News

Annual Christmas Gathering: Dinner Table

2021 VOSH Annual Christmas Gathering

Last year, the VOSH team was treated to a magical Christmas celebration that was graciously hosted by Prairie Gardens & Adventure Farm in Bon Accord, Alberta. The evening began with a tractor-drawn hayride around the farm, followed by storytelling around crackling bonfires and a taste of locally crafted beverages. Prior to the start of dinner, our staff enjoyed a hands-on Christmas wreath crafting session, complete with fresh juniper and pine branches and a wide variety of ribbons and baubles to add a personal touch to each wreath and door hanger. Our team also had fun concocting our own salt rub consisting of fresh salt harvested from Vancouver Island and fire ash to add a smoky flavour to the rub. As for dinner, it was absolutely delicious and most of our team had very little room for the Gingerbread Crisp dessert!

We highly recommend a visit to Prairie Gardens & Adventure Farm – for more information, please visit prairiegardens.org.

VOSH’s New Home

What better way to start a new year than with a set of keys to our new office location! As of February 4, 2022, VOSH received the keys to our new home, along with a lovely congratulatory gift from our real estate agent, Tom Lowe (Re/Max Real Estate). Since 2008, we have undertaken numerous renovations and expansions to our current location and to say that we are deeply rooted in this space is an understatement. From ISIS Design and Architecture Inc. to Voshell Architecture and Design, Inc., our story is one that speaks to determination and perseverance and the space we inhabited served us well. Now, it’s time for a new chapter. The great thing is that we’ll be less than a block away from where our story began and we can’t wait to show you our new home once the renovations are done!

Virtual meets reality

At VOSH, we’re able to create collaborative, immersive, interactive experiences for our clients, contractors and design team members alike. Even though virtual reality has been around for a number of years, it was the video gaming industry that pushed it as a mainstream option and one that has rapidly made its mark in the AEC industry.

Virtual Reality (VR) is an incredible tool and one of the value-adds that VOSH brings to a project. It allows for a detailed walk-through of a rendered version of our Revit model so that each space of a building’s design (complete with interior colours and finishes!) can be viewed before it’s even built. With a bit of programming knowledge, VR models can also be heavily customized, allowing engineers and architects to produce memorable, interactive real time walkthroughs.

In combination with drawings, renderings and 3D models, VR bolsters the visualization of our projects because it is far more detailed and complex than traditional physical models. We have also found that VR models can facilitate our clients’ buy-in of a proposed design solution and instill confidence in the overall quality and progress of our design team.

A Pop-up OF inspiratioN!

When it comes to interior design, we are always looking for ways to create innovative, collaborative, and inspiring spaces. When Steelcase and RGO Office Products opened WorkBetterLab in Edmonton, we jumped at the opportunity to experience different prototype workplaces of the future.

Made up of diverse work environments designed to accommodate all modes of work (i.e. collaborative, personal, learning , and social), the WorkBetter Lab reimagines the spaces people work so that they can work better. The Lab also features new ways to support focus work and hybrids of shared work spaces that offer people great control and comfort.

VOSH’s team members had a wonderful time exploring a number of highly flexible work spaces. The pop-up experience also highlighted workers’ changing needs in a post-pandemic world.

Appointments to visit a WorkBetter Lab can be made at workbetterlab.ca and we highly recommend it!

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parti

In addition to our project-related work, VOSH is currently preparing the firm’s first entry for an international affordable housing design competition. One of the pre-design exercises that individual team members were prompted to undertake was the creation of parti diagrams that would help squeeze the creative juices from our collective fruit basket. As a team, we discussed conventional definitions of “affordable housing”, applied it to the scope of the design brief for the competition and then developed parti diagrams based on individual interpretations of the task at hand.

In the realm of Architectural design, a parti diagram is a simple freehand sketch or doodle that captures and conveys the overall concept of a design project — an illustration that can be revisited regardless of where one is at during the design process. Simply put, a parti diagram is a visual representation of the interplay between imagination and ideas that provides a sense of order and direction in the chaos of the abstract.

The result? A collection of parti diagrams that are unique to each individual’s understanding and interpretation of the design brief, but still reflect parallels and crossovers in key design considerations from one parti to the next. Our firm’s Principal, Todd, had a blast highlighting the similarities between all of them and recommended jumping off points for our team to begin designing and we can’t wait to see how the building and the site turns out!