Steelcase Takes a Desk in the Classroom

I’m sitting next to a desk that could have been mine in elementary school. Yours was probably like this, too: a hard-backed wooden chair on steel legs with a small writing tray bolted to a steel pipe. The one I’m sitting in could hardly be more different, starting with its bright green plastic seat that swivels, and has elbow perches that double as backpack hooks and gives a little when I lean back.

“There just hasn’t been any significant innovation in classroom furniture in I can’t remember when,” says Sean Corcorran, director of product development and marketing for the education solutions group at Steelcase, which designed and made the desk I’m test-sitting. “We see 50-year-old chairs in classrooms today. I think there’s pentup demand.”

Still, I wonder whether the desk will enable Steelcase to break out of the office market and into classrooms. With a laptop-friendly work surface, the node, as it’s called, lists for $599. By comparison, basic desks by market-leader KI start as low as $169. What’s more, I haven’t heard of a school anywhere that’s got extra cash these days. Many, in fact, can’t even pay all their teachers or afford new books.

At a Neocon event in Chicago, Corcorran tells me that in four months of pre-sales, the company has received orders for 50% of the first year’s production. Yet in better times—say, seven years ago when Steelcase decided to branch out into the education market—the order rate probably would have been higher, concedes his boss, Steelcase Group President James Keane.

Schools are mostly submitting try-out orders, buying desks for a classroom or two rather outfitting the entire building. “There’s probably less across-the-board opportunities in this sort of economy,” he tells me. “But we’ve been very happy with the success so far.”

The node is so unusual because, as a newcomer to the market, Steelcase looked not at how classrooms are generally equipped, but at how teaching has evolved. Used to be that teachers stood in the front and drilled rows of students much like a sergeant would address the troops. Today students are just as likely to be learning from one another in groups. Students also need a place for their backpacks and, at the college level for sure, a work surface with room for a laptop and a book.

Steelcase began developing its desk with help from design shop IDEO about a year and a half ago, Corcorran says. The early prototypes, on display at the event at the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, were assembled from crudely cut plywood and old plastic chair seats. Nonethless, they look basically like the final product.

The node comes on wheels, making it easier for students or teachers to roll them into new arrangements. The concave base, made of aluminum, provides an out-of-the-aisle space for backpacks or other gear. Not only does the plastic-molded seat swivel; the work tray does, too. And the 22x12-inch plastic surface can easily accommodate a laptop with space to spare.

One of the bigger changes was to make the seat bigger. Corcorran says Steelcase added an an inch and a half to the width so that today’s heftier students can squeeze in. The desk, which weighs 32 pounds, can support up to 300 pounds. The American classroom has changed.

Gehry's Take Two on LEED Architecture

Frank Gehry asked me to call him. I thought it was to answer questions about how the Great Recession was affecting the next generation of architects. But before we could get to that, the founder of Gehry Partners and an instructor this term at the Yale School of Architecture said he wanted to clarify his comments about LEED building standards. (I posted this blog after Gehry spoke on that topic during a public appearance on April 6.)

Yes, he did say that efforts to win a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification can be a waste of time and money. But he told me on the phone that what he really meant to attack was the posturing around the LEED seal of approval. He’s all for energy-efficient buildings, he said, and has been since before there was an Earth Day, in the late 1960s.

Though he reiterated that he had never designed a building just to gain a LEED tag, he noted, in fact, that his Stata Center at MIT has been awarded a LEED silver from the U.S. Green Building Council.

“I’m not against LEEDs at all,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful. I think we’ve got to do this.” But then Gehry, who acknowledged that he is something of a cranky old man, got back on a soapbox to decry today’s automatic embrace of LEED certification. “It’s become ‘fetishized’ in my profession. It’s like if you wear the American flag on your lapel, you’re an American. That’s what I was trying to say. You get people who are holier than thou. I think architects can do a lot, but some of what gets done is marketing and doesn’t really serve to the extent that the PR says it does.”

With that off his chest, our conversation turned to other subjects including the job market for architects today, which is simply rotten. Gehry said he has 10 “superb” students in his graduate-school class. In previous years, he would have hired a few of them. But this year, with to little to do at his Los Angeles-based firm, he said he can’t. “Some of them will have trouble. And I don’t think they can all afford to have trouble.”

He said the students probably would work for less money, and some would be happy to be unpaid interns. But he said he insists on paying the prevailing salary for entry-level architects, and his partnership doesn’t have the work for more paid employees. For now, he said, the profession is in serious trouble, too. “You just hope it’s going to come back.”

Is LEEDing the Saudi Desert Really Green?

Just in time for Earth Day (natch) the American Institute of Architects announced its Top 10 examples of environmentally benign building designs. The 2010 honor roll includes office towers, schools, and even a prototype of a prefab single-family home designed for post-Katrina New Orleans. It also includes the world’s largest project to be awarded a LEED Platinum designation by the U.S. Green Building Council—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

But after all the hullabaloo my recent blog posts on Frank Gehry generated, I have to ask: How green is it?

