Home rental website Airbnb has opened an office in Dublin with a reception area modelled on an Irish pub designed by local architects Heneghan Peng (+ slideshow).
The architects designed a horseshoe-shaped bar in dark wood to mimic the interior of traditional pubs found across the city.
The bar is complete with bottles around the top, candelabras at both ends and a suit of armour that is posed to be having a drink between the stools.
Tables and chairs in the adjacent presentation space are also modelled on typical pub furniture, and the ceiling and flooring echo the decor of drinking venues from different eras.
Continuing the local theme, a pair of green and beige Irish telephone boxes form booths for private phone calls.
Heneghan Peng also included the 12-metre-long bench it designed for Ireland’s Venice Biennale pavilion in 2012, which dips and rises as users sit on different sections.
Throughout the office are a series of meeting pods made from oriented strand board, with interiors designed to look like apartments listed on Airbnb from cities across the world.
These rooms are glazed on opposite walls and the name of the city that the design is based upon is written on the side.
Some have seating set into the outside walls for employees to sit and chat in, designed to look like different spaces from the same apartment.
Other larger pods are hinged at the centre so they can be rolled apart to split them into two meeting rooms.
Giant wooden steps are scattered with cushions to create an informal meeting area or workspace.
Brightly coloured pods resembling submarines contain meeting rooms at the new Moscow office for internet company Yandex by Russian studio Za Bor Architects (+ slideshow).
The architects developed a scheme incorporating colourful communal areas and meeting rooms interspersed among more typical workspaces, which feature a muted palette of grey and white.
“The client, as usual, wanted to see a happy and comfortable interior that would hold a large number of specialists,” said the architects.
The red and yellow meeting cabins are located on the fourth floor, and incorporate transparent panels resembling giant portholes fixed to the exterior of their rounded walls.
Groups of sofas with high padded backs and sides are arranged close to the pod-like meeting rooms to create additional places for secluded working or conversations.
Original features such as brick walls and columns were integrated into the design, contrasting with new additions such as the colourful pods and furniture.
Two meeting rooms on the second floor are constructed as cave-like spaces with curving ceilings and walls covered in grey carpet.
The rounded shells of these rooms are staggered to make room for glazed gaps that allow light to enter, while curtains along the glazed front walls can be drawn when privacy is required.
On the lower levels, a stripe of green carpet meanders across the floor, and loops up onto the walls and ceilings that envelope glass-walled meeting rooms.
“The first three floors are connected with a generic element which is intended to form a giant ribbon that, while penetrating floors, forms streamlined volumes of meeting and conference rooms,” said the architects.
Curtains enclosing the meeting rooms on these floors match the orange and green colour scheme of the surrounding walls and furniture.
Photography is by Maria Turynkina and Dmitry Kulinevich.
Here’s a project description from Za Bor Architects:
Yandex Stroganov office in Moscow, Russia
The main place in Za Bor Architects’ portfolio is held by offices of IT-companies. It has a lot to do with a pretty informal and creative atmosphere that these firms are willing to build up for their employers, because working environment is one of the key factors that affect the company’s attraction. It is worth to note that Yandex – the largest IT-company in Russia, and one of the world’s leaders in this field, has been entrusting their offices to Za Bor Architects for six years already. Today there are 21 Yandex office in 12 cities of four countries of the world, that Za Bor Architects have developed.
Recently one more Moscow office of Yandex was opened in Stroganov building in Krasnaya Roza 1875 business quarter. This reconstructed building is full of columns and inter-storey premises, which influenced the interiors a lot. The client, as usually, wanted to see a happy and comfortable interior that would hold a large number of specialists.
The first three floors are connected with a generic element, that is intended to form a giant ribbon, that, while penetrating floors, forms streamlined volumes of meeting and conference rooms.
The first three floors have the following common elements of all Yandex offices, as open communication lines on the ceiling, unique ceiling lights in complex geometrical boxes, and compound flowerpots with flowers dragging on to the ceiling. Alcove sofas by Vitra are used as bright colour spots, and places for informal communication. Wall finishing is traditionally industrial carpet, marker covering, cork; and of course, a poured floor.
The fourth and fifth floors are constructed in a totally different style. You may only notice two signature elements of Za Bor Architects here – large meeting rooms – architects call them bathyscaphes, and employees named them Orange and Tomato due to their colours.
Such difference in decoration is determined with very complex construction elements and level differences in the building (the ceiling height varies from 2 to 6 meters), balconies, beams that were left from the previous tenants. Nevertheless, here we can see new colours, partition walls and flooring. Here, in these neutral grey-white interiors, rather than elsewhere, there are many workplaces completed with Herman Miller systems, and the largest open-spaces. Also there are cafeteria and game room with a sport corner.
