#312 - Nerd Fest

Evan Troxel:
00:00:11
Anger management. Is the, the key word for the day?

Cormac Phalen:
00:00:14
It might be, yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:00:15
Look, Look, at the, oh my, just, my face hurts. My brain hurts. My face hurts. They all hurt.

Cormac Phalen:
00:00:23
You know, amongst,

Evan Troxel:
00:00:25
happened? Cormick.

Cormac Phalen:
00:00:26
amongst all of the other things that happened today, work-wise and everything else, we have. Waterline, both the water main along the main road and the feeds into the neighborhood are all being replaced. So obviously they've gotta replace all of the taps within every part of the, like from the, the feed into the neighborhood to each of the houses. And so they put this, they, they put this little note on there that says, well first of all, they said that there was going to be some sewer line work coming soon, not waterline work, sewer line. So, you like, okay. And they said,

Evan Troxel:
00:01:17
people dunno the difference, but

Cormac Phalen:
00:01:19
and then they said that this. Work wasn't gonna be till like, mid-October or late October. I think it started like the week of like the 19th or something like that. 16th. I. is when it, you know, week of the 16th is when it was supposed to start. So we very fine. And then they start to mobilize and they start doing this work and they start, marking all of the different utilities. So, you know, we've got, marks for sewer, for water, for gas, and so on and so forth. And then they, are running power, like any of the power that's underground or whatever. Okay, fine. You know, I mean, we are, we're improving the, the infrastructure, right? Great.

Evan Troxel:
00:02:01
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:02:02
the little note that they, hang on your, door handle that says What's going on? We need you to make sure that you don't park on the street, blah, blah, blah, and all this other stuff. Well, then they,

Evan Troxel:
00:02:15
Unless you want your car tagged, you know, if you want your car tagged with the the neon paint, then then it's okay.

Cormac Phalen:
00:02:21
Then they say, well, just this minor inconvenience. It'll, it'll be a minor inconvenience. Lemme just

Evan Troxel:
00:02:27
If we don't say so, if we, if we say so ourselves,

Cormac Phalen:
00:02:30
Let me, let me, let me tell you what their minor inconvenience is. First of all. the four lane road is a one lane road. The, there's pipes and stuff like, All up and down, because we live on a court, there's one way in, you know, and it kinda like loops around. So you can either come in one way or come in another way, or they've got one side completely blocked off. Okay. if you tell us in advance that they're, you're gonna block one of them off, then we'll make arrangements to go through the other, road, right?

Evan Troxel:
00:03:03
Sure. Right, right, right.

Cormac Phalen:
00:03:05
No No, because.

Evan Troxel:
00:03:08
Yeah,

Cormac Phalen:
00:03:09
All of the piping and all of the material and everything else is on blocking that side of the neighborhood. The other side is the back hose, the dump trucks, the, you know, oh, let me just go ahead and set down this several, several ton chunk of concrete, water You know, like man, new manhole, um, structure and all this other stuff. And hope that at seven o'clock in the morning when we're starting all of this work, it's not gonna be too much of an inconvenience when everybody in the, neighborhood actually wants to leave

Evan Troxel:
00:03:50
Mm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:03:50
take their kids to, school or

Evan Troxel:
00:03:53
right?

Cormac Phalen:
00:03:54
whatever.

Evan Troxel:
00:03:55
Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:03:56
So, then they're like, okay, We're gonna be doing pipe bursting. So there should be like no real pro, you know, no real inconvenience to no real disturbance. Okay, that sounds great. You know, pipe bursting is awesome, you know, and, and, and so there shouldn't be any disturbances. So please tell me why. I have a 10 foot by 12 foot by 12 foot deep hole in my front yard.

Evan Troxel:
00:04:26
What.

Cormac Phalen:
00:04:27
my neighbor. Who just replaced his yard, pristine yard. It's beautiful. He dug it out himself. He leveled it. He put in new, new, uh, irrigation system, resodded and seeded the whole thing. It's now been in for a while and it's rooted and it looks beautiful. Sorry, let me change that. It looked. Beautiful

Evan Troxel:
00:04:54
no.

Cormac Phalen:
00:04:55
the, the 10 by 12 by 12 foot deep hole that I had, he's got two.

Evan Troxel:
00:05:02
Wow. For what? What do they, what do they

Cormac Phalen:
00:05:04
Oh. Also, he also has the, the luxury of being the house that was chosen to host the Portage on

Evan Troxel:
00:05:13
Oh,

Cormac Phalen:
00:05:16
I mean,

Evan Troxel:
00:05:17
what those pits are for. Those are pit toilets.

Cormac Phalen:
00:05:19
So the neighbor next to me, Not only is there their minor disturbances, three holes, now they have the half the front of their apron, of their driveway to the road, probably about three sidewalks steep, let's just call it 15 feet from the road to, 15 feet into their property that they don't have a, their driveway anymore.

Evan Troxel:
00:05:51
Wow.

Cormac Phalen:
00:05:53
That

Evan Troxel:
00:05:53
get put back exactly as it was

Cormac Phalen:
00:05:55
exactly, and this was a new, this they, they just paid for a new driveway too.

Evan Troxel:
00:06:01
Wow.

Cormac Phalen:
00:06:02
And they've got their

Evan Troxel:
00:06:03
this is the thing that scares me about the East coast because everything is so old on the East Coast,

Cormac Phalen:
00:06:10
yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:06:11
is so old and it's like one problem leads to another. I remember before I moved outta Southern California, they put new water lines in, not sewer lines, but water lines into the whole neighborhood. And it took 'em a couple months to do it, but they didn't have to dig a trench the whole way. They just. Have you seen these things where they do it like remotely, where they'll, they, they can like punch these holes and connect it without digging a whole trench. It's,

Cormac Phalen:
00:06:40
Well, so that, that's, that's essentially what they did here, except for the holes were, just a minor inconvenience. It just small minor

Evan Troxel:
00:06:48
for a, just a mass grave is what

Cormac Phalen:
00:06:50
Yeah, exactly. and, and, it's all so like, so they did one side of, at least the first half of the loop of our. Street and now they're starting to do the other side. So of course, you, you, you don't worry. It's just a minor inconvenience when this really large dump truck is blocking you from getting out of your driveway.

Evan Troxel:
00:07:18
right.

Cormac Phalen:
00:07:18
when you let, let's just, I'll, I'll give you an example. Let's say you have to go and pick up your daughter from school to take her to a doctor's appointment. And you, you know, that Well, I, I should probably leave a little bit early 'cause it's probably gonna take a little while just to get out of my, my yard. And so I walked down there, oh, wait, wait, sorry, this is hypothetical. Um, so, um, this person walks down there and walks up to the crew and says, you know, Hey, uh, I need to get to a doctor's appointment. Can, can you guys, Move your, move outta the way just real quick. let me get out. You can, you know, get back in. Um, just gotta get out of, you know, I, I just need to get out of the thing and I can't go around them because there's

Evan Troxel:
00:08:03
Somebody, you, you, somebody

Cormac Phalen:
00:08:04
Yeah, that's, that's right. That somebody can't get around them because there's a, hypothetically a 10 foot by 12 foot by 12 foot deep hole between the front of their truck and the, yeah. So, so then They go to the driver and say, Hey, we need to let this guy out, and the driver looks at this hypothetical person and says, F him.

