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.
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OUR PURPOSE
today’s challenges
We face many challenges in the world today - 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, loss of a sense of play, abandoned city centers, digital disruption.
The built environment can be reimagined through design to confront these challenges and to make places that are inclusive, supportive, and that facilitate flourishing.
OUR COMMITMENTS
We believe in listening carefully to the goals, dreams, and aspirations of the community, and the developer and builder. A successful project formally manifests these ideals to make a sustainable, flexible, and beautiful result.
We are committed to making buildings that enhance enjoyment, and places that people want to visit, to work in, and to live in.
We believe that the health of fragile ecosystems inherent to any site should be preserved, and that new interventions should enhance the health of the existing systems.
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.
the design of buildings and 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 work should foster equality and the right to the city, and reject forms of inequality.
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 desireable and sustainable. Suburbs, single use developments, and car culture often compromise this ideal.
“Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.”
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.
“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.”
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 collaborae with consulting engineers, architects, and other professionals as needed to meet the requirements of each jurisiction and brief.
“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.”
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 sustainabe 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 the need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges? ”
projects
Our featured projects include work in Africa, and North America, and includes programming, predesign and advocacy, establishment of urban design standards, masterplans, budgeting and schedules, and building design. 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.
“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of an appropriation. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place — an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City…a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.”