This has constrained partition of the building into two separate office, in fact it helps clients and numerous visitors of Yandex Money department to deal with their issues, without distracting technical specialists, located on the top floors.
Client: Yandex Address: Stroganov business center, 18B Leo Tolstoy str, Moscow Project management: Yandex Architecture and design: Za Bor Architects Architects: Arseniy Borisenko and Peter Zaytsev Project coordinator: Nadezhda Rozhanskaya Furniture: Herman Miller, GlobeZero4, Vitra Lighting: Slide Acoustic material: Sonaspray Acoustic solutions: Acoustic group Flooring: Interface FLOR Time of project — 2012-2013 Floor area: 5800 sqm
Interview: over dinner in an apartment inside a historic clock tower, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told Dezeen how two young design graduates built the home-stay booking website that is now bigger than most hotel chains.
The venue, The Clock Tower apartment (main image) in Sir George Gilbert Scott’s 1868 gothic revival hotel at St Pancras, is one of Airbnb’s elite rental properties. Guests share the property with its owner, Peter Tompkins, who rents rooms through Airbnb for just £150 per night (although it gets booked up months ahead).
The Clock Tower at St Pancras Chambers can be rented via Airbnb
“I think this really sums up the wonderful authentic feeling you get when you’re travelling,” said Chesky, who founded the company with fellow Rhode Island School of Design graduate Joe Gebbia in 2008. “We’ve kept the feeling of being at home anywhere.”
Inside the Clock Tower apartment, one of Airbnb’s “elite” properties
The duo had the idea for a site that would allow travellers to stay in ordinary homes instead of hotels when, short of money to pay the rent on their San Francisco apartment, they bought a couple of inflatable air beds and rented them out to attendees of a design conference in the city.
The Clock Tower apartment is inside Sir George Gilbert Scott’s recently converted 1868 gothic revival hotel at St Pancras
“We called it the Air Bed and Breakfast,” he says. “From that weekend it’s grown to where we are today, which is 252,000 people every night staying at Airbnb at peak.”
Airbnb’s home page
Silicon Valley didn’t take the company seriously at first, partly since it was headed by designers rather than engineers – and partly because nobody thought anyone would pay to stay in someone else’s home.
Another Airbnb elite property: a loft near Old Street, London
“When we came to the Valley, no one even wanted to invest in Airbnb,” he says. “One of the reasons was they thought the idea was crazy. People thought: ‘I’d never stay in a stranger’s home. That’s creepy’. But the other reason is that they didn’t think a designer could build and run a company.”
Designer Tom Dixon’s converted water tower in west London can also be booked via Airbnb
Chesky explained to Dezeen how the company won over the doubters and built a global business where “everything we do is design driven”.
Images are courtesy of Airbnb.
Marcus Fairs: What is Airbnb?
Brian Chesky: Airbnb is a new way to travel and experience the world. We had this vision: what if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere in the world? And that’s what we have today. We’ve kept the feeling of being at home anywhere. We’re in 190 countries, that’s every country but four countries in the world. Thirty-four thousand cities. You can get a home, a castle, a teepee, a treehouse, a boat. Really interesting homes. We’re here in the clock tower at St Pancras station; I think this really sums up the wonderful authentic feeling you get when you’re travelling.
Marcus Fairs: You’re a designer. Tell us about your design background.
Brian Chesky: I grew up in New York, my parents were social workers. I know they had a lot of anxiety about me becoming a designer. My Dad wanted me to get job in health insurance one day. I ended up going to the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] and I was very inspired when I got there because a teacher told me: “You can live in a world of your own design, you can change the world, you can redesign it.” No one ever told me that growing up.
The day of our graduation, my cofounder Joe Gebbia said “Let’s start a company together.” I ended up moving in with him [in San Francisco] but we didn’t have enough money to pay rent. I had $1,000 and I remember that rent was actually $1,150, so I couldn’t pay rent.
It turns out the weekend I went there, this international design conference was coming to San Francisco. All of the hotels were sold out, so we had this idea. Why don’t we turn out house into a bed and breakfast for the conference? Unfortunately we didn’t have any beds, but we had air beds. We called it the Air Bed and Breakfast.
From that weekend it’s grown to where we are today, which is 252,000 people every night staying at Airbnb at peak. I think part of the reason we’re so successful – and it’s partly luck, we’ve been very fortunate – is that we’re from a design background. When I was at RISD, everyone talked about how design could get in the boardroom, how you could get the boardroom to listen to design, how you could influence the CEO.
