Ep. 208: ICRAVE’s Lionel Ohayon on Designing the Las Vegas Sphere and Other Brave Ideas

Lionel Ohayon was born in Canada to a family spanning Morocco, Israel, and Spain. This multi-cultural upbringing armed him with the ability to synthesize different inputs and understand complex topics from an early age, and an innate appreciation of hospitality. He founded ICRAVE as a design-build startup in 2002, and several ground-breaking projects later, is now leading the charge in reinventing hospitality experiences like the immersive and otherworldly Las Vegas Sphere, and the anxiety-reducing David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

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TRANSCRIPT

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. And today I’m talking to Lionel Ohayon. Lionel is the founder and CEO of ICRAVE, a NY city-based innovation and design studio that reimagines built and digital environments for award-winning hospitality, airport, healthcare and workplace projects across the globe. A recent project you’ve most definitely heard of is the immersive and paradigm-shifting live entertainment venue the Las Vegas Sphere - it truly does change the game in terms of the concert-going experience. Lionel studied architecture at University of Waterloo in Canada before moving to New York City. Founded in 2002 as a design-build start-up, ICrave first made a name with projects like STK, a popular nightclub in the meatpacking district, which quickly led to hotels, cruise ships and airports, and reinventing the traveler experience. Now, 22 years in, ICrave is leading the charge in understanding how our digital and physical worlds collide across industries. And Integrating their expertise in strategy, branding, experience design, interior design, lighting design and digital design along with deep research into human experience for projects like creating patient-centric ecosystems for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,  St. Jude Family Commons, and 53 a restaurant next to Moma that extends the art experience to dining. The Las Vegas Sphere as Lionel has described it, is limitless and otherwordly… qualities of potential that you can hear in his words too… here’s Lionel…

Lionel Ohayon: My name is Lionel Ohayon. I currently work in Miami and New York and I’m an architect by training and I work in the space of solving problems using design thinking. Most of our work is in the space where people connect in real life our thesis has been about understanding how our physical and virtual lives are really converging into one broad experience base. So we’re navigating that new kind of experience map, if you will, to understand how we engage with each other, socially, emotionally and how we really look at our world as a place where we’re converging from all types of encounters. So for me, what really inspires me is understanding the world we live in, and what I call the ‘pointy end of the pencil of architecture,’ which is the emotive side of what it means to be in place, in space, creating a world that’s ever changing. And I think for us, and me specifically, that search has brought us to a world where there are a lot of unknowns. There’s a lot. For the first time in many parts of human evolution, we’re struggling with the understanding, what world do we live in, right? Which parts of it are real? Which parts of it are not? And I think people my age generally think that the whole new virtual world is not real, but we could certainly point to the fact that people are having real human experiences in completely artificial places. And in understanding that, we understand that those places need to be thought through, they need to be conceived, and we need to understand why they are the way they are and how they impact our lives in this physical world. 

Amy: That is impressive and psychologically laden, (laughs) maybe even fraught territory at times, but also a very exciting frontier and, you know, something I think about, when you talk about people our age, are we similar age? Are we both Gen X?

Lionel: Yeah, Gen X.

Amy: Okay, thinking that that space is not real is… that invites a certain sort of disconnection from it. They’re not participating in the building of that world and I think that’s, that’s a problem, because we need all people, building that world that is the world we are all converging into. 

Lionel: Well, there’s no doubt and I think we’re dismissive of it, right? We just don’t understand the weightiness of what it’s doing. I think people are starting to understand the impact of it, like what’s happening with our children, what’s happening with our happiness and where they seek satisfaction and what meaning is around their lives. I’ve always felt that architecture plays a super important role in the world we live in. It’s not the buildings we build, it’s creating the world we live in…

Amy: It’s the spaces we inhabit, it’s where our lives take place. 

Lionel: Yeah, it’s where delight and happiness and joy and grief and all those things take place, right? And we impact that. Someone said to me, what agency do you have to design the metaverse or the virtual world, or whatever it is? I was like, well, who has it if not me? 

Amy: Yeah!

Lionel: Tell me who should be designing and conceiving this world? I think in general architecture as a profession, probably since the 1700s, when the first engineering school was built in France, that has been portioning off pieces of its domain. Architecture as a… as a part of society, the part of society that said, we’ve got to build the cities we live in and they need to be good places for people to live. As it got more complex the world of architecture got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. All of a sudden there was landscape architecture, there was interior design and so on and so on, millions of different disciplines that got clipped off of it. And so maybe architecture itself, urban planning, all these parts used to be part of an ethos of thinking.  I think architecture has been gutted, really just like, we need somebody to sign off on the stuff and design cool buildings. I’m being a little bit extreme, but it’s kind of like if you look at the progression of how architects have lost control over the narrative of the world we build, the part of society that’s paid for it is the health of our cities, right? That’s really the issue, is that there’s no overarching vision that has authority over understanding what that world can be. And it does require new types of thinking and new types of experts to solve for it. But it needs to live under some sort of house, which it doesn’t right. And I think for me that’s the most interesting space right now because whether I code in some software or not, that’s not really the question. The question is, what is that world going to be about. 

Amy: I do think over the last several generations, we’ve separated into these specialties and now we’re starting to realize that when we’re all siloed off, we’re not benefitting from shared knowledge. We’re not benefitting from the cross-pollination and we’re also not thinking about things holistically, as you pointed out. And so the concept of you building a house where all this can live under one roof in order to have a more holistic sort of genesis of project and conceptual thinking, is something that I feel is really important, as an educator I feel that’s really important and I’m excited to hear you talk about bringing that together because you’re in a space where that’s difficult. You’re sort of going against the grain by doing that and at the same time it’s wholly necessary. So cheers to you. Before we get deeply into what you are doing right now, I’d love to understand how you got to be so interested in this and to do that, I’d really love to understand where you grew up and what your family dynamic was and what kinds of things interested you as a kid? I know you’ve always wanted to be an architect, where did that grow from? 

Lionel: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. It’s funny because I have so many inputs as a child that it’s always… I always choose how to answer that question depending on who I’m speaking to. What I mean by that is, I’m born into a Jewish family who immigrated from Morocco to Canada, pregnant with me. But I was born in Canada and grew up in Canada. But most of my family lived somewhere between Spain, France and Israel. And then my professional career really took off in New York for 29 years and now I live in Miami. There’s so many inputs that are formative, and when I look back and I think about where the important things that gave me what I believe a breadth of thinking… my ability to have… to synthesize a lot of different inputs and ideas and understand them. Part of that for me is having gone to Hebrew school and learning how to read from left to right and right to left and understanding concepts that are pretty complex around Torah studies, at the same time I was like a very in-depth art student. Torah studies are incredibly intellectual, incredibly deep thinking and opening doors that continue to open. And so between that and really being involved in language learning, being in a French home, spending my summers in Europe and then coming back to America, to North America, I feel like I was gifted with all these amazing opportunities to see different things and see the world from different points of view. And I think that that is…Something that I think a lot about my own kids, how broad… what’s a breadth of experience that I can offer them, so they don’t live siloed in one world of thinking. That to me has been a critical piece of understanding what it is that I understand, what my point of view is, because it’s not singular. 

