Archinect - News

Gensler will overhaul JPMorgan Chase's aging Chicago headquarters in the South Loop

2024-02-27T18:36:00-05:00

Gensler has unveiled plans for a major renovation of JPMorgan Chase’s 55-year-old Chicago headquarters in the South Loop that will transform the building into a new state-of-the-art workplace aimed at fostering collaboration and ushering the bank’s over 14,500 local employees into what the company calls the “future of work.”

The 60-story tower was originally designed by C.F. Murphy Associates and Perkins&Will and currently is home to 7,200 workers.

Image: © Gensler/courtesy of JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase says they want an environment for the bank's employees that is centered around health and wellness considerations. According to their press announcement, the project's scope includes:

Refreshed and interconnected, plaza, lobby and mezzanine with updated food hall, enhanced dining seating and collaboration spaces, modernized lobby entry experience, and mezzanine level common space with robust café experience.
Refurbished work floors with state-of-the-art technology and furniture, up...

SOM completes Two Manhattan West, marking a major milestone for corporate office design in NYC

2024-01-31T15:18:00-05:00

SOM has completed work on their Two Manhattan West tower project to culminate the shorter second half of its $4.5 billion mixed-use Manhattan West development in New York City.

The four-year construction effort yielded a total two million square feet of new office space that was built above active railroad tracks in what the firm describes as an "extraordinary" advancement of the methods used in urban design, structural engineering, and architecture.

Photo: Dave Burk © SOM

It joins SOM's already-completed One Manhattan West office tower and five other buildings at the eight-acre mixed-use site, which is being developed to over seven million square feet by Brookfield Properties. Design Principal Kim Van Holsbeke says it offers a "thriving new urban destination."

Photo: Dave Burk © SOM

By extending the urban fabric of the development west to its new boundary at Ninth Avenue and 31st Street, Two Manhattan West creates a new gateway to the neighborhood backed by the four smaller buildin...

Eero Saarinen's CBS 'Black Rock' Manhattan tower gets a gentle overhaul by Vocon and MdeAS

2023-08-08T11:21:00-04:00

A $36 million restoration of Eero Saarinen’s 1964 corporate headquarters for CBS in Manhattan has been announced by New York-based Harbor Group International, LLC (HGI) ahead of the project’s expected completion early this fall.

The architect’s lone skyscraper design, an ominous 38-story masterpiece of sable granite and polished concrete, is now renamed 51W52 in reflection of its Midtown location and features a pair of newly-renovated lobbies, restored bronze fin wall exterior, elevator bays, and lounge areas “curated” with Saarinen's own furniture designs for the Knoll company that were originally manufactured between 1948 and the late-1950s.

Image courtesy Harbor Group International, LLC

The building, which offers proximity to Grand Central Station, the 53rd Street corridor, MoMA, and Rockefeller Center, received a landmark designation from the city in 1997 and was renovated along similar lines in 1992 in an effort Paul Goldberger then criticized as “an attempt to convert one of th...

UNStudio completes Booking.com City Campus HQ in Amsterdam

2023-06-28T14:39:00-04:00

A new HQ project from UNStudio for the Dutch travel site Booking.com has opened in Amsterdam, offering a dynamic central location it says will serve as a “recruitment machine” while creating a more inclusive, healthy, and socially engaging experience for the company’s 6,500 employees.

Video courtesy UNStudio on Vimeo.

Designed to maximize connectivity for its users and visitors to the campus’ Oosterdokseiland location, the nearly 700,000-square-foot plan creates a highly-visible, activities-laden consolidation of disparate office locations that, for over a decade, had been spread throughout the city.

Image: © Hufton + Crow

Anchored by a striking main building made of glass and steel and sited on a double-height plinth that creates an urban element underneath and around a cantilevered overhang, the development was influenced by years of research into comparable corporate headquarters and engenders a “platform for human activity,” the architects say.

Image: © Hufton + Crow

A network o...

The Willis Tower turns 50

2023-05-05T12:24:00-04:00

Now called Willis Tower, the building has been a trendsetter since its debut. After starting life as a headquarters for Sears, Roebuck & Co., the building saw its namesake tenant relocate to the suburbs. Along with the rest of downtown, it suffered other blows, including fears raised by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the Great Recession. It’s always bounced back. But the tower now faces what might be its biggest test.

