Winn Darden:
I am Winn Darden, Business Manager for Lumiflon Fluoropolymer Resins for North America. Welcome to our new podcast series called In the Mix, Choosing the Right Coating Solution, where we'll be discussing with industry experts what influences their decision-making processes when it comes to coatings. We'll delve into how experts develop their strategic planning approach to current structural and future market demands. In this episode, we'll talk with Sameer Kumar, founder and principal at Techne Architectural Design, a building enclosure design and consulting firm in New York City. Sameer began his education in architecture in India and obtained a master of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He's been involved with enclosure design for notable structures like 111 West 57th Street Tower and Hudson Yards in New York City, 1508 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, the Latte World Tower in Seoul, and Campus Santander in Santiago, Chile. Sameer, welcome to the podcast.

Sameer Kumar:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Winn Darden:
I was reading your CV and the first question I wanted to ask you was when do sleep?


Sameer Kumar:
Well, I am sure you're reading too much into my CV. There isn't much.

Winn Darden:
Well, we appreciate you being here. I also wanted to introduce Fiona Levin, Fiona's sales and marketing manager for IFS Coatings. And she was gracious enough to get Samir on our podcast. So we're honored to have her here as well. Fiona, if you want to talk a little bit about coatings and building enclosure design and IFS and your relationship there, that would be great.

Fiona Levin-Smith:
Sure. Well, hi, Winn. And again, thanks for inviting us to take part in this. It's awesome. So I guess when it comes to working with enclosure design, obviously, the coding is the part of the building that everyone's going to see. After they see structure and form, they're going to see the color and everything else like that. So that's why I guess we and also experts like Samir see it as so important. It's what people see, but it's also going to help. It's also important in terms of performance. And so that coating has to not only look good, it has to perform. So that's where using the powder coatings with the lumafloin resin, the fluoropolymer resin in there, that really helps to push that performance to the very top levels. And we've been working at IFS. We've been working with Samir for a very long time. We got to know each other a long time ago. We've worked on several different projects over the years. It's always good to work with an architectural enclosure specialist and an expert like Sumi. It brings a lot of expertise and knowledge to a project and it's always fun to get involved. We have a good time when we're doing it as well, so always good.

Winn Darden: 
Well, good for you. That sounds great. That leads kind of into my first question. Sameer, within the architectural world, what is a facade specialist?

Sameer Kumar:
Facade specialization is relatively new, as in, I would say, maybe two, two and a half decades old in its current form. Building enclosures or facades were, for the longest time, they were integral to the design of the building because they were also the structure, they supported the floor slabs and they were also the primary face of the building. so for the longest time, it was really in terms of the discipline, it was not really seen as something being different from mainstream architecture. But as technologies have evolved and as our ways of building have evolved and as the structure has moved away from the facade of the building and the facades themselves have become non -load bearing and lightweight and mounted to the building. And as buildings have gotten taller and they move more, the building enclosure has tended to become more and more complex, technologically, geometrically, as well as materially. We are using many more different types of materials to build facades than we were doing historically. And we are building many more complexities into buildings today. And all of that simultaneously with a growing stringency in building codes related to environmental performance, which is also something that is not that old in architecture. So the building enclosure or the facade, which basically separates the inside from the outside, is the main mitigating layer that controls the major sort of performance criteria of human comfort and wellbeing for people within the building. But it also becomes the main sort of vehicle for conveying architectural meaning and architectural value to people outside the building, maybe in a city who are on the streets or looking at a building and trying to sort of add up to their image of the city and their personal experience walking down the street. So the facades mitigate, we often like to say facades are dual sided, they're two sided. There is one side which faces the occupants, there's one side which faces the rest of the world, and both of them are equally important and equally demanding. so coming back to your question, what does a facade consultant do? Because there is so much evolution in technology and expertise about the design of facades and how they're built, people like myself, and I am an architect originally, people like myself have developed deeper knowledge into sort of the smaller discipline of facades within architecture. And we help other architects and we help owners not only design the facades in design stages, so we help them understand how and architectural expression can become a facade system that can be successfully engineered and then designed and then built. But we also assist through the entire process of construction. We spend time on site, we spend time in factories, overseeing quality control implementation, we spend time witnessing testing that happens specific to the project. And we review all sorts of technical documentation that the contracting side produces for approvals and stuff.

Winn Darden:
So it sounds like you're involved really in a number of disciplines here, not only architecture, but also engineering, materials expertise and things like that.

