Three architects, owners of an architecture and urban design firm with roughly twenty years of experience, decided to renovate a new building as their central office. An old building was selected and presented to the designers: a three-storey structure roughly fifty years old. The designers faced various challenges from the start. It quickly became clear that the most significant challenge was the three particular clients -- experienced architects whose demands were often contradictory.
The functional and physical characteristics desired by these "architect-clients" were such that the designers effectively had to bring three projects into one, arriving at an appropriate compromise. The spaces needed to be adaptable to diverse functions, the design had to honour the authentic character of the materials, and ultimately all these demands had to remain economically reasonable.
The programme was carefully developed: the portion of the ground floor with access to the lightwell was allocated to the kitchen and dining area. The remaining ground-floor area was given to a smaller organisation that had formed within the main one, but with a somewhat different character and identity, demanding a different design approach. The first floor became the atelier -- a space tasked with enabling both group and individual work. In designing the atelier, two opposing concepts were juxtaposed: the spirit of collective work and two- or multi-person interactions on one hand, and the provision of individual solitude essential for creative work on the other.
The administrative management space, a meeting room whose wall has been removed -- perhaps as a gesture toward transparency of decisions -- the finance department, and the directors' offices form the second floor. Portions of the original building were seismically reinforced, and the idea took shape that elements of the old building's brick body, authentic and untouched, should be revealed and placed in an unexpected dialogue with contemporary materials. Thus the bricks of certain wall sections and most of the vaulted ceilings emerged from their old plaster skin, framed by metal grids that strengthened them further.
In the design, the opposing ideas and desires of the architect-clients reached a kind of compromise, so the design of their office may well be a physical expression of their long collaboration.