BBDO Moscow / VOX Architects

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: VOX Architects
Area: 3400 m²
Year: 2013

Text description provided by the architects. The main challenge that faced Nefaresearch's architects, was to reconstruct four-storey factory building of 19^th century to the office for advertising agency. The style of the office had to resemble an art centre, rather than traditional office. The aim was to create with irony a rich dynamic and contemporary image in the BBDO's branded palette (red, white, grey and black), covering and unifying all office spaces and in the same time dividing them into functional zones. The image should also contribute to creative and non-standard thinking.

Architects suggested to define ground floor as a show-window, which would radiate company's image. The front entrance was made as a strong trailblazing centre.

The project covers the whole four-storey building. The groundfloor is a public zone, where guests and clients are received; the rest three floors, on the contrary, destined to be agency's working space. The reception at the entrance organise people flow: company's employees, who are head for working area, and guests and clients, who came for a meeting or cafe. The cafe is easily transformed and has several additional functions, such as seminars conductions, discussions and design reviews, Digital Lab technology testing. In other words, this space is a public centre of the agency.

The red structure in the dynamic point represents the reception and the bar, as if growing out of the walls of the building. Evolving in the space it is grow stronger, focusing attention on itself and turning into the whole rooms, at one space, or it subsides and completely disappears, remaining as a small accent, at another. This design solution allowed to reconcile with the impossibility of transferring partitions and engineering services. This red structure could be interpreted as a navigator for the visitors. In the working areas it turns into a cubic form and purity of it's shape inspires agency for new ideas.

Working areas are interesting/remarkable for their planning conception. This conception was imposed upon typical problem of advertising agencies: permanent changes in the agency's structure, changes in the number of employees and departments and their correlations. Advertising agency – is a respondent to the situations surrounding constitution, and so the working space should be instantaneous reconfigurable to the new conditions. The enclosed administrative space/The enclosed administrative core located in the centre of each working floor and implements the function of a study and conference room: depending on a necessity they can be easily transformed from one to another. For it's design the administrative space/core embodies the idea of “architecture in the interior”. “Interior houses” organise the space in playful dynamism. Around these “houses” the mobile office space is formed along the windows, and it's sections separated by soft relaxation zones. Due to this structure, it is possible to easily reorganise both the whole floor and working areas without assistance.