What is the future of the built environment?
The National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where AFIRE members tour this week during our Winter Conference, is a museum about the world we design and build.
The museum’s exhibits celebrate building architecture, design, engineering, construction—and the act of urban planning. But most of all, it’s a showcase for the imagination and ambitions of those who help create what we call real estate. In this podcast, AFIRE CEO Gunnar Branson interviews James Ball, the National Building Museum’s director of future cities, about the past, present and future of the structures we exist in every day. This conversation is geared to people who invest in developing buildings around the world.
LINKS
To hear the globe’s top experts discuss opportunities in US property markets, register for future AFIRE conferences:
Winter Conference 2026 in Washington, DC
https://www.afire.org/events/wc2026/
Summer Conference 2026 in Tokyo
https://www.afire.org/events/tokyo26/
Find the National Building Museum on the web here:
https://nbm.org/
Ball discusses the NBM’s new exhibit, Coming Together:
https://nbm.org/exhibitions/coming-together/
The NBM’s online initiative, I Hope This Becomes:
https://ihopethisbecomes.nbm.org/
Discussed during the episode was Donella Meadows, the environmental scientist behind The Limits to Growth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows
KEY MOMENTS
00:00 Introductions
01:30 What is the National Building Museum?
03:05 Role of built environment in society
05:30 History of the building that houses the NBM
07:58 How our built world shapes us
09:41 Future of the city
11:50 Starchitect fallacy and the genius theory of urban planning
14:44 New NBM exhibit: Coming together
18:02 Destructive development narratives
21:20 How to make buildings beautiful
23:50 Museums’ role in real estate
26:01 Role of the building user
28:25 City as a multi-generational yet still incomplete project
30:25 Message to building industry
33:50 New moment in city building
35:18 AFIRE visits the NBM
36:20 Wrap up
DISCLAIMER
The publisher of the AFIRE Podcast is not engaged in providing tax, accounting, or legal advice through this publication. No content published in the AFIRE Podcast is to be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Some information included in the AFIRE Podcast has been obtained from third-party sources considered to be reliable, though the publisher is not responsible for guaranteeing the accuracy of third-party information. The opinions expressed in the AFIRE Podcast are those of its respective contributors and sources and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
The AFIRE Podcast with Gunnar Branson is the official, multiple-award-winning podcast of AFIRE, the association for international real estate investors focused on commercial property in the United States.
Hosted by AFIRE CEO Gunnar Branson, the podcast features informative and in-depth conversations with experts across the full spectrum of real estate, investment, sustainability, economics, geopolitics, and urbanism with a focus on helping each other become Better Investors, Better Leaders, and Better Global Citizens. To learn more, visit afire.org/podcast
QUESTIONS?
Benjamin van Loon, Communications Director
bvanloon@afire.org | +1 202 312 1405
Karen is the head of acquisitions for Allianz Real Estate, and has worked to invest in more than $25 billion of unlisted institutional real estate over the past 20 years. The first half of her career was oriented toward closed-end value-add and opportunistic fund investments in office, retail and multi-family assets across continental Europe. Since 2011, Karen has primarily focused on core and core-plus commercial investments in US gateway markets.
