If you have been through PDX airport, or the adidas campus, or the newest branch of the Multnomah County Library system, you’ve fallen in love with timber as an architectural material. And few architects have had more of a role in the renaissance of timber in the Pacific Northwest than Thomas Robinson. He is the founder of LEVER Architecture, the Portland firm whose Albina Yard, completed nearly a decade ago, was the first modern mass timber building in the United States. In 2015 LEVER designed Framework, whose structural system now underpins most of the cost-effective mass timber office buildings built in the country since. LEVER’s recent work includes The Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design at Portland State University and the thousand-foot Timberlab production facility in Millersburg.
What follows is one of the clearest practical articulations we’ve encountered of what the Design Imperative of Adaptive Urbanism looks like at the building scale. If buildings are options rather than bonds, then we need to know what an actually-adaptable building looks like, how it’s structured, and what materials make it possible. Robinson walks us through how to do adaptive design concretely – how a building can be designed to expand or contract mid-design, why digital fabrication has become inseparable from physical craft, what mass timber lets you do that concrete and steel don’t, and what working backward from already-built warehouses at Red Fox Commons taught him about how to design net-new buildings moving forward. Our conversation started with a book sitting on my desk: Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.
MATTHEW CLAUDEL: What appeals to you about Stewart Brand’s thinking? What are some of the ideas that stand out?
THOMAS ROBINSON: I think that he sees buildings as part of a continuum, not as a single point in time that you’re designing for. That’s what’s really valuable about the way he thinks – about everything. He was the original “do it yourself to save the world” guy. The Whole Earth Catalog provided access to technologies and ideas that improve people’s lives, but also improve our relationship with the planet.
Stewart Brand is one of the reasons the Bay Area is such a hotbed of innovation. He put tools out there for people to do innovative things, providing access to resources and sharing all these ideas about living off the grid. How do you make your own power? How do you make your own computer?
CLAUDEL: This is a bold statement: at the core of Silicon Valley innovation is the idea that you can do it yourself. Now that I think about it, it tracks. There is a myth of the Palo Alto garage as a place where you can just do it. You don’t need anything fancy.
Stewart Brand also talked about buildings changing over time, buildings having a life and adapting. One of the things that really appeals to me about that is that buildings reflect the character of their inhabitants and change with the needs of their inhabitants. That’s something we perhaps forget as architects. But your practice returns to the materiality, the maintenance, and the tectonics of things. Do you think that echoes Brand’s mentality?
ROBINSON: In the trajectory of my education and practice, it seems like I’ve alternated from the conceptual to the physical… I had to learn how to weld. I learned how to do woodworking. I learned how to do machining. All at a very basic level but enough to be dangerous. But what it did was to flip me from a conceptual way of thinking about design to actually building things in a way that tries to evoke a conceptual idea.
A lot of the time we take all these specific ideas and theories and we make incredibly complicated and useless spaces. In terms of their longevity, it’s a one-time thing. You’re designing the space to only work for one thing, and for these specific people who need this single thing. But when the building is complete, or even halfway through, well, everything’s changed. We need something more flexible. That’s why I think the [prototypical] shed or larger spaces that are designed to be flexible in the first place are the ones that have a long life.
A lot of those types of spaces are factories, right? [The original designers] knew that the processing equipment they would put in there was going to have a shelf life. They knew they would have to take it all out and redo it or reconfigure it because they had a new product. We don’t think that way enough about new buildings that are not about making. Absolutely not.
We’ve done a lot of spec buildings, compared to a lot of architecture firms our age. So you don’t know what’s going to go in there, but you need to have enough flexibility that many things could work.
CLAUDEL: Architects love to build a Ferrari: beautiful and optimized for a single thing. You and I agree that the Ferrari is not the building that makes most sense right now because the world is changing so quickly.
But the alternative presents a dichotomy. On the one hand, you have a space that is quite neutral – what you’re referring to as the shed, something in which many different things can happen. It’s very simple. On the other hand is a building that can change over time. It’s not neutral, but it’s flexible.
So I want to ground this in concrete specifics. Let’s talk about the PSU building that you are just in the middle of finishing. The Schnitzer School of Art, Art History and Design. This building is a marvel of engineering. I want to walk through it as a worked example. Is it correct to think of it as a building that has the structural capacity to change?
