Michael Maltzan Architecture

Recorded on November 28, 2022. Read a transcript of the episode below.

Michael Maltzan

Michael Maltzan FAIA founded Michael Maltzan Architecture in 1995. The architecture and urban design practice works globally across a wide range of typologies, from cultural institutions to city infrastructure. The firm and its projects have been recognized with numerous awards and have been widely featured in national and international publications, in addition to being exhibited in museums worldwide. 

Maltzan is a recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture award and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2020. 

Michael Maltzan Architecture has been steadily transforming its home base, the city of Los Angeles, with numerous large and small housing commissions, particularly through its sustained collaboration with the Skid Row Housing Trust, a nonprofit developer focused on providing housing for homeless individuals. 

Other recent work has included the Los Angeles Sixth Street Viaduct, Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, MoMA’s Queens Museum, MIT’s Vassar Street Hall, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery Inuit Art Center.

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.

Transcript

Transcript lightly processed and provided for reference only. May not accurately capture all aspects of the conversation.

Ana: 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’ toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny, and is 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. 

My guest in this episode is Michael Maltzan. Thank you for joining me, Michael. 

Michael: Glad to be here, Ana. 

Ana: Michael Maltzan founded Michael Maltzan Architecture in 1995 as an architecture and urban design practice that works globally across a wide range of typologies, from cultural institutions to city infrastructure. The firm has been recognized with 5 Progressive Architecture awards, numerous citations from local, state and national chapters of the AIA, the Rudy Bruner Foundation’s Gold Medal for Urban Excellence, the Zumtobel Group award for Innovations for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment, and a 2020 Best of the Millennium AIA LA Honor Award. The firm and its projects have been widely featured in national and international publications, and have been exhibited in museums worldwide. And Michael Maltzan himself is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and received the 2016 AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal. He is a recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture award, and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2020. 

Michael Maltzan Architecture has been steadily transforming their home base, city of LA, with numerous large and small housing commissions, and especially through their sustained collaboration with the Skid Row Housing Trust, a non-profit housing developer focused on providing housing for homeless individuals. Also, in LA, Michael Maltzan Architecture just completed the stunning Sixth Street Viaduct. Their recent work with academic and cultural institutions has included the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, MoMA’s Queens Museum, MIT’s Vassar Street Hall, here down the street, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery Inuit Art Center. 

We may get to talk about some of this work specifically, and certainly about what has been driving it for over two decades, but we will at least begin to do that by talking about what is not in Michael Maltzan Architecture’s portfolio, or on the boards at the moment, by discussing: at what point is a commission not worth it, what kind of line gets drawn with the decision to forfeit the possibility of work, and how such decisions are made in the studio. 

So, as I promised Michael, we have been starting these conversations with the most important or most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, and if that hasn’t happened, can you imagine it happening? And on what grounds? 

Michael  04:07: Well, that question of whether you take a project or not, and what it means to the office as a whole, and to the individuals here and to me personally, is something that I think is a, it’s a daily question, actually, it’s not, I’m not sure that, of course there are moments when there’s a particular project, and it creates a significant moment of decision. But I think, in a lot of ways, what’s more true is that it’s a constant navigation, constant questioning of what makes sense or doesn’t make sense in terms of the projects, and I think that also changes. It’s changed from when the office first started, and it was really just myself and maybe one other person at most, to a point where you have more people and a longer history of your work. That probably changes, those decisions probably change more from a practical, or even I would say, maybe a strategic sense. But I think philosophically, something stays very consistent, and that is around the question of whether the projects are projects that feel like they are a part of your ongoing interests and investigations. And whether they have any significant red flags around what the projects mean, especially culturally, socially, and politically. So I’m not sure there’s been a defining No, it’s probably been a more regular set of questions.