Sameer Kumar:
That is correct. on one hand, we are designers. We understand the process of design. We understand the cadence of how knowledge gets developed on a project sequentially and incrementally to enable the ownership and the architects to sort of make important design decisions. But on the other hand, we must bring with us a lot of know -how about the materials and the industry, the industries behind these materials that enable these materials to make it to a site. So I myself spend a lot of time speaking with people like Fiona in every material. I know people in say the terracotta industry or the stone industry or the brick industry or the metal industry or glass industry. All of these industries are effectively my industries and I maintain relationships through personal contact because a lot of my learning happens through these connections. So Fiona, for example, has been quite instrumental in my career in helping me understand what is critical in the world of codings and how does the industry see success and how the industry sees what challenges they have. And it really helps me understand how I can then position a project so that IFS will find success in it. Because we believe this very ardently, that a successful architectural project is the one where every stakeholder finds success we would only be able to get the best involvement and the best participation from everyone if they were to believe that that was a project that was important to their own success. And so we enable that by setting up the strategy for a project correctly and enabling all other participants who will join the project sequentially to come and find a sense of purpose and success in making our project basically successful.

Winn Darden:
Okay. So the coating aspect of this becomes extremely important. It's your window, I guess, on the outside, but the occupants of the building also are part of this. The fluoropolymer coatings that IFS offers, what do you see their advantages and what do they offer to a designer like you?

Sameer Kumar:
So first and foremost, I think that the majority of the conversations that I have had with Fiona are around aluminum coatings, right? I'm sure that IFS does more than that. I know you've actually spoken about some coatings for wood, for example, but aluminum is the main sort of bread and butter material for the modern facades, right? All modern facades will somehow or the other utilize aluminum in some form or the other, mostly as framing elements, because aluminum has a fantastic strength to weight ratio, and it is very extrudable and very easy to work with. So aluminum has become the mainstay metal in the fabrication construction of contemporary high -performance facade systems. And as we know, aluminum, like most other metals, oxidizes and corrodes if left in its natural form. And so we, because we are designing buildings that have to last whatever 50 plus years, we must ensure that all the materials, including aluminum that we employ, are properly protected against, you know, their own internal processes that could damage them. That is one side of it. The other side of it is that There is so much aluminum out there that is being employed on the facades that will be looked at that the appearance of it becomes important as well. Because even for a material like glass, which is otherwise transparent, the appearance of it is really important. Aluminum is an even bigger player in creating what we call the overall architectural language for a building Element of color is an important component of language. both for visual as well as for performance reasons, aluminum coatings are quite central to our work in façade.

Fiona Levin-Smith:
I think, Samir, would it be fair to say as well that when we first started talking about specifically powder coatings and the fluoropolymer coatings for the exteriors that we've used on some of those projects in the past, what was also really attractive to you in various roles throughout the years was also the sustainability element that the powder coating will bring over some of the competing coatings that can also offer that same level of performance and color, but the sustainability advantages in terms of the reduced No solvent, so know negligible VOCs, then no need to use the chrome pre -treatment, the ability to capture you know, overspray all that. I think that was a real driver as well. And on some of those past projects, so they kind of, it became like the trifecta, right? The three things, the performance, the color, and then the sustainability all working together.

Sameer Kumar:
Absolutely. You're absolutely right. I think that when I started my career, which was in early 2000s, the mainstay of coatings in the US was liquid coatings. And that is what I was learning from basically the projects that I was working on, et cetera. And then at some point, was probably the leading voice educating us informing us about powder coatings, about this alternative which had already caught on across the Atlantic in Europe, but for various reasons was sort of lagging in its adoption on the state side. And as we started to learn about powder coatings, we actually started to learn about the entire place of, you know, or let us just say that we became aware of the full conversation around environmental sustainability and coatings. And the discovery of the shortcomings of the of the prevalent system, and then the understanding that there are alternatives out there that are significantly better, that they that offer a significantly improved outlook of human impact on an environment. For example, as Fiona mentioned, whether it is the lack of solvents that would deplete the ozone layer, whether it is the amount of recycling that can be done by collecting the powder after it has been sprayed and then reusing it, or whether it is the greater flexibility in the choice of primers and being able to avoid toxic chemicals. All of those things were significant discoveries for me. And it became kind of self -evident at some point that there is good reason why we should all be following in the footsteps of people ahead of us who had adopted powder. And I started making an effort wherever I could in bringing powder into the conversation. And that sort of led to, and most of the time, when we would talk about powder, the resistance would come from the industry, from people who were, whether they were facade contractors who were trying to source material, or whether they were quoters or finishers who we would be meeting who would say, we have one way of doing things and we prefer to do it that way. And if you want it differently, then you you can have to go to somewhere else or something like that. But we would always sort of bring the conversation back to the idea of sustainability, to the importance of sustainability and why we were asking for a different solution. I would, Fiona, you I'm sure have a much greater insight into this. But I have felt over the last 20 plus years that I have been learning about and talking about it, that things have evolved and they have moved. And today, when we say powder, it is not as much of a, you know, resistance, surprise or resistance from the other side. So, and I do believe that as architects or as specialists in our field who are involved on a project much earlier than a supplier or a contractor,The onus is very much on us to bring this into the conversation. We cannot leave it for someone else to do it. And so we take this role of being the ones who should educate ourselves and then push for a more progressive outlook. I take that role very seriously.