Amy: Having a lot of inputs and understanding what your point of view is, but it also sounds to me like you were comfortable with complexity from a young age, and also comfortable translating across worlds, translating across dimensions even, from physical space into, let’s say written or artistic space. And that communication, I’m wondering how that skillset that you were exposed to and probably developed from early on, I wonder how that informed your teenage years and the rest of your growth? 

Lionel: It’s interesting because I went to a public high school, I begged my parents to let me leave Hebrew school and go to a public school, so we cut a deal and I got out, which was interesting. But it was also really another piece of this puzzle where all of a sudden I was exposed to a whole breadth of different types of things that you didn’t always get in a private school. And I remember that I sort of crossed a lot of different groups of friends. I had friends who were in the art program and then I had my jock friends, and kind of like party and mess around, I had party friends. And this one time my mom threw a surprise birthday for me and invited all these different friends that were all in my basement when I got down there and I was kind of… I was a little bit horrified, right, because I was like oh my god, how am I going to bridge all these different groups who really don’t talk to each other, they don’t stay in the same part of the school. And I remember that specifically because I remember thinking about the fact that I’d seen myself in this event and somebody who had bridged all these groups, who would not talk to each other at school, but somehow my family knew I was friends with these different groups and just figured, well, let’s invite the people that are his friends. And it was a very cross-cultural kind of like bridging. I was kind of like bridging people. It’s funny, it was just a silly thing, but it stuck with me for a long time and it’s something that I think about a lot, about what it is… what you need to do, right, like how do you get big ideas to happen? How do you bring people together? How do you actually find yourself comfortable not only seeing one way, or understanding the world through a lens that’s formed by a group of people with, I guess today more than ever in these echo chambers we create. You just find the people who think like you do. You go into a group on some virtual community and you just stay there, right? That’s very dangerous. 

Amy: Yeah, that is very dangerous and I loved that you shared that story. I was also one of those people who had friend groups that didn’t mesh at school. But I loved them all the same and they were all interesting for a number of reasons. But they just, for whatever reason, didn’t mesh. I’m thinking about you at this surprise birthday party with all your different friend groups and like this also sounds like the start of like a hospitality muscle really being formed. In terms of making that space, now a space where all of these different people feel comfortable together?

Lionel: Yeah, well I’ll tell you. I grew up in a French Moroccan home and Moroccan culture is amongst… around the world, this is about receiving, it’s about hospitality, right? And Arabic culture, even though I’m Jewish, our traditions are Arabic. If you went to a wedding for me or my brothers and sisters, you’d see all these Arabic traditions and dressing up and eating certain foods that are clearly Moroccan culture. But at the core of it, we grew up in a family that was constantly receiving people, hosting events, creating these moments of family and holidays together. So I grew up in a house where it was kind of like pouring tea and bringing dessert, bringing nuts and fruit after dessert, there’s this constant kind of like… so I learned that through my extended family, spending summers in Spain with groups. And I tell clients that a lot. I’m like look, I can guild your venue in gold. But if you have a restaurant, you don’t know how to receive people, you don’t understand the nature of why you should do it more this way or that way, there’s nothing that anyone is going to be able to do for you until you get that right. You understand the experience, you understand what it means to receive somebody in your house. And I think that we’ve been able to… and a lot of what ICRAVE has done has really been about, like breaking open this experience. What is the experience of receiving somebody in your home? And how do we translate that into what you’re doing? What’s the difference between… we’ll talk to our clients and be like, what’s the difference… how do you want people to engage? Do you want them to pass the food around? Are they going to reach into the same plate? Does everyone get their own plate? These are signals for what experience is all about. And so certainly, I think that I was completely predisposed with thinking about, even if it was going to be architectural, which I always wanted it to be, it was always going to be in the hospitality side. 

Amy: Interesting. I know you cut a deal with your parents to go to public school, was that evidence of a rebellious streak or was that just an adventurous side who needed a different experience? I’m trying to understand if you went through the normal awkwardness that most teenagers did or if you were just already on your path and very driven?

Lionel: I would say I was more like on my path. I’d never strayed from this idea that I was going to be an architect. If you met my third-grade teacher and you said, “Hey, I met one of your students,” they would ask you, “Did he become an architect?” I actually had that experience, someone called and said, “Yeah, they asked if you’d become an architect.” Not that I wasn’t awkward, I’m sure I was, but I was good in my skin, I was very comfortable in my skin. And I just didn’t want to be… I grew up in a very multicultural neighborhood, Canada in general is very multicultural. I had lots of friends from my street, from my neighborhood, who weren’t Jewish. And I just wanted to just do something different. I was really interested in art and I wanted to evolve more. 

Amy: Have you always been proactive about your own evolution? 

Lionel: Always. I sometimes tell people that my superpower is my ability to stand next to my ego, and have that conversation. It’s like…You have to be able to know who you are and what your core is. You have to know what your ego is, when you’re kind of reacting to that. If you can literally have an out of body experience and understand those two things, you can get some clarity about where you need to be. 

Amy: Were you always so conscious of self-assuredness and composure? 

Lionel: You know, architecture school was… I went to the University of Waterloo, it was a very, very difficult program to get into. I was very competitive and the first year design award was like a big deal and I knew I was going to do whatever it took to win the first year design award. I say all this, because after I got the award, I just kind of was like, all right, you got the award, congratulations. What did you give up to get the award, and give up a lot, it was hardcore… you went to RISD, it was hardcore, competitive, you never get an A at the University of Waterloo, so to actually get there and get one felt like you climbed a mountain. But I also realized that my friends who were just normal people, who went to normal universities in first year were partying and having a great time and all sorts of other stories that they were… which I didn’t get any of. I was just working for a year. And so I kind of came back in second year and I kind of was like, yeah, whatever, I’m just going to do my thing. And what it did for me… at first what it did for me is like a professor would be like, you know Lionel, don’t even come to class, you’re wasting my time. 

Amy: Oh?

