We know, both intuitively and practically, that socially interactive spaces, furnished with warm materials and rich textures, are beneficial and useful to the people who occupy them. But how do you convince the data-driven person who pays the bills? Buildings cost money. Owners want their dollars to go far. That’s reasonable. It’s because of this that architects are asked to prove that their designs marry performance and efficiency with inspiration and user comfort.

Federal Center South

Our practice is focused on designing amenity-rich architecture, from spaces where interaction can take place in laboratories to art rooms and family lounges in hospitals. Atriums are utilized in all kinds of building typologies to bring daylight deep into a floor plate, create a natural gathering spot for users, and aid in wayfinding. Our recently completed U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle, illustrates this approach. The building uses an oxbow-shaped atrium to connect conference rooms, amenities, and offices. Here the atrium is particularly successful because it utilizes biophilic strategies that connect employees to living systems through the use of daylight, views, fresh air, vegetation, and natural finishes. All of these strategies, together, enhance the user experience. But such amenities add to the building’s square footage and often the construction cost – thereby reducing the efficiency of the cost per square foot. Measuring their appeal to the users’ humanity can be proven by the employees’ enhanced performance and satisfaction.  Still, making the case for this can be challenging from a purely quantitative standpoint.

We were recently challenged to design a new office building for a technology firm that wanted to measure the efficiencies and performance of the new project. I was part of the team asked that our decision-making process be based on empirical data rather than qualitative emotion.  The company had a strong desire to have a healthy, inspiring workplace for its employees, but required all qualitative design decisions to be based on evidence. They weren’t going to be sold on pretty renderings alone.

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Victoria Meyers is an architect with a prolific and varied career. She is a founding partner at hMa, where her current design interests include how architecture can achieve beauty while embodying the principle of “zeroness” as well as using sound and light to produce unique architectural solutions. But Meyers does not limit her endeavors solely to practicing architecture. She also writes—one book on light, another currently in development, on sound—and she teaches.

Given that the field of architecture has changed radically over the past five years through a convergence of economic factors and technological advancements, we asked Meyers to offer some of her observations on architectural education.

Won Dharma Center, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

Sherin Wing:  How did your own education influence the way you teach now?

Victoria Meyers: It’s hard to know what to tell people. My undergraduate degree was in civil engineering and art history, so I had a much broader knowledge of art history than my contemporaries at the GSD. It’s not for everyone to do what I did. Most people don’t want to be in school as long as I was, they don’t want to read as many books as I’ve read and they don’t want to spend as many hours studying as I’ve spent studying. But when I’m teaching and when I’m talking to contemporaries about a project, I will always go into the history of a typology more because that is very real for me.

SW:  How has your perspective on education changed over the years?

VM: For many years I was tough as a teacher, though now I’m not. I look at the kids and I see such a rough road ahead of them and I think back on my own educational experience. I think back at the different things that were evaluated and realize that things never turn out the way we were told or expect them to. When we were graduating, there was one or two students held up to us as superstars, but we never heard from them after graduation. I’ve also been behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and I know all the machinations of people who teach, psychological games, and how they’re presenting information.

Infinity Chapel, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

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As we wound down our a charrette, an exercise somewhere between a Top Chef “quick fire” and a game of “exquisite corpse,” we remembered seeing flickering pixels, oversized movable louvers, folding organ-like planes, and stretching ribbons. Our research yielded a number of innovative precedents —both theoretical and built— from architects and engineers experimenting with movable facades around the world. We had examined automated fins and shading umbrellas, tessellated screens and adaptive fritting from ABI, the homeostatic façades from Decker Yeadon, and the Aegis Hyposurface from Goulthorpe, among others.

But it was not enough that these façade components moved, either by means of carefully controlled computerized programming or by more rudimentary manual, hydraulic, or mechanical means. The movement that we were trying to describe was different. It had to be tied to performance. It had to respond to the sun. As Mike Hickok often said, it had to behave “more like a plant, less like a machine.” With our newly acquired understanding, how could we propose a future in which shading devices would deploy and contract biomimetically, like the artificial muscles we studied, in response to the sun?