Evan Troxel:
00:08:36
Vow shall not pass.

Cormac Phalen:
00:08:38
That hypothetical person looks at her like, really, this is this, this is how the day's gonna go. It's like just simply asking you to like move out of the way so I can go to a doctor's appointment and

Evan Troxel:
00:08:52
Nope.

Cormac Phalen:
00:08:52
this, this, seriously, it was,

Evan Troxel:
00:08:55
Wow.

Cormac Phalen:
00:08:56
it took me 15 minutes to literally,

Evan Troxel:
00:08:59
a, a very dark day.

Cormac Phalen:
00:09:01
Yeah. We'll just, we'll, we'll, we'll just admit to it, it being my, my joy of the day and, and so yeah, it was a, it, it was, it was something special and I was just like, I, I don't, I don't get it. I, I don't, I, you know, I,

Evan Troxel:
00:09:19
Bummer.

Cormac Phalen:
00:09:19
yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was fun. It was fun, you know? I mean, yeah. I, oh, and one, one last thing. So where they're stockpiling all of the pipes happens to be in front. So there is a very well known and has been a long standing tradition within this neighborhood and, and so I just learned about it, obviously only being here now a year. There's this, family that owns two properties and they've got a couple of like garages. So they have this thing called the Haunted Garage Productions.

Evan Troxel:
00:09:57
Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:09:57
what they do is they do this really, really big, haunted house, and it opens up on the 6th of October, which is in a couple of days.

Evan Troxel:
00:10:08
Not this year. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:10:10
And the,

Evan Troxel:
00:10:12
Oh,

Cormac Phalen:
00:10:12
and where all of this stuff is, is literally stockpiled in front of the entrance into this, awesome neighborhood. haunted house thing.

Evan Troxel:
00:10:23
Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:10:25
And I, I just look at him every time I go by and I'm just like, these poor people, they're just like, you know, this is a, you know, this is something fun. This is like, you know, and, and, and I will say that there's thousands of people who go to this thing all the time. I mean, yeah. And I, I can't even make eye contact to my neighbor who did all of this work on his lawn, and he now has Basically into these big, massive graves dug in his front yard and Oh, and they didn't bother to check to see if there was a, irrigation system, just assuming, you know, probably not. But he had one in, you know, we, I sat around chatting with him while he was installing it. Yeah, they dug that up too.

Evan Troxel:
00:11:18
Well, yeah, it's in,

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:20
So,

Evan Troxel:
00:11:21
of course.

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:21
So, yeah,

Evan Troxel:
00:11:23
It sounds like a comedy of errors. Is this a governmental agency or is it private? Did they hire a private company to do this work? Do you know?

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:31
they hired a private contractor to do the city's,

Evan Troxel:
00:11:36
Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:37
you know, uh, water main replacements,

Evan Troxel:
00:11:40
Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:41
so, yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:11:42
fat contract. Wow.

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:44
Oh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

Evan Troxel:
00:11:47
I.

Cormac Phalen:
00:11:48
exactly.

Evan Troxel:
00:11:49
Well, maybe before we talk about, uh, let's, let's lighten the mood a little bit. We'll do a little bit of follow up here and, uh, to, to a previous conversation, and then we can get back into the serious stuff. The, the real architectural, uh, What would you call this? This is, this is like an emo episode. It's gonna be very dark at some points. I don't know. Maybe that's not the right term. I don't know. I'm old. Uh, all right. I'm, I'm gonna share, uh, I'm gonna do a little follow up here and, and share my, uh, my screen. Uh, so I'll do enough talking about this to entice our listening audience to check out this episode over on YouTube, but, I don't wanna leave all this in the audio episode, right? So, we'll, we'll edit it out because I'm gonna be pointing at visuals here. So if this is just a, a, I just want to give a fair warning. I'm gonna share some images, I'm gonna share some stuff that I participated in, that we talked about in A prior episode where I, I wrote around the rim of Crater Lake and I wanna show some pictures and kind of some graphs and maps and stuff. Um, And we won't put, leave all that in the audio only episode, but we will have that in the video episode. So if that gives you, you know, if you're intrigued about that, you might want to go out and check that out. But it'll be cut outta the audio part. So, uh, I'm gonna share this

Cormac Phalen:
00:13:07
yeah. So just, yes, we understand that there's gonna be. A audio and visual component to this, and if you'd like to see the visual component, it doesn't mean meet us down at the local, Mexican cantina for some

Evan Troxel:
00:13:24
For the slideshow. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:13:27
again, Yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:13:28
right. All right, so I'm gonna start here.

Cormac Phalen:
00:13:32
rim was not a,

Evan Troxel:
00:13:34
Not, Not, the margarita bar that you had hoped for, right. All you can, all you can drink Margarita Bar. Sorry to disappoint. Uh, this, this is, I just wanna start off here because, so I'm, I'm doing like a presentation. This is where we're going in new directions with Archispeak, right? We, we've added the, the YouTube channel. We've got a visual component. We want to start taking advantage of that. It doesn't mean everything's gonna be over there and on, not on audio, but But in this case, you know, visual makes the most sense. Um, so I, I wanted to start zoomed out here because I thought this was cool. This is just a, a map of the United States and shows. I think in this case I'm filtering by hiking trails. Um, and I just thought this was kind of cool because You can see like the main, where the main trails are. It's like there's a, there's not very many trails in the middle of the US right? It's, uh, so we're very blessed here on the west coast. The East Coast is also very blessed. And, and if you, if you look at the, uh, the, the distribution, I guess we've got, we've got the Sierras and the Cascades on the west. We've got the Rocky Mountains kind of. Almost central, obviously that's in central time zone, so Central, central. And then we've got the East Coast, the Appalachian Trail that kind of runs where from, looks like Alabama to Maine. Right. I've never been on it, so I, I don't, I'm not familiar with it, but

Cormac Phalen:
00:15:02
Geor, the the actual start and stop is from, Georgia to Maine. There are a few little offshoots here and there, but, um, yeah, it, starts in Georgia. ends in Maine, or starts in Maine and ends in Georgia, whichever, whichever, direction you're going

Evan Troxel:
00:15:17
you want to go. Yeah. So I mean, that's, that is a long trail right there. And so, right. I'm, I'm drawing on the screen just to, just to show this stuff. Um, so we've got, we've got the Appalachian Trail, we've got the Continental Divide Trail, which I just thought was, was super cool. Goes from Canada to Mexico, down through the Rockies and I people mountain bike, that one. And then on the west coast we've got the Pacific Crest Trail, which comes up through California, Oregon, and Washington. It goes basically from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. And that's the direction most people go. Whereas I think the Continental Divide Trail, maybe at least the biking stuff that I've seen, they go north to South Pacific Crest Trail. You don't want to end in Mexico like, 'cause it's like it's in Tijuana, you're, you're hiking on Like highways in Southern California for some of that It, it's really terrible, I think. Uh, so you want to end up where it's beautiful, you know, you want to end up in on the Canadian border. I think so Um, anyway, I just thought that was kind of a, a cool, a cool place to start this conversation because the Pacific Crest Trail goes right by the location where

Cormac Phalen:
00:16:26
Well, I say will say what's interesting, and I'm assuming that it's also very similar for the um, Pacific Crest Trail, is that depending on the time of year, if you're a through hiker, I've, I've spoken with many a through hiker on the Appalachian Trail, and depending on the time of year you start. Is also depending on like which direction you're going. And if you, you know, start in Maine, you're kind of hoping that you, 'cause if you start in like Alabama and you walk to Maine and you walk to Maine in the wintertime, not a good decision.

