100: Branding Architecture with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK

you can't find what appeals to people through market research because they themselves don't know until they've seen it and so this is why you need much more experimentation in architecture because it's only when you experiment that you discover what people really want episode 100. hello and welcome to the business of architecture uk i am your host ryan willard and this week we have a super special episode because this episode is episode 100 and to celebrate this momentous occasion i have the brilliant rory sutherland who is the vice chairman at ogilvy uk he's a ted global speaker he's the author of alchemy the surprising power of ideas that don't make sense which is an absolutely brilliant book one of the best books i've ever read on behavioral economics on marketing and on advertising highly recommended and i had the good fortunes before lockdown to sit down and speak with rory we spoke about everything from isochronic maps to londonist propaganda to um how cool is the the currency to compete against wealth and really we were getting under the skin of like how important brand can be to architecture and how to communicate um the huge value that designers bring to property to buildings and rory wonderfully breaks it down into saying that property has four types of value use value investment value delight value and stability value and he goes into this in a lot of depth and just brings a huge wealth of ideas and anecdotes into how we as architects can be more powerful in the way that we communicate our value so sit back relax and enjoy the absolute brilliance of rory sutherland this episode was filmed and recorded at the stunning forza showroom on great portland street in london you can see the gorgeous water knoll collection that rory and i are sitting on so thank you very much to the team for making that happen you can see their website details in the information of this podcast so massive thank you to all of you for listening and supporting the business of architecture uk for the last couple of years big shout out to those of you who have come to our live events attended the webinars and of course to those of you who have downloaded the weekly podcast and have been listening to them on your bicycles and as you know we love helping architects win meaningful and profitable work but it's not always that simple to implement these ideas or translate them into something that will work for you so what i wanted to do was to invite you onto a quick 15-minute chat with myself we can both grab a cup of tea and i'd like to ask you about what content you found most valuable and why and what you'd like to hear more of i'd also love to hear more about your business and what you're building at the moment and where you are headed to business-wise in 2020 so there's no charge or any obligation with this call just simply to find out how our content has been of value and if we get that far and with your permission of course what might be next what might be possible and how business of architecture uk could be supportive of that does that sound fair brilliant so if you want to book a 15 minute chat with me i'm calling these calls the boa uk discovery call or just simply a chat with ryan use the link in the information and i look forward to speaking to you brilliant rory welcome to the business of architecture uk absolute privilege and a pleasure to have you on the show no i'm a fan boy so it's actually a privilege for me to be here because i'm a bit of an architectural groupie so excellent you couldn't have stopped me coming on wonderful and i noticed that you're a trustee of the benjamin franklin house and rochester cathedral so you're kind of in there with looking after architecture and preserving it and being it's the most undervalued um contributor to life happiness and by the way i'm not alone in saying this benazi at ucla yeah he's a very very good behavioral scientist and one of the things he noticed very rapidly is that good design makes a contribution to your well-being uh which is never properly accounted for yes and i often half-humorously ask the question you know that countries like denmark which report very high levels of happiness and reasonable levels of egalitarianism i think a large contribution there is a is made by the built environment and the designed environment yeah i have a little joke about denmark and i always call this the sutherland index which is in different countries when you go to the loo and you need to do a number two okay and you go to a public laboratory or a restaurant laboratory and you close the door and of course you need to hang your jacket somewhere what are the odds that there's a hook on the back of the door and in countries with a high design ethos like denmark the sutherland index is basically 99.9 okay and then in disorderly countries it'll fall as low as you know 15 or whatever yeah and uh the other thing that really interests me is i think we can apply quite a lot of the same things that are often applied to consumer marketing or to consumer product design to architecture and what i'd love to do you know this will be my retirement project is use it to justify and to make the economic case for what i often call the extra 10 that makes all the difference but is the first to get cut when the finance director gets involved yes because the things that emotionally make a difference emotionally make a difference precisely because they're slightly pointless i mean when i say pointless they're very very valuable but they're pointless to the utilitarian mindset yes yeah and so in in product marketing this was there's a wonderful thing called carno theory now very interesting that probably hasn't made its way carnotheria probably hasn't made its way from consumer electronics professor carno the university of tokyo and you can see his work reflected in the 1980s consumer electronics japanese consumer electronics market and he makes a point that there are three separate components to a thing now i would apply this to a building by the way and i'd also apply it to a cassette deck right and there are threshold attributes where they have to be present if they're not present you're furious and unsatisfied but their presence gives you no delight so you know a leaky a non-leaking roof for example or in the case if you buy a brand of milk if you find the cotton leeks and you buy the same brand again and the carton leaks again you'll never buy it again but nobody goes i always buy this brand because the carton doesn't leak okay you treat that as table stakes yeah it's it's a standard it's a then you have performance attributes and the relationship between performance attributes with something like a cassette deck that'll be sound quality battery life there are things you can measure quite often using objective measurements and the relationship between performance attribution and consumer happiness is linear and then there's a third thing which is the delight attribute which is super linear which is it's not actually necessary no one will be necessarily angry at its absence but its presence even though it may look slightly gratuitous creates a disproportionate amount of human well-being delight and uh excitement and now the classic example of this would be i always say if you bought a cassette deck in the 80s you're too young for this okay the way you chose it yes you cared a bit about sound quality battery life build quality all those things but what you what really determined your decision was you press the eject button and if it went clack that was manifestly rubbish you weren't going to give it whereas if there was a glorious damped counterweighted mechanism where the thing hissed open with a kind of you know balletic performance and the same with the dvd player you see and my architectural equivalent of carno delight attributes i always give the example and it's a marketing example when they open some pancreas station uh freud communications very good pr agency um every single press release contained the extraordinarily irrelevant fact about a railway station that it contained the longest champagne bar in europe now you know this is a bit like the inject mechanism okay no one ever says i think you can do a champagne box you name long ones you know or i don't go to the champagne brand anymore it's not long enough okay it's a totally nonsensical superlative and yet what it did was first of all 15 years later it must be more than that actually but certainly 15 years later everybody still remembers that fact because it somehow sticks in the mind and secondly what it said was this isn't just a utilitarian transit hub this station is a destination in its own right yeah and a place which you might visit even if you don't need to catch a train and it also by the way makes a visit to saint pancras kind of uplifting and it contributes to a wider general sort of and i think by the way that was an effective message also in attracting the kind of businesses that have opened in france yes there's a harrods and that's partly the euro star john lewis i think there's an espresso shop lovely yeah it's pretty safe i think with an architectural audience in praising the espresso most definitely i think that's a fairly safe little fan fanboy admission um now if you look at a place where they spend more money which is london bridge station yeah okay they've they've probably more or less got right to the basic attributes although the toilet provision is disastrous okay um i think it's much more efficient you know in terms of you know changing planes and the trains and trains and the movement of people yeah uh the signage is is it was quite bad but it is now better but they completely missed the champagne bar effect so what i would have done if you'd given me that brief as i would say let the architects and the throughput experts get on with all their stuff take two or three retail outlets that will otherwise end up being an oliver bonus or a paper chase yeah and just say okay we're gonna have london's largest florist and you might actually give the real estate away to you know i mean you know you could do some really eccentric things you need i mean i always thought that marlon station and the extraordinary cult following that the chilton line has yeah it's partly because marlon station had a speciality cheese shop you know so in other words don't allow market forces to create the sort of generic retail that you can everywhere else go out on a limb and create one or two real eccentricities so when you came down the escalators there was a massive display of flowers and now bear in mind of course that joe public when judging architecture doesn't have your vocabulary yes so joe public when you say what do you think of the news station they don't talk about architraves okay or spandrels or whatever it is like to go on about right um so what they will say is i really like the florists when you come down the escalator that once you've got that you've kind of won you know they're on your side they want to like you and they're looking for complimentary evidence to like you more if you don't provide that first kind of little reason to like then you end up as kind of and my point about the the florist idea i know and i sympathize because realistically that's the first thing that any finance guy would kill yeah isn't it yeah the first thing it doesn't it doesn't make logical sense no precisely because delight attributes and i think this is true of