The 20th anniversary of the awards program honors Thomas Phifer, IwamotoScott, and SCAPE Landscape Architecture, among others, for their excellence in design.
In San Francisco, the latest tech office has the cultural prominence a lavish restaurant or fancy boutique would elsewhere. As the battle to entice technical talent continues, designers strive to outdo the competition with their imaginative environments.
Open Platform: Treating weighty materials with a light hand, a local design team transforms a former warehouse into a communal workspace for cloud developers.
The cloud has an image problem. The term — which refers to the distributed networks of servers that store data and power all kinds of Internet services — gets tossed around a lot, but it doesn't evoke much beyond a vague nimbus of Amazon orders and MP3 files.
Owner: Obscura Digital Completion Date: December 2010 (main interior), July 2011 (ScreenWall) Program: A three-story, 36,000-square-foot headquarters for an interactive media company, with a large multifunctional showroom and exhibition area, prototyping workshop spaces, workstations for digital production, offices, and a conference room. The project is an adaptive reuse of a 1940s concrete and steel-frame warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. IwamotoScott's office shares the building, with an office on the second floor. Design concept and solution: The architects set out to give Obscura Digital a raw yet more refined version of their previous headquarters, a warehouse on Bryant