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With a little planning, you can capture some amazing moments at national parks. After checking the weather, Eric Neitzel drove 3 hours to Tuolumne Meadows – the one place in California’s Yosemite National Park that’s flat enough for the perfect sunset. Braving the mosquitoes, he carefully laid down on the meadow grass to try and make sure the beautiful flowers of the meadow where shown as well as the the sunset and Pothole Dome. “For me, laying in the flowers of Tuolumne Meadows taking this picture made me feel like half John Muir and half Ansel Adams.” iPhone photo courtesy of Eric Neitzel.
Architects began with works on the project in the summer of 2014, when they won the tender with an innovative interior design solution. “We had a specific task from the client, which for us was a clear challenge. Create a more playful office and environments than the Google Zurich have. Therefore, we have most of our creativity at the beginning invested in finding new informal solutions for the offices of today. The main topic was to find elements that are not only attractive, but still practical and widely used by all employees. The next task was to solve the running of the company, the location of individual departments and still maintain as possibly most airy space with maximum preservation of privacy, “says Roman Vrtiška, one of the two authors.
In a Prague office, we can find a private restaurant (whose running and eating employee is paid by the company), an internal, central staircase through all seven floors, gym, shop, recording studio, playroom, movie theater, game room, golf simulator, library or relaxation room full of hammocks and parasols. This amount, for the office non-standard elements, however, has its own reason. “IT segment is currently one of the fastest growing in the world, so a recruitment has a great interest in new talents, which now has the opportunity, not only because of these attractive spaces to better adopt. It is essential that the company Avast paves the relatively benevolent and liberal strategy towards their employees, so we were able to integrate these elements into the interior and to equip them basically almost the whole floor, “says architect Vrtiška.
The authors then tried to incorporate into the interior relaxed atmosphere that prevails in Avast while using industrial materials to highlight the origin IT companies and technology background. Therefore, the duo Vrtiška • Žák decided to put in a relatively narrow footprint of the building core, which is located on the longitudinal axis and has concentrated most of the space that are “not working” (meeting rooms, telephone booths, private employment booths, press corners, etc.).
The whole project was basically one big analysis of life in the “IT office” and its study. We have tried to avoid the usual stereotypes and offer the company Avast completely different perspective of work in offices. The result led into our idea called “Office golf”. In essence, it is our own invention, when we tried to get employees to regular exercise on all floors. Each office floor has a total of eighteen holes, just like a regular golf course. Additionally, everything is designed so that each of them is always different difficulty. Employees have the opportunity to go one after each other individualy floor by floor brainstorming, playing and visiting the places where most of them would probably never go. The idea of office golf indirectly linked the idea of kick boards, which are tailor-made for Avast and are freely available to all floors. The building is 135 meters long, so the scooter is ideal, simple and quick way to move all over the floors, “added the authors.
Hump-like protrusions extend down from the brick ceiling of this restaurant in London’s Marylebone by Andy Martin Architects, referencing the domed interior of pizza ovens. Read more
Sig Nordal 