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Details

Client: AOL
Design: Studio O+A
Size: 21,000 sq m
Completion time:12 months

Project Details

Since breaking away from parent company Time Warner in 2009, global media company AOL has been reinventing itself, acquiring influential websites including the The Huffington Post, and rebranding with a new logo by Wolff Olins. Now it has a stylish new headquarters in Palo Alto, California, too.

The architecture practice behind the new HQ, San Francisco-based Studio O+A, has kitted out offices for some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names – the Facebook HQ which Studio O+A also designed, and which FX featured last year, is barely a mile away. However, despite their proximity, the two projects were quite different in nature, say the practice’s founders, architects Denise Cherry and Primo Orpilla.

‘The Facebook building dates from the Sixties, whereas this one was Nineties,’ says Orpilla. ‘And with the AOL project, we were designing for a much wider age group.’ This meant that the AOL offices needed to be more diverse, both aesthetically and functionally.

‘With the Facebook project, a lot of the building’s character [it had been a laboratory] was already exposed,’ adds Cherry, ‘so the project was about cleaning up what was there; with this project it was more about how to expose the structure of the building, taking it back to the bare bones and starting over.’

The spacious single-storey building, previously used by a technology company, had been vacant for almost a decade and was ‘incredibly corporate’ in its design, says Cherry. ‘It had drop ceilings everywhere and the colour scheme was overwhelmingly beige with lots of maple furniture – a dated look that just wouldn’t have worked for AOL.’

Studio O+A began by stripping the interior back to a clean, white ‘canvas’, exposing the ceiling works and original concrete floors and creating a sense of openness and community. To accentuate the building’s natural character, building materials such as oriented strand board (OSB; also known as exterior board) were used to create bespoke furniture and other design features. It’s an approach the designers call ‘honest materiality’ – in other words using industrial materials in their natural state and prominently in the design.

Many of the walls have been painted with whiteboard paint, so that staff can draw diagrams and work out ideas on them, adding to the industrial aesthetic, as do basic florescent lights painted orange and arranged in a cross shape. Graphics feature prominently. The new AOL logo – lowercase letters in white with a full stop – has been designed so that it works well when placed on bright colours, patterns and graphic images. ‘We wanted to use that in the scheme,’ says Cherry, ‘so there’s a lot of white, but then you get these hits of colour based on the company’s marketing material.’

According to Cherry and Orpilla, the scheme was as much about the organisation of the space as about creating a bold new look. To promote collaborative working, workstation cubicles were supplemented with Inscape systems – a type of ‘benching’ popular in Europe but which Cherry and Orpilla say is only just catching on in the USA.

The space is mostly open plan, so different ceiling treatments were used to delineate areas. The main communal spaces, for example, have exposed services, while a drop ceiling in OSB has been used for some of the informal meeting areas; another breakout space has a reclaimed wood ceiling, while the cafe/restaurant has patterned plaster.

The brief stipulated that the office should be much more ‘collegial’ in its design, and that the layout should encourage staff to socialise. ‘One of the main directives was that the office should have one central breakout area,’ says Cherry, ‘a sort of “town hall” concept where staff would come together.’

Described by the designers as ‘part-kitchen, part-play space, part-kickback area’, the ‘town hall’ has a variety of meeting areas and breakout zones, as well as a games room and a bar, and a cafe/restaurant designed to look like an independent cafe. The space is also used as a venue for presentations and talks (The Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington spoke there when AOL acquired the website). In the games room, booths set into the walls are lined with sound-absorbing felt so that they can be used for informal meetings as well as for eating lunch.

The designers realised that the cafe/restaurant had to feel significantly different from the rest of the space, so that people using it would feel that they had actually gone somewhere for lunch even though they hadn’t left the office. A lower ceiling of patterned plaster creates a sense of intimacy, while bespoke benches and long tables in English oak give it a feeling of authenticity.

Meeting areas include glass-fronted rooms where the ceilings are covered with the kind of sound proofing foam used in recording studios. This means that private meetings can take place close to enthusiastic games of pool, but Cherry says the material was also chosen for its unusual, industrial look.

One of the key features of the scheme are circular ‘meeting pods’ scattered throughout the floor. Made of OSB and translucent fiberglass these cosy ‘silos’ provide a space for ‘informal collaboration and spontaneous creativity’, say the designers.

Both Cherry and Orpilla agree that the layout of the space is its most successful feature. ‘It’s a unique space and we made sure that the plan was very simple and easy to navigate,’ says Orpilla. ‘We created spacious hallways where people can sit down and have impromptu meetings or just hang out. The whole idea is that you can take your laptop and work anywhere – you aren’t tethered to your desk.’

Cherry adds: ‘During the course of the project we visited the company in its old offices and what you’d notice right away was how quiet it was – it didn’t actually feel like there was anyone working there. But when you walk into the new office, there’s a real buzz and a palpable sense of activity, and for us that’s really exciting.’

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This article was first published in fx Magazine.