The factory-wide renovation of Boeing's 98.3 acre factory at Everett was about improving the efficiency of production, and improving the work experience for the 30,000 employees who work there around the clock

Boeing Everett is the largest building in the world by volume, and is the size of a small city.  The factory consists of a series of enormous "assembly lines" for large commercial aircraft separated by 5 story office towers, "buildings within the building".  The factory is the major economic entity in the city of Everett.

Because of its size, the Boeing Everett factory was faced with a number of challenges for its users - the factory workers, office workers, and service employees who spent the majority of their awake hours within the building's space.

Through a stakeholder discovery process, the design team helped the client to identify critical success factors for the project, and problems which the factory renovation needed to solve.  Among these success factors were:

1. Providing a connection to nature:  within the factory walls, there was no daylight, no sense of time of day, and no sense of the natural environment beyond the factory. 

2. Providing a connection to the product:    workers in the office towers had no windows, they worked in a dense arrangement of cubicles, and there were physical barriers separating the product teams in the towers from the workers on the factory floor below who were building the planes.

Initial user and stakeholder research culminated in a set of core design principles which guided the the course of the three year design and construction process.    

The architectural team collaborated extensively with the environmental graphics team to develop a site-wide kit of parts "urban plan" for the factory that integrated architecture, graphic wayfinding, skylights, open office spaces, collaboration zones, and amenity spaces. 

Work on this project was done while at NBBJ.

Architectural Team: Brent Rogers (Principal), Pat Whempner (Lead Interior Designer), Keith Nielsen (Project Manager), Case Creal, Shih-hao Kuo, Alexandra Lara, Kazuya Mizuno, Kathleen Monda, Jan Ralkowski, Checha Sokolovic, Yoojin Sung, Samuel Sze  

Environmental Graphics Team:  Eric Levine (Principal), Samuel Stubblefield, Yusuke Ito

Photography by Sean Airhart

McKinstry approached NBBJ to design 26,000 SF of office space located above a parking structure that would house a green technology incubator.  We presented them with a design for a flexible and collaborative space, which included "operable office boxes" using residential glass garage doors as flexible translucent walls that doubled as whiteboards, and could open out to the shared amenity spaces along the main axis of the space.  At the rear of the boxes, matching garage doors opened up to the perimeter to expand the office spaces as the businesses grow.

The design made a cultural reference to the idea of startups and garages, and provided collaborative common spaces where there could be cross-pollenation of ideas between the cutting edge green technology startups working there.

Work was done while working at NBBJ. 

Team: Brent Rogers, Ann Cuningham (principals); Amy Williams (project manager), Samuel Sze (project architect / designer), Kathleen Monda (finishes and furniture), Jan Ralkowski (senior technical)

Photography by Seah Airhart

Office interior design for a Seattle developer and art collector. 

This work was done while at NBBJ. 

Architectural team: Anne Cunningham (design principal), Daniel Cockrell (project architect), Eric Levine (environmental graphics), Samuel Sze (designer)

A technology company headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Team: Chad Yoshinobu (design director), Sidney Scarboro (project manager), Bruce Dahlstrom, Ann Gottlieb, Erik Hieronimus, Yukako Horiuchi, Samuel Sze, Candy Wang, Barry Zimmerman

Adpark is a smart parking meter system which addresses the needs of visitors seeking street parking, cities looking for a source of revenue, and local businesses for whom street parking is a necessary landing point for their customers. 

The system revolves around a concept of "the parking meter as advertisement for local business", giving visitors an easy way to find parking, add time to their meter, and validate that parking at local businesses which sponsor the meter, and providing the city with an additional source of revenue through the sales of advertising space on the meter and on the adpark mobile app.

Our proposal for a revisioning of the Memorial Stadium site adjacent to Seattle's Space Needle provides a new urban park concept that weaves the Seattle Center's disparate urban elements together through a landscape for varied types of occasional and everyday performance.  It is at once an outdoor amphitheater, a memorial garden, and an urban farm.

