Commissioned to design the first Alpine outpost of the upscale café-restaurant chain Sant Ambroeus in Aspen, Colorado, Italian interior designer Giampiero Tagliaferrieschewed the classic chalet vibe, embracing instead a retro-chic, mid-century-inflected aesthetic inspired as much by the brand’s Milanese origins as the Alpine modernism movement. Working between Milan and Los Angeles, Tagliaferri’s creative reinterpretation of 20th century Italian design and Californian modernism made him a good fit with Sant Ambroeus, a historic brand that first opened in Milan in 1936 before moving across the pond in the 1980s – the fact that he is also a regular of Sant Ambroeus in Milan and New York made the pairing all the more fitting.
Drawing inspiration from 20th century architects like Carlo Mollino, Franco Albini and Marcel Breuer who reimagined Alpine architecture through the lens of the Modernism movement – most famously in the ski resort of Flaine, Breuer’s 1960s Brutalist masterpiece that stands out for its striking design and innovative use of concrete – Tagliaferri used concrete throughout the space, from the sinuous counter that greets patrons as they step inside, to the flagstone floor, to the banquette seating that extends along one side.
From an early age, co-owner and principal of Studio Heimat, Alicia Cheung Lichtenstein, has used clothing as an outlet to express creativity and style. “I was lucky enough to go to Italy with my high school when I was 15. I loved fashion, and I recall being so mesmerized by all the chic Italian women I would see. During our downtime from tours, I would sketch the outfits they wore and make notes to make the look complete – color references and fabric styles. My drawing abilities weren’t great, so I needed descriptive notes. Those women, those outfits – were art to me,” she said.
A love of designing her room each time her family moved, then dorms and apartments in college, brought a creativity of 3D space into the picture. Alicia shared, “I made a diorama in an arts elective class in 10th grade. I loved utilizing all the walls, playing with color blocking, and fitting in unexpected little easter eggs throughout. Looking back, this may have been a telltale sign that I loved creating moments of delight.”
Alicia Cheung Lichtenstein
Alicia’s passions led her to study Textiles and Clothing at UC Davis, and have been helping inform the aesthetics of her work ever since. In 2009, she met her current business partner and co-owner of Studio Heimat, Eva Bradley, while working for tastemaker and influential designer Ken Fulk Inc. The two bonded over a mutual desire to create beauty through design and curation, then in 2015 made the big leap and opened their own firm.
Studio Heimat’s culture is driven by a bottomless curiosity, working towards excellence, and collaboration. Alicia’s goal at the female- and minority-owned firm is to create soulful spaces that tell a story through clean lines while elevating the status quo, and adding a bit of edge to every project. Studio Heimat continues to grow, thriving at its highest level when collaborating with clients, architects, and builders to create thoughtful, comfortable, and beautiful spaces that cultivate a sense of well-being – that feeling of “Heimat.”
Today, we’re happy to have Alicia Cheung Lichtenstein join us for Friday Five!
I have a collection of Le Labo perfume, and each scent is unique and kind of colors the day ahead. They’re running their City Exclusives right now, and my favorite is Gaiac10 – quiet luxury in a bottle. Plus, I always get complimented when I wear Le Labo, no matter the scent.
We’re having bouts of nice weather in San Francisco, and when it’s nice out I love to have a bubbly rosé to drink. It makes the days feel lighter, and makes whatever I’m doing that much more enjoyable.
I go to Chrissy Field and walk towards Fort Point. It’s a beautiful walk, it grounds me. I often listen to the waves or a gratitude meditation to get my mind right before heading into the studio.
Mixing in a bit of science and art, I love taking my kids to these museums. Seeing the world anew from their perspective keeps me present and smiling, most of the time. (wink)
I’ve recently stepped up my coffee game at home and I love this machine. I’ve been making my own version of Blue Bottle’s Orange Blossom NOLA. It’s really refreshing and a perfect treat.
