OBM HEADQUARTERS EXPANSION
This advertising headquarters expansion creates a striking new silhouette in the city. Its sawtooth roof and massing trigger memories of an industrial aesthetic without literally echoing local buildings. Rather than a known, repetitive sawtooth roof, this sawtooth bends into maze-like figures. The mass is glance-cut at oblique angles, shearing the roof off and creating huge picture windows that look back at the city.
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Docking
The mass hovers, docking with the existing building rather than fusing with it or remaining separate. As when one spacecraft docks with another, the connection appears temporary -- almost precarious. Two very large objects -- the existing building tall and monolithic, the new one low and ridged -- meet at a small point of connection. The effect is a general outline of two separate objects that appear from many vantage points as a new, third object.
Thickened Floor and Helixes
Unlike many creative office spaces, the floor of this project is thick. In conventional offices, the floor is a single plane and enclosed spaces are defined by weak vertical subdivisions (walls). The thickened floor contains all enclosed spaces; it is a strong spatial division. Office life here no longer consists of moving horizontally through thin walls and little doors, but vertically, from vast open space to poche in the floor and back again. Helix stairs stretch from the thickened floor up to roof gardens, creating lively, incongruent figures in the open space. Small punched windows provide daylight to the offices inside the thickened floor, unlike the huge picture windows associated with the open spaces above.
Patchiness
A pattern of contrasting figures breaks down the maze-like roof into a patchwork of independent objects. Three types of material --ranging from silver chrome to gold chrome to glossy black (solar photovoltaics) -- are deployed one over another, like overmolding in toy fabrication, to produce graphic outlines that exaggerate or alter underlying mass features. North-facing skylights are shrouded with perforated panels, obscuring their diagrammatic function.A pattern of contrasting figures breaks down the maze-like roof into a patchwork of independent objects. Three types of material --ranging from silver chrome to gold chrome to glossy black (solar photovoltaics) -- are deployed one over another, like overmolding in toy fabrication, to produce graphic outlines that exaggerate or alter underlying mass features. North-facing skylights are shrouded with perforated panels, obscuring their diagrammatic function.
Docking
The mass hovers, docking with the existing building rather than fusing with it or remaining separate. As when one spacecraft docks with another, the connection appears temporary -- almost precarious. Two very large objects -- the existing building tall and monolithic, the new one low and ridged -- meet at a small point of connection. The effect is a general outline of two separate objects that appear from many vantage points as a new, third object.
LOCATION
Columbus, Ohio
TYPE
Creative Office Space / Adaptive reuse
YEAR
2020
FLOOR AREA
82,700 SF
CLIENTS
Orange Barrel Media
DESIGN TEAM
PROJECT TEAM
The mass hovers, docking with the existing building rather than fusing with it or remaining separate.
