DRIVING ECONOMIC SUCCESS 

ThinkLab data suggests architects and designers have 26 times more specification power than the average American consumer has buying power. That statistic indicates the ability of architects and designers to shape the future—and is one reason why ThinkLab’s second hackathon of the year dove deep into how product specification is evolving, especially as a result of increasingly hybrid work in the design industry. 

The event produced a playbook titled 100 Ways to Maximize Your Physical, Digital and Human Assets. In addition to sharing ideas to prompt new connections between sales and marketing teams, the book aims to help professionals in the industry rethink the way things have always been done and continue to harness the specification power of the design audience. The hackathon also revealed three major insights into the future of product specification in the phygital era:

01 Hybrid work will drive manufacturers to innovate and create new streamlined experiences for architects and designers. 

Hackathon teams, made up of specifiers from A&D firms NELSON, EwingCole, and HDR, along with commercial real estate firms CBRE and JLL, and prominent dealer design leads, helped us explore the future of showrooms, libraries, events, product presentations, and the sales representative.

02 Designers wish this conversation had taken place sooner.

When our panel of design participants was asked to share the most surprising thing about participating in the hackathon, Amy Mays, a design director in New York, said: “The most surprising thing for me was that it actually took something so catastrophic like the pandemic to get this conversation going.” 

03 Designers want the capability to self-serve, but what makes sales representatives great remains the same. 

The digital era is shifting what we need and when from our product partners. “As designers, we’re all visual, and we have the need to save information somewhere so we’ll be able to find it again,” said Shannon Noon, an interior design associate with EwingCole in Pennsylvania. “But we have to make that easily searchable, easy to digest, and easy to forward, whether on a computer or phone.” 

Kristin Cerutti, design leader and director at NELSON Worldwide, echoed the idea that needs have shifted: “We’ve had some of these struggles for years, but it has significantly increased with everyone going remote. At the moment, we are having to communicate to our clients in completely different ways than before. Today, we need Revit files earlier in the process and install photos to be able to see things like seaming. Remember, we’re trying to sell ideas to a client who might be inherently less visual than most of us are. This helps save all of us from the heartache and shock of walking in and not seeing what they expected.”

Erica Waayenberg, a ThinkLab panel facilitator, summed up all the panelists’ sentiments: “Right now what makes a great rep is that they understand the design process, and that they are trustworthy, effective communicators, and responsive. That hasn’t changed. Some of the digital tools may feel like they’re infringing on the role of the rep, when in reality the rep is leveraging these tools to be increasingly effective and consultative.”

Producing instructive insights, the hackathon equipped participants to embrace the future. “This project will inform our customer experience practices as we move forward, making sure that our phygital solutions remain an equitable experience for everyone,” said Meghan Sherwin, chief marketing officer at Keilhauer. “We’re inspired to continue expanding our virtual storytelling to ensure we are connecting meaningfully with the design community.”

At ThinkLab, we are excited for the design community to experience the innovations that come from these brands in 2022 and beyond, and we will be excited to tell their stories. 

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 Amanda Schneider is president of ThinkLab, the research division of SANDOW. Join in to explore what’s next at thinklab.design/join-in.

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• Amanda Schneider
• specification
• Think Lab

• Interior Design
• Publication

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized for her regenerative design of degraded landscapes. Founding her practice D.I.R.T. studio in 1992, she forged into the frontier of industrial sites, advocating for working landscapes’ cultural, environmental, and social value. Bargmann was recently named the inaugural laureate of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.

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• Julie Bargmann
• Landscape
• Noteworthy

• History

I recently saw an influencer on TikTok have a complete meltdown because she’d realized that many of her fellow content creators were using filters to enhance their appearance. “This is me!” she exclaimed; then she put on a filter that smoothed out her wrinkles and erased her moles. “Not this!” she yelled indignantly. 