But I thought: “Why should design be in the boardroom? Why can’t design run the boardroom? What would happen if two designers ran a technology company? What would that be?” That could never happen before. We are that experiment played out and I hope that we’re successful because of it. When we came to the Valley, no one even wanted to invest in Airbnb. One of the reasons was they thought the idea was crazy. People thought “I’d never stay in a stranger’s home. That’s creepy”.
But the other reason is that they didn’t think a designer could build and run a company. They were straight up about it. We weren’t MBAs, we weren’t two PHD students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people that worked for people that ran companies. That’s what they told us. We never believed that; we thought designers were the perfect people to run a company like this. A human-centred company, built around empathy, using creativity. I thought we were the perfect people and we certainly have something to prove.
Airbnb Hoxton Loft interior, London
Marcus Fairs: So is Airbnb more of a design-led company than most other Silicon Valley startups?
Brian Chesky: Absolutely.
Marcus Fairs: In what ways?
Brian Chesky: We’re very much a design-driven company. Everything we do is design driven, not just the products we make or how we design them. Every decision, from the board meetings we run, through how we hire people, to our office design.
We have this methodology that’s called Snow White. It’s inspired by the film Snow White, the feature-length animated movie. It was the first time Walt Disney created storyboards, and we did that for the trip. We storyboarded what was the perfect trip, from the time you book your trip, you leave your home. We did every frame, which in our business is the story board trip. We design it and make sure it’s great every time.
We created this whole end-to-end service design system, design every part of the trip. Hotels, Expedia, booking websites, they don’t do that. They typically use financial data to make their own decisions. We make decisions based on people. We do the same things with employees, how we recruit them, how they join, how we train them. We storyboard and try to design the end-to-end system. We try to see things very differently. For our office design, we redesigned meeting rooms to look like apartments because we thought meeting rooms were ugly and meetings suck.
We have really simple core values that are really like designing the culture. I think there’s a lot of intent around things that before us, there weren’t a lot of intent around. And they weren’t considered from a human basis. Typically they were done from a financial basis.
Marcus Fairs: How is the hotel world reacting? I heard a rumour tonight that they’re getting a bit defensive.
Brian Chesky: Well we’re as big as they are now so there’s a little bit of angst to them. But I think I can’t yet generalise the whole hotel industry and I think it’s because a lot of people have a lot of different views. Some are trying to figure out what we are. I was just in Davos [for the World Economic Forum] and met with a couple of CEOs of large hotel chains. They were actually really friendly and one of them said: “We don’t know what to think about you yet, how should we think about you?” and another said “We don’t actually think of ourselves as competitors with you.” But I heard off the record that another one does think we’re a competitor and has some concerns. So I can’t really generalise, they all have different views.
But I don’t think we’re as much competitors as people make us out to be. Most hotels make all their money in business travel. There’s not a lot of profit for them in ordinary people. We’re the other way around; we have some business travel but most people on Airbnb are using it for vacation.
Airbnb Spitalfields loft interior, London
Marcus Fairs: We’ve seen over the last few years the rise of design hotels, boutique hotels, design filtering into the hospitality industry but do you think that’s just a bit superficial? You’re talking about designing the whole trip experience rather than just the lobby or the room.
Brian Chesky: I think there’s two things there. The first is that I ask myself: “If the internet was around 100 years ago, what would it look like today?” My conclusion is that it would look a lot like Airbnb or be more of a home. I think home design has been an amazing thing that’s lived on for generations, and we kind of celebrate existing home design. I think home design is more authentic than hotel design and I think the idea of home is just more authentic. It’s not manufactured to simulate something, it’s got to be authentic because it has to be there year round. So it’s got to be honest.
I also think that we think about designing the entire trip experience, like Snow White. That entire end-to-end storyboard. We’ve come out with some things, some things haven’t come out yet. We’re really thinking about every frame.
Marcus Fairs: Give us some examples of how you’ve improved the sequence in the storyboard of a trip for travellers.
Brian Chesky: Most of my examples are things we’re coming out with this year. I can give you 100 examples but unfortunately we haven’t announced any yet. I guess our app… with a lot of hotels and a lot of booking sites, their app and how you book is a bit of an afterthought. We design every part of the experience. We even thought about when you get off a plane at the airport, how you pull up your itinerary, how you would check in. The whole app was designed for someone who is a traveller and using it while travelling. A lot of sites, the don’t really think about the use case.