Ana  06:37: We’re interested in lots of little Nos too. But let’s flip the question for a little bit and talk about what you have preferred to. When I look at the work, I see two distinct, though, of course, overlapping bodies of work, one dedicated to shaping LA in which your collaboration with housing developers and housing as a key piece of city’s social infrastructure and image are vitally important. And that takes various forms, and then institutional work that is oriented around the specific content and immediate context of each of the buildings wherever they are. So maybe let’s start with housing. How do you think about it at your firm? And what would you say has been crucial in making these commissions and collaborations work?

Michael  07:27: Well, for me, this is actually interesting, to flip the question, as you’re saying, because I probably feel that I’m looking to find ways to say yes, more than I am to say no. And the reason for that is that, not trying to say yes, but I think often, the bigger challenge is to find a way to make a project work and make a project work in its in its full complexity, and more and more the kind of work over the years, the kind of work that we’ve done, I think is often been marked by a real complexity in housing has been central to that. When we first started to work for the Skid Row Housing Trust in downtown Los Angeles, they approached us to do what was at the time their first permanent supportive housing project for formerly homeless individuals. It was a different model. It was one that they had no experience with. It was a model that was just beginning to be discussed in the supportive housing community and world. But it had some, it had some genuine complexities that were part of the program, it was meant to support a more permanent community. It wasn’t a shelter or a transitional housing model, it had other program that had not normally been a part of those buildings. And there, there were really no prototypes for that, and it was going to have a very difficult budget from a construction standpoint, because of the kind of financing that a nonprofit like the Housing Trust had to put together, stack together to make a project like that feasible. Much of our work in the beginning, was before we even started to design the project, was to try to design an approach to how you would make a project like this work. What were the, what were the issues that we were going to have to deal with? How could you schedule that work? How could you work with the City of Los Angeles and all of its, all of the agencies to develop pathways for them to permit the project with a project that was unusual for them. That really required a series of, in a way, affirmations in terms of the goals of the project. And that really became the underlying structure set, if you will, for the project, it was the thing that we kept returning to. Taking on that kind of, readily taking on that kind of complexity is something that, I think, continues to be one of the things that really defines the practice and the conversations in the office.

Ana  11:00: Would you say that taking on or beginning this collaboration with the Skid Row nonprofit that, basically, that affected what you think of as preferring to do now?

Michael  11:16: I think it had a huge effect on the office. It was, when we did the first project Rainbow Apartments, I would say it was one of the defining moments of the practice, because we’ve been working in downtown Los Angeles on as I had mentioned, Intercity Arts, it was a multi-phase project for a nonprofit in a part of the city where architecture very rarely seemed to exist. When we were approached by the trust, I had wanted to do housing for, well, since I was in school, since I was an undergraduate. I thought housing was something that all architects did, I had, all of the history that I had looked at, especially modernist history, had housing as one of its central typologies. So I imagined that’s the kind of work that, as an architect, you would do. And then it turned out that that was not the case, it was seemed impossible to get housing and I had largely come to believe that I wouldn’t get to do housing. So when the trust first approached us with this problem to, kind of project where they were really changing the model of what they were doing. I was ecstatic because I was finally going to get to do housing. At the time, we had in the office quite a bit of institutional work, museums, higher education work, work that was more traditionally thought of as the place where architecture existed. And I had a bit of a panic, after I said yes, because I thought people in the office wouldn’t want to work on this housing project, they were working on the more visible projects. But over the next couple of weeks, people kept approaching me surreptitiously when I was going, I would go to the espresso machine or something like that, saying, we really, we heard we have housing, we really want to work on that project. And it came to realize that it was a typology that really resonated across many, many different sensibilities and values for people, not only again, formally, historically, but because of what it meant in the city, what it meant socially and culturally.

