Continuing Education: Spaces for Design
Five years ago, Covid-19 shut down much of the world. Countries sealed their borders, schools closed, and businesses shuttered. For architects, projects slowed or were canceled due to travel restrictions, funding problems, and supply-chain issues. But many found that they could effectively work remotely. Now, for at least part of the week, they are back in the office—but it isn’t the same office. The pandemic prompted a shift in attitudes and priorities, as well as a rethink of the physical workplace. RECORD looks at five recently completed projects conceived during or in the wake of the shutdown—four architecture studios and one design consultant’s office—to explore how these environments support each firm’s distinct creative process and unique culture.
In the fall of 2021, the leadership of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) held open-air meetings in Bryant Park, directly across the street from the Midtown building it had called home since 2007, to begin plotting the post-Covid return of the firm’s 336-person New York–based staff to in-office work. Their scheme included giving up the lease on half of floor 18 in the Art Deco skyscraper; moving that staff to floor 7, one level above where the rest of the firm was located, and, at some point, in a second phase, connecting the two floors. During those open-air meetings, KPF determined that the new workspace should facilitate collaboration, but also allow many ways of working. “Some people need more focus,” says principal Marianne Kwok, who led the renovation with principal Brian Girard. At the same time, she adds, “we wanted to showcase our work a bit more purposefully.”
In the space the architects moved into two years later, the firm’s global reach is evident as soon as visitors step off the elevator. Wall-mounted 3D-printed cityscapes show the locations of KPF offices internationally, while models of some of its most recognizable towers are displayed on pedestals, like sculpture.
Beyond the reception area, open-office studios of roughly 30 desks each that Kwok calls “neighborhoods” have been placed in the four corners of the H-shaped, 25,000-square-foot floor plate. Partners have private offices within freestanding doorless cubes clad in pinup surfaces. A variety of other enclosed spaces are distributed throughout. One-person, acoustically isolated “Zoom rooms” are designed for virtual meetings, phone conversations, or focused work, while conference rooms of varying sizes are equipped for seamless hybrid meetings. The largest of these can accommodate 82 people in lecture-style seating and has a folding glass wall that, when open, allows the space to flow into the adjacent café, making it ideal for receptions or other events. Notably, the café occupies what is arguably the floor’s most desirable real estate: the south edge overlooking Bryant Park. “We wanted to make the view more democratic,” says Kwok.
At KPF, the café overlooks overlooks Bryant Park. Photo © Eric Laignel, courtesy KPF, click to enlarge.
Partners’ offices are enclosed in free-standing cubes. Photo © Eric Laignel, courtesy KPF
The strategy for selecting materials, Kwok says, was to use as few as possible, “speaking to what is already there.” Existing floors of terrazzo and concrete have been polished to a high sheen but still retain traces of removed partitions. At the core, a messy patchwork of concrete block and poured-in-place concrete was covered by cladding it in new textured-concrete panels. Overhead ductwork has been left exposed—in part to deal with low floor-to-floor heights—but painted white like the ceiling above it. Overall, the space comes off as sleek but comfortable, or, as Kwok describes it, “clean, simple, and honest.”
In contrast to the layers of history in KPF’s space, HOK had a nearly blank slate to work with when creating the Birmingham, U.K., office for the engineering firm Arup. The 64,500-square-foot WELL Platinum–certified space spans the lower three floors of a 13-story glass-and-steel structure, completed in 2024, in the city’s center.
Relocating from a suburban office park to be near collaborators and clients, Arup desired a workspace that was adaptable and sustainable. “That ultimately led us to the new-build route,” explains Alison Kilby, an Arup associate director. Signing on as early tenants, as well as serving as the building’s civil, structural, and services engineers, meant Arup could work with the project’s developer and Howells, the core-and-shell architect, to influence systems and infrastructure decisions—convincing them, for instance, to go all-electric.
The new office has its own street-level entrance lobby, in what was originally intended as a retail space, that functions like a shop window, connecting Arup to the urban surroundings, says Timothy Hatton, a principal at HOK in London. The ground-floor space includes a “touch-down” zone for visitors to work in. A cross-laminated timber (CLT) bleacher stair leading to the second floor allows the reception area to double as event space, where Arup often hosts arts, culture, and STEM-related gatherings.