SOM won the commission from the Sears corporation in 1970 at a time when office parks and the desire to project a stronger image of America against the backdrop of the Vietnam War were separately prevailing forces in the AEC industry. Sears eventually sold the 110-story building, which was the world’s tallest for 22 years, for more than $1 billion in 1988. More recently it has turned into a focal point of the city’s office vacancy crisis, and new owners Blackstone are now looking forward to returns from a $500 million-plus renovation led by Gensler with optimism.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)'s CEO Javier Quintana de Uña agrees. As he said, "It always keeps ahead of everything else."

The Tribune has historic photos of the tower under construction here.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (@skidmoreowingsmerrill)

Foster + Partners tapped to design supertall 350 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan

2023-01-17T18:08:00-05:00

Ken Griffin’s empire will occupy more than half of the office space at a new Manhattan skyscraper at 350 Park Ave., which is expected to be completed in 2032. [...] Citadel confirmed plans to construct a tower at 350 Park Ave., a 1.7 million-square-foot (158,000 square-meter) building that would replace three properties in that area. The firm has been working with developers Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin Management Co.

Citadel's fund is managed by billionaire philanthropist Kenneth Griffin, whose 2018 donation to West Palm Beach, Florida's Norton Museum of Art earned him a special named wing also designed by Foster + Partners' New York office.

If approved, the new 1,350-foot supertall 350 Park Avenue tower will piggyback off the just-opened 425 Park Avenue and 50 Hudson Yards developments as well as the forthcoming J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters and 15 Penn Plaza designs to become the firm's seventh tall building project in Manhattan. Expectations are for construction to be completed by the end of 2032.

'A symbol of reinvention': Michelin opens renovated new headquarters in France

2022-12-20T14:43:00-05:00

A recently-inaugurated renovation project for Michelin’s corporate headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand, France, has given a new identity to the 130-year-old legacy brand that was “in need of a new setting to project into the future,” according to President Florent Menegaux.

The project was completed last year as a collaboration between the French studios Encore Heureux Architectes, Construire, and Base. It included adding a two-story extension and wood canopy entrance to the existing factory building at Place des Carmes which was acquired by the company in the early 2000s. An all-glass greenhouse that was enacted at the site soon after became the focal point of the project after initial plans called for its demolition.

Image: Nicolas Trouillard

As a “symbol of reinvention,” the new facades and remade greenhouse are combined with other renovated structures in order to create a more welcoming buffer between the site’s public and private spaces. Its design was a pr...

SOM's latest corporate design will yield an expanded new Alibaba campus in Shanghai

2022-07-25T15:49:00-04:00

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has unveiled its design for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s new 75,000-square-meter (807,209-square-foot) campus expansion in Shanghai.

The building is designed to recall a cloud in reference to the computing technology that has propelled its 23-year ascension into the upper echelon of corporate multinationals under the stewardship of founder Jack Ma.

Image © SOM

SOM will help the now $300 billion company accommodate its expanding workforce with a modular design beset by biophilic elements and a network of indoor-outdoor “collaboration bridges” designed to increase productivity and induce healthier work habits in line with Norman Foster’s gridlike headquarters building to be located next door.

“‘The only constant is change’ is one of Alibaba’s guiding principles,” SOM’s Scott Duncan said in a press statement. “We took this ethos to heart, designing a workplace capable of evolving and adapting to new needs, teams, and technologies over time. The hea...

See inside Nike's new Serena Williams-themed office building

2022-07-20T19:18:00-04:00

Portland-based Skylab Architecture has shared new photos of its recently-completed signature office building dedicated to an American tennis legend (and design aficionado) and located at Nike’s World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.

The more-than-one-million-square-foot Serena Williams Building, anchored around a 12-story tower, was designed to help the sportswear giant maximize creative workflow and efficiency inside a new 2,750-person office whose focus is similar to recent workplace designs for other large corporations that are equally bent on re-instilling collaboration in a post-pandemic world.