Lionel: It was like a byproduct of me pulling back too far where I was like screw this, I don’t need to do all this. And the other part of the byproduct was that when I did lean back in, I leaned back in to search for the things that interested me. 

Amy: Yes, yes, yes. 

Lionel: So I wasn’t kind of packaging the perfect project to get the mark, I just had some things that I wanted to explore and I just spent the next five years exploring things that were important to me, without this kind of anxiety of like, oh my god, am I going to get recognition? Am I going to get the grade, or whatever? And so a lot of times my projects weren’t finished, but the ideas that they were grappling with were a lot bigger than I would have taken on because I was worried to finish it on time or whatnot. And I was comfortable with that. I was like, I don’t know, I’m not sure what the answer is to this, but this is where I am, this is where I’m going. 

Amy: That is such an important place to be, you have the benefit, the privilege of education, you have the faculty and the expertise and the facilities and to get to that place where you’re not just trying to work the system, but you’re actually deploying it to evolve your own knowledge in the direction that you needed to go, is the most empowered place I think to be in education. But not everybody gets there as quickly as you did. So that’s a pretty powerful realization. It makes me think that you might be a non-linear thinker. (Laughter) Is your traditional pattern to zoom in and zoom out almost like aerial style? 

Lionel: Yeah.. I’m the kind of person who will take the approach to a project and then take the absolute opposite side of what I just brought on just to challenge it, you know? I used to do that in high school with essays, be like, you’d have like a subject matter in English and you had to go write an essay on it. Well the whole time you were discussing the subject in class, you have a position vocally, as you discuss it with your class. And then you turn in a paper that was the opposite of what you’d been speaking about, that’s how you’d have to think through ideas, back and forth and challenge them and challenge them. 

Amy: Exactly, you have to interrogate your own thinking. 

Lionel: I think one of the strengths of what we’ve been able to creative is just to challenge our ideas and just not wrap it in a package and make it beautiful, you know what I mean? And it’s an interesting thing to see, because I think like at ICRAVE in general, the people who work there and who have been there for a long time, and people, alumni who have left, have carried that kind of process forward. It really is my greatest joy to see. 

Amy: Yeah, I bet, you’re the ‘university’ of ICRAVE. (Laughs) And thinking, for a firm such as yours to continually be at that sort of frontier edge… you are not delivering what people think they want. You are showing people what they could want and then helping them get there, does that sound accurate? 

Lionel: That’s great by the way, I’ll make sure I write that down! 

Amy: (Laughs) That’s a skill and that’s diplomacy and tact and communication as well, because you have to help people see your vision in order to get them on board, especially if they’re collaborators or clients or in some way, you know, working on this with you. Bringing people along seems like maybe one of your superpowers? 

Lionel: Well, I always tell people in the studio that if you did your job right, the client will tell his friends that he designed it and you were just there. Everything was their idea; it was all their idea and you just kind of helped push the process along. And that is hard to do, but that is how you do good design. You’re not imposing your ideas. There are times when we kind of looked at each other and we said, ‘we should have pushed harder, we don’t have to acquiesce so much, you know what I mean? You’re always towing that line, where you’re not jamming something down someone’s throat. Our mantra has been ‘Ideas for the Brave.’ And the ‘brave’ are not us, the brave are our clients and I could point to every project and say, “That’s a good project because I had a brave client.” They’re just letting me come up with ideas and they’re saying, yeah, let’s do it, right? Usually the good ones are ideas that have not been done yet. So it takes a lot of courage as a client to just be like, yeah, let’s do that.

Amy: How do you think you summoned the courage to go from architecture graduate, all the way through to founding ICRAVE? I know you had a chapter of work before that where you did a lot of design build

Lionel: So, I think that I was predisposed to work for myself. I think that just was part of my DNA, right? And at the University of Waterloo we were in a co-op program. So you’re at school, and you went to work and then you went to school and then you went to work, so by the time I graduated architecture school and done the whole year in Rome, there was another year and a half or four month or eight month… I guess two and a half years… where you actually were working in architects’ offices. I’d worked for architects in Paris and Montreal and Toronto, all over the place. And along the way you got to learn what the world of being an architect is like inside an office. And so what that did is it allowed us, when we went back to school, not to ever be taught anything about… like how you make a drawing, any of that stuff, you learnt at work. And at school you were just being as creative… it was all creativity, it was pure ideas, which was perfect for me. 

Amy: That’s a nice model. Yeah. 

Lionel: What I also got to learn was that I never worked for an architect that was happy, ever. 

Amy: Oh god (laughs), that’s… 

Lionel: And I’d never heard of somebody who’d worked for a happy architect. They’re just miserable. They were complaining that they weren’t making enough money for the work that they did, or they weren’t able to do the creative projects they always wanted to do, right? Or that they were working too much or that they… they were like frustrated people. Even the incredible architects, they just were like, they didn’t get to control the idea process. And so it became very clear to me that if I was going to do this, I was going to have to do it the way I thought it should be done, right? And so when I finished my thesis in architecture school, one of the professors said to me, your work is very … it’s almost theatrical, very kind of like… the narratives are so strong, have you ever thought of being a film director? I was like, not really, but that’s actually pretty interesting. So I started poking around on sets and the Directors Guild, and all that stuff and thinking maybe I want to be a chief production designer…But then I came back to, you know, there’s a whole other narrative here about… my father passed away just when I graduated architecture school, so there’s this real crossroads in my life… it really happened literally… I found out the day I finished my thesis, he went to the hospital, he died six weeks later, so a very pretentious moment in my life, where I have finally graduated architecture school and then this happening and being like, okay, why is this all happening together? What are you going to learn from it and what’s your next step? So for me there was this thing where you wanted to be an architect since you were six, and I can hear my dad saying, “You’re not going to drop it now, right?” Like you have to do this, at least give it a chance. And so I said, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it my way. I went back to the beginning of architects and what they did and a little bit about what I was talking about earlier about how architects have been piecing off their position and building worlds. And I was like, you know, architects used to be master builders, they weren’t just the guys who drew it, they’d be on the job site and they’d build the thing. That’s how you would do it. And I was like, maybe what I need to do is take control of what I design, so I should do design build… I should build everything I design. I should actually think about becoming a master builder, meaning that we do all the design and we build everything. And so that’s kind of like… I stayed home because I had family, what we’d just gone through and everything, I was staying with my mom, I moved back into my mom’s house, cleared out the basement and started this business of designing and building, basically suburban basements, backyards, decks, fences, renovations and stuff. And I was really successful at it, I was making a lot of money, I paid off my student debt that first year…

Amy: Wow. Were you hands-on on the job site too, like putting boards together and… were you hands-on on the job site? 