Work by Alicia Cheung Lichtenstein + Studio Heimat:
This project is also the home of Studio Heimat co-founder Eva Bradley. Eva and her husband, artist Cory Bradley, purchased the historic Victorian in San Francisco with plans to transform it into a family home. Studio Heimat added curvilinear furnishings to soften the hard lines of the original interior architecture. The artwork, vintage pieces and portraits painted by Cory, line the walls. The Mario Bellini sofa fits perfectly into the sunken living room and fulfilled Eva’s vision for the family’s favorite spot of the home. Photo: Frank Frances
A longtime client of Studio Heimat was a newlywed looking for a new home. The couple found this property a few blocks from their current location and wished to renovate it with a family in mind. This contemporary space has stunning views of the city and the Bay, and features a growing art collection. Like most designers, Studio Heimat worked to marry two different design aesthetics – especially under a time crunch of a new baby arriving – during the pandemic. The result is an understated, warm, functional interior with custom millwork and unique design details. Photo: John Merkl
Studio Heimat brought both the Urban Tasting Room and Lyon & Swan to life with a design inspired by the Eco Terreno Winery & Farm, the landscape, and the brand’s regenerative farming practices. They chose color palettes, materials, and works of art reminiscent of the Cloverdale property, but elevated for the San Francisco audience. Each level is its own design adventure with moments of discovery throughout. The Urban Tasting Room is reflective of the Eco Terreno winery with hand-painted murals of the vineyards, bee motifs, and a lion’s head plaque as a nod to Mark Lyon. The color palette includes the deep red of a Burgundy wine and sage green found throughout the Eco Terreno farm. Photo: Frank Frances
Studio Heimat invested in a triplex on a quiet block in Nob Hill, San Francisco a few years back. The team took their time renovating two of the three units for rentals, and Alicia and her family occupy the top unit. The historic home, originally built in 1906, was very outdated, and they worked to keep as much of the original detail as possible – such as original floors, moldings, and ceiling height. The interiors were a study of mixing and layering cultures and time periods, creating an eclectic space for contemplation. With a young, growing family in mind, Alicia needed space for play and snuggles, and she wanted functionality without compromising style. Bold choices in wallpaper, prints that transcend trends, and an extra-large custom built-in sectional maximize the space. Cozy velvet fabric and unique pendant lights in the living room and principal bedroom bring in some flare. Photo: John Merkl
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Kelly Beall is Director of Branded Content at Design Milk. The Pittsburgh-based writer and designer has had a deep love of art and design for as long as she can remember, from Fashion Plates to MoMA and far beyond. When not searching out the visual arts, she's likely sharing her favorite finds with others. Kelly can also be found tracking down new music, teaching herself to play the ukulele, or on the couch with her three pets – Bebe, Rainey, and Remy. Find her @designcrush on social.
A group of dancers in cocoons convulse on stage, thrashing their limbs in tortured spasms as if trying to break free from their elasticated sacks. This is a scene from Free Your Mind, Danny Boyle’s live-action, Matrix-themed extravaganza which launches Aviva Studios – a new £240m arts venue that Manchester city council’s leader has described as “the most important cultural development in Europe”. The frenzy of writhing, shrink-wrapped bodies is a nod to the movie’s depiction of humans being grown in amniotic pods. But it also looks eerily like the dancers are showing the audience what this building was supposed to look like before the reality of escalating costs, functional requirements and straightforward gravity intervened.
When plans were unveiled in 2015, they depicted an astonishing structure unlike any theatre ever seen. It was as if a spandex-spinning spider had smothered the building in a stretchy white web, with odd protrusions poking through – as if artistic energy itself was bursting to get out. The sculptural chrysalis was an otherworldly appendage to a vast, glass-walled hangar, where full-height sliding doors would allow theatrical wonders to spill outside, down a great cascade of steps.
None of this remains. Four years late, and costing more than double the original budget – variously attributed to Brexit, Covid, war in Ukraine and the design’s complexity – the project is unrecognisable. Where the sinuous white carapace was promised to hover, there now lurches a hulking faceted lump that looks as if it was cobbled together from bits of corrugated metal hoarding found around the site. This wonky container doesn’t emerge from a shimmering glass pavilion, but stands bolted to the side of a massive concrete shed, which greets its surroundings with all the blank anonymity of a datacentre.
Nothing remains … an image of how the venue was meant to look. Photograph: OMA
“We haven’t compromised on the core vision,” says John McGrath, artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, the organisation behind the project. “We still have a warehouse and a theatre, which can be joined to create infinite possibility for artists.”
The novel selling point of the venue is that it is both a 1,600-seat theatre and a 5,000 capacity mega-venue, able to operate independently or be combined, meaning it can host everything from opera and experimental art shows to all-night raves – reflecting the diversity of the Manchester international festival (MIF), which calls the building home.
The seductive, competition-winning design was the vision of OMA, a firm of once radical Dutch architects who built their global reputation by reinventing building types in surprising ways. Their Casa da Música concert hall landed in Porto in 2005 like a chiselled meteorite, leading concert-goers on a theatrical spatial journey inside. Their Taipei performing arts centre stands like a robotic transformer, where three theatres can be combined. So what happened to their beguiling Manchester mirage?
“It was just a sketch,” says Ellen van Loon, the OMA partner in charge. “We did it in 10 days and made the presentation in 24 hours. The tent-like structure and the glass box could never have worked with the acoustic requirements.”
What both architect and client seemingly failed to foresee was that their building would be hemmed in by residential towers, as the publicly funded cultural beacon of a £1bn private real estate venture. Aviva Studios lies at the heart of St John’s, a 13-acre regeneration project around the old Granada TV studios, developed by Allied London with £300m backing from Aviva and some land from the council. The insurance giant stumped up a further £35m in June to acquire the naming rights to the venue (formerly called Factory International), cementing the building’s role as value-adding bauble to the wider commercial enterprise.
