Dan Kaplan of FXCollaborative: Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Real Estate Industry

An Interview With Jason Hartman

Real Estate is the largest industry on the planet, but it functions as a small village: there are generally 2-degrees of separation between all the players (I say “player” intentionally, since it is a team sport). Therefore, always do the right thing, and always try to act with grace.

As a part of my series about the ‘Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Real Estate Industry’, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Kaplan.

Dan Kaplan, FAIA, LEED AP, is a Senior Partner at FXCollaborative, a New York City-based architecture, interiors, and planning design firm. Dan serves in a design and leadership capacity for many of the firm’s complex, award-winning projects. Adept at creating large-scale, high-performance buildings and urban designs, he approaches each project with the mission that it must elevate and resonate with the larger urban, cultural, and climactic totality. Notable projects include 1 Willoughby Square (Brooklyn, New York), Allianz Tower (Istanbul, Turkey), Eleven Times Square (Manhattan, New York), and Fubon Financial Center (Fuzhou, China).

Dan holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and is a registered architect in numerous US states.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to the Real Estate industry?

I grew up on Long Island, the fourth of five sons to wonderful parents. My father was a psychoanalyst, and my mother had a thriving Interior Design practice — a combination of influences that truly has proven to be invaluable as an architect.

During my high school years and while attending Cornell architecture school, I worked in the plan desk and model shop of Fox & Fowle in their early days. I accompanied Bob Fox (operating the slide projector for him) to my first community board meeting when I was 17 years old and got a first glimpse of design and development in the public realm.

I was very lucky to land at Cornell for architecture school during the peak influence of two great theorists: Colin Rowe and Mattias Ungers. As a reaction to the postwar suburban culture 50’s and 60’s, they both promoted a distinctly urban point of view, rooted in history. There was a great excitement and ferment about the possibilities of a reclaimed and reinvented City.

After graduating Cornell, I worked in Switzerland for a year, which was formative. Between design competitions, I used Switzerland’s central location to travel all over western Europe. Sketchbook and Eurail Pass in hand, I absorbed so much of its history, especially the iconic examples of Modern Architecture. In the late 1970’s and early 80’s, Switzerland was a hotbed of architects seeking to keep true to the ethos of modernism, but to do so with a vocabulary rooted in a specific context.

To this day, I am still “mining” this design territory: a reinvention of the city with modern architecture, rooted in the specific sense of place and context.

In the late 80’s, I returned to Fox & Fowle which by then had blossomed into a NYC powerhouse. Over the years the firm grew, changed and most importantly evolved. It continues to do so, now as FXCollaborative. I like to think that I also evolved and matured along with it. Along the way, I have had the great opportunity to direct the design of over 75 completed urban buildings all over New York and all over the world.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that occured to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or take away you took out of that story?

After my year in Switzerland, I returned to NYC and went to work for a wonderful couple — Jane Siris and Peter Coombs who started a great practice (that their daughter Annie now runs). My first project was a full-floor Park Avenue apartment for a young fashion designer named Vera Wang. It was an education in craft, detail and exacting requirements. There is this oft-repeated cautionary tale in the architecture world that goes something like “you learn all this heroic stuff in school and then get out only to design bathrooms and closets.” I think that this is completely wrong-headed. I tell young architects that if you can design a bathroom and closet for Vera, then you can design the core of an 80-story tower: it’s all the same attention to problem solving, integration of form and function and attention to detail.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are completing 1 Willoughby Square, a new office tower that we designed in Downtown Brooklyn (and home to FXCollaborative). As I often think about how we can make our projects more antifragile, the building’s timeless design attributes — unencumbered, column-free, high, loft-like spaces with ample light and multiple outdoor spaces — is attracting a diverse group of tenants, beyond the TAMI tenants first imagined. A more “efficient” design would have had more columns, a centralized core, lower floor heights, floor-to-ceiling windows (not as flexible as one would think), minimal egress stairs and certainly no outdoor space. Interestingly, a public school is occupying the building’s base floor, attracted to its “bones” and its ability to happily accommodate the vagaries of a school space program. The building’s flexible design ethos is proving to be antifragile.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

While we have created important additions to skylines of cities from Istanbul to Boston, most of the firm’s work is in NYC. From Times Square and Hudson Yards to Downtown Brooklyn, The Bronx Zoo, Lincoln Center, and Liberty Island, FXCollaborative has made a significant mark on the City that we love. We are currently working on several important efforts that will help the city as it emerges from the pandemic, including a reimagination of the Fifth Avenue streetscape, a new home for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, several innovative mixed-income housing schemes and a far-reaching plan for the transformation of Penn Station and its surroundings.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest? Please share stories or examples if possible.

