In San Francisco, the latest tech office has the cultural prominence a lavish restaurant or fancy boutique would elsewhere. As the battle to entice technical talent continues, designers strive to outdo the competition with their imaginative environments.
Erich Mendelsohn's Schocken Department Store in Chemnitz, completed in 1930, is well known to architects worldwide. Yet encountering the recently renovated early-20th-century landmark will be a revelation, even for those familiar with it.
A striking mix of glossy black walls and white light, the Vegamar Selección, a wine boutique on an exclusive shopping street in Valencia, Spain, was given the black-tie treatment by architect Fran Silvestre and interior designer Andrés Alfaro Hofmann to meet the client's ambition to achieve an image of sophistication and quality.
Many San Francisco startups inhabit industrial warehouse spaces: the lofty, open structures readily adapt to become modern workshops for artisanal software development.
Machine for Viewing: The renovation of the top floors of a 1960s apartment building created in an airy triplex with breathtaking panoramic views of Rio de Janeiro.
“In Rio, the landscape comes to you,” Brazilian architect Arthur Casas says about his commission to renovate a penthouse apartment in Rio de Janeiro's Urca neighborhood. Casas, who has an office in São Paulo, plus one in New York City, had quite a landscape to work with.