Dance extravaganza … Free Your Mind, the launch show at Aviva. Photograph: Marco Cappelletti/Courtesy of OMA and Factory International
The situation was a shock to Van Loon. “In the Netherlands,” she says, “when a big developer comes to an area, the city says, ‘OK, you can develop this and, in return, we get the building.’ But here, that’s not the case.”
The hard-nosed reality is plain to see. A pair of bleak 32- and 36-storey towers of “co-living” flats now flank the venue, their hoardings trumpeting, in AI-speak, “the very best living experience which connects all through the commonalities of lifestyle”. But this city-centre lifestyle, with bedroom windows just metres from the biggest new music venue in the country, seems to preclude noise. To pre-empt complaints, Aviva Studios’s warehouse has been wrapped with a 2.5-metre-wide double concrete wall, built at substantial additional cost, while the theatre was also entombed in concrete and clad with faceted metal in place of the sinuous membrane. “We realised we had to be much stronger,” says Van Loon. “The architecture of this building had to be quite brutal to withstand whatever was built around it.”
The sense of heft continues inside, with a bit more success. Visitors are ushered beneath an undercroft – jazzed up with twinkly Broadway lights – into a big open lobby, where a Victorian viaduct punches through one side, housing loos in its arches, and a busy ceiling of exposed ducts and wires sails overhead. Drawing on the origins of Factory Records, from which the organisation takes its name, the designer of the label’s Haçienda night club, Ben Kelly, has livened up the space with his trademark hazard stripes, colourful furniture, and an elevated orange DJ booth which crashes into a red-painted girder, scaled with the brawn of the viaduct, to hold up the venues above.
A workmanlike staircase and escalator leads to the theatre, conceived as a pared-back affair of cross-laminated timber, with a fixed balcony and movable bleacher seating below, as well as a sunken orchestra pit allowing for theatre, concert and gig set-ups. An acoustic wall at the back of the stage can be opened up, enabling the action to extend into the echoing depths of the warehouse beyond, “so you can have real perspective, not the false kind”, says Van Loon. “We had this dream that, after the show, the performers could just walk out into the street behind.” (It remains a dream.)
Hint of Hacienda … the inside continues the Factory aesthetic. Photograph: Marco Cappelletti/Courtesy of OMA and Factory International
The warehouse is truly gargantuan, taller than four double-decker buses, almost as long as a Boeing 747, and capable of supporting 200 tonnes from its sophisticated technical ceiling grid – “strong enough to hang the Statue of Liberty,” adds Van Loon.
All of which raises the question: how often would the production budget be big enough to conjure such heroic feats? And how many performances would ever require such flexibility? The building feels like it wants to host spectacles on the scale of the Colosseum – “you can flood the whole floor!” – but MIF sadly lacks the resources of the Roman empire.
Many are the costly arts venues where the promise of adaptability remains little more than an architect’s fantasy. The retractable shell of New York’s $500m Shed, a 4,000-tonne enclosure designed to roll back and forth on tracks, has stood stubbornly stationary for most of its existence. In Manchester, it seems likely that the building will generally operate as two venues, each less functional than if they had been separate. Their connectable nature means there is no conventional backstage and no fly tower, both fairly crucial to most theatrical productions. For the opening show, stage designer Es Devlin has struggled to showcase the building’s transformable potential: the two spaces are not joined, yet there is still a considerable interval while the action and audience move from theatre to warehouse, as various bits are reconfigured.
McGrath says his ideal scenario is that there will be a performance happening in one venue while artists make new work in the other. Some have even proposed to stage work in the acoustic corridor that runs around the perimeter. “Our rule is: the building is a playground,” he adds. “So why not?”
The energy and creativity of the Factory International team gives confidence that they will find ways of using every part of the building to the max, almost in spite of the architecture. There has even been a performance in the loos already. But it’s hard not to think the money could have been better spent on smaller projects elsewhere, rather than funding this supersized, awkwardly flexible, clumsily finished hulk.
At the Lindemann, a shimmering, fluted (and fluted again) aluminum curtain wall nods to the intricacy of its historic campus surroundings and evokes a billowing stage curtain disappearing into the ground. To avoid the challenges of the location — including vibration from a bus tunnel and an exceedingly large footprint on Brown’s modestly scaled campus — the firm scrapped its plan and started over, well into the process — convincing school leaders to use another site that was home to Brown’s history department: the 1872 Sharpe House, which was moved to another location. The firm created a raised, wedge-shaped glass-wrapped lobby that beckons visitors and glows from within at night.
These two buildings embody Ramus’s obsession with detailing and “exquisite restraint,” a term he uses to describe the work of one of his idols, the midcentury architect Gordon Bunshaft. Inside, their auditoria are advanced machines that can enable virtually any type of creativity — at a show’s earliest conception or during the performance itself. The Perelman’s three theaters (plus a rehearsal room) can be shifted and merged into 10 different proportions and arranged into 62 seating configurations via movable walls, blinds, stages, balconies, floors, and more.
