Schiller Projects have designed the collaborative offices for global law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, located in New York City, New York.
Boies Schiller Flexner, a globally recognized legal practice, has long operated with an entrepreneurial spirit while confined to the templated workplace of a more traditional law firm. BSF’s New York offices were re-imagined to align the built environment with the firm’s collaborative workstyle while fostering a uniquely egalitarian corporate culture.
This project, the outcome of a full integration of a top-down analysis of the client’s workplace behaviours and design, delivered architectural solutions driven by aggregated data. This resulted in a space with no private corner offices, but rather a flowing space – a unique approach to open office design. The space represents a push into the greater role an architecture firm can play from re-thinking space to re-imagining the business practices that happen within that space.
The design team conceptually brought out the “core wall” to form a new inner boundary closer to the curtain wall – connecting people to light and each other – and canted and curved all these interior surfaces in concrete. The flowing organic nature of the design reminds people that there is something around the next corner, above or below you. A central sculpture spans the three main floors of the space connecting people visually across the business.
Critically, the design took associates out of private offices for the first time in a leading American legal practice. This controversial decision was supported by rigorous data analysis and a design focus on supporting the entire facility as “the office” freeing the focus on “the desk.”