Photo: Jeremy Bittermann

According to the architects, the theme of the “warrior muse,” a nod to the building’s namesake, served as material inspiration throughout the LEED Platinum-certified facility’s art-filled collection of workplaces, conference rooms, dining areas, laboratory spaces, and other coworking amenities.

Photo: Jeremy Bit...

How the architect behind Pizza Hut's iconic roof turned a tiny design fee into a small fortune

2022-07-11T17:50:00-04:00

“As the story goes, Burke had originally charged the brothers a hefty upfront fee that the fledgling pizza start-up wasn’t able to scrape together,” the company wrote in a 2015 blog post. “Instead, they offered Burke $100 per store built using his design, never guessing that Pizza Hut would become the global company that it is today.”

Contemporary licensing agreements between architects and chains like the Hut are typically undisclosed, but the low price commanded for each meant that, for all their liminally-pleasurable aesthetic, the otherwise unknown designer of the "red roof" restaurants, Richard D. Burke, might have raked in a small fortune for the services he rendered overtime since the late 1960s (the real number remains unclear, but Curbed once put the number of built units of his design that still existed by 2004 at around 6,300).

The sometimes odd reuses of Burke’s reportedly $100 apizza (forgive me) creations have been well-documented by bloggers since the beginning of the 2010s and brought about a death knell for over 300 former locations as well as many of the iconic red-tiled roofs that came along with their original designs. Yum! Brands, which now operates Pizza Hut, began shifting away from the model and towards a more modernized look in mid-decade.

HENN’s massive new Zoomlion headquarters breaks ground in China

2022-05-19T12:29:00-04:00

The latest in a lineage of corporate headquarters designs that dates to 1965 is officially underway in China’s Hunan Province, the product of a multi-year collaboration between HENN and the heavy manufacturing giant Zoomlion.

The Z-shaped design includes a museum, data center, and even sports facilities for workers of new the 311,000-square-meter (3.34-million-square-foot) industrial park. Project leader Hua Qiao described its form as an “immense, cut stone floating above its natural surroundings.”

Once realized in 2023, the Zoomlion headquarters will eventually join HENN's Zalando BHQ-Z project that recently topped out in Berlin in its growing portfolio of major corporate designs.

Image courtesy HENN

Per the architects, the new park “balances the client’s production needs with a sensitivity to its rural context, the geometric Headquarters blends into the hilly and densely wooded Changsha green-corridor. Made from white concrete, the classic ar...

KPF breaks ground on a new headquarters for T. Rowe Price in Baltimore

2022-03-31T19:36:00-04:00

An exciting birthday gift is underway in the Charm City as Kohn Pedersen Fox has finally broken ground on a new headquarters for T. Rowe Price in the company’s hometown of Baltimore 85 years after its founding.

The project was announced in December 2020 and centers around a new 550,000-square-foot two-winged building with an all-glass central atrium sited along a prime piece of waterfront real estate fronting the pivotal gateway of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area.

Image © Atchain, courtesy Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

KPF Design Principal Jeffrey Kenoff said the project will create a “hyper-porosity, both visual and physical, from the Central Plaza down to the harbor. The façade specifically reduces the scale of the massing through a cadence of grey double-height bays that echo the city’s historical DNA and industrial heritage.”

Plans are for construction to be completed in 2024. The building will aim for ambitious Fitwel Three-Star and LEED Platinum certifications in its interiors. T...

UNStudio-designed K-Pop 'urban speaker' heralds an amplification of Seoul's music industry

2022-03-16T17:54:00-04:00

The urban environment of Seoul is about to get quite a bit visually louder as UNStudio has returned to the South Korean capital with a new headquarters for the expanding K-Pop label YG Entertainment.

The building is meant to encapsulate “the industrious spirit of this production house’s business and the music industry as a whole.”

Photo © Rohspace, courtesy UNStudio

Its sleek interior is a play on the ‘black in black’ concept inside the neighboring YG Building, offering a brightly-lit, tree-lined atrium with a host of white tones and geometric lines that improve wayfinding and are enhanced by an influx of natural sunlight directed through its roof.

