ElectricWorks Office, Sheffield Digital Campus

24 May 2010

ElectricWorks Office, Sheffield Digital Campus

When Dive Architects was asked to create a zingy design for a digital office development, it set out to make every feature of the space reflect the trailblazing nature of the industry while avoiding the conventional office look

Details

Project: ElectricWorks
Design: Dive Architects
Client: Sheffield City Council/Creative Space Management
Size: 5,000 sq m
Cost: £2m

Project Description

There’s a certain continuity in the work of Stockholm-based Dive Architects, the award-winning practice founded by Ia Hjärre and Andy Nettleton in 2001. For this project, which makes the most of the practice’s penchant for bold colours and fun, offbeat design, Dive was invited to submit ideas on the strength of a previous scheme, and you can see the lineage quite clearly.

‘We did some work of the reception at Bermondsey Square in London,’ says Nettleton, ‘and I think it was largely what we’d done there that caught the attention of the client [property developer Creative SpaceManagement]. CSM was looking for someone who was going to bring something really new and different to the space.’

ElectricWorks is the first completed building in a new office development called Sheffield Digital Campus, which is part of Sheffield City Council’s plan to create a hub for creative ‘digital’ businesses employing between one and 75 people in the city. The interior needed to reflect the fact that this is not a place for stiff suits and briefcases.

There are four floors of offices, suiting companies both large and small, but these have been designed pretty minimally for tenants to do with them as they please. The really interesting design is in the public areas, such as the reception, which is connected to the upper floors by a spiral slide. ‘The slide idea came from CSM,’ says Nettleton. ‘The idea was there should be something in reception which would be a real talking point.’

It came from the same company, Josef Wiegand & Co, that supplied the slides for German artist Carsten Höller’s memorable exhibition at TateModern. ‘A lot of people were trying to get in to film it, says Nettleton. ‘It’s a talking point for the building, but I’d like to think that we did a lot more to the space than that.’

And so they did. The reception and ‘club’ area is a bright, double-height space with a bold palette of greens, yellows and oranges, something of a Dive Architects trademark. ‘We tend to work with a lot of strong colours in what we do. It’s something people tend to comment on with our work,’ says Nettleton.

A custom-made reception desk, designed by Dive and manufactured by Heleine & Whattam, is fitted with a light box along its irregularly stepped edge. This non-uniform shape, which was inspired by the building’s floor plan, is echoed in the design of nearby wall-mounted shelves and, further on, an informal desk. ‘This is a sort drop-in area that you can use for meetings, even if you don’t rent office space,’ says Nettleton.

Against one wall is a bank of lockers, also specially made by Heleine & Whattam. ‘The lockers are another part of this club idea, that you might come in for a meeting or visit someone in the office. The brief was that you could hang up your jacket and charge your mobile phone or laptop, so the tall section is where you hang your jacket and in the shorter one there’s a plug and a power socket for charging. That’s why we end up with these L-shaped doors,’ says Nettleton.

Acoustics could have been a problem in a space this size, especially given it is often used for meetings, so on the wall Dive installed a large square of acoustic fabric, made up of irregularly arranged prisms. Custom-made to the architect’s own design, it works brilliantly as a feature wall.

Stretched Barrisol on the club area ceiling helps to absorb sound, but elsewhere ceiling works have been left exposed. ‘From the start we all wanted to get as far away from the normal look of office space as we could, but the reality of this in the cellular space was just too complicated – if we had left out the suspended ceilings it would have been difficult to fit partitions and get acoustics right,’ says Nettleton.

Set back from the curved facade of the building’s south side is a conference room, which occupies almost half of the ground floor. It is closed off by an acrylic partition which, while allowing the conference room to be blacked out for on-screen presentations, also lets light through from inside. ‘The idea was that the room should light the space, so the whole things glows on the outside but it’s this dark space on the inside,’ Nettleton explains. ‘The conference room can pretty much light the space without any of the other lights being on. But there’s also pendant lights to top up lighting levels.’

Inside the conference room, Dive again used practical acoustic products to create a distinctive look. Here tubular acoustic batons have been suspended below an exposed ceiling fitted with red tubular lights. This practical element actually became one of Nettleton’s favourites of the scheme. ‘It was a nice surprise,’ he says, ‘because I think it could have gone either way.’

Continuing its mission to design an office that didn’t really look like one, Dive created a zig-zag corridor leading to several cellular meeting rooms. Its unusual shape continues the stepped motif seen in the reception desk and is also echoed on wall graphics. ‘What we were trying to achieve through that irregularity was that you didn’t get this long, boring row of corridors and doors, and it also allowed us to change the depth of the office space and give variations in the size of the offices,’ Nettleton explains.

One of the biggest challenges, he says, was converting a space built to house an open-plan office for one company into one now occupied by around 80 companies of varying sizes, as well as facilities for casual visitors. But the scheme is successful: it won the BIFM Innovation In Products award 2009 and was shortlisted for the Arkitektur Debutpriset 2009. ‘Creative Space Management and Sheffield City Council really embraced this project; you need a client that really wants to achieve something,’ says Nettleton. In this case, that’s just what they got.