Fostering Collaboration for Good: Arch Nexus and the BLOCK Project

Ecotone’s fall 2020 release Regenerative Retrofit: California’s First Living Building is out now! Check out this Trim Tab post to learn more about Arch Nexus’ journey to retrofit their Sacramento office. And, to take an in-depth look at the Block Project, read Kim Sherman’s story about hosting a Block Home in her backyard.

Two years ago, I was in the plenary session audience at the 2017 Living Future unConference. This conference is one of my favorite places to be each year, and having read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate the year before, I was excited for the opportunity to hear her deliver the morning keynote address. Little did I know that before that presentation, I would experience what would become another in a series of transformative moments in my career.

For those that haven’t had the opportunity to attend Living Future, there is a wonderful moment before each keynote address when everyone gathers together in a big tent, so to speak, and are given a little something more than you expected. Returning attendees know it’s coming, yet it provides inevitable delight through the discovery of learning year after year.

To whoever came up with the idea of 15 Minutes of Brilliance, a short presentation acting as a prelude or warm-up act for the headliner: thank you. It is through those carefully-crafted, brief moments of learning that I have been given access to ideas that were new to me, such as Pollinator Pathways providing ecological transit corridors through cities (Sarah Bergman), I have seen community permaculture in action in the form of the Beacon Hill Food Forest (Jackie Cramer), and I have been enlightened by new solutions to old problems, such as the notion of Urban Lumber, which considers the city as the next realm for forest stewardship (David Barmon, Fiddlehead LLC). What is powerful about these 15 minutes is that they shine a spotlight on an individual and their passion project. It is inspiring to see people in their element, sharing their story.

Flashing back to May 2017, a few months before this particular unConference, we had moved into a regenerated office in our Sacramento location, Arch|Nexus SAC. A year later, this building would become California’s first Living Building, notably the world’s first achieved through adaptive reuse of an existing building rather than new construction. I had a lot on my mind at the time as we were amidst our Performance Period. For those that have engaged in such an endeavor, you can appreciate the pressure cooker that we were in; nobody wants to come up short while pursuing the Living Building Challenge. Now imagine that your organization was the architect, owner, and operator of said endeavor. We had a lot on the line.

And then it happened. The Friday morning 15 Minutes of Brilliance session began and Rex Hohlbein and Jenn LaFreniere, the two leaders of BLOCK Architects, took the stage. If you want an idea of what this impactful presentation was like, you can check out their TEDxSeattle presentation. Rex and Jenn shared their very personal and astounding journey of bridging from simply being worried about homelessness in Seattle to doing something about it. By creating a constellation of organizations that, together, were collaborating on a solution for their community, Facing Homelessness, The BLOCK Project, and BLOCK Architects demonstrated that architecture was a tool that could solve this problem.

That was a powerful realization. As architects, we often try to tackle societal problems with our tool of choice, buildings, when really what is needed is people-driven solutions. But in this particular case, it is the absence of shelter that actually defines the state of homelessness. Any responsible solution would require skills outside the realm of architecture in order to generate durable results. Jenn and Rex saw through this complexity by choosing to help create a series of organizations which collaboratively leverage art, social media, social science, and architecture – together, all at the same time, to produce change.

I realized I was witnessing something truly unique: the answer to what had moments before seemed to be an unsolvable problem. Within minutes, the question of how Arch Nexus could help formed in my mind. I put a bookmark on this chapter of LF17 and waited for an opportunity to act to present itself. It came a little over a year later.

As I was preparing for a company-wide retreat, I considered some of the challenges that face our business: recruiting and retention, quality management, and access to meaningful experience for our younger staff. A good portion of any architectural firm’s production force has yet to achieve mastery of the profession (if that can ever truly be had). I remember when I was newly-licensed and struggled to understand what it was that I needed to draw. Ultimately this led me to design and build my own home – I, like many architects, craved the practical experience associated with building. What a crazy risk to take, especially in consideration of the market escalation that was taking place in the mid-2000s! But I survived and felt like an architect at the end of that endeavor. Reflecting back on that experience, the answer to the question of how we could connect with The BLOCK Project finally hit me.

What exists at the intersection of quality and inexperience? What exists at the intersection of Nexus’ people-driven values and our desire to increase access to meaningful experience for our staff? What exists at the intersection of our existing tools and processes and the need to help solve problems within the communities we serve?

For us, the answer is Nexus Builds. At our retreat, this nascent idea was introduced. Our Associates were asked if they would be willing to turn the idea into reality, our Principals were asked if they would give the Associates the latitude needed for leadership growth, and our staff were asked if they would support the program with their volunteering time and effort. The result has been incredible.

The Co-Chairs of Nexus Builds, Jeff Tuft (Salt Lake City) and Shannon Bolick (Sacramento), have worked closely with all of our Associates to create a robust program that is now the action arm of our firm’s philanthropic efforts. By coordinating our charitable giving and our volunteer efforts into this focused program, they have created an imageable and impactful solution that allows us to swing the hammer of architecture, literally and figuratively, to help the communities in which we work.

We have elected to start in Seattle as a thank you to Rex and Jenn and their team at BLOCK Architects. We are thrilled to have begun construction on a BLOCK home and, in partnership with the outstanding firms of Miller Hull and Herrera, are helping to ensure that the project achieves Living Certification under the Living Building Challenge (LBC).

The benefits of this work are massive: as a result, every single employee in our organization will have LBC experience by the end of 2019, and we will be the only organization in the world to have designed, owned, operated, and built an LBC project. Nexus Builds is now providing real-world construction experience to our staff in pursuit of increased professional mastery. This in turn should help to shore up recruitment and retention (though we would love to see our competitors rise to the call and match our efforts).

What’s more, is that one more person currently experiencing homelessness will have a house by the end of the year, and another city block in Seattle will receive a massive infusion of connection and social equity.All other benefits are secondary to this, the primary purpose of the BLOCK Project.

The process of determining our 2020 Nexus Builds recipient begins this month. As we speak, Co-Chairs Jeff and Shannon are publishing an internal ‘call for proposals’ to our staff in order to begin the search for next year’s community partner. For our second iteration, we will bring the program home – most likely to Sacramento. The Camp Fire that recently devastated Paradise, California created a smoke plume that spread far and wide, leaving Sacramento in an apocalyptic state of air quality for several weeks. It devastated the natural and built environment and left many homeless. Climate change-induced homelessness is an issue intensely local to California – our team understands the important of creating temporary housing to alleviate this problem for our communities. We know, too, that this issue is not unique; climate change-induced homelessness will have global undertones worthy of all of our immediate attention and action.

At Arch Nexus, we are people-driven in pursuit of meaningful experience. You normally don’t get to have them both every day, but through the collaborative spirit of Nexus Builds, we are doing just that.