People/Products

Surprising what you can do with a box. In designing Novartis's corporate global oncology offices on its East Hanover, New Jersey, campus, New York architects Weiss/Manfredi took the master plan's rectilinear form, 275 feet long, 100 feet wide and 75 feet high, and began carving up spaces inside and out. Each of the four elevations varies from the other by virtue of voids surgically cut into the glazed volume: one shelters a grand entrance stair on the northwest corner; one major incision creates an outdoor balcony on the fourth floor at the north end; another does the same for the third level at the south end; while yet a third balcony appears on the west side at the second level. Expanses of clear glass seemingly set in shallow relief within the patterned curtain wall express the program where the run of stairs connect the levels within, including double-height communal spaces known as “living rooms.”