Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
Kay Sargent, director of workplace strategies at Lend Lease, explores why the vertical campus — as opposed to the suburban corporate campus of yesteryear — is the natural outcome of both urban regeneration and new city development.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Current development practices have taken a marked turn away from putting all the proverbial “eggs in one basket” and are now focused on diversification and “placemaking.” Though the word is a bit overused in today’s master planning lexicon, placemaking describes the positive results that can arise from an authentic Live, Work, Play oriented project.
The Idea Fellowship continues as the Holistic Design Workflow team makes advances in the research and application of computational strategies. As buildings and the industry become increasingly technological, architects are challenged to continuously develop new ways of mastering the intricacies across ever-changing elements and systems. The architecture of today has not only been infused with technological growth, but it has also become dependent on it. Technology has enabled numerous design processes and yet not one single process can fully solve the thousands of contingencies that present themselves as a project evolves. Today, the design of a building is a challenge of bringing together various technological systems, outside of our domain, that rely on computational processes.
Over the past 20 years, green construction has gone from a niche enterprise to a major driver of new business. But in 2016, erecting sustainable, profitable green buildings will no longer be enough to stand out. Buildings will also be expected to directly contribute to the health and wellbeing of the people who live, work and learn inside them. For buildings, healthy will become the new green.
No doubt, for some architects and designers, success is fleeting. However, there is plenty of convincing evidence that architects are not only delivering impactful value but also they are being recognized and monetized for their leadership in the marketplace.
When Boeing, the world's largest plane manufacturer, started designing a new version of its top-selling aircraft, the company wanted to put the plane's designers as close as possible to the manufacturing process. At the airplane maker's sprawling Renton, Washington, campus, office workers often face as much as a 20-minute walk from their desk to the factory floor, making meetings between the people designing the aircraft and those building the aircraft dreadfully inefficient and time-consuming. Facing pressure to churn out more planes to meet demand, the company decided to put its design engineers closer to the action—in a new office building built directly inside the factory.
Stacked bars fan around a central axis in a scheme that merges an experimental outlook with distinct academic needs.
Successful workplaces enable a clear progression of ideas and people, which can be challenging for workplaces that occupy multiple levels. Perkins+Will's Sarah Stanford found some strategies that have proven successful.
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that construction spending dropped 0.4 percent in November. But it did so with one of the odder footnotes that it has ever printed: "In the November 2015 press release, monthly and annual estimates for private residential, total private, total residential and total construction spending for January 2005 through October 2015 have been revised to correct a processing error in the tabulation of data on private residential improvement spending."
Hao Ko is Design Director and Principal at the widely recognized leading collaborative design firm, Gensler. Hao is grounded by the belief that the fundamental role of architecture is to elevate the human spirit and he strives to design beautiful places — ones that are inspirational for life and work and that impact people for the better. Recently, Modelo had the opportunity to learn more about Hao’s unique approach and design philosophy.
A special report has noted that Asia Pacific institutional investors, including those from Hong Kong and Mainland China, are expected to pump an additional US$240 billion into the world property markets by 2020.
According to a release from CBRE, the total allocation of APAC investors into global real estate is expected to reach US$500 billion—nearly double the US$260 billion invested as of end-2014.
When Steve Jobs presented his proposal for a new Apple campus to the Cupertino City Council in 2011, he had one aim: to create the best office building in the world. A little over four years later, Apple is well on its way to completing its new campus in Cupertino, California, and from the looks of it, Jobs' wishes will come true.
It’s 4:30 in the morning, and you are just heading to bed after polishing your latest project. The client meeting starts in three hours and you have yet to go home, change, and come back to whip up a quick presentation. What you don’t realize in the wee hours of the day is that excellent design will get you nowhere without a compelling presentation. How do we convey our façade intention to a client who has never heard of a detailed wall section? How do we convince government officials to allow the development of air rights above a listed building? How do we demonstrate to our future employer that we are the candidate of their dreams?
Read the article on architect.com >
We talk about how cities and buildings look. We call places landmarks or eyesores. But we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy.
Read the essay on nytimes.com > [paywall]
This month, the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted its 10th annual UrbanCities debates, a forum where world leaders in the field of urbanism come together to discuss their views on the subject and its relative disciplines (mainly architecture). This year AN caught up with Design Museum curator Deyan Sujic, Norman Foster, and Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, among others for the debate.
As has been the case a few times this year, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) dipped in November. As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the ABI reflects the approximate nine to twelve month lead time between architecture billings and construction spending.
Clive Wilkinson, the designer of the original Googleplex, knows a thingor two about designing offices. And he thinks they're pretty wasteful. His satirical alternative? An endless, single-level workspace in the clouds that hovers above cities, sucking us up from our living rooms via pneumatic tubes and depositing us in an airy, open office right above us. The Endless Workplace proposal might be tongue-in-cheek, but it makes some good points about what's wrong with offices today, and the future of working.
The sheer size of Gensler—5,000-plus staffers spread across 46 offices in 16 countries—is one of the things that makes the firm so unique. But what makes a firm of such vast size work is its entrepreneurial structure. “We are a self-governing, self-sustaining firm with a rotating leadership,” explains co-CEO and co-regional managing principal Andy Cohen. “It’s an incredible collaborative team—it’s not just one person at the helm.” North American co-regional managing principal Robin Klehr Avia elaborates on the beauty of the collective approach: “We believe in a constellation of stars. Any one of our 24 design partners could have their own firm and be honored at the Interior Design Hall of Fame, but then they would not have the type of collaboration they have here at Gensler. People put their egos aside and do great work as a result of that.”
Montreal-based architectural studio Lemay, founded in 1957, has acquired locally based interior design firm Andres Escobar & Associates (AE&E).
Designed by Zaha Hadid, Volu is a contemporary dining pavilion concept that fuses computational design, lightweight engineering and precision fabrication. The design embeds the tectonics of manufacture within the form itself.
