The Stories Behind Our Spaces

Phillip

You wake up in a bedroom. You walk through a hallway. You enter a kitchen. You step outside onto a sidewalk or you pass storefronts. When you purchase lunch at a restaurant or you return home through the streets lined with advertisements, every day, without thinking, you navigate spaces designed by someone else for purposes that may not align with your own desires. Architecture and commerce are the twin inevitable forces of modern life. You must live somewhere, and you must engage with the exchange of goods and services to survive. This is the hidden curriculum of existence. The background conditions that shape our daily experience without ever asking for our permission. We think we choose where we live, where we work, and where we shop. But more often, we're simply navigating systems that were already put into place before we ever arrived. It was this realization that led Dami Lee from practicing architecture to explaining it. As a licensed architect turned YouTube storyteller, she began to see her field not as a technical problem to be solved, but as a cultural power to examined. Her videos, which have reached over 200,000,000 viewers, don't just explain how buildings work, they reveal how buildings work on us. What you buy is who you become. And this principle finds its architectural analog in Dami's work too. What you build is who you are. And a deeper truth emerges, what you're forced to inhabit shapes who you become. We at Future Commerce seek to spiritualize commerce. And Dami, she performs a parallel work with architecture. She's taking the most fundamental human innovation, and she reveals its deeper meanings through pop culture and a critique of modernity. From the stages of the VISIONS Summit live in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Dami shared her methodology for finding narrative gold in unlikely architectural subjects. In an age where attention spans shrink and algorithms rule, she's discovered how to make people fall in love with window details and urban planning theory. We are builders of worlds. But first, we are inhabitants of worlds that are built by others. The question is, how do we find agency, meaning, and beauty within the systems that we didn't design?

Dami Lee

So my name is Dami, and I'm a licensed architect from Vancouver, BC. But my job now is I'm a YouTuber. I make videos on YouTube. And we have a bit of a multi disciplinary practice. So we do a little bit of architecture, a little bit of speculative consulting for a video game. But the majority of our business, the core of our business is YouTube and architectural storytelling. {picture shown} That was me about five years ago, and I am smiling in this picture, but inside I was crying, because I had just made one of the worst mistakes ever, which is I quit my job without having another job lined up. And that week was the week when the pandemic happened. And so you guys probably remember, things were pretty uncertain during that time, and nobody was hiring. And so, had a pretty low point in my life, but that's also when I started dabbling into YouTube. And I just want to share a little bit of my back story. So, I'm from Vancouver BC, but I moved to Toronto, Ontario. Toronto is another Canadian city, if you guys don't know. I moved to Toronto, Ontario for my bachelor's and my master's of architecture. So, I spent seven years there. And during that time, my world really changed because I was starting to see the world through the world of architecture. And it was seven years of total inspiration. But after my master's, I ended up moving back to Vancouver to try to save some money. And so what happened is I left behind a lot of my architectural community and my circle of friends who were architects. And my new friends were, they were non architects. And of course I want to try to introduce them to this world of architecture that I found. And most times, whenever I would take them to buildings or talk to them about architecture or show them my projects, I would be met with, "Oh, that's cool." Cool. Cool. And so, I was really frustrated. And I used to think, they're too basic, they're too basic to understand the complexity and nuance and the beauty of architecture. But over time, I realized it was probably the way that I was talking about architecture that was a problem. And so, this is actually a general problem in the architecture industry. Architecture is just not very approachable, because we use a lot of jargon, and it's full of people who have been in school for a very, very long time. So the architecture industry is really of in a silo. So that's been kind of our question for the last couple of years of running the YouTube channel, is how can we make architecture interesting for a broader audience? So, we made a lot of videos on our channel, over a 100 videos. We've reached over 200,000,000 views, with over 7,000,000 watch hours, with over 1,900,000 subscribers. A lot of people who are not architects, just people who are interested in architecture. But the start of the channel, I started the channel mostly talking to architects and architecture students, because I had just gone through my internship process, and I was kind of frustrated with the fact that there weren't a lot of, there wasn't a lot of content out there from other architects talking about their experience. And so, I mostly was talking about my experience of going through the internship process and portfolio tips and presentation tips. But then, over time, we noticed that there were a couple of videos that started doing really well on the channel. And those were typically the videos where if you just looked at the thumbnail and the title, you wouldn't actually know that it was a video about architecture. And so we started to strategically move the channel from a channel for architects to a channel about architecture for a broader audience. And that's also when my business partner joined the team as well. And we really started to increase the production value and also really take this more seriously as a business. I think this is one of the most beautiful things about Google and YouTube, is that it gives you incredibly good analytics on your audience, and their watching habits, and it tells you pretty much exactly when they're getting interested and when they're losing their interest. So this is a really good tool for us to understand our audience. And then a big part of our process is these post mortems. So after every video and after every project, we try to look at what went right, what went wrong, and how we can improve for the next videos. But the two things that we always look at is the input, how many hours and how much resources did we put into the project, and the output. So, the performance of the video, like views, retention, but sometimes we know that the video is not a topic that's going to perform that well, but we just make it anyways, because we think it's a good story. So, in that case, we'll measure it with things like comments and how engaged our audience is. And what we found is that no matter how many times, how many hours we spend making the thing beautiful, or technical, or perfect, none of that really matters if we don't make the time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.