architecture um they either they're either surprisingly peripheral to the main function of something or they serve a function which we're not consciously aware of in some cases i mean i've always jokingly said about classical architecture this is a very funny thing which was a group of people trying to find the entrance to the purcell rooms at the south bank and we couldn't find the door now say what you like about classical architecture but nobody walks up to the british museum and goes i wonder where the entrance is so you know it's always worth remembering that great architecture also contains clues to its own use yes which we may only process unconsciously yeah so it may be that a lot of the delight of architecture is created by just unconscious forces as well totally totally but but i mean the fact that it contributes to happiness um we move to a robert adam house we live in the roof we pay no premium for the grade oneness what we're paying for is location and square footage no premium is paid for the capability brand view or the robert adams of the actual architecture um because i know this to my neighbor's an economist and i said i don't understand why we're effectively buying art for free yeah when we live here there was an apartment in notting hill which was a gropius thing um and that went for no more than the surrounding i think it was half gropius crystal fry would that make sense yeah and that went for no premium obviously it was bloody expensive because yeah yeah it's something occurred to me that there's a this is the cheapest way of buying art okay now if we could just create and persuade punters huge hats off to websites like the modernhouse.net yes kind of now you're not helped architects by the fact that rich people don't have fantastic taste by and large okay um but equally they can be educated i mean rich people tend to buy pretty good wine not because they know a lot about wine but because expert opinion has from the wine industry has permeated down to russian oligarchs and so they know to mix chateau la tour with coca-cola rather than rather than fixing beaujolais nouveau okay now um if you could create something where architecture became almost collectible and it was as much a repository of value architecture and design and just design quality was as much a repository of value as location you'd revolutionize the whole property market because at the moment once everybody believes that it's all about location and square footage all the financial gains go to the landowner and the architect is basically a cost not a source of value creation exactly and and this is the the perennial problem with with architecture you know what the kind of constant complaint is that our fees are so low when i when i said i was hugely undervalued in terms of the value you created yes no doubt about it and when i said i was interviewing you on the show i did a little kind of call out onto the on to our twitter followers and uh other followers everyone asked the same question how do we communicate this value of the design that we bring uh to to architecture rather than it always being seen as a cost and then we end up getting trapped in the kind of time based you know we sell our we sell our time basically i mean if you create a robert parker score for architecture where buildings were generally appraised on an architectural quality you probably i mean i don't know if this is possible who on earth would do it but one of the problems is that um this great phrase in business what gets measured gets managed but the problem is what gets mismeasured gets mismanaged and the metrics that are used are location now by the way we've been an extraordinary beneficiary of this because our offices in ogilvy are in the sea containers house okay which overlooks the gonam river and blackfriars station which i think is the best news station in london by some measure and when we were first told there's an opportunity in sea containers house i said we won't stand a chance being able to afford that because you know goldman sachs prancing or whatever weirdly south of the river on that bank does not count as prime london commercial real estate right so so it's got a view of the goddamn river how is that not prime real estate but now the victoria development will be treated as prime for example but this isn't okay now the metrics in all forms of architecture you know britain has suffered by the way in another way in residential architecture um uh in um uh effectively having this obsession with a number of bedrooms so that's a deformity if you go to countries where it's square footage or square meterage like germany or the united states um one you get a much more intelligent allocation of space you get more toilets that's the one thing you notice okay um and also you get a vastly more intelligent allocation of space because i've always argued the americans have this slightly weird thing about the master bedroom don't they where you practically if you want to go to the toilet in the night you have to set up a kind of base camp halfway there because the bloody main bedroom is so enormous yeah but to be honest if you've got one big room in a house you've solved quite a lot of problems how big the bedrooms are you know is becomes less important so the number of bedrooms thing i think has created a huge deformity in british property rather than square footage it's caused people to chase the wrong thing yeah um and so that and i also think that the i mean to be honest the quality of our building isn't first rate which doesn't help and by and large build quality is pretty second rate in this country i think yeah my my friend ray falk who is an architect i i was very friendly with at university he always recommended buying edwardian housing because he said uh the technology was pretty good but you still had cheap labor before the first world war ruined everything and um also of course architecturally we suffer from extraordin what i didn't realize is frankfurt was practically no properly regulated property regulation germans find it very very easy to build their own houses um and the um extraordinary restriction on individual or niche house building and the extraordinary restriction on being able to build eccentrically yeah uh is undoubtedly a massive limiting factor here yes and i was talking to a canadian developer who went to islington council and wanted to effectively sell or rent micro housing now for some reason if you call it student housing that's fine now here's what you got why is it okay for students to live in really small places where by by large by the way they're quite happy okay but if you're a third-year employee at ogilvy uh it's illegal to build that property for you yeah and so he basically said look there's huge pressure in the market for this kind of smaller but centrally located thing and he was told by the council it's not about what people want it's about what we think they need and so there are limitations there to greater inventiveness now you know you might argue if you live in a very central location in the city the city actually provides a large part of your living space yeah and what you need is a bolt hole i also find it interesting i've talked to a few architects about this saying that technology changes our perception of space because it enables our mind to be elsewhere and so television must have done that to an extent okay okay a very interesting friend of mine who had to for years very weird job where he had to spend friday and monday once a month in mumbai which meant he basically had to stay the weekend there and the place he was visiting was on the outskirts of mumbai so it wasn't even the middle of the city yeah and he said before the internet came along he said my weekend spent on this industrial estate on the city outskirts where he said you know it was sensory deprivation it was intolerable once they got high-speed broadband and i had the internet he said you know i'm skyping my daughter you know i'm reading books i'm watching films on netflix the that same feeling of imprisonment has completely disappeared once i can take my mind somewhere else i always tell the story that when because your younger viewers won't understand this but when you first went to a hotel room in on a business trip in 1989 you went up to your hotel room mind there was you could watch foreign television or read a book that was it uh you basically went to the hotel room you opened the door slung your suitcase through the door didn't enter the room at all close the door and went down to the bar because sitting on your own in the hotel room was intolerable yes and now nobody does this they get their laptop out they start charging things and so what property is you know you know what we need from space just as if you think about it dining rooms were a kind of dying thing to an extent in that people eat in the kitchen and there's nothing abnormal about that you know it isn't downton abbey for god's sake garages used to be considered necessary but modern cars basically don't rust yeah and in the same way our what our need for space is probably changes quite a lot yeah but then there's the other thing so the two ways you can actually stop the landowner or three ways i can see three ways of stopping the landowner getting all chains okay one of them is building very very high uh another one is building very very small yes and of course the two aren't mutually exclusive you could build very high and very small um i think the third way would be shared ownership or fractional ownership to an extent yeah okay and a fourth way would be branding where the primary decision you take is around what kind of house you buy not where it is so for example if someone decides the creative director of our frankfurt office used to live in a huff house i think he still does now if you say i want to live in a half house actually that's a case where location is no longer the primary discriminator and the nature of the accommodation or how it's designed or built therefore rises higher up the what what in choice architecture is called the elimination by attribute hierarchy yeah and so if you're if you're buying a car i'm fairly now of course it'll be a volvo because you're an architect you know what what is the compulsory architect's car now it varies doesn't it but um no but if you're buying bicycles but if you went to buy a car you'd have a preconception of the brands you're interested in yeah which would enable you to make an elimination to say you make the choice manageable you go you probably eliminate four or five brands whatever reason now that means that brand is quite important owning a car brand is quite important because it's a fairly early on decisive factor in people's choice if people go to prime location and they go where it is how much it costs how many bedrooms it's got does it have a greenhouse and then they only look at the picture and make a judgment about architectural design quality at stage seven okay the gains aren't going to the architect yeah because it's then treated in the decision-making process as an also ram factor and so if you could get people so my example would be let's take em sleep station okay which is in a weird kind of way if you look at a different kind of map of london which is the isochronic map have you ever seen those things so an isochronic map is a great thing you put where your workplace is right okay and then you choose acceptable modes of transport and then you have a slider and it says show me all the places that are 10 