ROBINSON: While we were designing [PSU], we had to design in the ability to easily add a floor or take away a floor because there was uncertainty about how much money would be available. It wasn’t clear that the legislature would vote to fund it entirely. The system was designed to change at any point – early or very late in the design process.
To do that without blowing up the process or the schedule, each individual element had to have a logic that was connected to how it’s detailed and connected to how it’s made. We call it the framework system, because Framework designed in 2015 was the first project where we used this system.
The structural system for Framework was driven by the fact that we only had enough money to do one fully loaded fire test for one component of the building. And so we designed a frame system connected by a thin beam made up of the CLT panels, in collaboration with our structural engineer KPFF. It was out of that necessity. Now pretty much every efficient office timber building in the US uses that system if they want to do something that’s more cost effective.
So PSU has 10 years of learned behavior built into the system that, when you look at it, looks super simple. It is relatively simple. But when that system gets repeated, and rotated, it becomes a lot more complicated.
CLAUDEL: The framework system is essentially structural modules fabricated offsite. It sounds like you have shifted clash detection and tolerance and a lot of what usually happens on site upstream. Is it happening during fabrication? What are the software tools that you’re using to span from the design process to fabrication to the construction process? And how does that shift your role as a designer?
ROBINSON: At this point, we’re still in the early days. Obviously we’re using Revit, and that connects into a program called Navisworks, which is the standard that contractors use for clash detection. But what we’re fundamentally doing is using that Revit model as the base for a digital assembly of every single component of the building with all the people that will actually be eventually building it. You need to have this in order to do what we’re doing with timber – to prefabricate and precut thousands of penetrations into the slab before they arrive on site.
You have to build the building digitally first, down to an eighth inch or three millimeter tolerance for every single piece. The timber is not actually the complicated part. It’s all the other systems that have to be integrated into it. Our team spent months saying, “Well, this pipe’s going here and that’s going there.” And then we actually disassembled them digitally, removing those systems from the model so we could see what’s left, which looks like a timber Swiss cheese. Then finally that feeds back into the model for the timber and that’s what’s fabricated. Then we bring everything back and fill in the holes with the building systems on site during construction.
There are a series of operations and it just takes a lot of effort from a lot of different people. I’m sure that, like you say, buildings learn. I’m sure artificial intelligence can learn how we did it with the teams. And it’ll be interesting to see what happens with that, right?
CLAUDEL: I have no doubt. Feel free to tell me if this is crazy, but I’m thinking about your relationship with Timberlab, your relationship with some of the MEP engineers and so on – the architect sounds a lot more like a product designer than an architect.
ROBINSON: Yeah, I think the architect is [like a product designer]. Interesting architecture is a version of product design. I don’t see them as that different, at least from my perspective, because I get really interested in how things are made, and that making is related to how we design. The material characteristics of what you’re building can be the keys to innovative architecture – just as one detail can then lead to a whole building. To me, it’s like cellular DNA. The replication of the detail creates the building.
Some of the people that I admire the most, like Jasper Morrison [think this way]. The way he talks about how he designs is inspiring. In the end, a building is a product, right? It’s a thing in the world.
CLAUDEL: What you’re describing requires an intimate knowledge of structural systems or material systems. You know how glulam works, for example, and you know how attachments work. You’ve gone through it. And that’s why the hanging system for the Timberlab factory building can become the parti for a whole building.
ROBINSON: Those are always the most exciting projects for me: when the detail is the building. When there are very few degrees of separation between the detail and the experience and the culture that you’re working in. I don’t know why we are not more focused on that as architects.
CLAUDEL: When you have a separation between the engineer and the architect, for example, each one starts blaming the other for problems that arise. You’re certainly not going to get a building that has the integrity of the component-to-full-building fractal you are describing. You’re talking about a continuum from the conceit of the building to its fabrication, to its construction. But the building doesn’t end when you cut the ribbon, right?
The literature for the PSU building says that the interior partitions are designed to be reconfigured. In theory it’s modular, so it can change over time. In practice, what’s locked? What is mobile? What would a future occupant need to understand if they’re thinking about this building changing? For example, if they decide the small studio concept isn’t working for the student of 2035. If we need to rethink what education looks like. How might the building react to that future condition?
