Starting Blocks

In this episode of OutFoxed, we delve into the interesting intersection of mathematics and architecture with our guest, Chris Dobosz. Join us as we explore how maths shapes architectural design and inspires solutions...

Guest Bio:

• Location: American architect based in Geneva, Switzerland.
• Education: B.S. Arch (University of Michigan); M.Arch (UC Berkeley).
• Expertise: Sustainable civic, cultural, and educational design (Williams College, ASU, UCLA).
• Current Focus: Technical delivery of bespoke residential projects using innovative European materials.
• Specialty: Resolving complex technical detailing and "thorny" design problems.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Chris shares how he got interested in architecture. Spoiler: It was Legos!
• He explained how architects work with clients, engineers, and builders.
• He recommends classes and skills for aspiring architects. 
• AI will change how architects design in the future, but Chris predicts that humans still make the final decisions on how space is used.
• He recommended a helpful architecture book and an alumni architect to look up.

Recommended Links:

• Study Architecture Firm
• Ching, Francis D.K.; Book: Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
• Clement Luk Laurencio; Alumni Newsletter: Architectural Designer and External Design Critic

Math Challenge:

Let’s imagine you are an architect, and you need to design stairs to connect the first and second floors. The height between the two floors is 2.4 meters. The average riser — the vertical distance of each step — is 20 cm, and the depth of each step — from front to back — is 30 cm. If your staircase were straight (no turns), how many steps would your design require (not counting the first floor landing), and what is the length of the base?

Follow-up Question:

Now you need to buy paint for the triangular wall on the first floor, and it takes 100ml of paint per square meter. How much paint would you need to buy if you were going to do 2 coats of paint on that wall?

Transcript

Mohammad 0:05

Hi, I'm Mohammad. Welcome to OutFoxed, the first ever podcast brought to you by the amazing,

Calvin 0:11

The one and only,

Aviva 0:13

The unbelievable,

All 0:14

Ecolint Foxes!

Jessica 0:16

Hey Aviva, tell us about this awesome podcast. I'm dying to learn more.

Aviva 0:21

Okay, we're here to take an exciting, fun-filled journey out of those stinky, stuffy, smelly classrooms and into the real crazy world. This season, we look at math, my favorite subject.

Mohammad 0:34

For some of us, math is the greatest punishment humankind has created for itself. Started from sweet little 123 to now brain draining inequalities and Pythagoras theorem. It's a subject that has frankly tormented some of us.

Jessica 0:49

Oh Mohammad, math can be enjoyable, something that sparks curiosity, creativity, and art. Think about mandalas, those beautiful geometric patterns that are supposed to help you relax and clear the mind. Plus, without algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, we wouldn't have indoor plumbing, food recipes, weather reports, or video games. Right, Calvin?

Calvin 1:17

Hey, don't look at me. I don't play too much. I mean, maybe a little as a way to relax, and as you said, clear the mind.

Mohammad 1:25

Okay, guys. Perhaps you've convinced me. Math is everywhere.

Aviva 1:30

Exactly. That's why this year's Out Foxed podcast theme is math. But not just equations and theorems. We're gonna do this by intervened professionals and a variety of careers. We're going to see how math works in our day-to-day lives.

Calvin 1:47

Today we're kicking off season one by exploring the connection between math and design. And there's no better place to start than with architecture. We are joined in our Geneva-based studio today by Chris Dobosz, an architect and designer with Study, an architecture firm based in San Francisco.

Aviva 2:02

Calvin tells us that you're an architect. That's pretty cool. Tell us a little about yourself and how you got interested in architecture.

Chris 2:10

Sure. Thanks for having me, guys. I'm honored to be the first guest on your podcast. I think my interest in architecture started pretty early on. I always really enjoyed building with Legos. And I remember I would always build whatever the Lego kit was out of the box with the instructions, and then shortly after that, just keep building cities or other things with it, just create other things. L uckily I got to go to a high school that had a focus on architecture and engineering. And I was able to take a couple of classes about architecture and design and engineering. You know, I had algebra geometry, trigonometry, and calculus in high school. And then I studied what's called pre-architecture in university, and that gave me the experience in the portfolio to work as a junior architect for a few years and then returned to graduate school to get my professional degree in architecture. That was another two years after university for the graduate degree. It's something that always interested me in terms of the technical and the creative aspects of creating space. Architecture is really about creating space with light. And then also how people interact in space and with space. That's allowed me to work in a number of different architecture firms and for myself designing all different types of buildings, houses, multifamily housing projects. I've been lucky to specialize in educational buildings. So for universities, I had a chance to design a film school, which was pretty cool, performing arts centers, hotels, corporate headquarters, a couple of parking garages, which are interesting in their own way. And then just off the top of my head, what comes to mind in terms of a contemporary building would be the Performing Arts Center in Hamburg. It's just a really incredible adaptive reuse. They added on to an existing building with an incredible performing arts center. And it's something worth looking up, and it's really an incredible sequence of spaces as you go to the main hall. So that's just off the top of my head an example that comes to mind.

Mohammad 4:41

A question I have for you is how do you coordinate your different engineers, different builders? So how do you like interact with them?

