David Galullo: 2024 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Call it DNA, call it destiny: David Galullo was fated for a career in design and architecture. Credit his late father, an Italian American builder and visionary who passed on a worldview that became the underpinning of his son’s multidisciplinary practice. “He taught me to see the world as an opportunity for improvement rather than something completed,” begins the consummate professional who, although a licensed architect, does not necessarily call himself such. “I don’t want limits.”

Learn How David Galullo’s Rapt Studio Breaks Boundaries

Work is a matter of gathering, too. Each project team assembles talents spanning the full creative spectrum: architecture, design, graphics, branding, marketing, and communications. With no siloing by skill set, everyone has a voice and is free to critique any part of a proposal, not just their area of expertise. This not only results in an integrated response to each brief but also helps shape Rapt’s organization, with its three studios viewed holistically rather than as competing profit centers. “We’re breaking down barriers that other firms may have,” Galullo emphasizes.

More than 70 percent of Rapt’s practice centers on the workplace, principally in the gaming, apparel, media, and tech sectors. Its roster of completed projects lists many big names: Google, Goop, The North Face, and Tinder for starters. Current or recently finished assignments include consolidating CNN’s Atlanta operations into longtime-client Warner Bros. Discovery’s seven-building Techwood campus; relocating online gaming enterprise Roblox’s headquarters into a 180,000-square- foot building in San Matteo, California; and having just completed language app Duolingo’s New York offices at 4 World Trade Center, going on to renovate and expand the company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh. Rapt’s global planning for international financial services corporation Macquarie Group supports the company’s real estate operations worldwide, providing local design firms with a template to work from, while for real estate developer Hines, another global enterprise, Rapt crafted regional headquarters at West Edge, a mixed-use development in L.A.

Explore Rapt Studio’s Encyclopedic Portfolio

Rapt’s branding projects range from Bishop Ranch, an idyllic 585-acre business and residential park in San Ramon, California, to Tishman Speyer’s Merge, an amenity-rich, four-building, 5-acre business campus in Seattle. “Things just pop up,” Galullo says of Rapt’s encyclopedic portfolio. How about a kit-of-parts play-book guiding a retail rollout for the California cannabis concern Embarc Dispensaries as a sign of the times?

“People are more than their job descriptions,” he says, emphasizing the importance of creating adaptable workplaces that accommodate varied sensory needs and cognitive styles. Galullo’s articulate thoughtfulness has made him something of a media darling, consistently covered over his four-decade career. So, tell us some- thing no one else knows. “I just got my Italian passport,” he gleefully responds. To which we can only reply, in bocca al lupo!—his ancestral homeland’s idiom for good luck.

See Workplace Designs From David Galullo

Discover How Rapt Studio Shapes Top Brands

Christopher Myers Creates Art on Ice in Brooklyn

Temperatures were chilly in New York over the winter holidays. But at 99 Scott in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the vibe was hot. That was courtesy of Studio Skate, a pop-up ice rink curated by Zoe Lukov featuring a site-specific commission by interdisciplinary artist Christopher Myers. Titled Feathers on the Waves, the installation’s colors recall Myers’s stained glass, yet his inspiration came from such trailblazers as Surya Bonaly, whose backflip during the 1998 Winter Olympics defied conventions. “The history of Black athletes on ice is long and complicated,” Myers says. “Feathers consists of images of bodies suspended between here and there, like those in the myth of Icarus, filled with aspiration, freedom, and sometimes failure.” Speaking of bodies, that of singer Alicia Hall Moran was outfitted in a costume by Myers when she performed at the rink. 

Studio Skate wrapped last month. But a solo exhibition of stained-glass light boxes by Myers is on view in Charlotte, North Carolina, as will be his monumental textiles at the Biennale of Sydney, from March 9 to June 10. 

Loie Hollowell Explores Birth and the Body in Latest Works

A few months into 2024 and Loie Hollowell is already having a banner year. The 40-year-old abstract painter known for biomorphic, female forms in radiant, mystical palettes—what she calls “metaphors for the body”—has not one or two but three solo exhibitions this winter. What’s going on? “They’re the compilation of the processing of the birth of my second child and the close connection I got to have with both my kids during the pandemic lockdown,” she explains of her work and offspring, born 2018 and 2020. “I’m having a prolific moment because they’re at an age where I’m able to have longer periods of time in my studio,” which, like her home, is in Ridgewood, Queens.

Things kicked off mid January in San Francisco at Jessica Silverman gallery, which introduced 10 of Hollowell’s new bas-relief paintings of a three-dimensional belly that morphs into a planetary orb. Later that month, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, bowed her first museum presentation on the East Coast with 39 works from 2014 to today. In March, with “Dilation,” Pace New York spotlights the artist’s process, which begins with pastel drawings, featuring 10 she has created in the last year. Measuring approx­imately 27 by 30 inches, they’re the largest drawings the gallery’s ever exhibited.