Soft Office Intervention
2019
Workspace for a Number of Arrangements
Brooklyn, New York
2019
Workspace for a Number of Arrangements
Brooklyn, New York
A sunny second floor corner overlooking a busy street in a former factory building near the Gowanus Canal is the site of this office renovation. The client, a graphic design studio, initially needed just half of the floor area, but required that they be able to ‘grow and shrink’ into the space over time without experiencing additional costs. This tension - between satisfying the potential future spatial demands with the client’s immediate needs - led to the overall design strategy of a soft intervention that would be somewhat flexible.
This light intervening had the goal of making contemporary the formerly neglected space for shared creative workspace use by the selective painting of flooring and exposed brick, new window treatments, and lighting - together imagined as the undercoat to receive a suite of furniture - while being sympathetic to the century-old building’s essential character. It aimed to be somewhat flexible by seeking to deploy the minimum number of furnitures able to combine (and recombine) into several very workable specific spatial arrangements given the likely changing needs of the client.
Recognizing the limits of the open floor plan office, the project favors visual- rather than audio privacy as more effective for the purposes of doing creative office work. The result of this observation is object design and spatial planning that yields an office environment somewhere between the cubicle-driven and open-plan workplace.
A suite of multi-tasking furnitures were designed to carry out this assignment: desks, storage cabinets, and a worktable to go along with a new kitchenette, and communal table and benches. Seven eight-foot long desks that are both an apparatus for storage and a generator of privacy are the centerpiece of the suite of furnitures. A partition delineates a communal eating area, which also serves as a meeting room and place of respite for workers looking to mix up their day.
The decision to (mostly) utilize a single material, alternately open and hidden to the lot of things used by the occupants, allows the large douglas fir plywood objects to become the backdrop for a comfortable and lived-in workplace, emphasizing the differences in the individual creative practices of each tenant, rather than hiding them, as is often done. The design of the furnitures deploys a loose, amenable grid, which remains consistent in proportion across the overall scheme but has no allegiance to maintaining specific dimensions, rejecting the intellectual (and some might say, paranoid) need for a strictly regular and ‘perfect’ grid prevalent to modern architectural discourse for a more nuanced understanding that takes advantage of the visual impact the grid can offer. At the smaller scale, several joint types (butt, dado, rabbet, and more complex combinations of those) are employed as a way to give variety at the tectonic level to an otherwise singular industrially-produced base material brought into regular, albeit varied, forms.
Finally, the scope of work included the selection and installation of artwork by Jake Berthot, Elaine Reichek, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joe Leavenworth, and an early body of photography by Günther Förg.
This light intervening had the goal of making contemporary the formerly neglected space for shared creative workspace use by the selective painting of flooring and exposed brick, new window treatments, and lighting - together imagined as the undercoat to receive a suite of furniture - while being sympathetic to the century-old building’s essential character. It aimed to be somewhat flexible by seeking to deploy the minimum number of furnitures able to combine (and recombine) into several very workable specific spatial arrangements given the likely changing needs of the client.
Recognizing the limits of the open floor plan office, the project favors visual- rather than audio privacy as more effective for the purposes of doing creative office work. The result of this observation is object design and spatial planning that yields an office environment somewhere between the cubicle-driven and open-plan workplace.
A suite of multi-tasking furnitures were designed to carry out this assignment: desks, storage cabinets, and a worktable to go along with a new kitchenette, and communal table and benches. Seven eight-foot long desks that are both an apparatus for storage and a generator of privacy are the centerpiece of the suite of furnitures. A partition delineates a communal eating area, which also serves as a meeting room and place of respite for workers looking to mix up their day.
The decision to (mostly) utilize a single material, alternately open and hidden to the lot of things used by the occupants, allows the large douglas fir plywood objects to become the backdrop for a comfortable and lived-in workplace, emphasizing the differences in the individual creative practices of each tenant, rather than hiding them, as is often done. The design of the furnitures deploys a loose, amenable grid, which remains consistent in proportion across the overall scheme but has no allegiance to maintaining specific dimensions, rejecting the intellectual (and some might say, paranoid) need for a strictly regular and ‘perfect’ grid prevalent to modern architectural discourse for a more nuanced understanding that takes advantage of the visual impact the grid can offer. At the smaller scale, several joint types (butt, dado, rabbet, and more complex combinations of those) are employed as a way to give variety at the tectonic level to an otherwise singular industrially-produced base material brought into regular, albeit varied, forms.
Finally, the scope of work included the selection and installation of artwork by Jake Berthot, Elaine Reichek, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joe Leavenworth, and an early body of photography by Günther Förg.