Designing in a Locked-Down City: The Early Days of Us

The early days were hard—not just for our small team—but for the cities we love.

In the spring of 2020, as we quietly launched our company, the world outside had come to a halt. The pandemic was in full swing, lockdowns were enforced in nearly every major city, and the idea of a vaccine still felt years away. New York, where our team was based, was among the hardest hit. The soundscape of the city had changed: sirens replaced street chatter, and each evening at 6 o’clock, neighbors would open their windows to clap and cheer for the healthcare workers risking their lives just a few blocks away. It was a moment of strange stillness, collective fear, and uncertain resilience.

But something else had shifted too—something deeper than just mood. The fundamental organizing principle of urban life—the movement of people—was flipped overnight. The modern city is designed around flow: from home to office, from school to store, from public space to private retreat. But now, for the first time in over a century, the city’s logic was reversed. Everything had to come to us.

Instead of going to school, school came to us. Instead of going to work, work came to us. And instead of walking to the corner store, groceries arrived in boxes, placed at our doorstep by masked strangers. We weren’t just isolating—we were re-routing the city around ourselves.

As a company founded to rethink how physical spaces are designed, built, and managed, this reversal raised immediate questions for us. What does design look like when the city stops moving? How should we build spaces—temporary or permanent—that serve people who can’t move through the world as they once did?

Parking Lots as Infrastructure

In those early months, we got a call from REEF, a large parking management company that operated thousands of lots across North America. At first glance, parking lots might not seem like a hotbed of innovation. But REEF had a hypothesis: what if these underutilized urban parcels could be transformed into flexible infrastructure for a new kind of last-mile economy?

REEF had already begun experimenting with using their lots as logistics hubs—starting with COVID testing centers and “dark kitchens,” commercial kitchen facilities designed for delivery-only food service via apps like DoorDash or Grubhub. They were betting that as cities adapted to the pandemic, the value of these small, well-located lots would increase—not just as places to store cars, but as places to distribute goods and services.

Parking lots, it turns out, are ideally positioned for this kind of pivot. They’re located near dense populations, have built-in access to roads and curb cuts, and can often be reconfigured more easily than traditional buildings. The question wasn’t whether the land could be used differently. It was how.

Systems, Not Sketches

This is where we came in. Our job was to help REEF design a modular system that could adapt their lots into multi-use logistics hubs—testing one week, grocery pick-up the next, maybe coworking or outdoor retail the week after that. The lots varied widely in shape, size, and access, so the design solution couldn’t be a fixed layout. It had to be a flexible kit-of-parts—modular units that could be arranged, swapped, or scaled to match each site.

This kind of complexity is exactly what we were built to manage. From day one, our vision was to create an online platform that unified design, procurement, and asset management into a single, intelligent workflow. Our focus wasn’t on one-off projects—it was on companies that needed to deploy consistent design standards across many locations, whether that was a workplace, a retail chain, or a pop-up logistics center in a parking lot.

Working with REEF was an early proving ground for this approach. We weren’t just drawing layouts—we were encoding them. Creating spatial rules, equipment libraries, and standardized configurations that could be scaled across a network. Design wasn’t a deliverable; it was a dataset.

Designing for Change

The urgency of the moment made this work feel even more vital. Every week, regulations shifted. Cities changed their policies, infection rates rose or fell, and people’s behaviors evolved in real time. This wasn’t the kind of design process that could afford long timelines or perfect conditions. It was iterative, responsive, and deeply collaborative.

One of the key insights we took from this time was that flexibility in physical design has to be supported by flexibility in tooling. You can’t adapt your real estate strategy at scale if your design systems are still trapped in PDFs and outdated spreadsheets. What you need is a living platform—one that captures the logic behind your space decisions, lets you simulate alternatives, and connects directly to procurement so you can act quickly when it’s time to build.

Our platform allowed teams to prototype spatial concepts, tag and track assets, and roll out consistent standards across their entire portfolio—all in the browser. No bloated CAD files. No siloed documents. Just a shared design language that made change easier to manage.

Building a Toolkit for the Future

While our collaboration with REEF was one of our earliest partnerships, it set the tone for everything that followed. We learned that cities, like software, can be updated. That design systems are as important for physical space as they are for code. And that adaptability isn’t just a feature—it’s a necessity.

We also saw, firsthand, that when infrastructure is invisible, it becomes easy to take for granted. But when it fails—when food doesn’t arrive, when tests aren’t available, when schools can’t open—its importance becomes impossible to ignore. Design is part of that infrastructure. It shapes how people move, gather, and interact, even in the most constrained conditions.

That moment in 2020 made it clear that tools for space-making needed to evolve. Architects and designers deserved better systems—ones built for collaboration, for speed, and for scale. And we believed we could be a part of that shift.

What began with a few experimental parking lots in a locked-down city grew into a platform used by teams across workplace, retail, and civic spaces. But the spirit of those early days—urgent, adaptive, and deeply human—still guides how we build today.

We’re not just designing spaces. We’re designing systems that help people design spaces—with clarity, speed, and purpose. Even when the world turns upside down.

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