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.
The architect Frank Gehry, famous for his curvy buildings and cantankerous personality, has a new gig—he's teaching an online class about architecture and design. For $90, Gehry aficionados can learn directly from the master through video lessons and a downloadable workbook with assignments. If you're lucky, Gehry himself will critique some of your work.
DLR Group Tuesday announced the acquisition of Minneapolis-based interior design firm Studio Hive. Founded in 2003 by Janice Carleen Linster, FASID; Shari Bjork, LEED AP; and Shawn Gaither, AIA, Studio Hive is consistently ranked as one of the leading interior design firms in the Twin Cities. Studio Hive is a recognized leader in the design of workplace, sports, and higher education environments, for clients including Gray Plant Mooty, Fox Rothschild, the University of Minnesota, UCare, as well as interior design at many of the collegiate and professional sports stadiums in the Twin Cities.
Meet the people shaping the future of design. Students from design programs stretching coast-to-coast recently traveled to Michigan in the heart of winter to unveil their final design submissions for Steelcase’s annual NEXT Student Design Competition. The finalists emerged from more than 65 programs and 800 students competing this year.
The students rose to the challenge of creating the next generation design studio situated in Los Angeles’ entertainment district. All five finalists presented in front of a panel of top industry leaders. Judges awarded Amy Groome, a Virginia Tech talent, top prize for her design inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. All five women who made the journey to Steelcase said they came away winners — validated for taking risks, energized by their new peers and inspired by their differences.
If you want to understand Silicon Valley's obsessions over the years, look no further than Fuseproject. Since 1999, the San Francisco design firm has helped companies turn new technologies into slick, consumer-friendly products, from fitness trackers and laptops to juicers and smart locks. We visited the studio recently to see how Fuseproject is approaching the Valley's latest craze: Robotics and AI.
Lots of ink—digital and real alike—is spilled on the work of the world’s busiest architecture firms, from Zaha Hadid Architects, in London, to Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in Paris, and a whole host of places in between. But rarely do we get an inside look at the firms’ offices themselves.
Photographer Marc Goodwin, founder of photo company Archmospheres, is helping pull back that curtain, and has traveled to the offices of David Chipperfield, MAD Architects, and more to give us an inside look at where the firms work.
As the newest restaurant he’s designed, for Hong Kong’s DFS, opens in Venice, the Frenchman talks mega yachts, Steve Jobs, why he stays away from fashion, and designing for Xiaomi despite not owning a mobile phone or computer.
Donald Trump, who will become the 45th president of the United States on January 20, seems like a distinctly American phenomenon. Yet he's not.
From the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union earlier this year, to elections in France and Austria this year where votes to keep far-right candidates from becoming heads of state ride the razor's edge, the world is dealing with a wave of isolationist kickback after almost two decades of globalist expansion.
It's a wave the design community, which is traditionally globalist, is going to have to weather. In America, this means that design firms are facing the prospect that their workforces, a huge percentage of which are made up of foreign-born talent, might face new scrutiny under the Trump administration. It also means that firms' values will be tested like never before.
Many companies can be forgiven for a lackluster office. Not Snøhetta, Perkins + Will, and NBBJ. These three architecture firms are specifically known for their office design work, among other things. From their use of authentic materials to their innovative layouts to their flexible, open office spaces, these firms' offices reflect the latest and greatest practices in workplace design.
On the morning of November 9, just a few hours after news broke that America had elected Donald Trump as its 45th president, Diego Zambrano was walking to the Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn, where he would finally be made a citizen of the United States. When Zambrano made it to the courtroom with his wife, who was also being naturalized, the mood was somber. Zambrano hadn’t expected that. Online, he’d read stories about how people would bring their whole families, laughing and crying, taking pictures. Instead, Zambrano says, "It felt like a funeral. Everyone describes it as a very special thing. It didn’t feel like that. Everyone was tense. There was a feeling like we had barely made it."
Zambrano, who’s been living and working in America for a decade, lives close to the Brooklyn Supreme Court, but even closer to Work & Co, the digital design firm where he’s a partner. Since its founding in 2013, the firm has been the very picture of business success in the 21st century: It has won a slew of awards and all-star clients such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. It has swelled to nearly 200 employees across three offices around the world. But Brooklyn remains its largest and most diverse office—43% of the staff are foreign-born, and a huge percentage of those are in the U.S. on work visas. To Zambrano and his partners, Trump’s ascendency didn’t simply feel like an abstract threat to American values; it felt like an affront to the ideals that had built the company. Would the business be safe? If so, what role would the company bear in fighting for its ideals? These are questions that have loomed large at creative agencies across the United States over the past two weeks, and there are no easy answers.
