Watch our Threshold Design introduction video 
and discover more about this theme below.
Thresholds define environment because we understand and experience through change. Thresholds can keep us safe and comfortable, mediate extremes, frame our experience and understanding of the outside world or the life within, and a method of representation.
In a time of extreme climate change and resource scarcity, it is essential to understand the agency of humanity and complex systems, natural and otherwise.
Through this we can find new ways to define and express ourselves across thresholds that exist in increasingly diverse social, political and cultural contexts.
A threshold can take many forms. They are zones across which we perceive change and communicate, but they also change us as we pass through them. They are critically important and complex elements of our built environment.
We live in a time of rapid change, and our designs must consider how to remain relevant into the future. Thresholds can protect us from adverse conditions. They can resist or mitigate physical danger, excess sun, wind, or seismic activity; balance water scarcity or surfeit; and protect from attack or intrusion.
Thresholds also help to define and enhance our experience of being inside, giving a sense of comfort and well-being. Air quality, temperature, light, sound, colour and texture in balance can remove distraction and enhance perception, while variety of experience brings personality to interior environments.
The human experience is part of the natural world, and the threshold is a medium through which inside and outside communicate. By creating space for human activity while working with the local ecology, thresholds enhance natural life and the experience of daylight, air and sound, following the cycles of the year.
Materials and systems are selected for longevity, beauty, and their feel, but also with a concern to the energy required to produce them, their reusability, and the ethics of their supply-chain. Processes are analysed for their efficiency in production and energy consumption.
We are excited by opportunities to use deep technical knowledge and regenerative principles to create practical, ambitious responses with lasting social value.
Thresholds present an opportunity and responsibility to communicate the life, stories, and personality of the people within them. Our cities and communities must represent their inhabitants and their history, both as individuals and collectively. Adaptation and creative re-use of existing structures, in the sense of both their embodied energy and their embodied culture, will be part of efficient and effective responses to new challenges.
Thresholds deliver environments that physically and emotionally embody identity, which may be the icons of tomorrow.
They can define spaces that are welcoming to specific communities, responding to their context, or support brands that want to deliver a declarative urban presence.
350 Mission Street San Francisco, USA
Read moreThresholds are where, but also when, we make a transition from one condition to another. The change we experience as we pass through a physical threshold is part of the design.
Our sense of the passage of time - tides, days, seasons, and even history itself - can form part of a threshold.
Our global society is on the threshold of a transition to a civilisation more balanced with the natural systems we inhabit. This temporal change must be understood, and the outcomes designed, as far as possible.
We can integrate physical and temporal qualities into a threshold that expresses change and yet endures across time.