Lionel: Yeah, yeah, I mean less and less and less as we become busier and busier and then I’d wake up and all of a sudden there are four people in my basement and then five, and it was like, you know, so I was like oh my god, I’m building a company here. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: And then I just was like, it happened very fast and I was like, okay, so is this where you want to enter the game, because you can stay here, and be in this game and doing renovations and you could probably… it looks like you could probably build the business and make a lot of money. But for all of the thinking you’ve done up until now, by then I was probably 25, is this where you want to enter the game? And I kind of realized that it wasn’t, it was like, I need to go for more intellectual, bigger projects, more challenging architectural world. And when I got brought to New York, which was just a year later…

Amy: And are we talking early 90s, when is this? 

Lionel: Yeah, we’re talking ’95… my father passed away in ’94, so ‘95/’96/’97.

Amy: Mid-90s, okay, New York is a tough one for design build. 

Lionel: So when I got here I kind of was running this big production of all these properties that were owned by this single man, who needed to be designed and built. And we had the infrastructure around that. So I took on that role. And I learned a lot. We build very complex things and we had our own shops, our own teams to build it all, so manufacturing became a really important piece of the puzzle for me and understanding how things actually get built. When I left there it was like okay, what are we doing here? Are we staying in New York, are you going back to Toronto and when I decided to stay in New York, I found somebody who had a design build firm, doing real projects in New York City. The question at that point was like, are you ready to really go into New York and just be a design build guy on your own? And I wasn’t. I just didn’t know the lay of the land well enough. And so I met this guy and I started working with him and I really ended up in a suit. I ended up in a suit with a tie on and about two years into that (laughter)…

Amy: You say that like it’s so not you. 

Lionel: Oh god, I literally had an epiphany one morning (laughs) and I was like… I had my head against the mirror in the bathroom, right, and I was putting my tie on and I literally said to myself, and I’m not paraphrasing, I said, “Choke yourself with that tie!” I said, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” I literally had this conversation. I said, “You spent your whole life working towards something, who are you, what are you doing? And that day I literally quit. 

Amy: Wow!

Lionel: I said, “I can’t do this anymore,” and that’s a whole other bunch of reasons. But fundamentally I was like running around with brokers, real estate brokers and trying to get deals and commercial interiors and stuff. I was like, what are you doing? And at that point I stopped thinking about should I be in New York, shouldn’t I, I was like, I quit, I moved… I was in a one bedroomed apartment, I moved my bed into my living room, I bought two doors and at a hardware store. I turned my bedroom into an office. I started ICRAVE, and I just said, “It will be what it will be.” And once I got on my path, which was then looking for projects that I actually wanted to do, and now to the credit of having done that job for a couple of years, I knew the brokers and I knew what was going on. I knew where I could slip in.

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: And then from there it was just like gliding into business really, that just flourished really. I mean it was hard work, but we were getting projects, we got into a cycle. We had a point of view. People knew why they were calling us, right? 

Amy: Yeah, and so what I’m picking up is that you learned valuable information about how the economics of this all works. Valuable information, I mean you’d been hands-on for a long time, so understanding materiality close-up. Understanding really how stuff gets build, I think, built, I think helps you become a better designer because you can push the edges of how things get built.

Lionel: If you know how to make it, it’s a whole different ball game. 

Amy: Absolutely. So you’ve started ICRAVE, you’ve always known that you’ve got this independent streak that’s pretty profound. You also have a knack for course correction.] And yet you’ve gotten yourself into situations where you learned the things you needed to learn, in order to take the next step. So now ICRAVE, when you founded it, you say that thing start flowing in. And you made quite a name and an impact on New York City, but also for your business in terms of nightclubs, hospitality, restaurants, and this is essentially world building. Like you are a production designer, when you’re designing these spaces. You are creating a new reality for people to exist in, and a narrative in a lot of ways. Your work is still very theatrical and very narrative. So all of this is kind of coming together, and are you really… are you still… how do I ask this question? Are you still finding your voice? Is your voice still being developed? And how are you getting braver and braver clients?  

Lionel: So there’s always like this, this kind of self-introspection that it’s not good enough. You’re not doing the projects you should be doing, they should be bigger projects, they should be more important projects, or so that’s innate in me, I think a lot of people have that where they’re not going to be happy with what they’ve done, they want to think about what they’re doing next. And that’s probably something that a psychiatrist could probably figure out, right? (Laughs) one of the things that it led to is this voracious appetite for new, for more and this constant… sometimes I’d open up an old file of a portfolio from years ago and I’m like, how many projects did we actually do? We were a tiny little studio, we did so many projects, to a fault, right? I think other people, maybe if I had another voice in the room would have said, nah, we shouldn’t do that one, we don’t need it, do you know what I mean? 

Amy: Okay? 

Lionel: It wasn’t about making money, it was about a new challenge, a new… you know what I mean? Maybe just trying something different. We had started to land, what I would call directional ideas that we were exploring, right? Like this is in the hospitality and nightclub stuff. The nightclubs were a natural evolution. My thesis was, the underlying idea of my thesis was, what is the impact of virtual space on our real world, this is like Snow Crash, like 1994. But it manifest in a theatrical nightlife venue in downtown Toronto. And I learned that you had the most license in an area like that, to be creative. Like you say, it’s like a production design. Who is going to tell you not to be more creative if it’s a nightclub? 

Amy: Right. 

Lionel: Especially that’s what they’re looking for, they’re looking for somebody who can do something really amazing, really cool, really crazy, because that was the currency to get people to come into your nightclub. But what we were landing were big ideas, like how can one step through the looking glass and relinquish their inhibitions to learn something new about themselves? That’s a pretty big idea for a nightclub. 

Amy: Yeah, I love it! (Laughs)

Lionel: But those were the driving principle in all of those nightclubs, was like, can I learn something new about myself? We’d say sometimes you might have gotten up on a table and danced in a nightclub on a table and that could be a life affirming thing, that you found the confidence to do it, or you relinquish your inhibitions and you just went for it. And there was always this kind of like intellectualization. We always had this kind of chip on our shoulder, that we came from architecture school and we were doing interiors. We were kind of like, how do we turn it into architecture, right? And I think that that was good for the work. And I think that we were forming this kind of sense about experience outcomes, emotive outcomes. A lot of things we talked about were delight, like moments of delight, which became like a driving principle about how light affects the way you feel and how we can manipulate… not just light, but the choreography of how light works, or how you move from one space lit a certain way to another one lit another way. That would create that kind of mode of response we’re looking for. 