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A bleacher stair (1) and a “slow staircase” (2) in Arup’s Birmingham, U.K., offices are made of CLT. Photos © Paul Grundy
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The studios on levels 2 and 3 include a wide variety of environments, from individual focus stations to large collaborative and social spaces, as well as dedicated “mindfulness zones” with greenery, daylight, and city views. The 850 Birmingham-based employees, who are required to be in the office a minimum of two days a week, can book these spots to suit their individual work styles or the task at hand. As in KPF’s offices, dropped ceilings are omitted to leave ducts, sprinklers, and conduit exposed. But here, Hatton says, the idea is to put Arup’s expertise on display. Sound-absorbing treatment is incorporated above the services, to help minimize noise levels, while a sophisticated circadian-lighting system adapts to the time of day and season.
Ceilings have been omitted to showcase the building services. Photos © Paul Grundy
Wherever structure was added, HOK chose natural materials, including that for a slightly skewed and sculptural “slow staircase” that connects the two upper levels. Like the bleacher stair below, it is made of CLT. The team looked at incorporating the handrail within the slow staircase’s mass timber, but that would have necessitated heftier slabs of CLT, “adding embodied carbon without structural gain,” says Kilby. The approach toward finishes meant using “just what was needed,” adds Hatton, and sticking to those that are primarily bio-based, such as natural linoleum and cork, in addition to wood.
Arup says its new studio has transformed employee engagement, with occupancy levels up 10 percent compared with pre-pandemic levels at its old location. The firm attributes this to the design of the office and to amenities like “lifestyle rooms.” Interspersed throughout, staff can utilize these areas to indulge in what Hatton calls “post-Covid hobbies,” spending downtime stretching, using exercise bikes, playing board games, or tinkering with Legos. One such space, near the top of the bleacher stair, is large enough to hold weekly Pilates classes.
Naturally, the best workplace design reflects the aesthetics of its occupants—something the old location of Chicago-based SCB did not, says Sheyla Conforte, SCB’s executive director of interior design. She describes the former space, where the company was spread out on three floors in an office building on the city’s Magnificent Mile, as low-ceilinged and dark, and obstructed with columns. “We would not take clients through,” she says. But the firm, formerly known as Solomon Cordwell Buenz, recently relocated to offices that have instilled a new sense of workplace pride, she says.
Now SCB is at 330 North Wabash, a 52-story Mies van der Rohe building on the north side of the Chicago River next to Marina City’s corncob-like towers. Here, column-free floor plates provide space on a single level (the 25th) for its 130-member Chicago-based staff, with room to grow, while floor-to-ceiling glazing affords plenty of daylight and allows for nearly uninterrupted city views.
The Chicago offices of SCB take advantage of the building’s full-height glass and column-free floor plates. Photo © Kendall McCaugherty
A primary design move when creating the 34,000-square-foot space, according to Conforte, was to “pull nearly everything off the glass.” Only the chief operating and financial officers have private offices, while the studios are organized as open-office environments, with all having easy access to telephone rooms, conference rooms, unenclosed meeting areas and pinup space. Almost the entire perimeter is allocated to informal collaboration spaces, where colleagues can meet in groups of two or three at small pedestal tables.
In a strategy reminiscent of KPF’s new studio, SCB devoted the floor’s most desirable spot to the café, placing it at the south end, directly overlooking the river. Underneath a reflective ceiling “for an expanded feeling,” says Conforte, the social space is situated next to the materials library, so that meetings there can spill out onto the café’s long walnut table. The café also looks into the adjacent “jewel box”—a glass-enclosed room furnished with modern classics and containing a curated library of books on topics that include art, fashion, and technology, and intended for quiet inspiration or a drink with a client.
The café at SCB’s has prime city views over the Chicago River and sits next to a glass-enclosed space for quiet inspiration, which the firm refers to as “the jewel box”. Photo © Kendall McCaugherty
Most design projects begin with a research and discovery process to understand client needs and priorities. For Architecture Research Office (ARO), relocating from a space it had outgrown in a former printshop in Lower Manhattan provided a chance to treat itself as its own client and “an opportunity to practice those engagement skills,” says Megumi Tamanaha, studio director of ARO.
Tamanaha, who led the relocation effort, organized breakout groups to solicit employees’ opinions and desires, not only on the design of the new office, but also on where, and in what kind of building it should be. Starting the process in October 2021, these engagement exercises revealed that health, wellness, and convenience were top of mind. Among the items on staff wish lists were a location near public transit, in a building that was LEED-certified, had good ventilation, and accessible to outdoor space.
