Letter from the Editor
Earlier this year I had occasion to swing through Kansas City,
the Midwestern U.S. hub whose metro area straddles the border between Missouri and Kansas. Beyond its jazz history and top-notch barbecue, I didn’t have much of a picture of the place before alighting there. As it turns out, KC is a stealth architectural hotbed, serving as the main or regional base of a bevy of A-list firms (including HOK, BNIM, Helix and DRAW) and dominating the field of stadium design (category leader Populous is also headquartered there). In addition, the relatively small city of just under half a million people has become both a fabrication powerhouse (local institution Zahner, a metal company founded in 1897, today helps everyone from Frank Gehry to Bjarke Ingels realize their fantastic visions) and a major player in the area of experiential design (Dimensional Innovations, located on the Kansas side of the state line, being among the most prominent).
It was during a tour of DI that CEO Tucker Trotter showed me the giant 3D printer his firm had just bought. Built by Thermwood, the Us$2.2-million behemoth, which DI acquired in order to undertake a “secret project,” has an impressive five-axis router and a build capacity of three by six by 1.5 metres. It wasn’t the printer’s outsized capabilities that impressed me most, however; it was the fact that DI had purchased the machine before having a clear idea of how it might proceed to use it beyond that mystery commission. These days, architecture and design are fastchanging enterprises, requiring decisive thinking and a strategically speculative outlook. What DI bought in addition to its printer’s immense capacity was both the freedom it affords the company to innovate and the competitive advantage that often comes with such freedom.
In my view, this kind of consciously conjectural thinking is the very essence of innovation, the theme of this issue of Azure. These days, being an innovator means not just embracing new tech, but also imagining functions and solutions for scenarios that don’t yet exist. This is what BMW Mini is doing by underwriting the Urban-x start-up accelerator in New York (see executive editor Elizabeth Pagliacolo’s survey of three of the most promising start-ups in “The World of Urban-x,” starting on page 72). It’s also what Canada’s largest city is struggling with as it negotiates the terms of creating what could be the world’s most technologically advanced community with Alphabet, Google’s parent company (see “The Many Sides of Sidewalk Toronto,” on page 60).
Will a global model for smart cities be realized in Toronto? Will DI find yet more uses for that expensive printer it owns? The answer – at least in the latter case – would appear to be yes. Before I left him, Trotter mused that the device could be used to 3D print a replacement for the incinerated spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, proving, if nothing else, that he isn’t just thinking about Kansas anymore.