by Sandra Tripp, IIDA LEED AP and Bill Puetz, CID LEED AP

​In 1986, three Harvard undergraduates—John Chuang, Steve Kapner, and Mia Wenjen—started a desktop publishing business based out of John and Steve’s dorm room. That business grew into Aquent, a marketing, creative, and digital staffing agency with offices across the globe.

Eventually, all that growth meant Aquent’s headquarters in Boston were getting tight. We’d been planning and designing a number of regional offices in North America for the company, so they turned to us. They were spread out on four floors, which was hardly ideal. But they were reluctant to relocate to a new building, because their culture was so bound up in their existing space. We looked into options for refreshing the space. Eventually they decided not to renew their lease, forcing the issue.

So Aquent leased a single 30,000-square-foot floor in 501 Boylston Street, an Art Deco building originally constructed in 1940 and known for generations as the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company building. We held a visioning session with Aquent to identify goals to guide the relocation. We came up with six:
 

1. The new headquarters should give Aquent all the tools they needed to work with similar-minded people and have fun.
2. The current space was homogenous. The new headquarters should be tailored to individual work zones, providing lots of choice.
3. The new headquarters should reinforce Aquent’s values of sharing space and resources.
4. It should be modern, liberated from “stuff.”
5. The materials should blend the modern and the natural.
6. The space should be alive and energizing and make people happy every day.

​Our charge was to preserve the culture that existed in the old space, in terms of the way the space felt, while transforming the way they worked by enhancing collaboration and connection.
 
The headquarters we designed reflects the egalitarianism of the company by switching to 100 percent hoteling—there are no assigned desks here, not even for the executives. We did provide one-to-one desking—120 workstations for 120 people—with the idea that the hoteling concept would allow the space to comfortably accommodate a growing workforce.
 
Much of the building’s historic interior had been stripped in previous remodels. So we had to give the space a sense of character that would reflect the culture—not just for the people working here, but for local clients and for visiting workers from Aquent’s offices around the world. 

​To organize the large floor plate, we created a variety of destinations for working, drawing on popular building forms, each with their own feel and personality: terrace, pergola, back porch, library, general store, hut, and start-up garage.

To welcome visitors from the start, the reception desk flows into the café, creating a big public space. The café has a 20-foot-long table—Aquent has one of these in each office. They call it the harvest table. At 900 square feet, the café is big, and can be zoned into multiple areas. It’s meant to be a sort of coffee shop, where people can work at the harvest table, at movable café tables, or in four-person booths. A large meeting room can be closed off with large wooden doors as needed.
 
We detailed the space using natural materials such as timber beams, lattice panels, and oversized wood sliding doors. For example, we used real exterior grade wooden shingles to clad the huts, which contain meeting rooms that can be reserved. Phone booths are drop-in spaces for one to two people. Whiteboards are everywhere—including tabletops. Because the headquarters is 100 percent open plan, acoustic clouds all over the work areas absorb sound, and white noise provides additional sound masking. 

​For those times when people really need to concentrate, they can head to the library. Although it’s also open plan, cell phone use isn’t allowed, and all talking is to be kept to a minimum. It’s sort of like the “quiet car” on Amtrak. At the back of the library, movable bleacher seating can be reconfigured for all-hands meetings. In a tongue-in-cheek touch, we put film on the glass windows that looks like shelves of books.
 
The pergola meeting areas are accessed through a corridor with a wood slat ceiling designed to resemble a trellis. The glass walls of each room are covered with a film that looks like switchgrass.
 
The back porch is a series of semiprivate rooms where people can get away from their desk and either have an impromptu meeting or just work at their laptop in a sunny space. 

​The garage came about because they wanted a place that felt completely different from all the other spaces, but that would still function as everyday workspace. The sliding garage doors enable it to be separated from the rest of the office as needed. The standing height desks inside have butcher block tops. Just like in a real garage, people can hang things on pegboards on the walls.
 
When we went on our initial walkthrough of the space, we were told there was a room we couldn’t go into, and that it wasn’t part of the leasable space. Of course, we went into it anyway. Turned out it had a stairway that the landlords had walled off in the middle for building code reasons. It was a stairway to nowhere.
 
We asked the landlords if we could have it, if we made it code compliant, because we’d like to use it for a little hidden room, and they said yes. So we added a few sprinklers and painted the risers multiple colors. At the top of the steps, we placed off-the-shelf lockers for people to keep their belongings—especially important for a place where people don’t have assigned desks.
 
Our clients tell us the space has completely changed how they interact, and they love it: people are talking to each other, and it’s served as a great recruiting tool. It was an unusual job for us—keeping the essence of the culture, while completely changing the way everyone worked.

​Before Photos Below

A Law Firm Relocates after Four Decades
by Bill Puetz, CID, LEED AP

Relocating an office of 120 legal professionals is a daunting task under any circumstance. But when a law firm has been in the same space for four decades, there is even more at stake.  This was the case for our client Squire, Sanders & Dempsey that took the opportunity to address changes within the legal profession as well as to reflect upon the core values that define its culture today.

Squire Sanders, an international law firm, had outgrown its San Francisco Financial District office at One Maritime Plaza.  Attorney Thomas Woofter and Office Administrator Joan Klaassen lead the charge to plan the new space.  We had the pleasure of sitting down with them in their new offices at 275 Battery Street to look back at the process.

