This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
This Website Uses Cookies By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn MoreThis website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
Corporate branding gets an illuminating twist in two projects where light is as essential as environmental graphics to convey company philosophy in satellite offices—one urban, the other suburban. In each case, architect and lighting designer integrate the interior fit-out of an existing space with an effective lighting scheme that is not only energy-efficient and low maintenance, but also tailored to client identity as it relates to the new location.
Across the country, corporations whose fortunes are built on indefatigable twentysomethings are reverse-migrating from suburbia to cities, where many young professionals prefer to live. At the leading edge of this trend, energy giant BP moved its trading and treasury departments in 2010 from a corporate campus in Warrenville, Illinois, to downtown Chicago, where it now occupies three floors of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) building. To make the move work, the company teamed with Gensler to replace existing interiors that had been cobbled together from conference rooms. “You could never achieve functionality by keeping traders apart from their support networks,” Dane Rausch, Gensler senior associate and design director in the firm’s Chicago office, says of those old spaces scattered over multiple floors.
The Gensler team placed the traders on a 24,000-square-foot trading floor that can seat 500 people. To do this, the architects fashioned a pit from the original CME that soars three stories high, and built acoustically separated mezzanines around it to house the main cafeteria, as well as BP’s treasury department. Teaming, conference, and training zones and a smaller caf' also line the perimeter.