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Terraces (1), microkitchens (2), and breakout spaces (3 & 4) provide room for gathering and conversation. Photos © Connie Zhou (1, 2 & 4), Pierce Harrison (3) click to enlarge.

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KPF’s intervention wraps around SOM’s new public waiting room like a doughnut around a hole, and uses space above the still-operational local post office behind the building’s famous Eighth Avenue colonnade. It also makes the most of the workhorse half of the campus, an annex fronting Ninth Ave­­nue that, since built in the 1930s, has filled the remainder of the city block. Spa­tially, a wayfinding system, conceived as a trek through a landscape, has been applied to this vast volume. From modest entrances along train-station concourses or a street-facing entrance on West 33rd Street, a double-height lobby leads, by way of a monumental staircase with amphitheater seating, up and over what’s called the “pass,” to the base of a four-level atrium populated by staircases and leafy interior landscaping by Scape.

Elevator cabs have been reused as focus nooks. Photo © Connie Zhou

Intuitive navigation through the cross-section—beyond mostly cubicle-free acres of desks, food halls, and library-like refuges—is supported by such semiconsciously apprehended details as level-to-level differentiations in background brickwork patterning, but more directly by themes for each floor. Biophilic elements and abundant greenery highlight the uppermost level, which is ringed by a planted terrace behind a parapet. Creative reuse of historic corridors and elevator lobbies distinguishes another level where the preservation of those elements was required—by the very 1965 municipal Landmarks Law passed after the loss of the old Penn Station. This treatment makes a virtue of a necessity by leaning into the uncanny theatricality of elevators-turned-reading-nooks, or of a restored and reconstructed globe-lit and transom-doored corridor that, amid the surrounding office landscape, looks like a film noir set. Other ready-made elements, described by Kassem as having a “garage aesthetic,” include a ferroconcrete structural frame around the lobby and atrium that were left as KPF found them. “There was a lot of craftwork,” said Kassem, “and a lot of attention to issues like patching walls. Do you erase time? Do you record time? Do you make that recording an extension of time into the present?”

This close attention to material practice and to spatial procession speaks to the poignancy of having designed office space during the pandemic years and for a technology company that is simultaneously investing ever more in the virtual simulacra of the so-called metaverse. “When people come back,” Kassem asked, “what are they going to be wanting to come back for? What creates encounter and community?” As her team designed, she reflected, “it heightened for all of us how important the physical and tactile is in our day-to-day practice, which informed our thinking about the experience.” A pessimistic vision for a metaverse is one in which a collective illusion supplants or segregates itself from a public commons. But a more radically optimistic vision is suggested by KPF’s interventions, in which the new is legibly woven into the old—and evocative contemporary elements (such as a fish scale pattern borrowed from historic details elsewhere in the building, then enlarged and skimmed onto concrete floors) acknowledge and celebrate their own artifice, yet also support both spatial and temporal orientation. “It’s not about homogeneity,” said Kassem about the creative repurposing of historical fabric, in words that could also describe a social network or a digital pocket universe at its best. “It’s forgiving, it’s inclusive, it’s honest, it asks you to approach, and there’s always an opening.”

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