The Lindemann has only a handful of configurations, but they can be transformed to accommodate wildly different uses — ensemble music, dance, theater, mixed media, cinema, narrative arts, spoken word. Ramus calls it one of the most automated buildings in the world. Even the connection between the performance space and the campus outside can change, via movable perimeter drapes.
The guts of these buildings look like futuristic factories filled with industrial mechanisms, used in unfamiliar ways: gantries, pullies, engines, hoists, steel tracks, bridges, and spiraling lift mechanisms. Ramus can rattle off adaptable supporting systems as if he were a mechanical engineer.
Pragmatic flexibility is another central pillar of Ramus’s story. His parents divorced when he was young, and between kindergarten and 12th grade he attended seven different schools across North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington State. This flexibility was sharpened at OMA, via undertakings like the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas, a collaboration between OMA and Rex. Here, Ramus and his colleagues developed the idea of “presets,” like you see on a car radio, offering practical, preconfigured spatial choices. The Wyly theater had only four presets. Ramus calls the Perelman “Wyly on steroids.”
New details have been revealed of The Ellinikon, Greece’s planned ‘smart city’ with one of Europe’s largest coastal parks, to show a star-studded cast of participating architects. The news follows the unveiling of the Foster and Partners-designed Marina Tower in 2021, which will rise over the masterplan as the tallest building in Greece and the tallest green beachfront high-rise building in the Mediterranean. Now, LAMDA Development offers a closer look at the new district, which includes designs by Kengo Kuma and Associates, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Aedas, SAOTA, Oppenheim Architecture, and Katsutoshi Sasaki + Associates.
The Ellinikon project sets its sights on becoming a pioneering example of integrated and sustainable living on the coast of Greece. Rooted in the principles of a ’15-minute city,’ it offers a comprehensive 360-degree experience to its residents, tenants, guests, and employees. This transformation will revive the former site of the Athens International Airport, which operated from 1938 until 2001 before the Marina was developed to host the Sailing Centre for Athens’ 2004 Summer Olympics. Now, this diverse masterplan will combine residential spaces, shopping, workplaces, leisure, entertainment, and cultural activities, all centered around a sprawling two million square-meter park.
As with any thriving 15-minute city, Greece’s the Ellinikon will be shaped by diverse spaces for living, working, gathering, and relaxing. A landmark for the district will be the Marina Tower, a luxury residential high-rise designed by Foster and Partners which will be dripping with suspended gardens (see designboom’s coverage here).
Along the waterfront, an undulating Riviera Galleria will take shape with architecture by Kengo Kuma and Associates. This area will become a premium destination for luxury retail, dining, and leisure, all overlooking the Marina dotted with sailboats.
The developers have announced that Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has contributed its vision to the Ellinikon with Little Athens, a vibrant residential neighborhood which will comprise over one thousand high- and low-rise homes. The clustered buildings will take on BIG’s familiar stepping forms, and will be infused with gardened courtyards throughout.
The Beijing-based architects at Aedas have designed a sprawling Commercial Hub, which will become the largest retail, entertainment and business complex in Greece — and one of the biggest in Southern Europe — spanning over 185,000 square-meters. This area will be divided between workspaces, a retail park, a mixed-use tower, and what will become the largest shopping mall in Greece. The developers envision this hybrid model to stand as the ‘shopping center of the future.’
Other areas include a strip of Cove Residences behind a row of waterfront Cove Villas. The Residences — designed by two prominent Greek architects ISV Architects and Bobotis+Bobotis — will include 115 luxury apartments and duplexes, complete with landscaped gardens and courtyards, rooftop terraces, and private swimming pools for the ground floor units and penthouses.
The Villas will more limited in number, with just twenty-eight plots to be built. This more exclusive collection of homes will be designed by a selection of world-renowned architects — including SAOTA, Oppenheim Architecture, and Tombazis & Associates Architects — and will be supervised by Foster and Partners to ensure cohesion within the overall masterplan.
A Mandarin Oriental Athens will introduce a landmark coastal hotel with an exclusive Luxury Resort together with Branded Residences, for a total of two hundred rooms.
A selection of contemporary pieces such as a Living Divani Extrasoft sofa, a B&B Italia Camaleonda sofa chair and ottoman, and a series of bright-blue stools by Max Enrich, echo MESURA’s boxy, sculptural design language while a bespoke coffee table designed by resident artist Sara Regal made out of waste materials from the construction process, further underlines the project’s interplay of art and design.
Espousing the same design principles as the main living area, the open-plan private zone is anchored by three free-standing, cubic elements, a bathtub, a sink and a bed, the latter featuring a wood-clad boxy headboard. Tying everything together, a colour palette of white and light grey tones both enhances the natural light streaming in from the large windows along three sides, and creates a neutral backdrop for the artworks on display.