Amy: Yes, and all of those things also influence the behavioral cues as well. If you can sort of nudge somebody in a certain direction, without physically nudging them, you talked about receiving people into your home before. It’s a little bit like that. Like you’re inviting somebody into an experience, with those physical and light and sensory cues of the space. 

Lionel: I’ll give you a silly but straightforward example. We would understand that when people walk into a bar, they’ll probably have a little bit of anxiety, maybe not a ton, but a little bit, and maybe they came in alone, there’s a whole noise level and social level going on and you need to find a perch. You don’t want to be standing there in the middle of the room, you don’t know where you should be standing, how lit I sit, can I go find a quiet spot? So people would, in general, we understood people either find a bar to perch on, or a side table, a lower lit space, or make their way to the bathroom, because that’s another reaction where you want to see what’s going on in the room, so the easy way to do that is make your way straight to the bathroom and check out the whole room and make your way back cause you found the perch. 

Amy: Yes, absolutely!

Lionel: And so we broke down these very banal things and tried to understand what it meant and how it was going to influence our reaction because we wanted to be good hosts. We wanted you to feel good. We never had people leave through the door they came in because people might be coming in and if they see people leaving, then it’s kind of like a negative signal, oh, why are these people leaving? I’m just walking into the club, why are people leaving already? These are very tactical but they came from a place…

Amy: No, but those are important, that’s the flow of the space as well. 

Lionel: Totally everything, it’s the flow, exploration, discovery, spontaneity, all these pieces. And so what’s really interesting is when we started finding ourselves in other verticals that had nothing to do with nightlife…And learning… we’re directing the exact same learnings into healthcare, or into airports. And it’s like oh my god, we’re not doing design architecture here, we’re doing something completely different. We’re extracting important lessons about how we as people find ourselves in public spaces, outside of our home, which we don’t work in, right? And we’re creating memories for people that are coalescing around place. And for me that’s like, oh, and by the way, it wasn’t until I got a phone call from Sloan Kettering, I was like my god, how did I not see this? How did they see something in us that we didn’t understand about ourselves, that they would call us, and it was so obvious once we started working with them, that we had a lot to offer to that world. 

Amy: Absolutely and it goes to show your initial thesis, that architecture had sort of splintered off into all these different separate factions, is undermining the whole system. Because those concepts that you deployed, those skills that you perfected in terms of understanding human anxiety and how to solve for that in a space, transfers to any space. 

Lionel: Right. 

Amy: And airports and healthcare, those are some of the most anxious spaces we ever exist in. So that’s even more crucial and meaningful in those places. That’s when we’re displaced, that’s when we’re worried. 

Lionel: That’s exactly right and that’s how they got to us. They understood, from an article, quite frankly, that we design places of anxiety. And they’re like, well, there’s nowhere more anxious than a cancer hospital, so let’s call these guys. And if you want to talk about brave, when I say ‘ideas for the brave,’ who is braver than Sloan Kettering that hired essentially a hospitality design firm to do a cancer hospital.

Amy: Wow! That is brave. 

Lionel: Right, that is brave. 

Amy: What was that like for you? Did that feel profound? 

Lionel: It was profound. First of all, I lost my father to cancer, so that was already a big thing. I think also we were… it was an affirmation. We’re not… we don’t ever really fit a proper peg in interior design or architecture… there was no experience design, experience design didn’t really exist as a discipline really in and of itself. Strategist… there was all these parts swirling around… we still have a hard time defining what we do. Like what do you call us for? When do you call us, and all these questions. So it was very affirmative for us and the work felt important, do you know what I mean? 

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: And it was really special. 

Amy: I’m happy you had that experience, in part because it says to you, but more importantly it says to the world that design can impact so many things, including health outcomes. If you’ll consider it, if you’ll bring it into the fold, if you’ll let the designers and the architects at the table, from an early point in the project, you can attack the problem from all of these different angles and solve for things that you might not even think could be improved by design. 

Lionel: Well, I think that’s true and I think this is where we are today. You have to expand what do you mean by design…

Amy: Exactly. 

Lionel: Do you mean what materials we’re picking or, you know, or the quality of light, all of the above, which I think they all play a role in it. For example, in our research we learned that people who are inspired have better outcomes. God forbid you have cancer and you go in it with a ‘try me’ attitude, as opposed to a ‘why me’ attitude, you have a better… you legitimately have a better chance of surviving because your head is prepared for the challenge. If you’re going to suit up and get ready for this challenge. And so we’re like okay, that’s the basis of everything we’re going to do here, right? We are going to challenge ourselves to figure out if we can create a facility that’s an active participate in your cure. We don’t do the medicine, so that’s outside of our purview. But everything else, everything else is like, we’re going to tackle that. 

Amy: Yeah, but it is, I do absolutely 100% believe that our surroundings, our environment, our space has everything to do with our wellness. And I agree with you, expanding our definition of design. When I think of design, I think of it really as a framework for achieving outcomes, a decision making framework for achieving outcomes. It’s about inputs and having enough experience to kind of anticipate what might be build and then having enough critical thinking to anticipate some of the un-anticipatable, the unintended outcomes. 

Lionel: Yeah, and I think if you think we have a mantra that says, ‘The experience is the brand.’ What’s your brand? Well, tell me about the experience, I don’t care about what your colors are, your pantone colors are, what font you use. 

Amy: Yes, I love your mantras man!

Lionel: Yeah, we’ve got good mantras, we give good mantra. (Laughter) And so for us it’s like, when you say, “What do you mean by design?” Like how do you find out that you should be at Sloan Kettering? What is that experience about, right? How do you get here? How do you receive your information? When you arrived, what is that first moment all about? When you leave, you just went through cancer treatment, what’s leaving all about? Do you ever leave? Are you part of a family now, some sort of communication, some experience? Do you pay it forward for people who are coming in after, that they can be inspired? So all these parts are like… we put RTLS technology on the patients, right? So part of our physical digital thing is like, half of the time you’re just anxious because you want to know if your loved one is out of surgery and you don’t know, you’re trying to find someone, be patient, doctor hasn’t come out yet. And that’s just ratcheting up the anxiety level. So for us, we’re like well, forget what it looks like, how do we bring that anxiety level down? And so by putting an RTLS device on the patient, you can now track where they are. So it’s like patient 13502 is in recovery. So by the time we did our second hospital, which was a radiation, infusion and chemo center, David H. Koch Center, 74th Street. You have people coming for chemo or radiation or infusion, they might be signed up for a year or more, a few times a week, right? It felt a whole lot more like enrolling into college. Like it’s your campus, this is your campus for life. This is a whole different relationship. And so we were like, well, how do we change the paradigm from people being like, I never want to see that color green again, or I never want to smell that Pine-Sol that you use in the hallways, right? 