Bill:       What were the big changes that took place in the 37 years prior to your move?

Tom:     I would say the biggest changes are in the ways in which we now communicate and work together, both internally and externally.  Thanks to technology, more and more communication is done by e-mail and most research is done online.  As a result, we now have lesser need for extensive library space, but greater need to make and find ways and places for people to get together to share thoughts and ideas.

Joan:    Also, as a practical matter, since this generation of attorneys does more of its own work, there is less need for secretarial areas.

Bill:       How did this inform the design of your new office?

Tom:     We wanted to have an area where people could get together and collaborate.  We wanted to have spaces where we could host seminars and interact with people from outside the firm.

Bill:       There used to be segregation between partners, associates, paralegals, and secretaries.  But you chose to create a shared lounge?

Tom:     We are not as hierarchical as your typical law firm.  We wanted to have areas like the employee lounge for everyone to gather.  The intensity of a law practice is just as stressful for the staff as it is for the attorneys.

Bill:       Would you say mutual respect is part of your firm’s culture?

Tom:     We really emphasize it, and what you emphasize is what you get. It creates your environment.

Bill:       The law library is still an iconic part of your office environment, though the number of books was reduced dramatically. Who advocated for the library?

Joan:    The funny thing is it’s the younger staff who were concerned about reducing the collection.

Bill:       Are they doing more of the research?

Tom:     Yes, they are, and while they do most of their research online, in some cases they still like to have particular resources they can lay on their desks and refer to as well.

Bill:       How have the meeting spaces changed how you work?

Joan:    We are doing more of our meetings here, which we weren’t doing before.  Attorneys were holding meetings at other locations, because they didn’t want to bring clients or guests to the old space.

Tom:     Everyone likes having a conference center as opposed to having conference rooms distributed throughout the various floors.  And now, we’re letting different organizations use our space for meetings and other events.  They are nonprofits that we support or associations for select practice areas.

Bill:       You both put a lot of thought into starting the design process early.  Many things changed in the commercial real estate market since you started planning.  Why did you have such a long schedule?

Joan:    If you leave enough time, the visioning can be implemented.  I was looking through the programming documents the other day, and what we wanted is definitely what we got.

Tom:     We were able to envision what we wanted, identify space early, evaluate what could be saved and reused, and pay no double rent.

Bill:       You involved different groups in visioning and the design phase.  Were you able to engage more people internally that way?

Tom:     We discussed how to shape that process, because we wanted people to be invested.  We had to have representation among practice groups, partners, associates, and staff.  We had a good balance between letting people have a say and making sure the process moved ahead.

Bill:       My hope was that no one would recognize that the space had once belonged to another law firm. Because of your sustainability goals, we reused 60% of the existing construction. Did that limitation ever get in your way?

Tom:     I don’t think so.  We achieved what we wanted and managed to keep 60%.

Joan:    I think the space looks completely different from what it did before.

Bill:       I’ve worked on LEED projects where clients wanted to pursue certification because it’s trendy, but Squire Sanders has a longer green history.

Tom:     Through Joan’s efforts in our Palo Alto and in San Francisco offices, we adopted policies to systematically improve the sustainability of those facilities.

Bill:       Do your clients care about your carbon footprint?

Joan:    Yes. We developed materials regarding our firm-wide green initiatives that we offer when a client asks about our sustainability efforts.

Bill:       Environmental law is one of your more growing practice areas.  There’s a link between what you do internally as a firm and the services you provide in that particular practice group.  What are some initiatives your clients want to know about?

Joan:    In all of the offices, we track kilowatt usage every month.  For this office, I worked closely with the building management to collect this data since our move.

Bill:       Many clients will focus on one aspect of the project, like sustainability, but you didn’t want to omit good design or other criteria.  Can you explain why that balance was so important to the project?

Tom:     Not having moved in 37 years, this was a very important move.  Getting everything right was critical.

I think you remember my line: “We can do whatever we need to do to save existing conditions, but in the end we have to have first-class space, or I will be hung.”  That’s why we paid attention to everything.  And also Joan insisted on it.

Bill:       Although we scaled back when you needed to meet your financial objectives, were there any goals you did not meet?

Tom:     You did a good job of helping us understand what certain options would cost, and we did do away with some features that would have been nice to have.  We kept a lot, too, like the folding door in the conference center.  That is the designer’s role, to help the client understand the trade-offs.

Bill:       Tom, with all of your managing responsibilities, was it difficult to attend every meeting over the two and a half years?

Tom:     Not when there are pastries.

Joan:    I think that shows real commitment from Tom, and if it’s that important to you, what’s the best thing to do?  It’s to be there.

Tom:     One of the reasons I could be at every meeting was this was one of the last administrative responsibilities I had, and I wanted it to go well.  When I was a junior associate, I worked on a letter and couldn’t get it right.  I gave it to Sandy Calhoun, who was a senior attorney, and said “wave your magic wand over this and make it better.”  And he said “there is no magic wand, you just have to keep rewriting it.”

Whenever you are involved in a project, you want it to be a success.  When it’s not a success, it doesn’t matter whether it’s your fault or not.  Even if you’ve done a good job, it has to be a success for everybody.  And this project was more than a success. ◙