As industrial designers working within an architecture studio, our projects often occur in the territory between, evoking and extending the studio’s architectural aspects. Though distinct in terms of professional certification, training, and output, architecture and industrial design are practices that repeatedly necessitate, cross into, and re-interpret one another. Within Foster + Partners, our industrial design practitioners are guided by a shared love of and objective towards elegant, innovative, and sustainable design – from the broad scale of an urban masterplan or heritage project, to the essential details of the tables and doorhandles within.

Since the early years of the practice, we have evolved this social and technical framework, with a particular change coming over the last decade. Today, our work signals a turn towards objects that are not just perfectly formed, but also appropriately informed – primarily by questions of carbon expenditure and sustainability. This is work that challenges our expectations of ‘design’ in the twenty-first century.

Two recent projects communicate this emerging design language: Foster + Partners’ collaboration with FSB (Franz Schneider Brakel), a world-renowned German hardware manufacturer, to make a series of door handles; and the AYA collection, a family of office furniture made in collaboration with the English timber furniture maker, Benchmark. Linking these two seemingly separate product ranges –doorhandles and office furniture – are two core aims that illustrate this new phase of Industrial Design within the practice: firstly, an acknowledgement of the material at hand, and secondly, a deep commitment to thinking sustainability about these materials.

Full article: Evolving and Sustaining Forms: Industrial Design at Foster + Partners