Practice: Materials

The rise of the co-working space has been spurred by demand, but so, too, has the cost of renting a desk at these venues. For those looking for an alternative, Open Lobby is a network of affordable public co-working spaces in the underused, overlooked lobbies of office towers in Midtown East, idly marking the boundary between the public sidewalk and the private offices above despite their premium zip codes. Open Lobby activates these sites — the ideal site for this public-private partnership — as a productive public space. Open Lobby will manage the physical spaces, the urban policy mechanisms, and the financial structures that support it.

Rita Catinella Orrell was previously products editor at Architectural Record and the founding editor of Snap, a quarterly building products magazine. she launched DesignyThings.com, a curated list of gifts, gadgets, and gear for consumers, in 2011, and Architects-Toybox.com, a resource for architects and designers looking for the latest building products, in 2013. This post originally…

Alucobond is the Kleenex of aluminum composite material: comprising two sheets of 0.02-inch-thick al uminum thermobonded to a core material, Alucobond has become synonymous with ACM. One reason why the brand is so trusted by the design community is that it has long been used to resist fire. Just several years after the product’s 1964 launch,…

IMAESTRI, as company founder and CEO Paolo Timoni describes it, is a “marketing and distribution pla tform for small leading-edge design companies.” The year-old business rigorously vets little-known Italian manufacturers and, if they pass muster, makes those producers accessible to designers and consumers via its members-only website — a hybrid destination in which e-commerce meets art…

The parking garage is a routinely overlooked architectural typology: a necessary structure, but rare ly one that garners much attention. Cook Children’s Health Care System — a Forth Worth, Texas, pediatric hospital listed by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation’s best — thought differently, tapping the potential of the ancillary piece of…

Rita Catinella Orrell was previously products editor at Architectural Record and the founding editor of Snap, a quarterly building products magazine. she launched DesignyThings.com, a curated list of gifts, gadgets, and gear for consumers, in 2011, and Architects-Toybox.com, a resource for architects and designers looking for the latest building products, in 2013. This post originally…

As the anchor event of NYCxDesign and North America’s largest showcase of global design, ICFF is just a week and a half away. Now in its 27th year, the show promises to be bigger and better than ever, a design destination for not only New York-based architects and designers but exhibitors and attendees from the…

After a record-breaking show in 2014, Dwell on Design LA returns to the Los Angeles Convention Cente r for its 10th annual show May 29–31, 2015. From humble beginnings in San Francisco, Dwell on Design has grown to be the largest design event in the country, hitting record attendance numbers of 31,000+ and expanding to New…

Jim Toole is a FLOS frosh. In June 2014, he joined the Italian manufacturer as VP of its decade-old architectural lighting arm. Toole was trained as an industrial designer and says he made the leap (from Cooper Lighting) for FLOS’s product line — “they’re creating the most interesting designs and working on the most interesting…