Architecture for kids podcast with Mark Southgate CEO MOBIE

Home is the most important piece of architecture in our lives. At MOBIE we want to attract and inspire the future creators of homes and the built environment by engaging young people in design challenges and creating exciting new technical and vocational courses and training.  We want to inspire them to deliver well designed and environmentally friendly homes of the future that we want and really need.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Mark Southgate. Mark is Chief Executive of the charity MOBI, Ministry of Building Innovation and Education. MOBI exists to engage, educate and inspire young people in home design, building and manufacture and to transform home building into a clean, precision engineered and efficient industry. Mark is responsible for overseeing all Mobis activities, to inspire the new generation to take up careers in and reshape the home building, built environment and construction professions, and to ensure that they have the necessary skills to future-proof the industry, including strategy, project management, project delivery and the running of the charity. Mark is a chartered town planner with 35 years experience in planning and environmental roles in local government, non-governmental organisations and central government agencies. He is a member of the General Assembly of the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Director of the Offsite Alliance. Mark, thank you for coming to talk to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Great to be here and thank you for inviting me. What subject did you enjoy most at school and what subjects did you excel?

SPEAKER_01: 2:08

That's a good question. Geography and history are the ones I like the most. I've actually... in my car where I've reflected that I actually did woodworking and designing the technical drawing as well. So I enjoyed those. I liked English. Probably if I excelled at anything, it was drop a few to my best discipline, which may

SPEAKER_00: 2:24

explain where I've ended up in terms of my career. You've anticipated the next question, which is if it influenced your career at where now, as well as what you supported in your choices to your studies to sort of to your career paths where you are.

SPEAKER_01: 2:38

I guess I'm a slightly older age, so I grew up in a generation where you sort of, you carried on studying the you did the subjects you knew best, and then sort of that led you on to where you went to do your degree. My final three subjects, my A levels that they were, were geography, history, and economics and public affairs, which is a combined discipline. Probably I've referred in history, but actually I was better at geography, went on to do that, and that's what led me into planning. So now I just have any sort of firm thoughts about what I was going to do, and just went on to do the discipline I enjoyed best, and actually I discovered planning in the final year of my degree. There was an option on practitioner overseas plan, I got into geography because I'm broadly an environmentalist from a most general perspective, both built and natural. And that was a discipline where you could carry on. But then when I found planning, that was a discipline where I could carry on doing that throughout my working career.

SPEAKER_00: 3:24

How did you discover planning? And how did your career unfold?

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

I discovered planning as a sort of final year option, say the third year of my degree. And I guess that's sort of lesson one for all of us is that it's never too late to discover the thing you're really passionate about. So if you don't know at the age of 16 or 18, you know, I found it at 21 and something like that. people find it in later. So that's one of my lessons. Yeah, and then I've had a very, what I describe as a squeaky career. Into the planning, I came out of university, the unemployment was a bit high about time, jobbed on all sorts of odd jobs for a year. Looking to get into planning, I started off as an enforcement officer, which is effectively a planning policeman, people who enforce the planning system. Then I worked on what was then described as remote control, which is dealing with planning applications in local government for six years. This is where I decided, okay, a bit squeaky I then went to work for the RSPB, the Royal Society of Protection of Birds, for nearly 13 years working on the planning system and how that can protect habitats and help protect bird species. So that was where I worked for a while. Then I moved to the Environment Agency, who have a very broad remit. I ended up doing a lot around planning and flood risk because there were quite bad floods in 2007, river floods, and a lot of development got flooded. So there's a question around how can we prevent that happening and are we allowing development to happen in the floodplain where it's vulnerable. Then another job, I went to work for Planning Inspectorate. They are a national government body agency. So if you apply to put local authority of the planning commission and it's refused, there's a right of appeal and they are the appeal body. They also examine local plans, which is a big part of the planning system. And lastly, I worked on the national infrastructure regime for big things like roads and rail and power stations, be that nuclear or offshore renewable and southern shore renewable. And then finally, I about where I'm at, which is how did Moby come about some

SPEAKER_00: 5:16

of the work you're doing?