Evan Troxel:
00:17:03
Yeah, That totally makes sense to me. Yeah. All right, so let's see. Uh, if I, if I just zoom in here onto Southern Oregon, you can get an idea of over to a, a better map. So this is the actual crater Lake National Park, and this is where we come in through the south entrance from our location. But there's also a north entrance. So you can see the, the highway kind of skims, the western edge of the crater. And if, if you zoom in here, you can see how much topography there is at the edge of the crater. So you kind of drive all the way up to the rim and then you're kind of. You know, going around the, the circumference of crater lake for the most part, and you're looking down into a hole, and there's this island out in the middle called Wizard Island. And on Wizard Island, you can kind of see the topography lines there. That's the actual center of the, the ci cone of the volcano right there. So it's not right in the middle. Of, of the crater, it's kind of off to the western edge. And you can do a boat ride and you can hike that trail up to the top. Uh, it's a little summit trail that goes from, from where, where you get dropped off on the boat up to the top. Yeah. So you actually can get to it. And I think most people don't know that you can do a boat tour of the lake and it is operated by the National Park. They actually fly the boats in with helicopters when they drop a new boat off, which I guess they even did recently. There's a couple different tours that you can do at a lake. One that drops you off on the island and one that doesn't. And, uh, they've also put submarines in this lake and, uh, Anyway, it's, it's pretty cool. All, all of those have to be delivered by helicopter because there's no road that goes down to the water. And there is a trail, there's no boat ramp. Yeah. So there is a trail on the northern edge here that I've hiked before, and that will take you down. It's a, it's almost two miles down to the edge of the water. That's where you catch the boat, uh, to, to go do one of

Cormac Phalen:
00:19:08
What's the, uh, what's the drop there?

Evan Troxel:
00:19:11
It's almost 900 feet at that trail head. So it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of different elevation gains and drops around the edge, but at that point, yeah, so over two miles, it's, it's a steep hike, but I would say it's a media, it's not a strenuous hike, it's just kind of media and it's, it's a wide trail. It's like, it's meant for a, a lot of people. That, that's kind of cool as far as like just giving you an overview of, of the lake and you can kind of get an idea of how much topography there is. And then this is the actual ride that I, I did myself. So it's 32, almost 33 miles around the, the entire, entire lake. And you can see that it gets kind of close to the lake and far away from the lake. We'll go to that map here in a second, but, Little over two and a half hours of moving time. It was about three and a half hours of total time. Right, right down there you can, you can see that and 3,500 feet of elevation gain throughout the entire thing. So it's, it was actually the same elevation gain and lost because we start in, we started and ended at the same location. Right? So 3,500 feet of climbing, also 3,500 feet of descending and If I scroll down here, you can kind of see a cross section of elevation as we did the ride. So the, the climbs in the descents were kind of evenly distributed the, the climb, uh, the the lake. And we did this stupid thing where when we were driving in, we saw people riding down the hill that we were driving up to go up to the top of the lake where we just thought everybody starts at the top of the lake and. We're like wondering why, oh, were they already done or what? And, and, and it just turns out that they, they were smarter than us. They started at the bottom of the hill and did their climb first. We started at, you know, halfway up the hill. And so we had to do three miles of climbing at the very end just to finish our 33 mile ride, which was the worst

Cormac Phalen:
00:21:10
Yeah, because that makes sense.

Evan Troxel:
00:21:12
yeah. Well, that's what an architect would

Cormac Phalen:
00:21:14
af after, after af after almost 30 Yeah. Say after almost 36 miles of riding. And that's what you wanted to do is do a hill climb at the very

Evan Troxel:
00:21:25
at the end. Yeah. You know, when you're, when you're the freshest, that's when you're, you're the most warmed up, I guess, at that point. So

Cormac Phalen:
00:21:31
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that, that was it. It was just like every, the, the 34 miles was just the warmup for

Evan Troxel:
00:21:39
Yeah. An easy, easy, warm

Cormac Phalen:
00:21:41
crush of a climb,

Evan Troxel:
00:21:44
Totally.

Cormac Phalen:
00:21:45
Yeah. I mean, because I, you know, looking at your time, I mean, you were doing a pretty decent, clip of time.

Evan Troxel:
00:21:51
Right. I think, I think it's pretty standard. They said anywhere between three and five hours of uh, to do it. And so for us, you know, it was and a half hours of time, but

Cormac Phalen:
00:22:04
For me, I'm pretty positive it would be closer to the five plus

Evan Troxel:
00:22:08
and, and actually if I did it again, I would take longer because I would enjoy it more. I think this first time it was like, let, we don't know what it's gonna be like, so let's go for it. And it's not like we were racing, but at the same time, I. Other people are waiting for us at the end. It wasn't just us kind of hanging out to do our own thing. There were other people kind of reliant on our schedule. You never know if you're gonna have a breakdown or a mechanical issue or a flat tire or any of those things. So, uh, the part, like it does stop at 6:00 PM they take away all the snacks at 6:00 PM at all the stations around the lake. And so it's like you you wanna be done before that happens. Um, otherwise you're gonna start risking various things. So

Cormac Phalen:
00:22:52
Wait, they take away the snacks.

Evan Troxel:
00:22:54
They take away the snacks at six, the volunteers go home at six, Yes. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:22:59
and this is something that they, they close the roads off, you know, free of, free of cars, or at least a, a good portion of it, right?

Evan Troxel:
00:23:08
So, yeah, so basically there's that entry road that comes in from the south, right? And then there's that other entry road that comes in from the north. That connection road there between the north and the south entry, they don't close those, that side because if somebody comes in one way and they want to get out the other way, they're not gonna make 'em drive four hours around that. Right? So our first portion of the ride was about eight miles with cars. Not too many cars, but it was probably a pretty busy weekend at the park because of the ride. They, you know, they, they do this two weekends a year, and basically the idea is they close down the other 24 miles around the eastern edge of the, of the crater to cars so that cyclists can enjoy it, car free. And so when you finally get to that northern entrance up there, you're car free for the rest of the way around, and that is, That's what makes it really, really a special thing because you're not concerned for your safety the entire time, which you totally would be because think about it, like when you're at a national park, drivers are driving around, they are not watching the road. They're looking around, they're looking at the view, they're looking at everything else that's going on. I can't even imagine riding this on a normal weekend traffic kind of a situation. So, um, yeah, it was, it was great to have 24 miles of the 32, 33 miles completely car free as we went around that Eastern rim.

Cormac Phalen:
00:24:44
That's amazing. And then I know that I, I see you like logged in a couple of photos

Evan Troxel:
00:24:52
yeah. yeah. Yep, yep. So let me close this

Cormac Phalen:
00:24:56
is, what is this app you're using by chance?