Photo © Rohspace, courtesy UNStudio

Above the atrium, a sectional concept unfolds based on function starting with four stories of capsule-like collaborative spaces supporting several recording studios and seven additional floors of offices with a stage-like presence that...

BIG reveals designs for a new Farfetch hillside corporate headquarters in Porto

2021-09-28T14:06:00-04:00

A futuristic new headquarters for one of Portugal’s hottest companies will form the basis of an innovative hillside “smart valley” in the country’s Porto region according to renderings unveiled today by BIG.

Image courtesy BIG

Fashion retailer Farfetch will serve as the anchor in the Danish studio’s expansive new FUSE VALLEY development overlooking the Leça River in the town of Matosinhos.

Image courtesy BIG

From end to end, the nearly two-million-square-foot development creates an elongated and art-filled commercial village ideal for corporate and community use alike.

Image courtesy BIG

Twelve tailor-made individual buildings connect through a winding program of landscaped terraces that feature plazas, parks, and public courtyards along a central axis road. Each building represents a different aspect of Farfetch’s core business and will incorporate design elements like open attic mezzanines and biophilic interventions to create an immersive natural working environment for all of the...

'Future Proof': MVRDV's design for a new R&D headquarters in Shanghai

2021-07-02T18:35:00-04:00

Plans for Shanghai’s latest corporate project have been unveiled this week, adding a giant allusion to food production in the form of a swirling tree-covered building that will add a rural feel to the city’s rapidly growing Lingang section.

MVDRV’s design for Lankuaikei Agricultural Development’s headquarters took its influence from the wave-like terraced rice fields that dot the Chinese countryside. Its stepped facade terrace is covered by a permeable solar panel roof that provides shading and ventilation for the 11-story “sustainability machine.”

Image: © MVRDV

The terrace spaces form a walkable park-like route to the building’s top reminiscent of Bjarke Ingels’s design for the 8 House in Copenhagen. The wood-clad walkways will have ample shaded areas and are covered in trees and exhibition spaces for the company’s research and development wing headquartered within the nearly 19.000 square meter structure. The roof’s design allows for it to capture rainwater, adding to sunlight-...

Seattle's F5 Tower is a case study for improving employee satisfaction

2019-11-14T18:00:00-05:00

Tall buildings do more than just help shape skylines. The architects who design these buildings, for example, often strive to create the most "alluring" structures using sometimes mind-boggling structural feats. The corporations and developers who commission these towers, on the other hand, seek the expertise of architects and their teams of engineers and construction experts to create office buildings that can help establish physical representations of their businesses within the built environment.

And what about the employees, the actual users of these towers?

When the Seattle-based technology company F5 Networks relocated their headquarters to what was formerly called "The Mark tower," their goal became to create a new space that places these users at the center of the design. Kurt Schlosser of Geek Wire reports that F5 executives wanted to find ways to improve their employees' commutes and work experiences, for one.

F5 Tower interior stairwell connecting 28 floors of office spa...

Construction teams for Microsoft's new corporate campus outside Seattle use drones to update 100 BIM models in real-time

2019-10-10T17:30:00-04:00

Microsoft's new corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, designed by LMN, NBBJ, WRNS Studio, and ZGF Architects, is being built with a bevy of digital technology tools.

Construction Dive reports that the massive construction project will bring up to 1.3 million square feet of new development to the company's historic corporate office campus. The build-out includes 17 new buildings, each of which will run between 180,000 and 220,000 square feet in size, a Microsoft press release reports. The project includes bringing upgraded accessibility features to the campus while also integrating the development with surrounding landscapes. Berger Partnership will be the lead landscape architect for the development in conjunction with OLIN.

All of this is being brought into being through a data-driven construction process that includes the use of an autonomous drone surveying system that makes weekly passes over the site to create high-accuracy GPS scans of the construction progress.

The surv...

Amazon HQ2 — what else can it offer to NYC?

2018-12-28T16:23:00-05:00

For years, suburbia has offered these companies acres of disposable, cheap, anonymous office parks: mostly one- or two-story concrete structures surrounded by loads of surface parking. These sites minimized costs, maximized security and allowed companies to scale up, contract or split into different units quickly — at the same time they promoted sprawl and traffic jams and transformed once-quaint bedroom communities south of San Francisco into phenomenally expensive places to live.

