9th Annual Best of Canada Design Competition
BEST OF SHOW WINNER: Herman Miller, Toronto
Best of Show Project Winner |
Herman Miller Canada’s National Design Centre occupies the fourth floor of the company’s headquarters in a First World War-vintage warehouse building in Toronto’s Garment District. Canada’s first LEED-certified interior includes meeting rooms, lounge spaces and a conference area.
An elaborate plywood sheathe organizes the 10,000-square-foot space. This tube-like element is defined by a series of butt-jointed fir plywood panels, routed in striped patterns to varying depths. This action exposes multiple grains of ply to be read, contrasting starkly to the smooth, pristine bent plywood of Herman Miller’s classic Eames furniture, which is also on display.
A dot-screen graphic image of Herman Miller factory work, printed onto vinyl wallcovering, coats small meeting rooms and support spaces.
Two custom sculptural lighting elements break down the scale of the loft space. Constructed of seats and backs from Eames lounge chairs, the lighting sculptures evoke mobiles by Alexander Calder (like Eames, another mid-century Modernist iconic designer) and the canopy of beech trees at Marigold Lodge, the 1913 Prairie School summer mansion near company headquarters in Grand Rapids, Mich., that serves as Herman Miller’s corporate guest house.
Chalmers: This is lovely. It breaks all the showroom rules. It brings humanity into a showroom space.
Kruse: The rule they’re breaking is that Herman Miller sells office furniture to offices that all look the same, while their own showroom looks so different.
Levitt: There’s a narrative in the layering here. The mandate of what the client does pushed them. The Douglas fir plywood has such an active pattern it isn’t used much anymore as a finishing material. Here, it grounds the showroom. And it’s a Canadian material.
Rock: Look at the juxtaposition of the exposed ducts and the finished work. That’s hard to pull off and they did it perfectly.
Chalmers: How ironic. We think of the West Coast as responding to wood, yet Herman Miller treats wood in a way that we didn’t see in any Vancouver or Calgary projects. It goes beyond a purely Toronto aesthetic.
