Masterful Appeal

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design an architecture firm office that is both sustainable and attractive to a wide variety of clients?

Summary: Gensler’s new Rockefeller Center office, which the firm designed themselves, uses dueling materialities to showcase their design skill and impress a wide range of clients. The facility is also LEED® Silver-certified, and staff have been hosting “eco-tours” that show visitors and clients how they too can apply green and sustainable building practices.

How are designers to demonstrate their creative prowess when creating their own homes and offices? Not with overbearing glitz and grand gestures. Ostentatious ornamentation isn’t a marketable design aesthetic, nor does pure restraint keep the phone ringing. Maybe the best way to show off design dexterity is to balance these two sensibilities with grace, and that’s the approach Gensler’s New York City Rockefeller Center branch has taken in designing their own offices.

The juggling act
Occupying 66,000 square feet on the 15th and 16th floors at 1230 Avenue of the Americas, the new Gensler office is an exuberant juxtaposition of opposing textures and materials. Its basic aesthetic is grounded in rich, tactile, natural surfaces: hardwood floors, exposed ceilings, marble tables, sheetrock walls, and hand-carved wood. “Typically, in a corporate interior everything is very slick,” says Mark Morton, the principal designer of the office at Gensler. “We wanted things that you want to go up to and touch.”

Because Gensler essentially was acting as its own client, involved designers say they were able to experiment with materials and interiors in ways that might not have been possible with outside clients. The greatest design “leap of faith,” says Gensler Managing Principal Robin Klehr Avia, was hiring an Alphabet City tattoo artist called Spock to tag a sheetrock wall that wraps around the two floor’s staircase with graffiti. Words from their design mission statement like “excellence,” “thoughtful,” “symbolic,” and “collaboration,” (as well as the artist’s girlfriend’s name) decorate the wall, stretched and distorted with stylized fluidity.

But often, and even in the same room, these tactile, natural surfaces are commenting on polished, processed counterparts. The white cube polyester resin lacquer elevator lobby walls are a sharp contrast to the dark hand-carved wood benches that sit next to them. (Some of the furniture was custom made by Gensler.) Slick glass corridors delineate workspaces, and layered, cylindrical lamps hover over meeting rooms. Some of these refined pieces could even be considered ornate, like the bright red Victorian chandelier that hangs in the matching “Red Room” meeting space.

Morton says this wide array of design approaches is necessitated by the diverse group of clients the office serves. The Gensler New York office works with education, hospitality, interiors, and master planning clients and more. This requires a design that will make everyone from more conservative institutional patrons, to cutting-edge provocateurs “comfortable and inspired,” he says.

Take the tour
Gensler’s old office was 5,000–8,000 square feet smaller, and suffered from a lack of natural light. It also didn’t have enough small meeting spaces for its 325 employees to gather spontaneously and discuss projects. Gensler granted themselves these wishes and added a large model shop, blueprint shop, a more open floor plan, and (announced in September) LEED® Silver Commercial Interiors certification. The facility (the second LEED-certified Gensler office) features water-saving fixtures, EnergySTAR-rated appliances, furniture made from recycled materials, low emitting VOC paints and adhesives, and lots of natural light. “From every point in the office, you can really get a sense of light,” says Klehr Avia.

And like the office’s showy balance between raw and processed motifs, the New York Gensler office isn’t going to be shy about its green features. Since they moved in last year, they’ve begun hosting “eco-tours” that seek to “extend our experience to the design community,” says Joseph Lauro, AIA, a senior associate at Gensler who helped shepherd the firm through the LEED process. These tours walk design students, design professionals, and especially clients through their office to showcase their wares, practices, and design ideology—certainly an influential gesture when coming from the world’s largest architecture firm.