Modern Flair Meets Art Deco In This New York Office

2024 Best of Year Winner for Small Financial Office

For new digs at 45 Rockefeller Plaza, Confidential investment firm sought a workplace that would balance gravitas with employee comfort. In response, Gensler strategically excised portions of a floor slab to create grand double-height spaces. The intervention also accommodates a glass-box mezzanine library carpeted in plush rust-colored silk-wool broadloom. On the floor below is the reception lounge, where a Nakashima Edition rug pairs with nesting Guilherme Torres tables and Minotti sofas, a setting that’s residential in feel. Throughout, metal accents such as Stickbulb’s nickel chandeliers in the 20-foot boardroom honor the landmarked 1933 New York building’s art deco heritage. Elsewhere, pockets of greenery provide the benefits of biophilia.

PROJECT TEAM: LAURENT LISIMACHIO; JULIETTE POUSSOT; JOE HYNN YANG; ALESSANDRA SHORTEN; NAOMI NOTTINGHAM; FANCH TSENG; ASKLY CHIRAYIL; KATHRYN MORSE; AUDREY STROM; TYLER DENNISON.

Inside Centennial College’s New, Zero-Carbon Addition

2024 Best of Year Winner for Larger Higher Education

A mass-timber, zero-carbon structure, the 133,000-square-foot, six-story addition to Centennial College’s School of Engineering Technology and Applied Science in Scarborough, Canada, comprises of flexible classrooms, collaborative spaces, administrative offices, a café, and a courtyard that’s also an outdoor classroom. A-Building, by Dialog and Smoke Architecture, integrates Indigenous principles and cultural markers with a contemporary aesthetic, an ethos reflected in such elements as the Wisdom Hall, a central atrium with bleacher seating enriched by artwork on wooden ceiling baffles evoking traditional Ojibwa canoe paddles; the Indigenous Commons, a domed, circular space for gathering and ceremony, embodying the principles of Anishinabe roundhouse design; and an exterior cladding of aluminum “fish scales” that suggests animal skin and gives the sense that the building itself is alive.

PROJECT TEAM: CHEN COHEN; CRAIG APPLEGATH; JUAN CARLOS PORTUESE; JASON D’ALTROY; FARAH AL AMIN; CAMILLE GANUELAS; KELLY DEMINGS; MEL FAIFMAN; MAYA JARRAH (DIALOG); ELADIA SMOKE; LARISSA ROQUE; CHELSEA JACOBS; JULIE BÉDARD (SMOKE ARCHITECTURE).

Discover This Shanghai Office Enlivened By The Color Red

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Financial Office

A massive, twist of spray-painted, 3-D printed acrylic weaves through the seven-story, 102,300-square-foot workplace for ChangJiang Securities Company in Shanghai, which was designed by M Moser Associates. It begins on the lowest level, where an atrium contains reception, and rises, entwined with a staircase that connects the upper floors. The ribbon continues even when the staircase is interrupted by the building’s structure; it simply takes a slenderer form and pirouettes in the middle of a circular seating area before traversing the slab and continuing upward, along a second staircase, to an atrium on the highest level. The installation’s color—vibrant red, which signifies happiness, prosperity, and celebration in Chinese culture—also appears elsewhere. The same hue enlivens an honor display wall where ChangJiang can show off industry awards, the seating and carpet in the aforementioned circular lounge, and even the lone desk chair appointing a meeting room equipped with modular furniture.

PROJECT TEAM: JOSEPH WANG; CAI JIA; JESSIE ZHENG; MICHAEL HSIAO; KEN ZENG; JOEY YU; CORA DENG; HELLEN GAO; ZOE WEI; KEVIN CHEN; LEO LEI.

Bible Verses Inform The Design Of Thailand’s Church Of Joy

2024 Best of Year Winner for Building Façade

The interplay of light, shadow, and geometry is driven by sacred meaning in the Church of Joy by Department of Architecture Co., with the architectural details referencing Bible verses. Cascading precast-concrete pleats enveloping the 5,400-square-foot con­gre­gation hall in Bangkok, Thailand, recall the “curtain” of Exodus 26:33, symbolizing the separation and the connection between the spiritual and the mortal. A dichroic Covenant Cross re­fracts sunlight into a spectrum of colors, embodying Genesis 9:16’s “rainbow.” By night, the illuminated cross trans­forms the structure into a radiant beacon, echoing the “light of the world” in Matthew 5:14-15. At this intersection of divine faith and worldly design is a place for worship that’s no less beautiful to more secular passersby.

PROJECT TEAM: AMATA LUPHAIBOON; TWITEE VAJRABHAYA TEPARKUM; WARAPHAN WATANAKAROON; PONGPAT POLSORN.