Evan Troxel:
00:24:58
this this app is called Strava, and this is where a lot of athletes and cyclists kind of track their all their tracks. So if you go running, trail running, if you go cycling somewhere, you're recording that with the G P S, you could be using The Strava app on your phone, you could be using a watch, you could be using another Garmin device or you know, several different companies make devices. And then it synchronizes up to Strava so that over the year you get like total tallies of how many days you went riding, how many miles you rode, how much elevation gain you did. And it's kind of a nice way to just, at the end of the year or over time, you know, people do it multiple years. So you can really start to get an idea of Of what's going on with your, your training or your cycling. So, yeah, so I'm gonna share some photos now. And these are photos of when we were, starting the ride. This is a photo when we started, and you can see the lake in the background. It kind of had some smoke in it. There are have been wildfires in the area. And so I did this with my daughter-in-law and, and we had a great time. I mean, we kind of. Split back and forth between two different kinds of bikes. One of the bikes was more of a urban, you know, uh, cruiser bike, and the other one was more of a actual road bike. And, and so road bike you have to hunch over, you know, you're, you're kind of like, it's got drop handlebars on it, and so you're in a different posture. The gearing is different, stuff like that. So, um, we, we kind of swapped back and forth between those, but, but we were happy when we started. Okay, along the way. This is kind of a, a cool shot of Mount Adams off in the distance, and it's kind of poking up through the cl. It's not clouds, it's, it's actually smoke from the wildfires, but, um, this is from kind of the northern rim looking north out over the planes of, of kind of eastern Oregon.

Cormac Phalen:
00:26:53
It has that nice, misty, kind of Ansel Adams type feel to it, but

Evan Troxel:
00:26:57
Yeah. yeah. It's not that Adams, it's, yeah. And this, this is, uh, named after the president, not the, not the photographer. There's several volcanoes up the West coast that are very standalone like this, and I think that it's it's, it's really it incredible to kind of watch them as you fly. If you were to fly from Southern California to Seattle, You would just see them all along the way. Uh, and, and that's pretty cool to have these kind of standalone mountains, which is very different than what I'm used to in Southern California where all the mountains are kind of together. So Mount Whitney being the tallest peak in the Western hemisphere, you can't even tell where it is because it's just into the other Sierra Nevada mountains. Right. So you, you can't really see it. But these mountains are very standalone. There's like Mount McLaughlin, Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson, Mount Bachelor, Mount Hood, all the way up through, know, Mount Baker, uh, what, what's the big one in, in, uh, Washington? Is it, it's Mount Rainier. Right. So that, that one's a, a huge one. Yeah. So they're, they're all kind of, you know, standalone, volcanic, uh, they're very, very cool geology up here. And then You can just get an idea here of the glassiness of the lake. It was just like incredibly crystal, not only crystal clear, but crystal smooth. as well, but polished. And it was, it was beautiful way to start the day. It was a perfect day to do this ride.

Cormac Phalen:
00:28:27
Yeah. And I, I. Drive past, you know, almost on a daily basis. You know, our Lake, lake St. Clair, uh, that kind of divides the US Detroit area with, um, you know, the Windsor area in Canada and nine times outta 10. It's usually like really choppy and windy and you see, you know, it's Like you see a lot of activity, and here this thing just looks like a sheet of glass it looks like that architectural project that you, you know, you cut all of the chipboard, you stack it all up, you make all the topos, you put in all of your thing. And then I don't know about, how you did it, but I just use like, A, a copious amount of white glue, poured over time and then just, like, you know, didn't, didn't have access or even, the mindset to do, in an epoxy thing. You know, mine was all just like built up white glue and it dries up and it's nice and glassy. Uh, which looks like this, but you know, yeah. That just, that that's an amazing shot. 'cause I'm so used to, our like looking like, you just put out to sea on the North Atlantic. It's a Northeast, huh?

Evan Troxel:
00:29:41
and those, those lakes are huge. I, I know the one you're talking about is not as big as the Great Lakes, like proper, but it's still huge. Right? And so, and you get a lot of wind and and here this is sitting down below the lip of the crater, right? And it is kind of protected. There's no inlets. There's no outlets. So you, you'll only get disturbed by weather. And there happened to be no weather on this day. So it was, it was perfect. Mirror surface.

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:08
yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:30:09
basically from,

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:10
besmirch my Lake St. Clair

Evan Troxel:
00:30:13
yeah, it's not very big.

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:14
not a great lake? Ugh,

Evan Troxel:
00:30:18
I said it's not one of the proper great lengths. you can, yeah, you can add that to the feedback bin if you'd like.

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:26
mm.

Evan Troxel:
00:30:27
Here's a, uh,

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:28
to give you Feedback. on that one there, sir.

Evan Troxel:
00:30:31
Feedback. Here's your feedback. Here's that kind of a panoramic shot of the lake on the way around. And you know, this is another, this is halfway around where I wasn't feeling the pain yet, but you can see some areas have some pretty serious cliffs.

Cormac Phalen:
00:30:46
a smile?

Evan Troxel:
00:30:46
Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's some pretty serious cliffs on, on different pieces of the coastline. Uh, and then this is the Phantom shipwreck portion of the lake and as just this gorgeous kind of rock structure that's poking up out of the lake. And there's a there's a separate trailhead that, that looks over that, but, uh, from certain distances it does look like a ship sank when it like came, you know, got too close to the ground or something. But it's these very sharp, jagged, uh, rocks sticking up outta the water right there. And it's, it's pretty, pretty sweet little feature of Greater Lake National Park.

Cormac Phalen:
00:31:26
Just to let you know, my lakes have real shipwrecks.

Evan Troxel:
00:31:31
Yeah,

Cormac Phalen:
00:31:31
have to pretend

Evan Troxel:
00:31:33
You can actually get boats into those, into those lakes. Yeah. Not these ones. Uh, this is,

Cormac Phalen:
00:31:40
the Edmund Fitzgerald

Evan Troxel:
00:31:42
Famous, famous Gordon Lightfoot song about that. This is, uh, the, the final kind of view when you get to the lodge at the very end of the ride and it, it could cleared up nicely. There was very little wildfire smoke left by this time in the day and a few wispy clouds. And you can see Wizard Island out there in this shot. And so it kind of gives you an idea of the, scale of the, actual.

Cormac Phalen:
00:32:07
Yeah, that's.

Evan Troxel:
00:32:09
cone that's in the middle of the lake, and yeah, I was tired by the end. Uh, my, my cycling partner was still doing just fine with her youthful age.

Cormac Phalen:
00:32:19
Yeah, I was gonna say, Uh, where was that last shot? Showing that you hit the, the, the ceiling, the wall, the, whatever we wanna call it. The pain. I.

Evan Troxel:
00:32:31
That's a wall of pain. you know, I, I actually did really well on this ride. I, I've been riding my bike for a few years now, but, uh, and I will do, definitely do this again. It wasn't one of those things where I'm, I'm not, I did it once and I, and I'm done. I would, you know, weather is good. It's totally worth doing this ride, and, you know, it's, now that I know even more what to expect, I would definitely, definitely do it again. All right, so that's it. I wanted to follow up because we had talked about doing that, and it's always fun to share a new adventure, so

Cormac Phalen:
00:33:04
Yeah,

Evan Troxel:
00:33:05
that was cool.

