Wieden Kennedy
Against the fad of the office-as-playground, WORKac’s New York office for the renowned advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy puts “work” back at the heart of creative work.
Wieden+Kennedy’s collaborative workflow allowed for increased density, with individual spaces shrinking in order to maximize the collective spaces. The design focused on creating a range of typologies of collaborative places for meetings of different sizes and durations, from tables for stand-up meetings to “phone booth” meeting rooms, to traditional conference rooms, to several larger collective spaces that involved carving the building in various ways.
A circular “coin stair,” which doubles as bleacher seating, is the office’s centerpiece and cuts between sixth and seventh floors. Nearby, another cut, with a perforated metal spiral staircase, connects the seventh-floor bar to the eighth-floor library. A double height courtyard creates an outdoor garden by moving the façade one bay within the building.
