Design Firm: OWP/P
Project Name/Client: Transwestern Commercial Services
Project Location: Chicago, IL
Products: 3square, 0square, 2square Tile

What is Design?
Design understands the client’s goals. It helps them work not only more efficiently, but more effectively.

Design supports the client’s culture. It is infused with an insight into how the client’s staff communicates and works together.

Design enhances the client’s brand. It makes a statement about how they view themselves and how they’d like to be seen by others.

Good design engages and challenges. Above all, it inspires.

How is Design best illustrated through the project?
The space was designed as a new home for commercial real estate brokers serving the Chicago marketplace. The design was inspired by the city itself. The plan treats the floorplate as a city: neighborhoods, blocks, buildings. Going from macro to micro, the block elements continue to be reduced in scale until it they are squares in the carpet pattern.

The design plays with the city context by treating elements as though they are either the reflection of or shadow of a building. This play of light and silhouette creates an ethereal connection between the interior and the city context beyond.

Biggest Design Challenge?
The existing space’s drywall-enclosed perimeter offices, which were retained to control costs, restricted opportunities for bringing daylight into the office interior. As a solution, the perimeter offices were left in place, but sections of the corridor wall were replaced with full height glass to bring in natural light and give access to views of the outside cityscape. A new ceiling element at each doorway portal helps define these spaces, creating a light “reflection” element juxtaposed against the “shadow” element created by the carpet inset.

What made it Innovative or Unique?
The space is pursuing LEED Certification. Toward this end, the design incorporates Shaw’s low-emissions carpet, local/regional materials and resources, rapidly renewable materials, reuse of existing conditions, and daylighting strategies.

Typically, real estate brokers are guarded in their work and require total privacy. The head of the office brought with him a European mindset that was more open to transparency in the workplace, which helped make the daylighting elements possible. The glass-fronted offices and glass-enclosed boardroom—with its “floating” white wall that sweeps down from the ceiling, stopping a foot and a half above the floor—are unique in the industry.

How did Design make a difference?
This office marked the first time that the real estate group had a space apart from the larger company. The design defined a distinct image for the group outside the larger corporate entity. The space’s different feel compared to other real estate brokerages has helped position the company in the recruitment of top-tier staff. The space has proven so popular that the building often shows it to prospective tenants, and it has led to new assignments for both the designer and brokerage. All this has helped position the client as a strong presence within the Chicago commercial real estate industry.

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