Cormac Phalen:
00:33:07
actually sounds fantastic.

Evan Troxel:
00:33:08
Well, so speaking of adventures, you went recently to, uh, architectural Nerd Conference. Yes.

Cormac Phalen:
00:33:15
The Architectural Nerd Conference, I believe what you're referring to is a day long seminar for the Michigan Building Code. And, yeah, just a, a, a building code seminar.

Evan Troxel:
00:33:34
Yeah. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:33:35
if you're saying nerd fest and building semi, you know, building codes in the same, breath, how dare you serve, because

Evan Troxel:
00:33:43
Mm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:33:43
I mean, it's building, it's, it's building codes.

Evan Troxel:
00:33:47
you have this weird thing, I think, I think we talked about this on a previous episode recently, even, uh, please fact check this, but You like continuing education, you like doing as much as possible. You, you do. Um, as mu as much as is needed for maybe five people for their continuing education

Cormac Phalen:
00:34:10
yeah, I, I mean, I could, I was sitting next to someone and they're just like, I can't believe how far behind I am on my CEUs, and I'm thinking to myself, I can't believe that I'm actually here because I don't need them. I mean, I need 20, I need 24 for the state of Florida, 24 for the state of Maryland. I need 20, is it 20 or 18 for a i A?

Evan Troxel:
00:34:42
I think it's 18.

Cormac Phalen:
00:34:43
I think I have all of them. Granted, it's, it's the same 24 for each state except for mayor or Florida actually requires a, a, a couple of extras. And we've, we've talked about that. I think I actually have enough CEUs to give them their own without doubling up. I.

Evan Troxel:
00:35:06
Wow. Oh, that's

Cormac Phalen:
00:35:07
I'm at actually before, before I went to that, before I went to that one. And truth be told, that I've actually already done two other EU since then. This was a six hour C e U. Um, and before I went I had 48. So

Evan Troxel:
00:35:25
Wow,

Cormac Phalen:
00:35:26
I really don't need anymore and it's it, and to be quite honest with you, okay, so Nerd Fest,

Evan Troxel:
00:35:32
not why you went, that's not why you went right.

Cormac Phalen:
00:35:35
It's not why I went, it's not why I went. Two things, two reasons why I went one, actually, it was a really interesting topic. Funny enough, I mean, know everybody. I, I told somebody that I was going and they're like, I don't know if I could, stay awake. The guy was engaging. He actually made as, as weird as this sounds, he actually made, building codes and talking about building codes and talking about kind of like weird ways of doing like mixed use buildings and stuff, which is stuff that we do all the time. I mean, I don't think that there's a single building I've done in the last, I don't know. Decade, two decades. that hasn't been a mixed use building. I don't think that I've done a single use building, even when you know you're doing education, the, it's still a mixed use because there's certain occupancies within that one that require you to do mixed use. And so, and

Evan Troxel:
00:36:32
I'm always a little confused by the term mixed use because mixed use to me is like, and you're, it is, it's correct. But I think of it as a typology, and I don't think of it as like a code thing. I think of it as, you know, there's retail on the bottom and there's living, you know, there's residential above or there's parking garage down below and, and, and you're so mixed occupancy is

Cormac Phalen:
00:36:55
well the, you know, there.

Evan Troxel:
00:36:56
talked about this,

Cormac Phalen:
00:36:57
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you know, mixed occupancy, mixed use is sort of interchangeable. I mean, mixed use, to be quite honest with you in the zoning world is exactly what you just said. Um, we just, I guess we get lazy and say, instead of saying mixed use occupancy, we just say mixed use

Evan Troxel:
00:37:19
right. Thank you for straightening that out.

Cormac Phalen:
00:37:20
I mean, it's, it's hard, it's, it's hard to actually add the word occupancy

Evan Troxel:
00:37:25
Yeah, that's a hard one.

Cormac Phalen:
00:37:26
already like exhausted my breath over mixed in use.

Evan Troxel:
00:37:31
Yeah. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:37:32
say occupancy but, uh, But, but, but what was, what was interesting about it? So like, you know, we went, so the first half of the day was, yes, nerd Fest out here. Um, but the first half of the day was about, The rehabilitation code, you know, essentially, renovations, additions, things like that to an existing, you know, an existing building. And, and that was interesting because, I do a lot of that. in fact, it seems like the last. Decade and a half of my career, if not two full decades of my career has been, a lot of adaptive reuse. And so it was, it's interesting to kind of go and sit down and go through the code in a way to almost make sure that I'm doing it right in a way, you know, it's am you know, have I been What was interesting is, so when we were doing the mixed use occupancy half of the day, He, he wanted to go through a portion of the code that was dealing with, control areas. And he's, you know, he started talking about, like control areas. And if, for those of you who don't know what control areas are, it's just a way to compartmentalize your building, um, that may have a higher hazard and separating it from a lower hazard, whether it be from, you know, Chemicals or other higher hazard, you know, situations and be able to like do a mixed use building and still have like these higher hazard, occupancies within that building. And so do a lot of lab buildings. So we're obviously gonna be doing things that deal with a lot of, control areas and things like that. So one of the things that he was talking about, he, he was going through the code and he was, you know, talking about like, you know, Um, the horizontal separation of, control areas and talking about, you know, ease egress and separations and things like that. And then he started talking about the vertical separations, and he was talking about what the code allows and he started going through, he's just like, you know, at, you know, one to three floors, you could have two control areas at, 50% each to get your, you know, full a hundred percent, occupancy of those and you know, so on and so forth. But as you dissent or ascend upwards within a building, it starts to reduce the percentage of chemicals in area that you can have up above. So that that's, you know, that that's all well and good. And so he gets to a point where he is like, well, you know, You can do all of this, but who would really do that? it's just like, it just doesn't make any sense to do that And I'm sitting here

Evan Troxel:
00:40:22
do that

Cormac Phalen:
00:40:23
I slowly start to raise my hand. Yeah. I, I, I slowly start to raise my hand and I'm like, uh, yeah, like literally your, the, the chart that you're using is a section through my building. you know, there's, there's certain, certain allowable, to, it's like nine floors and above. I'm like, well, I got a, you know, 12 story lab building. And then he's just like, and you've got, certain ones where, you can go below, grade your basement, one level, your basement, two level, you know, and then you're not allowed at basement three. And he goes, but, you know, he goes, it, it's, it's such a, an unlikely situation. They're like Well, guess what? I am living the unlikely situation because

Evan Troxel:
00:41:07
Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:41:08
every single solitary bit of information that you're passing on is embodied in this one project. And I, I ended up, because I had my computer with me and just so happened to have rabbit open and just so happened to have that, that building open because that's the last thing I was doing before I left to go to my nerd vest.

Evan Troxel:
00:41:29
You are the nerd at the Nerd Fest. You are the nerd at the Nerd Fest. Yeah.