“London’s favorite design fair is back” reads the London Design Fair’s website – and it is and it isn’t. The show, formerly known as Tent, is under new ownership, much smaller than in its pre-COVID heyday, and less tightly curated, but nonetheless it did contain some absolute gems. One of the highlights, not just of the London Design Fair but of the whole festival, was ‘You CAN Sit With Us’ curated by 2LG Studio, a London-based interior design and styling consultancy, founded by creative duo, Jordan Cluroe and Russell Whitehead (below left).
Photo: Megan Taylor
US Congress member Shirley Chisholm is credited with coining the oft-quoted expression, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.” But with Russell and Jordan about, you won’t be needing one. You CAN Sit With Us (emphasis on “can” and referencing the 2004 movie Mean Girls) is a curation that responds to prejudice they have felt and still feel from the industry. They placed a long dining table at the heart of an installation designed to explore inclusivity and asked emerging designers to each design one chair, giving them a platform so they wouldn’t experience the same barriers.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
The project also included a collaboration with Granite + Smoke (pictured above with Jordan and Russell) whose colorful blankets featured the words from the exhibition title and with Custhom (immediately above). Other designers featured in the space include Ercol, Helen Kirkum, Wilkinson & Rivera, Sam Klemick, and Amechi Mandi.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
The other part of the fair that really shone was the British Craft Pavilion and the first stand through the door belonged to furniture maker Nick James. Nick describes himself as “a highly skilled craftsman and tree lover.” He’s an advocate of traditional woodworking techniques, uses British-grown wood, making everything by hand in his Newcastle-upon-Tyne workshop, and feeds his creativity by spending every Wednesday in his local woodland.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Pamela Print spent 14 years in the fashion textiles industry and now relishes the slow pace of natural dying and hand weaving. Her Kantha III artwork (above) is hand-dyed using indigo and logwood plant dyes. As well as artworks, she also makes scarves, cushions, throws, and weaving kits.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Will James runs Knot Design from a small studio and workshop in central London, making to order and celebrating the natural imperfections of wood. Like many of his products, the Dickens Wall Shelf (above) can be completely customized by size, timber, and number of shelves, so it’s just as perfect for a tiny nook as it is to provide “a sprawling display for your cherished collectibles.”
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Woven Memories cushions’ unique designs are created with an online tool that can turn any typed message into binary code and therefore a visual pattern. They are made from locally sourced and deadstock yarn to ensure their sustainability message is as embodied as the message coded into their designs.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Barbara Gittings is a Brighton-based ceramicist, specializing in Nerikomi techniques. Inspired by a former career in textiles, these involve adding oxides or stains to the clay to color it and then joining, slicing, and rejoining layers of colors to build up patterns through the clay, which she then slab-builds, biscuit-fires, and sands down before a final smoke firing and polish. The result evokes the multi-layered effects of nature, such as the laying down of strata, weathering, and erosion.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Pointing out negative spaces in the doorway opposite her stand that she is already convinced will inspire future work, Jane Cairns explains that her work (above) “is about finding beauty in the ordinary; about recognizing the accidental poetry in the unnoticed and overlooked,” she says. “Living in the city, this is often found in apparently insignificant visual details of the built environment – the space on a wall where something has been removed, a juxtaposition of materials, the sculptural qualities of found forms.”
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Each lamp by Margate-based Lux Pottery is a slab-built stoneware artwork in its own right, brought to life with a vintage-style lightbulb. She also makes wall hangings inspired by her surroundings in referencing mid-century design motifs.
Photo: Courtesy of Spark & Bell
Outside of the British Craft Pavilion, a couple of stands really stood out, one of which was Brighton-based Spark & Bell – a sustainable lighting company that is even creating its own sheet materials from recycled plastic.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
Another sustainable exhibitor of note was Studio Lia Karras, all the way from Winnipeg, Canada. Lia specializes in custom handwoven textile art for architectural spaces made with reclaimed and reimagined materials – often taken from the very buildings the resulting pieces are commissioned for.
Photo: Katie Treggiden
“I believe that abundance could look different,” she says. “I believe in living and working gently and leading a lifestyle and practice where beauty, quality, and sustainability are in balance. In all of my work, I strive to contribute without taking; to make the best possible use of the resources available to me by thoughtfully re-imagining the materials at hand. I strive to create something beautiful, functional, subtle, and tactile.”
Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author and, podcaster championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. She is also the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a program and membership community for designer-makers who want to join the circular economy. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine and Monocle24 – as well as being Editor at Large for Design Milk. She is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and a podcast, Circular with Katie Treggiden.
The festival of ethical photography in Lodi, Italy, has announced the winning projects in this year’s World Report Award | Documenting Humanity. Twenty exhibitions display the work of nearly 100 photographers from 40 different countries
The winners’ projects will be exhibited in Lodi until 29 October
Offices have been trending toward open workspaces for over a decade, as employers look to boost collaboration and maximize use of space.
But as states begin to lift shelter-in-place orders and employees prepare to return to work, more than 80% of landlords and office managers are already re-envisioning the workplace, according to a study of 400 participants by VergeSense, a San Francisco-based proptech company.