KAUST is the first to achieve a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design imprimatur in Saudi Arabia. (Interestingly, it’s also the kingdom’s first coed university campus.) The 6.5 million-sq.-ft. development, which encompasses 26 buildings on over 9,000 acres near Jeddah on the Red Sea, was designed by HOK, one of the world’s top architecture firms. It’s the eighth win for St. Louis-based HOK since the AIA’s Committee on the Environment began handing out awards in 1997.

HOK pats itself on the back for KAUST’s green touches, such as shading walkways and buildings from sunlight, installing wind turbines and 178,325 square feet of solar panels, sourcing 38% of materials within 500 miles of the Saudi port, and creating an infrastructure that reuses all waste water for onsite irrigation and other purposes. Contractors did two other things on the LEED checklist: They recycled 80% of waste materials and used wood that was sustainably harvested.

That’s all well and good, but the fact is that nearly two-thirds of the tens of thousands of tons of materials needed to construct this desert campus—paint, carpeting, furnishings, wood—had to be shipped in from more than 500 miles away. I don’t know how much greenhouse gas those vessels produced, but I do know that ocean freighters emit a lot. Back in 2007, I wrote in BusinessWeek that, based on a study, they produced more carbon dioxide than 10 of the 39 industrialized nations originally included in the Kyoto Protocol. A revised study finds that that’s still the case.

I asked one of the AIA committee members, Liz Ogbu of San Francisco-based Public Architecture, about how far judges should go in assessing environmental impact. She said the committee discussed whether it was right to award a LEED project in such a remote, resourceless, and inhospitable place. But she said it was precisely for that reason that the committee voted for HOK design. “Not every building can be built in California,” she noted. “There is going to be building going on in Saudi Arabia. For that reason, it’s important to have an example that green building is possible.”

I also asked HOK’s Colin Rohlfing the same question. Rohlfing is sustainable design leader in HOK’s Chicago office and was one of the hundreds of HOK employees on the project. “We had a lot of things working against us from the get-go,” he told me. In an ideal world, developers would build in temperate climates. Here, however, designers confronted a climate like Houston’s, except set in a desert, and coral reefs and mangroves that had to be protected.

“It’s always a dilemma,” he said. “Should we develop in those areas? Should we be going after greenfield developments in such a harsh environment? But if we don’t go after them and win them and try to make them as efficient as possible, some other firm will come in. The king was going to build in that location regardless. We had to make the best of it.”

I have to agree. If Saudi Arabia is going to develop as a nation, it does the world a favor by building to LEED standards. Still, I wonder what Frank Gehry would have to say.

Architect Gehry on LEED Buildings: Humbug

Frank Gehry has never designed a structure that’s achieved LEED certification, and I’d wager that he never will, based on his gruff remarks during a public Q&A on April 6 in Chicago. The 81-year-old also jabbed a thumb, somewhat in jest, in the eye of fellow architect Renzo Piano and museum directors in general, and he described the early stages of creating a design.

Gehry, whose most famous work is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, was interviewed in the Harold Washington Library by Thomas Pritzker, chairman of the Pritzker Foundation, which awards the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, and Hyatt Hotels Corp. His family also wrote the check for the Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. (Hyatt itself recently won a LEED silver designation for a new hotel in Seattle.)

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and was created by the U.S. Green Building Council to promote the construction of buildings that are healthier for the earth as well as occupants inside. Developers seems to be tripping over one another to win LEED status these days.

What would you think, Pritzker asked him as they sat in hard-backed chairs on an auditorium stage, if a client said he wanted a LEED-certified building? “Oh, great,” Gehry answered in a high, mock-excited voice, as the audience laughed. Then, back in his regular voice, he dismissed environmental concerns as largely political concerns. “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.”

He also said the expense of building to LEED standards often outweighs the benefits. On smaller projects, he said, “the costs of incorporating those kind of things don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

He seemed eager to resume another fight when the conversation turned to Millennium Park, whose new neighbors include the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, designed by Piano and opened last year largely to acclaim.

Gehry recalled daring Piano to relocate the addition so it would directly face Millennium Park and the Pritzker Pavilion. “Renzo, come get me, baby,” Gehry said he told him. Piano did move the annex, which is now linked by a pedestrian bridge to the park. So how do you think it turned out? Pritzker asked.

Gehry replied that from inside the Modern Wing galleries, visitors can’t help but see the stainless-steel ribbons that adorn his pavilion. “He’s gotten better,” he faint-praised Piano, again to laughter. “You know the sibling rivalry between architects. We love each other, but we’re insanely competitive. Even at 81, I still do it. I can’t help myself.”

He suggested that something bold, like his Bilbao museum, would have been a better. But he said right after that building opened, the world’s top museum directors got together in London and, according to a friend who was there, voted never to commission another like it. “I think museum curators and directors like the predictable, so it’s all easy,” Gehry said. “A little bit of laziness, maybe.”

Pritzker recalled being a family vacation with Gehry in India and watched him sketch plans for a new building. Pritzker said the drawings looked like “scribbling.” Gehry said there’s more to building design than that, though he confessed: “I’ve always wanted to figure out to just do the sketch, get paid, and get out of there.”

