Hasta La Ideas

We sat down with Joe Haskett of Distill Studio to talk about his extremely successful shipping container building, the Box Office, and other projects in the works.

Core77: What are your goals as an architect?

Joe Haskett: I feel that there’s a lot of disservice that architects and designers have been doing over the course of the twentieth century—that we’re the ones who can solve a lot of the problems that we’ve created. It really finds itself in the form of energy efficiency and sustainability. The decisions that we make and the people that we aggregate together to make these decisions are critical. I think we’ve been doing poorly in that as architects and designers.

I really wanted to look at the process of architecture. Looking back at the way architecture’s been practiced before, it was typically in a vacuum between owner and architect. An owner would come to an architect and in order to keep costs down at the beginning they’d ask us not to bring in a bunch of consultants. What would happen is that architects would make a bunch of assumptions without bringing in people who would know [the effects of their decisions].

What I’m trying to do with Distill Studio is to perform an integrated design process. People have been doing this for a while, but it just kind of expands and opens up that front end of the project. It brings in all the stakeholders and decision makers. It really asks the questions first rather than later, because when you ask these questions when it’s too late you’re definitely going to spend more money. And the project is going to suffer – that’s the most important thing. The way that Distill Studio approaches buildings is looking at them as ecosystems. When you look at nature, it’s a closed system. It doesn’t have any of these outs. “Oh, we’re just not going to account for that.” We try to look at them as an opportunity to not only make better projects, but to try and solve some of the larger issues that we face as a country and globally.

Image courtesy of Stephanie Ewens

Image courtesy of Stephanie Ewens

How did you get involved working with shipping containers?

We had designed a building that was going to be more typical, that was going to be energy efficient. We were looking at a LEED certification. But the economy tanked and the owner was like, “I can’t afford that.” So it really put us in gear to figure out a way to approach building and design from a different way. We looked at pre-fab and modular and ended up looking at these containers. We didn’t set out to do a container building; we kind of backed into it.

What kind of consultants do you usually work with?

We’ve had a couple of what I call “pow-wows.” You invite people who are in the building continuum: architects, designers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. But one of the most important factors in that group are the banks. A lot of the time people will get all that together and then they’ll go to the bank. If we’re going to change the way we design and build, it really depends on the banks and how they lend and the terms they will lend upon. Because, if they’re scared, they won’t lend. If you’re trying to propose something that seems off the wall or overly unique, they get scared. If they get scared, they don’t lend…These pow-wows try to bring in the bankers who lend the money to green light these projects and expose them to some of the decisions and the thoughts that we’re having as designers and people who are interested in the environment.

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