This competition entry was a Sticklab and Rollerhaus collaboration. 

Team: Trevor Dykstra, Kevin Scott, Samuel Sze

Due to changes in the fire code, the university was replacing a great number of lecture hall seating and the team at the UBC school of architecture was tasked with designing alternative uses for the old seating.  For my project, I chose to salvage the tablet arms to build a series of free standing screens inspired by Eileen Gray's 'brick screens'

Construction of the screens was simple, using steel rods, cable straps, and plastic tubing as spacers.  The unique geometries and finish materials of the different tablets from different lecture halls produced an interesting variety in the character of the screens.  Imperfections and graffiti found on the tablets gave additional uniqueness and charm to the tablets.

A furniture dealer's showroom, the design sought to build as much of the space out of the client's product as possible, using as little conventional studs and gwb construction as we could get away with.  The goal was for furniture product to shape the architectural space.

This project was completed while at Gensler.

Team: Chuck Albright (design director), Natalie Engels, David Louie, Mickey Mazerac, and Samuel Sze

Converted 2,300 SF of unused office space at HP's Palo Alto campus into a health clinic for employees and their families.  Faced with limited funds and significant site constraints, adapted an existing truck dock into a new pedestrian entrance for the health clinic, including wheelchair accessible parking spaces.

Fablight was our entry into an annual light fixture design competition.  Instead of designing a light fixture, our team chose to propose a website that lets the user manipulate parameters to build their own.

Users manipulate a curve to define a shape, locate an axis within the structurally viable region, define a height of extrusion, manipulate a curve that varies spacing along the vertical axis, manipulate another curve defining scale along the vertical axis, manipulate a curve that defines twist along the vertical axis, and select a material.

Their light fixture is updated live on the screen as they manipulate these parameters.  As the form changes, a price field updates for the cost of fixture.  The user can then purchase the fixture and it is milled from the material, the correct pin supports are provided, and parts are marked.  Due to Fablight's flat pack nature, the fixture is easily shipped.

Team: Trevor Dykstra, Chris Grammens, and Samuel Sze

The Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens, Michigan hosted a competition to design a shop for the art gallery within a very confined space and with a very limited budget.  Our team's proposal, given the space and budget constraints, was to build a shop that doubles as a piece of sculpture.  The shop by day becomes a sculpture by night.

Team: Trevor Dykstra, Alexandra Lara, and Samuel Sze

Product Runway is an annual garment design competition in which architecture and design firms are paired with a product manufacturer and must design and construct a garment made from building materials.

Readings of public space are dependent on performance.  A pedestrian reads space differently from a skateboarder, or a person drinking a latte, or a child exploring, or a person walking a dog, or a dog. 

This proposal for an extension to an urban park in Vancouver's Downtown South neighborhood explored the idea that within a heterogeneous urban context, readings of public space are linked to the everyday and occasional performances of the urban dweller. 

A Taxonomy of Performance

Design research involved observing and documenting the activities of users at the park, and organizing findings in a taxonomy of user types.  The proposed design for the park extension sought to create a park that was driven by (and open to) a multiplicity of readings at different scales.  The park was many things: a recreation space, an open market, an urban backyard, a production / performance center, and a skate park.

A design concept and model by Samuel Sze.

Formwork is an essential but wasteful aspect of concrete construction.  Design of formwork focuses primarily on the qualities of the casted object.  At the end of a project, the mold is discarded, surviving only in a fossil negative of its former existence.

HYPOTHESIS:  Concrete exists in an intimate relationship with mold during casting.  By considering the mold both as castor and as an integral part of the final product, the concrete and formwork can create a material, structural, and textural hybrid.  The product can be both warm and cold, heavy and light, rigid and plastic, hard and soft.  Concrete registers the form, surface, and volume of the mold, and yet the mold offers contrasting material qualities which can give the resulting form a renewed vitality.