Shepley Bulfinch is pleased to welcome seminal design leader Scott Slarsky, who has joined the firm as a director.

In announcing the appointment, president Carole Wedge said, “Scott is an exciting new design voice for Shepley Bulfinch, with passion, vision, and a deep understanding of how design can provide clarity of purpose and mission during times of institutional growth and change.”

Scott cites Spanish modernism as a particular influence on his work, drawing from formative years spent in Madrid working with Rafael Moneo and Juan Navarro Baldeweg.  As a co-founder of designLAB, Scott and his ...[more]

What can you come up with to transform a parking lot into a community gathering place, in the face of financial and logistical constraints? That was the challenge facing design teams in the Flat Lot competition in Flint, Michigan. “Knot Lot,” a Shepley Bulfinch team submission, was chosen as one of five finalists from among 221 entries in the competition, which was sponsored by the Flint (Michigan) Public Art Project and the Flint chapter of the AIA.  Knot Lot and other top entries will be part of an exhibition opening in Flint on April 14.

Organizers asked designers ...[more]

In a provocative blog post on beauty in architecture, 2012 Summer Design Fellow Amrita Raja commented upon the reluctance of many contemporary architects to discuss the role of beauty, relying instead on more purely rational justifications such as performance. It reminded me of the 2009 NY Times article about Douglas Bowman who very publicly left his position as Google’s top visual designer because, in his words, “at Google design lived or died by data.”

Amrita’s post also reminded me of the scene in the documentary film Helvetica, where Michael Place from UK-based design firm Build talks candidly about how, for him, design is primarily ...[more]

Shepley Bulfinch was ranked 39th among the country’s leading interior design firms, according to a survey just published in the January issue of Interior Design magazine. The magazine’s annual ranking of the “100 Interior Design Giants” is based on 2012 interior design fees for major architecture and design firms around the US.

Shepley ranked fifth among education design firms, making the survey’s Top 10 in education design for the fourth year in a row. Shepley’s 2012 major education interiors clients included Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Hamline University, and the University of Houston.

Shepley ...[more]

Shortly after the buzz around the first anniversary of the opening of the Harvard Innovation Lab, Interior Design magazine announced more good news: a 2012 Best of Year (BOY) Merit Award for the Innovation Lab’s design in the Education category.

Since it opened in late 2011, the i-lab has quickly become a hub for entrepreneurs from across the campus. Ambitions for it are unbounded, as noted in an editorial in the Boston Globe in November 2012, “Success of Harvard’s i-lab could buoy the entire region.”

The Innovation Lab is the second ...[more]

Print magazine has selected the graphic design of the Harvard Innovation Lab as a winner in the 2012 Regional Design Annual, which has just been published. The design was the work of Shepley graphic designers Dan Vlahos and Erin Deeley.

The ‘Hi’ design establishes a distinctive identity and conveys a sense of welcome for the i-lab on Harvard’s Allston, Massachusetts, campus. In telling the story of the impact of the design, Shepley Bulfinch senior creative Dan Vlahos said, “Months after the building opened I got an email ...[more]

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Scientific Discovery, Inspired by a Walk to the Restroom”) made the argument that locating key support facilities has a role in fostering collaborative research environments.

As a design researcher, whenever I read a piece like this that cites research without providing citations or references, I become concerned about the quality of the evidence.

I decided to do a little digging. Although I was unable to find a research study documenting a 50-foot rule (“collaboration drops to 10% when workers are more than 50 feet ...[more]