“Every client we’re working with has one overarching concern: how do I create a safe environment for my employees, both from a health perspective and from an emotional and mental health perspective,” said Verity Sylvester, co-founder of Branch, a New York City-based office furniture company.
Companies are creating structural changes to encourage social distancing in the office. Some companies have ordered six-foot long desks, permanent wall dividers, cubicles and “sneeze guards,” or sheets of plastic separating employees’ space, according to office furniture suppliers.
“The ever-popular ‘open office’ trend is going to have to be quickly rethought and adapted — Nobody wants to bring their teams back to a true open concept environment,” said Sylvester.
Had an interesting Zoom today with a group of architects and office planers.
A nearly 100% sell-out of plexiglass and plastic/cloth office dividers.
One very large tech company—just today made an order for ~5000 that just about zeroed our all in the US.
“We are about to see a reversal of a decades-long trend,” said Joe Learner, Savills vice chairman, director and Midwest Region lead. “For years and years, there has been a move toward densification and collaboration. Companies wanted more people into the same area, so they took away ‘me’ space and increased the ‘we’ space.”
But restructuring an office is not practical for small businesses — a full-height cubicle can cost several thousand dollars per employee, according to Sylvester.
“There’s a divide in what companies can achieve in outfitting their office for the new environment,” said Sylvester. “Small and mid-sized companies just do not have the resources to invest in brand new office furniture, especially as we navigate through a challenging recession,” said Sylvester.
Cubicles and sneeze guards are not the only expensive items on companies’ futuristic office wish list. Companies like Amazon are using short-term measures like thermal cameras to detect employees with a fever. But thermal cameras do not detect asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 and can reportedly cost between $5,000 and $20,000.
Social distancing sensors have also gained traction. Cameras and other sensors can track employee interactions, to flag areas of the office that need extra cleaning or trace who is at risk if an employee tests positive. One San Francisco-based sensor provider, VergeSense, had a 242% increase in the number of prospective installations this quarter compared to last quarter.
But even providers say sensors are too expensive even as a short-term measure, considering a COVID-19 vaccine would make social distancing tech redundant.
“Because we want people to have this technology, what we are charging only covers part of the cost it takes to provide it. This solution won’t be relevant a year from now, hopefully,” said Sonny Tai, co-founder and CEO of Actuate, a New York-based artificial intelligence software company.
For companies that cannot afford sensors and “sneeze guards,” there are low-cost options to keep workers safe. Instead of thermal sensors, companies can use thermometers and ask employees medical screening questions. And instead of cubicles, privacy panels can be a lower-cost alternative. But office consulting firms say that structural changes might not be necessary after all.
“Companies don’t want to look at the pre-vaccine period and make enormous investments. It is not the appropriate time because we need more information. We can use the existing work environment, following certain guidelines and inexpensive modifications,” said Learner.
‘People want to know that their employer cares’
When employees return to the office, they can expect fewer chairs and desks, with at least six feet of distance between them. Signs around the office will ask employees to walk in a single direction, like in many grocery stores. Many employers will also provide masks, hand sanitizers and wipes.
“From a re-imagination standpoint, that is a capital expenditure and required cost. But a lot of the things we’re talking about can be managed with relatively less expense,” said Sanjay Rishi, CEO of JLL’s Corporate Solutions in the Americas.
To encourage social distancing, businesses may stagger employees’ returns. Experts say that most businesses will initially reduce capacity to 50%, while some employees continue to work from home, at least part-time.
“In the short-term, keeping shifts of employees working from home allows them to remain largely net-neutral on the amount of real estate they have,” said Sylvester. “We suspect there will be a long, and potentially even permanent, period of alternating work schedules and optional work from home schedules.”
But some major new expenses will be necessary for most office suppliers: cleaning is going to be a particularly important part of workplace re-entry. Offices will need to be cleaned more often and more thoroughly — and companies will need to prove to employees that they are returning to a sanitized work environment.
“When it comes to cleaning, people want to know that their employer cares. At another time employees may not have felt that their employer did care, so it is more important now than ever,” said Jim Underhill, former CEO of Cushman and Wakefield and current CEO of Cresa, a Washington D.C.-based commercial tenant consulting firm.
Some companies are instituting “experience apps” to communicate with tenants, according to Eddy Wagoner, executive director and digital chief innovation officer at JLL Technologies, while for others, seeing is believing.
“I spoke with a large company that is having the cleaners come in a half-hour before employees arrive, so they can smell the cleanliness. A lot of cleaning usually happens off hours,” said Kate Wieczorek, manager of workplace strategy at workplace consulting firm Ted Moudis Associates in New York City.
Sanitization expenses can get pricey, especially when installing new technology. Touchless options for doors, faucets, cafeteria check-outs and conference room check-ins — which can cost about $1,000 each — are already standard in many facilities, but health concerns will likely accelerate demand, according to Bryan Murphy, CEO of New York City-based flexible office provider Breather.
