MASS Design Group

Recorded on April 16, 2025. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

Model of Architecture Serving Society (MASS) Design Group was founded in 2008 by Alan Ricks, Michael Murphy, Marika Shiori-Clark, and Alda Lee in Boston as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. More than 15 years later, this global, multidisciplinary collective has over 200 members with offices in Boston; in Kigali, Rwanda; Poughkeepsie, New York; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In their own words, MASS Design Group believes that architecture has a critical role in supporting communities as they confront history, shape new narratives, heal collectively, and project new possibilities for the future. MASS’s projects are divided between contract work and design labs, which map onto slightly different modes of work and research. The American Institute of Architects honored MASS Design Group with the 2022 Architecture Firm Award. In 2020, MASS was named the Architecture Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and in 2019, Architect Magazine ranked MASS fourth in its top list of 50 firms in design. Additionally, in 2017 MASS was awarded the National Design Award in Architecture by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački   00:21
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljački, Professor of Architecture at MIT and Director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects tour boxes refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects, deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit placing other values above it, at least momentarily. Today, I’m talking to three co-executive directors of the MASS Design Group, Patricia Gruits, Christian Benimana and one of them also the co-founder of MASS, Alan Ricks, welcome mass team.

Alan Ricks  01:37
It’s so great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Christian Benimana  01:42
Thank you.

Miljački  01:44
Model of Architecture Serving Society, or, MASS Design Group was founded in 2008 by Alan Ricks, Michael Murphy, Marika Shiori-Clark and Alda Lee in Boston as a 501-C3 not for profit organization. A bit more than a decade and a half later, this global, multidisciplinary collective numbers over 200 members in offices located in Boston, in Kigali, Rwanda, Poughkeepsie, New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In their own words, MASS Group is motivated by the belief that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities as they confront history, shape new narratives, heal collectively and project new possibilities for their future. The group’s work is understood by MASS itself to fall into two different categories, contracted work and design Labs, which map onto slightly different types of work and modes of research. The American Institute of Architects honored MASS Design Group with a 2022 AIA Architecture Firm award. In 2020 MASS was named the Architecture Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal. In 2019 Architect Magazine ranked MASS fourth in its top list of 50 firms in design. And in 2017 MASS was awarded the National Design Award in Architecture, given each year by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. MASS has also won the Emerging Voices Award by the architectural League of New York, which it received in 2013 and many others. And it has been featured in hundreds of publications, including television specials on CNN and CBS 60 Minutes. Each of the co-executive directors we’re talking to today also has their own important teaching biographies and personal accolades that I won’t be able to do justice to in this format. Alan has authored books, op-eds and essays, was honored with an International Fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s young global leaders, as well as on the designer selection board to select firms for Massachusetts state funded work. And during his two terms, he also served as chair of that board. He is also a member of the Harvard University design Advisory Council. Patricia is a Senior Principal and Co-Executive Director overseeing the North American studios. In her time at MASS, she has been working at MASS’s Boston studio and in the African studio, where she led design teams on the African Leadership University, the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund and the Maternity Waiting Village in Malawi. She is currently leading the design for the headquarters of Children’s Services of Roxbury, among other things, Christian is a Senior Principal and Co-Executive Director overseeing the African studio. He also founded the Africa Design Center, a field-based training program within MASS. In 2023 he curated an exhibition at the 18th international Architecture Biennale in Venice. He was recognized as a Quartz Africa Innovator, and has been named among 10 architects and designers who are championing Afrofuturism. He is a Van Leer Foundation fellow, serves on the board of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and the Education Advisory Board of the African Futures Institute. That’s a lot, and I cut a lot. So today, I may have to ask a few of my usual questions a bit differently given the nonprofit structure and logic of your office, but let me open with our usual opener and see where that takes us. As you know, we have been starting by talking about the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission. Do those exist in your model? What form might they take?

Ricks  05:53
Well, I’m happy to take the first crack at it, and first, I just wanna say what a pleasure it is to be here. We’ve been such big fans of the podcast, and just loved the conversations that it has yielded, and we’ve used it as a conversation starter that has guided our leadership retreat, we had in the fall, was to listen to several of them and talk about what it means. So it’s been, I think, really generative. And I think, we are a nonprofit, so we are focused on work in the public realm and really civic projects. And I think because of that, we were… people, I think probably assume that we’re using a kind of ethical or moral framework to decide what we do. But that’s not really a huge issue for us, because the people that are inclined to seek us out are already doing things that are really in the public realm, but we, by design, aren’t working in a lot of the typical markets. We’re not doing private residences, we’re not doing commercial work. We’re not really doing a lot of office space or institutional work in the traditional sense. And so I think we’re not necessarily as focused on trying to parse what we say no or walk away from based on what it is, but really about trying to figure out, are we aligned in terms of the process that we want to take? And where MASS is really best suited to support people is in challenging the status quo of these industries and so often, our clients come to us because they’re working on affordable housing, they’re working on healthcare, it’s public work, but we have to say, are you aligned with us in using architecture to actually push the boundaries of what’s possible? Because our goal isn’t just individual projects, it’s about shifting expectations within the industry.

