That was part of like me having an oh well moment, but workplaces really could be incredibly inspiring. Welcome to Archniq Sessions 1-1. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hoffberg, and this week I'm speaking with architect Clive Wilkinson, known for his high-profile office designs. After moving to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and working in Frank Gehry's office, Clive started his own firm, Clive Wilkinson Architects, and has since worked with such big-name clients as Google, the BBC, 20th Century Fox, and Microsoft.
I spoke with Clive about the development from cubicle farms to serendipity machines and his thoughts on co-working spaces. Also turns out he's not a huge fan of the Apple spaceship. So to start things out, let's talk about the house that you built. I believe right after getting the commission to design Google's expansion of their headquarters in Mountain View, there was a New York Times piece a while back that referenced to the house that Google built.
Otherwise, I'm sure you'd love to have another title, working title for the house that goes against that. That's a Google book, I love it. No, that's a great title. I guess if I'm shooting it, I think I bought the lot just before we won the job for Google.
And sure enough, it may have assisted in paying the bills for the construction. I also, or at least in that piece, it was structured as the firm which you started in Los Angeles in 1991, had gone through some ebbs and flows, and the point at getting the Google project was kind of a triumph in the course of the firm's work. So that having the opportunity after that fact to build your own house was something of an exciting and very high potential opportunity. But now you're selling the house.
Do you feel any remorse or sadness that you're now leaving this project? Oh, no. No, not at all. I'm excited to leave it.
Well, I'm building another house and I'll leave it to that one. But I don't like to stay anywhere too long. So that's one thing. So 10 years is enough in one house.
And I like building things. So it just sort of makes sense, I think. I'll probably build another house and I'll be there too long either. And so leaving, do you suddenly see things in kind of a different light that maybe you can adapt to future design decisions where you see things as maybe working differently now that you've lived in it for so long?
I think it's definitely true that you learn from every project you do. I don't think that I personally think I make many mistakes, but I think that you learn other factors that you didn't entirely consider when you go to one project the next. The more you build and the more you design and what you do, you do get very good at being very inclusive about all the issues and certainly about the important issues in design. So I'm quite happy with being an older and more experienced right now because I sort of feel like one can do things really quite well and very efficiently and very fast.
I mean, I've been in business. I've been in the design world for a long time and I did that house. That was 2000 and official 2006. But I first started graduate in 1980 a long time ago and I did my first remodel of an apartment in London for myself in 84.
And I'd lived in different and that was even I didn't build a house as such. That was living in a space I designed way back then. And then of course, when I've done many multiple projects in between. So it was really quite easy designing the house for myself.
I think I had a funny sense of guilt about doing it in the office. And actually, in some respects, got less attention than it should have got. But I think that decisions came very fast, very easily. And they were good ones.
I enjoyed living in it for 10 years. It's certainly an easy house to live in. So what lessons will you be taking from there that are going into the new house? I think the new house is a very different direction than the new house.
So it doesn't have the introverted nature of house on the flatland. And I think that introverted thing is positive. It's called courtyard model. And as much as you focus into the center of a captured bit of outdoor space.
So it's different when you're in a hillside situation. You're really looking at beyond the lot of the site and the emphasis is very different. But they both are valuable urban models, I think, particularly with the flatland one, which is what the nice drive house is. So I'd like to also ask, because I think most architects are going to know your work for office design and various office projects that you've done.
And regarding specifically the time you first started your practice in the early 90s, I wanted to know if you recall the first moment you started working in the office world and started trying to think of a guiding principle for the kinds of office spaces that you wanted to make. Do you recall inspiration moment or kind of a first moment for that kind of thought? In some ways I don't because I first started working on offices so long ago. In 1980, I got my first job and I was thrown right into doing something that was part of public gallery and part of offices in London.
And then I did a couple of very large TV studios jobs, which involved a lot of work place in the early 80s, which were quite crazy. They were very ambitious and influenced by the Memphis movement that was happening then. So we were kind of experimenting a little flamboyantly way back then. So flamboyantly and referring to bright colors and kind of bold lines that you see in a lot of your current and ongoing work.
