The Specialist vs. The Generalist

Most are familiar with the adage “jack of all trades, master of none.” You’ve likely debated the pitfalls of specialization or generalization in your business and personal skill set. Whether project types, services offered, or clients cultivated, it can be hard to choose between perfecting your niche or expanding your offerings.

In this Roundtable, we’ll explore how real estate and design rewards and punishes specialization, generalization, and the area in between.

Hiring & Retention

We invite Brick & Wonder members, their teams, collaborators, and colleagues to join this open Workshop on building your creative dream team.

Billy Clark and Clayton Apgar lead BCCM Talent Acquisition and Everett Hollander leads BCCM Advisory, a business strategy and executive leadership practice focused on company culture, corporate finance, operations, and organizational structure. In this Q&A on attracting and retaining talent, the conversation will focus on the following: Hiring is Casting, Centrality of Culture, Comp Question, and Benefits of Benefits.

Resilience in Life and Business

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as business and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from difficult experiences, it can also catalyze personal growth.

In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss methods and strategies for cultivating resilience in your professional life and share lessons learned from past brushes with adversity.

Collaboration for Growth

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members to join us for a conversation focused on collaboration as a tool for leveling up your work and growing your business.

Redefining Client Services | Olympia Dumbo Site Tour

Research shows eight in ten customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss the evolving nature of client services, sharing strategies and insight on how to foster impactful, innovative, and sustainable client experiences and relationships. This Roundtable will take place at Olympia Dumbo and include a tour of the development.

Fall Cocktails – The Spiral

We’re thrilled to invite Brick & Wonder Pro and Council Members and select guests to join us for drinks and canapés at The Spiral.

Designed by BIG and developed by Tishman Speyer, The Spiral features a dramatic series of cascading terraces that reach every tower floor, delivering light, fresh air, and access to outdoor space.

We’ll gather near the top floor for amazing sunset views and endless opportunities to connect.

Ask the Publicist

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members to join us for a conversation focused on the role of publicity in growing businesses and public visibility for teams and leaders.

High-Performance Building: Cocktails & Case Study

This public panel, in partnership with Passive House Accelerator, will explore an expanded definition of high-performance building.

Hosted at Brickworks New York Design Studio, we’ll hear from an interdisciplinary project team on solutions to the built environment’s carbon problem. COOXFOX’s recently completed Betances Residence will serve as a case study. The affordable housing development in the Bronx is passive house certified and incorporates biophilic and active design to support residents’ health and well-being.

Moderated by Michael Ingui, Architect and Founder of Passive House Accelerator, the complete speaker list will be announced shortly.

Present Me vs. Future Me

You’ve probably read about the Marshmallow Experiment and wondered how you might have performed balancing the offer of immediate gratification with the promise of a greater future reward if you could wait a little longer.

Saving, investing, and certainly growing a business requires mastery of the same mechanism – deferring immediate gratification to build and gain something more valuable in the future. In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss how we balance taking care of Present Me and Future Me, and how we can create alignment with the teams we lead around the promise of future value while balancing their nearer-term needs.

Sales & Selling

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members for a conversation focused on sales and selling. Survival and growth in business depend on sales and selling, but, for many, the process is exhausting, emotionally fraught and a distraction from the satisfaction of doing the work we’re required to sell.

Seeding Innovation | Olson Kundig Studio Visit

Innovation in the ways we work, and in the products and servivces we produce creates opportunity. Yet innovation is an ongoing proposition – it’s not enough just to innovate once. In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss approaches to seeding innovation in the work you do, and nuturing the capability to innovate in the teams you work with – even in the consultants you hire to deliver your work. This Roundtable will take place at Olson Kundig’s new studio in New York.

Managing Your Margins

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members for a conversation focused on managing margins in their business operations. In any business, but perhaps especially in service-based business models, managing margins can be an extremely difficult aspect of business management.

The Obstacle is The Way

Everyone knows the axiom “you’ve got to go through it to get to it,” but sometimes it’s not clear whether an obstacle is to be avoided or hurdled, or whether pushing through it the hard way might be the best, or only way. In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss approaches to navigating the business and personal challenges that stand in our way, from confronting them directly to trying to steer clear. What’s the right approach, and when, and how do you asses the kind of obstacles you face?

Summer Social

We’re thrilled to invite Brick & Wonder members and their guests for our Summer Social at Spring Terrace in Tribeca!

This will be an informal gathering for Brick & Wonder members, as well as guests interested in learning more about the Brick & Wonder community.

Refreshments and light bites will be provided at the beginning of the evening.

Hell Yes, or No | Saint Marks Place Site Tour

In all businesses and projects, competing priorities can create decision fatigue that clouds our judgement and impacts the outcomes of our work. How do you decide what really matters to you and your business? And how do you get at your true values? This Roundtable will take place at Saint Marks Place and include a tour of the stunning development.

UAP Foundry Tour

We are pleased to invite Brick & Wonder Pro & Council members to a private tour of the UAP | Urban Art Projects (formerly Polich Tallix) Foundry just outside Beacon, NY on Friday June 17th.

