James Miner, CEO, Sasaki
Invest: interviewed James Miner, CEO at architecture and design firm Sasaki about the company’s 70th anniversary and why it is involved in city building, rather than traditional architecture. “If we design everything separately, that doesn’t reflect how the world works,” he said. “We are most valued at the urban scale because our projects involve long-range projects that involve numerous factors.”
What have been some key milestones and achievements for the firm over the last 12 months?
The biggest change for us over the last couple of years has been having a significant focus on having a stronger physical presence in the different geographies that we work in. We recently initiated a move from our previous headquarters outside of Boston to the downtown core, and this is the first year we have been fully downtown in the post-pandemic world. We also launched new studios in Denver, New York, and one is coming to Los Angeles. This was from a strategy born during the pandemic, when we had a lot of clients located in different US cities at a time when business travel slowed significantly. We were also responding to demographic shifts as people relocated from some major US cities to different locations and economies across the United States as remote and hybrid work gained traction. For example, we saw a lot of growth in places like Denver and Salt Lake City, and there has been an uptick in the amount of work we are doing in those places. Our Denver office, in particular, has really taken off and is continuing to grow and expand at a rapid pace.
The firm just celebrated its 70th anniversary. How was Sasaki founded and how has it maintained its success?
Seventy years is a long time for a design firm to be in business because many design firms often only survive as long as their founders stay professionally active. This is often because founding partners generate name recognition, making succession planning a challenge. Our founding partner Hideo Sasaki, established a collaborative model of practice that put planning and design innovation ahead of individual recognition. Some of this may have had to do with his humble beginnings as a Japanese American who was placed in an internment camp during WWII, before finding his way out into prominence as a modernist landscape architect and teacher at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. While Sasaki was himself a highly visible design figure in the 1950s and ‘60s, he was always highly sought after as a design partner by people outside his firm. The model he created is extremely relevant in today’s world – the concept of the individual architect as sole author and designer is no longer desired by most. The current emphasis is on creating places, spaces, buildings, landscapes, and parks that genuinely reflect the unique characteristics of the location, the site,and the people who inhabit it. This can’t be done properly by just one person or one set of ideals – you need collaborators and community members as partners to really do it well. Collaboration is at the core of how Hideo Sasaki practiced, and that is why, as we carry that legacy forward,our firm is even more relevant now than it was 70 years ago.
How does your interdisciplinary approach influence the effectiveness and innovation of your projects, and the sectors that you serve?
We believe there is a valuable proposition in the way we work as an integrated design practice. We sit next to people who don’t do what we do, and together we try to figure out the right design responses for a building or place. For example, landscape architects have a good sense of all the climate, environmental, and ecological considerations that should be considered to determine how buildings should sit on the land. Historically, traditional architecture practices treat every other design discipline as a support function, and everything ends up being done in different siloes. That is something we are continually trying to change at Sasaki – if we design everything separately, then a project won’t reflect how the world actually works. Sasaki’s value proposition is most clear at the urban and campus scales, because our projects involve long-range strategic moves that are held together by a very strong design framework. I like to call this “city building” when we are working in an urban context like Boston.
How are you integrating sustainability and resilience into your urban design?
There is a huge focus on both sustainability and resilience in all of our work right now as clients and communities have become more aware of the environmental impacts of construction and the challenges created by climate change. A lot of our work is focused on designing for sea level rise, and preparing for future climate risk through nature-based solutions. On the sustainability side we are doing a lot of work on decarbonization right now, and thinking about how we furlough emissions. We designed a digital tool that we call the “Carbon Conscience Calculator” that helps to measure operational and embodied carbon in both buildings and landscapes. We recently demonstrated the power of this tool on a recent project at the former Athens airport in Greece, called Ellenikon. Our design for what will be Europe’s largest urban park re-uses as much of the existing materials from the old airport on-site as possible, including vast amounts of concrete and asphalt, which are carbon-intensive. A project like this would have been aspirational 10 years ago, but now it’s the type of work we are being asked to do all over the world.
What are some relevant trends that are impacting your clients and your business in Greater Boston?
Political leaders in both Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are focused on making Boston a global hub for the cleantech sector. The city is working on ways to wean itself off fossil fuels, and to electrify the grid so that we can better support renewable energy across the city and region. It is a goal to be carbon neutral by 2050, and it is a huge opportunity coming from the highest levels of state government. However, Boston is experiencing a real estate downturn, which presents a challenge to progress because new building standards require new development to make progress, and construction activity has definitely slowed. Downtown is still far emptier than it was before the pandemic, and people are hesitant to go back to a five-day work day in their offices. Traffic congestion, uneven quality of service in our public transit system, and growing housing and cost of living expenses present significant obstacles to getting new development back on track downtown. As new development slows and there is less money available to the City from property taxes as buildings stand vacant, less funds are available to achieve the City’s strategic goals. This situation is often referred to as the Urban Doom Loop, and it has hit other cities harder than it has in Boston, but it’s definitely something everyone here is thinking about. That being said, I think there are still some good reasons to be optimistic for Boston’s future.
Just looking at Sasaki’s work here in Boston over the past decade or so, there have been some big projects that have reshaped the city and will continue to do so going forward. We completed the Seaport Square master plan in 2017 – many would have thought that the global pandemic would have stopped progress towards implementing that vision but, seven years later, it’s nearly all built out. In 2019, Sasaki was hired by Harvard to help develop a vision for its land holdings in Allston, and that plan recently yielded approvals for over a million square feet of housing, office, and R&D space. And more recently, Sasaki has also been engaged in two other major “city building” efforts at Fenway Corners (1.6 million square feet of new development adjacent to Fenway Park) and at Longwood Place (1.7 million square feet adjacent to the Longwood Medical Center). So, Boston is set to witness several major projects that will change the complexion of the skyline significantly between now and the end of the 2020s. The city will embark on a transformative growth trajectory, unlike any it has seen in over a century. We just need a little patience and need to be ready to act as soon as the right conditions present themselves – while the present may be challenging, the focus should remain on the long-term vision of Boston’s evolution.
What are your top priorities for the firms over the next couple of years? What strategies are you using to reach them?
Our top priority is to grow. It isn’t about dollars and cents, but about attracting and retaining the best and most diverse talent possible. Our nonprofit arm, the Sasaki Foundation, has been around since 2000. About six years ago, we updated and refreshed the mission of our Foundation to address a significant problem in the design industry: its lack of diversity. The vast majority of people in design look like me, and while that may make things feel comfortable for others like me, it doesn’t create space for new ideas to emerge from those with different backgrounds and lived experiences. Changing this pattern needs to start early in design education, so we have programs to engage middle school and high school kids, so they can learn the essential design skills. It is a drop in the bucket, but it is a start. A lot of design firms say they want to be diverse, but then complain that the pool of applicants is not diverse and so they just give up. That’s what we are trying to change.