Fiona Levin-Smith:
And I think that's something that's me has always done as well in terms of taking that idea and really owning it and taking it through the process and talking to the specifiers and say, look, as the architectural team, we want to be pushing the most sustainable products because that's part of sustainable design. So by doing that, we want to make sure that we're including these most sustainable products in our specs so that Even if we can't necessarily get it on every project, we want it to be in there so that we can show the industry and the construction industry that this is something that we want.

Winn Darden:
Fiona, how would you typically get involved with Samir during that design process? Are there other points of contact that you have if Samir is doing the design? But Samir, mentioned coders and facade constructors and the like. How would that process work when you get involved with TechNay or other firms like that?

Fiona Levin-Smith:
So, well, mean, to be honest, Samir and I have such a good relationship now that he sends me an email and says, hey, what do we need to do here? Can we talk about this or can we discuss this project? Or when I'm in New York, we'll get together and we'll sit down and we'll talk about a project. In the past, you know, we'll go, we've gone through, but we'll, once they get in the process and the design, when they're thinking about coatings, then we'll talk about what is the right type of coating first, the right performance level that's for the very step up different applications that they're looking to be coded. And then we would obviously work directly with Techni and then any of Samir's own customers, whether that's an architectural practice, a building owner, whoever it is, to make sure that we have samples and colors and we will provide those until we get to the right color and the right performance level and everyone is good with that. Then once it goes into spec and it's into construction, then obviously we can also help support with contractors or finding registered applicators, for example, who can, I think we talked about registered applicators on a previous podcast, but we can make sure that the people that are applying the fluoropolymer and the Lumafloor based coatings, that they are tested and that they are registered applicators who can perform those powders, sorry, can apply those powders to that very high level for that long -term performance that they want. So we kind of can be involved in those various steps in the process.

Sameer Kumar:
I would just add a little bit more just for the sake of understanding. I think that as specifiers, we are the specifiers because we write the document, the specifications that will become the contract documents when a contractor is hired. We always write performance -based specifications for the most part. We cannot prescribe that you must get a powder coating from IFS and that's the only thing acceptable. We write performance -based specifications and these performance -based specifications typically must be open -ended enough that the contractor has the option of multiple suppliers. And beyond that, we do not really have a position of imploring the contractor to choose our preferred or desired. We maintain our objectivity for the most part. So in theory, in principle, the relationship that IFS has to maintain with quoters, with applicators, is a different tier of the industry and of the business, which we typically do not cross over with. So there remains a separation for the most part. However,every now and then it does cross over. For example, on a recent project for a very important client, we were having difficulty because with, you know, we were working with a sub -facade fabricator, subcontractor who was sourcing material, which was going to have a coating of a different origin. And then they were having some difficulties with it. And so they came to us and said, we must, you know, we are thinking of changing this. so we had to then find a way where without us actually getting officially involved that we were able to bring in IFS's resources to assist this particular subcontractor in making a change to a different supplier so that a certain bottleneck that was being created for the project would be released and then the project would go back to being on track. So every now and then when we need help, we reach out to Fiona, as we would reach out to anyone else. I want to be very clear that our role is very objective in this matter. We do what we think is necessary for the project, for the success of the project.


Winn Darden:
Yeah, that's what we think. Well, Sameer, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. We appreciate it and look forward to seeing what your work's going to be in the future. 

Winn Darden:
We appreciate it. Thank you guys.

Fiona Levin-Smith:
Thanks.

Sameer Kumar:
Thank you.

Thank You for listening to our podcast, In the Mix. If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to here more, be sure to subscribe. To catch all the latest from Lumiflon, you can visit our website at Lumiflon USA .com, or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn @LumiflonUSA. Thanks again, see you next time.