union art co-op

 Selected art / design work

Hi there! We are incredibly excited at the possibility of joining you all at the Union Art Co-op. As we mentioned in our letter, Gennie and I have had art and design central to our personal and professional lives for quite a long time. We really love the idea of expanding on the work we do within the Co-op and to raise our daughter, Miro, amongst neighbors who create and help shape the world around them.

Gennie was a professional pianist and began her life as a classical musician at the age of four. From her earliest memories, she has always believed in the transformative power of music and art to bring people of all walks of life together. She travelled all over the world to perform and attended the Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts and Juilliard Pre-College during high school to support her musical career. During these years, she was able to achieve her dream of performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and also had the chance to play with musical legends such as Yo-Yo Ma and Van Cliburn. After high school, she attended The Juilliard School as a part of the College piano program but it was during these years in her early 20s where she decided to shift focuses after unfortunately suffering from debilitating pain in her hands that impacted her ability to continue her piano career in the same way. The cause of this pain was later diagnosed as fibromyalgia and early on-set arthritis, both of which she lives with and manages today. After Juilliard, Gennie set her sights on the fashion design world and went back to school to Parsons where she received a degree in Strategic Design and Management. She held a long and well-respected career in the fashion design industry working for Saks Fifth Avenue as a women’s designer buyer and later the SPACE at Nordstrom, where she frequently travelled to New York, Paris, Milan, London, and Tokyo to scout new and emerging fashion designers. Gennie decided to leave this position two years ago to spend more time with our young daughter and to give herself more time to work on her own creative pursuits including conceptual design work with our company.

Our firm is called Animal Name Design and we are primarily a conceptual design studio. We help other design firms, developers, brands, and individuals conceptualize and visualize future possibilities. I (Ben) hold a BA and a Masters in Architecture but have purposefully stayed on the conceptual side of things. Our work has taken a lot of shapes over the years, which is one reason we have decided to not limit ourselves to architecture. Our work is often 3D visualization or VR experiences but can also be furniture making, product design, graphic design/identity or even occasionally a public art project! I opened the studio in 2015 in Brooklyn before moving back to Seattle in 2017. Animal Name Design runs almost exclusively via word-of-mouth marketing and we keep an intentionally quiet presence on the internet.

Alongside the design work, I (Ben) have always loved making art. I first picked up my late grandmother’s oil paints in high school for a school project and just couldn’t stop creating since. I started with painting and then began glass blowing (taking lessons with Seattle Glass Blowing on 5th) and continuing working for studio time at Redmond School of Glass. At architecture school, my work often leaned more towards sculpture and I developed an appreciation for the tension between machined and hand-made worlds…between connection and disconnection. I designed and built rooms that killed your Wi-Fi signals and made accessories for personal technology that were intended to make you uncomfortable and question your relationship with technology. Later, picking up neon, I was fascinated by the tension between this medium that is always made by hand with the natural world, embedding the light in wood and plants. Later, this tension re-emerged in 3D printing perfect geometries and then casting and pouring vessels from concrete. Regardless of the medium, I am constantly trying to understand the evidence of a human, of mistakes, and of tension of being a human in an increasingly machined world.

At the request of our clients, some of the work below is confidential so this is intended for the eyes of the Co-op Board Members. We are including some professional work and some personal work to hopefully give you a sense of what we do. We would like to thank you all for having a look and your consideration of our application to join your building.

Various examples of neon and bending work

A tea chest designed and fabricated based on methods learned as a Carpentry Apprentice in rural Japan

Nightlights for Miro

Light painting with animations and ipads

A tower of books

A memorial sculpture for Travis Roy in Prudential Center in Boston (in construction)

Conceptual design for a pavilion to display giant crystals

Imagining the future development of BEMike’s studio in New Orleans

*use your mouse to slide the center button side to side to see the transformation

1300 E Jefferson, Seattle Conceptual design

Conceptual design for XQ schools in Barbados. Modular, CLT classrooms deployed across a country reimagining their post-monarchy education system (in construction)

*Use your mouse to slide the center button side to side to see the transformation

A memorial chapel for a healthcare advocate in Rwanda

A concept for a art walk island in Petaluma for a private client

A new student center for a Waldorf school in New Hampshire

A recent proposal for a park in California

Furniture designs for a home goods retailer

Skeuomorphic objects

Concrete planters

A shoe rack prototype

Glassblowing work

Difficult phone cases

1/4” craft dowels and primitive solids

Rubber and painted vases

Offset totems

Wifi Cold Spot - a room for disconnection

A library of the future and the past

Bar floor for a PNW Beer company

Storefront retail concept for a wellness company

Concepts for Dover Street Market

Retail spaces with Dover Street Market + Comme des Garçons

*Click the button to enter a virtual walk-through of the space in progress

Currently developing the future standards for Le Pain Quotidien

A bar of a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn, NY

A museum cafe concept for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts in LA

A new multi-concept building in Downtown Disneyland

Use your mouse of finger to navigate around the installation

Concept design for Eames Foundation imagining a design park masterplan acroos hundreds of acres in Northern California including the repurposing of the defunct Birkenstock Factory

A new concept for a PNW retailer

*Click the button to enter a virtual walk-through of the space in progress