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

by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
(featured in Contract magazine, May 2015)

Today’s cutting-edge office interiors for technology companies—open, creative, and amenity-rich—seem to be universally envied. This new paradigm perhaps even signals the future for traditional fields, like banking or law. Before accepting the tech office trends as the de facto basis for every future workplace, it is worth pursuing which features provide meaningful enhancements to well-being, culture, and productivity and which are just passing fads.

How tech companies really work
To understand the way tech spaces work at both a functional and cultural level, we first need to look at the drivers that have gotten us to this point in office design. Everything changed with the smartphone. Having a pocket-size supercomputer liberated the workforce from desks and office buildings. For tech-enabled workers, and indeed for most of the first-world population, the problem is no longer getting access to information or connectivity; it is filtering massive amounts of interactions.

Other drivers for tech workspaces are new collaborative and information-sharing models, including open-source product development, coworking, virtual or augmented reality, and rapid prototyping—all of which are influencing the pace of innovation and the way teams need to work now: fast, smart, connected, and collaborative. 

The design of built spaces has already been influenced by Millennials’ preference for democratic team structures, so it’s not surprising that the individual workspace is less of a status symbol. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the open among Facebook engineers, and many other tech CEOs don’t have assigned desks. Tech companies also use different ways to measure performance. Netflix, for example, empowers employees to largely manage their own time, provided they meet their job responsibilities. It’s what you produce, 
not where you are, that matters.


• Focus on wellness and sustainability. Providing bike storage supports a healthier commute. A place to exercise or meditate, height-adjustable desks, good ventilation, access to daylight and outdoor spaces, and toxin-free construction materials are all essentials of a healthy workplace. Operable windows can reduce both heating and cooling costs. 

Food also plays a key role. At the office of Kaiser Permanente’s Thrive group, healthful food and snack options are supplemented with regular cooking and nutrition classes to help staff make better lifestyle choices. When employee wellness is a driver for office design, increased productivity usually follows.

While these concepts may seem like obvious positives, industries outside of tech have been slower to follow suit. Implementing collaborative design principles in traditional organizations often involves concerns about maintaining information privacy, navigating and managing regulatory requirements, and breaking down reporting structures. Since shifts in demographics and mobility will eventually affect every industry, it’s time to adapt or be left behind. Creating a more progressive workspace means asking hard questions and challenging the entrenched hierarchies and models of corporate workflow and space utilization.

Clients expect creativity, competitive pricing, speed, technical proficiency, and competent project delivery, so designers are positioned to have the most strategic impact at the front end of the project. When a client hires a designer, one key consideration should be the designer’s ability to listen and then synthesize what they learned. Understanding an organization’s culture is a designer’s most valuable contribution.

Design is too frequently perceived as a commodity, and built space as a mere operational expense. To demonstrate tangible value, successful designers shift the conversation toward the role interiors play at a strategic level. This means emphasizing not only how a space will look or function but how people connect to it emotionally. Beyond merely looking cool, the best tech workspaces truly engage employees and amplify the organization’s culture, ultimately impacting the bottom line—and that should be the goal for every office interior as well.