Hasta La Ideas

The first thing that strikes you upon viewing the new Ziba headquarters is its size. It takes up most of the streetfront on two sides of a block on the edge of Portland’s Pearl District, floating with unlikely grace atop an expanse of vacant retail space.

That space, founder Sohrab Vossoughi explains, serves several functions: once rented, the retail will help offset the considerable expense of construction; it encompasses some portions of the headquarters that would be less practical on higher floors, like the model shop and parking space for 60 bicycles; and it elevates studios and project rooms full of confidential material out of easy view. This “box on a plinth” construction has already been explored by Portland’s giddy architecture press, and the effect is oddly charming: a sparse, airy box whose presence has been literally jacked up. The moment of the building’s unveiling, too, adds to the impression of loftiness and improbability: at a time when design consultancies across the globe are shedding staff and costs, the construction of anything grander than a shack imparts a sense of optimism bordering on foolhardiness.

What’s been created here is somewhat more than a shack though, and when compared to most design firms, it’s hard to get over how big the place is. 42,000 is a lot of square feet for a studio, especially when they’re replacing just 26,000 of them, in a far less iconic, more cloistered space a few blocks away. Once inside, the sense of bigness intensifies, in part due to the sightlines of the two “streets” that stretch the length and breadth of the building, but also because of the unexpected interconnections that stitch the various sub-spaces together. Our half hour tour had Sohrab and I ducking from shop to auditorium to kitchen to library in sequences unexpected enough to evoke secret passageways or games of “Clue” — “Oh, it’s very much on purpose,” he explained. “We want to keep people interacting and mixing, all the time.”

The mixing intention is persistent, in every aspect of the space. Desks are communal affairs, small segments of longer six-person tables, which everyone questioned agreed are adequate but retain a temporary feel: “This’ll probably all be completely different six months from now,” explained Interaction Design lead Bill DeRouchey, in an excited and slightly exasperated tone, though this probably has as much to do with the timing of the tour, on Ziba’s first day of official occupancy, as anything else.

The tour, summarized here in a six-minute video, highlighted a few other features too, ranging from sensible to odd. The “street” analogy is, for instance, part of a larger framework based on urban design terms, including “plazas” and “neighborhoods” where the work gets done. They’re still hashing out the terminology (other designers referred to the same communal spaces as “pods” and “design bays”) but the logic is reasonable: individual workspace is general and mixed, while most of the work is conducted in adjoining, client-specific project rooms.

more photos after the jump

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Every once in a while, the “no spec” debate flares up again, and so it has once more. This time the controversy surrounds blogger Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling book The 4-Hour Workweek. As he prepares for the launch of his next book, the writer decided to kick off a short design competition to come up with a cover for said new book. In exchange, he’d pick four winners and give each $250, with perhaps one of the covers actually making it through to publication (Ferriss warns from the start that the publisher might decide to just go with whatever they come up with in-house, in which case nothing gets used). Of course, this was all very ripe for the anti-spec crowd, who quickly jumped all over the competition, claiming it unfair and disrespectful to designers and asking if Ferriss would enjoy writing his books with the hopes of maybe, possibly getting a paltry $250 if someone deemed it worthy. All of this forced the writer to update the post and answer various comment in the huge swarm that developed, explaining himself and the contest. It’s fairly typical stuff, if you’ve seen any fight develop over spec before. However, our pal Eric Karjaluoto smells a rat about this whole brouhaha. He wonders if this is something Ferriss created as a controversy from the start, intending to get himself in the middle of an anti-spec debate for quick, cheap, and easy free publicity. Per usual, Karjaluoto forms a great essay, getting into a larger view of spec and what’s wrong about Ferriss’ contest from the start, whether it’s a stunt or not.

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Now that GM Exec Bob Lutz has put off his retirement to help turn the company around, he’s making the sweeping changes that only a man with his breadth of experience can. (Lutz was President of Chrysler, a Vice President at Ford, Exec Sales Veep at BMW, and Vice Chairman of Global Product Development at GM, among other positions held in the last 40 years.) Now in charge of GM’s marketing and communications, Lutz is reportedly “[giving] vehicle designers a powerful influence over the look of GM’s advertising.”

After leading GM’s global product-development effort for eight years, Lutz is back where he started 40 years ago at Opel in Germany–in the world of ads and brand management. He is bringing with him his passion for product design.

…”Designers are going to have their fingers in everything,” he said. “Ed [Welburn, Global Design Chief] has been one of the sharpest critics on how our vehicles are presented in ads.”

Read the business deets here.

via crains detroit

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We picked some of our faves for the latest IDEA Awards this week, but Valerie Casey’s got a fun piece up about designers and their beloved forms. She was actually a judge on the thing, but noticed some conspicuous repetitions from the field. Read the piece here for more, and for several other “before and afters.”

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While times have been tough for starchitects lately, from Richard Rogers‘ projects disappearing to Zaha Hadid‘s and Norman Foster‘s mass layoffs, it sounds as though rising star David Adjaye has it the worst. Despite his recent conquests including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, landing two libraries in Washington DC, and everyone still going gah-gah over his Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Building Design reports that his nine year old company is deeply in the red. Following a number of canceled jobs, Adjaye now owes at least a million pounds to creditors, forcing him to lay off staffers and seek council on getting the company back in the black. What’s more, the starchitect even put £400,000 of his own money to keep things semi-stable. Yet while the company is suffering, Adjaye seems confident that closing its doors isn’t a concern: “We have enough work on our books and we’re repaying our [Company Voluntary Arrangement] very well so we’re in a good place.” Elsewhere in Building Design, Amanda Baillieu says that the issue isn’t so much with Adjaye’s finances, it’s working with public building projects and having his central office located in the UK that are the larger problems.

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