20 30 40 50 60 minutes from work it's very strange because when you get out to about an hour from our office there are still parts of southwest london well inside the m25 which aren't illuminated yeah but ashford on intent appears it's only about half a mile around the railway station but if you're prepared to live next to ashford railway station you could basically get to black friars in an hour changes in pancreas thames link down now in that respect you could argue that ebbs fleet for example um an ashford station is almost magical ashford station's an hour and a bit from paris in 30 minutes from london now if i went to any of my younger colleagues and said why didn't you move to ashford i'd have to put a gun i'd have to put a gun to their head if i wanted them to move to bromley or orpington they're obsessed with shoreditch or hoxton or whatever because to a degree they've been fed urbanist propaganda and as a result hoxton landowners benefit from their i think i think it's something to do with mating and reproduction i think the truth of the matter is if you say you live in bromley you can't it's not cool you can't pull can you yeah exactly but so it must be something weird you know so hoxton and shoreditch must be these sort of weird spawning grounds but nonetheless they can actually afford pretty nice property right yeah now let's say above ashford station you built the coolest bloody building imaginable okay both in terms of design technology superfast broadband um and facilities you've got a place that's actually what an hour and a half from paris and 37 minutes from london okay um if you also did a deal with the railway company so that seven years of travel were factored into your purchase of the apartment so you've got a seven-year season ticket with your purchase could you get young people to see that a combination of design and extraordinary um travel potency yeah beats hoxton i don't know yeah because you'd have to make it pretty damn cool except for that it's it's interesting actually because it's you know in architecture we often talk about the kind of growth of cities and we often see that the areas that become very trendy or very very profitable places for people to develop are often started off by artistic communities and creative types they're the sort of shock troops of gentrification yeah exactly they kind of go out it's cheap they end up making it cool um not not necessarily deliberately so or doing it with the kind of intention of bringing people to the area just but just because that's their their culture and it's cheap and they want to build these sorts of areas it's quite easy in a weird way if you look at um our material needs what one thing that fascinates me is you'd think the internet would have had quite a big effect on now you need to the problem is that cities are extraordinarily productive places because of the extraordinary number of nodes of connection made possible and so you need cities to earn a salary now in terms of quality of life the what you might call the deficiency of stuff i moved out seven eggs when we had twins okay and the extent to which you suffer from moving out of london as a consumer rather than as a wage earner is vastly less than it would have been in 1990 i mean i can remember going back to monmouth um uh in you know in let's say 1992 you know and you know you had you know you had a week without kind of any exotic ethnic foods and when you were driving back along the west where and you saw the sign saying west end the city you know you felt the milk of sort of human kindness flowing back yeah you felt you know alive again now actually with the exception of restaurants and even then by the way the um that's evened out extraordinary you know there are pretty good restaurants in provincial towns if you and particularly ethnic or indian restaurants you can get really lucky yeah um online retail you know when i was a kid growing up welsh borders you wanted to buy a weird piece of hi-fi equipment or some speakers it was cardiff or bristol you know it was a 40-mile drive the way i was occasionally living in kentucky occasionally described london as the inconvenient alternative to blue water um but even further if you think about it london's got some fantastic shops there's the self-reduced website there's the fortnite amazing website you know there's the john lewis website and funnily enough those shops are exactly the same wherever else you happen to be yeah so that obsession with city life is is strange because it's happened at a time when technology has made it the gains from living in a highly densely populated area are slightly less you know at ocado for example um you know you you know it's not it's not that case where i had a um italian friend whose father in the 1950s had to buy olive oil from a chemist because it was sold as both a skin treatment and pour in your ear but as a cooking ingredient it was completely unknown you know we don't list we don't exist in culinary deserts anymore yeah um and um and equally actually other technologies like the ability to watch the opera from the cinema mean that you know you can i mean i ended up watching the lemon trilogy i couldn't get into the theater i couldn't even get into a cinema in cambridge wells i ended up driving down to canterbury to watch it at the curtin cinema there yeah now you know um you and i i i was almost tempted in fact just out of sheer glorious incongruity there was a live broadcast of the magic flute from the royal opera house i think the odeon in romford and i almost thought that was nothing the idea of that was so gloriously in congress i always thought it'd be much more interesting to go and see it there than you see it at the royal and um so i mean there's a strange thing this i mean there has i think i would accuse the bbc in particular of um of forcing urbanist particularly londonist propaganda yeah you know just by the nature of the people who live there um down people's throats and actually um suburbia is really nice i mean i know this everybody's being a little bit sick in your entire life a little bit sick in their mouth yeah but i had a friend who was an art director and a man of very unusual taste so he collected american muscle cars which again in kind of arty circles is a bit cool domination you know but he always believed that actually sort of 30s classic suburbia would in the same way that hipsters made sort of beers like pabst blue ribbon cool again yeah he always thought that suburbia would actually have a resurgence that actually living in a sort of 1930s mock tuna place in orpington would become the coolest thing to do he's still waiting it has to be said he moved back to new zealand so he never had to test it i've always i mean it is worth questioning course what happens with fashion yeah and i'm always very it's very funny because as a 54 year old man i find shortage very confusing okay because i walk around shoreditch and part of it is 54 year old bourgeois suburban me and part of it is kind of experimental tech loving me and so half my brain is going go that's fantastic there's 17 artisan coffee shops and look you know you can get this extraordinary so-and-so and then half piece cake it's a bit of a huh isn't it there's like crap sprayed all over the walls and i can't quite get my head around when i walk around shoreditch i imagine to be the same if i go to brooklyn next week you know is this place great or is it terrible yeah um but one interesting question would be undoubtedly if you could break the stranglehold of location and it's worth remembering that there's location um the tube map has a grossly deleterious effect on people's property um choices in london because uh the tube mapping misrepresents london very badly it totally hides occludes south london most of which operates by train or thus yeah but particularly train in fact and of course trains are non-stop in a way that tubes aren't yeah so bromley south is 15 minutes from victoria now no one looking at the tube map broadly south is not it but i mean no one could get there i could when i first moved out to kent i couldn't get my head around this fact you could get from bromley to central london in 15 minutes um so the tube map creates a huge distortion i think but if you could get people just to think more widely someone told me the other day that if you allowed everybody to build within half a mile of every tube station and railway station in the southeast on what was not green belt land but otherwise undeveloped not particularly attractive land yeah i think you'll be able to create something like a million new homes yeah like brownfield sites and now if you could get now in order to do that that's partly a marketing challenge isn't it yeah because uh you need to be able to get people to go i'm you know i'm you know bromley north you know all those places which in many cases by the way are closer to your place of work in community time than fulham is but ever because fulham is on the tube the the inhabitants of have this totally delusional belief that they live in central london um well there's the perception of south london being disconnected and i grew up in in pearly and croydon around that area and it's there's there's still the kind of perception of well it's not really london it's it's the interesting thing with for example pearly or if you take you know pets wood okay you can get into three different london stations so you can go into black friars i think you can go into cannon street you can go into victoria yeah okay london bridge is wrong right okay so so actually essentially you've got something which might you know without changing trains you just pick which train you want and you can be taken to four different bits of london yeah that's something that the tube doesn't allow you to do yeah for the most part and so i mean that's that's another under explored thing but if you started developing places near the stations and you could somehow seed interesting communities because cool is an extraordinary thing because cool is basically the currency that poorer cleverer people use to compete with wealth and eventually what happens there's a great book by douglas mcwilliams called the flat white economy and what tends to happen is the problem with rich people is they're not very cool yeah and so if an area becomes too rich it suffers by being becoming achingly uninteresting and cool because rich people generally have very conformist tastes and so you compete against this by redefining what's important and movements essentially create cool as a way to compete against posh i guess yeah you know or or wealthy yeah and so if you could find a way of of knowing how how to petri dish cool i'll give you the perfect example of cool as a trade-off for for for rich okay which is i go to a um a conference with amnesty international okay and they wanted me to speak there now if you're amnesty international you can't just go and take over a five-star hotel and lodge it up because it's generally frowned on yeah okay and so amusingly for amnesty international they held the conference in what had been a police station in east berlin but had been converted into a hotel and the rooms were more or less cells okay i mean uh i'm pretty sure the walls were unplastered they were just concrete walls floor was concrete with a bit of hessian matting the shower your bed was on a platform on top of them so little space in the room your bed was a platform on top of the shower so you climbed up a ladder and went to sleep on a raised