Amy: Yes. Yes. (Laughs)

Lionel: So it came to us to sort of turn this thing upside down and start with the idea of, thank god I have cancer, or thank god I had cancer, and the point of it was to challenge obviously the people at Sloan Kettering and ourselves to be like, look, nobody wants to have cancer. There’s a lot of things people don’t want, but because they went through it, they learned so much about themselves or they’re able to open doors that otherwise wouldn’t have been opened. Now, cancer takes all the control away from you. What you can eat, where you can sleep, can you work, can you do this, can you do that, what you look like, it’s like you lose all control. So just giving control back to people, right? Like okay, can we let them choose the music they want to hear? Sit in an environment that suits their emotion that day? Manipulate the color of the lighting, be in a class, learn something, watch TV, just veg out like a couch potato. All these different things that are just like giving you… even a minute amount of choice back, that we knew we were going to…

Amy: To reconnect with your own humanity…

Lionel: Yeah, just to be like, I’m still a person, I’m still a mom. I’m still a lawyer. But then there was this other part of it, which was like, what if this door did open up for you. Usually people don’t get this door. What would you do to fill that time? Would it be like, well I’m finally going to learn French, or I’m going to learn photoshop and make an album for all my grandchildren, or I’m going to write a book. I’m going to build a… blank. Can we facilitate that open window to actually be this positive thing? And we thought if you can look at it as like, if it weren’t for me going through this, I would never have done that, right? 

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: And facilitate the opportunity for people to engage in those kinds of things. You are going to inspire people. They are going to be focused on the book they want to write or the language they want to learn.

Amy: Not only that, but you’re fostering hope because you’re focusing… they’re having incremental progress and a new skill, which means they’re looking forward to the next step and the next day and they’re planning to live. This is important work! I’m glad you’re doing it. 

Lionel: So that’s what I mean by like, what is design? It’s like how far do you want to take it? And then go back towards the beginning of our conversation, it’s like, what do we actually have agency to… which parts of the project belong to you when you sit at the table, to talk about the client about what it is that you do? 

Amy: Right. And in that question, what parts of the project do you have agency over? How do you navigate that? Do you sometimes buy more space for yourself? 

Lionel: I do, I’m constantly buying more space for myself. As a matter of fact, I’m moving further and further and further up earlier into the process. For me, if the project is baked, it’s too late for me. It might not be for my company, but for me personally, at this stage of my career, I want to be there when we’re trying to understand the why and help form the why of any project. 

Amy: Yes, I understand that completely. I’m wondering, were you there for the ‘why’ on the Sphere?

Lionel: No, definitely not. You give Jim Dolan total credit for that one. We were there for the why of the experience of the Sphere, but why Sphere exists, he completely had a vision and said, I want to have this spherical thing and I want to do ABC and D. We were brought to the project, there was still a ton of room to figure out okay, so is this a stadium? Is this an arena? Is it a concert hall? What is it going to feel like when you arrive here? What world does this posit for you? We were really focused on the physicality, like where and what, how do you arrive, what’s your emotional response when you enter there? And what kind of world can we build? So for us, I think that was… it was a very difficult project insomuch as it was a complicated space and it was very, very, very hard to sort of like understand the entirety of what you were being asked to do. I remember when it clicked, when I went there and still was no roof on it, and we kind of understood the scale and what the customer would be going through when they arrived and how vast this thing was going to be. Have you been yet? 

Amy: No, I’m dying to go!

Lionel: Yeah, to their credit at MSG and Jim specifically, he really has kind of reinvented the way that one can experience a live show. And one of the interesting things is that from… it was actually Paul McCartney said it at opening night, he said, no, Bono said it, Paul McCartney was there. Bono said it on stage, opening night. He said, “This is solving the problem that arose in Shea Stadium, when the Beatles played in whatever it was, 1964, it was the first time that someone had done a big, live performance with sound speakers, right? And apparently at that show at Shea Stadium, you couldn’t hear the band because there probably weren’t enough speakers for that many people ever designed yet. And the band couldn’t hear themselves at all.

Amy: Oh right, yeah, this is legendary. 

Lionel: Yeah and from that moment until this, nobody had just designed a place specifically for listening to music, or seeing a big show.

Amy: No, right, there were these big venues that were repurposed for other things…

Lionel: Yeah, like football stadium or baseball or some sort of stadium was built for sports that you’d go and see a band there. And so it did sort of put a stake in the ground. And we were like, okay, what does it mean to arrive here? Where are you? At one point we thought about it as like, there was planet earth, the moon and the Sphere as the biggest spherical object on earth. So let’s put this place in… let’s give it space in this bigger world, like how do you enter your own world when you arrive there. And that really was the genesis of this idea that we saw the Sphere as the proscenium moving to the skin, as soon as you cross that kind of skin of what that Sphere is, you were inside the shell, right? And what we were hoping to do is that you raise that line between spectator and spectacle, right? You are now part of the show. You are part of the spectacle inside this world. And so we wanted people to feel like they were stepping through the looking glass, as one of our original mantras, step into the looking glass and be the spectator. You raise that line. The stage is everywhere and you are part of the stage.

Amy: Having done this, you’ve made a name for yourself, you’ll be doing more of these. But I also understand that you’re continuing to do a lot of award winning work in the restaurant space. And I think of it as a really important space for communities, but also for society. And so I wonder if you can talk to me about some of your restaurant work and maybe how that’s moving, like what direction you feel you’re evolving in, in terms of that? 

Lionel: Yeah, sure, when we got a call to do restaurant on the extension of the MoMA, at the base of the MoMA, it was an important time for me to understand, ICRAVE, I don’t know if it was 20 years old yet, but it was right around there. At this point I’d lost the immediacy of working on a project, it had been a long, long time since I had a project that I could just completely say, I did that project, you know what I mean? I have directors, directors have teams, I kind of do this executive creative direction oversight and client relations and stuff. But I’d stopped doing… the reason why I’d been a designer my whole life, which actually designed something. And so I kind of was like… if I needed somebody because I was working on something, I just kind of wanted to do it, right? It was at the MoMA, it’s a really cool opportunity and I really, really wanted to make sure I was all over it. So I took… for the first time in many years I took like a direct role in being the lead on a project and really thinking through things that again, that I was struggling with. And I think in general what I called a ‘Brooklynification’ of Manhattan had been going on for a long time. Where everything needed to look like it had been there forever and it was the bespoke wood with a piece of copper on it, just like, okay, I get it already, right? It was very… I feel like design had moved into a Pinterest’y, this is what restaurants look like kind of thing. And…so I was like, well what does it mean? What is a restaurant today? I was like what do I have to say? What do I have to say today about a restaurant? And so I kind of like sort of like really focused on the sculptural quality, this idea that you were dining in a sculpture, that this thing was not just a room for eating, but as an extension of where it lived, that it was part of the narrative of what the MoMA actually is and at the core of all that, there was also just this idea that I love a yummy room, right?   Everyone is like, what’s a yummy room? And I’m like, you know a yummy room when you’re in it, right? 