ROBINSON: At the most basic level, we try wherever we can to get rid of the core as a structural concept. A lot of times the core is the problem in terms of flexibility. If it’s structural, moving it is almost an impossibility.
The PSU building has no structural core – all of the structure is out at the perimeter. That’s also true in Spring Street, and it’s true in the project that we did in Kirkland, where we’re doing a timber exoskeleton. With the base move of how you handle the structure, you create the most amount of flexibility downstream. You can put up partitions or clear out a whole floor plate. The reality with PSU is that all of the walls can be removed at some future date. You could just come down to the basic shell with the braces and then begin again from there.
The other thing we did at PSU was separating systems so there’s not as much friction. We really tried never to put a wall and the structure right on top of each other – we always separate the two. The rhythm of the columns creates a series of micro galleries for students, but it also allows the wall to be removed with minimal interaction with the core timber structure.
We know the building systems will need to be replaced at some point. We know people are going to need smaller spaces, or they’re going to need bigger spaces. And the building’s completely set up to accommodate that. Obviously it will always cost some money but it’s not impossible. The other thing about PSU that’s interesting is that it’s basically a 40’x10’-foot module, repeated and rotated in a pinwheel throughout the entire building. All of these systems can potentially expand forever or they could only be a very nominal small chunk.
CLAUDEL: That implies extensibility in the future, even if what we’re building now is only phase one. If we decide it needs to be longer or shorter, it can.
ROBINSON: If you have a system that works, the building designs itself. We used the same method with the facades we did at the Arthouse project for the Pacific Northwest College of Art. We started with a panel we could afford – a Chevron-shaped metal panel. We’re like, let’s just design the whole facade around that as if it were a custom panel. The ready-made became something special because we used it and treated it like it is something special. Standardized products populate the world of architecture. If you really look at them hard enough and think about how to combine them in innovative ways, they can transcend their mundaneness.
CLAUDEL: Absolutely – let’s get into materials! With the PSU project, you’re describing a separation between the column and the wall, so that they’re not interacting with one another. That isn’t necessarily something that you can only do with mass timber. You could do that with many different structural systems. I’m curious – is there something you can do with mass timber that you can’t do with concrete or steel? Like cutting or reinforcing? In other words – is it a better material for adaptation? People make a carbon case for mass timber. Is there a modifiability case to be made?
ROBINSON: I would say so. Most houses in the U.S. are timber frames and they’re relatively easy to modify because of that. You don’t need to get a concrete saw in there to make an opening. Mass timber members are also a bit easier because the material itself is wood.
It’s not as processed as steel or concrete. Timber itself is something that actually was alive at one point. You don’t need tons of crazy tools to actually modify something made out of timber.
When we started learning more about it, we met this amazing guy, a Canadian timber installer. He and his crew were called “Chainsaw Divas” because they had these special chainsaws to get into tight spaces. When there was a problem with these early timber buildings, if they weren’t put together right – remember, it was just early days – the Chainsaw Divas would come out and actually modify huge panels or beams on site.
If you look at the PSU project, there’s an interface where 40-foot timber beams hang from the steel brace frame. To accomplish this we oversized the beams, then when they got them in the field, they just got a chainsaw and cut them on site to perfectly marry up with the steel.
When you see that this is possible, you can also see into the future that other modifications would be possible more easily.
CLAUDEL: So today we don’t have Chainsaw Divas – we have software like Navisworks.
ROBINSON: Right – we’re building and taking apart the building multiple times in the digital space, using a digital twin.
CLAUDEL: Presumably that twin will be a resource in the future, right? That’s an evergreen asset.
ROBINSON: Yes. Literally every single component of the building is in that model. It will be interesting when somebody feeds that model into Claude…
CLAUDEL: It’s probably already happened, Thomas.
ROBINSON: It’s probably already happened, yeah.
CLAUDEL: Over the years you’ve been at the forefront of mass timber architecture. But it’s been almost a decade since Albina Yard, and this is still fairly niche. What is holding everyone else back? What’s the actual barrier here? Is it code? Is it capital? Is it contractors? Is it design culture? Is it insurance? What’s going on?
ROBINSON: I would take almost the opposite view. I’m kind of amazed when I look at where we are today. There was nothing [mass timber] happening in the US 10 years ago. And now there’s like 3,000 projects and everyone, every developer and every person I talk to wants to build with timber. Editors at different publications are worried that they’re featuring too many timber projects. I think it’s really our own impatience, you know. 10 years is just a blip in the larger history of architecture and building, even in the United States.