Well, that's most modern. I'm almost ashamed to say. It's a dirty word now. It's a dirty word now.
It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, we were all trapped in it. I mean, the best of us were kind of trapped in that era. And I kind of resented it at the time because I just knew it was kind of a fashion that had to end. But there was so much pressure to do it because everyone wanted it and my boss certainly wanted it.
And it actually was one of the reasons I left London and, and that practice at the end was because the first modern thing was just too much. And I came to the States in 1919 with Frank Gehry and the first client that I was given was Shite Day. And I was project architect on the interiors of the binocular building that Frank had designed. And I learned immense amount from the client itself, TVA Shite Day.
Actually, it was only called Shite Day in those days because they really had an amazingly loose and creative outlet towards the workplace. They were all about ideas and living and dying by ideas. So I learned far more really from that commercial client than I did in my architectural training. And you're saying, of course, there's some degree of interpreting the intent and the ambience of the workplace into the actual design.
But I'm wondering because now we have so much focus on workplace design just as in architectural media, like whatever the most beautiful photos are, they're just put out everywhere. It's very hard to not have your office if you are a big company opened up to design criticism of sorts. Was there that much kind of expectation for those kinds of critiques to occur in those early days? Well, they're the amazing thing in those days was there was nothing like that around at all.
There was no creative office space. It was a complete vacuum. And Shite Day had also come from a sort of a, I think, a bit of a non-environment when they were downtown, and then they had Frank Giri do first do a warehouse conversion as a temporary space before they moved into the North Building. And that space was pretty radical.
J. Shite was very into art and kind of experimentation. And Frank did some great things in that warehouse. And that was part of like me going and having an oh-wow moment, but workplaces really could be incredibly inspiring.
So was there something that you took specifically from Shite Day's own managerial structure that then informed the actual built space? Yes, because as I said, such an engagement with the priority of ideas and knowledge sharing and about how people communicate and how to really kind of get that friction and provocation within the workplace. And J. Shite said something at one point, which I thought was quite eye-opening at the time.
He said, I don't want people to be comfortable. I want them to be provoked in the workplace. And there was such an established kind of mindset at the time, but oh, everyone in the workplace needs to be comfortable. Everything's about, you know, porting people so they can be as comfortable as possible, etc.
And he was saying the exact reverse. And some of the executives as well, I remember having a discussion with the president Shite Day about his personal office and the guests chasing the personal office. And he was saying, oh, I like this. There's particularly kind of uncomfortable looking hard guest chairs when we're looking for some images.
And I pointed out that that's very uncomfortable. No one ever sit near for more than five minutes. And he said, yes, that's perfect. I don't want anyone to talk in five minutes.
So anyway, it was through kind of learning about how the organism of a business like advertising works. That's a big eye opener. The old routine ideas of cubicles and all the rest were really kind of quite dreadful. And it was time to get out of that world.
We cover so much nowadays on the concept of the serendipity machine as a model to aspire to in workplace design that you're not necessarily just trying to keep people uncomfortable enough to retain a degree of creative edge, but you're actually trying to create spaces that socially engineer interaction in a way that is inspiring. And it sounds almost like, you know, kind of houblah at some point where it's like, how much can you actually completely change the way that an employee and a boss or so or within a collaborative organization, how they work just by, you know, moving things around within a space that you can't completely bulldoze or so. But that's where we see this kind of ongoing trend of giant open desk spaces. And I feel like because you've been involved in that kind of area of the practice for long enough, that you have seen the progression from the state cubicle world into this kind of new expectations of what is actually possible in the workplace.
But I'm wondering, what do you feel is actually helpful about having those open spaces? Can you like articulate what you think is actually necessary about that? Well, I think there's actually kind of a web of almost invisible infrastructure that is applied to any really well-working workplace. And the openness is just one factor, the value of the circulation, the movement, what drives it to meaningful destinations within the workplace, the things that encourage the friction between people and the serendipity need to be built into.