Miljački  08:00
And so the story of MASS Group’s origin starts with recognizing a need for architecture in a sector that did not have much of it, and encountering a model of nonprofit work in global health. But you also now describe the collective as having contracted work and lab work that has its sub-categories which we need to unpack. So it’s a big thing to unpack. So first I’m interested in understanding the contracted work. Does this mean you have commissions and clients who want to work with you? How do they find you? How do you find them? Those are many questions, I realize. But, but there’s so much to try to understand and sketch out so that we can navigate.

Benimana  08:49
I can start and my colleagues can jump in. Simply answered, the first question, yes, we do take on commissions. And what we found, our work in Africa is that there is a lot of need and desire to seek out firms like ours that are willing to work differently, because there is a general sentiment from many governments and nations on the continent to try and do things differently, to achieve different results based on the specific challenges they are faced, especially with constraints, at least what is perceived to be constraints at the moment, in terms of developing those solutions, which prohibits most of them to implement solutions the way that will be done in the Western world, for instance. So issues around the ability to accompany our clients and understand the problems they’re faced with, to benchmark what has been done elsewhere, to understand what we could do differently together with them, so that we can come up with different solutions have become more desirable since the founding of MASS 15 years ago, and because of that, we are more and more sought after to actually do commissions and paid work with fees for professional services that allow us to do that. And actually the work that we fund and support at MASS is the work where we see that the market more so in developing nations, like many in Africa, the markets haven’t caught up to be able to support but we believe is essential for that type of architecture to actually be successful. So everything that covers research and being present, for instance, to supervise a setup of a mock up, and we have to pay for the time for the designer to do all of that work, because we’re not able to get off the shelf solutions to implement we want. I mean, we can, but we choose not to. So all of that time, we find it important for us to invest in as a firm, because we believe it’s key to the success of the project.

Patricia Gruits  11:29
Yeah, just to build on that, I think the contracted work really is is allowing us to operate and work with mission-aligned nonprofits, communities that have ambitious ideas for impact and for the built environment, and intentionally structuring ourselves not to undercut other architectural practices, but really finding like-minded partners who really want to advance ambitious goals. And so I think the contracted work is important, but we have design labs, and I think that’s one of the key pieces of where MASS is so different than others in the industry, is that it really allows us to really understand where the impact in the built environment could be greatest, and where there are those gaps that the market won’t support, that other architectural practices couldn’t take that kind of risk to take on, and so we leverage philanthropy to really invest in these key areas, and it’s all really under this umbrella or this kind of theory of change that we have to really use our platform and our organization to prove what is possible and bring that to scale.

Benimana  12:45
I’m definitely going there. 

Gruits  12:47
Sorry!

Miljački  12:48
No, no, that’s good. We can introduce it earlier. But so maybe now that you use the word partners, maybe a question is, how are partners different from clients?

Benimana  12:58
There is a key difference I have observed in how we practice on the African continent, in many of our work, where it might be different from North America, where organizations that we would call clients, that commissions, the work that the architects do, are segmented. It’s not rare to find that the organization that is commissioning, which we hold the contract with, is different from the funding organization, and it’s different from the beneficiary. These are the majority of conditions that we work with, especially in the not-for-profit sector that Alan spoke about earlier. And what we have come to understand when we work in those contexts is that the definition, then, of the client becomes much more complex and complicated because decisions are segmented and we are required to respond to all of these requirements if one projects to be successful. So to answer question about how we’ll define the difference between a client and the partner for us, I’d say in the context of our work in Africa, we would maintain the profession’s old definition of client and whom we hold the contract with would be our client for fee paying work and commissions that we are working on for this project. But then we’ll have to define partners in ways that allows the project to be successful. And for our lab work, which we fund through philanthropy, then, is similar thing we need to happen so for us to maintain a more or less structure that we understand how to work with. Even in our philanthropy funded work, we insist that there must be a client. Because we are funding it does not mean it needs to exist in the vacuum. And for us, partnerships is, I think, more of a practice and less of an entity or a definition.

Miljački  15:17
A legality, yeah. You have said in lectures and in your programmatic texts that your office or collective is your first and largest project, and I mean you now as a collective plural you that you’re constantly testing and adjusting how it works ,and MASS Group now includes 20 design principles, around 200 people with a variety of expertise, and recently also a construction company, which I will ask you about later. Can you talk about the process of shaping and testing the design practice itself?

Ricks  15:53
I said it one time, our first, largest, longest running project, and it’s just kind of stuck as a kind of tagline, and I think it’s, we have always come at it from a kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we’re trying to figure out how to have impact, and maybe with a certain degree of naivete of the way the industry traditionally might have worked. And that has meant that we’re constantly evolving, where it was in sharing the work that was happening in Rwanda, but usually in the US context that people would challenge us to say, you know, what would it mean to bring that philosophy of practice here? And so we had to try to prove it. And that has led to the growth of a lot of work in the US market and into different typologies. And I think it’s, because we’re a nonprofit where there’s no owners, we have a board of directors that helps guide the strategic vision, and that Christian, Patricia and I report into, and we’ve had an amazing board over the years that themselves bring a kind of wealth of diverse expertise in architecture and outside of architecture. And we really have tried to be responsive also to the desires of our team, that people come, they get a kind of an immersive experience, often having to figure things out as they go, and then they challenge us to expand the areas that we’re working in. 

