ASID Honors O+A with Designer of Distinction Award
Summer nights are always warm in Georgia, but the evening felt especially balmy last month when some of our design team flew to Atlanta for the ASID Awards Gala where Primo was named 2019’s Designer of Distinction.
“It’s not this secret sauce of how to do something. It’s hey, we did this. Here’s the outcome. Take a look at it.”
The award comes at a time when Studio O+A’s open book approach to workplace design has moved beyond the tech sector where it was born to major new projects in food and hospitality, manufacturing, education and the entertainment industry. It specifically recognized Primo Orpilla as a “game changer” in workplace design and celebrated the spirit of inclusion that has driven O+A from the beginning.
In a brief film shown at ASID’s gala Primo explained how O+A’s aesthetic grew out of the company’s early collaborations with Silicon Valley disruptors: “We’d build 60 or 70 stations and they’d go, ‘Well, I don’t want to work in this single pod.’ So they’d take all the stations down between them and—they’d hack their own space!”
O+A quickly learned to hack the space with them and to hack it according to how it was used. For 28 years the company has pursued an ongoing design quest for space that is legible, that lets the light in and that empowers those who use it to let their own lights shine.
Thank you, ASID, for a great evening and a great honor!
Studio O+A, 452 Tehama Street, San Francisco, California 94103