It’s one of many little flare-ups between the real and the virtual that I now encounter every single day.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebranding of Facebook as Meta on October 28, 2021, it was the culmination of years of strategizing by the tech giant and a response to similar moves by its competitors. While we might readily associate the metaverse with virtual reality, cryptocurrency, and NFTs—even if we’re not entirely sure what those things are or how they are connected—the truth is we have been groomed to accept, and even rely upon, a digital layer on our physical experience of the world by years of advancements as benign as multiplayer games, e-commerce, Zoom backgrounds, and yes, TikTok filters. We’ve been on this road for a long time—some of us reluctantly—and we have only now been told that it leads to the metaverse. Now that we know, what role will architects and designers have to play on this path? 

The rules of designing virtual space are different from those that govern IRL experiences, writer Liz Stinson points out in “How Will the Metaverse Be Designed?” Architects could see this as an existential threat or “as an opportunity to question who can and should participate in the design process,” she writes.

“The underlying functional economy of the metaverse could eventually lead to the design of digital spaces that…will serve as a second home, encouraging anyone to amass digital currency and decorate their digital worlds,” adds Metropolis associate editor Leilah Stone in “Exploring the Potential of Interiors and Design Objects in the Metaverse” Unshackled from the constraints of materiality, objects and environments can become freer representations of human creativity and expression than ever before.

But these opportunities aren’t without real-world consequences. The first cost is a fundamental one—control. If Zuckerberg has his way, the metaverse won’t be a new world, but “only a way of prolonging the grift of social media,” warns Claire L. Evans (“Is the Metaverse an Empty Promise?”) The second cost is inclusivity: If the equipment and experiences are designed for the abled and privileged, then we put an even greater distance between people with diverse needs and backgrounds, says Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips (“Will the Metaverse Be Accessible?”) The third cost is ecological: Virtual worlds are fueled by the same energy sources that are currently dooming us to climate catastrophe. In “An Online World That Doesn’t Destroy the Real One” Audrey Gray reports on how experts at the University of Washington are leading an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers.

Given its potential and its pitfalls, I am both excited and cautious about where this path leads—and hopeful that architects and designers like you can help keep us safe, sane, and happy on the road to the metaverse. 

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• Avinash Rajagopal
• Metaverse
• Technology

• Technology

Merging a new main hospital, a medical pavilion, and a parking structure on a site previously home to a single medical building, the combination acute care, cancer center, and clinical facility consolidates Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s Kitsap County operations. Now one campus serves the needs of the vast Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas, which lie west of Seattle, across Puget Sound. The topographically complex site shifts 80 feet in elevation from top to bottom, which led the architects to establish two different main entrances on either side of the building, accommodating traffic patterns that differ depending on a visitor’s direction of origin.

Given the commanding views to the west and southwest, hospital staff recommended adjusting the building’s direction, during early design charrettes, to capture not just the Olympic Mountains but also a year-round view of the saltwater Dyes Inlet. These connections to the natural setting are imbued throughout the complex, where a generous tree canopy on the northern and eastern edges shelters a section of the eight-mile Clear Creek Trail. The expansion’s Mountain View entrance, where the great-room lobby can be found, also allows passage into a healing garden, where running water pools around natural boulders—remnants of the glaciers that carved out Washington’s Puget Sound region.

“For patients and staff, this is a place of relief and purity,” says NBBJ’s lead architect Chuck Kolb.

Behind the garden the double-glazed, curved glass curtain wall facade, made of low-e glass and insulated metal panels, relies on an extensive array of static brise-soleils to reduce solar gain. “The sunshades pay for themselves,” Kolb explains, noting that there’s less need for mechanical ducts and systems thanks to a reduction in peak load. Large chillers—essentially commercial-grade heat pumps—handle most of the heating and cooling.

To the left of the curved main facade, concrete block cladding echoes the geological history of the site, as does the use of gabion walls in the rear parking garage. Enclosed in part by this cladding, the cancer center takes great pains to improve the tedious experience of receiving a transfusion, which can take up to six hours. NBBJ made sure every infusion station has views of the mountains, forest, or water while also configuring the space to enable patients to select privacy or communal seating during the six hours they’re being transfused.

“It gives you a choice,” says Ronn Goodnough, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s clinical lead for the expansion project. Goodnough was also once a patient at the hospital, going through two bouts of cancer, and he contributed his experience to the addition’s design process.

