The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and address issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.
EPISODE 2 will focus on the future of the office. Our guests will be Eliot Postma, partner at London-based Heatherwick Studio, and Verda Alexander, co-founder of San Francisco-based O+A. Postma is leading Heatherwick’s design for Google’s HQ campus in Mountainview, California; a flexible, permeable complex that is reimagining what offices can be. He has worked on projects for Heatherwick ranging from the transformation of the 14-acre Olympia London site, the Bund Finance Center in Shanghai, and Bateau, a futuristic riverboat on the Loire River in France. Alexander, winner of a 2016 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, has helped spearhead her firm’s creations for companies like Nike, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Slack, and dozens more. Her artistic initiatives have challenged the status quo in office design, and in 2018 she launched a small studio within O+A to work exclusively on experimental projects and unconventional interventions. She recently completed The Food for Thought Truck, a mobile design studio that took a team of designers on the road to work with local communities throughout California.
The series is co-hosted by New York-based architectural writer Sam Lubell, who has written ten books about architecture, and contributes regularly to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Wallpaper, Dwell, and Architectural Digest; and Bangalore-based Social Entrepreneur Prathima Manohar, a contributor to The Times of India and founder of think do tank The Urban Vision. Our goal is to provide an international perspective, mixing guests from different continents. ArchDaily is the main media partner for this series.