Chris 4:50

So there's a couple of aspects to that question. One is internally, my team will talk to the clients about their aspirations or what their vision is for the house, how it wants to relate to the landscape, to views. Sometimes they might have very specific requirements. They might not know. And so they're looking to guidance from the design team. So we'll talk about those things with the clients, get some initial feedback, and then discuss internally how that could come together, and then distill down what we think are the best options for the client. It's an iterative loop of finding the right solution or the right design idea to meet their vision. Once we agree that this is the right approach, then the architect will take it and go into the technical drawings called construction documents. You know, there's the ducts, the mechanical systems, the plumbing systems that make the building work. I think one point that's important about architecture, 99.9% of buildings are not built by architects. Architects generally don't build buildings, they make drawings. It's like a musical composer who writes a score and then someone else plays it. That's kind of an interesting aspect to our work, I would say. That is how people interact. And so I think that is to say, being really observant, being a really keen observer of space, but also how people use it, how they feel, how they move.

Aviva 6:58

What role does AI play in your job?

Chris 7:01

That's a good question. So in my job right now, not a great deal, but it's something that will transform architecture even in the last couple of months. I've been trying to educate myself and understand more what the possibilities are, what the opportunities are, start to think critically about what that could mean for the practice of architecture, drawing, making a design, making 3D images, making plans or instructions for builders. Great amounts of that work will be influenced by AI. I think that one of the things that it does strike me is the need for expertise to enter data into AI models and then evaluate it critically will be elevated. It's incredible. You can generate anything that you can think of and then continue to train that model to what you'd like. When that image starts to interact with the real-world constraints of architecture, building codes, life safety, those things will still need to be checked and verified by humans in order to ensure basic life safety. I think my job, what I do, will look different in 10 years because of it. And I think people starting out will um their trajectories will be different than mine. What won't change is we're still one-to-one humans and we interact with the world. The buildings and structures and spaces that we design will all still incorporate fundamental needs of people. Our desire and our need to talk, to communicate, to to meet, to be alone will still be there. I just think that's an interesting aspect of it as well.

Calvin 8:53

So let's talk all about numbers and math and geometry. We learn formulas like the hypotenuse of a right triangle is A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Do you really know the types of formulas in your work?

Chris 9:04

Geometry, yes. I remember fairly early in my career, I was a summer intern for a professor, and he was a landscape architect. He had the job to redesign a big rural estate in a country where you needed to make a site survey, and we measured a field of trees, and we just took distances between all of the trunks. And he was explaining to me we don't even need to take the angles. We can just measure all the distances. And if you have this field of points, you can triangulate the whole planet, you know, the relationship between the trees using geometry and trigonometry. That's an illustration of how inherent and how baked in geometry and trigonometry are to what we do.

Aviva 9:46

Um, speaking of math concepts, what's the most surprising math concept that you use in architecture?

Chris 9:54

Probably when you start to work with curves in two or three dimensions, really cool things, really complex geometries create really amazing spaces, and they are tricky to control, but also really exciting and can create really cool spaces, that they have really interesting properties, really cool things can happen.

Mohammad 10:19

Thank you again, Chris, for joining us on our first ever podcast journey.

Chris 10:24

Can I leave you guys with just a couple of thoughts?

Jessica 10:26

Yeah, yeah, sure, please.

Chris 10:27

Just a couple of thoughts. One is that if you're gonna pick one book to look at, if someone was interested in architecture, is a book that an architect suggested to me by Francis D.K. Ching, that's the author, and it's called Architecture, Form, Space, and Order. It's probably in the bookshelf of just about every American architect and probably many others around the world. And then second, is there's an alumn of the school. I don't know if I'm saying his name right, but Clement Luke Lorencio, he's an architect working out of London who went to Campus de Nations and he has these really beautiful hand drawings. He's worth looking up. If you're interested in math, you have the benefit of having access to so much in terms of YouTube on talks. And I would challenge you, just look at it as a fun opportunity to figure out who are the people that are introducing mathematical topics in really captivating ways. There's so much illumination that's really available for free online now.

Calvin 11:29

That was a great interview. Inspiring, no? Keeping on theme, we'd like to challenge all of our listeners with a little architectural problem of their own. Quickly grab a pencil on some paper. I bet some of you might be able to do this to your heads. Are you ready?

Chris 11:45

Let's imagine you are an architect and you need to design stairs to connect the first and second floors. The height between the two floors is 2.4 meters. The average riser, the vertical distance of each step, is 20 centimeters, and the depth of each step, from front to back, is 30 centimeters. If your staircase was straight, that is no turns, how many steps would your design require? What is the length of the base?

Aviva 12:31

If you don't want a spoiler, press pause, otherwise, let's solve this together. If the height between the first and the second floor is 2.4 meters, the riser of each step is 20 centimeters, and the depth of each step is 30 centimeters. The first thing we have to do is we need to make our units mach. Convert 2.4 meters into 240 centimeters. If the total height between the first and second floor is 240 centimeters and the riser is 20 centimeters, we'll have to divide 240 by 20. 240 divided by 20 equals 12. So that means that we have 12 steps. The third step is to find the length of the base. Since we know we have 12 steps and the depth of each step is 30 centimeters, we'll have to multiply 12 times 30. That equals 360 centimeters. The base of our staircase is 3.6 meters. So our final answers are 12 steps, and the length of the base is 3.6 meters.

Calvin 13:46

For those of you wanting a little bit more challenge, head to our show notes for a follow-up question.

Jessica 13:53

That's a wrap for this episode. This is Jessica Chirambo with my co-hosts and co-writers, Mohammad Faraz, Calvin Reijers, and Aviva Slezak. Special thanks to Adele Reijers for inspiring our music and to our mentors, Kacee Ballew, Lorna Brown, and Michael Garbutt.