Global Design Workshop (www.globaldesignworkshop.com) founding partner Brent Thompson specializes in destination design: the master planning and architectural design of public places, including retail, resort, entertainment and town center destinations. Thompson has over twenty-five years of experience in architecture, concept design, master planning and urban design for a wide range of domestic and international clients, including every major entertainment company, with a rich portfolio of projects in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and North America.

Thompson’s history is unique among architects. He was educated traditionally as an architect and planner, a course he followed in his first ten years of practice. He further had opportunity to live and work in Prague, where he was a founding partner of Architects’ Atelier Praha and refined his theoretical approach to architectural design. Upon his return to the United States two years later, he began a five year parenthesis, designing entertainment venues for most of Hollywood’s major studios. Entertainers are students of human psychology, and expert at the idioms of story telling and metaphors. Hollywood is extremely pragmatic in its approach, and places great emphasis on the “guest experience,” and Thompson emerged from that time a unique designer. Though now running a more traditional architecture and planning practice, he has learned to combine design theory with entertainment based pragmatism.

His projects are media rich, multi-layered, metaphorical, expressive and culturally relevant. Perhaps more important, they work. He has throughout his varied career been involved in the pragmatic study of the way people use spaces, and the knowledge gained is the basis for each of his designs. He has further learned how to hear the vision of clients and to translate their vision into reality.

Recently, he has been designing projects in Dubai, China and Korea. He designed a number of projects throughout those regions, completing retail and entertainment centers, major resorts, parks, public art, urban design and a complete city. Examples include the Dubai Bazaar in the United Arab Emirates, and the Cloud Lake resort in Chengdu, China. He has been privileged to create urban scale master plans complete with resort hotels, amusement parks and aquariums.

In North America, for Time Warner’s new headquarters in New York City, he worked with the Cuningham Group, serving as lead designer for Time Warner’s corporate showcase and visitors’ center. He created a media rich variety of “experiences” and “spaces” for the project. More recently, he has created the design concept for the Celebration retail center in Los Angeles.

In Europe, he was a founding partner of Architects’ Atelier International; a Prague based firm specializing in retail centers, master planning and urban renewal projects.