Even though Amazon's search for its new headquarters' locations has ended all the talks and negotiations about the company's potential impact on the cities it will settle in — New York and Crystal City, Virginia—have only begun.

In ways, the choice comes as no surprise as tech platforms have been attracted to America's wealthy coastal cities, with their established cultures, universities and transit systems, for years. The intensifying expansion of the tech industry amidst urban landscape raises many questions about corporations' powers and rights in a city.

Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times notes that companies like Amazon, through their multi-billion biding process, should offer to satisfy more than just the city's growing need for new jobs. The author suggests options: "As for housing, the city’s regulatory and zoning policies are more responsible for driving up costs than tech companies. But, in an ideal world, Amazon would reverse what it did in Seattle and commit resources ...

Architecture critic Mark Lamster on the manipulative design of CVS Pharmacy stores

2018-07-12T15:21:00-04:00

[T]hough in practice CVS is context agnostic: A CVS looks like a CVS no matter where it is. It is a structure without character or distinction, and to walk along such a building is an unpleasant experience that degrades pedestrian life, the civic space and all the other properties around it.

Architecture critic Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News gives his two cents on why CVS Pharmacy, America's largest pharmacy chain, should rethink the “manipulative designs” of their retail stores, describing it as a case of “urban malpractice by chain retailers”.

“As a CVS customer, I would like to see the company do a better job of embracing the city on which it depends [...],” Lamster writes in the piece. “In areas where there is a growing pedestrianism, where the city is discovering a new walkability, it needs to rethink its designs.”

SANAA's Grace Farms raises uncomfortable questions about the role of corporate money in public projects

2017-03-31T11:27:00-04:00

Critic Curt Gambetta brings forward an age old uncomfortable question on corporate public spaces whose main purpose is often curtailed by exemplary architecture that is hard to reject.

His piece titled, "No free gifts," carefully borrowed from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, asks the question of, what would be the return of such corporate gifts. In his article, Mr. Gambetta alludes to large tax breaks and other conservative agendas of corporate cultures. After all, “nothing in life is truly free.”

"Much as ‘radical transparency’ is demanded from senior management at Bridgewater, the openness of Grace Farms to its community feels forced, its agenda delegated from above. When I visited this winter, the library contained an assortment of suggested reading, a series of social justice greatest hits for anxious Northeast liberals to get up to speed on: Bell Hooks, postcolonialism and so on. Next to a series of flyers about the foundation’s involvement with advocacy against sexual slaver...

Archinect - News

Gensler will overhaul JPMorgan Chase's aging Chicago headquarters in the South Loop

SOM completes Two Manhattan West, marking a major milestone for corporate office design in NYC

Eero Saarinen's CBS 'Black Rock' Manhattan tower gets a gentle overhaul by Vocon and MdeAS

UNStudio completes Booking.com City Campus HQ in Amsterdam

The Willis Tower turns 50

Foster + Partners tapped to design supertall 350 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan

'A symbol of reinvention': Michelin opens renovated new headquarters in France

SOM's latest corporate design will yield an expanded new Alibaba campus in Shanghai

See inside Nike's new Serena Williams-themed office building

How the architect behind Pizza Hut's iconic roof turned a tiny design fee into a small fortune

HENN’s massive new Zoomlion headquarters breaks ground in China

KPF breaks ground on a new headquarters for T. Rowe Price in Baltimore

UNStudio-designed K-Pop 'urban speaker' heralds an amplification of Seoul's music industry

BIG reveals designs for a new Farfetch​ hillside corporate headquarters in Porto

'Future Proof': MVRDV's design for a new R&D headquarters in Shanghai

Seattle's F5 Tower is a case study for improving employee satisfaction

Construction teams for Microsoft's new corporate campus outside Seattle use drones to update 100 BIM models in real-time

Amazon HQ2 — what else can it offer to NYC?

Architecture critic Mark Lamster on the manipulative design of CVS Pharmacy stores

SANAA's Grace Farms raises uncomfortable questions about the role of corporate money in public projects

BIG reveals designs for a new Farfetch hillside corporate headquarters in Porto