ARO ended up leasing 6,500 square feet in downtown Brooklyn, on the 12th floor of 1 Willoughby Square, a new 34-story glass-and-terracotta tower designed by FXCollaborative, which also has its offices there. The LEED Core and Shell–Silver building is close to several subway lines and sits across from a park. In addition, windows on all three sides gave the space a loftlike quality similar to that of the firm’s former printshop home. The column-free floor plates were also a selling point. “It is huge for flexibility,” says Kim Yao, an ARO principal.
The architects designed the space with as few walls as possible, creating a bank of three conference rooms of different configurations and sizes along one edge. The 33-member studio is arranged in an open plan with assigned desks, the three principals distributed among them. “People wanted their own landing spots,” says Tamanaha.
To control noise, the architects applied a sound-absorptive material made of recycled plastic bottles on the exposed-concrete ceiling. For the entry and adjacent pantry, they used a wool-felt waffle-like baffle that they helped develop. Panels, part of the same product line, clad the conference room walls, creating splashes of color visible through the rooms’ glass fronts. The result, says Tamanaha, is a “nice din,” establishing an environment that is “energetic without being loud.”
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ARO’S own line of acoustic felt is used above the pantry (3) and on the walls of the conference rooms (4) of its Brooklyn office. The materials library (5) is often the site of impromptu meetings. Photos © Magda Biernat
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The acoustic treatment is among the features that should help the space achieve its own LEED plaque, at the Platinum level, in addition to WELL certification. Also contributing are no- and low-VOC paints, conference tables of reclaimed lumber, and an air-quality monitoring system.
Lake|Flato Architects similarly used the pandemic pause to rethink its physical workplace. But, instead of moving, the firm revamped the 1920’s-era former car dealership in San Antonio it has occupied since the mid-1980s. Lake|Flato had expanded over the years, but somewhat counterintuitively it opted to make its built footprint smaller by demolishing an adjacent parking garage. “Though we had outgrown [the building], we realized we could make our desks smaller, create more thoughtful shared space, and—most importantly—create an incredible outdoor gathering space,” Lake|Flato cofounder Ted Flato told RECORD last year. The firm uses it for meetings, celebrations, and community events, including a weekly farmers market.
To create an outdoor collaboration space for its San Antonio office, Lake|Flato demolished a parking garage. Photo © Robert Gomez
The renovation relies on a limited number of new materials and finishes, favoring reuse and salvage. For instance, timber from the old garage was used to create interior wood-slat ceilings, which hide an acoustic liner. Overall, the approach achieved an 88 percent reduction in embodied carbon (including the reuse of the existing concrete and clay-block structure), which, along with other strategies such as off-site solar, helps put the project on track for Zero Carbon status from the International Living Future Institute. It already has achieved WELL certification.
Salvaged wood from the garage was used in the lobby ceiling. Photo © Robert Gomez
Arguably more consequential than the labels or certifications is a strategy that Jamie Sartory, a Lake|Flato associate and project architect for the renovation, characterizes as “reduction and reallocation” for reconfiguring the interior. The number of desks has been reduced slightly from 100 to 92, and, instead of a few large conference rooms, which Sartory notes were always booked, there is a wider range of collaborative environments, including open “huddle” spaces, Zoom rooms, and both small and large enclosed meeting rooms. “I’m no longer trying to make everything happen at my desk,” says Sartory.
Now Sartory and her colleagues have the appropriate tools and environments to connect and create. Lake|Flato—like design firms everywhere, it seems—has concluded that, though technology has made it possible to work from almost anywhere, they do their best work together, in spaces that reflect their values. “That’s why people come to the office,” she says.
Continuing Education
To earn one AIA learning unit (LU) read the article above and “The Post -Pandemic Workplace: The experiment Continues,” by Jim Harter and Ben Wigert, Gallup, March 11, 2025. Then complete the quiz.
Upon passing the quiz, you will receive a certificate of completion, and your credit will be automatically reported to the AIA. Additional information regarding credit-reporting and continuing-education requirements can be found at continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how the featured design firms have configured their own workplaces to foster collaboration.
- Describe the offices’ varying approaches to showcasing their work and expertise.
- Discuss materials-specification strategies that reduce carbon and improve occupant health.
- Explain the process used by firms to prioritize desired features and qualities in their new workplaces.
AIA/CES Course #K2504A
