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.
When a CEO plans out a re-design of his or her office, questions of culture surely come to mind. How should the desks and meeting rooms be laid out so as to best reflect the company’s culture? How do you want people to feel when they come to work? If you have a good grip on your ideal company culture, you can help bring that to life in your design.
Most of us inherently know that having “choice” at work is a good thing and that it helps us to be more productive, more creative, more engaged and healthier. When we don’t have control over aspects of our work, we become stressed, we feel trapped, and our performance suffers. But, you may ask, is there any proof that this is true? I mean, maybe we have a general sense that choice is good, but are there studies that prove this out? Turns out, there are.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Get an inside look at Jama’s new headquarters and see how JLL was able to help Jama translate their ideas into a beautiful new space.
Coming soon to an office near you These are the smart, striking design elements you can expect to see more of in cutting-edge companies' workspaces.
Art and technology company VSCO has recently moved into a new office space located in Oakland, California which were designed by DeBartolo Architects.
What has become increasingly apparent over recent years is that the office isn’t just a place to work, but also a driver of competitive advantage. We’ve always known this to a greater or lesser extent, but the dynamic and ever shifting nature of the modern world is presenting organisations with new and evolving challenges that they must address with all of the tools at their disposal. At the heart of this complexity is the physical workspace. Its design touches on every aspect of the changing workplace and the objectives organisations set for themselves and their employees. Although it has lots its primacy as the main place of work, you could also argue that the focus on the office’s key strengths makes it more important than ever within the context of overall working cultures. So, with that in mind, here are ten of the most important current trends in workplace design and management we foresee for 2016.
Nestled in the heart of the financial district, One Sansome Street is one of the tallest buildings in San Francisco. In 2014, it became the first skyscraper in the world to certify under LEED v4 for Existing Buildings and attain Platinum status. I recently spoke to Michael Barker, Managing Director of Barker Pacific Group (project owner) and Barry Giles, Founder and CEO of BuildingWise LLC (consultant) about One Sansome Street.
The LEED v4 stories series features the people the behind diverse LEED v4 projects. Here, you’ll find interviews with project team members and project owners that tell of their experiences—both the wins and the challenges.
Indoor plants aren't just about gussying up a sterile cubicle. Numerous studies have shown that greenery is a potent way to boost workers' mood and productivity. In Talinn, Estonia, the architects at KAMP took this notion to heart in their transformation of a factory into the offices of Lenne, a children's clothing brand.
Most of our recent workplace designs have dramatically increased the amount of meeting space available to the client. This happens not only because our clients usually ask for such increases, but our utilization studies tend to substantiate the need for more meeting areas. In many ways, building a case for more meeting spaces in the modern (frequently more open) workplace is easy. Yet there is a larger underlying question that goes beyond simple space issues: what type of a collaborative culture is an organization trying to foster? More cool and tech enabled meeting rooms are usually a good thing, but more meetings are usually not. In the research we do—the surveys, focus groups, interviews and other studies—a typical refrain is that there are too many meetings and many meetings are “a waste of time.”
The word wellness can be loosely translated into Chinese as 养生 (yǎng shēng), which literally means “nurturing life.” It implies a very gentle, well-rounded approach to a wholesome lifestyle. It calls to mind a sexagenarian doing tai chi at dawn or sipping herbal tea in the afternoon.
“It’s not a perfect translation,” said Cathy Gu, a Gensler design strategist in Shanghai. Because while the pursuit of longevity has a long standing tradition in China, workplace wellness is just starting to gain traction. “This is why we’re doing the research, because there isn’t a perfect translation,” said Keiko Toishi, a practice area leader for health and wellness. The two are part of a design strategy team in Shanghai dedicated to translating the wealth of knowledge in Gensler’s Workplace Performance Index for the Chinese market.
At this time of the year, the media tends to constipate itself with retrospectives and forecasts. Most of them these days tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes these things. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are the cookie cutter products of the permanently unimaginative. No footballpundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than talking and no marketing person has ever lost theirjob for publishing a list of Ten Trends. One thing all of these lists seem to share is an assumption that many of the ideas they reflect are new. That’s understandable. Nobody wants to think that what they consider to be on trend has all been seen before. The young people currently roaming around with wedge haircuts and ripped jeans won’t thank you for telling them they are 80s throwbacks.
There is still a forest of cranes in Hudson Yards, a 26-acre development on Manhattan's west side. Skyscrapers have mushroomed, seemingly overnight. A new subway extension has made it more accessible to the thousands of people who are expected to populate the area. Even the existing structures are undergoing change. The Brutalist building at 450 W 33rd is shedding its austere concrete facade in favor of slick glass. There, the creative agency R/GA is gut-renovating 200,000 square feet of space to house its New York headquarters—what founder Bob Greenberg views as a new model for connected offices.
The office won’t ever replace the home, but new designs in commercial furniture are making the workplace less confining, even enjoyable. The exploding variety of options range from living room-like settings—sofas, lounge chairs and coffee tables—to diner banquettes that offer solitude and privacy.
Read the article on wsj.com > [paywall]
Pivot Design is a creative agency that generates award-winning branding, marketing and advertising for leading organizations around the globe. Eastlake Studio designed a workplace that captures the vision of Pivot Design’s forward-looking leadership.
As the saying goes, "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again." This adage certainly holds true at North Park University in Chicago, where a recent renovation didn't meet the changing need of the student body, thus requiring a redesign of the space once more. AGATI took a field trip to North Park University recently to interview some of the staff and students who witnessed the change from "Ottoman Empire" to "the Age of Enlightenment."
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.”
Startups have open offices – mostly. Everyone from the twenty year old founder to the twenty one year old employees are all sitting around in open cubicles. It is a visible symbol of a non-hierarchical work culture. In a country where hierarchy is everywhere, this comes across like a breath of fresh air and becomes a great draw while hiring.
A new research paper claims to reveal changes in the way that UK companies now perceive and evaluate their commercial property portfolios – both as a physical workplace and as a strategic asset that can help them to meet corporate goals.
Architecture firm NBBJ moved in the 250 High project in downtown Columbus this summer, and the design goal for its office was to create “an ecosystem of interrelated settings that provide users with a range of spaces that support various work modes.”
