TURETT COLLABORATIVE ARCHITECTS
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Bio : Wayne Turett
Wayne Turett
Principal Architect
Founder and principal of Turett Collaborative Architects (TCA), Wayne Turett leads a creative team with a design vision that has defined his work for over twenty-five years. Turett plays an active role in all TCA design assignments and supervises the firm's general operations.
Turett's work in free-standing, public park structures began in a collaboration with community groups in Decatur, Illinois to design a playground for public housing. He followed this up by designing and building a newsstand on the corner of Columbus Avenue and 81st Street which improved the streetscape and became a focal point in pedestrian life of the neighborhood. He owned and operated it, selling newspapers from 6 to 8:00 am every morning, meeting his neighbors and becoming a part the fabric of that small part of the city. The newsstand won a City Art Commission Award in 1984. A few years later, Turett designed and operated NewsBar, a chain of fast-paced coffee-and-news shops, attracting international recognition (and many imitators) for its trendsetting mixture of multimedia and smart detailing. Engagement with the city and with his neighbors would become the hallmark of his design work for decades to come.
Turett started TCA in 1991 as a truly collaborative enterprise: a multi-disciplinary office including architecture and interior design, graphics, custom product and furniture design. TCA was an early adopter of sustainable design, opting for low VOC materials and energy-conserving design (on early projects including Tommy Boy records) in the years before LEED established its benchmarks. Early designs for corporate interiors and retail environments were widely published, garnering critical praise for their inventive and playful use of materials. Later projects included restaurants, residences, institutional spaces, churches, industrial designs, furnishings, and others. Today, Turett is fortunate to work on projects of many types and scales at any given time, maintaining an atmosphere of cross-pollination amongst his team of clients, designers and consultants.
Turett has degrees in Architecture from the University of Illinois and Pratt Institute, and studied for a year at UP-3 in Versailles, France. He is a member of the NCARB and is licensed to practice architecture in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. As a recognized architect and designer, Turett has served as a design critic at the City College of New York, New Jersey Institute for Technology, Parsons and Pratt Institute; he has taught at NJIT, Parsons, and the Fashion Institute of Technology and frequently lectures on restaurant design for the Institute of Culinary Education. He has been invited by the Cooper Hewitt Museum to lead a walking tour of the Flatiron District, and to create installations for the museum's annual Table Top Design Auction fundraiser.
Turett has lived and worked in TriBeCa for the last twenty years. His local ties have naturally led to a special expertise in working with –and a special regard for– community and preservation groups. A significant portion of his built work is in the immediate area where he can develop long-term associations with clients and neighbors; where he can live amongst the storefronts and streetscapes he has helped to design; and where he can realize his notion of design collaboration as an expression of civic involvement, and of architecture as a way of life. Having clients as neighbors has also meant a strong sense of personal accountability for their long-term satisfaction with the quality and enduring value of his work.
While his firm is widely recognized for its published designs, Turett himself is sought out by clients for his personal sense of calm, his track record of success, and his inspirational attitude toward design and the design process.