Courtesy of CannonDesign
Last fall, David M. Polzin took on a new role at CannonDesign. He’s been with the firm, a global architecture firm with offices in Mumbai, New York, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, and St. Louis, among others, for 18 years. The firm appointed a new CEO in the late summer who tapped St. Louis–based Polzin for the new position of executive director, design. SLM caught up with Polzin between flights to chat about his new gig, his vision for the firm, technology, and his home city of St. Louis.
Tell us about the new position. What do you hope to accomplish? [Executive director of design] is a title that hasn’t formally existed in the firm. Coming from the St. Louis office of CannonDesign, we have a uniquely creative culture. We have a real intensity of purpose and a drive for creative exploration, and I think we also have a great sense of mutual respect for each other. My expectation as I move into a broader role in the firm—16 offices, more than 900 people—is not to duplicate that culture, that’s not possible, but to try to put into place the right ingredients to stimulate creativity.
How do you plan for a built environment that will need to accommodate technology we can’t even imagine yet? You need to design for flexibility. You need to design buildings that are not so carefully proscribed to individual needs, so that they can’t be anything else in the future. It acutely resonates with our healthcare clients. There are constantly new technologies emerging in the healthcare realm. You don’t design a room around a piece of equipment that will be superseded in five years!
We wear our technology now. It’s posing a greater challenge for architects—how do you design for the human experience, how do you not let technology take over? How do we design to bring communities together, to look away from their devices? Maybe that’s the bigger challenge. I’m not trying to put forward a philosophy of being a Luddite.
Where does St. Louis fit in the larger conversation about evolving design? St. Louis is becoming a magnet for entrepreneurship. How does the built environment, how does architecture, respond to that? People have these prejudices about what the face of entrepreneurship looks like—it’s not just a tech giant being born in someone’s garage, it’s not just a hoodie-wearing billionaire with a foosball table. How do you respond to the rich complexity of what it means? I think St. Louisans have to start getting comfortable with the notion that the new can live comfortably with the old. I have the utmost respect for our cultural heritage as it’s expressed through our architecture. If we’re going to build something new, it has to reflect the future.
What have been some of your favorite projects in St. Louis? We designed the newest building at Cortex, the 4260 Building. It’s this amazing mashup of different things in a single building. On the ground floor it has TechShop, a member-based maker community with an educational component. It’s responding to this contemporary notion of maker culture. Right next door is Vicia; this James Beard–winning chef opened this amazing restaurant. Then up the stairs is a pharmaceutical company. It’s not the compartmentalization of all those different things, it’s really bringing them together.
A favorite project of mine is probably our own offices, we call it the Power House. It’s an old steam boiler plant that was built in 1926. It kind of embodies this juxtaposition of new and old. We took this empty shell of a historical building, a beautifully detailed building with terra cotta cornices and ornate brickwork on the outside, and we put this modern, contemporary office space inside. We incorporated a three-story gallery.
We’ve been asked to participate with a group of developers to breathe new life into the Railway Exchange Building, the old Famous-Barr Building. There’s going to be living space. We’re still trying to brainstorm about what happens on the lower floors. It’s a beautiful building. We just want to be part of what’s happening in the city.
