On the Boards: HGA's Holistic Approach to Sustainability

HGA's Design for East Los Angeles College's Student Success Center embraces a broad view of sustainability. Image courtesy HGA.

Sustainability is in the DNA at HGA Architects and Engineers. Just recently the firm took two awards—Excellence in Social Responsibility and Excellence in Stewardship of the Natural Environment—in the 2013 Sustainable Quality Awards program sponsored by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, Sustainable Works and Sustainable Santa Monica/City of Santa Monica’s Office of Sustainability and the Environment. For the firm, through, sustainability means more than just designing projects incorporating recycled materials or featuring renewable energy technologies.

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Showroom: Easy Pieces from Link Design Solutions

For 2013, Link Outdoor has added three sectional pieces to its Echo Collection. Image courtesy Link Design Solutions.

We first got to know Link Outdoor through its fabulous fabric collection—in particular the great geometric patterns that evoke midcentury glamour (Looking at them, you feel like you're being transported to a Slim Aarons photo.). Since then, we've become big fans of the company's outdoor furniture collections too. There's a great line of teak with stunning, traditional profiles, and another with more contemporary styling. The company's Echo Collection rounds out the firm's furniture options and offers a chic, sophisticated choice for outdoor living. 

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Workbook: New Life for a Historic DC Building

For a new outpost of Matchbox, the firm Studio3877 transformed a 1907 Washington, DC, building into a warm bistro. Photography by Ron Ngaim/Courtesy Studio3877.

“It was in rough shape from years of use and misuse and had seen better days,” architect David Shove-Brown says of an 8,000-square-foot, 1907 building in Washington, DC, that he and his Studio3877 partner David Tracz had been asked transform it into the latest outpost of Matchbox. Over the years, the building had done duty as a bowling alley, a jazz club and a car dealership and still retained a great character, so, he says, “It was pretty clear we wanted to be true to the building”—with a straightforward approach to its history and materials that matched the restaurant’s approach to ingredients.  

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Workbook: Standard Reinvents the Lemonade Stand in Beverly Hills

Standard's design for the Pressed Juicery's Beverly Hills store features oak timbers arranged according to the FIbonacci Code. Image courtesy Benny Chan | fotoworks.When Hayden Slater, one of the minds behind the Pressed Juicery, approached the architecture firm Standard, helmed by Jeffrey Allsbrook and Silvia Kuhle, he was thinking big and small. In addition to a space in Beverly Hills (it would ultimately become both the design idea lab and flagship for the company), Slater and his partners planned on rolling out several more locations, ranging in size from small to smaller. They wanted a firm that could create a concept flexible enough to fit a compact storefront on down to almost a niche, with elements that could be incorporated or not without diminishing the character of the brand.

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Web Extra: A Look at the Firmeza Foundation

One of the Firmeza Foundation's recent projects—a block of buildings in RIo's Santa Marta community were transformed. Image courtesy Firmeza Foundation.

If you read the print edition of FORM, you’ll definitely remember Michael Webb’s fascinating story Color and the City, investigating the role that color does or doesn’t play in today’s urban fabric. To illustrate the article, we included an image from the Firmeza Foundation of a Brazilian favela the group had painted.

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