SPEAKER_01: 5:17

Moby is the Ministry of Building Innovation and Education. We're not a government body. We are a charity. We were set up by or founded by George Clark, who is an architect and TV presenter that you may see on Channel 4 programs like Amazing Spaces. And the two reasons why he set up Moby, one, he's really passionate about home. And he describes home as the most important piece of architecture in our lives. And it is because actually having a good home and a good place to live in good community. It's fundamental to wellbeing, to actually your progression in career, et cetera, et cetera. But if you don't have a good home, that's the opposite really. So home is very important, but he's also really passionate about young people finding their way into the industry. A lot of us find it by mistake or accident or by relative. As I said, I found it on my geography course that a lot of people find it by knowing people in the industry. We want to make that much more visible to people. And we do that through two things. We have design challenges for young people. from primary school age through secondary school and then further in higher education and that's a way of either introducing young people to the built environment or helping young people who are studying the built environment connect with industry in a better way and then we also do work with education bodies around ensuring that what people are learning in terms of the built environment and construction is what I describe as modern construction and by modern construction I mean it includes a big emphasis on sustainability and that includes retrofit buildings a big emphasis on digital and how digital design and digital capability is increasingly a part of the built environment. And then finally, a bit around process thinking, rethinking, manufacturing, what we can learn from other ways of

SPEAKER_00: 6:56

making things, which we can then put into the built environment. One of the projects that I've been following that you'll be doing is EcoFix, which I think I ended now. But is there a particular project that we have seen that you want to talk about, or shall we talk about several of the projects?

SPEAKER_01: 7:10

We can probably talk about several of them, but Eco Ecofix is a good example. So Ecofix was a challenge we did with MACE and Grimshaw. So Grimshaw International Architects and MACE, a large built environment consulting company with a focus on retrofits. So that's about how do we adapt existing buildings, bring them back into constructive use. And that's a national challenge for schools and colleges and universities. And we had some amazing entries that we had and really inventive. So what it proved, it was quite a technical subject, but it proved to me there's a lot of young people who really could ideas about how you take red London buildings and bring them back into good use. We have a mid-terrace, a Victorian London house. How would you convert that into a property, not only which is energy efficient, but actually could deal with an adult with mobility issues. And it was actually the altar, one of the entrances. So that was really interesting. We had a older hospital up in the northeast, which was now out of use. And how do you bring that into a community which was co-living for older people? really invented. We had some Cold War aircraft shelters in Suffolk. So these are big, big sort of buildings which were used to house aircraft which would survive any attack from bombs, etc. And they converted those into a young person's, young professional's place where lots of young single people could live and have a community together. And then finally, the other final winning design was one around conversion of a historic mill in Trottshire. So really different ideas, different uses, but it really shows that you can bring buildings back into use. There's a current kind pain in the architect's journal about the most sustainable building is the building that already exists and this is about how do you take an existing building reuse it because about 15% of our carbon emissions are from the building off buildings that's in the UK so obviously if you don't have to rebuild that's 15% of the UK carbon you haven't used so that's why we did that then other ones we've done them with cities so Design Future London we've now done with London twice for young people from 5 to 25 plus actually so young professionals from primary school to young professionals focused on Croydon, particularly around how they revitalized Croydon and the Minnesotan Center in Croydon. And exciting on that challenge, we had a relationship with the GLA-led Education London Authority with Minecraft. And there was a special category for 5 to 11-year-olds for primary schools to enter their Minecraft designs. And we saw some fabulous designs. There are young people out there who are digitally designing to a really sophisticated level. And we need to show them that they can come into our industry industry and continue doing that as part of their career and help us create the homes and places in the future. In terms of the coffee, would the science give them to the participants or free to choose their side? Yeah, so we were very open on that brief. We said we want to take an existing building that you know and convert it and give it a reuse. So actually they were all chosen by those individuals, those teams. And that's why it was amazing because from those winners who were obviously the tip of the iceberg, there were other entries as well. We had really controlled different schemes for different users. It was just great to see young people grasping a building they knew and imagining what it would look like in the future. For example, the disused mill in Shropshire, they re-established the water wheel to provide hydropower and they then created a big glass extension which would get a lot of passive solar going, which means it gathers energy from the sun, free energy from the sun. They put solar panels on. They just were really inventive about how they did it and so this converting what are now disused former aircraft shelters into some accommodation for young people was a really inventive, clever idea. That was from university students. But we just love the breadth of what

SPEAKER_00: 10:51

they came up with. In terms of all these programs that are delivered, do you want to talk about almost step-by-step how the kids or the young people get involved in this project?

