David Polzin is profiled in a new Q&A-style article published by St. Louis Magazine. The article highlights David’s role as the Executive Director of Design for CannonDesign and then asks him for thoughts on design and technology, human experience, St. Louis, urbanity and more topics. David has delivered valuable design for the City of St. Louis and across the world throughout his career.
David’s full Q&A piece can be read online. Below are two key excerpts from the story.
How do you plan for a built environment that will need to accommodate technology we can’t even imagine yet?
You need to design for flexibility. You need to design buildings that are not so carefully prescribed to individual needs so that they can’t be anything else in the future. It acutely resonates with our healthcare clients. There are constantly new technologies emerging in the healthcare realm. You don’t design a room around a piece of equipment that will be superseded in five years.
What have been some of your favorite projects in St. Louis?
St. Louis is becoming a magnet for entrepreneurship. How does the built environment, how does architecture, respond to that? People have these prejudices about what the face of entrepreneurship looks like – it’s not just a tech giants being born in someone’s garage, it’s not just a hoodie-wearing billionaire with a foosball table. How do you respond to the rich complexity of what it means? I think St. Louisians have to start getting comfortable with the notion that the new can live comfortably with the old. I have the utmost respect for our cultural heritage as it’s expressed through our architecture. If we’re going to build something new, it has to reflect the future.