Marcus Fairs: There’s that scenario with conventional travel where you have to print off all these different bits of paper the night before you leave…
Brian Chesky: We have an app that’s super consumable, it’s super easy to use and these are just some of the basic things. Let me give you another example: the host site [where people offering their apartments for rent on Airbnb upload and manage their details]. We were looking at the storyboard of a host and we realised that parts of it were really hard. One part that was really hard was taking photographs of your home. So we created this network of 4,000 to 5,000 professional photographers. You click a button and a photographer will come and photograph your home for free.
This is something that we never would have considered had we not been designers. But we put ourselves in the shoes of the user and realised how hard this was. Then we thought “What would magical feel like?” and that’s how we approach design problems.
So here’s a great design lesson that we learned. We had a mentor who said: “Brian, it’s better to have 100 people love you than a million people sort of like you.” To create the perfect experience for one person and then scale that; work backwards. A lot of companies don’t do that; a lot of companies make a small tweak for everyone, measure it, make another small tweak and get that out and measure again. You keep turning dials, kind of arbitrarily, hoping you get a good signal. We said “Let’s just design something from the ground up for one person, make it as great as possible and then scale it.” That’s how we came up with a lot of our concepts. We designed the end-to-end system for a small number of people and scaled it.
Airbnb Spitalfields loft interior, London
Marcus Fairs: You were saying earlier that Silicon Valley doesn’t take designers seriously.
Brian Chesky: When I got to Silicon Valley they were not taken seriously.
Marcus Fairs: Is that changing then? There’s Apple, there’s fuseproject… Is there a culture change going on?
Brian Chesky: Well Apple was successful in 2007 when I got to the Valley. Their value wasn’t higher than Google or Microsoft then. Engineering was considered what made the most valuable companies. Apple’s a funny case. Now people in the design community see Apple as a design-driven company. In technology, a lot of people didn’t think it was design, they just thought of Steve Jobs as a God. They’d go: “Oh it’s because Steve Jobs is a visionary, that’s why Apple’s successful.” And I said: “No, he’s just a great designer.”
But we had totally different views on it and now you have a lot of young startups – us, Pinterest, Square, SoundCloud – all these companies are really well designed, so I think it’s changing. I think more and more the experience and the design of the system and product are becoming the epicentre for the user experience. I think they’re really important right now. I would like to think we played a very small part in shifting that narrative and sentiment, and giving a bit more visibility to designers.
Studio O+A created the interior for Cisco‘s primary San Francisco workplace, after the company acquired WiFi firm Meraki in November 2012 and needed more space.
Located in the city’s Mission Bay neighbourhood and overlooking the waterfront, the 110,000-square-foot office is split over two floors. It was designed to maximise daylight and provide communal areas based on feedback the designers received from staff.
“O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find out what they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters,” said the designers. “A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.”
Wood-frame pavilions that are partially enclosed with triangular panels provide intimate meeting spots and break up the large floor plate.
Timber-clad walls feature padded niches in which individuals can recline with their laptops.
Seating areas are sunk beneath floor-to-ceiling windows to prevent them blocking the light into the deep open-plan areas.
Giant whiteboards and blackboards give the employees opportunities to write and sketch ideas over the walls, while notes and memos can be pinned to cork panels.
Levels are connected by a wide open staircase, which has wooden stadium seating integrated at its base.
The mix of flooring types includes carpet, wood and astroturf, and a varied palette of colours is used for walls and furniture.
Green electricity cables run up the white corridor walls and across the exposed concrete ceilings to power the overhead lights.
The hallways are wide enough for workers to cycle or skateboard between zones.
A large roof terrace provides views across San Francisco bay towards the baseball stadium, the Bay Bridge and downtown.
Studio O+A has designed offices for quite a few technology companies around California. The studio completed both Facebook and AOL‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, as well as the Silicon Valley HQ for Evernote.
The panoramic view of San Francisco’s waterfront visible from Cisco’s new offices in some ways sets the theme for O+A’s design. From almost any angle the visual impact is of light, spaciousness, bright colour, long sight lines.
Meraki, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, makes wireless routers—and takes pride in the elegance of their design.
O+A sought to build the space the way Meraki builds its products – with an emphasis on simplicity and seamless ease of use. But it was also mindful of the importance to the company’s identity of the Cisco-Meraki merger.
Located in the rapidly changing Mission Bay neighbourhood, Cisco’s 110,000-square-foot suite of offices now becomes the company’s principal San Francisco location.
At the outset O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find outwhat they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters. A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.
The size of the new space and the prominence of its floor-to-ceiling windows made collaboration and natural light relatively easy bills to fill.
