An idea we come back to always is our appreciation for Office of Tangible Space’s ability to be the rising tide that helps uplift the entire design community. Beyond Michael’s Cooler Gallery in Brooklyn and Kelley’s Works in Progress series in San Francisco, their community support extends to collaborations with local artists, partnerships with platforms like Verso, and consistent advocacy for emerging makers. They create platforms for emerging talent while fostering dialogue around contemporary craft and design. Their approach to collaboration extends beyond their own practice to their client work, where they consistently specify and purchase from local producers, creating feedback loops of mutual support. As they put it, their studio ethos is rooted in maintaining connections to culture and community, making their curatorial projects core to how they want to grow.

We had the opportunity to interview them about their unique position as both preservationists and innovators, community builders and designers. The conversation revealed a practice that thinks across timescales, from their archaeological work with Aalto’s materials to creating spaces they describe as “out of time” – designs that could have been made yesterday or decades ago because they’re founded on essential human connections rather than fleeting trends. Through our questions, we tried to capture one facet of their expansive practice, though it would be impossible to encompass the full scope of what they do. Their work ranges from the smallest, most thoughtfully designed objects to major cultural institutions like the Whitney Museum store – their practice feels infinite, and we’re grateful to share even this glimpse into their approach to design, community, and the spaces between.

Your practice spans preservation work, furniture design, community initiatives, and spaces of various scales. Could you tell us how you view these different aspects of your work fitting together?

We consider our approach to design to be interdisciplinary, or as we often say “without discipline.” Our projects range from interiors to architecture, to furniture, to curation. In addressing each of these scales as equally important in conveying an individual project’s message and goals, we are able to come up with more unique and we hope better solutions to complex problems.

Our studio ethos is rooted in maintaining a connection to culture and community, which makes curatorial projects like Cooler Gallery or Works In Progress really core to how we’d like to grow. The focus becomes less about our own work but about the work within a greater community and the dialogue it creates. We are very fortunate to be personally involved with and impacted by the people in this larger web and hope to lend support to it.

The Kaufmann Conference Center project involved intimately dismantling Aalto’s work, seeing how materials had aged over decades. How did this archaeological experience shape your approach to selecting and working with materials in your own designs?

It was a unique, powerful opportunity to be able to approach this work so intimately. The work of Alvar Aalto has been a constant reference for our studio for how to make work on many scales and to aim to impact people on a deeper human level through design. To then be given the responsibility to handle the work itself and be its custodian and steward was not lost on us. It has been an incredible journey to dive deeply into this work.

It is a different thing to have the role of archaeologist rather than designer. It forces you to discover how others have historically creatively solved problems rather than creatively solve problems yourself. In doing so, you can see the mind of the original designer working. It helped to better understand that most of the aesthetic expression in Aalto projects are a result of a process of weighing many constraints, not just a beautiful thing upon itself. We similarly hold this principle in our own work.

The marine plywood at Uprise Art, the references to Finnish modernism in your furniture – you often incorporate historical materials and techniques in unexpected ways. How do you approach making these references feel vital rather than nostalgic?

Our work is grounded in a human-centric approach and a desire to create an interpersonal relationship with space. We think of our work as creating a dialogue with the people who use our spaces and objects—inviting a conversation with the senses and looking to spark curiosity. We hope this can be applied similarly no matter the project – from new construction to historic preservation work.

From carved wooden details to acoustic wall treatments, your work seems particularly focused on touch and sound rather than just visual impact. What drives this emphasis on the non-visual aspects of space?

In a world focused primarily on the visual in creative pursuits due to the role of social media, we think it is important to define a real world “experience” in our work. Many of these aspects are lost in a photograph. Engaging the other senses (touch, smell, sound, etc) is just one way we try to make the experience of once our spaces shine. We hope to make visitors take notice, to move differently, to feel something, and to connect with space in a way that stays with them.

At Looking Glass Factory, you developed unique solutions for privacy and collaboration – like the varying-height cubicles. How do you approach these functional challenges while maintaining a strong design vision?

Constraints are the foundation of any innovation in our projects. In the Looking Glass Factory project as in many office projects, there is a functional need for cubicles, but a desire for the look of an open office. In this project we were able to roughly organize the staff within an organizational chart based on their need for privacy (programmers) vs need for open dialogue (sales/marketing) and everyone in between (management, hr, etc). These each were able to be laid out in the space and we created an architectural “cubicle” that was sheared off at an angle in the space. The visual language is a result of the diagram of staff needs.