bed now the final touch was utterly brilliant which was there was a black and white television in the room it only had one channel and the only thing the channel showed then and now because this is still going on was the big lebowski and continuously okay now if you turned up expecting the marriage you would have had the worst weekend of your life you know but to me this is still one of the three best hotels i've done my share of bling travel it's still one of the three best hotels i've ever stayed at now just to be a very clear point this was not the only thing in the middle of the hotel was a kind of hipster coffee shop which i think was open 24 hours which served pretty much the best coffee i've ever had in my life so you can't make everything minimalist and ironic you've got to have one or two things that are fantastic yeah okay yeah but one or two fantastic things you know what extent did julie's wine bar uh change notting hill you know um doesn't exist anymore probably doesn't i don't think so i don't go that far west anymore you know particularly uncool um but um but but actually if you could work out the ingredients fairly well and it might also rely on the fact that you need to restrict who can buy and who can rent there because when people choose property they're partly choosing a peer group and a neighbor group yeah and part of the reason why i'll give you an example of another brand so if you own land in kensington people don't want to live in kensington because kensington is great they want to live in kensington because lots of other people who are like them think kensington is great therefore if you want to disrupt kensington right what you have to do is it's not enough to change one person's mind because people are choosing a peer group for themselves they're not choosing a location yeah and so in order to disrupt you have to change everybody's mind simultaneously which short of a neutron bomb is impossible is impossible yeah the same applies to private schools and universities okay people want to go to the universities that are most respected not by them but by other people and so university brands property brands school brands are very very difficult to unseat so they become these it's what's called a keynesian beauty contest in economics where everybody's second-guessing everybody else right so unless you can make everybody believe that everybody else has suddenly changed their mind so rooted in agreement becomes completely rooted now with property of course it does change over 20 or 30 years yeah um so the daughter of a colleague of mine said to her dad who's about my age she needed a bit of help with her first rental said dad i want to live in peckham because it's really handy for shortage now if you said that in 1988 you would have been sectioned okay um but so it does change but it's very very slow if you could find a way of accelerating that process i'll tell you a lovely story which is one guy who managed to do it which is a guy called sir christopher zeeman who was a mathematical genius was given the brief to launch mathematics at the newly founded university of warwick and he said look i'm only prepared to run a maths faculty at your new university if i can be mentioned in the same sentence as say imperial stroke oxford stroke came and she said i'm not interested in running a second tier third tier faculty if i can't be plausibly mentioned in the same sentence as those people i'm not doing it yeah they said fine how do you do it and he came out he came back with a very interesting proposal okay he said okay what you want me to do because this is what you're supposed to do when you start a math faculty is hire 15 different academics in 15 different fields of mathematics now if i do that i will get fairly averagely good people right okay because the best people have got tenure at yale or whatever it is okay but he said on the other hand i christopher zeman i i'm putting words in his mouth but his logic was i'm basically the world's leading expert in now i may have got this wrong but it's something like matrix topology okay a particular field of mathematics and he said i can't hire particularly good mathematicians in other fields but in matrix topology i can't get you the second best person in the world but i can get you the third fifth sixth eighth and ninth now if you let me hire just matrix topologists we could be the best place in the world for matrix topology okay and uh they allowed him to do it and sure enough of course you know it immediately gets on the map because the combination of these eight people is just extraordinary and then 10 years later they go and hire i'm not sure who it is i'm making this mathematically the best number theorist in the world and he repeats the process hiring the third fifth now all those people are perfectly capable of teaching undergraduate maths okay right they're not going to be going oh i've got you know oh i've got to do calculus today my brain that's right they're all perfectly capable of doing that stuff and the brilliant thing is if you want to compete with eaton you can't but if you want to be a place for music that's better than eaten you can right if you want to be a place that's better for sport than eaten okay there was that what what's that school that's full of you know you know you can do that right and so what you have to do is take a very narrow focus win on that and then wait so arguably the way to do it if you were a property developer is is to say we have to do one extraordinary thing here there has to be something here like the best coffee shop in the world and that will make the place a real an acceptable reason to go and live there yeah and as a result then bit by bit you know we'll start off with the world's best and this is analogous okay the world's best coffee shop and then we'll have the world you know two of the five years later we'll open three great restaurants and so on and so forth and it might be possible to seed coolness by doing it that way in other words you have to take one very narrow focus uh and then heavily ramp on that yes because the great problem with property brands like public school brands and university brands is they're formed collectively when you send your kids to school you're buying them a peer group really you're not really buying them teachers okay yeah it's the culture the whole cultural thing and so you're buying not your own beliefs but your assumption of everybody else's yes and so doing that is a really difficult thing to change but the bummer is i mean this is actually though it's not just a serious architecture but it's a serious economic question because henry george in the 19th century asked this question how do we stop the landowners basically grabbing hold of all the gains that are produced by the super productivity of people living in cities yeah and in london i guess a little bit of that the the underground was probably decisive in that by the underground and commuter rail was probably decisive in that it allowed the city to grow and of course area expands at the square of distance yeah so it allowed the city to grow for a time where um you know size wasn't the constraining factor i mean it's very interesting by the way american cities where there are two american cities where you don't have a massive constraint around property prices tend to have two characteristics they're not on the coast so in other words they can expand in all four directions yeah and the other thing is they were mostly built after the car was invented so what do i do that already scandalized architects by saying american muscle cars or whatever i really like phoenix arizona because the whole place i met a guy when i first went to phoenix i met a guy who was a tour guide at the botanic gardens in scottsdale and he was in his late 80s i think and he moved there in 1930 when the population of phoenix was 30 000 okay it's a town in the desert okay and it's now about what three million three and a half million now the great thing is that the whole town was built for the car now in phoenix when you're driving along and you need to make a right or make a left okay nearly everywhere else in the world you know the guys turning left stop and everybody behind them has to stop there you just create an extra couple of lanes on each side so anybody wants to go right we'll chuck a couple of lanes in there people going left we'll chuck a couple of ladies in there and you can just they synchronize the lights so you can flow into the center of phoenix if you maintain the speed limit right you can basically get in a single um uninterrupted movement uh vegas would be another case they're the places which had the worst property crash as well because there's no real constraint both on the directions in which they build yeah but also you live eight miles outside vegas you know even more so when your tesla model 3 arrives you know you basically just sit back and flow into town just let it do itself yeah um mussolini by the way uh wanted did you know this he wanted to build he thought that venice was old-fashioned having all these canals and he wanted to build an auto strada straight down the grand canal um uh the awful embarrassing thing is that fascists are good at infrastructure aren't they one of the terrible embarrassing you know uh uh elements of world war ii exactly in the military often yeah i suppose it's the military mentality and it won't have any of this nonsense exactly just get straight there straight it really interests me which is that you could i mean cable cars or something similar or some sort of elevated railway could help take the pressure off part of it could be done by rewriting the tube map you could solve a whole chunk of london's property problems if you first of all you have multiple designs of the tube map so everybody uses a different one yeah so the biases aren't compounding biases they aren't compounding areas it's not locked into that one everybody's not locked into that same mental model yes so for example people come to our office at black friars from say some pancreas and they get all the way around the circle line because thameslink isn't on the tube map now just to give you an example of this most of the overground existed most of the overground existed as a railway before it was called the overground it was called silverlink metro was a bit now i once needed to get from canary what being a railroad i once needed to get from canary wharf to richmond and i actually went up to stratford and took silverlink metro which is now the overground all the way around yeah to the thames i mean it's like it was like bad day at black rock and there's nobody on the platforms it was just you know absolute ghost town the instantly is when they added it to the tube map and called it the overground usage went up 400 in the first month so there are whole areas of it now the way i describe that is you've just created two billion pounds worth of infrastructure using inc because the infrastructure already existed for the most part it's just people didn't know how to use it it wasn't cognitively available and so one really interesting thing would be experimenting with property shortages by actually displaying london in lots of different ways so if you could encourage people to go to isochronic maps and dick around they go it's really weird what's that blob there yeah and of course ogilvy in my case i've got a colleague who lives in albans which is on thameslink in his case he sits at the front of the train beautifully uh black