Archinect - News

A Minneapolis Warehouse Reborn as Artist-style Chiropractic Office

2012-05-24T16:04:00-04:00

"Beauty is not an additive act but rather a coherent aesthetic. Anything else would be irrelevant. We have been advocating a total and integral environment for both physical and mental wellbeing, in other words, a healthy environment must work on all levels." - Ali Heshmati, '92 graduate from the School of Architecture at College of Design

Darin Duch, Associate Intern Architect at Laboratory for Environments, Architecture, and Design (LEAD, Inc.), and Ali Heshmati, owner of LEAD Inc., recently completed work on Ambiente Gallerie, a new artist-style chiropractic office located in Northeast Minneapolis. Duch and Heshmati both graduated from the School of Architecture in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota.

The project was designed for Dr. Kari Boudreau, who wanted to integrate art and design into a healing space for her business, formerly Art of Chiropractic. The 1910 warehouse has an open space flanked with exposed brick walls decked with original paintings, floating cloud lighting, and sheer fabric convertible rooms that resemble ultra modern pods. The massage and exam rooms utilize curved, boomerang pivot doors, "Duchamp doors" covered with a translucent skin of fiberglass that offer privacy without feeling confined.

"Beauty is not an additive act but rather a coherent aesthetic. Anything else...

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

2012-05-20T11:18:00-04:00

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor.

Open Doors form Open Minds?

2012-03-19T14:07:00-04:00

The architects often walk clients through it to show how an open environment works. There’s not a private office or cubicle anywhere, and there’s constant low-level hubbub: people in motion, and gathering into small groups. The tour makes some clients nervous; they wonder how their own workers would concentrate in such an environment.

Lawrence Cheek examines new trends in office designs which focus on providing employees room to roam and thus to think. Specifically, he looks at three examples the Seattle offices of Russell Investment, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters as well the offices of the architectural firm be hind the first two examples, NBBJ which occupies two 38,000-square-foot floors of a midrise office building it designed in 2006.