"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 — LEAD Inc.

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. — New York Times

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. — NYT