friar station is across the river we're on the south bank he effectively walks down a few flights of stairs walks along the embankment and he's 100 yards from our front door yeah the glory of that is he gets into london every day without actually experiencing any of the worst aspects of london like traffic or it's teleportation now you know if you'd encourage everybody at our office to play around with with um you know uh as i said isochronic it's like the isobar you see an isobar is a line of equal air pressure right and isocron is a line of equal journey in time what people would do is they'd completely rethink what they wanted from london yeah i think yeah so so when i say that that there's always a perceptual element to everything because our own view of london is hugely distorted yes um i mean from seven oaks just to give an example there are some two and three bedroom apartments above seven oaks station uh by the way don't move to terminate you want night life i will just just in case any young people take me in my word okay uh the place is dead after night but every other respect it's very nice place to live um now you know apartments above there are 34 minutes from some from sharon cross which is trafalgar square well that's fuller isn't it if you get on the tube at full and tearing across about 34 minutes i guess yeah okay but nobody thinks of the two places being even remotely comparable on any dimension at all okay and so part of part of the solution to property may be rebranding suburbia it's it's totally fascinating what you're talking about here absolutely no my mind's just going bloody hell because actually architects were very good at redefining how you perceive space how you perceive the city and you know the idea of using isochronic maps to be able to start um redefining people's relationship to how london is interpreted and that is a very powerful way for architects better communicate their value and a lot of how the industry works at the moment we're very reactive to because all developers by the way in the 19th century and before were brand were branding guys because if you look at fitzrovia pimlico bayswater was originally they tried to call it tyburnia after the model of belgravia and they named those areas and of course sometimes residents do it themselves with things like um clam and uh you know yeah but you know people do it themselves yeah and of course if everybody who lived in hampstead really lived in hampstead it'd be the third largest city in the you know people claimed to live nor i mean north kensington of course is the most dishonest piece of branding in there uh in london um uh but but all of those people were wise to that yes yeah um and somehow uh you know being able to create that kind of because the great thing is what you then do is the reason people created brands is it destroyed the power of the shopkeeper it restored some power of the of the manufacturer to influence consumer choice whereas otherwise the shopkeeper you'd simply come in rather like the soviet union you'd say i would like bread here is bread okay and by having branding and by attaching that branding to the product you regain and it's very important by the way because you have a feedback loop you see yeah capitalism doesn't work without branding because you can't reward good products by buying them again and punish bad products by boycotting them and dissing them to all your friends right so the brand mechanism is really important to the working of capitalism yes um because it's the it's what provides the feedback loop where good things get bought more and bad things get boycotted and um and therefore if you created brands around the quality of building rather than around the sodding location okay now i think we ought to give a bit of credit to barclay homes probably deserve a little bit of a you know a little bit of a hype if not a high five it's a high three is that fair or would you depends it depends they've done some yeah i'm probably scandalizing a lot of architects yeah um but but um but i mean there's been a little bit of effort made in terms of architectural quality and so forth yeah um i also think this is a terrible one okay i mean um i also think you could make planning permission um allow for much more indulgence of interesting uh buildings and architecture as well now it's a terrible thing coming from kent and again this is against analyze people but nothing that's weatherboarded is all together awful is that is that is that a okay okay but but i mean you know what i mean if you cover something one of the weirdest okay i'm gonna change this start question what's the problem okay in the united states they build their houses out of wood yes and they have tornadoes and hurricanes all the time in britain we don't have tornadoes and hurricanes and yet we won't build with wood to save our lives why is that because wood is nice okay yeah and there's again there's a perception about wood being something that's flimsy or you know even even now with kind of wood technology where it's at and people you know you can build skyscrapers out of timber nowadays that are absolutely incredible people still have the perception of like oh how's fire rating is it going to burn down oh i see but americans don't have that same paramount what what's going on there it's just what you're used to because in scandinavia okay you can't exactly have a problem with retaining heat because scandies do it yeah exactly exactly um generally wooden is an order of magnitude less unpleasant than concrete or brick shed also it would be interesting if you could create different forms of planning permission where there wasn't the assumption of permanence there's this huge problem with the property thing you see a the landowners get all the gains b the problem is you have property has a use value it has a delight i would argue it has delight value which is where architects come in yes okay yeah and it also has an investment value and the problem is that the investment value destroys the use value because if you have to pay the price for your property than an investor pays then that's more than you want to pay in terms of actual use and utility and also it crowds out the delight value of a property as well yeah okay because investors probably aren't principally interested in that because they're not they're not living there exactly exactly exactly but internet people aren't actually living there so the feedback loops broken and it's rather like having retailers deciding what chocolate gets sold rather than consumers yeah um so i mean there's so much i think that could be done here to make something i mean you know i mean a one question is we should just build some more towns because if there is a problem with nimbys don't build in people's backyard build somewhere else yeah so not far from seven eggs it's a place called new ash green it was canadian architect the span group in the 1970s and there's got a lot of experimentation there with two things one you couldn't park next to your house so you had a car park i think you might be able to drop things off at your house but then you had to go and park elsewhere to encourage people to meet and there was also experiments with local democracy over how the place was run and funded but the interesting thing it's got a population of seven or eight thousand it's in the middle of a wood no one in 7x even knows it exists they've just seen it on the front of a bus and so if you build in the middle of woods as part of rewilding no one's going to care right yeah okay so stop building in people's backyards that's the first brief you know and there are railway stations that serve basically bloody nobody where you could do that to an extraordinary degree of success this is really interesting because it's kind of again put in putting architects back in a position of being you know of her power and by leading developments rather than waiting for the property developers to come to us to make something squeeze something onto a site we're reacting to it actually architects have a lot of skills and abilities to be able to reshift the perception of a piece of city i mean and bring that factor of coolness to something i mean the one interesting thing one great thing by the way about living in a four bedroom apartment which is in a robin adam house is you you never suffer from property jealousy you see because you go and see someone's three million pound you know flat and cheney walk and your wife gets what do you think of their fat thought the architecture is a bit you know and um so you know undoubtedly one of the great lessons from psychology is that what you pay attention to becomes important you'd think it's the other way around okay yeah if people will decide what's important and then they'll pay attention to that actually if you use i mean literally kind of showmanship to get people to pay attention to um something okay that becomes important because they're paying attention to it so the flow of logic almost works backwards if you want to sell the euro star don't talk about speed because then people go well if if it's all about speed then i really need to fly to paris talk about how comfy the seats are the fact that there's wi-fi yeah and they'll go why would i ever fly because now suddenly productivity and comforts become the deciding factor and so you can i think use architecture so if you take those websites in america that's right on the market which is frank lloyd wright properties for sale yeah there's the modern house there's one called wow house as in bauhaus only warehouse yeah um i would i if i moved uh i would pretty much always go to one of those places and make my decision an architecture-first decision um and as a result as i said you're buying an extraordinary amount of both use value and what i call delight value yeah um very very effectively but the investment value is crowding out the whole thing the investment value is forcing too many two-bedroom apartments to be built because they're perfect for investors but they're print they're too small too big for an individual too small for a family yeah so that you know that's a distortion on the whole market and do you think as well there's there's a huge kind of restriction on the supply i mean with houses in london particularly there's a massive restriction on how many houses actually can be built the supply of them the price of land that becomes that that means that these kind of the property developers are very slow to do anything else they're very conservative as well which is yeah one of the things that's sad is i wish they could experiment a bit more um you know in um uh because public opinion takes time to shift as i said this is a job which has to be done collectively yes um and by the way i think a lot of i think a lot of nimbyism is driven by the fact that the buildings are so bloody ugly to be absolutely honest and they're hideously overcrowded uh in the you know the incentive to cram things in yeah they literally physically look bloated buildings it's absurd yeah and so um what what you could do there would be interesting which would be i mean at some level it's absurd that all the gains from property permission go to the owner of the land effectively i mean something's got to be done to kill that yeah so you basically go okay um uh there must be a way in which you could ensure that developers were less greedy and having once they bought the land at this inflated price they then have to do an appalling uh job there must be experimental