Cormac Phalen:
00:41:33
I am the nerd. I am, I was the nerd at the Nerd Fest. So I, during our lunch, or, well actually during one of our breaks, everybody kinda like just took off to like, make their phone calls or whatever, and I kinda like walked up to 'em and I kinda, I spun it around and I brought up my code review sheets and I showed it to him and I was showing all of these things. And, um, subsequently I've, I've like Emailed him to just tell him, you know, thanks for the, the seminar. It was, it was, really good information. I happened to be the guy that, came up to you and showed you that, and he actually like praised me on. He was like, oh, that was a, you know, an amazing, code review sheet. He's like, I love the section that you showed of your building and how the, the control areas were overlaid onto that, you know, so that we, you know, the reviewer could clearly understand like what you were trying to achieve and your, all of your separations. He was like ranting and raving about it, and I'm like, it was, it was willing, the first times that I've ever done that type of building with those type of constraints and stuff, it was a hundred percent guess. I mean, we did have a code,

Evan Troxel:
00:42:38
got approved, right

Cormac Phalen:
00:42:39
I mean obviously it was a It, it got approved, it got reviewed and everything else. It was just like, at the time, because I hadn't ever done that, I'd never dealt with that kind of stuff before to, to that level, to that degree. I mean, it literally was, so we had business occupancy with, a three, A two SS one, S two, so, you know, the, the, you know, storage, you know, assembly business. Um, industrial, uh, .Like there was wait five or did I, was that five? Yeah. Nope. Six. Six different occupancies. Yeah, six different occupancies. And I. Like multiple different hazard el you know, hazard, um, hazards, uh, buildings that are gonna definitely have, you know, tons of chemicals in them and, and everything else. And it was just, you know, it's just as he's like telling everybody, yeah, don't worry about it. You're never really gonna have to deal with anything like this. Like you are not, but I am

Evan Troxel:
00:43:46
I, I think one of the interesting things about the, what you were just saying is how you communicate that to the permitting agency. Right. And so you talked about showing those zones in Section. And, and this reminds me of that meme that's been going around of that, that somebody posted that, that says, you know, here's what my parents think I do as an architect. And they're showing, you know, beautiful design and swoopy buildings and, you know, just amazing architecture. And then there's what, what she's actually doing. And she's typing into Google, you know, how far away from the wall does a toilet go And,

Cormac Phalen:
00:44:24
I

Evan Troxel:
00:44:24
And, and I mean, that's what, that's what it's, it's like, it just kind of speaks to the type of work that you're talking about, which is the, the nitty gritty technical work that it, you have to do to get the, the set of drawings approved for construction and beyond just having all of the stuff in there. The requirements are all met, is Communicating 'cause you're not communicating this just for, you know, for fun. You're communicating it for the contractor to build it correctly, to actually protect the people who are gonna use the building in the right. Making sure that you have these separations in place and that, that it's all spelled out and it's specified, but also to the review the code reviewer to say like, here are the separations, here's how we did it and here's how it's gonna get built so that they can Just say, yep. Check, check, check, check, check. Because that is not an easy process.

Cormac Phalen:
00:45:22
Yeah. And sitting down and also convincing, like say, you know, go one for the fire marshal and talking to the fire marshal and talking about, here is the way that, here are all of the accessible routes that if you, have forbid have to do, deal with the fire within this building. Here are all of your protected routes to be able to move, safely throughout this building and, and things like that. And, you know, and it's. It's one of those things that people don't, uh, nobody really thinks that that's something that an architect does. And so, and they don't really, you know, they, they think, you know, oh, well you're just drawing all of the, you know, the pretty pictures and everything else. And, it's, it leaves it up to somebody else to do all of this other stuff and. I, I'll give you a good example of kind of like this, the, the misconception of what people think architects do and don't do and how they assist and work with, like, say, um, their engineers and everybody else is on a, on a call today, for this very building, you know, because it is under construction and I think I talked with you on a previous episode about how we are now Revising a lot of the interior planning because we had designed it with the intention of it being a generic lab building because we didn't have the user groups at the time. Now we have the user groups and there is a really big portion of this building that's actually already constructed that has to be deconstructed to accommodate some of their things

Evan Troxel:
00:46:59
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:47:00
and, and it's trying to be as very kind of like Understanding about their process and, and really, knowing it's like, how do you work, how do you actually do your job so that we can help the, help shape the building to accommodate your You know what you do, you know what you do. And, but, but you know, when we're listening to all of that, you know, we have to then take all of that information and, know, run an analysis and say, alright, well you want you, it was designed for this and we sort of have all of the infrastructure in for this, but you don't need half of that. You need something completely different that's gonna require different, supply and return and all of this other stuff. And they're like, yeah. You know, okay, so we'll, we'll do that. We'll, we'll, we'll do an analysis of it. And when they think that they're, they tell you what they need. Their assumption is, is that that's what they're going to get. And you know, we come back to them today and we're having this conversation with them and telling them what the building can give them. it's just like, well, I don't understand. Why can't I have, you know, this, this thing that I need? And you just think, well, because of how you've now set up all of your, your spaces you went from kinda like generic. You know, fume hoods and things like that to now there are these rig rooms with air tables and all of these other things, and because you've compartmentalized 'em now, you went from one open room to four little closed rooms, they now have a completely different requirement for air distribution. So that means more duct work up there. And they're like, well, why can't I have this and this? It's like, Because of this being an existing building and because of all of the constraints that we have with the existing structure and you know, like unless you want like a six foot high ceiling, we can't fit all of this stuff in there. We can only use, it's kind of like, one or the other, not both. it was a really hard conversation to have with them to let them know that you can't actually have both because They're like, but, but I need 'em for, for the way that I work. Like, I understand that, but the building can't give that to you. It's just like, well, we're only asking, you to move it from here to here. I understand that on paper, and, and you know, you gotta kind of, like, ev they were exactly, they were looking. It's just like, you know, I'm, I'm looking at it on paper and it's just really moving it from here to here. And they're not like, you know, and I, I had to like stop and kind of Explain that, you know, what you see, like as like, let, let's just say like, you know, they're asking for this thing called a scavenger arm and it's know, it's a piece of equipment on kind of like a boom, like I've got, you know, my microphone on and they see that part of it, but there's so much more that's attached to it. There's so much more that runs off the wall. There's so much more that goes up above the ceiling and hard ducks into everything and all of this other stuff. And so, but they don't realize that Yeah, they see this and it should be easy for this to be moved down the wall, but you still don't have the space above the ceiling to accommodate all of the things that makes this little thing here work. And they're just like, I don't get it. I mean, again, it's just, you know, it's just moving it down the wall. Can, can we just extend it more like you don't have the physical space. There's like literally, like if, if you said you have a five passenger vehicle, but you want to fit 12 people in there. You can't,

Evan Troxel:
00:50:40
There's a, there's another analogy. There's the, uh, 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag. Right? It's, it's like you just don't have, and, and, and that stuff is not visible on the surface. And, and, and I'm sure they're even thinking like, but we have the, we can do whatever we want. We have the money to do whatever we want. We can make this change,

Cormac Phalen:
00:50:57
Y yes, yes.

Evan Troxel:
00:50:59
but they're not thinking through all of the, different repercussions of what's involved in making that solution happen.

