In this project, we were contracted by Richard Christiansen, creative director and founder of Chandelier Creative, [a full service creative agency which is dedicated to making strategic change for fashion, beauty, retail, travel, and luxury lifestyle branding,] to come up with a few concepts for their new office headquarters in Manhattan. Richard, a dream client who is a quirky, highly creative collaborator / designer, gave us a lot of latitude to envision Chandelier in a way that would not only impress their clients but provide a working environment that is incredibly diverse in functionality and experience.
The overall programing of the space was conceptually based on emergent forces and parallel operations, like that of a network or a ant colony. Network members are autonomous, yet connected. They react to a series of individual conditions. Control is distributed not centralized, which means there is no authority in charge thus creating unexpected effects producing emergent behaviors that all add up to create a much more dynamic and interesting system. In collaborating with Richard, we felt that this was the way he worked with others, he didn’t try to control the work. He let creativity take it’s course, but was there to pluck the produced fruit.
We produced two styles based on this network approach where the program is broken into a series of work pods. The pods are work spaces that consist of a senior designer, and two junior people. They are self contained and connected to a mesh info structure that provides electrical power, data exchange as well as the physical support structure. The mesh serves as a conduit of information and structure that spans the entire main space flowing from the control wall. The control wall is the data base for the entire office. It provides all essential information such as electricity, data lines, network hardware and analogue storage for hardcopy files.