Just having transparency isn't, you know, and itself is not enough. So I really think it's actually quite a complex thing, and it varies very much from company to company because their, you know, particular DNA is always different. There's always, you know, leadership plays different roles in different companies. There's a load of subtleties about it.
So I think it's quite a sophisticated issue. And we've often been involved in what's called functional inconvenience ideas and planning, where you actually remotely locate things that should be actually adjacent because you want to encourage movement and crossover. So we did a project for J.W.T. in New York some years ago, where we had, before we really learned about this notion, where we arranged everything with perfect adjacency.
So everyone would have the shortest possible communication between the people that mattered to them. And then we realized that that would start by a real, you know, genuine kind of cross-platform knowledge sharing. And the president of the company made a strategic decision to take out a key component from the middle of that and put it right on the periphery so that people would be forced to travel, you know, mask the floors. We had internal staircases to get to, you know, the people and resources they needed.
And that was very successful. So you did post occupancy surveys through the company and that's how you determined like whether or not this was really working. We don't generally do actual survey because the client's when it comes down to it or not particularly interested in finding that. But we definitely follow that, you know, what's going on and do this with the firms later and get their feedback.
So building off of this kind of current atmosphere of office design, we also see that now since there's so many more opportunities for people to work from home and also maybe not opportunities, but you know, necessities that people are kind of tailoring the residential space and residential design to be kind of more of a hybrid model between residential and office design. Is that something you considered with this might be like the worst thing you would ever want to consider for your own home, but do you see that kind of trend also orbiting your own work? Well, I think that there's many functional things that drive the argument for telecommuting, working from home and everything and primarily has to do with children and families and things like that, particularly effects often, you know, the mothers of the family. So I think that's definitely something that needs to be supported.
But we're also very strong believers in the essential value of face to face that the mouth is communicated between people in the same room is just huge by comparison to the misunderstanding that can happen on phone calls and, you know, to the via kind of more attenuated kind of communicate. Like emails and text and things. And I think that going to future is becoming increasingly acknowledged that people really do need to be in each other's presence working. So what about these more, I say, maybe compromising models of say like so-called co-working spaces or spaces that allow for people to say a little bit of money by working alongside other people who are perhaps working as a industry but are not actually their colleagues, but that have that potential for say inspiring random run-ins or just having that atmosphere that they can have energy and production that they can kind of be a part of.
What is your opinion on those spaces? Do you think that that kind of model of office space can actually be kind of old? Oh, I actually find that in a mentally exciting model, the co-working model. I mean, I don't think it has from a business point, it has no value to us because it's very unlikely to be designing co-working spaces.
But I do think that it's a major value to the sort of sparking of small entrepreneurial businesses. I do think that the social aspect of it is very valuable. And I think that it's kind of it makes real incubators for new small businesses and for businesses that want to leverage multi-disciplinary partnerships and things like that. I can think of lots of people in the media world who need different types of skills, who are often provided by almost pre-lawned people.
And I think if they can co-locate in co-working space, it's just a great new facility. And I also think that going forward in the future is going to be increasingly valuable. I think in the 23 years' time, they're going to be really quite massive, potentially quite massive, provisions of this type of workspace, with a lot of smaller nimble, agile businesses that are able to provide highly specific services to do a big organizational needs. So I think it's great.
I'm a big fan of it. So in terms of bridging the gap then between, because those spaces do seem to have their own design conceit, and at least we've seen from organizations like WeWork, there is a very explicit and very thought out approach to how the spaces are designed as in reference to pre-existing officers and these other things we've been talking about. So do you feel like that the reason why it wouldn't be so relevant to your business is because there simply aren't so many other overreaching organizations that build places like that? That could be said, like your client would be WeWork of sorts.
I just think that I think the formula for co-working spaces is something that can be cracked already, very successfully, and will gradually evolve as the users' needs are becoming more evolved. So I don't think it's a complex model that necessarily requires the kind of skills that we have. I think we're more valuable when it comes to large organizations that have particular structural challenges and things like that. So one particular project I wanted to ask you about was the Superdesk project.