SPEAKER_01: 11:01

So it can vary depending on the challenges. But first of all, we find ourselves a partner to work with. So with Ecofix, it was a couple of commercial firms. With London, it was the Greater London Authority, the mayor We come up with a brief. So for London, we've had two briefs. We have one based around the Royal Docks and creating some new accommodation there. And then the second one was the rail regeneration of Croydon down to town centre. And the third one will be running to the back to kick off. We'll be around the London Plaid and what's the future of London and where do we find housing in London. So quite open briefs. We write the briefs. We then put those out to people. We create resources to go with them. So how do you design a home on retrofit? What is retrofit? We did some videos and some ask some experts to provide certain guidance around what that is, what is retrofit, what is taking this system building and make it as useful, reusing it and producing its energy as much as possible. We then give the young people about four months normally to come up with their designs, usually working as teams, so they'll brainstorm ideas. Actually, let's take that subject example. That's a team of university students at Teesside. I think there were about six members of those teams. They each proposed a building that they knew, and they They debated that as a team and chose the one that they decided to go with, which was the aircraft shelters. And then they designed them. They submit them. Then we have a sort of shortlisting exercise. We decide which were the best ones for Design Future Lubberland. We brought on some young people into that. So we had some school children who joined that judging panel to decide which we thought were the best to go to the finals. We had some people who just graduated. Then we had some young professionals who were sort of in there late to college. 20s to early 30s to sort of come on board and get that young person perspective you may not tell from my voice I'm a little bit older so it's around how do we get young people to come in and it was great because the young people had really good ideas even the school children had some great ideas about what we could do in Croydon so that forwarded the process so the important thing is clear brief support to teachers we can do some workshops to help either webinars or come out to actual locations and do the schools or colleges and And then we sort of wait for the inspiration to come back because it is such a pleasure judging these competitions. The quality, the effort, the capability that we get from young people never ceases. We always say, never ceases to amaze us. And it's true. It's just extraordinary. And particularly for the last London challenge, having five to 11-year-olds submitting their Minecraft designs. And some of those were incredibly sophisticated in both their design or their thinking. There was one which particularly struck me when where I think a nine-year-old girl had done about five green interventions in Croydon, which included creating green lampposts, greening the tramways in Croydon. And then she showed examples elsewhere in the world where this happened. It was a brilliant, very clever way of saying, if you just did these things around Croydon, it's going to look less great. It'll bring vitality. It'll bring a reason for people to visit. It was very clever.

SPEAKER_00: 14:05

Judging this program, or judging Bananasaurus put

SPEAKER_01: 14:08

together, we should ask young people more about the future of the building environment because it's your future. If you're a young person, where are the homes coming from? What sort of place am I going to live in? With that growing impact of climate change, how are we going to make that less vulnerable to things like flash flooding or flooding or a capable deal with increased temperatures as we saw a lot this summer, the previous summer? All of those things are part of what you are going to inherit from us, so actually you should have a really strong say in what happens there. But in terms of the judging process, we take them in, we look at them, whereas normally we five criteria and this is a tip for anybody when you do you do submissions be that for a school competition or when you get into practice make sure you read and respond to all those criteria because we will mark each submission against those five criteria and that might be design originality sustainability so how green are they teamwork we'll pick out different categories we make those those very tier at the beginning and then we mark people on the basis of the schemes on the basis of that we'll do a quite large lot list where we take out we get the best and then that's when we brought in our young judges in desired future london and the professionals we then have that job as a panel to get that down to a much shorter list which are the people who went to the finals and then the judges at the finals who were refreshed or um the people like uh the deputy mayor and george clark and others had a role in choosing who the real winners were and but the most important thing is you know if there's criteria if there's things a um a competition or a story that's a client who's up wanting you to designate a building or a place says they want, then make sure you respond to all of those. And if you don't, say why. Because there might be a reason why they decide not to, but if you don't do anything, that just becomes a low mark against your

SPEAKER_00: 15:55

scheme. These programs that you designed as mobile, is there an alignment with the national curriculum? Bills of regulations or reverse stages?