We forget so easily that companies like Katerra invested billions and then went up in smoke. Google Sidewalk Labs – hundreds of millions. There have been a lot of very smart people who are like, “I am really smart and really good at writing software so I know how to be a contractor and build things.” And the reality is, they really don’t. I’ve been in architecture 30 years, and I still have so much to learn.
Companies that have been around for a hundred years like Swinerton are saying, okay, I’m gonna invest in this and figure out how to do it in a way that really works. We’re building the kind of culture that will allow timber to really take off in the next 10 years.
CLAUDEL: As we see more companies like Swinerton or LEVER, or maybe some folks you worked with 20 years ago who have now started their own firms – do you think that as more architects and developers start using this material, it will become less expensive? Can we anticipate economies of scale?
ROBINSON: When you have more manufacturers, more cultural knowledge, more assurance that if you decide to build out of this material, you can predict generally what the building will cost.
We’re moving from brewing beer in the garage to brewing beer in a converted warehouse to brewing at an industrial scale. As you go up in scale the quality has to be better, because the risk is higher. The controls have to be tighter, the systems have to be more efficient. I think we’re in the transition, at least in the United States, from a medium sized brewery to an industrial scale brewery. As we go through that, you’re going to see an increase in quality and also an increase in innovation – we will have to make it work.
CLAUDEL: There are two sides of the building culture that we haven’t addressed. Obviously architects care – they love seeing CLT and mass timber construction in magazines. Others are not really as enamored of it: permitting and workforce. Your Framework project has a permitting element to it, if I’m not mistaken. You’re publishing it openly – and presumably that makes it easier to go through permitting and makes mass timber construction more standardized for workforce training. Are you seeing that bear out?
ROBINSON: The research that was done for Framework in 2015 has been critical for high-rise timber projects elsewhere. They used the open source testing and detailing for Framework to get their projects permitted. That’s well documented. You also asked the question about workforce – I think that’s more complicated. D.R. Johnson was one of the first gluam fabricators in the Western U.S. to have a CLT press. There were other people doing industrial CLT for other purposes, such as temporary roads. But architectural CLT manufacturing is technically complex. You need to have engineers. You need to have quality control. You need to have people that are running the machines, and people that are running the shifts. And a lot of the people that do that work are engineers and require specialized training and they often want to live close to a city. It creates challenges.
CLAUDEL: It doesn’t sound like a bad thing. It just means that we’re solving for a new kind of economic condition.
ROBINSON: It’s pretty exciting. Have you been to Timberlab’s new facility? It’s awe-inspiring – the scale. If you had told me 15 years ago that I would be designing a thousand-foot-long, all-timber factory, I would be like, you’re nuts, right? It feels like something that [Pier Luigi] Nervi did during the ‘30s or ‘40s. I’m not saying that what we’re doing is equivalent. They were doing much more innovative structures out of concrete. But I think it’s something special about the culture and history of Oregon, and the timber industry. It’s a massive step.
CLAUDEL: It reminds me of the Metabolists in post-WWII Japan, also. Their ambition was to create infinitely extensible structures – linear cities. Buildings are a simple module that can repeat indefinitely. Metabolism also had a goal of buildings that change over time.
ROBINSON: What is different for me is the actual experience of [the architecture]. The modules [designed by Metabolist architects] are beautiful but also maybe a little inhuman. What’s interesting about timber is that even at a small scale, the material connects. That might seem like a minor piece of the equation, but I think it’s actually pretty major. When you amplify a material that feels connected to our humanity, I think it amplifies that connection we have to a space. When you take something that is highly processed, or has very little [human] connection – something blank, like a concrete wall – and you amplify and repeat it hundreds of times in a modular city, it amplifies the character of that material. I’m not necessarily proposing that we do massive cities of timber, but I think it’s a quality that architects should be thinking about.
CLAUDEL: You’re right. The Metabolist movement was enabled by innovations in concrete. At the time there was a sense that the plasticity of the material unlocked architects from a lot of the constraints that they had to worry about before. So they started to think grander and they started to think in terms of infinity – something an architect would never in their right mind have thought of before. Perhaps we can rescue some of the modularity that was really interesting about that movement, but blend it with the humanity of timber.
