Contract - January/February 2016 - 61

Under their leadership, Felderman Keatinge & Associates had
grown to about 30 employees in the late 1980s. But, preferring to be
hands-on with all of their projects, the couple chose to focus on their
practice in Los Angeles, closing the New York office in 1993. They had
also been spending what they described as too much time on airplanes,
not just to New York but also long hauls to Asia, where they had a
number of projects throughout the 1990s, like the convention center in
Dalian, China (1992); the Samsung headquarters in Seoul, South Korea
(1996); and the Shibuya train station in Tokyo (2001). "We decided to
get off those airplanes and keep our firm at a size where we could enjoy
designing and also raise a family," Felderman says. Their twin daughters,
Kate and Sara, are now 15. "It wasn't about how big we could be," he
says. "It was about how much we get to enjoy what we do."
The artist and the problem solver
The couple's simpatico approach shines through in work completed
across a spectrum of clients and scales -from offices for entertainment
companies, corporations, and tech firms to restaurants, residential
projects, and product design. Their singular balance between imagination
and pragmatism originates with each of their strengths and insights.
Felderman is the artist. Keatinge is the problem solver, the one who
makes sure the projects stay true to who the clients are. Together, they
author projects that surprise and inspire, approaching each one as a
work of art in progress to be ultimately completed by the users.
In a sense, they are design futurists. Eschewing trends, they have
practiced ahead of the curve by listening closely to and their clients.
This is most evident in a project that had a profound influence on the
future of both their practice and workplace design as we know it:
MTV Networks' office in Santa Monica, California (1996).
Their design for MTV established a new precedent for playful,
forward-thinking, environmentally responsible office space, long before
LEED existed or open offices became the norm. One of the most widely
published office designs ever, MTV's office would set the tone for all of
the Internet company workplaces that followed. "It was really an
unusual project, and they let us do a lot of things that, at the time, were

not common," Keatinge says. "MTV gave us the program, and we said,
'OK, that's nice. Now we're going to go interview everybody.'"
Felderman and Keatinge prefer to develop a deep understanding
of the culture and aspirations of the client, from the leadership to the
facilities people and all of the different occupants in-between, enabling
them to design interiors to be flexible and malleable to people's needs.
That may be considered a norm today, but it was a radical departure
from the cubicles and closed offices of 20 years ago. In an approach
they call "fuzzy borders," the MTV interior was not only flexible enough
to allow furniture to be rearranged but it was also about making it
easier for people to get out of enclosed offices, move around, and enjoy
what Felderman and Keatinge called "living rooms." These spaces were
created with large movable walls that opened up conference rooms.
"At that time, we had been going to different innovation and
technology conferences that weren't design related," Keatinge says.
"We started asking, 'What would the office of the future be like? How
would people be working? And how do people want to work?' We
began to see how people were going to come out of their offices, and
they were going to start interacting more."
At one of those events in the mid-1990s, at the invitation of
Ray Anderson, the founder of the carpet company Interface, Felderman
and Keatinge saw Mikhail Gorbachev speak about Green Cross
International, the global environmental organization. His speech,
and the couple's relationship with Interface, were pivotal moments
that changed their perspective on design.
Learning from Green Cross International, they reutilized materials
and furnishings from the existing MTV office. "We even went to flea
markets to get used furniture that we later redid for MTV," Felderman
says. "When we heard Gorbachev and Anderson, it was like a light bulb
went on, [and we realized] that we are custodians of our environment
and that we need to be concerned about how what we use today can
be recycled and reused tomorrow." Twenty years and many projects
later, this remains a major driving force behind their work.
Not long after the completion of MTV, Interface hired the couple
as consultants to help envision a future for the company that was larger
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