and all over all over the place and it's exciting to have young bob tonight it's it's great to see you and i know you're busy guy and so it's great that you're able to you know carson time out of your busy schedule to be with us tonight just a little bit about bob for those states bob has received many many awards both internationally and nationally both lifetime achievement awards for his work and within the last year he also received the urban land institute legacy ward for land conservation and the development of affordable housing he has combined with his wife barbara to establish studio here which is a new business dedicated to architecture of land use strategies in urban design the firm is responsible for almost two dozen projects in the princeton region and has twenty new projects underway he's also a member of the core faculty at princeton university's school of architecture and is a major stockholder of not only town topics but also is now the publisher of a new magazine that has just gotten off the ground recently which is princeton magazine so bob welcome to the show and it's great having you here glad to be here and so first question i want to ask you is how did you get an interest in architecture and how did you start off interesting question  i was i thought i was going to be a labor lawyer and i was just princeton and i was a class officer my freshman year and the guy who was doing the dance decorations for the freshman prom flunked out and so i got into doing the dance decorations and my grades started to go down and i went to my counselor and i said how can i have seen as much fun as i'm having doing these dance decorations and yet still get the grades i'm used to getting and he said go talk to the people in the school of architecture and that was it that was it that was it i went in there was a sophomore and stayed got my master's degree did the whole two and that was that was the one and only building that i have two and ever done and i was his designer drafter assistant in turn for two years and it was just a great project a historic district and that rep that's a good thing but it does represent some challenges in my my feeling is the neighborhood itself is a wonderful neighborhood tree line streets houses are very close could density walkability to downtown but the street that the public sees is where the spring street and it's got to very historic churches on it but aside from that it has a bunch of really down and out bunch of properties which we've assembled and and we're out of both restore them historically but also expand them and create more affordable housing for people but the big thing is to just give with a spring street a facelift so that it is a better representation of the great neighborhood that's behind it great and then you also starting to work in some micro partment and maybe you can explain for our audience for those who may not be familiar with the term microapartment which include myself until just a little while ago about what mike apartments are and you know how they are how they come about you know with the benefits of micro which are the micro part answer something that bloomberg has mayor bloomberg is really emphasized in new york and they are a device called a single occupancy apartment and they're only for one person and they're basically a total area of about two hundred square feet of room that's maybe twelve by twelve and twelve feet high which is an important aspect because even though it's small it seems bigger because of the height and i'll explain that in a minute and then within the space or attached to it is a what i call an airplane bathroom but with a shower attached to it so it's a very compact  ready made comes molded it's one piece bathroom and then there'd be a kitchenette of about eight or ten feet of kitchen counter refrigerators that that kind of thing and then of of the kitchen cabinets i sleeping loft that you can go off and have your bed up there and the whole key to micro apartments is that by making them smaller they cost less to build and therefore they can be rented for us and i did the mathematics on them and without public funding you could rent one of these for about about four hundred fifty four hundred sixty dollars a month and  see them as a way to get what are known as the hispanic day workers into decent housing because right now as we know from the cupcake house fire you know they're sweeping in some pretty young variable conditions and i think if you could give each one of them their own space and it was with a regular mortgage just four hundred fifty bucks a month that's fifteen dollars a night that's a pretty pretty doable thing for them can walk into or you know a town center to you know his or city center and given the density so maybe we can talk a little about affordable housing and what we're doing to promote what will housing well i think i don't think we're doing enough to from zero to i think it requires it requires a good look at the zoning and allowing an increased density and right now it's very interesting if you do an apartment you have to you have to have a car and a half to you have to park a car and a half for each apartment that's four hundred fifty square feet a typical affordable one bedroom apartment would be about five hundred square feet so you're taking as much you land to park the car as as you are to build the apartment and so what's interesting is you make a three story building of three apartments and all said i got f four and a half cars and that becomes a big piece of land and and the fact of the matter is most people in affordable housing are taking public transportation or as is often the case especially on with this ministry they're walking to work or being picked up by their employer and so to me that i think we need to revisit zoning and allow more units on the land but we also need to as part of that look at the parking requirement which is to really i think unrealistic for that income level and if if i'm in an affordable unit and i can afford a car then i should be able to park it in a municipal garage like the one and at heinz plaza ok otherwise most of these folks have bikes or take a bus and frankly was from st has a lot of bus traffic it's got the freebie tiger bus and it has the new jersey transit buses there it's it's it's housing for fifty five or over and it's called active adults i can move in that you know you're giving away your age ok but it's it's what's known as independent living this is not assisted doing this is not a retirement community but we do have active adult that's right we have a cafe we have a game room we have meeting rooms and we have a fitness center and those are all accessible to everybody what's interesting about it is that when we were building the project we had about five hundred folks wanting to move into it on our waiting list and what i found out with this particular demographic is they take a while to make up their mind on whether to downsize or not and some decide to live continue to age and place where in their current home and what's interesting is we call everybody on the waiting list every six months and the number that say i'm not ready to move yet but keep me on the list so and i remember when my mother was getting on an a in yours and i said mom you want to move to one of these retirement places she said oh i can't deal with the closets and and the fact of the matter is it takes them a while to to make up their mind to downsize so as a result the leasing has we've been open a year and we have sixty percent lease at least at this point and but it's it's moving along very nicely under the federal housing or we are allowed to rent twenty percent of them twenty percent of the units to people under fifty five and because the town the township didn't want to have an issue of an empty building and because of the slow roundup of fifty five year olds they gave us a provision that if we weren't renting at a certain rate we could rent to more people under fifty five but only on one year leases you see and if let's say you now you've given away your age  up so at the end of the day and it may take five years it will be all fifty five and over but right now through the frankly this intelligence of the town we to have this provision that let's just at least fill it up so some places at least one person has to be that age but that's right but there's one person have to be at least fifty five yes ok you know that