Phillip

In 1956, sociologist William H. White published The Organization Man, a study of how corporate culture was reshaping American society. But his most prescient insight came later when he turned his attention to public spaces. The most successful plazas, the most vibrant streetscapes, the most beloved urban spaces were not the ones that were designed by master planners, but the ones that evolved organically through use. This is the principle that Dami Lee applies to architectural storytelling. When she examines Kowloon Walled City, she's revealing how human communities function when they grow like markets rather than monuments. The residents didn't follow a master plan. They followed rhizomic desire paths, creating connections and businesses based on need rather than ideology. And the most enduring spaces that emerge emerge from the bottom up, prioritizing human behavior over architectural theory. These are the commercial vernacular of everyday life, the spaces where people actually choose to spend their time and money. Stay with us. When we return, we'll discover why the most chaotic spaces often teach us the most about what it means to be human.

Dami Lee

So I wanna show you an example with one of the videos that we did. Because it's not just the storytelling that's human, I think we also try to make the process more human as well. So, this is one of our most popular videos and one of the first videos that really reached a wide audience. And it's a video on this crazy city called Kowloon Wall City. And it's also known as the densest city in the world. So, if you can compare that to the density of New York and Hong Kong, that's Kowloon. And, yeah, it was like 50,000 people packed into 6.4 acres of space. So, it was pretty crazy. It's demolished now, but when it was there, it was essentially a slum. So, there's some inherently interesting things about this topic. It's the densest city in the world. And extremes like this, we find it ignites a lot of the curiosity from our audience. But, our goal is not to just talk about the architecture or just to present the data. Our goal is really to talk about the human condition through the architecture and all of the multi faceted aspects of architecture by doing this. So this was our angle. So we presented the city as it is. So it was essentially a slum full of crime and drugs. But people who visited there or lived there, they describe it with a kind of fondness, and they say it had a kind of compelling beauty. So how could a place like this possibly be beautiful? So that was this tension, this emotional tension that we tried to carry throughout the video. And I think that's one of the elements that made this video human. {shows photo} So this is our intern Cindy, and she is actually originally from Hong Kong. She was born and raised there, and she moved to Canada not long ago. And she is actually the one who pitched this project. So she pitched it and she did the research for it. And I think trying to uncover the human element in this video was, it was a layered process, but I think it really came from her, because she had a personal connection to this place. And so we tried to always pick topics that whoever is doing the research is going to be personally interested in, because we find that that usually gets an objectively better product. So, like I said, essentially, it's a slum, which I was very concerned about, because I wasn't sure if there was anything interesting to talk about architecturally. Because I remember when I was in grad school, one of my friends wanted to do her thesis on Favelas, and my professor really drilled down on her, and he was like, "Well, it's not designed, it's not planned, so how do you want to talk about the architecture through this?" And then we found this, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. Does anyone know? Has anyone read this? Okay. One person. So we read this in grad school, and everyone was very confused. Essentially, the rhizome, it's a concept by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, and essentially, a rhizome is the opposite of a tree. A tree has roots and it has a hierarchical structure and it branches off from the center. But a rhizome, it's decentralized, so it can grow the shoots and roots from any point in its structure, And it can grow horizontally, it can grow vertically, and it can grow laterally. And so, Deleuze and Guattari, they used this as a metaphor to talk about things that are not really organized into a linear structure. So it could be ideas or research methods, but it could also be used to talk about cities. And as soon as we started looking at Kowloon through the rhizome, everything kind of made sense. And we were able to apply an order and meaning to the city, which is, you know, really chaotic. So, looking at Kowloon through the rhizome, it was a bit of an aha moment. But the city had three fifty buildings, but over time, it all merged into one giant mega structure. And it had these cavities between buildings, but the cavities would all get filled up over time with stairs. And at the intersection of these stairs, nodes would merge organically and these nodes would be made up of convenience stores or essential services, so people wouldn't have to go all the way down. Even the rooftops would merge, creating one giant rooftop. And even the buildings and the units would merge. So in this case, the part in the red, that was a strip club. But the real money was actually in gambling, which is the part in the blue. And so they would connect these buildings, and they would lure people in with the strip club, and then they would bring them down to the gambling afterwards. And so it was creating this synergy between these businesses. And so it was a place that really grew organically, and it wasn't planned at all. Deleuze and Guattari would call this multiple multiplicities, but this interconnection of the city, it was creating an incredibly strong bond within the community. And so, Deleuze and Guattari wrote a very dense, very complicated, a little bit convoluted book describing the concept of the rhizome. And we could have definitely talked about the rhizome through this book, but we decided to use a metaphor using an onion, which is essentially a rhizome, and pasta. But this was actually the most interesting part of the city. It was the courtyard, And within the courtyard was what you call a Yemen building. It's an ancient building that was there from the very beginning. And even though every other part of the city was getting built and rebuilt over and over again, they restricted any new kind of building in this area. And this was the only area where you could get fresh air and see the sky. And it really became the heart of the community. And we thought it was just very interesting. And we felt like we could use the courtyard to talk about this fundamental human condition, this need for stability, even in an ever evolving chaos, like Kowloon Wall City, and the tendency for humans to gravitate around any kind of links to the past, And that link can become the heart of the community. Comments are, I would say, the thing that really emotionally attaches us to our work. And in this case, we got so many beautiful comments, especially from people whose parents had lived there and grandparents had lived there, because the city is demolished now, and they were thanking us for making this video. And it's comments like this from people who would have never been interested in architecture, who all of a sudden see, woah, architecture is actually really cool. And it's comments like this that really drive us. And so, for us, we focus more on topics that we are personally interested in, rather than focusing on trending topics. We typically try not to work on sensational topics or timely topics, because those types of topics have a time limit. But we find that when we are personally interested, we're able to find meaning in whatever topic we're talking about. And it also encourages the team. It just leads to a much better product. The rhizome is actually a concept that keeps coming up in our process. And I think Phillip said, "If you give meaning to something, it gives you the permission to do it over and over and over again." So the rhizome is a process that's nonlinear. And our process is not, I wouldn't say it's the most efficient. And so as a business owner, I think the right response would be, we're wasting a lot of time, we're wasting a lot of money. But by going through this rhizomic process, we are able to make connections between things that we wouldn't have thought about. We're able to make connections between different categories. And we're able to make serendipitous connections as well. And again, I think this really motivates the team, and the team feels like they're contributing to something meaningful. And, you know, we have so many videos where we invest so much time and resources in it, and they don't perform as well. Sometimes, like you would say, it flops. But sometimes we just make a video that we know it's a really good story, and we know that it's not going to perform that well from the traditional sense. But we do it anyways. And the reason we do it is because we're able to establish such a good connection with our audience. Because our audience knows how much time we spend on these videos. They know that we pour our hearts and souls and blood, sweat, and tears into these videos. And I do feel like nowadays, a deeper connection is almost better than a wider connection. This is another video that we did on avatar robots that are operated by people who are bedridden. And we definitely completely changed the direction of the video midway through, because we felt like, well, this has to be more of a human story. And with this video, we are so happy we did, because the comments that we got from this was just so amazing. And with the video on Walking City as well, we were able to revive an old movement from the seventies and reframe it from today's context. And yeah, it was just a really fun video for us to make. And I think it's important, especially now, to do a process where everyone is really invested and involved. Because for us, it actually takes quite a while for us to all kind of get on the same page and train our team to think like us and make videos like us. And we also need a team that has a very specific skill set and a very specific personality. And so, we find that, you know, from a very pragmatic business point of view, doing this rhizomic process where it can feel like we're wasting a little bit of time, in the end, in the long term, it is actually beneficial for the business. And we built a process where we can really talk about anything and make anything interesting out of topics that could be boring. And I think I'm just reminded over and over again that architecture, even things that seem quite boring, can be super interesting if we just take the time to make it a little bit more human and reframe it from a human angle. {shows photo} That's the QR code if you guys want to connect, or if you guys have any questions. There's also some resources you guys can download. But, yeah, thank you.

