Building America

Somewhere between a dialysis lab in New Hampshire and a spine device inspection line in Massachusetts, a quality assurance technician started noticing something that had nothing to do with furniture at all: how much of the built environment, and the …

Factories in Reynosa, Tamaulipas do not usually turn out chief executives of American workplace design companies. Yet that is precisely where this particular story begins, on the production floor of Zenith Electronics Systems in the mid 1990s, where a young …

Careers, in this industry as in most others, are usually told through a chain of job titles, each one a rung on a ladder leading somewhere else. Ken Baugh’s story resists that shape entirely. He has spent nearly four decades …

In 2002, somebody had to want a failing business badly enough to buy it. Most people would have looked at the books and walked away. Joseph P. Lozowski looked at the same books and saw the outline of something else …

There is a particular kind of expertise that cannot be taught in a classroom or simulated in a training module. It accumulates slowly, through years of watching people move through spaces, of listening carefully to what a client says and …

There is a particular kind of work that never makes the front page, that earns little applause at galas and generates few headlines, and yet, without which none of the visible, celebrated work of community change would be possible. It …