Creating award-winning designs is how these architects have made their marks, so we turned the tables to explore the environments that inspire their ingenuity.

Bing Hu

The Hangar One facility located in the Scottsdale Airpark is an architect’s dream. While sections of the hangar house corporate aircrafts, a sizable portion of the building is home to H & S International, the headquarters of acclaimed architect Bing Hu.

“This is already a very incredible, beautiful space so we didn’t really want to do anything to the look,” Hu says. “We just worked with it to make it more inspiring.” Hu did so by adding splashes of primary colors throughout the 12,000-sq-ft office, a vision clearly realized in an area of the Hangar one facility known as the green room.

Encapsulated by a green-tinted, glass-walled entrance, the green room is an architect work space punctuated by a primary-colored plexiglass ceiling situated atop aluminum trellises. Turning your focus upward allows the eye to see through the patches of yellows, reds and blues into an additional work space above. Rays of light refract through the ceiling and provide a stimulating hue on the design environment below.

Upon occupying the Hangar One facility, which was originally designed by Adam Tihany with Swaback Partners, Hu knew which office would be his from the get-go. Essentially a glass room on all sides with glass doors that mimic aircraft systems, Hu’s office, much like air traffic control, oversees a segment of the runway and the planes on the ramp each day.

“I like speed,” says Hu, whose current primary design focus is on high-end residential resorts--essentially grand-scale custom residences. “I like to watch the planes go by every 10 minutes, because this is one of the busiest single-runway airports in the nation. So to watch them take off or the landing speed as they go by is very exciting. I just enjoy fast things.”