Then we had a rude awakening. How could we even begin to tinker with these shapes with our limited experience, with the kind of software that had the capabilities to produce what we needed?  Clearly we had found ourselves at the convergence of technology, media, and representation. We needed to make leaps in all three. As Lisa Iwamoto describes on her book Digital Fabrications[i], our design had to inform and be informed by its modes of representation and production. We had to go beyond, way beyond, the limitations of what we traditionally produced in-house and do it at the fast pace of a design competition. At once we were dealing with modeling software shortcomings, researching smart materials, studying artificial muscles, defining performance, contracting out the scripting of algorithms, buying software, and storyboarding the presentation to determine deliverables and staff allocation.

Rhino image of ribbon

Mike Fischer[ii], a fifth young designer was brought on board, contracted to work side by side with our team to help with computational modeling and scripting. We shifted to Rhino, a NURBS-based modeling software that would allow us to conceptualize, tinker, and control our shading strands. While developing the component, we needed to test it across the façade. Mapping it and remapping it to control its size, density, and openness required formulas—a lot of formulas—which we crunched in Grasshopper.

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“Good ideas can come from anywhere,” Mike Hickok, one of our principals at Hickok Cole is fond of saying.  His vision and the idea of new collaborations were tested when we were tasked to design the office building of the future.

It took weeks of long meetings and passionate discussions before we finalized our plan concepts. Through it all, we realized that we wanted to work differently than we were used to working, to design the building envelope. We had just seen the Metropolis film, Brilliant Simplicity, which inspired us to look for opportunities of cross pollination or cross disciplinary thinking that we could build upon, tinker with, and synthesize into a simple concept.

A substantial portion of our legwork was done in the form of traditional research. From the books and writings of Branko Kolarevic and Ali Rahim (UPENN); Lisa Iwamoto, Bill Mitchell (MIT); Chris Luebkeman (Arup): and Jim Glymph (Gehry), we learned about digital fabrication techniques like sectioning, tessellating, folding, contouring, and forming.  We learned about rapid prototyping and rapid tooling, parametric design and “file to factory,” innovative materials, and new modes of fabrication. And we were inspired by Kolarevic’s phrase, “form follows performance,” and by Iwamoto’s ideas about the correlation between architecture and its modes of representation and construction.

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What can you do if you’re part of the 92 percent of Americans without Herculean willpower? How can you successfully make a healthy lifestyle change in 2013?

The answer might surprise you. Start with a micro-adjustment in your existing routine – it’s guaranteed to improve your health and it costs nothing. You could be doing it right now.

It’s called standing. And it’s something we should all do more of this year.

Sitting, as every ergonomist knows, is hazardous to our health. Yet most of us sit all day — at work, in a car or on the couch watching a movie or a ballgame.

Sitting slows our metabolism. It’s been linked to heart attacks and diabetes, kidney disease and cancer.  Just two hours of sitting per day can drop good cholesterol by 20 percent and reduce blood flow.

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Most design competitions are won by entries with a narrow focus, as architects know only too well. There is simply no time to work through all the issues and tell a comprehensive story. The goal is to unearth a single idea and then work to present it in the most compelling fashion. Those who try to design too much fail. Those who concentrate on a succinct scheme, succeed.

When we began working on the Office Building of the Future Competition we realized that this was one of those game changing assignments, and it needed a completely new approach. Only by integrating a variety of issues such as engineering systems, site constraints, market forces, and architectural design could we hope to understand the challenge facing us.  How then, could we achieve this integrated concept with limited time and resources?

We called our friends and some of our most trusted consultants: Mark Tamaro at Thornton Tomassetti for structural engineering; Christian Agulles at WSP Flack+ Kurtz for MEP Engineering; and Paul Totten at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger for building enclosure consulting. We fully expected to have to “sell” them on this project.  After all, we wanted them to donate their most valuable commodity, their time. Their response was quick and definitive. Not only would they work with us, but they were excited by the prospect.

MEP Diagrams

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This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.

In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.

The short answer: “to scratch an itch.”  We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace.  Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.

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350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

It’s the New Year, but here in San Francisco (to quote that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra) it’s déjà vu all over again. After a year of growing optimism about the economy, I feel a dot-com fever coming on. Apartments and even condos are rising all around South of Market (SoMa), the hub of the city’s tech industry—and we’re following new commercial leases like celebrity marriages. Did you hear? Salesforce just signed an agreement for all 27 floors of 350 Mission, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed tower now in construction. This topped off a year of big moves in SoMa by Twitter, Square, Zynga, Yammer, Airbnb and other tech darlings. According to reports, the demand is driving some owners of Class A office buildings to strip vacant floors back to the structure in hopes of boosting their “creative space” appeal.