To improve patient and staff circulation, the third floor has been nicknamed the Autobahn for its seamless corridors and skybridges connecting all of the complex’s new volumes. That nod toward functionality across buildings is also a metaphor for the design’s success at uniting disparate elements of a growing health-care system to a singular setting. 

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• Benjamin Benschneider
• Gregory Scruggs
• Health Care
• Hospital
• NBBJ

• Architecture
• Interior Design
• Wellness

SFER IK, which gets its name from its curvilinear design (it’s pronounced the same as “spheric,” and there are no straight lines anywhere in the structure), is ensconced in a ten-acre creative community within Francisco Uh May, a tiny jungle town about a half hour’s drive from the fashionable resorts of Tulum. Containing around 13,000 square feet of exhibition space, the institution invites artists to participate in residencies, living for a time in the complex and absorbing its natural and cultural inspiration before creating work that grows organically out of the place and its people. 

And you can see how. The building is in almost every way an extension of the jungle that surrounds it. An armature of smooth, thin concrete wraps like a ribbon, or a giant swirling candy, around the site, forming floors, walls, tables, and walkways. Several existing trees stand where they have always been; vinelike, intricately textured local bejuco wood, fiberglass, and the limbs of other local trees form more floors, walls, pathways, railings, and window frames; vines hang from the ceiling. The overall form looks like a mountain from above. It’s not hermetically sealed like a typical art gallery. If it rains, some water gets into the flowerpots and trees, says Roth.

The building’s eye-popping forms were created with the help of temporary steel scaffolding, which enabled a top-down building technique that the team adapted from local wood frame palapa construction. Another key was to follow the lead of nature, rather than chasing a preconceived notion of what the building needed to be. The only hard rule was to build around what existed on the site. Another directive was to use the rounded, irregular forms of nature and to build as much as possible by hand, not machine. 

“Everything we build, we never have a plan,” says Roth. “We let a shape be born in our imagination and without any restrictions of conventional architecture, we find the way to make them real. You see the implicit forms of plants…. We are like midwives giving birth to the forms that want to be part of the whole.” He adds: “In the jungle, people have the intelligence of the hands. Hands are intelligent and sensitive.”

Around the museum Roth’s team has built a community of living spaces as well as studios for macramé, ceramics, textiles and fashion, woodworking, and even media production and architecture. There are constant workshops where new skills are taught and learned, and the community’s craftspeople provide most of the facility’s own designs, from plates to tables. 

Artists are experimenting inside the space already, but the first to install a monographic exhibition in the museum since its pandemic-induced hiatus (the opening is expected in early 2022) will be the Japanese floral designer and sculptor Makoto Azuma, whose work appropriately explores the intersection between the fantastical and the botanical. The museum’s director, Marcello Dantas, has worked with established museums and galleries around the world. He’s especially inspired by collaborating with artists in a place that doesn’t just look and feel different but inspires artists to work in a new way. “It’s about surprise and connection,” he says. 

He considers SFER IK’s audience to be more than locals and visitors, but bats, birds, scorpions, fungi, and trees. “You realize you have never been in a place like this,” says Dantas. “If we don’t find a way to make artworks that are relevant to the species that surround us, we are irrelevant. We’re a small piece in this giant jungle.” 

Completely eschewing the form of the box, adds Roth, is a model not just for the art world but for humanity at large. “When you work in a box, your mind becomes like a box,” he notes. “When you go into the jungle, everything is new and renewed. You harmonize with nature and go back to your origin. You reconnect with what you are. With life.” 

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• Biophilia
• museum
• Sam Lubell
• SFER IK

• Architecture
• Sustainability

His view is shared by more-established brands. Bit, a category-defying stool/pedestal/ table-in-one by Normann Copenhagen and Allsteel, has a “pixelated surface design,” owing to its recycled household and industrial plastic content. Skandiform and Charlotte von der Lancken’s Tinnef table won three Best of NeoCon awards in November, including ones for innovation and sustainability thanks largely to its surface made of yogurt cups and water bottles. Patcraft’s Spatial Palette, a modular carpeting system containing about 27 post-consumer recycled bottles in each of its tiles, won a Silver.

