Project Description
Our design process began with a deep dive into the legacies that precede Corporate Environments. We explored the history of Florence and Hans Knoll and their contemporaries–the modern masters they worked closely with, including Mies van der Rohe, to produce the iconic workplace furniture loved for decades and still produced by Knoll’s exacting standards today. We studied the details of the existing 1960s warehouse building and it’s consistent, though subtle, references to Mies van der Rohe. We developed an appreciation for the modernist dream of pre-fab mass customization present in DIRTT. What we found through our design research was that Mies formed a common thread in all three legacies, thus providing a lens through which we could conceptualize the whole project. We set out to pull all the myriad complexities of the design problem into a simple Miesian composition, logical and architectural while rich in material expression.