Shifting gears, I’m curious about your adaptive reuse projects – Red Fox Commons and Highland Hall are two examples. Maybe you have others. These started as industrial buildings, so they have a big structure that’s oversized for office or residential uses. What did that structure let you do? Where did it constrain you? And what is it like to work with an existing building rather than designing something from scratch?
ROBINSON: Redfox Commons and Highland Hall are different. At Redfox, there were two 30,000 square foot warehouses with 100 foot spans. The main building was built during or right before World War II, and used a timber truss system. We were talking to our engineer and they said it was designed right at the edge of what could work. There weren’t a lot of materials around, so they were trying to create the biggest possible span with the least amount of material. It was a huge metal shed with 100-foot span trusses and two rows of columns at each side.
Over time [the building] obviously evolved. So when we got involved, it was just a Pyrenesian structure with all these timber mezzanines with little dividers painted different colors, and people doing different things all throughout it. The first thing we did was to clear everything out because we had to seismically upgrade the building. And after we took it apart we found we had thousands of beams and columns and planks of various sizes.
We were in the middle of that demolition process, we thought, “well, what if we could use some of these? There were two warehouses. What if we use some of this timber to connect and create a bridge between the two?” That sounded good to the developer… we had all of this material that we already “owned” that we could reuse.
So the team cataloged a general typology of beams, and the ones we had the most of were the 4x12s that they’d used for flooring. There were a bunch of other ones, big old timber beams, the columns, that were worth a lot of money. So [the developer] sold a bunch of the timber, and we kept a certain amount. We had a timber grader [do an evaluation] – they come in and calculate the bearing capacity for each piece of timber.
We laminated two old 4x12s with one new piece to create a hybrid beam and column system. The contractor set up a production line in the existing building where they screw laminated all these pieces together. These guys were in there with screw guns, fabricating all the bridge pieces for weeks.
We saw an evolution – this building was filled with makeshift structures. We took it apart, cataloged it, and put it back together. And once we put it all back together, we blasted the whole structure with walnut shells to make it feel new. People really love that project. We won an AIA honor award for it. But it was really just about taking this material that happened to be there. It’s like if somebody handed you, I don’t know, like a hundred pounds of filet mignon, maybe even a tougher cut, and said “what are you going to do with it?”
CLAUDEL: It’s not crazy to imagine that the vacant buildings around the city are filled with similar – not the same, but similarly interesting – kinds of materials.
ROBINSON: Yeah. You’re seeing interesting research being done in Switzerland and Europe where they’re cataloging cities – all of the materials in all of the buildings that could maybe be reused. Creating a network of reuse.
Highland Hall is another evolution of that thinking. It was more intentional. [University of Oregon] had a grant to do a multi-story seismic test of a mass plywood panel structure at the Tallwood Design Institute at Oregon State University. There was a Master’s Architecture student who cataloged the components after [the tests] were complete. The budget was not large. So we thought, well, we need to try to re-use this material in the new School. It made that project really interesting. It’s an example of a more regenerative or synthetic approach where you’re holding two truths. [On one hand] I’m designing this building, [on the other hand] they’re going to be taking this thing apart. Can we land the plane at the same time? It took a relationship with a University of Oregon Architecture Professor and friend, Judith Scheine, who was one of the founders of the Tall Wood Design Institute.
CLAUDEL: If you back up a little bit, I think it’s interesting that the architecture school is in a building that has been a gymnasium and a theater.
ROBINSON: Right, but it could easily have been just a warehouse. It makes architecture more interesting when there are unexpected experiences and uses. At least I’m inspired when I go to a particular place and see these flavors or materials or ingredients that I’ve never experienced together.
For example you might have old growth timber – that feels contemporary when it is screwed together with state-of-the-art screws. Or you have an architecture school that’s actually reusing material that would have just gone into the landfill, but now has a refined platonic quality to it. To me that contrast is interesting.
CLAUDEL: Even if these materials you’re finding are humble, you manage to elevate them, and as you were saying, you can imbue them with new kinds of meaning over time. That’s typically happening in projects that work backwards – an existing building where you’re using a “harvesting” approach to find new materials and work them into the design of the renovation. But you’re also designing buildings that look forward, like PSU. Ones that can adapt in the future. How do you learn from old buildings? Are there lessons you’re learning from old buildings that you can embed into how you design buildings for the future?