Ana  13:42: In rapidly reading through a number of texts that covers your recent work in LA, I was left with two terms, or at least two terms floated up for me, out of all of those various articles, and they were lightness and optimism. And I thought we should discuss these as terms a bit, or as effects, or as the mood of the work. And maybe if I were to pose a question, it would be about your take on architecture’s agency, in this day and age and in LA or elsewhere. And so you’ve began saying something about that. But if you, it would be great to keep going on that sort of question of agency, or maybe draw a line between and connect these attitudes if you recognize them, and aesthetic concerns in your work to the question of agency

Michael  14:36: Well, I think it is important to be very self-reflective as architects, and for architecture to be self-reflective about what architecture can and potentially cannot do. And to constantly be critical about the role of architect and architecture, especially in cities, in culture and society today, because on the one hand, I may be more optimistic than ever that architecture, as a discipline has, has a deep role when you look at the range of, of challenges that exist in front of us at the moment, but I also think we have to be very careful that architecture on its own, is not going to solve or save the day, and that these problems are deeply complex, and they take an enormous amount of work and collaboration and perseverance to attack them. There’s, the possibility for architecture to walk in as a singular hero, I think is, you know, is really a fantasy. What I’ve been convinced of, partially out of the work around housing, reinforced by our work around public institutions and what they mean, in cities and in culture, what kind of role they can play, and reinforced probably even more fully by watching recently, the sixth street viaduct open, and the ability for infrastructure to really play a role in the civic conversation in cities- that architecture can both be present in the widest range of contexts, and architecture also has a very special capability to choreograph really challenging, really complex sets of issues, to find ways to bring those ideas, those sometimes competing ideas together into a more synthetic approach to a problem, to represent that, to talk about that, to find ways to be in a conversation with the larger community as a whole, obviously to finally realize those projects and make a form that represents maybe a different way or path forward in the city, to some of these challenges. And that range of capabilities is something that again, I think is, is a kind of superpower that architecture has, and I feel very, very confident that architecture because of that has a real role, as we’re, we’re facing some of these challenges. It’s one of reasons, well, I just, it’s one of the reasons that you were asking about the difference between saying no, and saying yes. And, you know, to go back to this idea of saying yes, one of the things that, one of the reasons why I’ve tried to find ways to say yes, is to take on as many different types of projects in as many different types of places as possible, to keep trying to prove, as I’ve said, in the world, but maybe even just to myself, to try to keep proving that architecture can exist almost everywhere. And that that’s an important role for architecture to continue to try to prove to itself.

Ana  18:44: I mean, maybe it would be useful to talk about what kinds of things have to align in a situation for it to go as well as you’re describing. Or maybe, what are the conditions that you, that enable you to do your best work, or produce the architecture that has these sort of qualities that you’re interested in or agency that you’re interested in, in the city? And, yeah, let’s start with that. Or also I can attach to the question of the skills that maybe go into orchestrating such a situation.

Michael  19:25: The bridge is, in some ways, I think a good project to look at because at least for a part of that question. Because it’s not a, it’s not a type of project that’s normally in the scope of what architecture does or where architects are often involved in, it’s really a civil engineering and a structural engineering project. It’s the kind of project that’s normally done by infrastructure engineers and contractors. But the questions that were really a part of the brief that the city of Los Angeles developed at the beginning of the project, and the ambitions that they developed, were things like trying to make a bridge that had a, had an iconic quality from the beginning, that represented something about the city because the bridge it was replacing, the old six street viaduct, had that role in the city. So the new bridge needed to have that role. It should be a bridge that tried to find ways to connect communities together in ways that traditional infrastructure has not in the city, you can make the argument that infrastructure in many, especially postwar cities, has done more to divide communities than connect them. That it had to have a strong sustainability approach and, sustainability approach that was working on a number of different levels. There were, there was really a range of questions that the bridge was asking. I think much of our work, much of my work, beyond the traditional aesthetic role that you play in a project, was to find ways to keep insisting that all of those complex issues had to find a home and had to interweave with each other. All of those issues interweave with each other. So that they became inherent parts of the overall design scheme and approach. That meant that the conversations that you needed to have as an architect, and the kind of learning that you had to develop around all of these complex issues politically, structurally, again, the civil engineering standpoint, just to have conversations with all of the different say, would say stakeholders, meant that you really had to constantly expand how you normally, how you normally define, again, the role of the architect, which can be quite circumscribed often in these, in these projects. I think I spent more time explaining why something was important or related to another seemingly separate issue, then actually working on the design of the project. It means that agency, I think, has to be thought of as a very expansive, ongoing, somewhat relentless endeavor.

