Edward Ogosta Architecture – California
Designed for a creative media agency of thirty workers, this office contains a menagerie of typological hybrids, which together engender a unique interior world. Existing somewhere between furniture and architecture, these hybrid-objects infuse the office functions with new iconographic presence, and abstractly reference nature and the surrounding city. Collectively, they foster an atmosphere of creative intensity, and embody the idiosyncratic spirit of the company.
An existing 6,000 square foot tilt-up concrete warehouse provides a purified container into which the hybrids are deployed. Each hybrid synthesizes essential traits from two “parents” of differing typologies; for example, a set of bookshelves combined with the stepped form of an arena results in the book-arena, which doubly functions as storage and seating for office-wide meetings. Other hybrids include the tree-chair, mountain-offices, house-table, and sky-cave. Each is constructed from simple veneered plywood and white painted fiberboard (though the house-table and its materials will be customized from manufactured office furniture). A variety of micro-scaled individual spaces and group-sized collective spaces are thus available to all workers.
This conceptual intertwining of interior office and exterior world expands the experiential possibilities of inhabitation. To sit in a chair as if inside a tree, or occupy a table as one would a house, is to prompt a rethinking of how we exist with objects and environments. One’s fundamental notions of dwelling and working are consequently upended, yet simultaneously clarified.