Growth Relationships

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members to join us for a conversation focused on the value of identifying, pursuing and building growth relationships in order to level up in your work.

Catalyzing Success

Sometimes we find ourselves needing or benefitting from steaks of success that build one upon the other. Recognizing this pattern, and the need to make our own luck to benefit from it, how do you think about building from one success to the next in your business?

On Time, On Budget

In this Discussion, we invite Brick & Wonder members to join our conversation focused on the tools and processes you use to keep projects on time and on budget.

Living in the Future

Are you following the status quo or are you operating ahead of the curve? Real estate is speculative by nature – nothing that is designed is built immediately, so the work is always looking forward to some future state.

Leveraging Thought Leadership

In this Discussion, our conversation will focus on using thought leadership to bring value to your team, clients and industry colleagues, elevating your profile and becoming more visible for the work you do.

Cocktails & Canapés

We’re thrilled to invite Brick & Wonder Pro and Council Members and select guests to join us for drinks and canapés at Zanotta House in Greenwich Village.

Grace Farms Design For Freedom Summit

Join Sharon Prince, CEO and Founder of Grace Farms Foundation, and Design for Freedom Working Group members for a day-long summit exploring corporate ethical responsibility and the government policies that impact forced labor in the global building materials supply chain.

Growth Strategies

In this Discussion we welcome all Brick & Wonder members to join a conversation focused on strategies they are engaging to level up and grow – personally, professionally and for their businesses.

Failed Flooring

We invite Brick & Wonder members, their teams, collaborators and colleagues to join this open Workshop on hardwood and engineered wood flooring installation.

Intelligent Risk

Risk is an essential dimension in business (and life!), but it can be the making or undoing of businesses, ideas, partnerships, projects and teams. How do you manage and take risks in your business?

Brand Stories

In this Discussion, our conversation will focus on approaches to ideating, developing and telling your brand stories to extend your reach and cut through the noise.

The Essence of Leadership

What does leadership mean for you in your business? What leadership mean for you in relation to your work in the built environment industry?

Private Lending for Speculative Development

In this Member-led Discussion, our conversation will focus on understanding the landscape of lending products available for small to mid-scale speculative (spec) development projects.

Successful Contracts

For this workshop, we welcome Jamie Lieberman, Founder of Hashtag-Legal, to guide us through the core components of successfully written contracts, best practices and common pitfalls.

Making Better Decisions

How do you make decisions? Do you use a values-based decision making framework, or another framework to check your instincts?

The Built Environment: Transformed

In this Discussion, our conversation will focus on the changes to the built environment itself – the industry, the world of work, leisure and home life – that have come about due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

How to Spend ERC Funding

Following a discussion thread we ran on the Brick & Wonder forum, we invite Brick & Wonder members to join an informal conversation with fellow members who have received Employee Retention Credit (ERC) funds.

Bring Your Presentations to Life

Want to raise your shortlist interview hit rate? Feel more confident when you speak in public? Successfully navigate your virtual meetings? In this fun, interactive 90-minute Graceworks workshop, we’ll share a strong foundation for presenting and communicating both in person and online.

BassamFellows Design Studio – Private Tour

We are pleased to invite Brick & Wonder members, their families and team members to a private tour of the BassamFellows Design Studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut on Saturday November 6th.

Sales & Selling

Survival and growth in business depend on sales and selling, but, for many, the process is exhausting, emotionally fraught and a distraction from the satisfaction of doing the work we’re required to sell.

Creative Feedback

Providing creative feedback requires the highest engagement of our social & emotional skills in order to be constructive, fair, supportive, helpful and critical all with the same few choice words.  This Workshop will focus on developing your skills and techniques for giving and receiving Creative Feedback.

Rooftop Gathering

We’re thrilled to invite Brick & Wonder members and select guests to join us for drinks and canapés on the rooftop at 488 Sterling Place in Brooklyn, a new passsive house condominium development from The Brooklyn Home Company.

Goal Setting

In this Roundtable our co-leaders will dig into your goals for the coming year, show you how to track and measure progress, and help you reverse engineer a path to achieve them.

Open Restaurants Volunteer Build Weekend

After many weeks of fundraising, research, design and co-ordinating between our volunteer teams, we’ve now raised the funds to go ahead and build outdoor dining structures for Settepani and NBHD!

Helping Your Clients Move

For this Workshop, we’re thrilled to have two Brick & Wonder members sharing their combined decades of experience helping clients prepare for and manage moving house as painlessly as possible.

Around Manhattan Boat Tour

We are pleased to partner with Classic Harbor Line and the AIA to offer Brick & Wonder members a boat tour circumnavigating Manhattan, with architectural commentary from a registered AIA tour guide.

Shop Talk

SHOP TALK is a monthly event for Brick & Wonder members to gather informally, talk shop, share resources, knowledge and project updates.

Rooftop Gathering

We’re thrilled to invite Brick & Wonder members and their guests to join us for drinks and canapés at Spring Terrace in Tribeca!

Supercharging Business Creativity

In this Roundtable our seasoned co-leaders will help attendees explore the meaning of creativity in business, and the value of applying, nurturing and growing organizational creativity as a tool for innovation, problem solving and growth.