Ana  23:12: Have you ever worked with, I’m going to call them clients who you’re not aligned with?

Michael  23:26: Yes. Yes. In the sense that there are disagreements. We’ve had, we have had a couple of cases, clients, who turned out to be really not in alignment with things that I felt were things I could agree to. So in that sense, I guess that does go back to your first question. There have been a couple of cases where, after the first phase of a project, it was clear that it, there wasn’t really a sense of agreement, not in the, in the practical aspects of the project. But really, in, in the values that each of us had about the role of, the role of architecture, I think, in the world as a whole. And so it really came down to issues of true philosophical differences. And in a couple of cases, we did, we just didn’t continue. But I think that there, I think it’s partially the role of the architect to find ways to in a sense solve the, solve the problem, even when the problem is set up in a way that you don’t feel necessarily comfortable with or you don’t, it doesn’t fit necessarily so easily into the work that you’ve done before, for instance. I have this thing I talk about in the office that we can’t ever try to convince a client, I don’t think you can convince a client of anything long term. You may be able to make a compelling argument, somehow, about something that you really want, you think is important, or you want to do. If the client ultimately doesn’t believe in it, you may have won that battle for the day. But the client is always going to come back and eventually say, I don’t feel comfortable with that. It’s something that they fundamentally don’t believe in. So is there a way to, is there a way to find a pathway that relates to their very real concerns, if substantial concerns, with the design, and I think, often what I’ve found is in those moments, if those concerns are coming from a very genuine, authentic place, that it forces you to often invent something in the project that you might not have expected. It challenges your work. And that I think is, sometimes that’s where some of the best invention in our work has come from.

Ana  26:59: I wanted to quote from another piece in which you spoke about housing, so, but try to extrapolate from it maybe beyond. So you said that reducing the presence of those things we usually call architecture demands that we return to what is most effective about architecture and the way it frames social relationships. And after you said this, in the context of this piece on housing, you ended with an emphasis on the most fundamental elements of architecture, like courtyards, double loaded corridors, maybe edges. And I wanted to sort of go to that question of what is fundamental, or maybe the question that again, that might connect your aesthetic interests and disciplinary interests to the larger sets of attitudes and optimism?

Michael  27:53: Mm. Well, you could answer the question of what’s fundamental in architecture probably in two ways. One is that there are very deep fundamental qualities that architecture is working with. And I do think that those are around the possibility of making space that allows for people to connect, to start to quite literally see each other, to create community, that, in the case of housing, these are places where people live out both their private, their semi-public and their public lives very often. That the buildings are a real connection, as Yona Friedman talked about between the house, the front lawn, the street, the full range of our social and private public lives. And then there are maybe the pragmatic fundamentals, in a project. You mentioned the double loaded corridor as something which is very typical in housing, as a, I guess, you could say it has 

Ana:  A typology.

