answer it truly about what it’s about, then you’ve got a project. If you can only answer it about finances, you don’t have a project, you have a commodity.

What I’m seeing and what I’m really tired of is that every developer I know… I just can’t even hang out with other developers. It irritates me to my core. I also can’t hang out with other architects because all I hear is the same broken record about being suppressed. And I can’t hang out with other general contractors because I could write a book on that. Being a general contractor in a general contractor’s world, I mean, we just are not like any other general contractor because of where our heart comes from.

I can’t even hang out with those people because everyone’s still focused on the same thing; liability, covering your tail, and making money. And it’s like that is not what we’re about and that’s not what this world should be about. So our economic good comes back to, number one, every project we do, how do we serve the people that are going to be using or dealing with this project? How do we serve them first? Number two, once we get past that question, how do we take our skillsets and the blessings that we’ve been given in our lives and share that with nonprofits or pro bono projects or giving back.

I never realized how much giving back in the community and my free time and with our resources has projected my awareness of the community and making our work better. It’s not about getting anything back, it’s about just waking up one day and dealing in someone else’s mess for a little bit and realizing, oh wow, there’s a problem here that needs to be solved. By doing that, you realize, wait, that’s going on over here too and over here. Again, I go back to that word awareness and leading with your heart. Those are two things that are just really critical to us.

Caroline Saba:

I think that’s great, especially the aspect of giving back to the community. If you were to look at architecture as art and that philosophy and really changing the narrative too for maybe some of these architects or developers and contractors, what are some strategies or steps to put in place for people to just view things a little bit differently?

Jared Bradley:

Two things. I think they need to start at a personal level. They need to start asking themselves what’s their higher purpose? Because I guarantee you everyone has one, they just don’t stop and think about it. Because if you wake up every day, you know you have to get to work, you have to do this, you have that. Everyone has a list a mile long, and everyone’s trying to check things off the box. But if you stop for a second, ask what your higher purpose is. It can be anything from if you’re one of our guys in the field that are digging a trench or if you’re one of our architects sitting upstairs designing a building.

Just do what you do great and go past that. How is what I’m doing helping someone else? So that’s the first thing I think about when I try to think about how to correct some of this. But the other thing I would say is that… getting involved with problem areas. I think, again, we get so caught up in self and what we need to do that if we look around, if everyone looked around and helped three people in their little circle of influence, what a difference that would make. And stop worrying about money all the time. It’s easy to say, hard to do, but really you’ve got to take moments in the day to stop worrying about that.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I like that. Infusing the passion back into everything it sounds like.

Jared Bradley:

Yeah.

Caroline Saba:

Then what about the end user? What are they really looking for? We’re talking a lot about the human experience and how you feel in a space and what that looks like. Is there anything that you can call out that really impacts the way that person feels?

Jared Bradley:

We were just having this conversation earlier about how… and it went back to a COVID-19 question, post-pandemic, new world, new normals, whatever. What’s interesting about it is that I think people are looking for something that they don’t know that they’re looking for. What I mean by that is I feel like they’re looking for comfort and feeling like they’re part of something bigger and feeling like they’re connecting to other people. I often look at younger demographic, I’ll just say with their phones in their face, doing Instagram shots in these beautiful, little…

It’s funny too because if you zoom out, it’s probably just one little thing they’re capturing behind them. I get frustrated by that because I think it’s so vain in some ways, but then I realize what everyone’s doing is they’re trying to connect and they’re trying to capture moments in history of their lives so that they can just enjoy life. They’re doing it through the phone and through Instagram and other things now. What that tells me is that there’s a cultural shift happening.

And I think it’s interesting, the same people doing that also don’t want to work anymore because I think post-pandemic, everyone’s focused on life and how to live it, and everyone gets so like, “I just want the good stuff now.” Again, I get frustrated by some of that, but then I realize what’s interesting about all that is that everyone’s looking for the same thing. I think everyone’s looking for comfort, for places to relax and places to connect with other people and build community and build culture or be a part of culture.

