Skylab, ZGF, Holst projects earn year-end honors

Interior Design Magazine has awarded Skylab Architecture a 'Best of Year' award for the design of the branding agency North. The 10,000 square foot office situated in the Lane-Miles Standish building (formerly home to an 85-year old printing business and now on the National Register of Historic Places) took the Best Small Office category.

North sought a new kind of office that would reduce or eliminate the traditional cubicle and stretch the parameters of working in a creative environment. The design responds to alternative social interactions with a series of breakaway modules for working, eating, collaborating and lounging. A stacked, cantilevered think module reveals a newly articulated view of the West Hills through clerestory windows in the building. A series of interspersed glass and metal panels define the edit module, two soundproof rooms without doors. Taking a universal icon for quick creative thought, the media module is post-it note yellow.

The magazine also honored Zimmer Gunsul Frasca for its design of the University of Oregon Athletic Medical Center. "When student athletes first enter this sports-therapy and training facility," writes ID's Nicholas Tamarin, "they're greeted by a zigzagging white Corian bench that unravels like a roll of sports tape. And that's just the beginning of the athletic imagery Zimmer Gunsul Frasc Architects created for this 15,000-square-foot center. A seating area features four sandblasted glass screens depicting students in various athletic poses, images made from the names of the school's former athletes, while an adjacent oak wall is branded with the names of the school's most important coaches. The school's "O" logo is depicted in a large relief comprising 3,000 aluminum rods that pierce a glass wall in the nutrition bar. Even there, the stools boast leather covers laser-cut with sport statistics."

This was Interior Design’s third annual Best of Year Awards, with winners in 62 categories from a pool of nearly 1,300 entries. An award ceremony was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on December 4th, 2008. The winners are featured in the December issue of Interior Design.

Meanwhile, online design magazine Cool Hunting has selected Holst Architecture's Clinton Condominiums as one of the 'Top 5 Buildings of 2008'.

"The building's minimal interiors combine attractive design with eco-consciousness in a way that's right at home in the Pacific Northwest," wrote Cool Hunting's Doug Black. 

The other four winners were all European architects or firms: Englishmen Nicholas Grimshaw (for an experimental media center at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York)  and Thomas Heatherwick (a cafe in Littlehampton, England), Dutch architect Trude Hooykaas (for the Kraanspor dock-to-office development), and the French company Abilmo (for their 'Pop-up Hotel' rooms).

This award also feels like somewhat of a vindication for the Randy Rapaport-developed Clinton condos. There has been some hostility from neighbors who feel the bold modern look doesn't fit its context, or that the project turns a blind eye to Division Street, or regret the historic home displaced from the site. And to extent, there's some validity in those claims. Nevertheless, I marvel at the Clinton Condos every time I see the building, particularly its jewel-like front facade and its sumptuous mahogany trim at ground level.