Creative Brief

Since VMDO was founded in 1976, the firm has hosted an annual open house in our Charlottesville, VA office. What originally started as an informal potluck has turned into a more elaborate affair, but the original spirit is still there: deliberately taking time outside of normal business hours, project deadlines, and day to day operations to celebrate who we get to work with and where we live.

The Open House is a way for us to honor our clients, colleagues, and collaborators while also ‘showing off’ what we’ve been up to over the past year. Each year's invitation and theme is managed by our Marketing department but the Open House itself is a team effort. The whole office gets involved with designing different installations and arrangements that express the year's theme while demonstrating our innovation with architectural design.

The invitation has traditionally been memorable in being able transform or be used in different ways. While tactile, its analogue nature demanded incredible printing resources (and trees) not to mention person-power to stamp, stick, and seal thousands of envelopes. In 2019, we decided to not only make the Open House a zero-waste event but to also make the invitation digital: an interactive invitation “microsite,” embedded on our corporate website.

Themed around "New Frontiers," our first-ever digital invitation and website celebrated VMDO's growth – in the firm's geographic reach with a new office in DC, in the advancements of staff, and in the firm's commitments to climate action and equity in architecture.