case history: the flexible, collaborative workplace

case history: the flexible, collaborative workplace

We were approached to design the new headquarters of Neustar Corporation, a spin-off from Lockheed Martin charged somehow with administering website domain names, a business that turns out to be very big business.  Like selling shovels to goldminers, we suspect this might be where the real money is.

We flew to Washington DC and were shown a dark cavern of space, a pancake wedged between neighboring buildings and filled with concrete columns every 20 feet in all directions.  We had been imagining empty loft space on the trip over, and felt like we'd accidentally stumbled into the parking garage instead.  The space was...challenging...

We asked Neustar if they could get out of the lease, but no dice.

Back at the studio some time later, committed to the project, and programming complete, but not yet struck by thunderbolts of inspiration, we simply started with test fits.  The existing floorplate was a sea of columns with an elevator core stuck in the middle:

We had the company broken down by department and personnel count, we understood the flat hierarchy, we had heard their commitment to collaboration and fluid teams, but we didn't yet understand possible layouts that worked with the unusual floor plate and limited access to daylight and views.  The test fit result was a horrifying rat's maze:

One of us remembered a night from his youth, north of Agadir, Morrocco, with an inky black sky above and dozens of bonfires lit along the beach, groups of people gathered around each, carousing and playing music, ...and we might have rolled our eyes at yet another story from 1979 except that it captured exactly the experience of being in that deep, dark space down in Washington, and it captured the possibility of some kind of beacons scattered around the floorplate that would serve perhaps as departmental hubs, cutting the darkness.

A new plan emerged, now with each department centered on a conference room, a glowing totem of a room, a room that started off as a bonfire but became more like a lit beacon or lighthouse, crossed with an idea about grafitti and Paris kiosks filled with announcements that led to us adding erasable whiteboard to the rooms both inside and out, a place where people could gather in ad hoc ways and doodle or brainstorm:

This new plan imagined workstations spreading throughout the floor organically, growing and shrinking like a bacteria or a virus throughout the rigid matrix of the floorplate.  It was a conception made possible by a new hexagonal workstation design developed by Herman Miller, that abandoned the orthogonal limitations of traditional furniture systems.  This new furniture system was radically light and open, dispensing with tired concerns about privacy or hierarchy and embracing teamwork and visual connection.  This felt like the way work should happen in order to fuel creativity.

We could imagine now, a floor filled with glowing totems:

With encouragement from the client, we developed the design further.  The conference rooms in particular required careful consideration, serving now as beacons, kiosks, meeting rooms, and presentation venues:

The resulting workspace proved radical: combining density with flexibility, juxtaposing the stationary with the fluid, encouraging collaboration with the whiteboard kiosks, identifying departments with the beacons and creating an unbridled atmosphere of creative freedom.  There was resistance certainly, fiercely, as no client like this is monolithic, but we had captured the imagination of the CEO with our vision of his company, and this is perhaps the only reason this project survived: just this one man and his sense of possibility.  We recall Buckminster Fuller, who famously dealt only with the very top of the organizations for whom he worked, anything else in his estimation a complete waste of time.  The problems we solve, the architecture we commit ourselves too: they aren't flashy or particularly fashionable usually,  We wring meaning from them however, and bestow nothing less than careful attention and yes, love, and this is how we feed our own hope that tomorrow is even more exceptional than today.  Hope, Love, Meaning.

See our portfolio for photographs of the final results.