Research
The Keys to the Kingdom
In 2021, we had a chance to interview the founders of Nest Vans - and learn about their solution for the new employer employee contract.
Network Science Applied to Workspace
If you are interested in networks and workspace design, you might enjoy this podcast with Carolyn Clark Beedle, Joshua Emig and Nash Hurley talking about our findings from our 2020 research grant. It's a start to what we hope will be a much larger body of work on the forces shaping architecture today.
grant provided by One Workplace
Measure what we value
New metrics for commercial office building design
Humans tend to measure what we value. For many of us that means money. We equate more money to increased autonomy and greater happiness. For others it is time. Time spent on what we want to do versus time spent on what others want us to do. We measure the first as “vacation time” and account for the second as “work time”. We will give up money for “vacation time” but expect to receive money for “work time”, and measuring value is not all about time and money.
The last few business cycles have shown us a new, more powerful metric for value creation: this value is measured in users. Counting users has become so attractive that many companies, both mature and startup alike, will give out all kinds of goods and services, all kinds of money and time to gain more users…
Open Air Office Building
When we were looking at the architecture of our traditional office buildings through these fresh eyes, we identified the biggest opportunity for change as the building’s primary circulation system — its hallways, elevators, lobbies and stairs. Obviously, changes to filtration and mechanical systems makes more sense for existing buildings, but for new construction rethinking circulation is a real opportunity. In this system, we saw a chance to empower a user to get from the public realm to her group’s own workspace, what someone in the 1980s might call their office-suite or today we would call their cohort, without having to share the air of another cohort.…
Space as a Link
applications of network science to workspace design
Nash Hurley, Jorey Hurley and Josh Emig present their findings from our One Workplace sponsored research. Their hypothesis was that companies were increasingly operating as distributed networks of people, places and things - and these networks were adapting at a rate previously unseen. Our workspaces on the other hand were still best suited for the hierarchical structures of past generations. Now as we approach the one-year-anniversary of our collective forced experiment in distributed work, our studio remains as convinced as ever that network science offers some clues about the pressures shaping workspace today and will continue to shape it tomorrow. Full white paper from our research can be found here.
This is air.
Last summer, Josh Emig and Nash Hurley got together with their mechanical engineer friend Marco Alves to discuss the topic of fresh air in buildings with a not-so-secret goal: to raise awareness that most of the air in many of our buildings is recirculated. We wanted to outline an actionable framework to help all of us understand what we could do, as dads and everyday citizens, to make our offices and classrooms a bit safer.
Adapting the Architect
repositioning the architect for existing buildings
Last year Bruce Danziger, SE and Nash Hurley cooked up a concept to make more play spaces for our dense urban centers. Reflecting on this work, this article explores why existing buildings might be the promised land when it comes to innovation in architecture and lessening our environmental impact.
Where We Forget, Our Buildings Remember
Making sense of centralized and distributed workspace
Every generation builds the world of their imagination. Human memories, however, are short-lived, and we forget the imaginations of past generations. That forgetfulness can lead to the mislabeling of foreseeable market forces as unexpected social disruptions — making the path forward unclear. Where we forget, our buildings remember. They tell a story of cycles of change: expansions and contractions of production that result in an ebb and flow from centralized to distributed workspace.
2020 Medium Article (also available on The Registry)
Hidden in Plain Sight
Creating a sustainable legacy for America’s Car Culture
As part of our larger Network Communities research with Josh Emig, we have been investigating gaps in the existing marketplace — between what we produce today and what these networked communities will need. These will be the products and the services that will allow people to seek value and create economic opportunity in new places outside of the traditional city centers.
We are moving towards more distributed models for work. Liberated by technology, more of us will have options for where to live and how to work. Gone are the benign debates over open-office or closed-office, replaced by much higher-stakes gambles of centralized headquarters or work-from-anywhere distributed real estate investments. But what does work-from-anywhere look like? And who is going to pay for it?
Seeing the street
Over the last couple of years, we have been developing a product to better support urban prototyping and pop-up street life. While interest and its applicability has certainly increased recently, with our 2020 tendency to outdoor living, we think our Power Plants concept may be most exciting as an example of what a product-design mindset could mean for our approach to new types of infrastructure.