Phillip

French architectural poet and philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in the Poetics of Space that the house is our corner of the world. But what Dami Lee's work reveals is that every corner of the world is potentially a house, and every space is a potential site for meaning making. Her exploration of Kowloon Walled City becomes a meditation on resilience and adaptation. Here was a space that existed in the gaps of formal planning, where people created value through proximity, through connection, through the simple act of choosing to build their lives in relationship to one another. The rhizome becomes more than just an academic metaphor. It is a way of understanding how culture spreads, how meaning emerges, and how human communities function, not through top down design, but through bottom up adaptation, not through master plans, but through organic response to changing circumstance. This connects to our work at Future Commerce, where we explore how commercial culture spreads through social networks and how trends emerge through the grassroots. How we buy becomes who we are through processes that are often invisible to us. The most profound architecture surprises us with its humanity. It grows from the needs and the dreams of the people who inhabit it, and it creates space for the unexpected connections that make life worth living. This is what it means to be builders of worlds, not just to create physical structures, but to create conditions for human flourishing. What you buy is who you become, and what you build is who you are. If you like the VISIONS storytelling format, you can see all of the video by subscribing to FutureCommerce Plus. It's our premium content available over at futurecommerce.com/plus. And you can find more of Dami Lee's architectural storytelling on her YouTube channel, where she continues to explore the human stories embedded in our built environment. If this conversation sparked something for you, like, subscribe, and follow wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. It helps more people to join into the conversation. And if you wanna bring more of Future Commerce into your world, check out our print shop at futurecommerce.com, where commerce meets culture in beautifully crafted journals, zines, and collectibles. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.

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