He said his first step is to build a site model of roughly 10 blocks around the site, to see how his new building night fit in. Then he does a bigger-scale model of two or three blocks. He also walks around the area to understand the community. “It’s a pretty well-informed mind that starts to sketch,” he said. “I maybe do 20 or 30 of these drawings that look like scribbles. But when the buildings are finished and you look at the drawings, a lot of them look like the buildings.”

Gehry said he’s kept these sketches over his career and now has a file cabinet with perhaps 4,000 drawings. I’m sure even one of those stick-in-the-mud museum curators would love to put them on display.

Chicago Mayor's Innovation Answers: Better Schools, Fewer Wars

You may think you know Chicago Mayor Richard Daley pretty well after reading his recent profile in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos, a former colleague at the Chicago Tribune. But even after more than 20 years in office—and even longer in the media—Daley can still surprise, as I found out during a private lunch with him. The lunch capped the latest Chicago Innovation Awards and provided the winners, profiled here on businessweek.com last fall, a chance to tell their stories individually to the mayor. I was there as one of the judges.

Most of the talk was on innovation, naturally. But as we sat at a large rectangular table in an anteroom in Daley's City Hall office for more than an hour, Daley leaned back in his chair to launch into monologues against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failure of public schools—Chicago's included—to adequately train kids today in technology, math, and science. Among the education fixes Daley said he's contemplating: a fifth year of high school and elite math and science academies for Chicago's brainiest students. He also praised for-profit schools.

Daley had surprised me just the day before the March 26 luncheon. I had seen him at an event at the CME Group, where he met the media to talk up the jobs and technology that the futures-trading giant has created. In the middle of a standard pro-business speech, Daley seemed to have a Tea Party moment. He scolded government for raising taxes and boosting its payroll, saying such moves put too much burden on the private sector and probably don't really help much anyway. Later, I asked him whether his remarks were aimed at President Barack Obama. No, he answered. But he added that the federal stimulus measures had succeeded only in creating jobs in Washington and not in the rest of the nation, where people are still hurting.

At the lunch, Daley seemed most interested in a couple of inventions by firefighters. One helps crews battle high-rise fires by enabling them to attach a pipe to the building's exterior to pump in water from the floor below. The second is essentially a giant shop-vac that quickly sucks away debris to help rescue victims of cave-ins. But he was also intrigued by dot-com startups such as Everyblock.com, Groupon, and Visible Vote. What more could the city do, he asked, to promote more innovation and entrepreneurship? The winners suggested city sponsorship of tech and scientific conferences. Daley, in turn, pushed education as a way to supply employers with the talent they need.

Too many students are graduating high school knowing too little about technology, math, and science, Daley said. Even bright kids come out with too few skills because they get held behind by the rest of the class, he said. Chicago, he said, should have career-tracked schools where nerds wouldn't be ostracized. Daley also related anecdotes about students who scam the system by obtaining Pell Grants to go to community college but then take just one class year after year, spending the rest of their stipends on whatever. (For-profit schools aren't scam-free, as this report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek showed.)

Endless wars are undermining America's competitiveness, too, he said. The reason the country doesn't have enough money for better schools or job retaining, he went on, is that it is spending hundreds of billions a year on war. This isn't what the U.S. should stand for, he added. He also wondered where the public outrage is. Back when his father was Chicago's mayor, he recalled, thousands of people would routinely take to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. Nowadays, he said, there are no demonstrations—people shrug off war and say if enlistees want to go off and risk their lives, well, that's their choice.

He also said he could never talk like that in Washington, or he'd be branded as being politically incorrect.

As we stood in line to help ourselves to the food, I asked Daley what he thought of the New Yorker profile. He said he thought it was fair and that Osnos didn't seem to have it out for him like the local media. Way to go, Evan.

BusinessWeek NEXT blog

Everything prior to this post is extracted from BusinessWeek's NEXT blog.

Debate: Who's the Most Innovative Company of 2010?

Posted by: Michael Arndt on March 08, 2010

We’re a month away from publishing our Most Innovative Companies ranking for 2010, dear readers. Let’s see if your opinion matches those in our survey of top-level execs around the globe. Who do you think will top this year’s list? And who do you think actually deserves to be No. 1? Also, name a newcomer that has earned a slot in the Top 25.

To refresh your memory, here’s 2009’s list. I’ve put an asterisk after companies that were honored in our first ranking, in 2005. The 2010 ranking comes out on April 8.

1. Apple*
2. Google*
3. Toyota Motor*
4. Microsoft*
5. Nintendo
6. IBM*
7. Hewlett-Packard
8. Research in Motion*
9. Nokia*
10. Wal-Mart Stores*
11. Amazon.com*
12. Procter & Gamble*
13. Tata
14. Sony*
15. Reliance Industries
16. Samsung Electronics*
17. General Electric*
18. Volkswagen
19. McDonald’s
20. BMW*
21. Walt Disney
22. Honda Motors
23. AT&T
24. Coca-Cola
25. Vodafone