You did, or rather the Superdesk desk, you did for the barbarian group. What in the design process did you come to to make you think this is what this space needs? Some of companies tend to operate like extended families. Not that barbarian was that small, but we normally take a company in the range of 20 to 80 people or something like that, a really extended family.
We feel that those types of companies don't have the same challenges as very large companies. And the primary challenge with a very large company is that individual employees can very easily feel that they are disconnected and alienated from any particular community. They feel like a tiny carbon amass that we all. So that's one of the challenges that we like to try and address when working with large companies.
Small companies don't have that problem. They work on a network of trust and familiarity. Everyone more less knows everyone else so that the organism is very different. With the barbarian group, we had that type of community and they're also very creative people and also certain level of homogeneity in that they were all young and definitely up for an agile mobile way of working.
But they also had a lot of heavy equipment because of the type of work they did, digital work. So they couldn't really move around the desk too much. They certainly didn't require the privacy and have hierarchical issues and all that. So we put the idea to them about what if everyone was just around one big table and they were like, yeah, that sounds very cool.
And then we had done projects with very large tables in the past. We did one for 200 people at Mother in London and around by the same time as Google actually. And that one we made out of concrete. But we also realized we had to break the table.
When the table gets very big, you end up having to break it because circulation would become kind of ridiculous, you know, getting around the table. So when we thought about one table with barbarian, we said, well, if we want to have a continuity in the surface, we're actually going to have to add a crawl under the table or else lift the table up so you can walk underneath it. So it became sort of a ridiculous logical exercise in saying this is how the table has to be configured and then that turns into a whole structure. So we put the thing, how do we make it into something?
And the opportunity of the space is underneath just emerged out of that. It's like, oh, wow, there's space underneath. Let's turn them into meeting spaces and hang out space. So it's interesting how a kind of slightly ridiculous proposition can end up by going down a route that becomes very interesting.
And you said that that idea emerged kind of directly from conversations with how the organization operated. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of research that you do and the kind of conversations you have with the clients before setting out to design? Well, we try very hard to get to know them as well as we can. And we try and involve many people, certainly in the leadership position in these companies in understanding their DNA, how they work, what the challenges are, what the aspirations are.
How they see themselves as a community, how they want to improve relationships and connections within their organization. And we do this mostly through combination of traditional programming work but also visioning sessions with the client. And it's not super-scientific. A lot of it is kind of conjectural and circumstantial and it just emerges out of conversations really.
But we make sure we have the time for that and we make sure that the conditions are right in as much as everyone's very relaxed and eager to contribute to getting a vision together of where they want to go. And it ends up with every project being unique, which is great. I don't believe we have an obvious signature to what we do because the conversations with clients really determine the result. And that way, of course, you also get incredible buy-in from the clients because they recognize the product as theirs in the end of the day.
In fact, I think we sometimes have a bit of a problem with clients believing they did themselves. We don't have to pay you, we did this ourselves. You're right, I know, I have that. Well, I'm also wondering then because you do have a fair amount of pretty high-profile well-known works in Los Angeles in particular.
I'm wondering if you feel that you're in some way contributing to kind of a particularly LA or Los Angeles kind of approach to the office or to the workplace or say Southern California if we can open it up. I think that's I think it's fair to say I think it comes from an ethos that's kind of common in Southern California where experimentation is encouraged. I felt when I first came here that one of the great liberating things about being in Los Angeles was that they wasn't a powerful pre-existing urban culture. There really isn't, but it wasn't certainly in 1990.
And I come from a very powerful pre-existing urban culture being in the city of London where there are immense amount of constraints about what you build and how you go about what messages you're creating and what the details of life, et cetera, et cetera. And this city is extremely supportive of experimentation and it doesn't take things too seriously, it doesn't take itself too seriously. So I think it's encouraged a lot of great work and a lot of best modern architectures happened in this place. So we're proud to be part of that kind of long tradition and I think it's going to continue into the foreseeable future because this is also a unique city in that it's a multi-notal city.