O+A’s design offers a variety of meeting spaces formal and informal, indoor and outdoor, many of them bathed in the crystalline light of San Francisco Bay.
The scale and the light support both a rich palette of colours and design elements tailored to the broad canvas: a wide staircase with integrated stadium seating at its base, a meeting room showered from above with hanging tillandsia plants, an outdoor deck with views of the baseball park and Bay Bridge.
Maintaining Meraki’s cozy ambience in the hangar-sized complex proved more challenging. O+A’s solution was to create a medley of small gathering spaces within the large footprint.
Sunken seating brings intimacy to horizontal common areas while preserving broad sight lines. Yurts, cabanas and phone rooms offer varying levels of enclosure. And throughout the office informal lounge spaces allow passing colleagues to sit down and talk.
Despite the richness of the finishes and the wide array of typologies deployed, this is not a project that feels overly “designed”. One of O+A’s goals was to give Cisco a canvas on which to paint their own pictures.
In lieu of pervasive branding graphics, O+A provided ubiquitous chalkboards, whiteboards and corkboards so that Cisco’s employees could sketch, write and pin-up graphics meaningful to them.
As might be expected of the company’s strongly do-it-yourself culture, mobility and adaptability were big factors in the selection of furniture and workstations. These are people who like to move things around.
Opinion: as protests continue against private shuttle buses for tech company workers in San Francisco, Mimi Zeiger asks how designers and architects should engage with the fight.
When did the war between technology and urbanism now battling on the streets of San Francisco begin? On December 10, protesters blocked a private bus from commuting from the city’s Mission District to Google headquarters in Mountain View, 34 miles away. Over the summer, emotions ran high when tech entrepreneur Peter Shih posted his screed 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition.
Perhaps the first battle cries sounded in February when in the London Review of Books writer Rebecca Solnit singled out the wifi-enabled, luxury buses shuttling Silicon Valley workers as a symbol (The Google Bus) of the growing inequity between the coders and the code-nots. Then again, a dispatch from a skirmish in 2000 over displacement of low-income tenants due to tech expansion was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline: Dot-Com Boom Makes S.F. a War Zone.
Architects and designers caught in the battle for San Francisco’s civic soul face a critical decision: “Which side are you on?” The question posed by David Taylor – an activist and programmer also caught betwixt and between – is not only critical, but also complicated. Practitioners design for clients on both sides of the divide. They build headquarters and affordable housing, high-end retail and public spaces. As such, one might think their role is agnostic, a service provided to a client. Yet Bay Area architects, only just recovering from the recession, also represent a constituency struggling to keep a toehold in the city and to keep a practice going. In which case, Taylor’s considered answer applies to tech workers and designers alike. He writes, “It is also the responsibility of the tech workers to own their privilege and engage in their communities and not just reshape them to be comfortable.”
If the call is to engage, rather than get comfortable, then where should this engagement take place? The question applies to San Francisco and other cities with strong tech economies.
On the surface, the fight seems to be about transportation and urbanism, or rather, why are private companies creating parallel systems for their employees rather than engaging in the messiness of civic life by investing in regional infrastructures and urban public space. But much of the underlying issues around booming gentrification and cost of living in San Francisco stem from housing inequity and the rise of evictions. More specifically, the Ellis Act, a California state law that functions as a rent control work around by allowing landlords to evict tenants and take properties off the rental market for a given period. When these properties return for rental or sale they are priced at market rate.
Demand for housing in San Francisco is extreme. A real estate round up in the San Francisco Chronicle lists a half dozen new apartment buildings hitting the market with rents starting at more than $3000 for a one-bedroom unit. Deals are brokered: an eight-story, 114-unit condo development with a $70 million price tag was given city sign-off in exchange for 14 below market-rate units elsewhere in the neighbourhood. While there is little financial interest for developers to mess with the current model, housing as a topic in itself is an area ready for a total examination and real engagement by architects.
Contemporary housing investigations tend to focus solutions on formal and material propositions abroad, in cities and countries in crisis. However, a design such as Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental housing, which helps residents build equity in impoverished areas by asking owners to build out 50-percent of their house, not only reimagines the process of making housing, but confronts the issue from a social and political standpoint. I don’t suggest that Aravena’s design is one-to-one applicable in a place like San Francisco, but rather use it as an example of how the redesign of policy, processes, and protocols toward a socially just end is a key point of engagement if architects are ready to address the problem. This also means that architects should lobby civic leadership, and demand more than the placemaking jargon typical of mayoral summits.
