The 27 Most Innovative Spaces and Places of The Year

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The 27 Most Innovative Spaces And Places Of The Year

From hospitals and houses to subway signs and parks, these projects are reshaping the world
around us.
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BY K AT H A R I N E S C H WA B
9 MINUTE READ
How can cities build infrastructure today to support tomorrow’s rapidly increasing urban population,
which the UN says will only increase in the coming decades? Over the past year, we saw designers,
architects, and urban planners hard at work finding new ways to think about housing and improve
public spaces. They range from new construction–micro homes and prefab houses–to various forms
of adaptive reuse, with derelict urban spaces finding second lives as environmentally friendly parks
and arts centers.
The winners and finalists in the Spaces, Places, and Cities category of Co.Design‘s Innovation by
Design Awards exemplify the move toward focused, thoughtful design for communities. F O LHere
LOW are 
the
27 best projects of the year.
WINNERS
Carmel Place
Firm: nARCHITECTS
Carmel Place is New York City’s first micro-unit building, where modular units averaging 300 square
feet were prefabricated off-site and then stacked to create a tower of compact, tiny living spaces. So
life doesn’t feel quite so cramped for those inside, the building devotes more space to communal
amenities, like a gym and public roof terrace. It’s one alternative to the housing shortages gripping
many expensive cities, New York included.
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Hunts Point Landing

Firm: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects
Meet the micro-park. This 100-foot-wide park and pier in the South Bronx brought new life to a tiny
sliver of land located in an industrial zone and polluted shoreline as part of the South Bronx Greenway
Master Plan. Mathew Neilsen Landscape Architects transformed a dead-end street into 1.5 acres of
vibrant, community-minded green space, taking on the New York City bureaucracy to make it happen.
FINALISTS
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“Laying The Groundwork” Design Guidelines

Firm: Design Trust For Public Space
Published by the Design Trust for Public Space in partnership with the N.Y.C. Department of Housing
Preservation and Development, this design bible acts as a guide to the intricacies of urban design. Its
nine core commandments focus on the ground floor of buildings in particular, exploring how retail and
community spaces can be integral parts of every community. The guide gives architects and
developers a set of best practices on how details like bench placement and electrical service can
make them more usable and even more social.
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1.8 London
Firm: Studio Echelman
This web-like sculpture suspended over London’s Oxford Circus is actually a visualization of the 2011
Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. At night, visitors can use their smartphones to influence the
patterns of light projected onto the dynamic sculpture, which is named for the number of
microseconds the day was shortened when the earthquake hit.
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Biodesign Studio
Firm: Local Projects
This permanent exhibition at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, allows visitors to
gain a deeper understanding of synthetic biology, bioengineering, and biological design. How?
Hands-on, interactive labs let visitors do things like hack live bacteria’s DNA to make it change color
or “create” their own digital creatures. It takes an incredibly complex emerging field of science, and
makes it tangible through space and exhibition design.
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Blackbirds
Firm: Bestor Architecture
This cluster of 18 homes in the Los Angeles hills could be an answer to the future of urban housing.
The homes were designed to maximize the number of single-family homes in a given area. The two-
or three-bedroom homes fit together to look like a single house, complete with a courtyard and
shared outdoor spaces, increasing density without appearing to do so.
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Brooklyn Boulders Urban Design And Architecture Strategy