SPEAKER_01: 16:03

Yeah, obviously we try and design a challenge around a real-world problem where there's people wrestling with it. So, yeah, the Croydon was done in conjunction with both the GLA and Croydon Council around. They've currently got an urban room and they're looking to involve young people about what's the future of Croydon. So that was a very real problem for them. In terms of curriculum, it varies and it can vary by country, actually. So actually, quite often in England, we find you'd sort of get, and I'd say this as a geographer, I told you I was a geographer, you'd sort of think it fits in quite well with that curriculum at GCSE and A-level, but it doesn't to a degree because there's so much to be learned in that that actually squeezing extra stuff in does that work quite so well. It's really good on design and technology. In Wales, there are built environment GCSEs and A-levels, so actually it's quite easy to incorporate in there. So where we can, we link it. Where we can't, we actually find that a lot of people step forward and want to do it anyway, because it's great on the soft skills. So working as teams, taking a brief and converting that into something, doing design thinking. There are a lot of things you do that are a lot of challenge, which aren't technical, but are absolutely about how you work in the world work how many to work if you want to do college work because if you go to university you'll be asked to work as teams on projects that sort of thing so we'd love it to be more closely related in all honesty but at the moment some of it has to be done outside of that but we're not short of young people who want to take it as a challenge because they

SPEAKER_00: 17:29

really really like it and want to do it in your career working with children and younger people what kind of changes have you seen and where do you think we are at at the moment

SPEAKER_01: 17:39

what I see is clearly a room really strong focus by young people on sustainability and around environmental issues because studies are becoming more and more current. They are very high on their radar. So are issues around bachelor's students. Where am I going to live? Where is the home that I can afford? So those are quite high on the agenda. The design skills, digital design skills are just so much better than they were in my day. So I am of an age where I'm not sure I saw a computer at school and I only just saw one when I was at university. We have young people now who have been working with computers from the age of three, four, and they've got all of that in their head. So actually, it's about how you translate that innate skill, almost like a muscle memory, into putting it into designing a building. So there's that bit. And actually, I think young people's confidence in presenting is phenomenal these days. I really like just that. So I would say I see designs, and our head of design has said this, he's seen designs from 11 to 15-year-olds that he says he probably may not have been doing in his second year of architecture when he studied. I see presentations which I don't think I'd have been doing in my 30s. There is a level of confidence and of, you know, and of knowing how to get across to people that young people have because they grow up in an age of communication which is much more visual, much more audio than we were, which is probably well written.

SPEAKER_00: 19:03

In terms of the industry and the client, just what is being your experience? Where are we at the moment?

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

Well, industry has probably got three crises and they Well, actually, there's four. There's four crises that are the least I can think of. There is a housing crisis. We have a lot of things in the UK. It's been in the news literally the last week with various connotations from the Labour Party conference up in Liverpool, I think it was, around the need to build more homes, et cetera. So we've got a housing crisis. One of my favourite things is the people who really live in this country. We've got a climate crisis, which is very obvious. Linked to that is a biodiversity crisis. So actually, we've lost a lot of wildlife and actually the UK is one of the most major liquidity companies in the world in terms of all that industrialisation and agricultural reform. We did have a real impact on wildlife and our natural areas, so that's Kent's wife. Those are incredibly important. And then actually within industry, we've got a crisis of not enough people to build the homes that we need to build or build the infrastructure. So industry is responding from all of those perspectives. It wants to hear all people's views in terms of what is the future like, what are young people thinking, because there'll be a people who design and live in our future buildings at the moment. It obviously wants those young people to come into the industry and play the part in doing that. So I guess that's where industry is. It's very keen to engage young people. They are bikers of the future. We're going to lose about 20-25% of people in the ability of our construction in the next 10 years because of their age basically. They will be retired. We need that many people coming through to help us build. If it's really 1,000 homes per annum, we're was the target we had my system will get back to you know that's that's a lot of people we need to bring into the system i mean people with ideas you've been thinking about this sort of stuff so that's why industry is interested and actually on the retrofit challenge in a very technical area it's an area where we're all getting our heads around how do we take these 27 million homes in the uk have got to be made more energy efficient so we can reach a goal of being net zero by 2050 how do we do that it was really genuinely interesting to see where are any people on that are they even thinking about it if they are what are their thoughts, actually. I think what we learned were not the massive amount of young people thinking about it, but there are quite a lot who are really passionate about it, have some fantastic ideas. Now, if they want to come in the industry and help us solve some of these problems, then that's why industry is interested in what we have to say. And the other thing that industry can do is when young people knock on the door and say they're interested, create that time because it's not difficult for us to gather and spend an hour at a school or to invite somebody in to show them. Particularly around these days with the T-levels the new learning there's actually a lot of young people around those who are already interested in the built environment and need that work experience so making that available and telling them about what we do because that can be well either it's part of them or it might confirm that that's actually not what they want to do but either way that's important but hopefully it inspires them and shows them what the industry is all about I tend to find that most of the industry really love what they do and I don't mind talking about it so I think the thing is having the confidence that you can talk about the built environment in general and then what you do and that will very often inspire the young person and help them understand a bit better what they could be doing because it's really around showing them options and letting them do the narrowing of the options so I think your job, our job is to say well here's the duck and burrow of the round here's all the things you could be doing and then they go off and find out what it is they actually want to do.