On the tech sector side of the equation, the headquarters and offices of the established internet-based companies and startups offer ample opportunities for architects and designers to apply their skills in new ways. Granted, Norman Foster’s scheme for Apple HQ, the spaceship in an orchard, has been roundly thumped for its anti-social tendencies. But the isolated Silicon Valley campus is no longer fait accompli. Airbnb, Pinterest (co-founded by an architecture school dropout), and Twitter are all located in San Francisco. In fact, tech tenants are putting pressure on commercial leasing, filling nearly a quarter of the city’s available office square footage.
In her New York Times op-ed What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning, Allison Arieff, editor and content strategist for San Francisco urbanism non-profit SPUR, critiqued Twitter. Arguing that despite the company’s high-profile move into a vintage high-rise on a rough and tumble part of Market Street and the city’s belief that ample tax breaks would bring revitalisation to the impoverished area, Twitter had made little effort to connect to the neighbourhood. So while surrounding commercial rents rose, the quality of street life remained unchanged.
Just days after the Times piece, and almost as if in direct response to the issues the story raised, Airbnb announced that its new office in San Francisco’s SoMA district will be open to the public. In keeping with the company’s couch-surfing, community-based roots, a classroom will be made available nights and weekends for use by locals residents and organisations, SPUR will host a series of talks and programming, and Arieff will curate Airbnb’s library of books on urbanism, design, hospitality, sustainability, and computer engineering—all of which “will be accessible to the public on a weekly basis during Airbnb Library Open Hours.”
Airbnb’s outreach to the neighbourhood through programming and semi-public space offerings seems sincere enough, in spite of opportunistic timing. Yet the effort recalls POPS, Privately Owned Public Spaces, the beleaguered bonus parks, plazas, and atriums provided by high-rise developers in exchange for extended floor area. Made famous by the Occupy Movement, Zuccotti Park is one example. San Francisco got its first official POPS in 1972, a redwood tree grove designed by architect Tom Galli in the shade of the Transamerica Building. The park is open during weekday business hours.
In 2007, the San Francisco-based interdisciplinary design group ReBar mapped and evaluated the city’s POPS and asked, “should a public space under the unblinking eye of private ownership be called ‘public’ at all?” Their query took the form of maps, web-based field reports, and a series of “paraformances”: performance actions inspired by the crowdsourced reports. Today, the question is just as potent at Airbnb’s headquarters where all access is governed by the pleasure of a private company. As with the Google buses, tech investment into parallel systems, like bonus parks or community spaces, mirror civic amenities without actually supporting the public life of the city. Can design, then, productively provoke a deeper engagement?
As a former strategic designer for the Helsinki Design Lab and co-founder of the architecture and design practice Dash Marshall, Bryan Boyer sees opportunities for designers at the very intersection currently provoking conflict, the point between what he calls the “secluded innovation” of internally-minded tech culture and the urban realm.
“We’re seeing the growing pains of an entire industry that shot to global prominence at light speed and is still struggling to make sense of its new existence outside the garage,” he says.
Boyer is on the board of Makeshift Society, a co-working space for creative entrepreneurs in San Francisco (and soon in Brooklyn). He stresses that technological innovation cannot happen in isolation. “Architects have a real contribution to add here, which is to spend the long hours with potential clients and collaborators in the tech community to help them see the shadows on the wall of their garage. That entails more than just helping people make better choices about their physical environment,” he explains.
Boyer cites technology’s lessons: iterative design, full-scale prototyping, and the integration of data into decision-making as ways to influence and strengthen architectural processes. Ultimately, on a battlefield strewn with buses, garages, and quasi-public spaces there is no single side for designers to take. And no easy way to bow out of the fight, either.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
Continuing our coverage of the recent explosion of tech company headquarters in San Francisco, here’s a look inside the offices of online property rental service Airbnb, which feature rooms modelled on eight of the company’s listed apartments (+ slideshow).
Airbnb currently offers rental accommodation in over 34,000 countries cities, but the company’s first ever listing was a San Francisco apartment, so the team’s in-house designers decided to transform one section of the interior into an exact replica of it.
They sourced items from various countries to furnish the spaces and even installed a bed in one of the rooms.
Other sections of the headquarters mimic properties from various other places around the world, including Reykjavík, Bali, Amsterdam and Paris, and are filled with casual seating areas where staff can interact.
“We asked ourselves, how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” explained Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky. “Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there.”
Named 888 Brannan, the offices occupy a renovated 100-year-old industrial building. One of the structure’s original rooms was a conference suite modelled on the War Room in the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, which has been completely restored.
The office canteen features long communal tables where staff can hold informal meetings, while the walls are covered in over a hundred sketches relating to different employee experiences.
