Simple bank headquarters (Christian Columbres)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Recently I had the opportunity to visit two new Portland offices while writing a pair of corresponding articles for Contract magazine: the Stoel Rives headquarters, with interiors by ZGF in a building (Park Avenue West) by TVA Architects, and Simple bank, with interiors by Hacker Architects in a building by Mackenzie. Along the way, it got me thinking about the state of the American office — specifically as it relates to the open configuration that burgeoned over the past decade but now is seeing signs of pushback.
I can't help but wonder if some middle ground is what we're working toward: where executives may no longer hog all the offices along a window, but where it's not exactly a completely open space like some Washington Post newsroom of yesteryear. It's always an interesting back and forth, I think: the shrinking of desks and the removal of cubicles allows more variety of other spaces. But when you lose your sense of personal space, you lose that last shred of privacy. Suddenly everyone hears your phone calls, or your chats with other employees, and sees every move you make. As someone who works from home, I'd never want to be that out in the open all the time. And yet the variety of shared spaces in open offices does seem to invigorate the overall ambiance.
1976's "All The President's Men" (Warner Bros.)
Hacker's brief for designing the Simple headquarters for more than 300 employees (and growing) was to retain the open-office plan they had known since the company's founding, as part of an effort to retain a former startup's collaborative energy even as they became a corporation.
“Simple has always had an open layout. When I started, our CEO sat in a desk next to me,” Mel Snyder, the company’s manager of office administration, told me. “We wanted everyone to sit together for that collaborative feel you’d have at a startup of under 100 people—to have casual interactions and meeting spots, and to preserve the ability to randomly run into each other and to have cross-pollination."
From the beginning, though, there were limitations to that openness. The wood-framed building's ceiling beams dipped further down into the space than originally expected, even going below the tops of windows. And a design proposal to create an open stairway was deemed too expensive by the client.
Simple bank (Christian Columbres)
Even so, a series of design moves were made to break down the potential chaos and noise of a totally-open office. The low-dipping ceiling beams were harnessed to create a rhythm of smaller spaces, such as conference rooms, informal meeting spots, and intimate phone booth–like cubbyholes. Fabric scrims hang from several of the beams for acoustic mitigation and to define spaces. Hacker smartly found a way to ape the effect of the disallowed open stairway by cladding one of its walls in glass, allowing the stairs to act as a kind of social space for employees but mitigating the acoustic effects of doing so. And even in the more open portion of the office, sit-stand desks feature custom-designed three-sided enclosures that help to create a sense of privacy in the otherwise open office.
I also enjoyed how the designers created a greater feeling of height and openness in certain communal spaces. At one corner of floors three, four, and five, part of the raised access flooring was removed to create sunken living room–like gathering areas, known as hearths, which were designed with Douglas fir flooring and bench seating to accommodate casual meetings or employee gatherings. While Simple wanted an unadorned space without luxurious surfaces or installations, the interior designers helped introduce a sense of color and whimsy by inviting visual artists to create a series of murals.
A mural at Simple (Brian Libby)
As you might expect for a venerable law firm, the Stoel Rives offices feel a bit more formal, and yet there is a simple elegance, materiality and lack of pretension that seems to fit our culture.
Stoel Rives' headquarters is decidedly not an open office. And yet ZGF's introduction of far greater transparency is a bit of a nudge in that direction.
For the past 45 years, the firm was located in the Standard Insurance Center, a downtown office tower by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill dating to 1970 that is almost Brutalist in its use of concrete and its lack of natural light. Not only did the building feel dark inside, but, explained Stoel Rives partner Wally Van Valkenburg, “You could close your door and nobody could see what you were doing.”
Stoel Rives reception area (Nick Merrick for Hedrich Blessing Photographers)
“We decided that [an open plan] was just a little bit too far to go,” Van Valkenburg said, citing client confidentiality. Yet in the new headquarters, each attorney's closed-door office is made of glass, which Van Valkenburg believes has transformed Stoel's culture with a sense of light and transparency. The interior has “given us energy and a sense that we’re a 21st-century organization, as opposed to the feeling we had in the old building,” Van Valkenburg added. “You want to hold on to the history that’s of value, but you also want to feel like the organization is looking to the future.”
The firm occupies 120,000 square feet on the top nine floors of the Park Avenue West tower, with two floors for reception and a conference center for client meetings; five floors of attorneys’ offices; and two floors for administration, a cafe, and catering kitchens for meetings and events. But the centerpiece is the two-story reception areas, where visitors encounter the warmth of wood with white oak floors, vertical-grain Douglas fir walls, and a latticed ceiling. As a nod to the firm’s many timber industry clients, the extensive use of wood also helps create a warmer, more relaxed feel with both texture and imperfection. “It’s going to have knots, and it’s not going to be a perfect wood floor as you’d assume there would be in a big law firm,” Sue Kerns, ZGF’s interior design director and principal in charge of the project, told me for the story.
Stoel Rives (top & middle: Nick Merrick, bottom: Pete Eckert)
Stairs are also part of the story, as they were at Simple. Because Stoel Rives signed on to the project early, before construction of the building was complete (it was delayed for a number of years after the recession), ZGF was able to create both the firm’s lobby and a series of interior open staircases. The stairs, which encourage more incidental contact among colleagues, connect two or three floors each, the maximum allowed by code. And yet because there is a lack of open-office desk configurations, the open stairway doesn't make the rest of the headquarters too noisy.
And while this isn't an open plan, attorneys’ offices, ranging from 112 to 220 square feet, are about 14 percent smaller, on average, compared with the previous building. In return, the attorneys now enjoy a greater variety of conference rooms and collaborative workspaces, as well as a partially covered roof deck.
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