The Future of Modular Architecture with David Wallace

We are on the cusp of a transformative change in the way we design and build our cities. Join us as we sit down with David Wallace to dig into his fifteen years of research, technical development and design on the subject of Modular Architecture.

(Re)Building Office Culture

After more than a year of remote work, teams are finally now re-emerging to gather in shared offices and workspaces. But what, if anything has changed? And how do we begin to rebuild the team dynamics, collaboration and workplace culture that was taken from us in the pandemic?

Shop Talk

SHOP TALK is a monthly event for Brick & Wonder members to gather informally, talk shop, share resources, knowledge and project updates. This month our topic focus is on the renovation boom and post-covid supply chain shortages.

Virtual Tour: At The Luss House with Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing

We’re thrilled to offer Brick & Wonder members and their guests a chance to virtually tour The Gerald Luss House in Ossining, NY on the occasion of the exhibition, At The Luss House, organized by Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing.

Getting Teams Vaccinated & Back to Work

We invite Brick & Wonder GC’s and any guests to discuss the challenges of getting large teams fully vaccinated and back to work.

Expanding Business Ownership

In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss the notion of expanding business ownership by extending Profits Interests or Shares (of different kinds) to senior team members.

Shop Talk

SHOP TALK is a monthly event for Brick & Wonder members to gather informally, talk shop, share resources, knowledge and project updates.

Self Limiting Beliefs

In our personal lives, and especially in business, where decision making is complex and fraught with risk, breaking out of our established internal models of thinking can be difficult. For this Workshop session we’re excited to invite Brick & Wonder member and business coach, Chris Smith, to get us looking our limiting beliefs in the eye, and then looking past them!

Digital Advertising for Small Businesses

In this session Digital Advertising expert, Taryn Ramos (Content Project @ Google), will guide you in thinking through how to make a start, set strategy and optimize ad spend, even when working with a limited budget.

Financial Times Dream Home Panel Series: The Big Reveal

This three-part series will be produced in partnership with the Financial Times.

Featured Panelist: Tom Kundig, Olsun + Kundig Architects

Financial Times Dream Home Panel Series: Designing and Building

This three-part series will be produced in partnership with the Financial Times.

Featured Panelist: Amin Taha, Groupwork

Shop Talk

SHOP TALK is a monthly event for Brick & Wonder members to gather informally, talk shop, share resources, knowledge and project updates.

Financial Times Dream Home Panel Series: Finding Your Dream Team

This three-part series will be produced in partnership with the Financial Times. Featured Panelist: Deborah Berke, Deborah Berke & Partners

On Time & On Budget

Regardless of the discipline, delivering projects on-time and on-budget is difficult. But there are methods, teams, approaches and collaborators who succeed. What are they doing right? What are others doing wrong?

Shop Talk

SHOP TALK is a monthly event for Brick & Wonder members to gather informally, talk shop, share resources, knowledge and project updates.

Join if you’d like to: Meet other Brick & Wonder members, near and far; Share project updates or project needs; Share resources, knowledge, connections and more with Brick & Wonder colleagues; Update Brick & Wonder team on the things you’re working on or collaborators you’re looking to engage; Share an opportunity to collaborate, partner or work together with other members.

Hiring & Firing

This is a roundtable event for Brick & Wonder members.

In this discussion, we’ll hear from our seasoned co-leaders as they share insights gleaned across hiring markets and different geographies, with companies big and small. We’ll reveal some of the common pitfalls with recruitment (and firing), and some of the tools and techniques that can accelerate the processes and improve outcomes. This Roundtable will be co-led by Lonny Rossman, Principal and Founder at API Partners, and John Piombino, Head of Human Resources, Buro Happold USA.

Building Science Fight Club

In this conversation, we will take Brick & Wonder members and their teams into the details of common mistakes and assumptions in construction and design, while also looking at emerging trends and opportunities for cost-saving and risk mitigation in contemporary building science. Our conversation will be led by Christine Williamson, Founder of Building Science Fight Club.

Exponential Growth

This is a roundtable event for Brick & Wonder members.

In this discussion, we’ll hear from our seasoned co-leaders as they share how they’ve successfully scaled their businesses, from the decisions and tradeoffs made, to the challenges and setbacks they’ve navigated, and the rewards they’ve realized.

The roundtable will be led by Andrei Dolnikov, Founder & CEO, BINYAN, and Andrew Kotchen, Founding Principal at Workshop APD. The Roundtable will be moderated by Drew Lang, Founder, Brick & Wonder.

Food, Design & Influence

This discussion will explore the nuanced relationship between society, food and the spaces that make it meaningful. Food and culinary arts have transformed our homes and social gatherings, as well as being a natural catalyst for spatial design and materiality. Culinary tastemakers, who have galvanized followings and activated compelling spaces, will lead the discussion on the important cultural intersection of food and design. Panelists include Dana Cowin, Editor-in-Chief of Food & Wine from 1995-2016; Patrick Janelle, lifestyle influencer and founder of Untitled Secret; Amanda Frederickson, Author restaurant owner; and Skyler Stevenson, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Gaggenau North America.