A+I designed the public areas of 1 Hudson Square as a part of its Hudson Square project, which aimed to use a unified design language to re-create the feeling of an office campus spread across multiple buildings in an urban setting. Courtesy © Magda Biernat / A+I
It’s still too soon to predict what office life will look like post-coronavirus: The end of open floor plans? Plexiglas “sneeze guards” around every desk? No more communal coffee? However the workplace evolves, it’s clear that not being at one’s desk, within the confines of an employer’s leasehold, is a real possibility—and is potentially liberating for employees.
“We all have learned that I might be twice as productive if I’m not at my desk,” says Brad Zizmor, cofounder of A+I. But Zizmor and his colleagues don’t think the pandemic spells the end of the office; in fact, they believe people will race back once it is safe to do so. “Technology has allowed us to replace the functions of your desk with the home office,” says Peter Knutson, an A+I principal and the group’s director of strategy. “But it doesn’t offer community.”
A+I, a New York City firm whose early projects were fueled by the dotcom boom, has designed schools, retail, and houses. But the group has earned a special reputation for its integrated approach to amenities in workplaces that respond to individual clients’ needs, and to employees’ desire for workspaces to feel as crafted and considered as their homes or hangouts.
The company’s work has expanded alongside developers’ agendas, with the former sometimes challenging the latter. Many today are rethinking their relationship with tenants, viewing their real estate “in terms of community rather than commodity,” says A+I’s other cofounder, Dag Folger. Instead of dropping siloed enhancements into an office tower’s storefront, or defaulting to the identities and branding of chain restaurants and gyms, developers are beginning to view amenities as support spaces for human beings—who also work. In A+I’s hands, these areas are fluid and connected, both in their design and in their function. “The most evolved tenants will be drawn to this and pay more money for this. It’s a motivating force for landlords,” says Folger.
One of A+I’s most successful case studies for this subtle but meaningful shift in office culture is the firm’s $40 million renovation of the common spaces at theMART in Chicago. Spanning four million square feet over two city blocks, and rising 25 stories, the facility is one of the largest commercial buildings in the world.
Designed by Alfred Shaw in an Art Deco style, the Merchandise Mart, as it was originally known when it was built in 1930, was developed by Marshall Field & Co. as a wholesale center. Shaw’s design combined three typologies: the warehouse, department store, and skyscraper. He included streaming vertical windows to draw the eye upward, and deployed chamfered corners, minimal setbacks, and corner pavilions to counter the building’s mass.