Amy: Yeah, it’s sensuous, the lighting is good…

Lionel: The lighting is perfect…You can hear the people at your table…

Amy: Yes, you can hear them. You stay a little bit longer because it feels so nice in there. 

Lionel: You might hear the clank of a wine glass, just the right sounds pop up and not the cacophony of birthdays, people laughing and cackling and all sorts of things. 

Amy: Or the din of just everything on top of each other so that you can’t distinguish anything. 

Lionel: Or you feel like you’re in like a ripped out page of a travel magazine because it’s just got to look a certain way to get that perfect Instagram shot, and we’re just like, let’s not be that. Let’s figure out how to create this yummy room, it’s a timelessness. Basically you say, ‘where do you want to go?’ You know you want to go there because you want that kind of intimacy of space with friends and where the light emerges from the center of the table and everyone is lit, like around the fire and whatnot. So these kinds of things were super important. And oh, by the way, it wants to be a sculpture that you’re living in, inside the MoMa kind of thing, right? 

Amy: Yeah, that’s it, that’s all. (Laughs)

Lionel: It was very cathartic for me. It was super important for me. Once I realized that I still can do this and I can work and I can get… I want to design, I want to draw, I want to paint. There’s things I want to do that I’m not doing, because I’m running a business. And that’s just taking time away from me doing what I not only want to do, but should be doing as a contributing into the world and into… I want my kids to see me actively doing interesting things. It’s not running a business. And I think that the time came in a kind of serendipitous way for me to look at where does ICRAVE go from here? And how do you do that with integrity and not be like, hey, ICRAVE design metaverse now, we now do this. I used to say ICRAVE will be the company it’s supposed to be when we look at our competitors and go, ‘let him design that, he’s better at that than we are.’ Because you’re not just so desperate to get the interior design fee, because you need it, because you’re running a business, you actually stepped outside of that and you’re kind of like looking at it in a much more strategic position with your client. And you’re like, ICRAVE will handle all of these, this company will do this one, that company will do that one. So I’ve got to do it all because it’s more fee, right? And sometimes you actually know that there’s a company, they’re actually better for that. And that takes maturity and that takes confidence in what you do, not to just want to do everything. 

Amy: That also saves you from spending your energy and your steam on a project that doesn’t really fulfill you or your team. 

Lionel: You’ve got that right, and the team is so important. They want to be working on things that mean something to them, because they’ve also made a lot of sacrifices to be in this profession and you know, that’s about passion and it’s about drive and it’s about integrity and all those things. You don’t want to just jam things down… not at ICRAVE, we don’t want to jam things down people’s throats because we have to do it. But you know, I’ve always wondered what ICRAVE would look like, or what company would you build if you had to build it today. If you built a new firm today, and that’s where Journey was born, right? Journey was born…I was introduced to somebody who was a former CEO of Frog Design firm and we’ve known each other for at least 10 years now, we’ve been bouncing around the idea of what a company would look like, what do we do? How can we reinvent the way creatives get remunerated for their work, you know this fee system sucks and these people aren’t making enough money…And we should own part of the equity and all these kinds of things…Which I’ve done a lot, by the way, in my career, I’ve [owned 1:20:49] a lot of the projects that I’ve designed. And again, that affords you more opportunity to be as true to the creative process that you want to be, because you’re not counting on every dollar that comes in being a dollar from your design fee. So we’ve always thought, there’s got to be a way to change this. These creatives are so… they add so much to the process, add so much to these projects. And at the end of the day they just… it’s very hard to get the pay structure across a creative studio that you’d like to because just the revenue is not there. 

Amy: Plus, it’s fundamentally misaligned with the human output of the endeavor, don’t you think?

Lionel: Oh, it’s just wrong, it’s wrong. 

Amy: If you’re just paying me for my service and I’m putting in all of this energy to sort of imagine what could be built for you on behalf of your brand, and how it’s going to function for you and your customers, and then when it’s designed, and I’m not getting paid anymore, I’ve just been squeezed dry for this thing that continues to serve you and your brand forever and ever, and potentially grows your brand, not just your bottom line, but your cachet and all of that. 

Lionel: Yeah, look, I’ll say it this way. People will always exploit passion I get to do something that a lot of people don’t get to do. I get to wake up every day and do what I love every day. I get to think about ideas. I get to go from something in my head, put it down on paper, be part of the process while it gets built and then actually see people use it. That is a gift. That’s a tremendous gift that resonates deeply to understanding what a life is all about. and it’s a really sad thing. They know that there’s passion in it and so it’s sad, that’s what bothers me the most about it. Forget the hard work. If you just understood how much passion people are putting forward, how much of themselves they’re putting forward to solve this problem for you, would you rethink it? 

Amy: And one of the things that’s so really arresting about that, it’s making me really uncomfortable, is this idea of passion being extracted as opposed to understanding that if you contribute and reciprocate the passion, then it’s generative and that everybody wins. And so it’s almost like a fossil fuel, you know? If people continue to exploit the passion of passionate individuals, it does not serve humanity. Including the person who is doing the exploiting. 

Lionel: You’re right and we spoke earlier about this. We do not live in a world that’s set up today for people to be passionate. They’re better off being the opposite. They’re better off being callous because everything is a ‘get rich’ scheme or some sort of evidence that you could do nothing to make a lot. It’s a different culture. Listen, I’m scared because I have kids…

Amy: That’s what I was going to ask you. In your parental fatherly role, do you want your kids to see you passionate or do you want your kids to see you safe?

Lionel: I think my kids are safe with me being passionate because that’s who I am. I’m more concerned about if they find their passion… that’s my job, right now I have two jobs with my kids. Is to teach them who they are and make sure they have a strong core, that’s like something that they can wibble-wobble all day, but they’re going to come back to their core. To me that’s critically important. And the second is to help them find their passion and have the confidence to stay in that passion and manifest a life along that passion. The problem is, if you live in a world where it gets sucked out of anybody with passion, and people do… they know when they’ve found somebody with passion and they bridle up next to you. 

