This Residential Lobby in San Jose, California Offers a Study of Contrasts

2022 Best of Year Winner for Residential Lobby

To borrow from Dionne Warwick, Miro—a pair of mixed-use towers by architects Steinberg Hart—will help you find the way to San Jose: At 28 stories each, they’re the tallest structures in the city’s skyline. Along with 630 residential units, the development includes a plethora of amenities and two lobbies, one for each high-rise, by San Francisco-based Edmonds + Lee. The latter spaces, which span 5,300 square feet in all, are a study in contrasts—one is dark, the other light—though both use wood slats on walls and ceilings to create spatial definition and polished marble in reception areas to produce a sense of quietly substantial luxury. The sophisticated material choices are coupled with an equally urbane mastery of proportion and light, giving both lobbies an unmistakable aura of secure arrival—just the state of mind the lady was looking for in her song.

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Edmonds + Lee Architects: vivian lee; shelley fu; christina yue

Mavis Wiggins of TPG Architecture: 2022 Hall of Fame Inductee

Ceaselessly generous, effortlessly elegant, and indelibly humane, Mavis Wiggins thrives in the “and”: that beautiful landscape between nuance and subtlety, art and design, the said and the unsaid. Her colleagues at TPG Architecture, where she serves as managing executive and studio creative director, consider her something of a client whisperer for entities from DZ Bank to Irving Place Capital, who tend to emerge from their collaboration as design evangelists in their own right. “Mavis’s clients know every design decision is important to the success of the project,” TPG managing executive and studio creative director Suzette Subance Ferrier explains. “That is because she includes them in the process and educates them, so that they become an advocate for the design scheme.” Adds TPG managing associate and creative director Ricardo Nabholz, “Mavis understands clients better than they understand themselves. She shows them a vision of their future that fulfills their every aspiration and responds to needs that have yet to be articulated and offers them the opportunity to build that vision.”

Behind the “Mavis Mantra”

The “Mavis mantra” equates the design process to a revelatory and bottom line–affirming journey that requires seeing the arc between what is needed and what can be achieved. “I first determine how I can best help a client, really help them, and therefore improve their business acumen by guiding them through a remarkable journey together,” the workplace specialist says. “My mission is to help them see what is possible.” Her vision is truly multidimensional and peripheral, allowing her to look, see, and interpret from a multiplicity of stances. “What sets Mavis apart is her understanding of both space and occupants,” says Howard Albert, chief risk officer of insurance company Assured Guaranty, its New York workplace TPG completed in 2016. “She spent the time to understand exactly how we work and collaborate in the office, finding a way to be true to her aesthetic while really hearing what we were saying.”

“Seeing the possible” is Wiggins’s guiding principle, in life as in design. Her clear and coherent vision was honed by an early interest in photography and fine art. Growing up in Berkeley, California, in the 1960’s, Wiggins was deeply influenced and affected by the multicultural mix of that time and place—one that saw peace and turbulence, youthful uprising and middle-aged malaise, civil rights and social unrest. The era’s musical culture left a lasting impression, too: Wiggins still finds joy in the wall of sound that surrounded her then. “Sly Stone was a radio DJ at the time and played a crazy range of artists in the morning as we got dressed for school,” she recalls. “Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Smokey Robinson—my personal sound­track then is my playlist now.”

Wiggins took her love of the visual arts with her to Brooklyn, New York, where she moved to attend Pratt Institute. She claims the design profession “found” her. “At Pratt, I realized I could shape space and continue to enjoy the fruits of what fine art offers, and even apply some of those principals to interior architecture,” the discipline in which she received her BFA and connected with mentors like Joseph D’Urso and Stanley Felderman.

That desire to shape space in combination with her keen photographer’s eye for composition and framing—and her deep intuition to see place from both a designer’s and the end-users’ perspective—has resulted in a definable signature. During her three-decade career working at a roster of top-tier commercial-design firms (Gensler and HLW among them), Wiggins has become known for interiors that are elegant, serene, rational, and always tethered to place. “Mavis’s work is deeply contextual,” Nabholz says. “There are geographical, architectural, cultural, and organizational touchstones in each project. These come together to create spaces that are as timeless as they are specific to their place and purpose.” Ferrier concurs: “There is a level of clarity to her work that echoes great modernist design but with today’s level of sensitivity.”

Thomas Giannetti, partner and CFO of Lexington Partners, recalls teaming with Wiggins on the firm’s Manhattan headquarters, a project for which TPG was retained just before the pandemic. “Because of COVID, there were more challenges in the build-out than I ever thought possible,” he says. “Mavis’s determination to solve all the issues was tremendous given that we never knew what to expect with the pandemic,” from labor and supply chain issues to health and safety protocols, and even the dissatis­faction of not being able to cross the usual benchmarks and hurdles in the typical order. “Mavis was steadfast,” he continues. “She was determined to finish the project, without compromise, in a way that was seamless to our team.”

