PLP Partner Andrei Martin spoke at the Office of the Year Conference 2023, in Budapest, exploring how cities and the places that we design in them can be catalysts for human creativity.

Andrei argued that as AI continues to grow and evolve it will serve to amplify, not diminish, and certainly not replace, one of the most fundamental human qualities – creativity. But how do we design dwellings and workplaces to actively foster and nourish it? His answer to the question above may be found in environments that for millennia have been magnets for talent, hubs of innovation and centers for creativity: cities.

He went on to say that an ongoing approach to design at PLP is to leverage the archetypal components that make cities vibrant, memorable, desirable, and allow them to activate our buildings so that they also become engines for creativity. He explores the approach of the ‘building as a fragment of the city’, seen as the next step in crafting hyper-mixed smart buildings – hybrid typologies that define the architecture of contemporary living and working.