Edward Ogosta Architecture

Location:  Los Angeles, California
Date:  2012

Awards: 
Workplace of the Future Competition 2014, 2nd Place out of 153 entries
AIA Los Angeles Next LA Honor Award 2012
Boston Society of Architects / AIA Unbuilt Architecture Honor Award 2012
ArchDaily Building of the Year Finalist 2012
Architizer A+ Awards Finalist 2013
AIA Center for Emerging Professionals 2013 national exhibition selection

Publications:
Metropolis magazine, January 2015
WorkScape, Gestalten Books, 2013
Design New England, March/April 2013
FRAME, September 2012
Contemporary Minimalism, Dopress Books, 2012 
Der Standard newspaper (Austria), 11.11.2012 

Project Description: 
Designed for a creative media agency of thirty workers, this office contains a menagerie of typological hybrids, which together engender a unique interior world.  Existing somewhere between furniture and architecture, these hybrid-objects infuse the office functions with new iconographic presence, and abstractly reference nature and the surrounding city.  Collectively, they foster an atmosphere of creative intensity, and embody the idiosyncratic spirit of the company. 

An existing 6,000 square foot tilt-up concrete warehouse provides a purified container into which the hybrids are deployed.  Each hybrid synthesizes essential traits from two “parents” of differing typologies; for example, a set of bookshelves combined with the stepped form of an arena results in the book-arena, which doubly functions as storage and seating for office-wide meetings.  Other hybrids include the tree-chair, mountain-offices, house-table, and sky-cave.  Each is constructed from simple veneered plywood and white painted fiberboard (though the house-table and its materials will be customized from manufactured office furniture).  A variety of micro-scaled individual spaces and group-sized collective spaces are thus available to all workers.

This conceptual intertwining of interior office and exterior world expands the experiential possibilities of inhabitation.  To sit in a chair as if inside a tree, or occupy a table as one would a house, is to prompt a rethinking of how we exist with objects and environments.  One’s fundamental notions of dwelling and working are consequently upended, yet simultaneously clarified.