We are excited to announce Allsteel & Union Office Interiors ‘Fell in Love’ with PAYETTE’s design entry for the Gather furniture contest and awarded PAYETTE with the Grand Prize.
What is it all about?
In mid-January, Union Office and Allsteel paired up to invite design firms from New England to enter their ‘Fall in Love’ design contest. The premise was to re-design a specific area in your firm’s office, or within a general 1,000 sq. ft. space, using Allsteel’s ‘Gather’ line of furniture to create an area reflecting how you’d like to collaborate as a firm.
We are honored one of our three submissions, Invite, won the competition and take home the grand prize from Allsteel, $15,000 to spend on their furniture to turn our ideas into a tangible reality.
Why we entered
The opportunity to enter the ‘Fall in Love’ contest came at the perfect time. As a firm relocating our office two years ago, we seized the opportunity to design a new work place to re-energize the spirits of our firm and promote cross-studio dialogue across one open floor plan. In the past two short years, we noticed certain designated ‘collaborative zones’ are underutilized and need to be reevaluated in order to serve their intended purpose and to reinforce our firm’s core values.
The Design Process
Our team visited our local Allsteel showroom to test out the Gather collection and to get a feel for the furniture we would work with in our entries. From this visit we figured out what items we could see realistically being used by our firm and in the spaces we wanted to redesign.
For two weeks, we held regular team meetings to track our progress resulting our final three submissions Invite, Provoke and Activate. We brainstormed solutions for furniture layouts, colors, textures and visuals to create three compelling entries that spoke to both our firm and the products used from Allsteel.
Winning Entry: Invite
Invite captures the essence of what Allsteel hopes to provide with their Gather furniture, and is a verb we hope will describe our firm’s platform space.
The design is influenced by our team’s comments, and from feedback on our firm-wide post-occupancy survey. The ‘Invite’ concept creates a welcoming living room with informal areas meant for casual lunches, reading magazines or team brainstorms and offers privacy from the open office below.
Stay tuned to see our other two entries, Activate and Provoke, which we’ll showcase next week.
The PAYETTE Team
Ian Adamson, Milly Baker, Susan Blomquist, Mary Gallagher, Kristyn Hill, Cara Pomeranz, Karen Robichaud
View the complete Invite entry.
Read the Allsteel announcement about the competition.
Sandrine Héroux, Sophie McKenzie, and Emily Chowdhury are each members of our in-house Fabrication team. Their day-to-day work centers on a simple question: what changes when design becomes something people can physically test?
These women challenge the notion of fabrication as a support service, framing it instead as an essential component of architectural authorship, a way to test ideas, share agency, and widen the boundaries of what architectural practice can include.
In our most recent blog, they discuss their individual paths in architecture and reflect on their experience using fabrication as a tool for fostering shared agency, community engagement and broadening the role of the architect. Link in bio!
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