Proprietary projects are part and parcel to design work—but so is collaboration. For in-house designers, those two concepts aren't necessarily at odds. But for design studios that take on outside clients, it can be a trickier line to toe.
This might be especially true for the global design firm Frog, which is so dedicated to the idea of close collaboration with clients that it has developed a habit of bringing them in-house for the duration of the project. So far, their San Francisco offices have been pioneering this way of working—most notably for an ongoing collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer—but it's spreading to their other offices as well. Case in point: the firm's new New York office, where the physical space was actually designed to complement this setup.
Frog found the 27,000-square-foot industrial space in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn over a year ago. Together with the New York architects SHoP, they set out to build an office that answered the question: How do you design for open collaboration as well as NDA-enforced privacy?