Cormac Phalen:
00:51:06
I, I had the conversation with, the owner's rep, the, the, the top of the, the pyramid, and they were like, you know, if we had to do this all over again with the money that we're spending on this building, it would've been a new building. We wouldn't have had to deal with the, the 12 foot floor to floor heights and, the deep beams and all of these other things. And, all of this weird little dissection that we had to do to the existing building and the new building and, and know, and all of these other things have had to like mesh it all together. And even though we are making it work, is it. Exactly like, you know, I mean, it, it's still I would say that it is the best, it is the finest used vehicle we could have. I don't know. I, I'm trying to think. I, I was trying to think of what's, what's a good analogy to say? It's like, it is like the, the nicest new, it's the nicest used car that you've ever seen. You know, like,

Evan Troxel:
00:52:06
like a resto mod in the, in the car world, right? It's like you use the bones

Cormac Phalen:
00:52:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very much

Evan Troxel:
00:52:11
you completely re-skinned it. New engine new knew everything except for a,

Cormac Phalen:
00:52:18
except for the only thing,

Evan Troxel:
00:52:19
structure.

Cormac Phalen:
00:52:21
so, yeah, exactly. I was gonna say, except for the only thing in like a REST mod is a lot of times they'll replace the entire frame. So it'll be this brand new, like lightweight, you know, frame and all of these other things that can take on all sorts of like weight, you know, and torque and all of this other stuff. We got a 1962. concrete and steel building that has really, really low floor to floor heights and The air conditioning wasn't like, main like duck trunks and all this other stuff running through there. They were, essentially glorified window units. Um, well it was just a, you know, a, a dual duck system and you know, it was all these, just ridic. It was the thing that I've learned, and I know you probably have too, and I know that, you know, plenty of other people who are listening, you know, have dealt with this, but the thing that I've learned that is like, Increased my knowledge of construction is all of the bad construction that I've had to deal with over the course of my career of having to undo something that should have never been done, but it was the way that they did it. You know? It was just like, and so to like learn, to learn by Trying to renovate buildings has taught me so much more about like both new construction and renovation construction from just looking at, it's just like, wow, why would they have ever done that?

Evan Troxel:
00:53:55
So what is the conversation in the beginning if you, uh, I mean obviously you can't do it all over again, but you and. You, you alluded to what, you know, what that conversation might be like. But the question that I guess I have is why didn't it happen in the beginning? Why wasn't the conversation in the beginning? Like, because, you know, everybody who's probably involved in that situation is enticed by the quote unquote savings of reusing the tower that they had, because obviously budget's always an issue with architecture, right? And so I. There's other constraints too, like proximity and you know, where they wanted to be, you know, for their offices and their labs and all those things. But somebody with the experience that you're talking about having now, Has gotta be at the table to say like there are serious trade-offs. And I think we've even talked about this in the past. The people who are gonna be there at the end might not even have been the people who were there in the beginning making those decisions. Like you're talking even about making major changes to lab spaces because it was C O V D and nobody knew what they wanted. They didn't even have the staff, et cetera, et cetera. And now everyone is beholden to the decisions that were made before they even got there. And they're like, this sucks.

Cormac Phalen:
00:55:13
Yeah.

Evan Troxel:
00:55:13
What, what do you, how would you do it differently next time? Because those trade-offs that you're talking about, people having to deal with now has gotta be so disappointing and they're gonna have to spend the next 20 years there or whatever the, the period is maybe longer.

Cormac Phalen:
00:55:30
Okay, so can I do a little bit of show and tell,

Evan Troxel:
00:55:34
Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.

Cormac Phalen:
00:55:36
I can kind of show it. It's, it's, it's really sort of hard to explain some of the rationale of this building. Um, and one of the, you know, the, the reasons why we did what we did without really sort of, Showing you like what, what some of the constraints were. And so on screen, you can now see the, uh, Johns Hopkins Hospital Complex. this, this area here is one of the original, original buildings called Billings Hall. And you can kind of see like these little U-shape or little L-shaped buildings that kind of created the original. So you can, if you can see in this picture, a tower crane right there. So I. I would like to tell you that the decisions were made because of the constraints of things. There was a building right here where this tower crane sort of sits, and you can kind of see this, this blank hole here. There is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 buildings all surrounding and touching our building. And even more so is there is a series of utility tunnels underneath here and I don't know how I get The short straw, blessed, whatever you wanna call it. that actually, I, I mean, really there's, there's like, you know, I don't know how, how or what you really wanna call this, but somehow, some way I always get stuck with having to build over the top of These, these projects that have all of the sitewide site-wide utilities, not just per for the building, but site-wide utilities.

Evan Troxel:
00:57:39
Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
00:57:39
And so, so then here, here is the actual as you can kind of like see and, you know, spin around and everything, you can sort of see the constraints of the actual building. And so like you can see all of these other buildings squeezed in and around it. We are. Touching, a lot in this, and it's just, it was a decision not necessarily made on economics. It was more about logistics. Also, the fact that, there are multiple buildings that are still occupied while we're doing the construction. And so, you know, there's a, the, an occupied, you can sort of see like all of the, the greenboard going up on this, you know, building in the background. That's the, south wing of this. This is the West Wing, it's their core. And then our North Wing will be, in this particular one, it's actually there, but in this particular view it's not there. and, but I mean, So it's this kind of like weird T-shaped building that, you know, fits into all sorts of different things. And so, honestly, because of the fact that, oh yeah, by the way, because of this podium, it's sitting on the central circulation system, pedestrian circulation throughout the Throughout the hospital core. And so there's like, it's called the main loop that like loops around to all of the different buildings and everything else. And so it, it's pretty complex. I mean, there's, there's a lot of different rationales and reason behind it. And, and you you'd say, well, you know, at the end of the day it would've saved a lot more money if we would've just like leveled this and, started over well, That's not really the case because then they wouldn't have been able to get the amount of like square footage into this building because we would've had to have conformed to the new zoning code rather than, because this is an, an existing building and we're doing a adaptive reuse to it, we are able to like keep, the, the floor to floor heights and I mean, we're allowed to keep the, the number of, of stories we have. If we were to demo it and start over the, to still to get the needed, like say 16 to 18 feet, floor to floor for a high performance lab building, you wouldn't get as many floors in. and because technically the building already exceeds the overall, zoning regulations for the area, but because we are grandfathered in because of its, its existing nature and the existing building, we don't, we are, we can go as high as like this adjacent building, which is the highest point on the campus. So we, sure enough, we are as exactly as high as that. And, and so, I mean, there's, there's just a lot of constraints to this. there's a main, arterial road that goes through, the city and, and it's just, there's just a lot to the decision behind why we did that. If it was possible to like, do this all over again, I'm not sure how the, powers that be would've approached this May, they may have said, this isn't the right place for this particular project. I mean, we've got, you know, other areas throughout the campus. Maybe we do it somewhere else.

Evan Troxel:
01:01:08
Mm-hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
01:01:09
Um, that, kind of the, the situation, you know, I mean, there's actually even like, you know, this, this little building right here, which is the, this is their actual office building, but right here is another building that they, which is the state of Maryland's, lab buildings for the state of Maryland. It has the appropriate Florida floor heights. it is almost as tall as our building, but it has five left less floors than we have,

Evan Troxel:
01:01:40
Mm.

