We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry:  Will there even be office buildings in the future?  How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now?  What impact will technology have on design and engineering?  But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”

As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew.  If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.

The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before).  Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!

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The Argentinean blog Ombu Architecture recently posted a wonderful animation that shows off, in alphabetical order, some of the world’s most influential architects and their greatest works. “The ABC of Architects” begins with Alvar Aalto and runs all the way to Zaha Hadid, bouncing through the list in a playfully minimal style.

The ABC of Architects from fedelpeye on Vimeo.

In the animation, each building disappears almost as quickly as it appears, but by reducing them to their most basic elements, the buildings become instantly familiar. When the video ends, don’t be surprised if you find yourself starting all over again.

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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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Since 2007, Metropolis, with editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy has traveled to more than 35 cities and 150 architecture firms, design organizations, and industry shows in the United States and Canada delivering the Metropolis Tour. With the help of various sponsoring companies through the years, this Metropolis-produced CEU-accredited film screening and discussion program continues to inspire, intrigue, and challenge today’s practicing professionals in architecture, interior design, product design, and engineering. Sponsors for 2013 include KI, Kimball Office and Universal Fibers.

In 2007, our editor took a close look at the winners and runners-up from our annual Next Generation Design Competition and decided that the projects, products, and ways of working submitted as competition entries were not only forward-thinking—they were inspiring, innovative, and brilliant. The magazine decided to produce a new film for the Metropolis Tour program based on these individuals and teams. In mid-2008, Brilliant Simplicity was born. The film is as inspiring now, as it was four years ago.

The film delivers an overview of what so many innovative designers are doing to have a positive impact on the world while maintaining a commitment to achieving excellence in design. It’s proof that good design and sustainability can effectively coexist on all scales. It emphasizes the necessity for research and an ever-widening collaboration that, in the most fortuitous circumstances, can lead to innovation. And today, that word, innovation, has become our culture’s mantra.

From the largest and smallest offices of Gensler, Perkins+Will, HOK, LPA, NBBJ, Leo A Daly, and SOM to the various groups at Studios Architecture, Callison, Mithun, Shepley Bulfinch, and Cook+Fox, we’ve gained insight further into our own industry, and the culture of the design firms, and we’ve learned from each audience in a different way.

In her May 2010 Notes column, Lifelong Learning editor Szenasy states that “the future is clear: designers need to learn cross-disciplinary teamwork; to create a more sophisticated understanding of sustainable design; to reach out to larger communities and groups that have a voice in reshaping the urban form; to harness a new generation’s enthusiasm for saving the environment as well as its understanding of technology and connectivity.”

The film had a slow start before the design world fell off the cliff as the 2008 recession hit. Then it picked up momentum as design firms began to redefine themselves for the “new normal” and it continues to ignite conversations about the importance of research, collaboration, and innovation. LPA Architects in Irvine, CA documented the Metropolis Tour program they hosted in June:

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What’s driving the $60 billion dollar interior design industry?

In September, I posed this question at ASID’s first annual State of the Industry Address, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This was an exciting day for the interior design community as we looked back on a year of gained momentum. We can now confidently look forward to a continued industry growth, new opportunities to elevate interior design, and new ways to demonstrate the profession’s role as well as its importance to the economy.

At the American Society of Interior Designers we have kept a watchful eye on how our industry has been performing in the post-recession economy.  After a gloomy 2010 and an erratic 2011 affected by concerns about the Eurozone economy, stalemates in Congress over our national budget, and a rash of natural disasters that deflated client confidence, our industry has sustained positive, although modest, growth over the past ten months. A growth that’s trending above the major building and architecture indexes.  Current forecasts indicate that growth will continue into the first half of next year.

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Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

It is no exaggeration to say that Steven Jobs may have been the most important person in the history of design, but of course he was not a designer. I’ve come to think of him, instead, as the world’s greatest art director, the ultimate end user, a one-man focus group for cool. His famously secretive design department (quick, name another Apple designer besides Jonathan Ive? You can’t), was dedicated in large part to one exceedingly challenging task: pleasing Steve. He dreamed, they executed, he critiqued, in an endless, iterative loop that never really ended. (iPhone 5 anyone?) What was no secret to the world was that everything he touched, from products, to movies, to ad campaigns, took on a sophistication, beauty, and smartness that went beyond anyone’s expectations. Steve was a master at the “whole package.”

Designers say it all the time: you can’t do a great project without a great client. In a sense Apple was lucky enough to have in Jobs the most brilliant, intuitive, perceptive design client imaginable.  He kept hitting the ball back to them, harder. If they pleased him—no easy task, surely—the marketplace and the press was usually a breeze. What he brought to the table—for the designers at Apple and the agencies they worked with, especially—was irreplaceable. The good news: there are likely some Jobs-inspired projects and campaigns still in the pipeline. The bad news: They won’t get perfected by the master.

