Archinect - News

Gensler and CIVILIAN team reimagines abandoned Detroit book depository as startup hub for mobility innovation

2023-04-28T11:55:00-04:00

A team including Gensler and CIVILIAN has completed the adaptive reuse of an old book depository in Detroit. The new center will serve as the headquarters for Newlab, a technology collective hosting startups in the field of decarbonization, energy, mobility, and materials.

Image credit: Jason Keen

Newlab’s headquarters sits within the wider Michigan Central campus; a 30-acre center advancing mobility-focused technologies and the vision of Ford executive chairman Bill Ford. On the campus, Newlab will create what the organization calls a “center of gravity for startups, entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists to build breakthrough companies in Detroit.”

Image credit: Jason Keen

Image credit: Brian Ferry

The 1936 Albert Kahn-designed building housing Newlab was originally built as a post office and mail-sorting facility, before being used as the Detroit Public School’s Book Depository. The art deco building will now serve as a 270,000-square-foot center with purpos...

Clive Wilkinson says he regrets the role he played in the Googleplex's design

2022-01-24T17:35:00-05:00

For more than three decades, Clive Wilkinson has been among the most sought-after office designers in the world. He has planned spaces for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, Intuit and other companies seeking unorthodox approaches to work life. But he now has regrets about what is perhaps his most famous work: Googleplex, the tech giant's posh headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Wilkinson’s statements offer a rebuke to the Silicon Valley culture he played a role in pioneering and now deems to be "fundamentally unhealthy." The $1 billion office complex in Mountain View, California designed by STUDIOS Architecture with interiors by Wilkinson is serviced by a secretive $250 million transportation network and is famous for its plush employee perks that Wilkinson now says he regrets.

"This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker's life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive," he told NPR’s Bobby Allyn. "But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts. Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do. It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."

Relisten to Archinect's 2016 podcast interview with Clive Wilkinson

Wilkinson also stated that he do...

Archinect's Virtual Event Guide for the week of June 22-25th

2020-06-22T14:53:00-04:00

Today's featured virtual event happenings, from Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, address issues from resiliency, mass timber, community engagement, residential design, art, public art, urban design, Palm Springs modernism and bamboo.

Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation? Tour? Interview? Happy Hour? Submit it for consideration by clicking here.

Are you an expert in an arena that's especially important right now? Let us know if you would like to work with Archinect to host an online event.

The Future City: Urban Resilience and the Power of Data
Monday, June 22, 2020 7:30 PM BST
Our societies are surrounded by an abundance of data in both the online and physical world. Has data the power to help us understand better our communities and complex reality? Can data help us create new tools to manage urban risk and design resilient cities?
Click here to attend and/or register

Time to reconnect with nature: Timber offices of the future
Tuesday, June 23, 2020 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM BST...

From prayer rooms to “meeting pods”, quiet spaces are being revived in open-plan offices

2020-02-19T16:00:00-05:00

More than a decade since the swing toward open-plan offices — and the resulting backlash from workers concerned about noise and a lack of privacy — a host of ancillary spaces are cropping up in workplaces, offering employees an escape from their (sometimes overly loud) co-workers. These private spaces include prayer rooms, wellness rooms and libraries [...] All of which prompts the question: After pulling down the walls that defined yesterday’s workplaces, are we once again putting them up?

Are phone-booth-sized offices the future of workstations?

2019-08-30T08:00:00-04:00

The idea of a workspace has transformed over the past decade, in large part, due to the emergence of co-working spaces like WeWork and Industrious. The shift has fueled the proliferation of the "open office," and the many documented problems associated with the setup. Is the pendulum ready to swing back to a focus on single-person workspaces?

Mitsubishi Estate Co., a Japanese real estate investment company, thinks so and has offered a potential solution to the problem of the open-office: a phone-booth-sized mini-workspace for one. Meet Telecube, the 13-square-foot, soundproof workspace that comes complete with a desk, seat, and power outlets.

In collaboration with office furniture maker Okamura Corp. and video-conferencing software vendor V-Cube Inc, Mistsubishi Estate Co. has unveiled plans to install 1,000 Telecube units by 2023. According to recent coverage from Bloomberg: "The companies are betting there will be enough demand for the mini workstations. Coffee shops in Tokyo ar...

According to WeWork "Buildings equal Data"

2019-03-02T13:08:00-05:00

There are T-shirts floating around WeWork’s New York City headquarters that say “Buildings equal data.” The nano manifesto hints at a conviction that architecture should be shaped by a methodical study of how people utilize spaces instead of unique aesthetic signatures. More than that, correlating digital information with physical structures is good business—it has quickly become a core strategy for the eight-year-old, $47 billion company racing to expand its footprint globally.

Architects today are very familiar with data and its influence over design, construction, and feasibility. However, what else can data teach us? When you're a massive billion dollar company like WeWork, opportunities for turning data into teachable tools coincides well with the company's progressive ethos.