SPEAKER_00: 22:29

We already talked a bit about what is the impact on children and young people by involving them in programs such as the ones that Moby does, the built environment as well.

SPEAKER_01: 22:40

There's a strain seeing around the built environment is everywhere so we see it every day and around nine percent of the uk population were uh in a job which is related to the built environment being that the building of the buildings or running and maintenance of those buildings or at the end the demolition or dismantling of those buildings yet it's not very visible to people um there's a bunch of reasons for that um and when it is visible that there tend to be two things that people know there's architecture which is quite often very aspirational and something that people really want to get into and there's destruction which is quite often seen in the other direction it's a term of that's generally going to be for young adults who are probably not very academic because they're much more hands-on workers, think in a 3D way, and why don't you go and work in instruction? There's a whole range of jobs between those. So part of this is around showing those to young people, explaining they're there, and actually not just young people, so this is two teachers, two careers advisors, two parents, so there's this massive industry, which is amazing. Most of the people in the industry, like me, love what we do. You can probably tell that from My tone of voice, I love what I do. It's a brilliant industry to get into. We're going to make an impact instead of trying to address climate change. We're creating homes for people. We're creating communities. We're revitalizing areas. That is an incredibly positive thing to be doing, but yet somehow people don't find those jobs. That's one of the reasons we do it. Then what we find is we'll get to a certain group of people. What I've found is we get to two broad groups of people. There are people who are very interested in it, but it's perhaps a little bit uncool. And there's a lot of the built environment like mine when I had it wasn't shared by everybody. But identify those links of other people out there who think the same way. So one, it gives them the confidence to say, oh, it's not just me. And actually, oh my God, there's all these people working in the world of the built environment who are doing jobs like this. I could be that. So that's one. The second one is the people who just don't know it's there and go, oh, that's interesting. Well, Lake Elk could do that. So what does an accountant do with a construction firm or what does an architect do or what's the quantities that they do so they get to understand what it's all about so that's that's broadly what we're about and then we've got a lovely story of so before I joined maybe the first challenge we ran was in 2018 was won by a group of girls from a Nottingham Girls Academy in Nottingham they were 11 to 14 years old I think they were mainly 14 they beat university teams their idea of a hexohomes hexapenal student accommodation was to judge the areas where winning design in that group. I should explain we run these by age groups so we'll run the primaries, the secondaries, the further and higher education but then so they can each be a winner of their age group but then we'll pitch them in at the end to say who's the overall winner. So one of the girls on that team is now studying interior architecture at Teesside University. She came from a family with no history working in construction of the environment. She came from a school which has really not sent people on those sort of disciplines so it for her has been a way to say oh it has some have been working and now she's going off and following that. So it's really opening up that opportunity to say it's there. There's loads of people working in the industry who would love you to join them and actually hear some of the routes you can take. It's cool and could more be done about

SPEAKER_00: 25:54

and open pupils and students' eyes to these careers.

