The Creation of Place Collaborative
How it began
I’ve lost track of the miles we ran with dogs, the countless coffees and beers we shared while reflecting on ways we could make changes in our industry that were meaningful to us, our communities, and our environment.
Throughout the years, we would always challenge each other to do better and would ask the same questions regarding how we can make greater impacts within our firms and our communities:
What does it look like to treat every other design firm like a partner? What if we were able to help share our knowledge, learn from each other, and bring the industry up faster through collaboration?
How do we make meaningful change that is not only accessible and scalable to all but also moves the industry towards a truly more resilient and regenerative future?
Here’s our team, posing for family photo. Cute!
Getting the team together
Our team, comprised of friends and former colleagues, is gathered around many interests, specifically, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and the uniqueness of place.
We each have experienced many successes on our projects and made changes within different companies, cities, and states. Still, we knew we could do even more as a collaborative team working within our communities in pursuit of meaningful work and impactful change.
We've reached the inflection point that is the result of many ideas, conversations, shared experiences throughout the years, and a vision for a new type of practice.
We're founded on bringing together open-minded professionals and thought leaders to collaborate, discover, and share place-based design and policy solutions through open-source knowledge sharing. We support our team to create their own career paths while encouraging work that contributes to meaningful change.
A typical work day in the office. Can you spy little Rhonda?
Our work is to support collaboration and regenerative knowledge
Place Collaborative is a design firm practicing architecture, planning, and policymaking. Our purpose is to discover and share place-based design and policy solutions across all scales. We share our knowledge and expertise to allow us to focus on creating balance within social and environmental systems in all places.
We created a non-competitive collaborative that has complementary skills which bring other teams and our community’s knowledge and resilience to a higher level. By working together toward solutions instead of in competition with each other, we can broaden the potential for positive impact.
A strong foundation of Place Collaborative is slowing down and doing things at the right pace. To take on Doing everything with intent, doing it as well as possible instead of as fast as possible and with multiple, nested levels of use and meaning - nature doesn’t create single-use solutions, and neither do we. Quality over quantity. This allows us to take on meaningful projects so we can share place-based strategies and outcomes with our collaborators and help share open-source solutions for positive change.
We are a majority woman-owned B-Corp that infuses sustainable, equitable, and resilient strategies in all the work that we produce. We want to be and create the positive change that will benefit our communities. We can accomplish this, in part, with work that's refined, elegant, and focused on solutions that are and practical and scalable for all levels of design and policy.
We like to understand the places where our projects are located. Here’s one of our “Fun Friday” trips to Zion National Park! The team is hiking The Narrows
As a team we like to spend time in nature. This image was taken during our Fun Friday weekend retreat near the Uinta mountains.
Our vision of design must include:
Place based: Our designs and policy solutions are informed by Place. We build in collaboration with the environment, not against it. This includes proper context, materials, sustainability, resilience, and affordability while still retaining meaningful aesthetics.
Resilient design without compromise. Our designs and policy solutions are adaptable, scalable, and are inherently resilient and sustainable.
Collaboration is our specialty, and our passion is sharing knowledge to help others grow and make the changes that benefit their communities and environments. We are open-sourcing case studies and scalable solutions from our projects to be applied and adapted to others.
