Professional Portrait Day

Are you in need of a new professional headshot?

Join us in January as we offer a day of complimentary headshot photo sessions to Pro & Council members with the talented portrait photographer Harry Zernike. This is the perfect opportunity to update your professional image.

Roundtable Austin: 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? What are the qualities or factors you weigh in taking risks? What is the course you are plotting with the risks you’re taking?

We invite Brick & Wonder Pro and Council members to join us in Austin for a Roundtable on Intelligent Risk. 

Site Visit: Newlab

We are pleased to invite Brick & Wonder Pro & Council members to a private tour of New Lab – a remarkable adaptive reuse project located in The Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Newlab is a multi-disciplinary, high-tech design and prototyping center that opened in 2016 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

DBI Projects led the development and project management of Newlab from conceptual planning and financing through entitlements, construction and completion.

DBI engineered the Public-Private Partnership between the developer, Macro Sea, the property owner, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp, and the State of New York through the Empire State Development Corporation and the City of New York through the Brooklyn Borough President, the City Council and the Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

Newlab was founded to address significant societal needs by scaling and commercializing emerging technologies and companies.

Today, Newlab includes more than 900 entrepreneurs, partnerships with forward-thinking corporate and civic entities, and the support of domain experts—all working together to scale frontier technologies.

Roundtable: Performance Under Pressure

Entrepreneurship, leadership, and management all create great stress and pressure on those who lead, but we don’t always succeed in managing these moments well.

In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss strategies and insights for navigating intense workplace pressure, avoiding failure, and supporting those we lead and manage to do the same.

Special Event: Design For Freedom Summit

Join the Brick & Wonder team at the Design for Freedom 2024 Summit at Grace Farms on March 26th as we come together for a day of action and awareness.

Grace Farms’ Design For Freedom initiative accelerates the movement to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain by engaging leaders from architecture, interior design, manufacturing, policy, owners, and developers, as well as engaged community members and not-for-profits that are committed to a more humane future.

Roundtable: The Power of Collaboration

Intuitively, we know that we go further together. Collaboration may help us do better work, and it can even increase the joy in the work we do, but in the crucible of doing our best work, things can sometimes get heated…

In this Roundtable, we’ll discuss strategies and insights for developing and sustaining collaborations that unlock new opportunities in business growth.

Roundtable Austin: The Sustainable Building Imperative

The built environment contributes up to 42% of global carbon emissions. These emissions take the form of embodied carbon needed to build and repair buildings, and the operational carbon that buildings consume to stay warm or cool, connected, and productive.

As professionals designing and building the places people live, work, and play, we are both part of the problem and part of the solution.

This Roundtable will explore the imperative to build better, more sustainable buildings. Our lives and the future of life on our planet depend on it.

Site Visit: Manitoga Residence and Russel Wright Design Center

We are pleased to invite Brick & Wonder Pro & Council members to a private tour of the Manitoga Residence and Russel Wright Design Center, on Friday May 9th 2024.

Located in Garrison, New York, approximately one hour north of New York City, Manitoga is the former home and 75-acre woodland garden of American industrial designer Russel Wright (1904-1976), envisioned with his wife Mary Einstein Wright (d. 1952) for their family. Manitoga is a National Historic Landmark, an Affiliate Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and one of the few 20th-century modern homes with original landscape open to the public.

In 2021, the Russel & Mary Wright Design Gallery opened to the public, offering a permanent onsite display of the Wrights’ groundbreaking designs for the American home.

Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center stewards Manitoga as the embodiment of the Wright’s design philosophy and life work and celebrates good design for living in creative harmony with nature through tours, programs, events, and free year-round access to woodland trails.

Roundtable: How to Handle Client Relationship Breakdowns

Though we enter new client engagements with energy, enthusiasm, and high hopes for what the future holds, the reality of realizing any built project is that it places stress on the clients, the project collaborators, and on the original vision for the project.

We are wise to counsel clients (before we engage!) that there will be ups and downs, and that this process can often be additive, though it seldom feels like it at the time.

Many projects survive or even flourish in the crucible of getting the work done. Others, for a variety of reasons, do not.

Roundtable Austin: Making Better Decisions

How do you make decisions?

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

In this Roundtable members will share their experiences in decision-making and how the use of frameworks has influenced their memorable business decisions.

Roundtable Austin: The Specialist vs The Generalist

Most are familiar with the adage “jack of all trades, master of none, ” and 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.