Brandy and a colleague discuss how Lake|Flato built a sustainable architecture practice using regional materials and collaborative culture. They focus on mentoring young staff and transitioning leadership to ensure the firm's impact lasts beyond any single person.
Architecture can be a very environmentally unfriendly process if you're not careful. It could be about extracting materials, it could be about using energy, using water, and not thinking about how you regenerate those things.
We're drawing on regional elements. We're not carting materials in from across the nation, across the world, that we're working with what we have. We're trying to be good stewards of the land and the community.
Our goal is to have buildings be kind of a bridge between human beings and the landscape. Heading forward, I think our biggest challenge is that our two founders, we will likely be retiring or diminishing dramatically the amount of work they're doing. And they've had such a profound impact on the company from its inception through today. So Brandy and I would be some kind of second generation owners. The question is, what's that next group going to bring? Because it has to be, I think, to be vibrant, it has to be something new. It can't just be extending what others have done.
If there was a metaphor for the values of Lake Plato, I think it would be a river.
You think about a river, it has a source, it has a course, but every once in a while it kind of jumps its banks. And we've let that happen within our practice. We think we know where we're going, but whether we generate an idea internally or life kind of hits us from the outside, we've been willing and able to jump our banks. 10 or so years ago, when the country was in a recession, that was a real stress point for our office. We were adding a sustainability department to our office right literally in the middle of the recession because we were looking forward, saying we should not let go of this person we hired six months ago because a recession's hit. We should figure out how to keep this and actually grow it because it's important.
My greatest role right now is being a mentor. Looking at the young staff that come in and just really spending time with them.
For us, doing good is in creating this culture of attracting and then supporting people who just want to do more than just do their job. There's no hierarchy in how we sit. And it makes just standing up and talking and communicating really comfortable.
We recognize that we can't practice 80 in a room. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't even work with our physical constraints. So having these smaller groups of 20 say is the right size for mentoring. Being in touch with each other, being in touch with their projects.
As we change and grow, we want to be better without a lot of definition about what better means, but we'd like the work to be better, we'd like the office culture to be better. I think we apply a little bit of definition to that and leave a lot of it open ended so that that can be a constantly evolving discussion and equation within the office. But there'll be a group that are probably 10 years younger than Brandy that will need to have different characteristics and attributes about them. I think we're still trying to figure out exactly who those people are and what those things are that they're going to bring. We're planting ideas out in the world, and we're planting ideas and thoughts and values with our young architects, and we're trying to nurture and grow those things to make the world better.
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