“We have an overload of plastic in our oceans and landfills, and as 21st-century humans, we even have plastic in our bodies. So, I think it’s important to try to recycle plastic as much as possible,” says regenerative design expert Laurence Carr, who is also CEO and creative director of her namesake firm and ambassador of the Sustainable Furnishings Council. 

Oceanworks is one organization that partners with manufacturers seeking recycled stock. U.K.-based company Smile Plastics was founded to manufacture the recycled plastic panels that other companies and designers use in their products; its mission is to make “the most beautiful circular plastics in the world.”

Does this middleman sourcing clarify best practices or further muddy the recycling waters? “That role may be a part of the solution,” says Carr. “I see it as a positive: People who take care of this part of the supply chain and try to find ways to use waste, transform it. Because that’s what we want, a kind of new product.”

Supernovas was founded on that exact viewpoint, developing all of its collections to use recovered plastic trash. “We do this every day by diverting postconsumer and postindustrial waste away from landfills to make our collections, and by physically removing it from shores and beaches, as we did with One Ocean Foundation in Sardinia last summer,” says Rossi, adding “Then we figure out how to transform it into useful products.”

To be fair, all of this activity seems to be occurring while companies search for permanent replacements for synthetic plastics, so it could subside when production of virgin plastics ceases. A short-term goal is to accelerate a circular use of plastic already in play. For example, Skandiform purchases the recycled tops it uses for the Tinnef table from a third-party processor, instead of manufacturing them: “In striving to reduce fossil-based material, we need to [divert] the material we already have,” says von der Lancken, whose Stockholm-based studio CVDLAB designed the table. “Not that we will be able to reduce all waste, but new products should be designed with materials that can be integrated into a circular supply chain.”

Beyond that, the ideal next stage in addressing man-made plastics is to stop using them, and to transition to biobased alternatives. Having previously developed products with biomaterials scientists, von der Lancken says she can think of many natural sources, including cellulose and lignin, a plant-based class of organic polymers. “There are many sources of feedstock that can replace today’s plastics,” she says. For this purpose, as in other aspects of life, “diversity is good.” 

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• 3Form
• Kelly Beamon
• Patcraft
• recycling
• Supernovas

• Sustainability

Changing Seats

“Seventeen billion pounds of office furniture gets dumped in our landfills every year in the United States,” entrepreneur Brandi Susewitz points out. And as a former furniture dealer in the Bay Area, she knows exactly why—companies undertake an office refresh or expansion every few years, but put off making a plan for their old furniture until it’s too late to do anything but pay someone to dump their chairs. In response, Susewitz and her husband, Eric, launched an online marketplace for used furniture in 2020. On Reseat’s website, facility managers can register every single piece of furniture in their workplace so when the time comes, they can find a buyer, set a fair price, and even have Reseat handle the logistics end to end for them. It’s a win-win for sellers, buyers, and the planet, Susewitz says: “Reseat also shows you how much carbon you’re saving by using existing furniture instead of new.” 

Eco Translator

One of the challenging aspects of sustainable design is that every product category has its own ecolabels and certifications. Decision makers often find themselves in a quandary—should they pick a Red List–free option or a fully recyclable product? Is post- or pre-consumer recycled content better? Enter Design for Health, a new tool from sustainability start-up MindClick. “It’s a digital studio for healthy interiors,” says JoAnna Abrams, MindClick’s CEO and founder. Building on years of expertise working with product manufacturers and the hospitality giant Marriott, MindClick assesses thousands of products, translating ecolabels, factory visits, and process audits into robust ratings on health and sustainability. These ratings feed into Design for Health, enabling any decision maker—designer, purchasing agent, or client—to understand, at every stage of the project, how a combination of products aligns with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards or other project goals. “We help you make sense of all the ecolabels,” Abrams says, “and we make reporting easy.”