Miljački  17:15
But I’m wondering how that looks like. If I go on a back on time machine, I’ll see different things on the way the organization is, on the website, about how you’re organized, or how does a meeting look like, for example, how did you arrive at your collective agreement? How did it literally take shape? And it says, we accompany partners in their quest for transformational change. We believe that the design process can be a force for good. We make choices to nurture a thriving planet. We value our team’s talents and biodiversity. We seek to expand access to design. Okay, so these five points, how do they emerge?

Gruits  17:34
Through a lot of iteration!

Miljački  18:21
Among whom?

Gruits  18:22
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, I think that has been a set of values that in different forms have been a part of the organization and our core, whether building from former manifestos, former statements of who we are or our approach. And this last iteration was a chance to really be more inclusive in how those statements were generated and how they were formed. We had a collective visioning session, going back into our language and our values as a leadership team. We selected some of the statements that really resonated, ones that we were ready to move beyond, and ones that were missing. And then as a group took them and reflected on it, and then iterated it, and it went through many, many hands and many different iterations, and then going to each one of our studios or departments for the broader team’s feedback. And it’s, again, still being edited. I think that now we’re reflecting on it as well, two years after those statements were written, questioning what’s the next version? And to Alan’s point, around how the business model has evolved. Our north star has always been the same, but I think how we institutionalize what we’re learning is a process of listening, engaging our own team and bringing that in. And we have, as Alan mentioned, we have annual retreats. We’ve always had these moments of connection that aren’t about the work, but are about connecting with each other and the ideas that have been really important, we’ve instituted monthly all team meetings. So as you mentioned, like a big team from many different…  

Miljački   20:08
200? 

Gruits  20:10
Yeah.

Miljački  20:12
All 200? Or some other…

Gruits  20:14
All at the same time. We pick the one hour of the day where all time zones are technically on almost working hours, and those are the moments where we get to both talk about some of the big ideas that are emerging from the practice or from different corners of the practice. It’s also where we have what we call our executive team roundtable, where we’ve opened up and tried to be transparent with some of the decisions that are being made with our financial structure, financial status, and those are things that we do monthly and quarterly. And I think it’s a, really, it’s an attempt to really think about how we not just shape our projects and bring those values to our process, but how they are embedded in our practice.

Miljački  20:58
I want to go back to labs and maybe this term de risking. I don’t know if it comes back into this question, but I speak now as someone at MIT, labs involve different feedback loops or maybe different types of research and testing, and it seems important to me to understand how the catalyst projects work, or your own granting of seed grants to projects that you describe, as it transforms, I think, the logic of patronage in some fundamental ways. And so can we talk about that, the de-risking? Maybe that’s what I took from the previous answer. So I just want to bring it into this.

Ricks  21:46
I think it’s an important part of it. And I think we really see it taking two forms. One is often we have people with big ideas but very low certainty of whether they’re going to come to fruition. So investing in professional services for a small nonprofit with a big vision is challenging, and so one of the ways we can de-risk it is by being some of that first money in to help develop a vision to see if they’re going to be able to be successful at raising the money to actually complete the project. And then if they do, and they are successful, then they can cover the professional services. We don’t need to do the entirety of the project pro bono, but it’s to help de-risk that front sector. And The National Memorial to Peace and Justice is one of our most key examples of that, where you have a really visionary organization, Bryan Stevenson, the Equal Justice Initiative, that had an idea about the impact they wanted to have in the world, were able to contribute some early work, and then they were successful in being able to actually do the project. The second type we often find is more about the way that we’re delivering a project, and that we have an agenda that goes beyond the core mission of a project. Let’s say it’s a nonprofit housing developer. They’re trying to get as many affordable housing units on the market as possible. But we’re also trying to figure out, how do we maximize the kind of indirect impacts of the project, the sustainability metrics, the investment in labor and craft and beauty, and sometimes those things can feel risky too, that we’re asking to do something that might not be as tested in the marketplace. So we can invest in some of the R and D to help reduce the risk, to prove that it will work. It is possible. We can. We can do something that will actually move the needle, and then hopefully it makes it easier for other clients in the future to adopt those types of methods.

Miljački  24:10
I’m gonna keep pushing this one topic so that I can clarify it. So maybe this is about, this is what you mean by when you say leveraging philanthropic dollars. But it sounds like what you’re offering is your own work as that catalyst that can have certain amount of value attached to it, that is financial, but am I understanding it correctly?

