2. 54
TRANSITION
TWO THOUSAND THIRTEEN
Sleek Significance
Wuxi Ying Hui Center - Wuxi, China
Eastern Soul, Western Veneer
Wuxi Ying Hui Shopping Center - Wuxi, China
Incremental Innovation
Costco Wholesale - Worldwide
Ripe With Possibility
Suning Chengdu Plaza - Chengdu, China
Mise En Scène
Hiroshima Ballpark Town - Hiroshima, Japan
Social Agenda
Tonkon Torp - Portland, Oregon
Water, Symmetry, Scale
China Resources Land Mixed Use - Taizhou, China
Creative Team Members
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Gary Larson, AIA, FAAR - Global Design Leader
Moments In Transition
Ming Zhang, AIA, LEED AP - President
Intention Drives Design - Relevance Is Our Measure
Gary Larson, AIA, FAAR - Global Design Leader
Instigating Urban
Bellevue Towers - Bellevue, Washington
Playful Minimalism
HANNspree - Beverly Hills and San Francisco, California
Reading Target
Target @ Mosaic District - Merrifield, Virginia
Civic Gravitas
Redmond City Hall - Redmond, Washington
Product and Placement
Suzhou New World Center - Suzhou, China
Theater of the Brand
China Resources Land Showroom - Qingdao, China
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CONTENTS
3. 73
TRANSITION
TWO THOUSAND THIRTEEN
Architect
Construction
Completion
Type
Location
Square Feet
Certification
MulvannyG2 Architecture
Precision Construction Company
2011
Corporate
Portland, Oregon
62,000 SF
LEED® Silver
O
n a typical day, attorneys at Tonkon Torp,
LLP, one of Portland’s premier law firms,
would come up the elevator, enter the
firm, go to their respective offices and shut the
door. They would work, of course, behind their
closed doors, but they’d work alone. That meant
collaboration didn’t occur naturally; it had to
be scheduled, in a reserved conference room.
Because casual encounters seldom occurred,
camaraderie lagged, and that made meetings
more formal than they needed to be. Other effects:
Younger attorneys clamored for more mentorship,
which was hindered by a degree of distrust stoked
by a general lack of empathy among the firm’s four
generations of attorneys—each of which harbors
different working styles and expectations for
communicating. Yet the firm understood that it
could capitalize on the greater revenues that would
come from cross-pollinating information and ideas
then siloed in individuals and practice areas.
For MulvannyG2’s tenant improvement of
Tonkon Torp’s offices in downtown Portland, the
design team revisited a renovation that Principal
Karen Niemi herself designed for Tonkon in 1989.
The opportunity to re-engage your own work is an
enviable one, but also difficult. Niemi’s perspective
as a young designer versus a firm leader 20 years
later parallels not only the maturity of Tonkon Torp’s
business model and brand, but one of the primary
intentions of this design: To bridge the knowledge
and perspectives of different generations of lawyers
by creating spaces that are not simply a backdrop to
innovation, but actively court it. The goal is not only
to encourage but enable attorneys to talk to one
another. Why is that the primary intention behind
a workplace design? Because working together
THIS DESIGN IS A STRATEGY TO INCREASE
EMPLOYEES’ CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY AND
INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL.
4. 7574
TRANSITION
TWO THOUSAND THIRTEEN
SOCIAL AGENDA
TONKON TORP
is conducive to innovation and it
increases profits. Communication,
collaboration, productivity and
innovation become causal.
We believe that design can—
and has in this project—strategically
influence and channel social
interaction, modifying behavior
to deliver an intended result. This
design is a strategy to increase employees’ creative
productivity and intellectual capital.
Tonkon Torp is located on the top three floors
of Pioneer Tower on 5th Avenue, downtown
Portland, Oregon. The top of Pioneer Tower’s
domed building features a large, round skylight that
seems to unleash the spiraling form of the firm’s
three-story, central staircase. An unfurled ribbon,
this staircase, part of Niemi’s 1989 renovation,
isn’t just a formal intervention, but a means of
communication within the firm.
