Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 1, Episode 9 /May 2, 2024
Why an Arcadis creative director designs spaces people return to without knowing why
Robin Elmslie Osler, Arcadis
May 2, 2024 /Design & Practice
Why an Arcadis creative director designs spaces people return to without knowing why
Robin Elmslie Osler is a principal and creative director at Arcadis. She grew up in a family of architects, spent eight years modeling in Paris and Italy, studied at Yale, ran her own New York practice for more than 25 years and taught at City College. She argues that as design tools get faster, the work that matters most is still about people, light and feeling, and she explains how she teaches that to a team.
Robin Elmslie Osler, Principal | Creative Director, Arcadis
In this conversation
Robin on a childhood where design lived in the silverware and furniture, and a father who walked his children through job sites among the bare studs.
How modeling in New York, Paris and Italy taught her to look at cities, years before she believed she could become an architect.
The efficient camp and the empathetic camp in architecture, and why she thinks everyone should sit in the second.
How she coaches designers by flooding them with references from textiles, sculpture and plants, and leaving the idea with them.
Why she treats retail and mixed-use projects like a story that should never feel finished.
Design was really just a part of our daily life. It was in the objects, it was literally in the silverware and in the candelabra and in the furniture and the textiles.
Robin Elmslie Osler
Chapters
A family of architects
Cranbrook, Louis Sullivan's office and a house where everything was designed.
Paris, a farm and Yale
The long way into architecture, including the unemployment line.
Values across generations
Humility, site, and opening the door to the next generation instead of lecturing it.
Efficiency versus empathy
Two camps in the profession, and teaching students who never heard of Aalto.
Building a team's creative muscle
Global scale, remote critiques, and giving designers ownership of their ideas.
By the numbers
Arcadis in 2024
people
countries
gross revenues
Robin says the firm's size is what lets her pull the right specialists into a team for any brief, while the design work itself still happens in small groups.
Source: Arcadis, Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results 2024 ↗Spaces that tell a living story
Light switches nobody can find, and places people come back to.
Creativity, it's a muscle and you have to exercise it.
Robin Elmslie Osler
Takeaways
Designing on screens favors how a space looks over how it sounds, feels and smells. Test those other senses on purpose, and walk sites in person whenever you can.
When reviewing someone else's design, understand how they got there before redirecting it, and give them references to filter rather than answers. The idea should stay theirs.
Good experiential design works under the radar: people may not know why a courtyard feels right, but they come back. Plan for flexibility so the place changes between visits.
You just think the technology is going to solve it. It's like, no, you forgot about the human, you forgot about instinct and intuition.
Robin Elmslie Osler