Ricks  24:38
Yes, our contribution is in the form of services most of the time. There have been projects where we have actually helped raise funding to deliver the project. When we first started working in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, we’re working with an amazing nonprofit, Haitian organization called GHESKIO, actually started the first AIDS clinic in the world. And during the middle of rebuilding their tuberculosis hospital, there was the cholera outbreak that was brought by UN peacekeeping forces and then spread like wildfire. And so we actually worked with them to not only design a cholera treatment center, but to raise the funding to do it and, in fact, manage the construction in that case as well. So there have been examples of that, but primarily it’s that we’re offering to do professional services work that is hard for them to justify until they know that it can actually have a meaningful impact on their core mission.

Miljački  25:51
Can you imagine this model of practicing and producing architecture becoming widespread in the US context? I’m interested in the African context too.

Benimana  26:01
Afterwards.

Ricks  26:02
I do think it can become more widespread, and I do think there’s plenty of potential for nonprofit work, but at the end of the day, what we hope is that it actually affects the private sector work, and that we’re creating more potential for all firms to implement these things. I think we believe, there’s strong alignment between our values and most people practicing in terms of their commitment to delivering social, environmental benefits. But the industry and the business model has not been configured in a way that helps make that possible for people to do.

Gruits  26:49
Yeah, I’ll just jump in, that I think, this is often how I think nonprofits or the third sector have been structured, is to sort of work where the market nor the government can function, to sort of lead in these places, to take on that risk, to advance impact and agenda, et cetera, and I think I see that similarly for us. And, for most nonprofits, the end game is market adoption or a need, no longer a need to exist, you know? And so while I don’t think that we will be there in the next, I’ll be out of a job in the next 10 years, but I do think that is one of the things that I see as the future, is that widespread adoption of more people seeing what is possible and to be able to point to examples. I think whether that’s an example in a project or an example through some of the impact evaluation that we’ve done on projects to prove the value of design. I think a lot of what we are doing is valuable to other practitioners to be able to leverage in their own market-based work, or wherever they might be working.

Benimana  27:51
I think the point I will make there is that being a not for profit, say, for MASS, was a means to an end, and for me, that end is, maybe what Alan has started to alluding to, is it’s not just necessary, but it’s crucial. Especially for the African continent, there’s very simple figures that we keep reminding people: that, less than 30 years from now, one in four people on the planet will be from Africa, and this will make this continent the epicenter of global growth, both in population, but also in development. And it’s very clear from the current situation, where the continent is, to where we want to go, to avoid disasters of supporting all of that increasing population to think differently and as we said, and I don’t think we can stress this enough, is that the current industry in architecture, engineering and construction, is not structured to take on and absorb all the risk associated with thinking differently in any context on the planet. So what happens in Africa, that Alan just mentioned, the proliferation of firms that are trying to figure out how to create this middle space that also Patricia just mentioned, is not just important, it’s crucial to be able to unlock the potential of this continent. So we avoid migration patterns that are not only going to disrupt Africa, but the entire world, economic systems and climate resilience that we wish can actually work, landscape regeneration, all of these problems that we’ve seen elsewhere, that could be corrected in Africa. So what is happening now is that, I think what MASS has been able to demonstrate in that space is that by structuring the practice differently and being able to unlock some capital that can help advance innovation in understanding how culture can inspire new ways and forms of thinking about architecture, forms and spaces, beauty and ethics, standards in practice, all of those things, are things that architects, we would love to be able to invest in, that the market in Africa is not willing to pay for. Even if they are willing to pay for, can’t pay for because the market is not there yet. And the things that also governments are not willing to invest in and creating and subsidizing Silicon Valley type of innovation hubs for architecture and design on the continent, so we’re able to come up with these solutions. But everyone agrees that it’s the right thing to do.

Miljački  30:56
So there’s something about this model that is really helpful in the context where the market is yet to appear or to become robust. But I also have been thinking about how the DOGE hatchet of the moment affects your work as a result of philanthropic money or grant money that you might be relying on.

Ricks  31:37
Like everyone, we’re in a real period of uncertainty about what the future looks like in our industries, in our communities, and it has impacts for a lot of the organizations that we’re working with that have federal funding. For us, there’s a relatively small number of the projects in the portfolio that are funded with federal grants, but yeah, we did have some projects that got shelved that were were happening in health and education sector work, both in Africa as well as in native communities in North America that are impacted. And then, of course, I think, for organizations who are focused on topics like justice and equity, those have become very controversial words and themes to work on. And I think we’re all the more committed to advancing that work. I think, we have to try and help show the potential that I think we often, especially around climate, have fallen into a kind of trap of talking about it from what we might call the scarcity mindset. I think instead, we need to show that a more just and beautiful future is possible and can lead to shared prosperity, and that is not about necessarily sacrifice. And so it’s by showing these projects that can actually deliver value that it’s not necessarily just a kind of moral or ethical argument. It’s about creating that future that Christian’s talking about, Africa is going to build more than China and India combined in terms of square footage over the next couple of decades. And so there’s this enormous potential to leapfrog an extractive, colonial model of development and show that growth is happening. Development is happening, why not use it as an impact to leave our society better off?

Miljački 33:59
I wanted to, I’m wondering still a bit about the labs and this financial model. And I’m wondering, obviously, they’re set up… obviously, to me, they’re set up to capture your accruing expertise in different domains, and you said that yourself, but are they also financially independent from one another, or is everything under a same sort of financial umbrella?