Firm: Brooklyn Boulders
Rock climbing gyms are on the up-and-up–but could they also serve as community hubs? One New
York-based mainstay, Brooklyn Boulders, builds its gyms in neglected places, providing colorful, art-
covered climbing walls in old factories and unused churches. But these are more than exercise
spaces–the company also uses its facilities for community events and concerts.
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Chicago Riverwalk
Firm: Ross Barney Architects, Sasaki
This open pedestrian walkway along the Chicago lakefront has been in the works since 2001, and the
latest major addition adds three distinct sections of public space. There’s the Marina, where
pedestrians can watch boats come and go while they dine or stroll. The Cove, with boating and kayak
rentals. And the River Theater–a public amphitheater right on the water. It’s a car-free pedestrian
environment, designed to handle the Windy City’s annual flooding while still providing a beautiful
place to walk along the water.
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Clover
Firm: Mathieu Lehanneur
This design for Paris’s streetlights is a refreshing update to the city’s classic art nouveau posts, with
digitally manufactured wooden bases made of different grains that represent cities across the
country, and efficient LEDs that are partially powered by a solar dome on top of the entire structure.
Très chic!
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Havemeyer Building
Firm: Common Living
Common is in the middle of the coliving craze, providing housing for young urban professionals who
want maximum flexibility and minimum hassle. You can apply online for one of the Havemeyer
Building’s 51 private bedrooms (stocked with Casper mattresses), and management keeps all the
shared spaces clean and stocked with necessities. Say good-bye to buying toilet paper or fighting
over who takes out the trash.
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Connected Worlds
Firm: Design I/O
This immersive installation inside the New York Hall of Science’s Great Hall Building is like a giant,
virtual world (complete with a 45-foot waterfall) built out of projectors and Kinect cameras that visitors
can manipulate. Connected Worlds is designed to help kids understand the trade-offs and
advantages of sustainability as they explore a wildly complex, abstracted environment much like our
own.
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“Forest Of Light”
Firm: Sou Fujimoto
Created for the fashion label COS, this installation from architect Sou Fujimoto uses a bare minimum
of materials to create an immersive spatial experience. Architectural beams of light paired with sound,
fog, and mirrored walls converge as a mystical environment that reacts to visitors.
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Forest Of Light, The Asia Culture Center

Firm: Kyu Sung Woo Architects
This park in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, has exhibition spaces, libraries, performance halls, and
a children’s museum–not to mention gardens, playgrounds, a tree park, and a grand lawn. It’s all in
service of revitalizing the city’s identity and providing it with a cultural centerpiece. But the complex
also serves as a memorial and monument to the Gwangju Uprising, when hundreds of people died
revolting against the dictator Chun Doo-hwan in 1980.
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Generator Amsterdam
Firm: DesignAgency
Do all hostels have to be dingy? Not according to Generator Amsterdam. Located in the Dutch
capital’s hip Oost neighborhood, this hostel is full of lounges, bars, and designer wallpaper–with no
lumpy mattresses or bedbugs in sight.
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Hudson Yards Public Square And Gardens

Firm: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
This elevated public park, which will be situated over New York City’s new Hudson Yards
neighborhood, is being built on a steel platform on top of old railroad tracks. In short, it’s a park that
floats. And to support the growth of 30,000 plants and 200 mature trees, it will use jet engines for
ventilation, a 60,000-gallon irrigation system, and “smart” soil that will allow trees to grow in just four
feet of dirt.
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LinkNYC
Firm: Intersection
New York City is in the process of replacing its 7,500 antiquated booths with new kiosks that offer
free Wi-Fi, phone calls, and device charging, all powered by digital advertisements on the sides of the
kiosks. Even though they’ve been controversial since their rollout, LinkNYC offers a vision for the
future of connectivity in cities.
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Maggie’s Centre Barts

