Standing desks are the default, which science confirms encourages more employees to adopt them. (Andrew Hetherington)
A bike commuter’s dream office might look like this: you enter a parking garage from the street, ride down a ramp, and store your bike in a secure room.
Or, if your bike is clean (there’s a fully equipped wash station), you ride straight into the elevator, then exit into the lobby and hop on an indoor bike lane that twists an eighth of a mile through the building, passing by repair stands, coffee counters, and a capacious locker room with abundant shower stalls and fresh towels. Arriving at your desk, you dismount and hang your bike on an adjacent hook.
Welcome to the global headquarters of SRAM, the bicycle-component manufacturer. Here, in a former industrial neighborhood in Chicago’s West Loop, some 150 of the company’s more than 3,500 employees occupy one floor of 1K Fulton, once a huge cold-storage warehouse that kept much of the local meat-packers’ wares on ice before it was converted in 2015. Joe Connell, who headed the SRAM headquarters design team for architectural firm Perkins and Will, tells me that when the building was slated for renovation, “it was the first time the chillers had been turned off in about 80 years. There were ice stalagmites and stalactites as big as us.” The ice harkened back to a time when the neighborhood was, as Connell notes, “the mecca of American bicycle manufacturing,” home to dozens of bike brands, including Schwinn.
Not surprisingly, the SRAM office practically pulses with bike culture. There are walls full of jerseys signed by pros like Alberto Contador, and the first thing you see when the elevator opens is a time-trial bike ridden by Bradley Wiggins. The door handles to the bathrooms are wrapped in handlebar tape. Stem caps are used as cabinet pulls. And that bike lane? It reinforces the cycling theme but is also functional. “We have a full engineering workshop here,” explains David Zimberoff, SRAM’s vice president of marketing. “We are literally designing and building and prototyping. When it’s February and you don’t want to go outside, it’s easy to just hop on a bike and test a shifter.”
It may also seem a no-brainer that many employees bike to work. “More than 60 percent of our employees ride in some fashion,” Zimberoff estimated. Much of that is multimodal (e.g., bike to train), while roughly a quarter of those are point to point. Zimberoff, who lives ten miles away, rides nearly every day. (Although not today, as post-work he’s headed to a Foo Fighters show in Wisconsin.)