ways where we could change this where for example um what would what might be interesting would be um you know where for example you buy property for its use value and the capital gain returns to the local authority for example um and you know countries like germany which have never had particularly places like berlin although you have a problem with gentrification there uh interestingly yeah but places which have never had that same uh problem um as the uk you know quite properly your property should be an element of enjoyment it should be principally considered as a pension yeah um but that's it but the other thing the other thing by the way is the extraordinary that could you a energy efficiency okay right b um tech houses are appallingly low tech okay i mean the front door key is a little you know you need to have a key for emergencies i accept that but the fact that my car opens automatically when i walk towards it but my house doesn't should be an item of shame i recently bought um a a gerberat aqua wash toilet with a japanese style don't don't call it is that the one with the with the little the hose the little thing comes and washes your bum right now now interestingly it's technically actually jeberet invented this and the japanese then cottoned on so technically we give the japanese the credit because they've adopted it the most enthusiastically it's an extraordinary brilliant thing and yet only one percent of toto's sales are to western europe and when i bought it someone sent me the i think the particulars for number one hyde park and pointed out that you could buy a 150 million pound apartment and you'd still have to wipe your own ass because it doesn't come with japanese style toilets okay it might be that if you're that rich someone else wipes your arse in fairness but but um uh the the low technicians i remember staying in the 50s of i mean the united states what say what you like about the us but at its best the architecture is fascinating so my brother-in-law lived in california uh in los angeles where he had a house it was three bedroom house two of the bedrooms were tiny but it had the most brilliant arrangement i've ever seen where the main living area was two squares in other words about 18 feet square which overlapped by 50 percent at one edge okay so they were contiguous at 50 percent of of an edge of each of them right okay and there was a screen you could close off therefore between the two so this meant in a sense you could have a television room and a sitting room by splitting them in two but if you wanted a whole host a larger well i suppose a coke-fueled orgy given that it's california given this los angeles but if you wanted to hold a mass party you could just connect the two and you had one huge room if you divided if you joined them together again you had two reasonably intimate rooms yes you know i stayed in a place in new york where there were rubbish shoots i stayed in place in los angeles where there was in-wall vacuum cleaning so you have central vacuuming so it's a ruddy rate machine in the basement and you just plug a snake into the wall and immediately it turns on the vacuum in the basement and you hoover the floor everything goes down to the basement and is retrieved from that laundry shoots uh milk doors you know none of this stuff's being added you know that what you you know and now different given the advances in tech there's something pretty shameful here isn't there there's something really really um crap about our ability to reinvent yeah we're still literally using roman technology basically to build to build houses yeah and and it's and it's in its bizarre as well because in architecture school or in the architecture profession there is this romance and love for technology and the kind of academic world perhaps produces these incredibly speculative buildings being you know that are organically growing by themselves being you know they're working with doctors and biologists about how buildings can reproduce themselves and artificially but then it's so divorced from actually how our cities get produced i don't exactly it's it's it's it's kind of like proof okay so buckminster fuller was ranting on about mass production of housing on the car model you know years ago wasn't it yeah yeah and when we're still struggling to have mass-produced houses or to help in terms of like a design for manufacture houses i worked i worked for um for rogers for a long time and we were and this is about 10 years ago when we were sort of pioneering design for manufacturing in housing using the kind of and it wasn't that sophisticated technology but to have any of the house builders adopt it was was they were very very reticent to do anything that was different too so i mean consumers are a bit at fault there because i faced a bit of spousal resistance to my bum wash toilet uh gibberish aqua wash bit of product placement there i'm all about people are very reluctant to look weird okay yeah um there was one spectacular i think there's a new york apartment where your car goes up in a lift is that right yes so actually your car is on the same floor as you are which did strike me as whether it was the most appalling thing or the most brilliant thing i've seen in 30 years that was damn interesting yeah you know um and um uh i mean really interesting questions arise of course with things like if if elon's work with batteries you know a kind of off-the-grid life so the really interesting thing might be the electric motorhome not the electric car yes because you know particularly if you could make the things slightly modular okay um you know i i do occasionally wonder about buying 32 acres of woodland somewhere on the grounds that actually that's you know that's the future yeah well and again it's the it's the the nature of ownership of house of of homes is totally changing well by the way you mentioned that because you by the way that's a really interesting point because you've got if you think about you've got use value you've got delight value you've got investment value and with ownership there's also a question of stability value which is i can invest in this okay without wasting my money which conventional rental doesn't allow you to do and i can now plan my life on certain basic assumptions which renting doesn't allow you to do because you can be kicked out too easily yeah yeah by the way i think all my father was a rental landlord and nearly all landlords also make a mistake by the way because if you've got a good tenant and he's been there for three years and inflation isn't particularly huge drop the rent now that sounds crazy what happens is landlords get greedy they try and put the rent out by 10 they then have the place empty for four months which cost them far more than they would have gained um in rent for you know the next few years yeah and the next tenants an okay if you've got a good tenant actually the price should fall to reflect his diminishing level of risk and i think there needs to be some sort of amazon prime version of rental where you can pay more up you know but anyway we'll talk about that later but but but but the the continuity thing in other words we hate kind of instability or we know we kind of do it kind of territorial a little bit yes and having that freedom that someone could actually create something which was permanent would be fascinating yes yeah i did meet someone who's got a brilliant idea for doing this by the way very recently and i'd love to describe it but i'm sworn to secrecy but there is a very clever way in which you could do it um but actually also working in behavioral science or marketing for a uh you know a a mass producer of housing simon woodruff by the way of the founder of yo sushi i don't know where it went he had a very interesting idea about how you can make space multiple use so my father by the way interestingly has i mean for 30 years has always thought that it's pretty stupid that bedrooms during the day have a sodding great bed on the floor and that you should be able woodruff's idea was using the counterweights of stage scenery you could make very large elements of a home completely movable because stage seems scenery because it's counterweighted you know you can kind of lift up to immensely heavy things with one hand yes and he had a plan to have very small apartments where apart from the bathroom and shower every single square foot had more than one use so the study could be a second bedroom because the desk became a bed and i'm fairly sure that um you lifted your bed into the ceiling in the main room and it revealed a kind of conversation pit and wine cellar patently saying one of mr woodruff's interests but that he said every single square foot of the thing bar the bog can basically serve more than one purpose yeah and so you turn 400 square feet into 800 or 800 and 1600. and that that by the way is also by the way kind of true um we had a huge bit of luck with our four-bedroom apartment we thought we were gonna be there for six years and then outgrow it but um the two children one of the one of the the four bedrooms is up in the roof at the top of a spiral staircase this is because it's weirdly aligned okay the other one is actually in the portico over the front okay now they're both tiny but they're really weirdly located and shaped now our massive bit of luck was both our children wanted as their bedrooms the two weirdest but smallest rooms because they were kind of cozy and eccentric leaving us with a room to turn into a study and a room to turn into a huge bedroom and so that you know that's an interesting question which is you know making the whole layout of buildings more eccentric yeah you know i mean the the the level of sort of bourgeoisness around you know what function is designated to what room uh is is really pretty yeah and i mean and as an architect i mean we still struggle with getting things to be open plan with with a client sometimes and you're still you know fighting to have a flat roof for example they are worse on the maintenance terms my father always hated flat roofs not now not now i mean you're pretty convinced yeah you can get good get a good well-performing flat roof um you know same as a same as a pitch roof if it's done done properly and now i mean i mean this is interesting isn't it because the i'm pretty convinced that just as if you like the status currency of humans are innately status seeking creatures okay forget about trying to get rid of that because it's not gonna go away we're chimps you know it's it's embedded okay but the currencies we use to compete for status change and can analogy can be changed as well and so just as for example urban millennials don't really i don't know what any of my staff whether they own a car or not or what car it is in 1988 i knew all my colleagues what car they drove because you talked about it all the time now interestingly you can go to machu picchu and put it on facebook but you can't really put your ford mustang on facebook if you're an urbanist millennial and so as a result they're obsessed with travel but not very interested in cars yeah i think you could create a generation which is obsessed with architectural and design quality and with sustainability yes yes not not just sustainability nobody does something out of pure altruism but you can get people to do very very altruistic things if you bake in a little bit of selfishness well this is an interesting question actually is the you know our architects we're very passionate about sustainability