Journal

Scale is a modular partitioning system designed for open plan offices that allows you to easily split up any space, and make it quieter.

Big open offices are the modern—and perhaps broken—standard, but acoustically, they’re nightmares: cavernous concrete bunkers where people are afraid to speak above a whisper. “No one really thinks about the quality of sound in a workplace,” says Benjamin Hubert of Layer Design. “Everyone loves these huge concrete open plan workspaces, because they’re visually cool, but the sound is wearing.”

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In a city with rapidly rising rents, the Collective is creating a hotel-like space to house the young, penniless masses.

Move into a newly revamped London high-rise next year, and you can have a few hundred housemates. An abandoned office building is turning into one of the world’s largest experiments in co-living, designed in response to London’s insane rents.

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Former Trader Joe executive Doug Rauch has opened a Boston market that brings healthy food to people who usually can’t afford it.

Think of a food desert, and you might picture a neighborhood where the nearest fresh vegetable is miles away. But the biggest challenge to healthy eating in poor neighborhoods isn’t always access to healthy food, it’s whether people can afford to buy it. One solution: A grocery store that gathers nutritious food that would otherwise be wasted and then sells it at insanely low prices.

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An oil and gas company is launching an innovative floating wind park where the wind blows hardest—and that you can’t see from shore.

Statoil’s new Hywind wind park, off the east Scottish coast, may not, in fact, be the “world’s first floating wind farm,” as the Norwegian oil and gas company claims. That honor surely belongs to Japan and its iconic floating field 12 miles from Fukushima Dai-Ichi (yes, that Fukushima). But, maybe we’re being unkind to point that out. That Statoil is building a floating wind park at all is pretty remarkable. Indeed, you wonder why it had to stretch the truth about its good news.

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Industrial design and architecture collide in Konstantin Grcic’s 100-square-foot prefab hut for Muji. Here, he walks us through his process.

Konstantin Grcic is no architect. Renowned for colorful, exquisitely crafted furniture, the Munich-based industrial designer has never built anything bigger than a trade show pavilion. So when the Japanese retail giant Muji tapped Grcic to develop a prefabricated hut, he figured he’d do what he does best. “My approach was that of a designer designing a building, not a designer trying to be an architect,” Grcic says in a phone interview. “The concept for Muji is very much creating a building as a product, something that could be reproduced and produced in a serial way.”

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