Our Power Plant design team : Chris Yorke, Samantha Villaseñor, Yuchen Song with Frances Gregor and Emily Rupright
2020 The Registry Article released on Medium in 2021
The End of the Great Compromise
There is a certain kind of freedom that comes with tackling apparently insurmountable problems. We took the freedom presented by the current pandemic to rethink the relationship of user-driven workspaces and the economics of the commercial real estate industry. To learn more about this and our solution that came out of this latest studio challenge, check out Nash’s recent article in The Registry.
Our MWU design team : Samantha Villaseñor with Yuchen Song, Liz Lessig and Anthony D’Auria.
This is air.
Written in collaboration with Josh Emig and Marco Alves at PAE Engineers, this article looks at our perspective on and engagement with the air in our buildings. Worth a read as the quality of outside air and inside air become drivers of behavior, economy and building design.
Joint Structures
2019 ARCHITECT Magazine Podcast
Joint Structures
In 2019, we collaborated with the engineering firm Arup and Frog Design to envision a new urban, architectural typology called Joint Structures. Listen in on our conversation with Architect Magazine and Nash Hurley to understand our vision for the future of cities, work, transit and community.
2018 Submittal to the City of Sunnyvale
Creative Campus
Google submitted documents for a potential second Moffett Park development project after spending more than $1 billion on real estate in the Sunnyvale business district in recent years. Our studio worked closely with our client and collaborator Devcon Construction to prepare the informal application for the preliminary review of the proposed development. The informal application outlined the plans for the 400,000sf, four-building campus on nearly 19.5 acres of land - and includes schematic designs from the landscape architect, West8 and the interior architect, Situ.
Knowledge Space
In 2016, we took a focused look at macro trends of knowledge exchange in the public realm. In our increasingly digital age, Our studio sought to better understand how physical space has shaped our experience of knowledge in the past and will continue to shape our experience of knowledge in the future.
2014 interview with our friends at Fireclay
Fireclay Showroom
For years, on the corner of 8th and Brannan in the Design District of San Francisco, was a building known to locals as the Dwan Elevator building. In spite of the signage still hanging on the buildings facade, the space had not been occupied by the elevator company for years, and had fallen into a state of disrepair. With the help of architect, Nash Hurley our vision for a new San Francisco showroom and office space…
Creative Cultures
In 2013, we spoke with a number of organizations known for consistently delivering exceptional creativity. Our studio wanted to understand what was common to these creative cultures despite the disparity of their size, offering and economic models.
2012 short video
“For those who are better in treehouses than offices”
In 2012, as we were launching the studio we wanted an approachable story that communicated our point of view on architecture, workspace and design. We landed on treehouses; realizing that our studio is more likely to deliver architecture for those who prefer treehouses over offices. That connection to treehouse space is as true today as it was when we first hack together this little video ten years ago.
Visual Artist: Sam Slater
Retrogrades
In the debate about how to make America’s buildings greener, there is one thing everyone seems to agree on: designing buildings in order to conserve energy isn’t enough. It’s essential that buildings’ actual energy use, post-occupancy once it is filled with users, be measured and disclosed. This article hits on some of our studio’s early work with Taylor Keep, Jonathan Warner and The Tides Foundation - working through trial and error to figure out how an architect, a UX-designer and a mechanical engineer could be more useful toward decreasing our buildings’ energy consumption.
Comfort on Demand
The General Services Administration (GSA) partnered with Metropolis Magazine to release an open invitation for design ideas to transform its existing Los Angeles 800,000sf facility into a net-zero building. Our solution was based on the concept that utimately people, not buildings, use energy. Working with Beau Trincia and Taylor Keep, Nash developed a concept for a furniture-integrated, user-controlled, heating and cooling system, that provided the users of the building with “comfort on demand” while delivering a net-zero-energy campus. Beau ended up exponentially expanding this idea and partnering with Andrew Krioukov and Stephen Dawson-Haggerty to launch Comfy, which has since become part of Siemens AG.
