Excerpted from Modern Luxury:
“When you walk in in the morning and the sun is shining through those windows and the floors are gleaming, there is something,” says Mary Clare Bonaccorsi, managing partner of the Polsinelli law office in Chicago. “Actually our receptionist and I always joke that it’s going to be a good day.”
Such is the effect, top to bottom, of the firm’s new quarters, which house 100 attorneys over three floors in 85,000 square feet. The glittering triumph is recent work from HOK, an international design and architecture firm with 100 employees in Chicago and 1,700 worldwide. Polsinelli has hired the company for 30 other outposts, including those in Denver, Kansas City, New York and elsewhere. The Chicago location elegantly represents the firm’s collaborative, thoughtful approach to addressing client objectives.
One of the key design questions, says Tom Marquardt, director of interiors, was, “How do you honor the functionality of what they are doing? You think of a law firm as so secretive and heads down.” The overall effective of the Polsinelli design, he notes, is to “put the space back into the hands of their client engagement. And there’s a decided sensibility or approach with the art that becomes the tether that holds the whole thing together. It’s more open and client-centered.”
“The goal is always about the quality of work and striving for design excellence,” says Peter Ruggiero, design principal. “The worst possible thing is a preconceived idea. We’re motivated by discovery, by finding what’s not apparent.” And that, he says, only comes about through “iterative” engagement with clients. Thus, the firm may be characterized more by its process than by a style.
“You’ve probably been in a lot of HOK buildings and didn’t know they were HOK buildings,” says Managing Principal Riccardo Mascia. And even if that isn’t the case, it most assuredly will be sometime soon. Among the firm’s current projects is the massive upgrade underway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport—a challenging undertaking, to say the least, and just the sort of thing HOK seeks out.
“We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We pride ourselves on buildings that are essential to how a city works,” Ruggiero says.