Cormac Phalen:
01:01:41
so that, that's kind of, you know, behind, there's again, you know, there's the alchemy

Evan Troxel:
01:01:45
of those

Cormac Phalen:
01:01:46
all of the different, you know, situations. Exactly. It was all of those trade offs. So, I just find it, it's easier to kind of, it, I'm one of these visual explainers. It's like, it's easier to like, show you the, the craziness that was behind, some of these things and why we made the decisions that we did. And was it because of the economics a little bit? Was it because of the fact that they can actually get more people in this, in this building? Yeah, I mean, because then that also comes back to economics because this is a building that they are building, they being the, you know, hospital and they're leasing it to the school, the university. And so, you know, there's the return on your investment for that. And there's all these other things that we've already gone through the whole conversation about the, the politics of all of the different, you know, shareholders and stakeholders in here. And so,

Evan Troxel:
01:02:43
It's just hard to explain those.

Cormac Phalen:
01:02:46
into that so much.

Evan Troxel:
01:02:47
hard to explain all that to people who come to, to the table much later in the process

Cormac Phalen:
01:02:53
Yeah.

Evan Troxel:
01:02:54
and And it's like, you can't, there was no good answer, right? There was no good answer. And at some point you have to make a decision And that sets you on a path. And, and it's like you kind of just wanna say like, you can't ask questions about decisions we've already made because we can't go undo it. Like there's no, like, yes, it might satisfy you more if you knew the answer, but at the same time, like, you're totally wasting my time by having me explain this to you. You're not, and you're, you're not gonna be satisfied with the answer because we've, we've all already been down this for several years now. It's a, it's a tough business and it's, it, it, reminds me of when people say, you know, what's the value of an architect? And how come architects are so bad at explaining their value? And it's like this, this kind of presentation, this kind of of conversation right here shows the kind of work that Like how much of that even happened before the project officially kicked off? Like so much, right? Just to figure out the feasibility and the direction you were gonna go or what the options were and things like that. And again, I, I go back to this idea of like what people think architects do versus what they actually do. And the difference in like the aesthetics, the image of the building and The technical aspects of feasibility code, all of these different compartmentalization requirements, uh, multiple use types in the same envelope and all, all that stuff. It's just insane. And most people can't even comprehend that. And it's the same time they're the ones saying, what do we need an architect for?

Cormac Phalen:
01:04:36
Exactly. I mean, and, and here's the project that literally has been a part of our lives for, at, at least eight years so far. Um, even a little bit more, um, for certain aspects of it. To help them, with the decisions. Like, we were, we were involved early on with, the decisions of, do we even, entertain using this building before we even like release you to do a scope study to determine what we could use this building for. And, what are, you know, some of the best practices? I mean, it's been kicked around. Should it just be medical office buildings? Should it just be this, should it be that, hey, we wanna increase the presence of the school of, you know, school of medicine on the hospital campus. What is the best way to do that? You know, and all of these decisions, we've been a part of every one of those decisions for, you know, the better part of, almost, almost a decade. Um, and when we are done with it, It will be 2026 when we are, completely finished with this. There will have been people who are still on this project that have worked on this project for a decade.

Evan Troxel:
01:05:49
Yep.

Cormac Phalen:
01:05:50
Fathom that for a while.

Evan Troxel:
01:05:51
I, yeah, it's

Cormac Phalen:
01:05:52
know, that is, that is, yeah, that, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, uh, so what do architects do?

Evan Troxel:
01:06:03
Yeah, and, and it, I, you know, we go back to this idea of the NERD conference that you went to and the idea of getting better at what you do and going to those kinds of Events and sharing experiences with other architects, like, like the guy who was giving the presentation said, you know, you'll probably never have to deal with this. And then you're raising your hand and you're saying, look, like I deal with this all the time, and there's other people in the room. Who have never dealt with it. They, they know they're going to have to and, and, and there's the whole spectrum. Right. And I think it's super interesting to kind of think about the difficulties, the challenges, the, that you're saying. Yep. We're up for that. The time commitment involved in doing it, and working with the clients and all of the, everybody who's a stakeholder in this kind of a project. Like that to me is, is exhausting. And you're also going to a conference and saying, Yeah. I, I wanna get better at this. We, we want to share our experiences. We wanna learn more. Um, because this is, this is a profession where you actually never stop learning. you never can stop getting better at your job. I would hope. I mean this, that's the kind of thing that, that is also going on in, in the professionals in our, in architecture.

Cormac Phalen:
01:07:24
Yeah. And, and that, that honestly is if you wanna call it, I think you call it the obsession with, you know, CEUs. It's really just trying to stay in tap with, what I, you know, like what, what am I gonna be dealing with, on the next project? I mean, what are the things that are out there, a few years ago or, I don't know, A few codes ago when we started to change from requiring, you know, continuous insulation. Well, what does that mean? Like, I, I like, you know, we used to have thermal brakes all over the place and, and all of this other stuff. How do you achieve that? And it's just like, I, because I'd never experienced it before, I had to figure, you know, I had to like, I. Either A, figure it out or go to the experts who have figured it out and sit down and listen to them. And that's the kind of like knowledge sharing that we need in the profession is to be able to like openly and freely exchange the conversation about, okay, well how did you achieve this? like when we see these, you know, kinda like really cool designs and we want to sit down and ask. the architect who designed that, Hey, how did you like, create that detail? You know? And a lot of times they're like, ah, I don't want to, hold it close to the chest and say, I don't want to, you know, give you that, that information because, that's, that's like I, Staple of design. it's just like, well, how, like everybody wants design to get better. Everybody wants like the, the, the tectonics of things to get better, the performance and all this other stuff. We wanna build lasting buildings. We don't want just, them to be these, how long is your, uh, warranty? 30 years. Well, that's all you have to worry about this building being around for, you know, we want to actually, I mean, the buildings that surround this particular project are, you know, well over a hundred, plus years old. And, we want to, maintain the legacy. We wanna make sure that the buildings that we're putting around it are gonna last as long as it, and the only way to do that is to kind of like share our knowledge, you know? Um, and, and so, yeah, I mean,

Evan Troxel:
01:09:28
Hmm.

Cormac Phalen:
01:09:28
that's why I go to my nerd fests,

Evan Troxel:
01:09:33
Cool, man. I, I appreciate you sharing all that because I think, uh, like I would, I would ask the question up front and, and not really expect it. An in-depth answer, like, why would you go to something like that? Uh, and obviously there's people who have been to these and they understand the value in those kinds of things, but then there's a lot of people who haven't gone to these and we've talked about the value of the a I A conference as an example, which is very different from the workshop that you went to, right? But there are elements of it that, that are like the thing that you went to. And it is a reason why a lot of people go to the national conference to get their CEEs and things like that as well. but it is worth sharing why these kinds of pieces of the profession, the continuing education parts of it are important and the kinds of experiences that you can have at those learning or otherwise, you know, if you're, if you're absorbing, if you're giving back to the crowd at large and, and helping them progress as architects too. I think these are all valid reasons for going. And so it, it was cool to hear your experience with that.

Cormac Phalen:
01:10:39
and you just wanted to pick on me and call me a nerd,

Evan Troxel:
01:10:42
Mission accomplished,

Cormac Phalen:
01:10:45
accomplished and appreciated.

Evan Troxel:
01:10:47
All right. Are we done for the, for this one?

Cormac Phalen:
01:10:50
Yeah.

Evan Troxel:
01:10:51
Cool.

Cormac Phalen:
01:10:52
I believe we are.