Over the weekend, the architecture community erupted in debate over a statement from the American Institute for Architects (AIA) that declared support for President-elect Donald Trump and his infrastructure policies. Architects remain split over how the profession should confront the incoming administration, and many are expressing dismay over the AIA's conciliatory tone on behalf of its members.
Founded in 2003 by Israeli-born designer Dror Benshetrit, Dror is a relatively small studio. With only a dozen employees alongside its founder, it operates out of an eighth-floor WeWork space.
Despite its streamlined size, Dror's portfolio is incredibly diverse. Over the last 13 years, Benshetrit has expanded his practice from furniture to retail to architecture, designing everything from vases and chairs to island retreats and cruise-ship terminals. Perhaps best known for his ruffled Peacock Chair, which Rihanna used as a throne in her video for S&M, Dror's work has been acquired by museums around the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and clients range from Louis Vuitton to Target.
The workplace is undergoing rapid changes and A&D firms are right at the center of it. As drivers of innovation, A&D firms are charged with satisfying their clients’ desires to incorporate all of the latest trends, now. In order to deliver meaningful solutions, new resources, and more impactful content, we teamed up with AgilQuest to better understand the state of the A&D industry today.
Who we surveyed
The majority of our 312 survey takers work in large firms. Twenty-six percent hail from firms of 250 or more, and over 63 percent of respondents work in firms of 30 or more. Responses from A&D professionals in firms of less than 30 clocked in at 23 percent.
To better understand the scope of their current work, we asked the respondents about their client base. Results showed that they primarily work with clients who have multiple locations, as opposed to 24 percent of survey takers who work mostly with clients in single locations.
An adherence to strongly held beliefs can make people think and behave in peculiar ways and get them tangled up in all sorts of peripheral issues that suddenly take on a great deal of significance. Early religious artists, for example, spent centuries wrestling with the intractable problem of whether to depict Adam and Eve with belly buttons or not. It’s a question that troubles theologians to this day but at least they can talk about it in metaphysical terms whereas artists have to choose whether to suggest that Adam and Eve were born rather than created, hiding the belly button completely or just going along with whatever and letting other people do the arguing. Many classical artists chose the latter although some chose to use a fig leaf to obscure both the genitalia and implied origins of their subjects.
The AIA's monthly Architecture Billings Index declines for the second straight month, signaling economic uncertainty as election looms.
I’ve been working out of a coworking space in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood for the past year. And it has been a very interesting and positive experience.
For starters, the building is gorgeous and the location is wonderful. We can work in the terrace overlooking the canal. The Wi-Fi is reliable. The people are really nice and there are some killer cookies and snacks on Fridays. We have met interesting people around the cafeteria table. We can ask the staff to do some clerical work for us and we only pay a monthly membership.
Last Wednesday night, Italian furniture brand Arper collaborated with Architizer to present a panel of experts who discussed the varying ways design offers value in spaces for living and consumption - from the workplace to retail or travel.
Four presenters — Ray Ehscheid, Senior Vice President of store design and merchandising at Bank of America; Julio Braga, Design Director and Principal of IA Interior Architects; Jason Long, Partner at OMA; and Randall Stone, Senior Partner and Director of experience innovation at Lippincott — gathered to share some of their organizations’ projects that best exemplified the challenge of designing high-value experiences for forward-looking brands.
As a service provider, one of our top priorities is responding to RFPs, or requests for proposals. When we work on developing any response, we make a concerted effort to create a proposal that is easy to understand, effectively addresses the questions posed in the RFP, and conveys the value IA can bring to the project. Sometimes this is a very straightforward process, and sometimes we opt for a more creative approach.
On September 21, 2016, IIDA’s Northern California Chapter honored IA Founder and CEO David Mourning, AIA, FIIDA with its Leadership of Excellence Award. The award recognizes an IIDA member for exemplary leadership within the profession of Interior Design and was presented at the chapter’s annual Leaders Breakfast at the San Francisco Four Season’s Hotel. Previous winners include Stanford Hughes, Laura Guido-Clark, and M. Arthur Gensler.
DLR Group has acquired Cleveland-based Westlake Reed Leskosky. The combined integrated design firm’s 1,000-plus employees will operate from 26 locations, including consolidated offices in several cities where each already has a presence.
An interior designer is designing a busy healthcare clinic. The clinic’s lobby needs to accommodate many anxious clients waiting for their appointments. The designer understands that the patients will likely be stressed and anxious. However, he is unaware of research on how to diminish stressors in the environment. Even if he was aware of the research, he’s too busy to read a lengthy article, so he discusses some options with a colleague, follows his intuition, and hopes for the best outcome.
