The United States General Services Administration (GSA) recently announced the winners of its National AEI IDIQ, the Architect Engineer Interior Design Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract. New York City-based workplace strategy consultancy PLASTARC—working in partnership with architecture, design, and research office Marble Fairbanks—was among the dozen firms selected through the competitive RFP process. The awards approve the winning firms to provide architecture, engineering, and interior design services to all agencies and projects managed by GSA nationwide.
“The fact that this award includes workplace strategy in the list of services GSA wants firms to offer its clients suggests that workplace strategy as a discipline is becoming integrated with architecture as a discipline,” said Melissa Marsh, Founder and CEO of PLASTARC.
Marsh has an extensive history with the GSA stretching back to the late 1990s, when the organization began examining the execution of office space within the federal government and engaged a series of architecture and design firms to help connect public agencies with high-performance workplaces.
“The federal government is more forward-thinking than many people expect when it comes to the workplace,” said Marsh, citing initiatives like President Obama’s Freeze the Footprint policy, which seeks to cease the growth of the government’s real estate footprint and reign in excess and underutilized properties.
In 2002, Marsh became involved with GSA’s WorkPlace 20·20 research and development program, the predecessor to the National AEI IDIQ, which focused on helping agencies use workplace as a strategic resource. Marsh was a core leader for the project execution team at the firm then known as DEGW, whom GSA had hired to share, research, and develop a toolkit of methods that illuminate the linkages between work and workplace.
In 2010, Marsh won the GSA’s Achievement Award for Real Property Innovation for her leadership of POR, the Program of Requirements GSA used to document their methodology. The training methods she devised have since been employed to instruct 11,000 real estate professionals nationwide, and remain a resource for architecture advisory teams today.
What does this award mean for PLASTARC? “I want to take the closeness I had to the first era of this project—WorkPlace 20·20—and apply it to the next generation of work,” said Marsh. “The federal government has long been our nation’s largest owner-operator of workplaces, so this award represents a wonderful opportunity to apply our decades of insights on a large scale and help ensure that many more people achieve better workplaces.”
PLASTARC, founded in 2012, is a consultancy dedicated to increasing the flexibility and desirability of space using social research and occupant engagement. The company specializes in integrated workplace performance and helps clients leverage their real estate for optimal organizational performance.