Plus, old heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems may need to be replaced if they are not providing clean air for employees. That could cost up to $10,000 or more, but ineffective air filters and dry air conditions can amplify risk, said Murphy.
“Customers are not looking for the cheapest cleaning service anymore — they want the healthiest office,” said Adam Povlitz, president and CEO of Anago Cleaning Systems, a Florida-based commercial cleaning company with over 40 U.S. franchise locations.
Getting to the office safely
But there is one immutable problem that employers don’t know how to solve: getting workers and employees to the office. Long commutes, especially on public transportation, pose health concerns. And the last bit of the commute, the elevator to the office, threatens to create unsafe conditions for employees. Most employers say they have not found a full answer to this problem, but they plan to limit the number of passengers on elevators.
“Most of the problem is not where it is safe to go into the office, but how do I get to work? How do I get through the lobby and the elevator?” said Learner. “The biggest obstacle right now is getting people up to their space with the capacity in the elevators. Might need to stagger start and leave times.”
Employers are thinking through every aspect of office life to adapt to a post-pandemic world. But as extensive as these changes are, they may not be enough to make employees want to return to the office.
In fact, some 74% of CFOs say their company will reduce office space because employees have adapted to working from home, according to a survey of over 300 CFOs by Gartner, a Connecticut-based research and advisory firm.
“Businesses are gonna realize they have way too much space to utilize and they’re going to want to renegotiate their leases,” Barbara Cordcoran, Shark Tank judge and founder of the Corcoran Group, a New York-based residential brokerage, recently told Yahoo Finance.
Shrinking demand could cause up to a 15% decline in office rent prices over the next 12 months, according to Murphy.
Sarah Paynter is a reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @sarahapaynter
Claude Cormier was intrigued when he was asked to create a winter garden for the lobby of Montreal’s convention center in the late 1990s. But an interior “greenhouse” of living plants seemed to him completely unsuitable and unsustainable. What Montreal needed, especially in the winter, he thought, was color.
His solution: Lipstick Forest, the name he gave to 52 concrete tree trunks lacquered in bright pink.
When he first presented his design, he recalled, there was dead silence. But the project moved forward, and when the trees were finally installed in late 2002, Le Journal de Montreal, a city tabloid, panned them on its front page, declaring in a headline, “C’est Horrible!”
The public, however, disagreed, and the forest became a beloved city landmark. Mr. Cormier always said the newspaper had delivered his favorite review.
Mr. Cormier, an avant-garde Canadian landscape architect who created playfully subversive and much loved public spaces, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Montreal. He was 63. The cause was complications of Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a rare genetic condition, according to his firm, CCxA, which announced his death.
Bureaucratic confusion and public delight were typical reactions to Mr. Cormier’s work, which enlivened Toronto as well as Montreal. In reimagining a section of Dorchester Square in Montreal, he designed a fanciful Victorian style fountain, tiered like a wedding cake, to evoke the city’s “belle epoque” period.
Yet when it was installed at one edge of the square, it was fabricated to look as though it had been sliced in half; from the street, it resembles a two-dimensional cutout (with a realistic-looking cast-iron woodpecker pecking at its highest tier). The slicing was Mr. Cormier’s response when he was told to lose the fountain in his original design because the city needed more room for tour buses.
A fountain in Berczy Park in downtown Toronto also runs on whimsy: It is ringed by life-size bronze dogs (and one cat) which spout arcs of water. It was a project Mr. Cormier hoped would be financed by a public art fund, and when he showed his proposal, the park’s board members announced that dogs were not art. Mr. Cormier’s team returned with a 50-page treatise on the role of dogs in art throughout history, and the design was approved. (A cat park designed by him, on the west side of town, has yet to be built.)
Mr. Cormier oftenjoked that he was the love child of Martha Schwartz, the provocative landscape architect who made her name bringing contemporary art-like elements into her work, and who was his professor at Harvard, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of urban landscapes like Central Park in Manhattan.
When Mr. Cormier conceived his first urban beach, known HTO, on the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto — his firm has since designed four — he was inspired by the well-known Georges Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Its approach is a gentle slope planted with weeping willows; the beach is planted with yellow umbrellas.
His second beach, Sugar Beach, a Toronto public park near the Redpath Sugar factory, is planted with pink umbrellas, a nod to the refinery’s sweet product. There was resistance to that hue, however. Pink was too feminine and too frivolous, some thought. Mr. Cormier and his team lobbied hard and prevailed. They wore pink hard hats to the job site.
Pink was a totemic color for Mr. Cormier, who deployed it in a seasonal installation in Montreal called Pink Balls — 170,000 strands of pink plastic spheres suspended over Sainte-Catherine Street East, a predominantly gay neighborhood, that transformed it into a pedestrian mall.
The neighborhood had become run down and store vacancy rates were high, said Marc Hallé, a colleague of Mr. Cormier’s. The installation, which went up each summer for five years starting in 2011, buoyed the street’s fortunes by bringing foot traffic back into the area.