What we’re doing as designers and architects and builders and developers on our side, it’s fascinating because we don’t have to change anything we’ve been doing, because from the beginning, it’s all been about context and creating place for humans and creating human-scaled places and spaces and really making things light and airy and natural light and views to outdoors and views to parts of the city and then walkability. Then we get into things about negative spaces in the building where people can stop and hang out for a few minutes and catch up before they go to another part of the building.

So we try to infuse this whole narrative of human space throughout our buildings. So I don’t think it’s any one thing in specific. In fact, I would say people who go through our buildings probably prefer to be in our buildings, but they could never put their finger on why. It’s-

Caroline Saba:

Almost a specific thing is. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Jared Bradley:

Right. Yeah.

Caroline Saba:

Cool. Well, it sounds like this whole community aspect is important, especially as we’re creating these spaces that people want to be in. So do you have best practices or strategies for designing projects that bridge different neighborhoods or different types of buildings or even different types of architectural styles?

Jared Bradley:

Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to context. I think I should elaborate a little bit on context because that’s an easy word to throw out there. It can even be a buzzword sometimes. But you have to look at where you are in a particular city or a particular community and then you have to listen to what’s happening in that community, and then you have to respond to that one way or the other. We respond to that by communicating as architecture with buildings and spaces, and that actually serves the community.

When you play it all out, there’s this heart of a servant that’s going into it. If we don’t do that again, I’ve already mentioned this, if you don’t do that into the development world where it’s all about commodities. That’s what we’re seeing happen throughout our cities, is that developers are coming into cities because they see economic profitability area. So they drop their product, their commodity right there. And they can pick that up and drop it in Denver, they can drop it in Austin, they can drop it in Nashville, wherever.

So we’re getting this monotony of just mediocrity. That kind of thing is the antithesis of what we do. We go into the community, we listen to the community, we listen to the site. That context is really about everything from topography of that site, the geometry of that site. One thing that drives me nuts as architects, we always draw the property lines of what we’re working on, and the rest of the sheet around it is white. That tells me right there you’re not thinking contextually because there’s buildings and there’s streets and there’s sidewalks and there’s adjacencies to this.

You have to put all that on the paper to see how you’re affecting that fabric of the city. That’s really what we’ve been focusing on when I say context. It’s that pragmatic, physical, technical thing that I just described. But it’s also things that are intangible, like, again, views out to the city or views out to open space. It’s what your neighbor’s scale of their building is going to look like. It’s what the building behind you looks like. It’s what the street scape looks like. Are there street trees? Are there not street trees? Can you park on the street or not?

All these things create that context that bridge not only this one neighborhood to other components within itself, but it also can bridge that character to other neighborhoods, because again, it’s leading with integrity and leading with intentionality. So if you’re really intentional about those types of things, the architecture will start speaking its own language and it will not be able to be picked up and put into another location. That’s really our guiding principles on every project, is how do we possibly make this very specific and very intentional and how does this serve everyone in the community better?

Caroline Saba:

I love that. I think this goes back to what you were saying, it starts with that awareness to create that intention, and then from there you put everything into place.

Jared Bradley:

That’s right. Yeah.

Caroline Saba:

I know we’ve talked a lot about the pandemic too. I think something else we’ve seen come out as a result of the pandemic is just a larger focus too on sustainability and resiliency in the built environment. So same thing. I’d love to hear your perspective on strategies and what that looks like, how that has changed for you as an architect, contractor, and developer.

Jared Bradley:

Pandemic, COVID-19, and sustainability is always the key questions we get asked. And it’s the same answer. I grew up in Southern California professionally. I grew up in Kentucky when I was younger, but I grew up in Southern California where in the late ’90s and onward, it was heightened awareness about sustainability. That was just ingrained in me from architecture school all the way through. So I’ve never really thought much about sustainability because it’s almost like, do I think about structure or do I think about doors and windows?