and having you know we're very aware of how much mess the construction industry makes and being able to market if you like or build a brand for sustainability a lot of the times it's kind of like a it's in the context of a big make wrong and a kind of fear-based make make you know we've got to do this otherwise it's the end of the world type of thing and it and it's becomes doesn't always land very well with developers and our clients and actually it's um the way to sell it is that sustainability provides an answer to the question where do you live okay so if you want to live in an area where land is less expensive but you say i live in this new sustainable i mean what okay bexley would probably be okay which londoners don't even realize is in london okay but if you if you say where do you live and you say i live in bexley you know basically uh you're going home alone okay you know i always think that part of the reason young people are obsessed with living in hackney as i said you know if you live in bromley you can't pull you know you know people go what if i'm going home to bromley and i discover he's a loony you know i've got a 50 pound tax engineer but if you just said um actually i'm looking at this really new sustainable now if you said i'm looking to move to bexley right you know basically you know everyone will shuffle off but if you said there's this new sustainable development in bankster and there's a great paper written by sanford bernstein um flatteringly i might say self-flatteringly slightly influenced by something i wrote yeah which says that actually sustainability is now part of the product cycle it's a reason to innovate okay so in order capitalism marketing in order to get people to continue to buy stuff okay yeah have to give them a new reason to buy something yeah okay and in many cases the reason that companies are now putting in is is it precisely sustainability it's a reason for you to change your behavior because the products are all doing you know basically most products you know for all the faults of capitalism it produces an enormously high range of ship that's pretty good but doing the job it's supposed to do and so in order to find a way to differentiate yourself or innovate sustainability out of pure selfishness on the part of the competitive business is one of the planks they can actually choose to invest in and actually i would say that sustainability is that's the way you get young people to move to bexley i mean you know you know i just put a hundred quid down for a tesla okay and um ultimately the reason i'm doing it i'm buying a smaller car that i already have etc and the reason i'm doing it is i you know is that i need to change my car and i can't really think of a reason to change my car or to improve it other than sustainability and i have got to the point where using a petrol car feels incongruous yes okay yeah and also um the you know as i mentioned about the carno theory the tesla comes with dog mode um which is how you set the air conditioning on your car but even cleverer what they're front of course if you leave a dog in a car on a hot day other people who don't understand the tesla's dog mode will assume the dog is in distress so dog mode actually comes to stop them smashing the window it comes with a display on the screen that says don't worry my owner will be back soon and the temperature inside is a comfortable 69 degrees fahrenheit you see now the interesting thing is that massively appeals to me even though i don't have a dog um and so you know in a sense it's a form of novelty which is if i'm going to do a new thing which you know there's no point in just doing a new version of the old thing because i spend a lot of money and i get something that's it it's just like it's what i was saying when i went shopping for bedding with my wife okay um i weirdly said no can i make a deal with you i said we're here in this bedding department can we spend one of two amounts of money nothing or a lot okay and she was making sense she's used to saying that okay i said no no i'm kind of happy with our existing bedding okay yeah i'm cool with it you know if we spend 200 pounds we've got the same bedding we had before but it'd be kind of fresher well i've spent 200 and i don't really get anything new out of this you know i don't get an endorphin rush out of going oh we've got some new machines right if we spend nothing i've saved 200 quid so i'm gonna buy a drone on the other hand if you spend quite a lot i can get excited by togg values and egyptian cotton and oxford pillowcases mattress toppers turn it into a project and actually notice something new yeah and so in a sense the environmental movement can harness human neophilia yes okay i think that's why the dyson works right which is so how how it effectively works is that um if i if i move from my existing house to a sustainable that dyson i was putting my business okay which is oh the vacuum cleaners okay oh god we've got to spend 200 quid and i can't you know i spent 200 quid and i get a vacuum cleaner that's like an old vacuum cleaner so i've i've spent 200 quid and i haven't moved forward okay i'm just where i was before on the other hand if i spunk 500 quid on a dyson it's a lot more money but i've actually got something different right yeah i've actually got you know i've actually got something which goes wow this is cool you know attachments you know bagless and so i think you can use sustainability in that way as a marketing tool which is you know if you've got if you've got a house which miraculously opens the top when it gets too hot and does weird things you know and yeah i can't wait to get solar panels not to save the money but just for the geekishness of you know going four kilowatt hours today yeah you know you know it's kind of celebrating the performance of it it's the way you get people to do better things is by making it a bit selfish or novel or so nobody washed and bought soap in 1920 and for pear soap didn't say wash with pear set and help prevent a color outbreak did they right they didn't speak to the big overarching social good they basically said if you don't wash with so with our scented soap you'll die single alone it was all really darwinist you know it was all about if you smell if your house is dirty you know they're unbelievable kind of anxiety promoting things promoting selfish benefits the scent yeah whereas the big collective benefit which is the fact that the soap was also act antibacterial was almost left to the left to the background yeah and in the same way i think the way to sell environmentalism is me this house is cool and it's also environmental yes and i think tesla's done that fantastic yes right i mean i know it's environmentally clean it's electric i'm you know i'm conscious of all that stuff um but at the same time that on its own doesn't get me to act okay whereas dog mode does now i know that makes humans seem unbelievably trivial and stupid but the fact is we are okay so let's just live with that okay that's how we perceive the world that's how we act there's not much you can do to correct that without making people no longer recognizably human okay so let's park that project because you know various authoritarian regimes have already tried that okay and let's just actually work with the grain of human nature yeah that's wonderful don't don't you know i mean i i you know the the one thing i would probably move house to would be if someone came up with a really cool and that would also mean not only sustainable boring sustainable house not going about they bought a really cool house which was also sustainable okay now i'm interested okay if it's got you know weird features like you know i mean easter eggs we need more easter eggs and by the way that can be just a really eccentric room you know you know an observatory i don't know you know what i mean yeah okay yeah yeah but um but i mean and i i think that way of of and the other interesting thing about that of course is you can't find what appeals to people through market research because they themselves don't know until they've seen it and so this is why you need much more experimentation in architecture because it's only when you experiment that you discover what people really want yeah you know in a sense centralized capitalism wouldn't work that badly if people could articulate exactly what they wanted in advance the truth of the matter is we don't have introspective access to a lot of the things that drive our behavior and so you know what what would be glorious okay is if if one of the large larger developers or or a collective of developers just had a skunk works and said we're just going to put 20 well we're going to keep on doing what we're doing we're just gonna put 20 into the skunk works because four out of five of the things we try first will fail okay but if we if we find a really miraculous success like young people you can get them to move to bexley if right you know whatever it may be if you could just find a hack that works then the gains from that hack way more than that pays the cost of the four failures and so bees do this eighty percent of bees obey the world will dance twenty percent of them are the skunk works and it's what's called exploit explore eighty percent of your efforts exploiting what you already know i know where these flowers are i know they've got pollen i know they've got nectar we will exploit that knowledge but then the 20 of bees which at first glance look like an inefficiency because they fail frequently are there to explore what you don't yet know it's kind of like deliberately uh creating a mutation if you like in in your in your creativity and just experimenting mutation is exactly the right word yes it's exactly how evolution works yeah um so that would be something i'd really really like you know i mean any kind of property skunk works and i mean uh old um frank lloyd wright um uh he had that um the prairie homes where actually you could order the designs off the page couldn't you now having some sort of national competition i've tried to get the spectator to do something similar which is because you do have that weird committee for the built environment don't you which roger scrutin was forced to resign from yes yes um i i mean that that sort of stuff just brought the hell out of me like an awesome synthetic scandal and it and it's and it's i mean again that kind of stuff particularly what's happening that's very devoid from a lot of current architectural thinking and it's very traditional in many aspects and yeah i mean the traditional people actually write about some stuff which is that over design leaving room for um uh you know so that to some extent the process will always be a bit organic that business where you actually wait to see where people walk and you don't put concrete down until you see where the muddy paths are there's an element of that i think you have to leave room for and everything yeah there's kind of emergent strategy yeah and the other one weird thing would be so do you remember we talked about okay with property there's use value investment value delight value yes and also what you might call stability value um it's interesting to me i mean you know if you take airbnb which was experimenting quite heavily with different lock technologies it occurred to me that if you had let's say a second home where you had a key to it all the time and depending on an app on your phone which was either green or red you could on the calendar you could either use the property