CREATIVE DESIGN SOLUTIONS FOR THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
District Office is a design consultancy that provides visioning, planning, and design services for the new multimodal, pedestrian based, urban development.
“The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”
David Harvey
OUR PURPOSE
TODAY’S CHALLENGES
We face many challenges in the world today including: pandemic disease, climate change, over reliance on fossil fuels, social isolation, no access to public transit, separation from commercial and social activity, inequality of wealth, and abandoned city centers.
The built environment can be reimagined through design to confront these challenges and to make places that are inclusive, supportive, and that facilitate flourishing for all.
OUR COMMITMENTS
01.
–
We believe in listening carefully to the goals, dreams, and aspirations of the community, and the client. A successful project formally manifests these ideals to make a sustainable, flexible, and beautiful result.
03.
–
We believe that the health of fragile ecosystems inherent to any place should be preserved, and that new interventions should enhance the health of the existing systems.
05.
–
the design of cities is a social art; they are built in the interests of society and community, and they conspire to enhance the flourishing of the lives of all beings. Built projects should foster equality and the right to the city, and reject forms of inequality.
02.
–
We are committed to making projects that enhance enjoyment, and places that people want to visit, to work, and to live in.
04.
–
Sustainability is a complex concept that encompasses a broad range of issues including: energy and materials use, settlement patterns, movement modalities, and governance and planning, among many others.
06.
–
The root ambition of settlements and homes is to enhance sustainable community. Well connected and dense cities, towns, and villages are not only beautiful, but also desirable and sustainable. Suburbs, single use developments, and car culture often compromise this ideal.
“whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.”
aldo van eyck
OUR APPROACH
We use transparent and inclusive methods to integrate artistic, social, and financial opportunities into each new project. We base our work on research, precedent, best practices, and local codes, but our aim is to expand significantly from these guidelines to provide rich and complex design solutions that exceed the expectations of the client. We collaborate with consulting engineers, architects, and other professionals as needed to meet the requirements of each jurisdiction and brief.
“there are certain fundamental laws that are inherent to the natural world that we can use as models and mentors for human designs. ecology comes from the greek roots oikos and logos, “household” and “logical discourse.” thus, it is appropriate, if not imperative, for architects to discourse about the logic of our earth household.”
william mcdonough
EXPERTISE
We have creative and technical expertise in planning, and building design for projects of all sizes. Clients hire us for our ability to facilitate the vision, scope and details for new projects, to provide comprehensive new thinking about planning for cities and sustainable design, and to ensure the regulatory and technical details are incorporated into clear and feasible solutions.
Some of our services:
Creative solutions for sustainable environments
Transit oriented urbanism
Strategy, feasibility, and advocacy
Building comprehensive and meaningful project narratives
Standards and prototyping for urban and public space
“would not specific urban needs be those of qualified places, places of simultaneity and encounters, places where exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit? would there not also be a need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges?”
henri lefebvre
WHO WE ARE
We are planners, and designers with extensive experience and a passion for sustainable and livable communities. We are experts in planning, energy, gardens and forests, masterplanning, transportation, organizational programming, and construction processes and assemblies. We combine our shared expertise to make creative solutions for complex projects.
“Cities, it occurred to me, are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts, not so much as individuals, but as the social animals, we are. A cognitive scientist need only look at what we have made—the hives we have created—to know what we think and what we believe to be important, as well as how we structure those thoughts and beliefs.”
david byrne, bicycle diaries
PROJECTS
Our featured projects include work in Africa, and North America, and includes programming, predesign and advocacy, urban design standards, and masterplans. Our goal is that in the final work one can clearly see the social and cultural aspirations of the design, and the rigor of the technical and financial solution.
“The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He has a need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gather these perceptions in a ‘world’.”
aldo van eyck
would you like to work with us?
Contact Us