Metropolis’ art directors, Dungjai Pungauthaikan and Ashley Stevens, take a look at Apple’s most memorable campaigns over the last two decades.

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Last month, attendees at the annual Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) conference, were shown the best films chosen from this year’s Interior Design Education Video Competition. Aiming to change the public perception of the profession, the competition asked students to demonstrate the quality of interior design education and industry standards. This year’s theme:  “How is the public’s health, safety and welfare protection enhanced by the skills of fully prepared health care interior design practitioners.”

The winning video, “Interior Design and Health Care,” was submitted by Louisiana State University students Colette DeJean, Leigh Hardy, Ryan Weilenman, Sarah Tull, and Alyse Lambert, with the guidance of faculty advisor, Danielle Johnson. It builds a strong business case for the process of design and its impact on health care. The description of the seven-stage design process is a logical progression, which would make sense to health care practitioners and administrators, as well as practicing designers. It is an excellent promotion for the value of design, and its impact on the customer, including patients and staff. As I watched the film, I kept wishing that design firms would make similar presentations to their potential clientele across all market segments. As the students have discovered, it’s a great, shorthand tool, to communicate visual messages. Read more…

Since we posted the December 2010 issue last month, our cover story on New York City’s landmarked interiors hit the charts (Most Shared Stories in web language) consistently. And no wonder. These memorable spaces add the kind of rich experience to being in New York that the iconic buildings crowding our skyline can only promise. These rooms deliver an aesthetic trip back in time, a trip that makes a visit here a truly memorable time. Though these theatres, lobbies, restaurants, and stores are public spaces where you can marvel at the detailing—its richness, its restraint, its exquisite sense of proportion, its materials—photographers have a hard time setting up their tripods in them. Access is grudgingly granted or often denied.  Obstacles can be daunting. This is the story of one such adventure.

Documenting this crop of landmarked interiors (including the Cunard Building, Film Center, Brooklyn Historical Society, Time & Life Building, Charles Scribner’s Sons Building) fell to photographer Sean Hemmerle. The tight deadline added to the degree of difficulty. As he tells it, it takes a village (in our case our editorial and art staff) to pull off such an assignment. So I asked Sean to find a comfy chair in his downtown studio, and talk into my Flip camera about photographing the Beacon Theatre, which ended up on our cover. He’s currently updating his website http://seanhemmerle.com/  where you’ll find full documentation of the shoot as well as his other shoots from the world over.  But for now, take a look at the image he took inside the Beacon, lit by only one light bulb, then compare this to what his camera captured when the lights were—seemingly miraculously—turned on.

 
The Beacon Theatre, lit by one lone bulb.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an Italian merchant in the 13th century who spent a lot of time with the Arabs in the North African trading post of Bejaia. From them, he learnt of a deceptively simple series of numbers – 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … – in which each number was the sum of the two numbers before it. He published this series in a book in 1202, and all hell broke loose.

As Spanish animator Cristóbal Vila illustrates so beautifully in the video below, the Fibonacci series turned out to not only have many hidden patterns and possibilities, but was also everywhere in nature. Vila pulls up the usual suspects – a nautilus shell and the seeds in a sunflower – but my geeky heart was most satisfied by the complexity of that dragonfly’s wing.

Before you replay that wonderful video, you might want to remember that the Fibonacci series was also long considered bread-and-butter mathematics for designers and architects. The ratio of the higher numbers in the series comes closer and closer to the Golden proportion – that divine formula that some say underlies the architecture of the Parthenon and the composition of the Mona Lisa. You may think that Le Corbusier was indulging in hyperbole when he said that the Golden proportion “resounds in man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned.” But consider this – all standard sized credit cards measure 54mm by 86mm, less than a millimeter off of a perfect Golden ratio.

In this month’s issue of Metropolis, Mason Currey wrote about the fantastic story behind Made in Japain, the exhibition of Spanish design at this year’s Tokyo Designer’s Week.

In a bid to make the Japanese see Spain in a new light, the work of big design names like Manolo Blahnik, Jaime Hayón, Lladró, David Delfín, Nani Marquina, Camper , and Pretty Ballerinas y Tous, will be presented with an intriguing conceit. The curators, CuldeSac, claim that in the hoary past, Spain and Japan were one country – Japain – that was torn asunder by shifting tectonic plates. 

In these videos, grandmother Hana explains to 7-year-old Leo why the two nations have so much in common – the secret language of fans, a tradition of floral textiles, and the love of the color red. Read more…