Amy: Yeah, it’s true. 

Lionel: I tell young people all the time, do not be frivolous with your time, because these people will waste your time. When people leave and say, ‘I want to start my own business,’ I’m like, all right, let’s sit down and have a talk. I think you should, it’s a good time for you to start your business, right? But here’s the things you need to know. 

Amy: I love to hear your parenting perspective, because I think it resonated really deeply with me, as a human. I think your kids in a good spot with you. 

Lionel: I hope so. It’s definitely my most important work. I’ll tell you, it’s really interesting. I was at Burning Man, which you probably know, I’ve been going for many, many years. 

Amy: I did read about that, yes. 

Lionel: I know, and it was just after Larry Harvey died, who started Burning Man. And somebody said to me at this event, on the [pyre 1:28:17], they said, “What are you going to do for Larry?” And I thought about it for a couple of days and I hand out these kinds of Little Prince pop-up books as a gift that I hand out to people, The Little Prince is an important book to me. And so I’ll put notes in there, whatever, and I hand it out to people. And so I was like, you know what, maybe I’m going to write down some of my inner thoughts, like I’m just going to start writing them down and then on the night of the burn, when they burn the temple, I’ll dedicate it to Larry and I’ll put it in there and it’ll burn with the temple and that will be my kind of like tribute to him. And so I started writing, it took me a long time, a lot of procrastinating, a lot of procrastinating and I started writing and I realized that I was just dropping ideas and stuff that had been with me forever, right? If you’re ever this, then always remember that. And going through… writing in the margins of the books, the book is now this codex kind of thing, it’s getting thicker. And my wife comes back into the RV and I’m like, I’m not burning this book. (Laughter) I’m giving this book to my kids, are you crazy? I was like, could you imagine if your dad or your mother gave you a book like this, that’s just like your life thoughts and just all this kind of like… you know, I’d read a paragraph of The Little Prince and then I’d just start dropping words ba-ba-ba-ba and come back to it two days later… now it’s been going on for years. 

Amy: That’s so great!

Lionel: And so I think it’s important with kids, like I said, the idea of raising exceptional children isn’t that they might be the President of the United States or a CEO of a company. You have to define what that means to you. Every parent should have a clear idea of what the project of raising their kids is. It’s the most important project of your life. What does exceptional mean, because that’s the only reason we’re here, we have kids because we want to make a better world. Well, maybe that’s not what everyone thinks, that’s what I think. So that exceptionalism probably lays an empathy, right, and it probably lays in strength of self and having a point of view that’s based on some of sort ideals that are fair and valuable. And so without overburdening your children with your own precepts… for me, one of the things that I’ve always recognized, especially as a Jew in being challenged as a Jew a lot, is knowing who you are. And knowing what virtues are important to you and what you believe is right and wrong and understanding why you believe that. It’s not dogma. And so for me, this idea of being able to resist this current trend of humble we egos, you can’t say anything to anybody because if you dare say anything that will anyone’s feelings, then we haven’t fortified these kids with enough sense of who they are to just be able to say, ‘yeah, that does offend me, but I understand your point of view, let’s have a conversation about it.’ That to me is so frightening. The idea that if you’re offended, that is the pinnacle of what is an affront to you. And I think that… I already see with my daughter; she gets really upset with me because I hurt her feelings. And she just turned eight, right? She was really mad about it. I started to see… Charlie, I’m going to hurt your feelings a lot. My job here is to challenge your feelings. I gave her her first mantra. I said, “Your feelings don’t control you; you control your feelings.”

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: “This is your mantra. You are not formed by your feelings. You need to be able to have your central core strong. You need to be able to understand who you are and that you’re not the summary of all things that happen to you.” You know what I mean? I can see it happens at an early age, they are like, hey, those are my feelings, she’s at school or whatever, I was like, why does she think her feelings are so important? Your feelings are important and you should be able to understand that your feelings feel a certain way and she’ll be able to react about it. They’re not the pinnacle of why you exist, right? We have to confront those things. And so for me, I think it’s indicative of this idea that you are… you need to have a sense of your core and where it comes from and what your history is and why you are a make up of all these different things, and what the world has offered you. I didn’t grow up like my kids. I think my kids are growing up much more affluent than I did. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Lionel: What do they need to know that I had to deal with or where we came from, so it’s part of who they are. 

Amy: Yeah, I think it’s interesting at that young age, the concept of feelings and also learning to honor your feelings, but not let them control you. Learning to not take things that personally or define you, or internalize them and let them inform your sense of self. That’s kind of a difficult abstract concept, especially when feelings are flooding your system. But I understand what you’re saying in terms of helping guide that shaping, that process in terms of learning to understand where you are in relationship to your feelings. Understanding who you are in relationship to what happens in an external fashion, in terms of what people say or what happens to you. And that…

Lionel: I think that’s a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, about being able to stand next to your ego, right? 

Amy: Yeah, I think it is! I think it is!

Lionel: I never thought of that before, but I think listening to you, I think yeah, okay, this is how I feel. Why do I feel that way? 

Amy: And could I feel differently if I thought about it differently, if I reframed it. 

Lionel: What’s making me feel that way, is that my ego or is that something… is that really…

Amy: Absolutely, yeah. 

Lionel: I just really pray that we’re able to step through this moment right now, to kind of like… the world is vibrating at such a bizarre pitch right now, in so many fronts. I think there’s a purpose missing and all these things that are happening all over the place are just indicative of a lack of vision or purpose, about where we want to actually go, we’re just always getting bounced around from one thing to another. It’s frightening. 

Amy: It is frightening.  I do sometimes just derive a lot of hope from my students. Sometimes the next generation just astounds me with their clarity and sense of purpose and it gives me a lot of encouragement. 

Lionel: That’s amazing to hear. I’m really happy to hear that. 

Amy: You are a profound man Lionel. I have enjoyed every second of this and I feel completely enriched from having shared this time with you. Thank you so much. 

Lionel: Well, so do I, thank you so much for this time, it’s been great. 

Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening for a transcript of this episode, and more about Lionel, including links, and images of his work - head to our website - cleverpodcast.com. While you’re there, check out our Resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors. And sign-up for our monthly substack. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: - share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, support our sponsors, and hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter X - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven.  Clever is a proud member of the Surround podcast network. Visit surroundpodcasts.com to discover more of the Architecture and Design industry’s premier shows.

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Lionel Ohayon

53 Restaurant Bistro Bar, photo by Evan Sung

Inside the Las Vegas Sphere

Inside the David H Koch Center

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Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.

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