Gensler European Headquarters acts as a modern workspace that provides its users with a creative platform with very little fixed space, enabling each and everyone within the space to feel empowered.

Our modern workspace acts as a creative platform, a workshop that enables each one within the space to feel empowered. The project provided us with a chance to transform our processes and ways of working to be more relevant to our business and clients, now and in the future.

Located in East London, we worked seamlessly to create a design scheme inspired by locality and contextual history. We created a more active and transparent façade that would bring the inside outside to ensure that our presence in the area was complementary and enhanced the existing environment. We established a palette of timber, concrete and steel to provide a framework to the important notion of ‘handmade’, to create a space that gives stage to the skilled craft and unique work of our designers.

The workplace strategy clusters teams on each floor in ‘neighbourhoods’, aligned to foster transdisciplinary collaboration. In addition to many ergonomic features such as sit/stand desks and reconfigurable furniture solutions to accommodate for future changes, the feature staircase connects teams vertically to utilise amenity and collaboration spaces, while also promoting the healthy benefit of active design.

For the space, we developed a modern agora to showcase work, invite our clients, to host and create a memorable and dynamic user experience that blurs the lines between hospitality and workplace design. From the ground floor up, these agile and reconfigurable amenities are all intended to support flexible work, socialisation and collaboration.

As we strive to understand more about the world around us and the impact we have on it, we included a material lab, a place where everyone can learn about the vast possibilities of materials by browsing our physical collection. Moreover, we designed a maker space for our talent to make, collaborate and learn. Here, you will find tools both pioneering and timeless – 3D printer, laser cutters, CNC machines and hand tools.

We wanted a modern workspace that would act as a creative platform, enabling each person within the space to feel empowered. Through a process of collaboration, discovery and research with our teams, we delivered a workplace that would allow us to evolve the way we work. The challenge we set ourselves was to create a space that acted as a workshop to prototype concepts, objects, spaces, ideas and behaviours. And we wanted this workshop to be fluid, industrial and experimental in character; a work in progress – reflecting how we define ourselves in terms of constant change.

Stuart Templeton, Design Director at Gensler