Inside Julie Hillman Design’s Refreshed Madison Avenue Office

2024 Best of Year Winner for Firm’s Own Office

Rather than relocate from the Madison Avenue address it has inhabited for 12 years, Julie Hillman Design opted for renovation and reconfiguration to accommodate growth. Prioritizing enhanced functionality, light, and flow, the 2,500-square-foot space was opened up by razing the wall separating an accounting office and the sample room, creating a front-to-back railroad effect. At rear is the design studio, daylit by windows on three sides, with additional illumination coming from a giant Isamu Noguchi lantern; it’s installed above timber work tables and Jean Prouvé chairs. The sample room, now at center, doubles as conference and breakout space. Reception was reinvented as a sitting room with Verner Panton chairs, a cowhide rug, and a vintage sofa. For her own office, Hillman installed a 1950’s glass-and-brass Georges Addor desk she’d long coveted, along with Swedish monk chairs. Equally as curated as the furnishings is pervasive art—French, Italian, American—in various mediums. It’s no accident the New York atelier resembles the firm’s tony residential projects.

PROJECT TEAM: JULIE HILLMAN.

Explore Google’s Energizing New York HQ

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Tech Office

The 1.3 million-square-foot North American headquarters by Cookfox Architects and Gensler for the tech giant’s Global Business Organization comprises a three-story, 1930’s brick building in St. John’s Terminal, New York,—a former railroad terminus—topped with nine new overbuild levels. Pairing sensory-rich physical spaces with on-demand programming, the new and historic portions work together to create an energized workplace for 3,000 employees and their visitors, featuring flexible work areas, biophilia, and hospitality-infused common spaces. Google’s research shows that innovation thrives in small, tight-knit teams working towards common goals, thus workspaces follow a shared neighborhood seating model providing each group with an assigned area as its home base. These zones aren’t uniform but include a variety of desks, meeting rooms, phone booths, and communal tables to support different types of work, helping foster greater levels of social connection and team cohesion.

Transform Spaces With These Tetris-Inspired Bookshelves

2024 Best of Year Winner for Residential Storage

Italian manufacturer Desalto garnered a win in the Residential Storage category for Rebus, a modular bookcase system that’s molto elegante. Conceived by Milanese designer Francesco Rota (also the brand’s art director since 2023), the sinuous unit neatly corrals clutter. Inspired by the video game Tetris, five multidirectional and stackable square, rectangular, L-, and Z-shape elements, made of 3-mm-thick bent and painted metal, provide endless options for configuration. Ingeniously, the modules inter­connect via magnets. Bold goose-bill orange and cobalt blue are among the 17 standard colorways adding to the fun.

Landscape Forms Introduces A Sleek Outdoor Silhouette

2024 Best of Year Winner for Outdoor Furniture Collection

Michigan manufacturer Landscape Forms’s foray into cushioned outdoor seating landed with a bang, winning best Outdoor Furniture Collection. A sinuously bent rod seamlessly traces the perimeter of Monterey—forming the back, arms, and legs of the club chair, sofa, or sectional. Welded and powder-coated metal rods provide slat-effect bracing, cradling seat and back cushions covered in Summit Furniture’s Tradewind weather- and abrasion-resistant performance fabric. It’s all finished with French seams, concealed zippers, and a sartorial dart on each corner for a snug fit.

This Retail Locale For Drones Features A Test-Flight Park

2024 Best of Year Winner for Retail

The flagship location of DJI, one of the foremost producers of camera drones and stabilizers, obviously had to incorporate a test-flight park. The landscaped grounds of this 43,000-square-foot renovated store by Various Associates, now has a spectacular one dubbed the DJI Oasis, with ramps traversing soft lawns that also sprout artful drone-control towers. For the new interior in Shenzen, China, a metal-slat skin traces the building’s irregular pyramidal form, simultaneously emphasizing the dynamic structure and providing solar shading. The four floors offer sci-fi-esque zones for sales, product experiences, customer support, and training, while a grand staircase twists and turns on its way to an alfresco viewing platform on the second floor—a prime spot for watching drones at play.

PROJECT TEAM: QIANYI LIN; DONGZI YANG; HANQUN CAI; YUWEN DENG; ZEBING LI; BENZHEN PAN; CHAO LUO; JUNRUI ZHANG; QIAN XIE; YUE ZHANG.

Explore Stylish And Sustainable Indoor/Outdoor Rugs

2024 Best of Year Winner for Environmental Impact: Flooring

Inuit and Tuareg communities are nomadic, moving in search of resources and pastures for their animals. “Since they cannot carry more than light-weight elements, essentially, they build their homes with fabrics, rugs, and cushions,” designer Alejandra Gandía-Blasco Lloret notes. Her Nomad collection of indoor/outdoor rugs and stackable cushions is inspired by such lifestyles, and made with 100 percent recycled PET—netting the collection a Best of Year Award for Environmental Impact: Flooring. The patterns themselves are based on Indigenous Indian designs that Gan explored during research into how recycled PET fibers behave on a loom. Those samples are now the fabrics of Nomad, in two chromatic ranges: Inuit in neutral, pink, and gray, and Tuareg, in blue, taupe, and white.