A celebration of concrete columns
Interior Design magazine, August 2008
Twenty-five structural concrete columns, pocked and scarred and showing every one of their 80 years of ignoble service, paraded through the raw space that Seattle’s R.C. Hedreen Company had targeted for its new offices. What to do? Hiding them between interior walls was out of the question; most of the 10,800 square-foot floor plate wanted to remain open to daylight—increasingly precious within the thickening gang of much taller towers in downtown Seattle. Celebrating the columns would have seemed ludicrous—they were merely clunky, not intriguingly quirky.
So NBBJ interior designers Rysia Suchecka and Anne Cunningham ordered up a single Texas limestone block wall and placed it on strategic exhibit flanking the reception desk and elevator bank. The limestone, like the concrete, was blotched and pitted—but with fossils of ancient shellfish. At some level, everyone who enters the office now absorbs the textural connection between the dilapidated concrete and the dazzling limestone, and begins to understand the former as an artifact of culture, paralleling the latter as a record of evolutionary biology.
“I feel like I’m walking around in something between a brand-new facility and a ruin,” says a delighted Dick Hedreen, company founder and principal.
“He never said, ‘Make it a backdrop for art,’” Suchecka says. “He just said, “Make it elegant, subtle, restrained, a place where it feels good to be.” Those specifications, however, formed a natural invitation for substantial pieces of Hedreen’s personal collection, which includes works by Rauschenberg and Stella. Eleven big pieces now grace the company headquarters.
The seven executive offices line the perimeter of the floor on two sides, and they’re designed with meticulous attention to light and detail. To preserve privacy from eyes on the street below, the designers printed swarms of overlapping Hedreen insignias on the lower portion of the outside windows. Higher up, the swarms thin and finally evaporate into full transparency. The inside wall of each office is a pair of 10-foot-high sliding glass partitions, one transparent, one frosted, that move to fine-tune the occupant’s desired degree of privacy. Above the partitions, interior clerestory windows insure that every last lumen of daylight sweeps through the offices and into the interior work zones. The offices’ bronze door pulls are particularly designed to give tactile pleasure; Suchecka and Cunningham even commissioned U.S. Starcraft to produce a mockup, then fine-tuned it with assorted-sized human hands.
More felicitous details: The designers preserved the building’s 1927 gravity-fed mail chute, complete with bronze slot, as a vertical element beside the elevator bank. Where a felt-clad wall turns a corner, the designers specified a slim, floor-to-ceiling metal blade inset at a 135-degree angle so that passing shoulders wouldn’t eventually rub the felt into shabby disrepair. The executive offices all incorporate custom-designed walnut-veneered work wall boxes and built-in bookcases, and their free-standing oval tables are a generous 34 inches deep, providing space for a sprawl of architectural drawings and documents.
And then there’s the big picture—the feel of the space, engendered by NBBJ’s manipulation of very simple geometric elements. Everything is severely rectilinear; it’s all long, narrow planes, slabs and volumes, and there’s an underlying visual tension between fierce vertical and determined horizontal thrusts. The door pulls punch vertically as powerfully as the credenzas sprawl horizontally. Because the energy seems absolutely balanced in both directions, the overarching sensation is one of serenity. The forces are in repose. The architecture quietly recedes, leaving the art to provide the sizzle.
It seems significant, though, that every guest’s and employee’s arrival and departure inevitably encounters that 18-foot-long limestone wall. There’s no art displayed on it, nothing at all except a modestly sized company logo. It’s all about the stone itself, its texture, history, gravity, and the delight of discovering unexpected detail. An enterprise looking for an architectural metaphor for itself could hardly ask for more.