Project Description
An architectural studio is a place for inventive minds to come together and create. Woods Bagot designed their own New York studio to spur this collaboration and showcase its results. The workplace is equipped with tools both pioneering and timeless – virtual reality and colored pencils, 3D printing and flexible pin-up surfaces, video conferencing and soft furniture, and, most important, an industrial-strength espresso machine. Like Woods Bagot projects worldwide it prioritizes the human experience, aspiring to be a place people look forward to coming to.
Sarah Kay, who leads the Global Workplace Interiors sector, and Wade Little, head of the Global Hotel sector, designed the firm’s FiDi home as a mix of technology-enabled spaces to accommodate the agility of today’s creative class. Social spaces that facilitate chance meetings, collaboration hubs, and nooks for private conversations compose the studio. Reflecting Woods Bagot’s blurring of hospitality, residential, and workspace design, the design mixes New York City grit — raw columns, exposed pipes, concrete floors with natural cracks and stains — with couches, soft drapery, and plants.
At the entrance is a spacious lobby next to a large kitchen where employees socialize over lunch and congregate around the coffee machine. Adjacent to the kitchen is a virtual reality lounge, where clients and designers can enjoy an immersive experience of their projects in progress. From the library to the model shop, every inch of space is maximized. Filing cabinets are replaced by ‘holes in walls’ — overhead storage lining the flexible workbenches that form the studio ‘street.’ Also gone are labelled ‘conference rooms,’ replaced with ‘workshops’ that reinforce the studio’s purpose as a place for making.
The architects’ work is central to the layout. Throughout, pin-up spaces and shelving showcase drawings and models that provoke everyday conversation, collaboration and critique.
A neutral palette of black, white, and soft greys allows the models and drawings to shine, while a mix of materiality from unfinished concrete floors to textured and refined finishes — wood, steel, and leather — gives the space a compelling edge that is both raw and sophisticated.