Public image: expansion of a leading advertising agency is another stage in its imaginative flight from stifling corporate design - Interior Design - architects design unique office buildings for Chiat/Day Inc., TBWA Chiat/Day Inc

Architectural Review, The, April, 2003 by Penny McGuire

As a leading advertising agency in America, Chiat Day's business is creating images that subliminally stir the imagination and amuse. In registering its presence in the public mind -- in Los Angeles, New York and, most recently, San Francisco -- it has employed original architectural minds to design offices for its inventive and technologically sophisticated staff.

The firm's Boat, Binoculars and Trees headquarters on Main Street in Venice, California (AR May 1992), was designed by Frank Gehry (with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje von Bruge) as a roadside landmark. But the building's impact, in a city used to such events, derived from Gehry's skill in manipulating filmic imagery, subverting the normality of Main Street (the entrance is Oldenburg and von Bruge's giant binoculars), and drawing on associations with Hollywood and Disneyland. Behind the playful facade were fairly conventional offices, the prevailing informality conveying the non-hierarchical character of the advertising industry.

Gehry was succeeded in New York by Gaetano Pesce, who was asked to do away with lingering notions of Burolandschaft. His exuberant design of (virtual) offices was confined to the interior of an undistinguished block in Manhattan and had a Venetian cast. Restricted by a tight budget, it was described at the time as 'the furthest flight from the rectangle ever achieved in office design' (AR January 1995). Pesce transformed the amorphous space into a riotous carnival of brilliant colours (used to delineate zones), surreal forms and strange conjunctions of inexpensive materials (polyesters, resin and rubber). There were no individual spaces or work-stations.

Marmol Radziner's brief in San Francisco, when designing new offices for TBWA\Chiat\Day, was that they should be different in character from the firm's other premises. After Pesce, the firm has become more conventional - Marmol Radziner has provided corridors, right-angles and enclosures, even if they are at first obscured by impressions of shipwrecked hulls. As in New York, the budget was limited but, in San Francisco, the building was romantic; the offices occupy three floors of a historic brick warehouse at 55 Union Street on the city's old Barbary Coast. The site, once a shipyard, is reclaimed land incorporating hulks of ships abandoned by the Forty-niners rushing inland for gold. Once famous for brothels, bars and opium dens, the area has been taken over since the 1960s by design and technology companies, and public relations industries.

The handsome warehouse was stripped back to its bones -- brick walls, wooden beams, columns and ceilings -- and cleaned up. Within this envelope, Marmol Radziner's design, lit by large windows, draws on the site's piratical history (for Chiat\Day, 'pirate' is a symbol for rule-breakers and innovators), and ideas of flood, receding waters and stranded timbers. As an architectural stage set, focused around the entrance, it is less literal in execution than Gehry's scheme in Los Angeles, but still there are resonances.

The entrance to the old warehouse in a back alley was inconspicuous, designed for cargo rather than people. This has been transformed. Stepping in from the street, you find yourself among enormous curving forms, like wooden hulls, beached among and impaled by the building's massive timbers. An undulating wall guides you to the reception desk where the floor has been cut away so that wooden forms, plainly hollow at the upper level, are two storeys high. At the upper level, subliminal impressions of a sub-aqueous world are reinforced by translucent, watery walls (of polycarbonate), that line structural ribs and enclose conference and project rooms. The overwhelming sensation is of light on wood: on the roughened texture of the horizontal timbers, made to pop as they are pulled into an arc round meeting rooms on the ground floor; on the smoother plywood surface of vertical forms; and on the grainy one of cork that covers reception. The light is softened, smoothed out, and made harmonious by colour and texture.

Such theatrics entertain and are pleasurable, but more importantly their arrangement expresses the agency's collaborative ethos. Cutting through the first floor establishes a vertical connection in a sturdy building with an otherwise impermeable section; and the lightness of the inserted structures dispels the weightiness of the old structure.

Beyond reception are open-plan offices on two floors. Connected by lifts and staircase, the various departments are arranged in orthogonal fashion. Low enclosures, specially made in different sizes, allude to the wooden crates that once occupied the building. Beneath long lines of rice-paper lanterns, they allow views and communication across the building, and give privacy. Their sturdy functional character is echoed in the architects' design of furniture -- wooden storage units, conference tables and low sofas.

Architects

Marmol Radziner+Associates

Project team

Leo Marmol, Ron Radziner, Anna Hill, John Kim, Su Kim, Brendan O'Grady