And that flexibility around having a multi-notal urban structure means that your ability to expand and contract is much greater than cities in growing compared to single-centered cities. It does allow certainly for a greater flexibility and diversity within the greater space and you don't have to hold it any given style, especially because the weather is so nice. So you don't have to worry about the mung room of sorts. But I wanted to ask about LA in particular because one of the projects that you've also done is maybe a little bit less common to your work is the exhibition design for Never Built Los Angeles.
It's a super, super popular exhibition posted by the Architecture and Design Museum in 2013, I believe. So I'd love to hear, did you kind of come, I believe the curators of that reached out to you. How did you first learn about the project and what were your first thoughts about doing it? Well, the curators, Sam and Greg approached us and said, hey, would you like to do this?
I don't know if you've got any money, but we'd love you to. And I don't think at the time, well, we've been wanting to do a pro bono project and this could be perfect. Nothing could be more exciting than looking at how to represent, kind of, kind of lost dreams of the city. So I think it was a brilliant idea and I think that they're going to go and do more in other cities in North America.
It was an exciting to be part of that. But was that a particular challenge or so? I know you said you were excited to do it as a pro bono piece, but had you had any explicit desires before to work more in exhibition design? The question, I'm actually trying to think back with what I've done in exhibition design before.
No, I think it's probably one of the first ones, but it's not a very difficult thing. And it's very much about the story of what you're representing. I think one of the, you know, fun things we were able to do, kind of, right off the bat was to, you know, cut the whole floor with a map of the city back in the 1940s. You know, things had really kind of drove home, the sense of place and fragmentation and network, which are kind of inherent in the city.
And then the material, of course, was pretty great. We had a lot of hair-raising moments though, because a lot of material was plucked right up until the end. You know, two days before, and we didn't even know with a certain model, we were actually going to be able to gear the exhibition. So it had to be pretty flexible about how we structured everything.
Yeah, the space itself, since architecture and design museum have moved to a different location, but the space itself, as I recall, is a little small and kind of a little cramped. It can cause some like, strange difficulties with circulation and actually exhibiting, giving the pieces room to breathe. Right, right. I mean, we sort of planned against some of the problems there by just shutting out, you know, I think, pretty much all the retail frontage and using those vertical surfaces as exhibition surfaces.
So I think we're able to make it feel like it was a bit bigger than the space really was. So I also just have to ask, and you are free to knock on it if you don't like, but do you have any opinion on the new Apple campus design, the spaceship? I have been asked to have the spaceship before, and I didn't think I said very complimentary thing. My concern about it is that it's derived from some idealistic concept that really has nothing to do with the notion of community other than a circle.
And the radius of the circle is so large that the distance from one side of the circle to the other, from a walking point of view, is a negative aspect, I think. It's just too big. You know, you'd expect there to be, you know, serendipitous and kind of friction and stuff between the different organizations within Apple, the different departments. And if they have to, you know, circulate around the perimeter of the circle, well, you've got a really long route between departments and it's strung out in the long line, which actually makes it not very much different to having incredibly long and thin building.
And then the space, and as I said, the space in the middle is just not a quick and easy thing to traverse. I personally think it's a bad model. I'm actually very for the Google model of some of the way it can be off the Ingalls. I think that's kind of parasol, whether it's a mensinite of flexibility underneath it is a much better model for tech companies, which really needs a lot of flexibility in their expansion and contraction to let grow and shrink departments and things like that.
Well, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. And thank you for sharing your thoughts about Office Design and coming on the podcast. Sure, Amelia.
Thanks for listening to our Connect Sessions 1-to-1 with Clive Wilkinson. Daniela, why not that it's the podcast and Matt Scalinges composed our music. Myself and Paul Petunia are the producers of 1-to-1. New episodes come out every Monday.
Make sure to not miss an episode by subscribing to us on iTunes. And if you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a review. You can keep up with podcasting news from our Connect on Twitter through at our sessions or hashtag our Connect Sessions, or you can email us through Connect at our Connect.com. Thanks again for listening to 1-to-1.