No 1 Poultry in London - WeWork interior; Image © WeWork

Say what you will about the company, regardless of your views their intentions of transforming the tools and perspectives of real estate, architecture, and design is reflective of the decisions they've made thus far. For WeWork, data isn't just a tool but an asset to the company's overall growth and success. "It’s hard to overstate how essential data is to WeWork’s operations. Specifically, architectural data. Nearly four years ago, the company underscored this dependency when it acquired Case, a BIM consultancy whose expertise WeWork relied on even in its early years (it was founded in 2010). With David Fano, Case’s co-foun...

Could "landscrapers" like Google's new London HQ represent a shift in workplace design?

2017-12-05T14:00:00-05:00

Last month, London mayor Sadiq Khan, joined by a trio of Google executives, broke ground on the site of Google’s new campus in the city’s King’s Cross district. [...] The property has been dubbed a “landscraper,” a building as long and as horizontal as skyscrapers are tall and vertical, and it could represent a shift in the very shape of the places where people work. Google’s London flagship will be 1,082 feet long, which is 66 feet longer than The Shard, London’s tallest building, is high.

Quartz' article features input from American futurist, Amy Webb, who predicts a bright future for landscrapers — not only in London.

Image courtesy of Google.

More about the new Heatherwick Studio + BIG-designed Google London HQ here.

Microsoft offers treehouses to connect their employees back with nature

2017-10-18T14:54:00-04:00

While Apple opens the doors to their new campus, and Amazon looks for a location for its second, Microsoft has gone in a different direction, building Wi-Fi tree houses so staff can connect with nature.

Microsoft's campus is comprised of 120 buildings spread across Redmond, Washington—a suburb of Seattle—and surrounded by 500 acres of woods. After a recent employee survey found many workers would like to work outdoors more, the tech company has added to their campus by rigging up three high-tech tree houses in Redmond's Pacific Northwest Douglas firs. The company is also currently working on other tech enable outdoor districts around the campus for their employees.

Pete Nelson of Animal Planet's "Treehouse Masters" was recruited to help create the new elevated meeting space. Equipped with Wi-Fi, electricity—every weatherproof bench has a hatch containing a power supply—an outdoor gas fireplace, and a shipping container that houses a barbecue restaurant, the company hopes to boost em...

Inside the MVRDV House, the firm's new family home-style office

2016-07-22T19:25:00-04:00

MVRDV settled into their new office headquarters inside the remodeled Het Industriegebouw, nestled in the heart of Rotterdam. Now dubbed by the firm as the MVRDV House, the building was originally designed by iconic Dutch architect Hugh Maaskant in 1952. The new 2,400 square-meter interior is modeled like a family home, filled with ample working and gathering spaces that reflect the “work hard, play hard” balance many firms strive for in their office's design.

Photo © Ossip van Duivenbode.

Now with 140 employees based in Rotterdam, “[t]he expanding MVRDV family needed a new house,” says MVRDV co-founder Jacob van Rijs. MVRDV's new office has “everything that [a] home requires, a living room, a dining room, a sofa for the whole house to sit together,” he described. Surrounded by various creative start-ups and design firms, MVRDV believes they fit right in their new neighborhood.

The Family Room serves as the firm's main communal space for social interaction...

Office Space: Clive Wilkinson on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #20

2016-04-25T15:55:00-04:00

Shortly after starting out in Frank Gehry's office in the early 1990s, Clive Wilkinson founded his own firm in Los Angeles, and has since designed far-reaching workspaces for such big-name clients as Google, the BBC, 20th Century Fox and Microsoft. I spoke with Clive about the evolution from cubicle farms to “serendipity machines” in office design, and his thoughts on co-working spaces. Also turns out he’s not a huge fan of Apple's "spaceship" campus.

Listen to One-to-One #20 with Clive Wilkinson:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

Projects mentioned in the episode:

↑ Clive Wilkinson's home at Norwich Drive

↑ Pallota Teamworks

↑ FIDM Annex

↑ "Super Desk" for The Barbarian Group

↑...

Red Bull's INABA-designed office is the "antithesis" of trendy workspaces

2014-11-18T19:05:00-05:00

When it comes to a high-energy drink giant like Red Bull, most would probably expect their corporate offices to reflect the sporty, frat bro-friendly culture that the brand overwhelmingly attracts. Not a single hint of that can be seen in the company's newly designed office in New York by Brooklyn-based architects INABA.

In fact, Red Bull's New York office looks generic and insignia-free -- which is not common for large companies. INABA states that the design doesn't integrate the latest theories of workplace productivity nor is it driven by narrative or graphic imagery. It ignores workspace interior trends like grand-scale gestures, playful recreational lounges, or urban-chic office decor. On the other hand, the no-brand minimal aesthetic is a growing trend itself as well.

The office's "timeless" and brandless design questions the standard that corporate offices must be a spatial representation of the company and the brand qualities of which it established itself. "Red Bull’s New Yor...

The Open-Office Trap

2014-01-08T13:16:00-05:00

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve.

Robert Peck, ousted head of Public Buildings Commission at the General Services Administration, is hired by Gensler

2012-08-28T17:02:00-04:00

What constitutes a modern professional workplace is changing rapidly, and Gensler, the San Francisco design and architecture firm, is betting those changes will factor more heavily not only into clients’ interior design decisions, but every single real estate decision they make. That bet led Gensler to hire a well-known name locally in both design and real estate circles: Robert A. Peck.