I mean, I think I do, but a lot of that is so intuitive that I don’t stop and go, “Wait a second, let’s check our sustainability boxes.” So there’s a part of that that I’ve had always had a trouble talking about because I just… Like, what do you want to know about it? Is one of those things. Of course, everything everywhere we turn, we’re making sustainable choices. Where shall I start? But instead, what I realized though is that what people, I think, are getting at is what are we doing beyond the norms?

I think where I go with this immediately is that when we make spaces for human beings, we should never have to talk about sustainability. It goes hand in hand. I hate to admit this stuff on recording, but I’ve been watching this bush building contest show with my kids at night where these guys go out in the bush and they build these great structures and it’s a competition thing. And I just watch my kids and their response to this and their wonder and their amazement at what these guys are doing in the middle of nowhere in Utah somewhere.

I think we’ve lost all that wonder and amazement of just building for survival. And that’s pretty abstract from your question, I think. But what I think about when I watch those things is I try to think about how I can put that back into what we do as architects. When I think about the exercise of survival building, that’s the concept, the way we should be thinking about every project we approach. It’s not complicated, but we make it so complicated. It’s all about livability, it’s all about how you feel when you’re in one of those structures.

Yeah, sure, it’s about materials and it’s about environmental sensitivities, but that’s really goes into manufacturing. So where are we sourcing our materials? It’s going to be hard for us to get away from a lot of basics, but making sure that we’re choosing the basics that are the smartest and the most sustainably harvested type of materials. But the big problem is we skip over the livability portion of this and we go right into our lead points. Did you use or reclaim this or reclaim… Of course, everywhere we could.

But let’s talk about livability. That’s really an important thing about sustainability that everyone can’t skip over. But again, we don’t really ever have to change our approach much because that’s at the core of everything that we do.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I think like you’re saying too, the livability aspect has become so important since the pandemic as people are more in tune with what they need out of a space, especially as we spend so much time at home originally and some people still are spending time at home. So I think that perspective too, that it’s every single component it’s ingrained into your process and those systems is really interesting. I’d love to end it on a piece of advice for young professionals entering the field. What would you tell them?

Jared Bradley:

I used to say, “Don’t do it,” but I don’t say that anymore. What I mean by that is because the years of struggle have been real. I hate to be old school about it, but I feel like if you’re not putting years of struggle in, you’re not growing, you’re not pushing yourself. But I would really say, just don’t listen to everyone. Carve out your own path, blaze your own trail type of thing. And obviously, stick it to the man every now and then is good advice. But again, following your passion.

I also really am a big believer in outworking people. You have to outwork everyone always. I’m not saying work is everything, but when I see people now not wanting to work at all and go straight to the good life, it’s just going to end poorly. It’s going to end poorly for them. You have got to build a work ethic that will outwork everyone in your office when you first get out of school. Outwork everyone in your office, stay late, be the first one there. Those things are just basic business rules. That’s not anything new, but we forget that, the younger generation definitely forgets that.

It just builds good habits. When you start outworking everyone, you start out-thinking everyone. And when you start out-thinking everyone, you start doing things no one else is doing. Then you’re quote… using the buzzword of disrupting the market. So instead of trying to follow the buzzwords, just outwork everyone. Start there. Then the other advice I used to hear grad students all the time was, just make the profession work for you.

Don’t do not work for this profession, make the profession work for you. Because if you get too focused on working for the profession, you’ll get disenchanted so fast. We have got architects, bit by bit, have got to start taking some of this back.

Caroline Saba:

Yeah, I love that. That’s amazing. Well, I think this is such an important conversation too, especially if we’re talking about the human experience and the impact we can have on the built environment. So thank you again, Jared, for joining me today.

Jared Bradley:

Thank you, Caroline.

 

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