Gruits  34:21
So we’re all one entity. So it’s all underneath one MASS. There is a difference between some of the funding that we receive that is unrestricted, which is allowing MASS to use some of that philanthropy where it’s needed the most, and there’s restricted philanthropy, which is dedicated in many cases to a specific lab or topic or project. And so in that way it is used differently throughout the organization, but it’s all towards the same end. And I think the labs and the eight of them that we have at this moment include some far-ranging topics. Like public memory and memorials, where we have specific, dedicated funding to support advancing that work, expanding our efforts around creating new narratives in the built environment and sponsoring collective action. We have dedicated support for our Sustainable Native Communities Coalition, which is really in deep partnership with indigenous communities, looking at building a future that can conserve and preserve culture and promote health and wellness. So any one of those topics could have a dedicated source of support. And that, I think, is where we have a lot of, I think maybe we have a lot of both flexibility to meet the needs of partners as they come, but also are able to dedicate research and initiatives related to really the systems-change aspect of our mission.

Miljački  35:57
In an article you Patricia co-wrote in Oz, you talk about evidence-based approach, seeking proof of the impact of our work and capturing lessons to make design decisions that promote physical, social and psychological health. This is a quote from it which made me want to ask about the way you measure success. I already heard you talking about certain kinds of success, but I’m interested in it. Some of the topics that you listed in that are traditionally outside of architectural expertise, though, from the outset, MASS has been working with at least political economy of architecture. So I’m interested in that general question of measuring success, but also in the context of that these questions of beauty and justice, or beauty as justice and vice versa, which suggests that there’s a project of intersecting politics with aesthetics, neither of which is easy to measure. So I’m interested in how you think about various topics there, if you can connect them for us.

Gruits  37:06
I think in our long history of MASS, we’ve always had this core set of values around asking why, and being sort of driven by evidence and really questioning some of the systems that exist, I think I might consider it the invisible policies or systems, that kind of invisible cloak that’s shaping the built environment. And so while we’re looking at it from a systems lens, understanding and questioning why these systems exist, we’re also questioning tangible, evidence-based practices that can lead us to a different type of architecture. And the article that I wrote for the Oz journal, is specific to a body of work around trauma informed design, which is really building from an approach that we saw with a lot of our partners in the healthcare and public health space around trauma informed care and understanding the whole person. And I think that that brought to the architectural practice allows us to connect what I like to think of as or what we call neuro-aesthetics, like how we can really understand how space shapes our behavior and shapes how we feel and shapes how we respond. And that when we understand those factors, we can design a better built environment for users at that fundamental level, but also build it back out to understand what might be evidence based solutions for a healing center design at the community level and to really challenge the systems that are at play in a lot of our evaluation work, we’ve tested or ways that we evaluate ourselves is based on that human health condition. Are people healing? Is their physical health, is their mental, emotional health, thriving in this space? And we can measure that. We also look at the environmental impacts of a project for us again, we’re expanding the role of architecture, and we can take on the construction, we can take on the furniture, we can take on creating all these other sort of more adjacent design professions. We can control the economics of a project, or the economic impact that we’re having. And we also talk a lot about the educational impact, where there’s moments for training, where we can build capacity, not just within our own team, but for folks in the community, or folks that may actually work on a project alongside us. And lastly, we talk about the emotional impact, and that’s the one that I think is probably hardest or most nascent for us to often think about the value of design, but there is an emotional reaction. There is an emotional neurological response. When people feel beauty, when they feel natural light and access to nature, they feel it in their heart, their soul and where the ways that we connect and capture that impact isn’t through the quantitative metrics that we might use elsewhere. It’s where we really look at the qualitative… and our team has built an entire film team and media team really around capturing the stories, the narratives that come out of the project, and understanding their value as equal to the quantitative results of whether or not we’re having impact.

Ricks  40:20
And yeah, I think we think beauty is a really important thing that we’re providing as designers, that inspires connection, fosters belonging. It can elevate the human experience. But the evidence that we have is whether people cherish the spaces that they occupy and that… the simple fact that they endure is the evidence that it’s valued, and that when we prioritize beauty, it reflects dignity and respect for the people and communities that we’re a part of and has transformational impacts on behavior and solidarity and belonging and has to be elevated as an essential part of what we do.

Miljački  41:11
Maybe I want to make that word a little more nuanced, or help us make it a little more nuanced, because my instinct is to ask you, do you all agree on what constitutes beauty? So you just started… or do the 200 people who work for MASS agree? And you just started adding some dimensions to it, Alan, but in one of your talks, I think you recast beauty, or at least I heard it even now, as a quality of maybe construction and maybe dignity. For those who use architecture, like, there, I feel like there, or a kind of a space that is dignified in some way. But can we talk about quality, architectural qualities that you would say you pursue in the work without this word that you’ve been using, and could those ever become part of the collective agreement, or are they more tactical?