“We wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity,” said Chesky.
Another feature is a green wall that extends up one side of the main atrium.
Here’s the full design statement from Brian Chesky:
888 Brannan
The opening of 888 Brannan is an exciting moment for Airbnb because the building embodies what we value as a company: creativity, community engagement, and thoughtful design.
Joe, Nate and I started Airbnb when we saw the potential in something others had overlooked – the spare space in our apartment. In the same way, we saw massive potential in 888 Brannan. The building is a hundred‐year‐old city landmark that had been practically forgotten about, but we saw the opportunity to turn it into the perfect space for our growing company and community.
The first time we stepped into the atrium, we imagined looking up and seeing a cross section of the very homes that are featured on our site – immediately knowing, without seeing any logos or signs, that you were at Airbnb. We invested a lot into the space, learning about its history, and transformed it from a non-descript building into a physical representation of who we are and what we believe.
At the core of Airbnb is the connection between people and spaces. In designing 888 Brannan, we asked ourselves how we could use the space to encourage connections between people. All too often, office design doesn’t consider collaboration, creativity or spontaneity. At Airbnb, we wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity.
To achieve this, we wanted as many lines of sight as possible, both inside the building and to the neighbourhood outside. Not only is this visually interesting, but we believe it inherently creates connections. We also created spaces for these connections to develop. In an open floor plan, you typically have two types of spaces: desks and meeting rooms. We focused on creating a third shared space as well. Sofas scattered amongst the desks, the communal dining area, and project rooms with long standing tables all provide an opportunity for our employees to have casual conversations, spontaneous collaborations, or informal meetings.
Another key focus for our new home was to create a truly comfortable place for our employees, whose hard work is fundamental to everything we do. We believe investing in them is the foundation of our success. A lot of companies under‐invest in their office space, and therefore under‐invest in their employees and their growth. We believe that if our team is working in an inspirational and creative space, they will be inspired to create a better product and service for our hosts and guests.
One exceptional aspect of the new space is the ability to experience travel without leaving the building. We asked ourselves, “how can we create the sense of travel in an office?” Simply having photos of listings and far off places was not enough. It is not just about recalling the memories, but about feeling that you’re there. We replicated some of the most unique places on Airbnb to create this feeling. Each room, from Milan to Reykjavik, Bali to Amsterdam, not only celebrates our global community, but also lets everyone who visits them truly experience a different place.
In designing Airbnb’s new home, we wanted to create a place that would bring our mission to life, a place where people could instantly see what is at the heart of our company. At 888 Brannan, we are creating a space not just for our employees, but for our hosts and travellers, our neighbours and friends. Airbnb is creating a world where you can be at home everywhere, and everyone can be at home at Airbnb.
News: Amazon has gained planning permission for a new Seattle headquarters that will feature a trio of glass orbs containing a jungle of mature trees and tropical plants (+ slideshow).
Designed by American architecture firm NBBJ, the proposal for a new headquarters for online retailer Amazon was unanimously approved last week by the Seattle planning department.
The 30-metre-high transparent balls will accommodate 1800 Amazon employees, who will be surrounded by a wilderness of plant life that includes green walls, hanging gardens and flowering shrubs.
“The generative idea is that a plant-rich environment has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting,” reads the proposal document.
It continues: “While the form of the building will be visually reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, plant material will be selected for its ability to co-exist in a microclimate that also suits people.”
Proposal presented earlier this year
Offices will be divided across the four storeys of the greenhouses and shops will be located around the edges of the ground floor.
Three traditional office blocks will also be included around the outside of the new campus, which will be located on 7th Avenue on a site called the Denny Triangle.
News: architect Frank Gehry is designing new offices for social network Facebook in London and Dublin.
Frank Gehry first started working with Facebook last year on the design of its new Silicon Valley campus, but will now work with the company to replace its existing offices in the UK and Irish capitals.
The new London headquarters will reportedly occupy three floors of 10 Brock Street – a British Land development at Regent’s Place, London. With an area of 8000 square metres, it will double the size of the existing Covent Garden address and will place Facebook in the same building as rival social network Twitter.
“Our new home will give us the space to double the number of people working at Facebook London and build on what we’ve achieved there over the past few years,” Facebook’s European chief Nicola Mendelsohn told the Evening Standard.
Facebook’s Dublin staff will relocate to a new 11,000 square-metre space in Grand Canal Square, allowing capacity for up to 1000 employees.
