111 Java Corners

In response to this tech company’s increasing need for flexibility and personality within their work spaces, the design team developed a strategy for this unique campus that could evolve with its users as business units changed and the workplace evolved.

Exploring advertising billboards as inspiration, the team developed a structural vocabulary with abstracted trusses to create broad and continuous surfaces along primary circulation axes. The billboard as a metaphor pays tribute to the client as the pioneering force in online advertising. The structural truss system provides opportunity to update design features over time as well as unify adjacent buildings while giving each space a sense of identity.

The team worked closely with the client’s finance user group and real estate teams to develop overarching concepts for the billboards. 111 Java Corners Building embraces a theme of American idioms illustrating phrases such as “When life gives you lemons” and “What you see is what you get” into whimsical collages throughout the building. Materiality, layering and transparency were studied in order to develop distinct visual compositions, then curated with architectural design elements. Billboard artwork was coordinated to relate designs to furniture, finishes and lighting fixtures throughout the building. The collage style references aging roadside billboards; configurations evolve as panels are added and decay over time.

770 individual artwork panels were produced and curated into 30 installations. Art was direct printed onto plywood and OSB in order to provide an honest and raw beauty in billboard construction materials, then finished with paint dipped fields of color. Juxtaposing a delicate fabric canvas provides the structures with transparency, alluding to how aged billboards are often missing panels. Feature movable locations are easily rearranged to encourage manipulation of compositions.

Design Team

Crystal Adams (art director, designer), Ellen Bean Spurlock (project manager, designer), Stephen Killion (designer), Allison Rokusek (designer)

Project Area

158,000 sq ft

Fabricators

Antire Creative, AMP Printing