Image perfect: offices for a thriving American copy center were inspired by the firm's history and tradition, and by the nature of the business

Architectural Review, The, March, 2003

ImageNet in America is a chain of copy centres that has expanded from a typewriter-repair shop, with one man working on a kitchen table, to a national organization with 350 employees and eight regional offices. In designing the firm's new offices in Oklahoma City, Rand Elliott of Elliott Associates has used ordinary materials and inexpensive construction to encapsulate the firm's history, and to express the fact that ImageNet is at the cutting edge of the copying/imaging business. The office represents a significant move from an old garage to the third floor of a restored 1920s building in Automobile Alley, at the heart of the city's new business and technology district.

Expression of the firm's history is contrived through design of the lobby. Walls have been given a textural lining of copy paper made into uneven bricks; and the same paper has been used to form three plinths. On top of each one is a rare antique typewriter. Light playing over the pale paper planes illuminates their soft irregular texture and lends them an abstract sculptural quality. From this padded cell you pass into the workspace which, in contrast, is crisply designed with white walls and floor, glazed divisions, overhead ducting and a glass conference room at the centre.

The various sections -- copy room, scanning and imaging -- are repositories of high technology. With the manager's office and data department tucked away from public view to the north of the site, the sections are organized so that customers can wander around and inspect the production and assembly process. The tour is enlivened by an installation running down the middle of the room. Conceived as a play on the business, the work consists of a series of acrylic sheets suspended between mirrored walls and inscribed with fragments of copying history and the story of ImageNet. Words and letters, superimposed and multiplied, are reflected to infinity and, in passing between the sheets, the viewer becomes part of the copying process.

At night, blue fluorescent light suffuses both ImageNet and the adjacent Vesper building, where Elliott is creating premises for a sister company engaged in recycling copier-ink cartridges.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect Elliott Associates Architects

Project team

Rand Elliott, Brian Fitzsimmons, Amberly Russell

Photographs

Hedrich Blessing

Our History

BMI Systems was incorporated in 1977, and the business originated in 1956 as a small, one man typewriter repair shop called Southwest Typewriter Company. Bobby Roberson started this company from his garage in South Oklahoma City. Today BMI Systems and its affiliates, employ over 400 people in eleven cities and five states.