that is the rule right ok you've done a lot of i personally designed which was a personal mission was the chapel with bob i'm leslie dole they they donated the chapel use the chapel and i did that personally otherwise i was like a design critic i mean you got a project like that we had a team of like forty architects working on it so it was a matter of do you like this poverty like that bother and then i'd have to go talk to barry reverend said you like this parish you like this so i was i was involved in it but more on the client management and the site design ok so let's talk about some design work you did petty lawrenceville school one school the princeton international school of mathematics and science and you know how did how did he get a vision for the design that you're about to do you know how do you stablish say you know what this does look good here you know this type of building in this type of shape or model or has that come into your head  it's a good question when i go look at a project i go get three things they take three individuals to make a project the architect obviously the client they're paying for it and the third individual is the site  the site is the most complex personality of all in the stand age because of environmental issues sustainability issues etc and so with when we do we worked on the petit campus for forty and done just that we've done just about every building on that campus and it's a brick georgian type of environment but it's now with more of a modern touch to it  we did the art center was very much in the postmodern architectural period but it belongs on that campus it works and then with the whole science and technology emphasis now showing up in  school programs the science building is a great sweeping zinc roof that collects the sun and is pretty dramatic and they everybody thought well that doesn't look very georgian but it did look like a science building and what's interesting as a souse they built that building they started to attract the best science faculty you can imagine and every scientific oriented kid that walked in there looked at it and said wow i want to go here so  it really got the message across as a science building what we're doing right now is we're doing new dormitories for them and this is funny they first hired me to do a dormitory as i said forty years ago and they're tearing that do math building that was very attractive and we tore that down and we're now the kirby family contributed the science building originally and mr kerr abby was very generous and so it's a beautiful building and now his sons are contributing the math building and the mass building has to be a good a good sister or brother to the science building and it's in addition to it and so that's been fun is working with a building we originally designed ten years ago and picking up what was good about it and continuing that and forgetting some of the stuff it wasn't so good about it and doing better this time around  that that stood out your mind you could share with us the i admired me bender row who did the seagram building with philip johnson and because of his vices more very modern probably the most stunning architect was core boosie i mean who did the chapel on the border swiss border with france called r was nice he had a language corbis he had a language michael graves has a language had a language and by language every building you could you could look at him and say that's great building you know but with cern and each building was its own event like the t w a building which was like a bird taking off you know and there restoring it it's now historic most art i mean frank lloyd wright that didn't ninety everybody's moving into their eighty's now so it's a it's a real tragedy when somebody like zazi died two weeks ago dies at sixty five years that i'm more of the sharon and track on on that there are some really favorite buildings we did we did a whole campus for bryant now bryant university was right college when we did it in rhode island and that's an important building the petit campus and the marshall campus where we've done more buildings on the lawrence welk campus than any architect in their history they told me that last week so those your interest in the princeton magazine and you know why you decided to go this route and how it all got started interesting it's a real quick i gave a lecture at princeton day school in architecture for ken smith who was teaching architecture at the school and about three days later after that i got an e mail from him saying how would you like to own a part of  princeton institution and that was town topics and his wife were going to buy telling topics and they needed an investor and they needed an investor in a hurry because there'd been complications with the investor they'd been working with and so i met them for coffee on a saturday and monday gave them a big check and they went off and bought town topics and the agent who handled that transaction was a classmate of mine from lawrenceville so about five years after we bought town topics chuck rubel my classmate from lawrenceville calls up and says pop how would you like to and princeton magazine at the time was being published out of north jersey it was one of those magazines where you paid to get on the cover and it was all the stories were about this dancer that prom and that kind of gala and and the rest it was just selling advertising and so we made some critical decisions about it when when smith who was is the editor in chief and also the publisher of with me of  town topics we made some critical decisions first was to bring it to princeton and publish it here and to write it here and have a bunch of writers who knew princeton be the authors of the articles and then we changed the graphic of it and it already and it just put it on a much higher plane and it's been a huge success i could do all the buildings of the world but when i go around people say i love the last month's issue  twice it's you know you've got a lot of good material in this town to put on the cover besides the local hairdresser and so that's what we've been up to and it's financially very strong and  well so you like being involved in my involvement is i've become a little bit of a magnet for stories people like you were talking about the cinema right people tell me about stories is we just did an article in the last issue about the trenton circus troup and that article has just gotten legs and has meant so much to them that they're getting  article and sending it out to potential donors and it's just a good thing and it all came about because the woman who runs it out i met her at a reception and she said you want to come down and see my circus in trenton so i went down one friday at lunch hour and it was it was it was really a hit with me personally what happens is the trenton police when they have a problem with a kid they take them into this program of circus performing and it turns them around and it turns them into just it's a great circus troupe and to have that kind of thing come out of that magazine is everybody it's win win for everybody it's great it's great so the first time that we have left bob what else can we expect in the near future you know that you may be working on really projects that you would like to see developed in the years to come i think   the original with us from school for colored children that's what it was called and so on the corner of mclean and witherspoon right next to our office we own it and that's where i got the twelve c because it was an old school building all those their little part ants in their two hundred square foot micro farms and they're all twelve feet high and so when you go in there they don't feel small and that's where we got the idea for the mike new micro apartment to do the extra high ceilings and anyway we're going to restore that to its original architecture and then we'll probably do an addition behind it because there's space to do that and with more affordable units in it so that's good well hopefully we'll be looking at more and more projects to come and hopefully with the spruce tree will go well and i'm sure you know we'll continue to see a lot of good things coming coming out of your work and want to thank you for a lot of the work that you've already done and helping make prints and surrounding areas you know the magnet that it is for many people to come enjoy and visit and hopefully be