I recently read Nassim Talib’s thought-provoking book, “Anti-Fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Talib rejects the binary paradigm of resilient as the opposite condition of fragile. Rather, he considers antifragile as the opposite of fragile, putting resilient as a fulcrum between these two poles. It provides a powerful lens to look at and think about urban planning, architectural design and the parameters that drive the built environment. Inspired by Talib’s thinking, the following are three thoughts of how our industry can better serve society.

1. Downgrade the concept of “efficiency” — Most building design and innovation is driven by a single-minded pursuit of efficiency. It’s how developers and financiers judge properties. It is the outsized focus of attention for architects, engineers, space planners and contractors. Unfortunately, this entire effort proceeds assuming a benign set of conditions. As we are collectively discovering, the unhappy result is our built environment struggles to function effectively under more challenging circumstances: climate, social and public health stressors have rendered entire building types and locales fragile and deficient. Look at what happened to the San Francisco Central Business District during the Covid-19 Pandemic, or Lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy.
2. Elevate the ethos of “resiliency.” — The ethos of resiliency has gained a new-found urgency. Consider, for instance, the high-rise office building in the central business district. The Covid-19 Pandemic reduced these archetypes of strength, productivity, and vitality into vertical ghost towns. Their hyper-efficient design approach needs to be tempered with strategies that combine to create pandemic-resiliency; strategies that accommodate social distancing, greatly enhance air quality and lend psychological comfort during a public health-emergency. All elements of the building type need reconsideration: entrance sequence, lobby layout, vertical circulation, mechanical systems, delivery and trash handling, core design, sustainable features and access to nature. In addition to incorporating a suite of measures to impede the spread of disease, the defining feature of a resilient approach is a building’s ability to flex between normal and health crisis modes.
3. Create antifragile environments — As the ironic proverb goes, we have been “blessed to live interesting times”; times that are increasingly characterized by stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures of our infrastructures and systems. Antifragility is defined as a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive in this context of woes. Nature and natural systems provide an antifragile model for healthy and thriving environments. From a design point of view, it means looking to the model of natural environments and incorporating a diversity of uses, forms, and scales — and avoiding barren monocultures. Critically, it also means diversification of our culture: supporting and celebrating differences in races, ethnicities, values, genders and schools of thoughts. No manifestation of this ethos is more emblematic than the city. It is no surprise that Talib identifies urbanism — albeit a thoughtful and well executed one — as a key lesson in antifragility.

What advice would you give to other real estate leaders to help their teams to thrive and to create a really fantastic work culture?

FXCollaborative is a great place to work because it is a great place to grow. We like to think of ourselves as a “teaching hospital”; we are dedicated to serving the profession and the larger public through our projects, process, and our internal community. For projects, we seek opportunities for sustainability and justice. Our most innovative projects are large affordable housing developments. For our process, we avoid siloed departments. The same architects take a project from massing study to punch list. Our internal community centered around mentorship and resource groups is thriving and constantly evolving. The result is much like a teaching hospital where patient outcomes are better, our clients and their projects benefit from our ethos.

Ok, here is the main question of our interview. You are a “Real Estate Insider”. If you had to advise someone about 5 non intuitive things one should know to succeed in the Real Estate industry, what would you say? Can you please give a story or an example for each?

1. Real Estate is the largest industry on the planet, but it functions as a small village: there are generally 2-degrees of separation between all the players (I say “player” intentionally, since it is a team sport). Therefore, always do the right thing, and always try to act with grace.
2. Real Estate in general, and development in particular, generally attracts conservative and conventional thinkers who like to think of themselves as renegades and contrarians. True innovators are few and far between, and often don’t look the part. When you find one, stick with her or him.
3. Most of the beloved NYC Buildings (e.g., the Chrysler Building) could not be built under current as-of-right zoning. This relates to my favorite quote when working with city planners, community boards (and sometimes, maybe even often, clients): “How come when you gave me what I asked for I didn’t get what I wanted”. It’s important to always look for the question behind the question; seek to define the problem behind the problem.
4. All engineering problems are people problems, and its corollary: “the laws of physics are universal, their application is local.” Building traditions, industrial capabilities/capacity, legal regimes, and cultural attitudes have an immense impact on every aspect of the built environment. This is why the regulations for handrails vary all over the world, even though the force that they are subject to is the same. Or why handicap accessibility accommodations are so different from place to place. Or what the expectations of a properly functioning air conditioning system are.
5. Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building and leader of the development of the high-rise said in 1900: “A skyscraper is a machine to make the land pay.” While it is a truism that “form follows finance,” design quality is grossly under-valued.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can follow FXCollaborative on LinkedIn and Instagram. Join the conversation!

Thank you for your time, and your excellent insights! We wish you continued success.