“It was so simple,” Mr. Hallé said by phone. “Hang a bunch of balls over the street.”
It was typical of Mr. Cormier’s work, he added, which he described as both humble and monumental. “It was highbrow and lowbrow — not intellectual but visceral.”
The pink thread was a quiet bit of activism on Mr. Cormier’s part, Mr. Hallé said. Mr. Cormier, who was gay, came of age during the AIDS crisis, when there wasn’t a lot of joy in the gay community. His work, with its humorous and welcoming features, is designed for pleasure and for joy. “He was a pleasure activist,” Mr. Hallé said. “He changed hearts by making you feel good.”
Claude Cormier was born on June 22, 1960, in Princeville, a rural community in southern Quebec. His father, Laurent, ran the family’s dairy and maple syrup farm until his death at 44, when Claude was 17; his mother, Solange Cormier, was a teacher.
Claude studied agronomy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, graduating in 1982 — his focus was plant breeding; he wanted to invent a new hybrid flower — and then landscape architecture at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1986. He earned a master’s degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1994.
Mr. Cormier is survived by his mother; his sister, Louise; and his brother, Pierre.
His last project, Love Park, designed in collaboration with gh3*, a Toronto-based firm, opened in June. Built on the site of a former expressway ramp, it’s now an inviting urban oasis dotted with lawns and shade trees — and a menagerie of bronze woodland creatures — around a vast heart-shaped pond bounded by a low, red-tiled wall you can sit on. Mr. Cormier and Mr. Hallé called it an urban love seat.
Gardens are boring, Mr. Cormier told The Ottawa Citizen in 2000. “How can we make gardens that look the same as we were making 100 years ago?” he said. “Fashion, architecture, cinema, everything else has changed. Can we make gardens that represent who we are now with the values and culture and technology that we have?”
‘Andrea Branzi has left us. He was a giant of radical thought on human spaces, a sophisticated historian of italian design, a visionary artist capable of inhabiting other universes and parallel worlds with irony. He leaves us a powerful and generative legacy of works and texts; and a film produced a year ago by Triennale which is his intellectual testament. He left us thinking and dreaming. A few hours ago, we spoke with him and Nicoletta and Emanuele Coccia to resume the project of a ‘Great Paris’ crossed by 50 thousand large sacred cows -so that they could ‘reduce metropolitan stress’. Ciao Andrea, keep dreaming about us.
Andrea Branzi began his architectural journey at the Florence School of Architecture, where he earned his degree in 1966. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Branzi founded Archizoom Associati together with Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, and Massimo Morozzi, an experimental design group known for its groundbreaking projects, including the visionary No-Stop-City, an unbuilt project presenting an urban utopia where the architectural form disappears and only the essential remains.
‘A project that was of great importance for me, but also for my generation, for many artists that came afterwards was the No-Stop-City project,’ Branzi told designboom in 2003. ‘A fluid metropolis, where even the concept of modernity within order changes towards an idea of uncontrollable complexity and a world destined to a huge diversification. Today I see that this type of scenario is appreciated, shared by famous contemporary architects who recognize the radical movement and the No-Stop City project to be a genetic event, which intercepted a development in the culture of the project, becoming an example within the project itself.’
No-Stop City (1970) by Archizoom Associati
Some of Andrea Branzi’s notable furniture designs include the Superonda sofa (1966), the Mies chair (1968), and the modular Safari sofa (1968). These pieces were created with the intention of challenging conventional notions of how we use and interact with furniture. Later, he played a significant role in Studio Alchimia, founded in 1976, and collaborated with the Memphis Group in the early 1980s. In the mid-1980s, Branzi shifted his design approach away from the highly stylized aesthetics of postmodernism and embraced what he termed ‘neoprimitivism,’ blending elements of nature and artificiality.
The pieces featured raw sections of trees integrated into sleek and minimalist tables, chairs, and benches, all characterized by a grayscale color palette. Branzi’s impact extends beyond his design work. He co-founded Domus Academy, the first international post-graduate design school, and served as a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano until 2009.
Domestic Animals bench (1985) by Andrea & Nicoletta Branzi | image courtesy of Wright
In more recent years, Branzi’s designs have evolved into personal objects with a fragmented composition and subtle Yiddish irony. These designs reflect his ongoing exploration of innovative concepts and aesthetics in the world of furniture and object design. Branzi has received several awards throughout his career, including three Compasso d’Oro, honored for individual or group effort in 1979, 1987, and 1995. Additionally, he received the title of Honorary Royal Designer in the United Kingdom in 2008 and an honorary degree from La Sapienza in Rome.
His work was also featured in an installation at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in the same year. In 2018, Branzi received the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts from the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Andrea Branzi’s design legacy endures, with his works held in the permanent collections of esteemed institutions like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.
Safari sofa (1967) by Archizoom Associati | image courtesy of Poltronova
Little Athens | visualization © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)
Riviera Galleria | visualization © Kengo Kuma and Associates
