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.