Primo Orpilla Visits UTSOA on April 17

Primo Orpilla is the co-founder and principal of Studio O+A, an interiors firm in San Francisco that specializes in workplace design.  Establishing the company with Verda Alexander in Silicon Valley in 1991, Orpilla drew on an early interest in engineering and a feel for the growing tech economy to orient O+A to a rapidly changing work environment.  Moving to San Francisco a few years later, O+A quickly gained a reputation for being a design firm as innovative as its clients—Facebook, Microsoft, Yelp, Cisco, Uber, and many others.



A believer in design as an art form that embraces all disciplines, Orpilla grew his company from a two-person space-planning operation to a full-service design studio with more than 20 designers, project managers, graphic artists, and branding specialists.  The firm’s work has been recognized for over two decades with international press coverage and multiple design awards.  In 2015, Orpilla and Alexander were inducted into Interior Design Magazine’s Hall of Fame.  In 2016, O+A won the Cooper Hewitt Design Award for Interior Design.



A lecturer on design and the future of workplace, Orpilla speaks at schools and design conferences globally.  The course in workplace design he teaches at IE University in Madrid with Verda Alexander seeks to pass on to a new generation of designers the philosophy of immersion in a client’s culture that has been a driving force behind every O+A project



In recent years Orpilla has taken up a new passion - product design.  His company Orpilla, Inc. designs multi-faceted, versatile workstations and office products for OFS, Kimball Office, Martin-Brattrud, and Idea Paint, bringing the principles of customization and adaptability that made O+A famous to the level of the individual workspace.