The new Silicon Valley HQ of data storage company Evernote features a coffee bar in the lobby, staircases with built-in seating and an in-house artist to paint murals on whiteboards. (+slideshow)
San Francisco interior designers Studio O+A converted a gloomy 90s office building in Redwood City for Evernote, carving out a double-height reception area and adding a broad staircase containing banks of seating to encourage staff to use, and meet on, the stairs.
“In their old space they were on one floor,” Studio O+A Principal Denise Cherry told Dezeen. “When they moved there was a lot of discussion about how to get interaction between floors. We built an expansive staircase that includes cushioned steps for seating – it’s kind of understood that you’re not supposed to use the elevators.”
The 80,000 square foot building includes Silicon Valley staples such as a ping-pong table and a gym as well as a variety of different workspaces.
“We put in lots of different types of meeting spaces – formal, informal, collaborative, concentrative,” says Cherry. “There is whiteboard paint everywhere. Anywhere you have an idea you can jot it down. And in fact they have an amazing whiteboard artist on staff who creates beautiful murals.”
Cherry describes the look of the new space as “Simple, clean, bright, airy. We wanted to create a clean palette for them to layer in their work, much like their product, which creates layers of personal documents and pictures unique to every user.”
The reception area is the most innovative part of the project, Cherry says. “Evernote doesn’t have a reception desk in the traditional sense. They have a coffee bar in the lobby. The emphasis throughout the office is on circulation – they really want to encourage people to move around, meet with each other, talk with each other so we thought coffee and donuts in the lobby would help with that. The receptionist doubles as a barista.”
Here’s some text about the project from Studio O+A:
Project: Evernote
Square Footage: 80,000
At Evernote in Redwood City, California, the strict budget and swift pace of construction helped determine the direction of the design. Evernote is an online data storage company that allows its users to save (and retrieve) everything from Post-It notes to photographs to formal documents in the Cloud. With the company moving into a much larger building than it had previously occupied, and with business booming, Evernote needed to be up and running in its new space with a minimum of downtime. Our challenge was to design an office commensurate with Evernote’s soaring profile—on what was essentially a start-up budget and schedule.
We began with the concept of making the process of construction part of the aesthetic. In a clean and modern context, construction materials may acquire the design impact of richer finishes. Evernote’s coffee bar and break areas are clad with Douglas fir plywood, the texture and grain of which provides its own graphic patterns. Forgoing expensive interior branding, Evernote instead hired chalk artist Dana Tanamachi to draft a wall-sized representation of the company’s identity, complete with its tagline, “Remember everything,” and elephant logo. Low-maintenance, water-conserving plants on an adjoining wall contribute to the reception area’s look of unforced spaciousness.
Adding to the informality is the placement of a coffee bar—with fully functioning donut and pastry counter—at the reception station. An echo of Evernote’s mission of turning impulses into lasting archives of information, our design transforms the spontaneous habits of its staff (grabbing a donut on arrival, for example) into a lasting element.
This encouragement of spontaneity is reprised in the white ash stairway that connects the second and third floors. The wide staircase is fitted with cushioned step seating to make it a natural gathering place and area for relaxation. There are other spaces for breaks and informal meetings throughout the office—a large communal dining room; a ping-pong table; a designated fitness center equipped with treadmills, stationary bikes, and other exercise devices; and a series of small, strategically placed snack and coffee counters. The cumulative result of all these break options is an environment that promotes those casual interactions from which so many creative impulses spring.
As befits a work environment attuned to informal collaboration, the finish palette for Evernote is light. White walls and pastel accents mix with blonde wood and lighting that augment the natural brightness of the windows to subliminally communicate the spirit of the company—and turn a tight-budget, tight-schedule build-out into something memorable.
Architect: Studio O+A Project Team: Primo Orpilla, Verda Alexander, Clem Soga, Denise Cherry, Perry Stephney, Elizabeth Guerrero, David Hunter, Emily Brooks, Kroeun Dav, Alfred Socias, Sarunya Wongjodsri, Alma Lopez, Caren McDonald, Olivia Ward, Jeorge Jordan Location: Redwood City, California Client: Evernote Gross square footage: 80,000 Contractor: DA Pope Consultants: Vaziri Structural Engineering Key materials (type/brand) Carpet: Shaw Contract, Interface Flor; Furniture: Allsteel, HPL, Inscape, Herman Miller; Cabinetry: Caesarstone, Abet Laminati, Formica, Nevamar; Flooring: Bolon, Armstrong, Capri Cork; Lighting: Daybrite, Kirlin, Amerlux, Pinnacle, Prudential, Louis Poulsen, School House, Lithonia, Intense, Omega, Delray Software used: AutoCAD, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Creative Suite
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