Benimana  42:10
I’m happy to jump in and respond to it, because beyond… just the simple fact that, because in our language, we’ve prioritized talking about other things that are around, like ideas of justice and equity, I think sometimes we are misunderstood that we don’t care about the quality of the architecture. And I think it’s quite the opposite. And sometimes we can, we might come out as if we only care about the process of design and I don’t care about the outcome, but I think in answering this question, that’s what we are trying to get at. In Africa, there is a little bit of dissonance when it comes to this idea of beauty, and what aspect of our lives define beauty, and who gets to have access to this beauty and the situation is a bit tricky, because the aspiration that’s been set is coming from the Western world. Right now, there’s a big trend of tall buildings with blue glass. That’s a trend, because the proliferation of what a modern city looks like. That’s the image that’s been put out there. On the other hand, you find that there is this beautifully crafted, very exclusive resorts that are only serving again, the Western audiences for most part and the general population in Africa will say, Oh, that’s for white people. So there’s this dissonance about what consists of beauty that collectivity can aspire to, but also who that beauty belongs to. My theory is that we don’t just create beauty, but we invest in it. Because if you invested in then you are able to prove to people that, yes, it is possible to craft an alternative form of beautiful spaces that are not exclusively belonging to a certain group of people because they can afford, and that access is as much of the right to anybody that believes and wants to have it and lives in Africa than it is for somebody that is able to access it, because they have the means, and they come from the US and Europe and everything else. So there’s this investment that I believe that the architecture profession, because of its evolution, in the last, I don’t know, 200 years, to quote Professor Leslie Lokko, that curated the Biennale, that Alan mentioned at the beginning, that we created an exhibition in, she says that because of the trend of that evolution that left swaths of populations across the globe, the architecture that we practice it now, the way we understand it, the styles and schools that defines what’s beautiful and elegant in architecture, is not wrong, but it’s incomplete, because there’s a large inspiration from cultures and traditions that it hasn’t really tapped into to be able to create new styles and schools and and I think what we’re doing at MASS is to try to say architecture has the power to invest intentionally in those areas and come up with more beautiful spaces because we believe that beauty is not a monopoly to a certain group of people. But the investment in beauty is not equally distributed.

Miljački  46:04
So Kigali is your largest office, from what I understand now, with an even larger construction arm, and your recent projects in Rwanda were also all constructed by MASS. And I’m wondering again, is this a kind of model that can be transferred from Africa to the world or to the US? Are you aiming to do that?

Gruits  46:34
No…

Ricks  46:35
I’m, like, talking too much! So I think the difference in the reason that we have developed the vertically integrated team in Rwanda is that it’s an emerging market. There aren’t, there isn’t the same breadth of disciplines that are available locally, and frankly, delivering the projects in construction was one of the main barriers, because there just wasn’t, when we started 15 years ago, there weren’t a lot of options. And so we have gradually expanded, eventually saying the only way we’re going to deliver the kind of quality and integrity of the projects that that we are designing is to demonstrate it, and that has helped us actually shape things like building codes, and shape things like health and safety standards and Rwanda, and Christian can elaborate, it has just been, has transformed in the past decade in terms of development where, even in that span of time, the market is already catching up, there are more construction companies, there are more architecture firms, there’s more engineering, there’s more products. I think our goal is not to just get bigger and bigger and take on more and more. It’s to make sure we can deliver the right end product, and if we can do that through partnership, we’d rather do that. We’d rather do it through collaboration than assuming broader and broader responsibilities. And in the US that already exists, we already have a breadth of expertise and capability in all these sectors, and so we’re, don’t find ourselves needing to necessarily assume the same type of roles.

Benimana  48:32
I can add on to that, maybe to clarify that our ambition to go into those ventures that actually are very risky from a financial and liability standpoint, I think is a testament to our commitment to this idea that we want to prove that things are possible, especially when we are in markets where there is, there might be some willingness to try and see if it’s possible, but there is less willingness to invest and take the risk to actually do it, from the partners, from the funders, because majority of these systems, their political, economic and social and leadership, are working in a scarcity mindset. Everyone is trying to manage the resources, and I think that’s where MASS can step in and say, if we work with the right partners, and there’s the right willingness and commitments to figure this out, we will try and see how different we can do things. And there’s a laundry list of things that we believe are not working as efficiently or as well as they should, and we’re willing to push them to see where the innovation comes. So that becomes a bit different than what you will do in established market, because what we doing in Africa is to be proactive in doing things that haven’t been done or are not widely accepted, while I feel like in established market like the United States and Europe and everything else is about bankrolling or rolling back established systems that we don’t think are functioning and providing opportunities that exist, which I don’t know if providing alternative methods of doing things is the right answer to or maybe changing policies and regulations and incentives is the right thing to do. So I don’t know what the problem would be and the answer would be in those matters,

Miljački  50:31
I am finding fascinating how aligned you are on this notion of a demonstration or proving things are possible as the core. It’s not a business core, but maybe it is of the enterprise. And maybe, on that note, from your lectures, it seems that Rwanda’s Institute for Conservation Agriculture is at the center of thinking about another such thing that needs to be proven, a project in regeneration. And you might have different projects that stand in for that, for that topic, but this seems paradigmatic to me, and maybe it’s worth talking about, what are you proving in that one?