ROBINSON: I think it comes from experience. I’ve learned what not to do. When I was a young architect, I worked for this architect named Joe Esherick, who’s a well-known Bay Area modernist. I was 23 and I was working on a brewery in Montana. He was in his 80s at the time, a World War II veteran. He just said, “Go do it.” So I did it. There wasn’t micromanagement in any way. It was 1995 and there was this high-tech aesthetic floating around. I thought – I’m going to put my life into this railing design!
When it was complete he took me aside and said: “You could have just done a simple picket.” It wasn’t mean. He wasn’t putting me down. But I always remember that. Sometimes you can just do something very simple, and it can be very good. It doesn’t necessarily need to take a massive amount of effort, but it does have to take into account the actual technologies, so that when you’re designing the thing, it is the thing. We need to always [remember] that what we are drawing will actually be a thing – as opposed to having a great idea that looks great in your head but you have no idea if it’s actually going to become something that’s buildable or real. You always have to be working with the thing itself.
CLAUDEL: That goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning – there’s a tectonic sensibility that architects used to have. You’re not just making drawings. Ultimately, you’re making a steel plate that holds a wood beam, for example. With a deep understanding of those different elements, you can actually start to play.
Shifting gears: we are facing increasing uncertainty and an increasing pace of change – what is the world asking of architectural practice that the discipline isn’t set up to deliver?
ROBINSON: One of the key things facing architects is the sense that what you’re creating is valued without having to justify or explain why it’s valuable. A lot of architects are very good at talking about their work, but the talk doesn’t always connect to the experience that people have in the space, or how they feel about its usefulness for what they have to do, or even just what the culture actually needs.
So I think architects need to demonstrate their value through innovation at every stage. When people say I’m going to hire an architect, that’s actually going to create a certain amount of value, both in terms of the experience [of the building], but also even in terms of the economics of a project. If architects can demonstrate that they create economic value and also societal and ecological value, then we’re going to have more ability to impact the future.
I also think, as we’re designing on a specific site, we really need to connect what we’re doing there to sites we may never visit, but are definitely connected to our project through the materials we build with and energy we use. The choices we make about the materials we use, how they were sourced, how they were transported and who puts them together can lead us toward a more regenerative approach to design. We should see our sites as something more – not just the program and the urban context, but also how materials matter in a larger context of the world.
CLAUDEL: That speaks to the value that you’ve been able to create with LEVER. Many of the systems you’re creating, whether it’s an attachment and structural system or whether it’s a piece of software, these are things that extend beyond the building itself. These are replicable systems. In a sense, you’re not just designing a building, you’re designing the first example in a larger system that will generate buildings in the future.
ROBINSON: Right. For me, architecture is more like a transformational tool rather than a single [object] on a site. We’re designing a set of tools that we can then deploy to solve different issues in different ways. And the more you apply and work with the tools, the more intelligent they get.
The connector for the Framework system is a good example. When we built it the first time, it was kind of clunky. The second variation utilized a cleat connection that is a manufactured product, and now it’s just timber to timber to timber connection using a mortise and tenon detail that is thousands of years old. It took a lot of evolution to arrive at something simpler than what we started with. There’s a beam and a post, right? But there is also 10 years of thinking about how they interact. Hopefully we keep evolving.
There’s a really interesting quote, I think it is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. “Think well to the end, begin with the end in mind.” To me, that’s about thinking through, from the concept you have all the way through to how it will be made, and then you come back to the beginning.
A lot of times people think about the concept, concept, concept. And they never say, “Well, what would this really be if I just built it? What if I had to build it? What would it actually end up being?” That’s something we’ve done a lot. It’s definitely Stewart Brand’s ethos. We’re going to go out and do it ourselves: design a system that actually does what you’re asking for. We’re going to find the fabricator and we’re going to find the supplier and figure out how we would do it. We’re not going to do a mock-up that makes it seem realistic. We’re just going to put it all out on the table and make it real. I don’t know if a lot of people in the profession always value that. I do think there is space for more prosaic systems to be part of architecture and hopefully part of more people’s everyday experience of buildings.
CLAUDEL: That’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you Thomas.