But it's that it's just a raw feed of like an interesting conversation yeah but um to
cue these up. It's an interesting dynamic with photography that if someone calls me
to get something done they expect me to be on every aspect of the capture sure at minimum
I have a studio manager and retoucher that retouches everything you know he's a technical
wizard and an artist in what he does sure but if someone were to show up and I weren't
there in creating that there would be a strong like whoa whoa whoa. But with architecture
you can have that the head of the firm show up and sell the whole project but then other
people design it you know and that's an interesting difference in in that whole practice. It felt
funny to like I I got to a point where you know if you're practicing for 18 20 years
you're facile enough you can produce a building on your own but then if you're doing it under
someone else's banner it's their work and and so there's that funny like it's your art
and it's the clients art and that's a collaboration and I experienced this many times where I
work with a client we get to the end of it and it's like but that's not mine it's the
person whose name is on the door and that I don't know if that's wrong or right but
that was a conflict for me for sure and maybe that's just my ego as an architect or an artist
but I realized that at some point that there had to be another way and something else that
I wanted to try and you know my business has just been like a whole series of experiments
you know fundamentally it comes down to making things and making is the act of taking an
idea and turning it into a physical reality and that can happen with architecture that
can happen with a business like I found a lot of creativity in just like starting a
business like business the creative approach to business to me is also very valuable and
I find that I've often got ideas for other businesses going on in the back of my head
that I have to keep killing like don't don't get distracted Trent shiny object dude yeah
let squirrel yeah and we strap it down in the back and put it through the moonroof and
shoot in downtown New York City of the larger buildings oh that's wild yeah so we’d drive
around with basically what looked like a gun turret in the back and like pre 9/11? No after
9/11 like no one would blink an eye like we did it right in front of a cop station too
double-parked I'm on the roof with this up high like I don't know I think they're just
used to crazy in New York I made a horrible horrible employee I could have never worked
for someone else and I I would be completely bored if I knew I had a consistent income
like for me for some reason the being on the edge of failure I intrinsically know that
that drives me you know the challenge of starting your own thing yeah and really figuring out
how to make it like there's nothing that makes you grind harder than that I really miss kind
of those early days because I was free to experiment and fail no one was watching it
felt so like at some level so liberating and also as you say like really scary because
you're responsible for bringing in the same level of income that you had before and so
everything became a creative challenge as opposed to well I'm gonna get in the car and
drive 70 miles to and from work and you know just check in check out. It's not an easy
thing to make money as a creative and pay for a house and family and kids you know well
what is it about your personality and what are some of the choices you've made you think
that if that have made you successful? I mean if I were to say one thing it would just be
I relentlessly execute on ideas and I think a lot of people have a lot of ideas but that's
where it ends the idea how do you pick the ones you're gonna go on? That's a hard thing
for me like I'm I have a hard time staying on like the one thing that's working for me
it's like you know? It gets easier the the farther you get into it but in the beginning
when I was first starting this I did everything and like people don't like hearing that cuz
that's not easy I tried writing I tried making videos I tried taking photographs I tried
working you know with clients one on one I tried doing consulting I try like all these
things right? And what I did was I figured out which ones gave me the most creative energy
and the most feedback and the ones where I saw the most potential to leverage my time.