Michael  . . . A piece of, yeah, maybe it’s a piece of a typology. Those are often the places that we, I would say, go after, we attack very directly in our work, I’m interested in that. Because in those traditional forms, there are often traditions and those traditions get passed from one project to another without much of a, much reflection or examination. And so it also brings along a lot of preconceived ideas about the way that we live. When we did the very first project for Skid Row, Rainbow apartments that I mentioned before, maybe one of the most radical things that we did in that project was actually very simple, and it was to crack the building open so that it was no longer a building, a traditional building of double loaded corridors. It was all single loaded corridors. It’s something we can do in the climate in Los Angeles, people can be on these outdoor walkways and balconies, but it had a very important, very deep relationship to trying to change the equation around these formerly homeless individuals’ lives. To be in these buildings, you had to have been chronically homeless, which meant you had been on the street for approximately 10 years. And in that time, almost everybody, understandably, develops this kind of psychological shell, bubble around themselves to just live in, in a sense, in the public all the time. So when they come into the buildings, they’re very reticent to engage with other individuals. And I thought that the building, by having these single loaded corridors, could create a kind of semi-public realm where you couldn’t just go in the elevator, go up to your floor, walk down an anonymous double loaded corridor and disappear into your room. You had to, as you walk to your apartment, be in this community courtyard, not fully engaged, but at least visible. And that that would start to help create a sense of, of a safer reemergence into public life. And it was very effective. It worked. And it was a case where that first project really changed almost all of the other buildings that Skid Row did subsequently. Single-loaded corridors became the norm, even if they were slightly more expensive to build, because it had a deep effect on the (Ana: life) life, on the foundation of what the project was. I think that the, maybe to the second part, the aesthetic piece of it. In those first projects, we were working with very simple materials. Stucco plaster, because it was very inexpensive. It’s also material that I’ve come to love because it’s very plastic. It’s quite fluid, you can do many things to it, you can develop many textures with it, it captures light in a very beautiful way. And in the context of Skid Row, the lightness of it, really the white stucco plaster, which comes from traditions of, of early Los Angeles architecture, that it had this, this very optimistic feeling to it in the context of a gritty, inner city part of Los Angeles. And it really stood out from the rest of the city. And that was also something that in effect, I was, I thought was important here as well. We continued to then use that material in all of the projects, because it started to not only, well, it continued to be about this idea of lightness and optimism in the city, but it also started to connect the, all of the different buildings that we did with the trust into a family of buildings. And it got at this other goal that I’ve had with these projects that even though each one is quite small, 80 to 90 units, that over time doing a number of them, it becomes actually quite a large project in its total and it has a quite large effect on the, if you will, the map of the city. And that has, I think, it changes the way that maybe you begin to have the conversation about the scale of change in a city.

Ana  34:44: I wanted to talk about both the tectonic innovation and research that you’ve been undertaking within the work and, sort of, to really ask how you locate it in the conversation with clients or how these differences situations have enabled it or where it registers within the office as a conversation. And then I wanted to talk about the role of models for the internal workings of your team and office and maybe also that conversation with clients. You also describe their presence as artifacts as important in the office, and so these are maybe connected, we can we can tackle them together as questions.

Michael  35:30: Well, your first question about tectonics, and how that relates to maybe the conversations with clients. Possibly a good example is actually another housing project, Star Apartments, that we completed a few years ago, Star apartments is 104 units, the largest actually of all of the projects we’ve done with the Housing Trust, and it’s built using prefabricated modular units that were brought to the site, built, actually in this case in Idaho and transported to the site. It was the first multifamily prefabricated project in Los Angeles. Before that you weren’t really able to do multifamily prefabrication for a series of somewhat arcane regulations. But to do that, we also were given a site by the client where there was an existing building that they wanted to save. And that meant that there really was no room on the site, to lay down materials and to stage the project from. So it started to force us to look at ways of reconceptualizing, how you would even structure the project. Eventually, we came to a solution where we built more or less a concrete tray that was lifted above the existing building, we needled down through the existing building, structurally, with a series of gravity and seismic structural elements, and then stacked the units on top. Very quickly, when after the tray was built, all of the units were stacked in under 30 days, which is quite remarkable. That invention really came from the specific needs of the project. It wasn’t something that, we weren’t looking to try to do prefabrication beforehand, it had been, we had looked at it a bit. But it really came from a direct rethinking of how to try to take on the construction problem in maybe an unusual, but actually, in the end, very efficient and direct way. The client was a part of those conversations from the very beginning. And I think that’s, that’s important, that it has to be something which has a benefit for them, a tangible benefit that they can see. Sometimes that benefit can also be what the project brings in terms of identity within their world as well. They were really seen as a innovator and a leader because of that project, but it really started with how they would build the building most efficiently.

Ana  38:31: And then models are useful in talking to clients or to build a kind of idea in the studio…?

