Architecture and Carchitecture. This Times article points to the recent work of California architect Jennifer Luce for Nissan in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Presented with the challenge of making cavernous hangar-style industrial space inspiring for Nissan’s designers, Luce introduced a warm, intimate, textured and residential feel to her designs.

Her approach has gone beyond the dot-com cliché of comfy sofas and pinball machines sprinkled around a high-tech office: at Nissan she drew on lessons from her work on lofts and houses—about the texture, color and “intimacy” of materials, as she puts it, and about the balancing of privacy and openness—to reconcile workplace efficiency with human needs. In doing so, said John Parry, the chief administrator of Nissan’s American design division, she has helped the company create a more fluid, inclusive and original environment, and to attract and hold onto some of the best design talent in the business. At the Farmington Hills studio, which Ms. Luce designed with the help of Albert Kahn Associates of Detroit, she and her team worked to humanize the huge building, she said, by calibrating “the rough and the finished, the industrial and the domestic, and the vast and the intimate.”