Ricks  51:18
So it’s interesting, we got involved with that project before there was even an institution, working to actually just understand the site. To get to the site, we had to build a road just to get there. But one of the most important discoveries was surveying the land and seeing that it felt different than the surroundings. And we brought in an ecologist who actually developed a taxonomy of all the species he saw there, and kind of uncovered that it was the largest remaining patch of Savannah woodland in the country outside of the National Parks Rwanda, because of this exponential growth over the last 50 years has largely been deforested and land shifted to agricultural production, where 80% of the land is for food production. So this was this rare opportunity to actually conserve and maybe expand biodiversity. And to actually demonstrate that agriculture and conservation are not only necessarily at odds, but could actually be beneficial to one another. And so re-stitching this forest to the wetlands and lakes that feed the Nile became part of the agenda, just as delivering the optimal conditions for the curriculum that was developed. But this project, we ended up doing everything from the design of every piece of furniture, from the scale of the toilet paper holders, up to the scale of all of the beds and classroom furniture, light fixtures, all the way up to the scale the ecosystem. So it’s 69 buildings, all off grid, largely earthen construction using things from agricultural waste, and it meant having to actually do all of the testing to actually demonstrate all of these different building technologies were possible. So testing our wood, testing the earth, testing waterproofing, testing using stone foundations instead of reinforced concrete, testing all of the different plant species that would be to see if they would thrive and survive there, and the only way that was possible was by taking on the ownership of actually delivering it.

Gruits  53:53
Your original question is about proving what’s possible. And I think what RICA (Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture) and the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund Campus and the North Wind House and so many of these projects that are built in Rwanda, it pushes us in our discipline, not just to put something on paper and label it, but to actually do the work to manifest it. And you know, as Alan’s describing the testing of materials on RICA, for the Diane Fossey campus in Musanze, Rwanda, in order to regenerate the campus, we had to propagate all of the plants ourselves. So our landscape team wasn’t just selecting the species and doing the research to better understand how to rebuild this ecosystem, regenerate this ecosystem, but actually had to go through and find these native plants, selecting them from sites, asking local botanists and experts to then source over 2000 native species, and I think just that level of commitment to executing an idea is something that at least in the North American context, for many of us as architects, we just aren’t getting our hands as dirty. We aren’t taking it beyond the typical documentation of an idea, we’re letting someone else, sort of, when we assume that that expertise is on the other end of the reception of that documentation, and I think, at MASS and what we’ve learned is how we need to actually not assume that someone’s going to pick it up and take it to that next step, but actually do it ourselves.

Miljački  55:42
I have a few more questions. So one, I’ve been trying to formulate, and it’s not perfect yet, but maybe I just need to ask it the way I have it. So it’s a question about working in Rwanda as a particular post-genocide context, not only context that is growing, but also one that has experienced major trauma. And I’m wondering to what extent and how might that fact shape the work that you do there?

Benimana  56:15
Yeah, there’s a story about Rwanda that is not often spoken about. Because I think we get tend to focus on these two phenomenon, of what happened in 1994 when the genocide against the Tutsi happened, and the recent more positive news that have happened. And I think we ignore the connecting glue. What led to these two, or at least it is not as often spoken about, but you’re right, the country is still struggling with that memory very much. And the reason why I believe MASS has been able to do the work that we’ve done in Rwanda and be successful as we’ve had, has to do with the choices that we made after the genocide. I believe that the Rwanda community made a few choices that were hard, nonetheless, to say to do a number of things that I believe were summarized in three choices. One was to promote unity. And what that choice has done is has allowed, for instance, in our work, to understand that issues we talk about sometimes in big concepts like social cohesion are actually valued, and you can find communities that have specific examples of what could be wrong or could go wrong if those things are overlooked. So now it’s no longer about concepts that we say because they sound good in concept briefs of architects and projects promotions, but we can point to specific examples where the built environment had either served or not served national unity and actually became this tool of segregation that led to the worst. Second choice the country made was to dream big. So in the reconstruction after the genocide, the leadership decided that if you’re going to rebuild anyways, there’s no need to build the same mediocre systems that were not functioning anyways before, because the evidence is in what they led to. So they decided to build the best that there is that promotes unity, well being of the population, everything else. And when you translate that into our work, that’s how we’re able to dream about these projects, there is still a sentiment that when there is a need for a project, crazy people like from MASS that proposes, like, all these innovative projects, can still be listened to and say, maybe we’re not going to try everything you want to do, but we’re going to try. We’ll try majority of what you want to do, so we can do these transformative projects, and the partners or the promoters of these project, or clients, however you want to call them, that we are working with, are also supported for us to be able to deliver these type of projects for them. And the last choice, the third one was to be accountable. There is a sense of urgency of doing things in Rwanda that had allowed the country to say, at least, we can’t do that with corrupt systems. But the best we can do is to not normalize them like they’re very frowned upon, because they erode the other two choices that we try to make that had allowed us to be tolerant to some of the risks we’ve been discussing on the podcast, like opening a construction company. Our industry is notoriously known to be corrupt, but we were able to at least rely on certain systems that says we can, to some extent, take on some risk aligned with de-risking innovations and in design, as we said earlier, because we believe that we’ll be able to at least have some control over how the process goes without bankrupting the organization. And the confluence of those things, in my opinion, is what makes this our work in Rwanda at least be a model that when we talk about how our work in Rwanda inspires the work we do outside, we’re not exporting expertise, quote, unquote, but we’re exporting an understanding that an amalgamation of leadership and community led choices and initiative and decisions can lead to these type of architecture and special solutions that carry more value beyond the building.