Michael  38:39: I, you know, models have been a part of the culture, the design culture of the office, from the very beginning. It’s something that has to do with, has always had to do with the way I feel most comfortable working three dimensionally. It has evolved to take on, I think, a greater and greater importance in terms of the way that I, we even think about space, within projects within urban contexts, within buildings themselves. And it for me is an extremely useful tool in contrast to trying to design digitally because of, no matter what, no matter how fantastic the software is. For me, there’s always this challenge of seeing the building two dimensionally. And it they’ve turned out to be extremely useful communication tools, in the conversations with the client and also with the communities in which the buildings are going to be built. I think for the clients It’s fairly clear, they get to see something very tangible. I’m not sure clients always, no matter how experienced they are, truly understand drawings in the way that we as architects, having been trained to understand the abstraction of two dimensions, understand drawings. So the models become very useful, maybe sometimes even a little too useful. Sometimes they see things that, and they question them, and are, really push back on certain things that they might not have seen in two dimensions. So sometimes, the drawings might have hid something, and maybe would have, wouldn’t have had to change things in the way that sometimes you do in the models. But I think in the end, that’s also extremely important because it builds up a great deal of trust in the conversation with the clients. And that question of trust, is where I’ve found models to be very effective out in the conversations with the community. Another example of that is a very large model we made of the Sixth Street viaduct. The viaduct is connecting two areas downtown Los Angeles, an area now called the arts district, with Boyle Heights, which is really, it’s on the east side of the LA River, it over the years has developed into really the heart, socially, politically, of the Latino community in the city, there has been a great deal of fear on, within that community around gentrification, not just because of the viaduct, but just because of its location and the pressures that you’re seeing, because of density and affordability in the city as a whole. The Sixth Street viaduct was also something the old viaduct that was very deeply embedded in their culture. So there was, it was a beloved bridge, there was a lot of anxiety about this new bridge. And as we were in community meetings with drawings and renderings, I kept feeling like there was always this sense of mistrust around the drawings. And I understand that because, frankly, drawings we all know can be manipulated to show, they can be taken from a certain vantage point. They are the, they are the architect’s, they come from the architect’s decision around how to portray the project. You decide where you’re going to take the rendering from, what time of day, what the atmosphere is of that drawing. I wanted the community to feel more involved with the overall design. So we ended up making a model, a kind of preposterous model, it was 68 feet long, of the entire bridge. (Ana: Oh, wow!) and we had to get the gymnasium in one of the local schools to show the model in, for the community. But it was incredible. Because the people, these meetings were always heavily, heavily attended, hundreds of people. And it totally changed the conversation because it was no longer this feeling of, that we were trying to convince the community of something, they started to take ownership of the bridge, because they could quite literally wrap their arms around it. It wasn’t that they didn’t have questions, or they didn’t have criticisms. But you could have a very open dialogue around what those concerns were, stripped of a lot of the mistrust that other things like drawings often bring. So I think that it’s important to use whatever forms create the most direct, open dialogue that you can. And I’ve found models to be the most useful tool for us in that regard.

Ana 44:23: Participatory in a way. (Michael: Absolutely. Absolutely) Here’s my last-ish question. Did you ever regret not taking a commission or vice versa?

Michael 44:39: I… I have regretted not taking commissions. Not that often, but there have been a few of them. And mostly it’s because, I think, after the fact I came to, it was generally because when we decided not to, my role in that decision to say no, was, came from what I thought the project could be or was about. And later on, I found a way to find a different possibility in it. That could have been, that wasn’t so clear at the time. And that that possibility, because it wasn’t so clear, actually meant that, that you were going to have to find some completely different approach or, or more radical form to solve that problem. And I just, I didn’t see it at that time. And I came to see it later on. And I don’t know if I was in, that’s when I regretted not taking the project. I don’t know if, the challenge in that is that I don’t know if what I then saw as a possibility actually could have happened or not, because the only proof, of course, is to have done the project and seeing if you could have pulled it off. So you know, maybe my regret is my own fiction, but nonetheless, you know, you live with regret. And those regrets never go away for architects, I think.

Ana 46:36: Alright. Thank you for talking to me today, Michael. And listeners Thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To.