Morphosis will design a new high-tech global headquarters for lululemon in Vancouver, Canada. Working with Francl Architecture and Clive Wilkinson Architects, the team will create the main office to serve as an extension of the core values of the brand itself. The design for the 13-story headquarters is made to create strong connections between the building and its site, landscape, and community, with exterior and interior spaces that encourage collaboration and innovation.
Offices and cultural buildings both offer the perfect opportunity to design the atrium of your dreams. These central spaces, designed to allow serendipitous meetings of users or to help with orientation in the building, are spacious and offer a lot of design freedom. Imposing scales, sculptural stairs, eccentric materials, and indoor vegetation are just some of the resources used to give life to these spaces. To help you with your design ideas, below we have gathered a selection of 15 notable atriums and their section drawings.
Google has unveiled plans for a new campus in the Moffett Park area of Sunnyvale, California that will be located just a few miles from its long-awaited ‘Googleplex’ headquarters in Mountain View. And just like the company’s Mountain View and London campuses in the works, the building has been designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
Located at 100 and 200 W. Caribbean Drive, the complex will consist of two terracing buildings containing over 1 million square feet of office space and room for up to 4,500 employees.
The latest innovation in workplace design, Clive Wilkinson Architects’ “Activity Based Working” (ABW) has revolutionized the way people go about their daily activities at the GLG Global Headquarters in New York. Broadening the idea of workable area to a number of specialized environments, ABW fosters a new dynamic in office relations, providing spaces for both individualized activity and collaboration. Experience this through the Spirit of Space-produced video above.
Domino Sugar Factory Master Plan Development / SHoP Architects
Fast Company has announced who they believe to be the most innovative practices in architecture for 2014. Topping this list is New York’s SHoP Architects who has gone from “boutique to big commissions in only a few years.” See who made the list after the break and let us know who you believe is the world’s most innovative firms in the comment section below.
When designing offices for creative companies, it's important to strike a balance between an efficient workplace, a fun space to be in, and an attention-grabbing signature for the company itself. That's exactly what Clive Wilkinson Architects did for the Barbarian Group, an advertising group in New York for whom they designed the Endless Table, a single desk which both seats all of their 125 staff members, but also defines spaces within the office, such as meeting rooms and cozy work nooks.
The announcement instigated a flurry of analyses and criticisms over the meaning of the design for the world – the Zen-like significance of the circle, the role of architecture in this technologically-driven age, the legacy and hubris of Jobs – but produced very little discussion over its meaning for the company itself.
Meanwhile, months before news of the “spaceship” landed, another internet giant was searching the California landscape for its own space to call home. Still very much under-wraps, the new Googleplex will be the first time Google builds a workplace completely from scratch. [2]
These projects will be the Magnum Opuses, the ultimate physical representations, of the two most influential Tech companies in the world, and the two share striking similarities. So let’s clash the plans of these two titans and take another look at Apple 2 – but this time in the light of Google – and see what they can tell us about these companies’ futures.
This week our Architecture City Guide heads to Richmond, Virginia. Admittedly, it was Richmond’s pair of Cinderellas in this year’s NCAA Tournament that first caught our attention. However, with our interest peaked, we spent the last week exploring its architecture and found much to be admired. Richmond is by far the smallest city we have featured; with only 200,000 residents, the next closest on our list is twice its size. Architecturally, this Cinderella city can compete in her own way with the architectural powerhouses we have previously featured. Richmond’s architectural appeal comes from the city’s ability to keep its rich historic fabric intact while experimenting with new modes of design. While the city strongly embraces the gritty manufacturing buildings of its past, Richmond has resisted the imitation trap and has promoted modern interpretations of the older forms and materials. The majority of the buildings we chose to feature are emblematic of Richmond architecture, rehab/addition projects. We couldn’t possibly fit all our favorites in our list of twelve, so please take a look and add ones that visitors should not miss in the comment section below.