What Business Looks Like in West Midtown.
West Midtown is an old industrial district that got reused rather than rebuilt. Rail yards, packing houses, seed warehouses and light manufacturing space became studios, showrooms, restaurants and offices, starting with projects like King Plow and the Carriage Works in the nineties and continuing along Howell Mill, Huff Road and Ellsworth Industrial ever since.
The tenants match the buildings. Design and architecture practices, photography and video studios, agencies, product companies, showrooms, and the food businesses that made the district a destination. These are firms whose work is visual, whose files are enormous, and whose clients walk through the space.
The technology problem here is physical, not organizational. Exposed ceilings mean every cable is on display in a room that a designer chose the paint for. Brick, block, steel decking and mezzanines defeat wireless that would work fine in drywall. Pathways were improvised by whoever came before. Existing drawings, where they exist at all, are frequently wrong.
Which is why we survey rather than quote from paper here. A walk-through takes an hour and prevents the conversation where a job costs more than the number we gave you.