So YouTube ended up being a great confluence of all those things because it’s a creative
outlet I get to film architecture I get to think about editing I get to learn about cinematography
so there's like this whole headspace in there that I just unlocked I didn't even know it
was there it's also a way to earn income and it's a way to promote my business so I can
get new clients it just ended up being this kind of perfect storm to invest in. There's
also the financial aspect right? I mean you have to this has to work financially I really
struggled hard in the beginning to make it work financially and I realized that you know
if I was gonna take ten different clients small little projects and get on this hamster
wheel of like you were talking about you know addition, renovation like what's that three
or four months worth of work if that? And then I have to find a new client and it's
like all these little things no I'm gonna wait for big client to come along good project
nice people to work with but in order to wait that long I need to have revenue that's supporting
that so right I did plan sets I wrote books I'm doing advertising revenue I'm doing affiliate
like all this stuff because I want that to leverage my time so that I can wait for these
bigger commissions to come in. That's a more entrepreneurial approach to practice most
people just say I'm gonna do the client thing and whatever that looks like it's gonna be
a struggle and I talk to people every week that are in that same position like well how
do you do this and? Keep your expenses low work hard that's true but and it's like it
is executing and I think most people the execution part that's where it falls flat. What you
can essentially do with a with a tighter focal length you can compress stuff more and it
feels more like natural eye but if you can use a tilt shift you can get more of the frame
so what you essentially do is you make your vanishing point you know the focal point of
where your camera is further back by doing that so where I could be here and use a 24
and everything would be a little distorted I could use a 45 and it'll feel like I'm further
back. I see. So that thing kind of takes this and it goes like that. Oh interesting yeah
connects back like this. It works very well. We have a I I think a very similar taste in
architectural design what what informed that taste? I mean you probably didn't grow up
in a house that looks like your house or this studio I know I didn't grow up in a house
that reflects the house that we were actually able to just finish building finally – thank
you God - but like what what informed your tastes like for me at the beginning of architecture
I had this one professor who was insanely just active mind and really excited about
what he was doing sure and he just had he was from somewhere in Europe and he had a
very kind of more minimal and modernist approach and I was just like wow this is really cool
stuff yeah and I've since found that I just very much gravitate towards minimalism and
a modern take with a take on vernacular architecture as well and like Scandinavian minimalism and
that that idea of simplicity sure really really appeals to me where do you think you were
informed for your taste on design yeah I think it's it's obviously a function of sort of
where you come from what you've sampled your education all of your life's experiences right
it all passes through this filter and I think you know if I look way back my father was
a history professor a lot of history in my house he worked at a museum so I was always
accompanying him to the museum you know he was a photographer so like I'm always in the
workshop with him seeing old stuff you know we grew up in upstate New York so lots of
barns lots of agriculture you know it's a very rural place not not dissimilar to this
place but a huge farming tradition there so you know a love for barns and these big blank
walls and these big you know vacuous spaces timber frames all of those sort of historical
elements but when I come to school I realize gosh there's so much more to architecture
than just this sort of historical notion of like what the past the 1800s has given us
right you know New England they imported the English tradition of barn making and these
sort of colonial homes were all built on that English tradition get to school and realize
okay modern architecture like there's this complete other world out here right and I've
travelled to New York but it was nothing that was ever all sort of viscerally like important
to me those those buildings seem very disconnected from my personal experience but get to school
and I realize architecture can look like a thousand different things and I think part
of the process of going through design school is really sampling all those things and then
putting it through your own hand and figuring out what you're actually capable of creating.
Like there are things that I looked at in school and I thought my god this would be
so fantastic if I could do that and I would try to do that and it it would it would fall
flat I mean I'm sure you had this experience like everyone wants to do the the current
trend in architecture so in school when I was in school it was deconstruction and everyone
wants to be a decon architect so it's like these crazy you know I mean you remember that
style I'm sure it's very aggressive and bold design moves but what you realize is that
you know part of creating your style is figuring out what your past is understanding your past
and then figuring out how you're gonna move that into the future and and what I realized
was that my design process was more of a reductive design process I was not good at adding things
and making it look better I was always better at taking things away and so I think you know
finding a more simplistic style just felt right to me it the the more I took away the
better it looked to me and and you always have this like I'm doing that with my photography
all the time so this feels like it's a calmer more able to take the space in the the less
that there is in it and it's just kind of a I don't know if for me it just has this
feeling of serenity and peace that I can relax in it it's just so hard though and you're
at this stage of life and you don't have a trust fund I don't have one either man yeah
it’s it's a hump it is for sure and and what I you know I did a video on this one
time because I had some a bunch of questions people saying well you know how do you manage
to get this done and I just said that I sleep less cuz I get up really early and people
were not when do you typically get up? I get up at 4. Really? I've started I did that a
little bit last week man I get so much done between like 4 and 8 it's like geez I've worked
a half day and now I'm just gonna hang out with the kids for a bit and but my thing is
like that I feel like that puts me ahead of everybody else and it's like kind of evil
evil little sort of voice in here that's like and so when people ask me that it's like get
up earlier yeah and it's not a popular idea but it actually does work oh no it totally
does work you can get so much more done in those four hours before 8:00 then you can
the rest of the day because the phone's not ringing the kids aren't coming in nothing
you can just you plow forward and you pay for it on the other end of the day I can promise
what do you see is like wow that's good architecture like what makes you see something as good
when it comes to architecture it's a really difficult question because I think there's
you know there are academic answers to this you know you and I both went to architecture
school.