Our work is always a concerted effort to share our process among residential, commercial, workspace, and furniture assignments. I am a strong believer that conceptual thought can transcend scale, and that scale is the ultimate tool for its expression. Recent projects have been a constant dance, an intellectual interaction, of designing a home on the beach for two landscape architects, designing a restaurant for a talented pastry chef, and designing innovative environments for automobile designers. The scales are immensely different: 3,000 sf to 7,000S sf to 25,000 sf to 45,000 sf. The fascinating discovery is that each informs the other.Influences/Exchanges/Interconnections: How It Seems to WorkHouse to Nissan Studio: The Nissan design studio at Detroit has a long and generous loggia space that is the connective tissue between 400 engineers and 30 designers. It is an active space that changes as staff communicate through visual image, modeling, and prototyping. In the scheme of things, this is the public landscape of the design process. There is a very private room that protrudes slightly into this space. This private space is a huge redwood clad volume, which houses the power wall. It is a secure space where designs are shared and finessed globally. When closed, this room is secret, accessible only to those privileged to the sensitive information within. At any moment, however, the 20 foot by 30 foot wall can be slid open to reveal a space that shares the image of a finished product with its public audience. A precursor, or lesson, brought to the Nissan wall was the stainless steel door of the home on the beach. Closed, these elements are striking signifiers of a private and mysterious space beyond. Open, they offer the rich sharing of experience, thought, and creativity that transforms the private to public instantaneously.Nissan Studio to House and Restaurant:Our work with Nissan has further intensified our fascination with material and how it transforms both space and sensation. Working closely with the Nissan studio designers, we shared creative solutions in the use of materials in both the automotive and architectural environments. We gained access to innovative methods of working with materials, with metals in particular. Our palette became clear and concise; stainless, aluminum, steel, rubber, felt, and wood. In automotive design, art and craft come from shaping metal into a form meant for speed. In architectural terms, this translated into an art form, Nissan’s exterior viewing courtyard, their 'egg'. Then, at a different scale, the restaurant’s formal translation of this approach is its public street image, its facade. In manipulating perforated metal with Nissan, we discovered a method of articulating a screen/facade for Extraordinary Desserts. Both interpretations were art: the first, the egg, defined volume; the second, the lacy skin of the building, defined transitional space. In the design of both of Nissan's studios, in Detroit and La Jolla, California, we were challenged by the constant interplay between the industrial nature of the automotive process and the human desire to be surrounded by an innovative, refined environment. We balance stone to wood to glass in our projects; here we learned to balance rough to finished, industrial to sophisticated, and vast to intimate. From this constant study we progressed to meet a similar challenge at the house. The clients enjoyed the satisfaction of exploring fine detail and yet had no desire to live in a overly precious space. They desired a truly industrial cooking space but wanted it to be set directly in the center of the house. They loved the expression of steel floors and motorized doors but wanted woods and hand-crafted details for balance. Our work at Nissan taught us about the curiosity of the human mind for that which is mechanical but helped us to understand the balance of touch. Texture, color, and intimacy of material ultimately provide the counterpoints that make space humane.