Miljački  1:01:39

Thank you. I know that was a simple, but not simple question, did you at MASS ever regret taking or not taking a commission or pursuing a line of work? [pause] This one’s harder?

Gruits  1:01:54
It is harder.

Benimana  1:01:56
We have. I can start. I can start. I think we, we have been in situations where the ambitions at the beginning of the project seem to be aligned with our values, and only when it gets to practice or to the concrete implementation of the process that leads to the outcomes that were claimed to be desired and then the drift happened. There’s a number of opportunities that sometimes I don’t want to say, like lie about the intentions, but maybe withhold information that is necessary for the success of the project. And when we discover that, then it becomes misaligned. We’ve gotten opportunities to work on projects because people have seen the work you’ve already done, and they aspire to those outcomes, but they don’t fully commit to the process. I can give very simple examples. We’ve designed some schools that look really good, and we will be approached by people that want to build the same schools, because they find the outcomes, the designs, the buildings, aesthetically pleasant, how they facilitate the learning. Everything makes sense because we invested a lot of time and the resources to figure that out. But in the process, we find that the financing model relies, let’s say, on quantifying the costs of what it takes to build those schools, excluding the labor because the organization’s establishment has created the model of building that requires communities to provide or to match what they are bringing in terms of monetary funding to do the project, which is not something that we believe should happen. So building a school in Africa, in Rwanda somewhere, does not cost $25,000 because land is given, because labor is given for free, because materials is given for free, it costs $250,000 and without that financial commitment to be able to compensate people when they give their labor, it’s something that we will philosophically disagree with. And I think those drifts sometimes have happened for people that have approached us with good intentions for the outcomes but are not fully committed to the process.

Miljački  1:04:47
How would you describe the conditions in which mass does its best work?

Gruits  1:04:52
I think for me, some of our best work has come out of when we are able to work upstream of typical design phases before an organization or community really even understands what they would put in an RFP, before the program is defined, before the site is selected. I think there’s so much intention that is built into those early phases that many organizations, many clients and partners, are unprepared to actually put some of that information on paper. And I think the more we’re able to get into those early upstream phases, the more successful the project is, the more clear the project is and the scope is, and the more that we’re able to actually invest at the right moment. And a lot of that comes from a real clear alignment on the mission of the project, not just with one individual, and not just with, not just MASS’ mission for the project, but an alignment with a partner. And we saw that really acutely in with, in our partnership with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, they had such a clear mission that was aligned with our own, both in terms of what design could do for them as an organization needing a new campus, but really that they saw the opportunity and the unique value add that a building could have to help them address the challenge and the tension between conservation and human development, and that the project was a mechanism to help them achieve their mission, not just through its final outcome, but through the process. And that, their mission, also led to, like, a much broader vision, something that was much bigger than who they were in that moment and where they wanted to go. And that vision is what aligned all of the design decision making. It’s what aligned the process decision making, ending up building the campus for them, and all of the different sort of smaller, nuanced decisions that went along the way. And it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t contentious, that there weren’t moments of cost overruns or hard conversations around scheduling and delays, but it meant that the relationship was based on a mutual understanding of success and a relationship that was really based on trust, and it allowed them to take risks on us and for us to be able to do our best work in that kind of environment of safety.

Miljački 1:07:09
I feel like you’ve already answered my next question. So take it on only if it adds more to this. But is there an ideal commission, or ideal circumstances for a commission?

Ricks  1:07:24
Yeah, it’s such a great question. I feel like I could offer up so many speculative possibilities. I mean, we talk about trying to identify the dreamers, the people that have an audacious vision for a better world, and that, how can we help them through space, catalyze that outcome? So I think we’re always on the search for people with radical ideas. But I mightpivot the question a little bit, that too often we imagine we have to have the perfect opportunity, and that, in fact, every day, every designer is making choices that can advance progress, and that it, especially today, things, or in 2025 maybe it feels daunting to imagine a future of justice and beauty and prosperity and equity, but we are advancing that vision in every decision we make. And everybody has that same possibility. And I think hopefully we can give ourselves some grace by saying, Today, I get to do something that gets us a little bit closer to that.

Miljački 1:08:48
That’s a great place to end. So Patricia, Alan and Christian, thank you very much for talking to me today, and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produced by myself and Julian Geltman, thanks

Ricks  1:09:05
Thanks so much. Such a treat to be here.

Benimana  1:09:08
Thank you for having us.