Firm: Steven Holl Architects
Hospitals rarely feel like healing spaces. The U.K.-based Maggie’s Centres provide comfortable
environments for cancer patients to heal, without the clinical coldness for which hospitals are so often
known. The latest location in London takes that dedication to warmth and recovery to the next level,
with a public roof garden that features space for yoga and tai chi and a beautiful translucent facade
inspired by musical notes. It’s a new vision for how hospital architecture should look and function.
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Maven
Firm: GM
Car-sharing services have their perks, but they can’t ensure that your next car will already be tuned to
your favorite radio station or the chair set to the position that most suits you. This experimental
program from GM allows car-sharers to set up their preferred settings via an app, which can
communicate with the OnStar system inside the next car they’ll be driving. The app also allows the
user to control the interior settings on their smartphone while inside the car, regardless of what make
or model they’re sitting in.
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Mercedes-Benz Stadium
Firm: HOK
The new home stadium for the Atlanta Falcons has a semi-transparent retractable roof that resembles
a camera’s aperture, a striking departure from most stadiums’ roofs, which mimic the design of a
convertible car. When closed, the roof hosts a large screen to envelop fans in 360-degree video. The
finished stadium will receive LEED certification–a first for professional sports arenas.
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Muji Hut
Firm: Muji
The Japanese lifestyle company’s first prefabricated house follows its broader design ethos. It’s
highly functional, with just enough design to be beautiful as well. The three houses are simply adorned
but aesthetically pleasing, their compact design revealing how the company envisions its products,
both small and large, augmenting urban lifestyles.
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Rockaway Beach Boardwalk

Firm: Pentagram, WXY
After Hurricane Sandy took out a chunk of Rockaway Beach’s boardwalk in Queens, Pentagram
stepped in to help rebuild the walkway. The agency was in charge of signage, which it built right into
the new boardwalk, with massive 150-by-50 foot letters that can even be read by planes in the air. To
beachgoers, the words “Rockaway,” composed of a subtle blue hue, blend into the walkway, a
striking combination of signage and environmental design.
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Square, Inc. Headquarters

Firm: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
The mobile payment company’s San Francisco headquarters are housed in what was once a
windowless data center for supercomputers–but you’d never know it. The company’s four floors are
grounded by a central staircase that takes the city boulevard as its inspiration, with Square-enabled
vendors selling coffee and sandwiches along the edges of these “streets.”
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Starter Home*
Firm: Office Of Jonathan Tate
Cities and suburbs are littered with wasted spaces that are too small for conventional homes. That’s
where Starter Home* comes in, with a strategy to transform these vacant lots into micro homes that a
wider range of people can afford. A 195-square-foot proof-of-concept settles between a duplex and
an industrial warehouse in New Orleans, and there are more Starter Homes on the way in New
Orleans, Austin, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Oakland.
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The Kathleen Grimm School For Leadership And Sustainability At Sandy Ground
Firm: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
New York’s first net-zero-energy school uses 50% less energy than your average New York City
public school to serve nearly 450 elementary schoolers. How? It’s all about efficiency and lighting.
The building uses photovoltaic solar panels to collect energy, and is oriented along a strategic “L”
shaped plan to increase daylighting. Plenty of skylights and reflective ceiling panels take advantage of
every last drop of natural light, too.
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The Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History & Culture

Firm: Adjaye Associates
British starchitect David Adjaye designed Washington’s latest addition to the National Mall–a museum
dedicated to the history and culture of African-Americans in the United States. The multilayered
facade resembles an inverted ziggurat, covered in detailed ironwork made by African-American artists
that’s designed to allow light into the museum’s interiors.
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The Strand, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.)

Firm: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
The Strand is a former 725-seat abandoned movie theater that was given new life as the home for the
American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. It’s a perfect example of preserving a building’s
history and character while repurposing it to a new purpose: The renovations preserved the building’s
facade and some of the original decorations, marquee letters, and even graffiti, but the interior is
decidedly modern, with a giant LED screen dominating the lobby.
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[PHOTO: CRAIG DUGAN PHOTOGRAPHY]
University Of Minnesota Health, Clinics & Surgery Center

Firm: CannonDesign
This University of Minnesota’s health center reimagines what a hospital can be, with no private offices
or front desk. Instead, patients are checked in via iPad by staff members who come to them–and
rooms are available by reservation. It’s a new way of thinking about how space can be effectively
used to promote healing. No one likes going to the hospital, but details like these can go a long way
to improving the experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR F O L LOW 
Katharine Schwab is the deputy editor of Fast Company's technology section. Email her at kschwab@fastcompany.com
and follow her on Twitter @kschwabable More
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