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• Avinash Rajagopal
• furniture
• low carbon
• MindClick
• Reseat

• Sustainability
• Technology

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• Biophilia
• book
• Dragon Rock
• Ethan Tucker
• Russel Wright

• History
• Preservation

Disruption in technology is often associated with negative consequences like social disorder, environmental degradation, and economic marginalization. Facebook (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg summed up this ethos with his early motto “Move fast and break things.” But disruption can also be beneficial. When done right, it can encourage health, wellness, efficiency, and equity. In that spirit, Metropolis is thrilled to share the winners of its first Responsible Disruptors program, honoring A&D technology projects that represent significant change for the better. 

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• Erin Langner
• Responsible Disruptors

• Architecture
• Sustainability
• Technology

Inviting as visions of the metaverse can be—a 3D stroll through Barcelona, avatars kissing, selling your side-hustle NFTs for mad Bitcoin—the real-world price of virtuality is alarmingly high and climbing. Nothing “internet” happens without megatons of hardware, those hot racks of servers in highly secured data centers (DCs) that sprawl in the most unimaginative way across hectares of former farmland. Humans have built more than seven million DCs (around 3,000 in the United States, which has the most) in varying shapes and sizes, but have largely failed to limit the carbon emissions embodied in their building materials and released to generate the enormous amount of electricity necessary to power and cool these structures daily. According to University of Washington (UW) construction management professor Dr. Hyun Woo “Chris” Lee, the entire DC industry accounts for roughly 2 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions, and in the United States alone, the facilities use as much energy each year as the entire state of California. 

“Demand is spiking and it’s getting worse,” says Lee. “It’s time for us to take action.” 

Drs. Julie Kriegh (lead instructor) and Chris Lee with Jan Whittington, UW College of Built Environments colleagues, spent 2020 doing just that, leading a multidisciplinary studio that challenged architecture students from UW, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania to reimagine the modern data center, from design and material use to the role DCs play in our communities, all with the intent of getting to net zero any way they could. Google sponsored the course, offering funding and visiting advisors, and Microsoft hosted a kick-off workshop and sent DC experts to review the students’ work as well.

“We were looking for ways to turn a problem into a solution,” says Kriegh, an architect and UW affiliate professor, who brought Passive House experience and an expertise in sustainability tipping points to the class. “These companies are so large and data center growth is so rapid, they can drive the market with demand for lower-carbon materials,” she says.

The students broke up into six teams based on different climate geographies and set about calculating the impact of lower-carbon materials like recycled steel or alternatives to traditional concrete. And because data centers tend to be gutted every decade as server and microchip technology progresses, they experimented with designs that were modular and reusable. 

Valarie Milbrath was a UW senior double-majoring in architectural design and construction management on the Phoenix team. She says traditional DCs look “like Costco but bigger.” She got excited when her team started pondering the aesthetic and structural potential of rammed earth sourced on-site.

“If you’re going to excavate dirt to build walls, you have a hole in the ground, so we realized we could just be in the hole,” she says. “The less surface area you have exposed to 100-degree weather in a place like Phoenix, the less heat you take in.” 

Milbrath’s team took a stab at lowering operational carbon emissions by topping off their structure with a wing of solar panels to power an admin area. 

“The design students would say, ‘What would happen if we did this?’” Milbrath says. “I’d plug in my equations and say, ‘Here’s the difference. Go forth!’” 

Other teams took on the challenge to design small “edge cloud” DCs that could be part of urban life in city centers like Seattle, Detroit, and New York. They imagined more vertical structures that used the waste heat from servers to do things like warm a public greenhouse. Their ideas were compiled in a final report (with Kriegh as the lead author) that went back to Google and Microsoft. 

The world’s tech companies are not impervious to lower-carbon practices and sometimes situate new DCs next to renewable energy sources. More than 370 data centers around the globe are LEED-certified (often for operations), including an Apple facility in Guian, China. But that number still represents only a fraction of the global tech construction boom. 

Meanwhile, the industry has a brand-new employee: Milbrath went to work for the builder Mortenson’s DC group right after she graduated from UW. “I hear rumors that people are considering low-carbon concrete for the next job,” she says. “I have some hope.”

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• Audrey Gray
• Data Centers
• Metaverse
• University of Washington

• Architecture
• Cities