Lindsay Wilson has been with Dallas-based architecture and interiors firm Corgan since 2008; it was also where she started her career, working as a designer from 1998 to 2000. In between, she held positions in business development for Knoll and Benson Hlavaty Architects. Over the course of her career, she has helped design more than seven million square feet of interior space. Metropolis’s editor-in-chief Avinash Rajagopal sat down with Wilson to discuss her career, the evolution of the workplace, and memories from NeoCon.
Corgan’s executive managing principal, Lindsay Wilson Courtesy Corgan
Avinash Rajagopal: Looking back over your 20-year career, how do you think the American workplace has changed or evolved?
Lindsay Wilson: The biggest shift, to me, is from the office just being a necessary evil, the place where work gets done, to the office being the embodiment or the artifact of an organization’s brand and culture. It’s expected to tell a story instead of just being a volume where people come to execute a task.
Part of it is just the exposure that we all have to design now. We didn’t used to think about [the fact] that every item in our household was designed. Beginning with Target’s “Design for All” tagline in the late ’90s, design began to be seen as a right and not a privilege. You can point to Apple or Starbucks for the story they tell: How they look and feel is as much about the experience as going there and actually purchasing something. The workplace was an obvious place where people would start to expect a higher level of design and thoughtfulness around the environment.