David Guthrie / [ fluid-G ]

Agency of the Decade (Advertising Age)

5X Agency of the Year (Creativity)

3X Cannes Interactive Agency of the Year

This project was CP+B's first opportunity to create their own space from scratch. It was our job to create a design that would embody and express the agency's identity.

A 180 ft long ramp, taken either as a slow lane, for a strolling chat, or as a fast lane for skate boards and bicycles (or anything with wheels), is also wheelchair accessible. 

"Public Street"

This was the first, or one of the first, examples of this concept applied to an interior space. It started out as an enclosed theater that gradually dematerialized and merged with the open public space. Now these are ubiquitous.

Main circulation spine populated with "billboards"

The idea that defined the design strategy is the notion that an animated, in-your-face, "creative looking" space (typical of many ad agency designs) does not necessarily make the best creative environment.

When I presented this concept in our first meeting, it resonated with the clients, especially Alex. It wasn't what he expected to hear.

From the beginning, our approach was utilitarian.

When I first toured the existing CP+B offices, which were split and shoehorned into three isolated floors of a standard office building, what stood out was the visible manifestation of kinetic imaginations covering the walls, doors, and windows of every creative's office, spilling out into the hallways like an uncontainable, chaotic wallpaper. I was struck by the similarity between the energy of the messy, physical evidence of the agency's creative processes and a typical design studio in an architecture school. I immediately recognized that it wasn't the role of the architecture to demonstrate the agency's creativity, but rather to provide an ideal container for their unfettered creative process. The key to a successful design would rest upon staying out of the way, doing nothing that would inhibit or restrict the agency's creative process.

Materials: Make a creative mess. Rinse. Repeat.

The architecture forms the background, acting as an armature, providing a context that allows the creative and social activity it contains to occupy the foreground. The industrial materials reinforce the perception of a reusable container: resilient, unbreakable—the antithesis of fragile or precious.

Serving as a background, a container of activity, does not exactly imply invisibility.  The existing concrete structure is inherently powerful, and offered opportunities to configure monumental spaces intended to inspire. One aim of the material choices is to project a quiet strength, an underlying seriousness, pragmatism and directness. Another is to use exterior materials to illicit a sense of being outside on a public street. The existing concrete envelope acts as a landscape that is populated by buildings, pedestrian streets, sidewalks, a public square, and billboards.

The staff quickly adopted the moniker: "the factory".

Two of the primary performative ambitions of the architecture were to make the relationships between functions (departments) implicit and transparent, and to design circulation patterns that cultivate "positive friction" and passively encourage spontaneous interactions and cross-pollination between employees working in different departments. The mezzanine bar is literally transparent, drawing inspiration from the ant farm's revealing vertical slice through the colony's activity. The circulation paths vary in spatial qualities that shape perception, affect movement, and encourage interaction. The ramp's promenade and strategically placed circulation eddies offer opportunities to pause, inviting accidental, informal interactions. 

Constructing the mezzanine: The new steel structure, spanning 50' between the central row of columns and the columns along the exterior wall, attaches to the existing concrete columns with large winged collars. We used pairs of I-beams to minimize the structure's depth. The central columns don't align with any of the other column grids, so we installed a steel tube ledger which runs the length of the structure to the exterior columns, providing the beams with continuous attachment points and reconciling the shifted column grids.

The existing concrete structure was capable of supporting a mezzanine level with a maximum area equal to 1/2 of the floor's footprint. This limitation drove the design strategy of shifting the mezzanine entirely to one side of the central columns.

Mezzanine Construction

The space is on the third (top) floor, which presented several challenges. First, was getting 18 50' long, 2-1/2 ton steel beams up and into the space. We accomplished this task by cutting a large hole in the exterior wall and lifting the beams from the transport trucks with a crane. Then we faced the structural limitations of the existing 3rd floor slab, which was strong enough to support the concentrated weight of the new steel beams or a forklift large enough to handle them, but not both simultaneously. The solution was to build a pair of moveable, large A-frame hoists. The massive beams, which weigh 175 lbs. per linear foot, were lifted into place manually with chain hoists.