or you couldn't yeah that could actually use technology to mimic what you might call ownership value the sense of ownership that you know there might be really clever both financial mechanisms legal mechanisms but technological mechanisms and like perceptual mechanisms to be able to yeah to to create that feeling that experiences no no hotel i mean i imagine hotels would do this if you ask nicely but to to pay a small amount to have a right to use a a building full of micro homes in london but where you also had a small amount of storage because then if you can leave your there the reason i own a second home in deal in kent um and it's just a two bedroom maize net thing but the reason you own it okay is largely because i could i could go down there now on the train uh i've got the key i've got the key okay and i could basically i've got clothes there i've got underpants there i've got a charger for my laptop okay i put my phone on a charger rather than having to retrieve a cable all that and of course i can arrive and leave at random times okay without the feeling that i have to you know meet someone at two to hand over the key so technology in some ways can i think provide some really interesting psychological hacks in terms of what ownership means because if you have a place where essentially a you've got a degree i want to see i've always had this idea that fractional ownership and timeshare was such a brilliant idea okay that the trouble was because it was such a brilliant idea it was very very lucrative which attracted a load of crooks which therefore discredited the whole category right but i went to see an interesting madeira fractional ownership development where the bedroom had four wardrobes and each of the four owners had one of the wardrobes and then you went down into the basement and there were four things the size of a garage where you keep a canoe or a sailing dinghy or you wouldn't keep a surfboard but i don't know what you keep there but you keep a whole load of stuff i mean literally you could keep you know wardrobes of stuff there and again each owner had one of the four so essentially when you arrived at your house you just unlocked wardrobe number three and there was your stuff there that's fascinating which is fascinating what does ownership actually yeah and how and how a small something gestural something gestural and symbolic yeah something's wrong with people change the way you feel absolutely fascinating but but an invitation to anybody in your category this is not you know anybody who's trying to trying to innovate or do something significantly new in the property space i'd love to hear from you just from a sort of behavioral science point of view of what it takes to um i mean an interesting one would be if you founded a huge sort of innovative property club and you got young people to join and you could continually market to them electronically this is the new stuff that's continually happening okay if if you've been if you go to the modern house okay roughly speaking uh six times a month okay you're never gonna buy a conventional house yeah okay if you've got a prime location you're gonna end up with a conventional house so if you can change the frame of comparison the choice architecture and the path dependency of choice uh in the way people look for housing um there are a few other interesting experiments with rental housing uncle which is i think a guy called ryan prince has developed a brand for the landlord which is their you know their property developments for rental yeah where there's actually a kind of uh because if you think about it you're paying a stack of money to your landlord but again all you have is his own individual reputation there's no bigger brand to be built you know and actually a good landlord's worth paying a premium for yeah right a good tenant is worth uh you know it's actually it's actually like uber it's a two-way market yeah actually um good tenant you can lower the rate my father always said that if you've got a good dependent long-term reliable tenant do what you can because that continuity and you know i mean one you know in one month can undo a hell of a lot of you know a hell of a lot of games and so and by the way i mean we ought to remember this okay landlords are routinely vilified sometimes within reason but my god you'll remember the worst 15 of tenants are awful i mean really really awful not necessarily awful by the way in that they trash the place they have parties that's one kind of awful but the other kind of awful is the litigious tenant who keeps trying to sue you because the bath is dripping you know or the totally aimly retentive tenant who complains about things that um you know no sane person would care about so i mean there are quite you know you know there are two or three ways in which landlord can be awful but there are ten ways in which a tenant can be off yes so we mustn't forget in that sort of in this new trend to vilify landlords um we must forget that it's a two-way street yes it's fascinating this idea of a kind of property club i mean i've spoken before with a colleague of mine we've you know talked about doing developments or having a more like a subscription-based model for for renting so yeah you kind of you know you kind of pay a monthly subscription you've got access to 15 20 different properties over a certain period of place uh over a certain area it could even be international type of thing it's kind of that sort of knowledge if you live in bexley but you get three weeks ago yeah yeah yeah exactly okay i mean that i mean that's another way in which you could make it cool yeah but anything anything that kills this bloody i mean there's a very good anthropologist i think who said to me when when anybody in london meets anybody in london their first question is where do you live and if you can get them to answer the question you know in the sort of inner half house rather than location okay i mean that that would be a huge change because at the moment i mean it was hapo marked wasn't it you said i think buy land because that's the one thing they're not making anymore yeah and the extent to which landowners have a stranglehold over this is deeply damaging to the economy i mean new yorkers have said to me that new york under rent control had the most fantastic nightlife and too fantastic you know um but the most fantastic nightlife because there was all this disposable income kicking around okay you know i mean i suddenly noticed that young people are kind of boring now and i suddenly realize this because they've got no discretionary income because you know property is soaking this all up and actually if they've bought that you know massively enthralled to a mortgage they're renting you know it's soaking up a huge amount of their expenditure and um so anything that cracks this problem yes would be absolutely fascinating yeah absolutely and you can crack it you what you've just got to do is you've just got to get people advertising pulls this trick okay i'll tell you that i always tell the story so apologies to people who've heard it before so i'm landing at gatwick airport and you know that business where the plane's engines wind down you're still a mile from the airport building and you're it's going to be a bus right now if you change the story if you change the frame of comparison you change the perception right you don't have to change the thing itself you just have to get people to look at it in a new way and you can totally get people to reevaluate something and this example is case where the pilot it's going to be a bus and the pilot says something ingenious which is an ad okay i'm afraid i've got some bad news and some good news he says uh the bad news is i won't be able to get you an air bridge because there's a plane blocking the gate the good news is the bus will take you all the way to passport control so you won't have far to walk with your bags we looked at each other i never thought a bit like that before that the bus isn't just an inconvenience it's convinced and i don't have to walk through loads of caf gas corridors to get to passport control and baggage reclaim because the bus takes me right there okay and if you if you do that on a plane people are actually now quite glad there's a bus particularly something like skipper where sonic miles and you can do the same thing if you get people to focus on property from an architectural quality sustainability technology any standpoint like that why is apple the most valuable company in the world because it got people not to ask what's the clock speed what's the memory capacity it stopped people looking at phones by what they could do and it got them looking at what it feels like while you're doing it yes and by by changing the frame of comparison and by owning the new uh the new dominant consideration it's now worth a trillion dollars and um you know if if i have one regret it's probably that if jobs had gone into the property and development business musk might in a weird way elon musk with these weird batteries because they they do change a lot don't they when you think yes those batteries potentially yeah no exactly it gives the potential completely off-grid completely like mobile phone okay email arrives wherever you are you've got a 4g 5g connection uh you're off the grid uh okay you've got a running great solar panel somewhere um actually you know that that changes the game yeah because you put the damn thing on wheels make it notionally movable and um you've just hacked planning couldn't you yes i suppose there was one one example i'd give a perfect place to end okay where which killed that where do you live thing which was to answer a houseboat and that might be a clue you should have been yes i i was i was gonna say actually um when i i used to live on a houseboat actually and and unpredictable and as a young man in my 20s it was the best thing to say on a night out where you lived i live in a house but i live on a houseboat and uh yeah beat them you couldn't answer that what is a better answer to that there's no better answer yeah absolutely fantastic and likewise if you created a branded development somebody's doing this a little bit um again um who was it who got philippe stock os made okay so i just met um brent uh hoberman yeah okay and when they started maid they got philippe started on the board of directors and designed some of the furniture if you got a first-rate architect to you know design the central thing and then young aspiring architects to design the thing around it again that's that you could use a mixture of rock star architecture and young talent to create something which gets complete reappraisal yeah love it absolutely love it what a pleasure rory thank you so much and that's a wrap thank you so much for listening and don't forget to book your 15 minute chat with me by using the link in the information i look forward to speaking with you the views expressed on this show by my guest do not represent those at the host and i make no representation promise guarantee pledge warranty contract bond or commitment except to help you be unstoppable

Channel: Business of Architecture

Views: 6,993

Rating: 4.9754601 out of 5

Keywords: architect, architecture firm, architecture, Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy UK, Branding, Branding architecture, brand and property, advertising and property, advertising architecture

Id: 5Cq-157gaao

Length: 95min 55sec (5755 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020