SPEAKER_01: 25:57

It is a great industry to work in. If you want to make a real difference, it's a fantastic industry to work in with massive opportunities, lots of things, the different things you can do within that industry. There aren't that many industries where you can say, I helped build that, I helped create that community. I help design their house or that home. It's a really tangible thing because you can see the physical product of what you've been involved in. So that's one of its great attractions. In terms of curriculum, we've actually done some work with Twinkle, who are a big resource provider for primary schools. And we created, with their Scotland team, a resource called Building Our Future, which is aimed at primary schools from frog reception up to the final year of primary school, all about the built environment and the home and sustainable development. It was done around about the COP26 summit, which was the climate change summit, which was held in Glasgow, if you remember. And it's all about green buildings, green roofs, water resources, energy, insulation, explaining those concepts in simple classroom exercises. So people start asking that question, because it's about asking questions, really. Well, who did build my home, and how did it work, and is it energy efficient, and is my school energy efficient, and how could we make it more energy efficient, and do we have an area of wildlife and do we save water? All those things that you can just carry on through life and not thinking about or once you start thinking about them you can't stop thinking about them. So yes, so we can do that primary school education, open people's eyes, get them to think about it. I'd love to see more at secondary level. I think what Wales is doing around built environments is really interesting and hopefully we might get some of that in England in due course. Geography clearly is a discipline where it's relevant, social design and technology so I'd like to see them think about more about the built environment. I mean, there's quite a lot of it in there. There's climate change as well, so it's creating those links. It's maybe being more direct around these are the concepts that you learn, but have you ever, did you realise you could go on and do that as a career? There's a whole range of jobs which are basically addressing those problems and trying to solve those problems.

SPEAKER_00: 28:00

Enough can we talk to the parents about coverage of these children, as

SPEAKER_01: 28:03

well as community advisors, teachers. Well, I've got two older kids now, but they were younger. And as with every child, it's finding the thing they're passionate about so yeah we will expose this to a lot of young kids and for some it doesn't it doesn't resonate it's not what they're interested in but some it is so if A don't steer away from doing it if they show an interest let them pursue that interest because you know as we hopefully anybody who's in a job which they love doing knows it doesn't feel like a job it feels like a vocation it feels like you know if I'm getting paid to do something I love doing so don't sort of stop that enthusiasm and if anyone finds a way to channel that, so our design challenges are all the way, but there's loads of other ways you can do it. They're probably watching built environment programs or looking at buildings, et cetera. Encourage that interest. I've got equal natural environment interests. If they're interested in natural environment, understanding about species or why that lamb falls there, it's asking those questions of why rich young kids always do it. So if they're asking those questions, keep that going and then see if you can connect in to people who work in the local area who are doing those sort of jobs, maybe to connect or talk to people like us. There are others in the built environment who do these sort of things, but the number one, talk about it, show it to them. I often say that people who are interested in the built environment walk around towns bumping into people because they're always looking above shop level. If you look at shops and shop fronts, there are a lot of them that many have been converted and they're now quite modern. If you look above, there's another layer of buildings at the first and second and third floors which show a much older history and you can go around and see, how old's that? Who built that? Oh, there's a plaque on that, it says that was built in 1780, I wonder who built that? It's around sort of unclean realities really. I once had an art teacher, and I'm not a great artist, but he said, look, and then he said, really look, and that's one thing I learned from him, just look at something and really think about it. So encourage that, encourage their passions, and then if they have got a genuine passion, see if you can connect, see if the school's got information about jobs in that area, and if not, try and connect with local people who might do, because there will be architects or local government local council and all sorts of people who are working in the area who might be able to provide some help I am a planner by profession but I increasingly talk about being a built environmentalist in the whole of the built environment and how it works and showing people actually have you ever thought about what it takes to build design run deconstruct a house a city a wider area so actually what does it take to run a city because actually that's what we're in or a town or a village so there's a bit around that probably in terms of questions no I think the education side it's around this we need to be making sure that the young people coming into the industry are coming with the right skills and the skills to challenge it so my other criticism of the industry would be we're not as joined up as we could be and we're also not as inventive as we could be so one of the reasons we want young people to join is because we want them to come in as the most important question in the world, why? Why do you do that? Why are you building a building which doesn't have zero carbon emissions? Because we can do it. We know how to do it. And it's by young people coming in and challenging us to do better that we will get better. So that's probably what we'd love to see. Young people coming in asking really difficult questions about why do you do it that way? Why haven't you done this other way? So yeah, that would be my sort of, my plea and actually the thing that you can do most as a young person, never stop asking that question because the answer will often be because that's how we've always done it. And then you ask again, well, why have you always done it that way? And because sometimes you get stunned silent because they haven't asked that question and they don't know the answer. And that's probably because, well, somebody in the 1930s admitted that way of doing things and they just haven't thought of changing it. So, yeah, come in, shake us up a bit, challenge us, and thanks, Sebastian Worley.

SPEAKER_00: 32:05

My pleasure. Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, And please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family. And to find out more about it, visit our websites. And follow us on Instagram, Twitter Thank you.