“The client said, ‘Don’t give me just an open floor plan,’ ” Robert recalls. “They’d had a bad experience with [standard] open offices. Designers and software developers were stuck in open areas, and consultants hogged the conference rooms.”

Some clients might be put off by the sight of architects unfurling U-Haul-box prototypes, but as a company accustomed to bringing its own products to fruition through experimentation, BCG was delighted by R&A’s approach. The client even kept the cardboard models for internal presentations to employees, asking the architects to make a second “working” set. Not only had R&A hit upon a solution for the awkward 45-degree angles of the Manhattan Beach office floor plan, but it also landed on a template that BCG wanted to roll out to satellite offices in New York, London, Seattle, Shanghai, Sydney, and several other cities around the world. They would use a series of hexagonal project spaces, dubbed Venture rooms, to create more wall-display space than you’d find in a square room. Custom-made movable rhomboid tables would be adapted to each team’s needs. The almost-circular spaces have an effect analogous to that of a round dining table—no one is at the head, so hierarchies (ideally) dissolve.

In some iterations, more glass is added to the design. “The transparency allows [collaborating] teams [who share a project] to know what [counterparts] are working on,” says Robert. “There is cross-pollination.”

Clients and staff navigate the 54,000-square-foot Manhattan Beach office along an internal “beach walk,” a pathway of Maxwood veneer flooring with a noise-reducing cork backing. Being able to see into the glass-enclosed workspaces helps orient them to the correct project. The walkway provides a slight separation between.