A Workplace Through the Looking Glass

The corporate utopia of the future stands on a little-traveled road in Playa del Rey, in a dull-gray converted warehouse amid a sea of parked cars. And this time the celebrated freedom of the Information Age is tinged with a calculated sense of mission.

Designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects, TBWA/Chiat/Day’s new office complex is a self-contained virtual city where hip advertising employees huddle together in deep creative thought, each searching for that elusive visual image that will drive the next campaign. Flickering computer screens. The trill of cellular phones. Brainstorming meetings. All are elements in a vast playground for marketing wizards--one where architecture is meant to foster both social interaction and the genuine exchange of ideas.

But the Chiat/Day building is also an idealized model of social engineering. Both Utopian commune and Orwellian nightmare, it is a shrewdly designed “social condensor” whose inhabitants are carefully sealed off from the outside world with their common goal--the subtle manipulation of public desire.

Chiat/Day has long sought to challenge accepted notions about the traditional workplace. In 1985, the firm hired Frank O. Gehry to design its Los Angeles offices in Venice--a building notable more for its playful relationship to the Claes Oldenburg binoculars out front than its somewhat conventional office spaces. More recently, Italian architect Gaetano Pesce’s design for the firm’s former New York headquarters included movable workstations meant to reflect the nomadic nature of the contemporary white-collar worker, but employees tired of having to stuff their paraphernalia into lockers because there were no private offices. (Chiat/Day left the Gehry building last September; the New York office moved a month later.)

But the current project is in many ways a more radical reworking of the conventional workplace. Set on a vast lot at the edge of the 90 Freeway, the building presents a blank exterior to the street. Visitors enter through a two-story “gatehouse” that stands slightly detached from the main structure; clad in corrugated metal and painted a shocking yellow, the eye-shaped structure is both playful and menacing, a sci-fi satellite that functions as a threshold to an exclusive, insular world. From there, visitors slip down ramps through one of two tube-shaped tunnels--each about 50 feet long--before stepping out into the cavernous interior of the warehouse. The effect is like Alice falling through the looking glass.

And like Alice, you can’t help but feel an initial shudder once you land here, followed by a sense of wonder. You have entered a vast, bustling Lilliputian world cheerfully oblivious to life outside. The office is organized as a grid of playful, free-standing structures along broad pedestrian alleyways--an ersatz city enclosed under the warehouse’s vast umbrella-like ceiling 27 feet above. The entire complex is bound together by a network of “outdoor streets,” stairs and elevated walkways.

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The space’s central axis is Main Street--a nod to Disneyland’s famous mock town--flanked by yellow three-story-tall shed-like buildings. Dubbed “cliff dwellings,” these structures house the two-person teams that make up the company’s soul--the shock troops of the advertising world. Other structures--some clad in raw plywood, others painted in strong colors--house a variety of informal meeting places and conference rooms. Dozens of “outdoor” cubicles--simple structural frames that support the necessary computers, modems and cellular phones--fill the interstitial spaces between the free-standing structures on the ground floor. The idea is to create a hierarchy of private and communal spaces, to balance the privacy needed to nurture the creative imagination and the communal spirit that will encourage the free exchange of ideas.

That cheery sense of community, however, is also what gives the complex its aura of the surreal. An internal park--dubbed “Central Park”--is dotted with garden furniture and a grid of black ficus trees. Light spills down through a grid of skylights, a couple sits and chats intimately, an employee walks her puppy. Everywhere, offices open onto rooftop lounges. A series of tent-like structures, made of white spandex and supported by taut steel cables, serve as flexible conference rooms--a neat metaphor for both the nomadic condition of the contemporary worker and the ephemeral nature of ideas.

Unlike Disneyland, whose false perspectives and toylike buildings are meant to evoke doe-eyed sentimentalism, here you are trapped in a world of hyper-reality. An image of Picasso--part of a current ad campaign--gazes down from a giant billboard, a token of the creative impulse as well as of the firm’s global success. Pool tables, espresso bars and a basketball court are not only places for play, but shrewdly planned safety valves for the release of the intense pressures of daily competition.

Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, once suggested that “the very essence of the democratic process [is] the freedom to persuade and suggest.” Here, that image of democracy becomes a motivational tool. The idea is to encourage the smooth, seamless flow of information, and in the process to hone each employee’s marketing skills.

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Architecture, too, can function as a tool of persuasion, as a means for the subtle reinforcement of social patterns. At the turn of the century, Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford devised entire social programs based on the efficiency of the assembly line, where factory workers functioned like well-oiled machines and their moral lives were carefully regulated. During the ‘20s, architects such as Soviet Constructivist Moisei Ginsburg invented social condensors that discouraged solitary life in favor of a more communal spirit.

That image of man as an efficient cog in a complex mechanical apparatus is no longer meaningful in an age relentlessly bombarded with new information, where life is restless, migratory. Today, the necessary illusion--to use Noam Chomsky’s choice phrase--is one of freedom. Man exists as part of a vast network of thought, where the fluid exchange of ideas is encouraged, where flexibility and communication--not segregation--is the norm. The question, of course, is whether that freedom is real, or yet another well-fabricated illusion. Part of the answer can be gleaned in this warehouse. *