350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Like their dot-com predecessors, this new cast of entrepreneurs prizes SoMa’s stock of historic mid-rise, light-industrial buildings. Those around Third and Brannan Streets are considered some of the hottest properties in the city (or so I’m told by friends fretting over looming lease renewals). In the gnarlier corner of SoMa where I share an office space, itself a dot-com relic, anticipation is running high. Even a nearby church, vacant since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, is up for grabs.

Landmark 120, church, photo by Yosh Asato

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We work hard to advance the interior design profession, as well as the success of our members, at the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). To this end, we provide professional development and educational resources, as well as leadership opportunities. For many of our members, building networks is key. And as the design industry evolves, so does our commitment to meet the changing needs and values of our professional members.

During my first year at ASID, while conversing with our members and industry leaders, I heard a recurring theme—the beneficial role of interior design in our living and working environments. These discussions ranged from the work being done to design livable homes for veterans, to creating warm environments in children’s hospitals, and using design to aid an aging population and those with learning disabilities. As I hear more and more about the many inspiring projects our members are working on, it’s becoming clear that we, at ASID, need to create ways to recognize, foster, and communicate these myriad ways that design is improving lives and communities.

We’re starting to do this by adopting the goal of “advancing and communicating the impact of interior design in enhancing the human experience; ” as one of the pillars of our strategic plan — the roadmap that steers our mission. From this, several exciting programs have developed, such as our partnership with The 1% program, an effort that connects design firms with nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance and asks designers to commit one percent of their time to pro bono service.

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The concepts “natural selection” and “survival,” in the evolutionary sense, ultimately mean competitive reproductive success – passing the genes on to other generations – and they are implicit in – in a sense they drive – everything we design, build, and inhabit.

The ancient city of Petra at a desert crossroads, now in Jordan

In practice, every human choice is about “rewarding” ourselves with “pleasure.”  Scientist Steven Pinker puts it neatly “…(G)enes selfishly spread themselves.  They do it by the way they build our brains.  By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.”  In other words, when our thoughts and actions trigger pleasure circuits – a reward system of connections and chemistry in the brain and body – we sense we are enhancing our odds for surviving and prospering – winning Pinker’s “lottery” – in whatever environment we encounter.  The “happiness” we’re in “pursuit of” is not an abstraction, but repetitions of these kinds of physical pleasures.

Naturally, “survival” – the word I’ll use to refer to “natural selection” or “reproduction of the fittest” – means staying alive and healthy, pairing with the right mate, raising a family and building a secure, nurturing habitat.  It’s built into innate predilections. Then, in practice, “survival” involves competing, winning and sustaining the independence to control “my” surroundings for “my” interests.  That, in turn, is likely to work best by acquiring the strength of more knowledge, better tools and more skills, multiplying them through trusting alliances, and exploring, migrating or trading to gain access to still more resources. It involves, too, constantly moving ahead, avoiding losses and anchoring security by storing-up and protecting the “wealth” that has been won, earning respites from challenges – in other words “prospering.”  The most valuable “wealth” was and is, of course, the accumulated knowledge needed to master the environments we encounter and to manage them in ways that maintain a constant competitive edge.

Further, the natural in-born human limitations that can stand in the way of competitive success keep us searching for ways to transcend them.  And with our evolved creative imaginations we continually develop technologies – tools or weapons – that diversify and multiply our biologically constrained skill, time, and energy.  Equally important, innate predilections – reinforced by body chemistry – to advance by cooperating comes into play.

Survival-of-the-fittest includes a propensity for the forms of moral behavior that make trust and collaboration possible. We’re prepared to volunteer to compromise a hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – by merging our own personal projects into the survival and prosperity of larger and more powerful alliances – mating, friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  We exchange a measure of freedom for strength and diversity. And then those connections, in turn, become part of our identity. They draw their power from another innate level of pleasure we tend to call spiritual experience – the sense of entering into and sharing – belonging to – something larger than one’s “self” – a larger purpose and sense of destiny.  The ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally; joining in time cycles that exceed our lifetime and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.  Some, of course, try to escape the rigors of earthly competition altogether by living in an imagined or virtual world.

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