When moving their headquarters to two floors at the top of the city’s skyline, this investment firm desired an elegant workspace that would echo the firm’s ideals. Set against a backdrop of unobstructed views, a new space is crafted with an elegant, timeless palette of natural materials. The lobby is wrapped in a ribbon of custom white oak slats set against a Calacatta marble floor and reception desk.
The team shifted away from traditional workplace planning where private offices line perimeter windows, monopolizing light and views. Instead, the plan follows a more democratic ideal, with circulation lining the perimeter and private offices framed in low-iron glass. This allows all employees to share in the unobstructed city views while mitigating solar heat gain and glare on workstations. To maintain the openness to the panorama, full-height glass brings light and views as deep into the plan as possible. Frosted glass, clerestories, and sidelights allow light in while providing the desired privacy for conference and office spaces within the open plan. This openness facilitates interaction between employees across both floors, modernizing office organization and feel.
Bio Mark Cavagnero Associates is a San Francisco-based architecture firm built on a foundation of serving civic, cultural and institutional clients. We approach each project with a focus on the immediate and greater community it will serve. The firm has completed a wide range of architectural and master planning projects based on this ideal, including large and small scale institutional, non-profit, and commercial projects. The firm provides a full range of services, from programming, master planning, site planning and conceptual design, through construction documents and administration.
Other prizes In addition to being well-received by users and the community, our work has garnered more than 100 design awards from local, state, national and international organizations. Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects was honored with the AIA California Council’s 2012 Firm of the Year Award, the highest honor that the organization bestows upon a firm, recognizing distinguished architecture and a culture of mentoring the next generation of architects. The firm ranks in Architect magazine’s 2015 The Architect 50, the ranking of the top 50 architectural firms in the country. Mark Cavagnero was personally honored with the AIA California Council’s 2015 Maybeck Award, a lifetime achievement award often referred to as the “Gold Medal of California.” In every project we design we strive for logic, strength, functional excellence, clarity, sustainability, economical use of materials, and, of course, beauty. Ultimately, the challenge of our work is to build something that authentically represents our core values and innate beliefs: fairness, stability, strength, and openness.