Wiggins is equally dogged when it comes to fostering inclusion. Though personally quiet, she speaks up loudly for others as an activist instrumental in increasing diversity in the A&D community, through her thought leadership and her support of fellow BIPOC practitioners. As this author’s personal aside, I stand proudly beside Wiggins as the only two Black women thus far inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame. When asked what our joint selection means in the context of time, she responded, “It means we all have more work to do. And we will.” There it is again: that word. There is beauty in the and—in the elegance and optimism that Mavis Wiggins embodies.

A Closer Look at Projects by Mavis Wiggins 

OMA and Gruen Associates Design Audrey Irmas Pavilion, Los Angeles

2022 IIDA Winner for Public Space and Commercial Lobbies

Designed by architect Abram M. Edelman and built by Hollywood moguls in 1929, Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple is pure Cecil B. DeMille, a camera-ready, domed architectural extravaganza waiting for a cast of 1,000 congregants. But by the second decade of the new millennium, the synagogue was looking to present a more appealing and open public face for a more inclusive mission.

In 2015, the congregation held a competition for an ecumenical “gathering space” to be built on the temple’s parking lot. The brief was simple: rooms—small, medium, large. The architectural issue was how to design a building that neither cowered from nor competed with the synagogue next door.

Led by partner Shohei Shigematsu with associate Jake Forster, OMA won the competition. The architects basically created a five-story, 54,600-square-foot object-building that, from some angles, looks like a truncated pyramid warped in a distortional field.

The interior organization is straightforward to the point of being diagrammatic. Lobbies, conference rooms, reception spaces, and service facilities flank either side of the hall and chapel in simple, orthogonal layouts. On the roof, OMA cut a circle that opens to a glass-enclosed sunken garden one floor below. A symmetrical set of stairs zigzags through an airy atrium, connecting the plaza entry to the chapel and the planted rooftop above.

Including terrace furniture by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the new pavilion is fresh, spirited, and brash­ly colorful. With a jolting change in visual mode, the contrast in eras jumpstarts the campus into the new millennium.

OMA: SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU; jAKE FORSTER; Jesse catalano; david chacon; caroline corbett; nils sanderson; andrea zalewski; natasha trice; marie claude fares; wesley leforce; sandy yum; jade kwong; shary tawil; joanne chen

Gruen Associates: Debra Gerod

NC Design & Architecture Takes Home a Best of Year Award for This Residential Complex in Hong Kong

2021 Best of Year winner for International Lobby/Amenity

Hong Kong is about the last place you would expect to encounter a tree house. Yet there you’ll find a wood cabin with a simple gabled outline that a child might draw, suspended 12 feet above the street amidst tropical foliage. Conceived by NC Design & Architecture principal Nelson Chow, the cabin marks the entrance to a new 30-story residential complex by architecture firm AGC Design. It is also an invitation into a world of curiosity and childlike wonder where, Chow says, “I want people to feel that anything is possible.” Communal amenities span the second floor. A lounge, dining area, and kitchen occupy a terraced corner space overlooking the adjacent forested hillside—a shock of green that’s echoed in the finish on the kitchen cabinetry. Custom French trompe l’oeil wallpaper brings a librarylike calm to the lounge, which is furnished with its own suspended cabin similar to the one down on the street. A third of the floor is dedicated to a play area that includes more of the little structures. Floating above a ball pit, padded activity zone, and reading nook, they are connected by tubes, like a miniature cloud-borne city built for and governed by children.

NC Design & Architecture: Nelson Chow; John Liu; Rain Ho; Rafael Pardo; Jasmine Kong; Eddie Wong

Tomo Design Creates an Ethereal Sales Office in China

When Tomo Design was selected to design a property sales office for the Chinese real estate giant Sunac, they knew a conventional office would not be enough. “Customers want novel, superb, unknown experiences,” said founder Uno Chan. “We customized a variable selling and experiential space, that creates a spiritual realm beyond the physical one.” They called it “Art Beyond Mansion.”

That spiritual, ethereal quality is exemplified by a UFO-like installation of mirror stainless steel in the entry lobby. It hovers above a sandboard table where property models can be displayed. Nearly everything, from furniture in the lounge areas scattered throughout to whimsical robot sculptures, is custom. 

For all its extravagant touches, the designers never lost sight of the business function of the sales center. Relaxation areas and even a gift shop are multi-functional spaces that can also serve as places for meetings and conversation. Tomo Design also had to let go of some ideas due to budget constraints. But in the end, they delivered a forward-looking artistic environment that transcends its purpose as an office.