Cincinnati-based GBBN is a relative newcomer to the Twin Cities, but the architecture firm hopes to expand its footprint in the area with help from experienced leadership and tools such as augmented reality.
Leading the Minneapolis office, which was established in 2020, is associate principal Michael Grage, who has 20 years of design and project management experience and is a project manager within GBBN's health care market.
GBBN's local projects include work for Children's Theater and the Hennepin Theater Trust, as well as a tenant improvement for Brown & Brown in the former AT&T Building at 901 Marquette Ave. in downtown Minneapolis.
In the following interview, Grage and Troy Malmstrom, GBBN's associate principal and director of computational design & fabrication, talk about how their company is using augmented reality to break down communication barriers with clients and end users, among other topics.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Talk a little bit about your firm and the types of work you do.
Grage: We were founded in 1958 in Cincinnati. I started the office here four years ago, having worked here in Minneapolis since 2007. I had worked with GBBN on a health care project in Cincinnati back in about 2010, so that's where I first got to know GBBN as a firm. They were the architect of record on a medical office building that we had designed here in Minneapolis.
We've got four offices here in North America. We also have one in Beijing, which we started in 2004.
About 60% of what we do is in health care. But we also have a higher education practice, where we specialize in student centers, dining facilities, classroom buildings. We do work in the arts as well, primarily performance spaces, both theaters and music venues.
We also have a mixed-use market, which would be multifamily apartments, both market rate and subsidized. We also do community buildings, like libraries or community centers.
Q: I understand you have been using augmented reality to improve communication with clients and end users. Talk about that and how it works.
Malmstrom: One of the things that's unique within the architecture world is everything that we are doing is through visualization and communication. What our vision is for the final building never gets realized until it's actually built. But we have to communicate internally, within ourselves, amongst our team. We have to be able to communicate with our clients. We have to be able to communicate with our contractors. Obviously, we do that through drawings and renderings and models and other forms of representation.
The constant issue with all those things is that drawings are a language. There are symbols and there are representations that you have to be trained to read that language and understand that language. Our clients are fantastic at what they do as a profession; reading drawings is not what they're asked to do as a profession. So interpreting those drawings often comes as a bit of a challenge.
I'll also say that trying to represent three-dimensional space through two-dimensional media, like on paper and drawings or in renderings, doesn't accurately represent the idea of the space, or doesn't tell the whole story, if you will.
So we've been working a lot with Augmented Reality as a way to get us one step closer to that built, full-scale element to help that communication and understand the space. Because really, the designing of the space is about a feel of that space. To see on a drawing a 10-foot-wide corridor, you may tell yourself, "I know how far 10 feet is." But then to actually be in a hospital and pushing two gurneys past each other down a 10-foot corridor has a little bit of a different feeling. [With augmented reality], we're actually able to put ourselves, our clients, our contractors, in a three-dimensional space that is of the scale of the final, to be able to help talk through some of those potential issues and how we might solve some of those.
Augmented reality allows us to take digital elements, digital design elements, and put them in the physical space that you can then navigate throughout. And being able to do that has just elevated the understanding and the experience that our clients are getting for that space to help that communication even further. And it's also allowing them to walk through, talk through, potential issues in the configuration of those spaces.
That communication issue is at the heart of basically everything that we are doing as designers to better communicate what our design intent is before any dollars are spent on actually building out the final space. Changing things early in the project is a lot less expensive than changing things later in the project.
Q: This sounds similar to building information modeling, or BIM. How is AR similar or different?
Malmstrom: Building information modeling, BIM modeling, is still all about a computer model that exists fully and is primarily used for production and documentation. It's just a way for us to build out the model in three dimensions as a single object, and then be able to cut necessary plans and sections and the necessary construction documents from that.
What's nice about building information modeling is the other information you can embed into it -- things like door schedules, window schedules -- that are necessary for that construction process. However, this is more focused around the end user. This is more focused on walking through that space and understanding it at a full scale 'real life scenario,' as opposed to looking at it through a computer screen and moving around through a computer screen.
Q: On another subject, AIA recently came out with a report showing that architectural billings were down for the 12th consecutive month in September. What has your local workload been like and what is your outlook for the next 12 months?
Grage: It's definitely true that there are some real challenges out there, some headwinds. We felt some of the impact, like everyone else in our in our region. But in our conversations with clients and potential clients, there's still an appetite for projects there. They want to move forward, but they're still held back by budget constraints and different uncertainties around funding strategies, mitigating rising costs and complex funding environments. It's not that there isn't the desire. It's they're just waiting for the right time when the financing can make sense.
We're optimistic with the recent adjustments to the interest rates. That is going to take some time for that to kind of work its way into the market. But then also, increasing availability of diverse funding sources should help unlock some of that pent-up demand.
In the next few months, it's going to still be a challenge. It's going to take some time to get that momentum back. But we're quite optimistic that as financial pressures ease, we're going to see some of these projects starting up again.
We had quite a few that were awarded, but then put on hold last year. And we've got a tremendous backlog just waiting to pop here. We see that across all of our markets.
We are also starting to see a return-to-office effort take hold slowly as companies are adjusting to the remote working environment and how that's affected their communication, office culture and the like. So we're hoping that will also lend to some more interest in centralizing again, or going back into the office in some ways.