Back in 1989, the staircase—even then—
was designed to be a place where attorneys
could serendipitously meet, to very briefly talk
about the points of a case. They didn’t meet for
long on the steps of its luxurious curves and
sweeping switchbacks (scheduled conference
rooms or phone calls were for that), but those
stairs simultaneously encouraged a civic gravitas
and camaraderie at the firm. In 2013, it’s still the
central circulating mechanism for the office—in
today’s nomenclature an “active” staircase. But
this renovation expands upon its original social
purpose with a design that offers several ways to
leverage the possibilities of employees hatching
and building on great ideas in places besides
their desks. Today’s Tonkon Torp exhibits design in
service of serendipity that’s in service of revenue.
Spurred by the Tonkon Torp’s first lease
renewal since the ’89 renovation, our contemporary
renovation creates 13 open community spaces
from what before were several closed partner
offices along two floors’ perimeters. The decision
to appropriate closed-door offices to community
space provides a more democratic access to
daylight, more opportunities for more efficient
file storage, and more unscheduled spaces for
meetings with clients or other attorneys. This design
decision means attorneys no longer have to book
a conference room for a meeting, and it lessens
the formality of idea-exchange. That in turn has
encouraged more inter-generational mentoring and
communication, in particular between the soon-to-
retire Traditionalist and Boomer attorneys and their
Gen X and Gen Y cohorts. How? The ambience of
each collaborative space is designed to connote
other familiar places—a coffee shop, university club,
gallery, living room—and to elicit how we behave. Our
work immediately provides a sense of comfort by
tapping the understood conventions we associate
with these familiar types of spaces to diffuse
tension and cue an implicit degree of familiarity
among those meeting there. It engenders greater
trust among attorneys of different generations and
specialties, and attorneys can choose which space
to go to depending on the type of conversation they
hope to have with a client or with one another.
A specific example is the firm’s coffee shop—
staffed by a firm barista—which offers seating at the
bar on stools, or among a cluster of upholstered
chairs. The plush chairs were specified to allude
to the comfort of residential appointments, much
in the way Starbucks does. So the space connotes
the coffee bar experience, which in turn intimates
residential design. The layering of this meaning
is indicative of how signifiers from many different
places collude today: Work is more like home,
home is more like work, coffee shops are more
like home and have become places to work. This
decision regarding program and design works to
actively increase employee retention and morale
while providing more opportunities for casual
collaboration among attorneys and between
attorneys and their clients.
Our design accomplished these goals while
achieving other, surprising benefits: The in-house
coffee shop now keeps attorneys in-house more
often. Instead of taking a break to walk two blocks
to the nearest Starbucks once or twice a day, they
simply go downstairs to the 14th floor. Consider
the time spent to and from Starbucks and multiply
it by attorneys’ billable rates, and you
can see that recovered billable hours
quickly add up—to $1.5 million last
year alone to be precise. Another
unanticipated effect: Lawyers say the
coffee shop now provides them with
a reason to go to floor 14, thereby
increasing their interactions with other
lawyers located there. Before, they
never had an excuse to go to 14, so
those interactions simply didn’t occur.
Another design intent is to convey
the status, stature, and sophistication
of Tonkon Torp and its purposeful brand
shift from “trustworthy,” “established”
and “collegial” to “sustainable,”
“leading-edge” and “progressive.”
Means to accomplish this include both
the overtly symbolic and the subtle:
a living wall of floor-to-ceiling plants
punctuates one of the community
spaces while the lack of Tonkon Torp
signage within the firm’s elevator bank
signifies the values of discretion and
sophistication. Other elements signal
a moment of arrival, from the plush,
sustainably-grown wool pile underfoot
to the minimal, horizontal plane of
stained anigre at reception.
THE AMBIENCE OF EACH COLLABORATIVE
SPACE IS DESIGNED TO CONNOTE OTHER
FAMILIAR PLACES—A COFFEE SHOP,
UNIVERSITY CLUB, GALLERY, LIVING
ROOM—AND ELICITS HOW WE BEHAVE
The function and metaphor of the active staircase is
elaborated upon in this renovation.
Discretion—and “leading edge”—are also signified as
you approach reception. The desk is minimal, clean-
lined and contemporary, with an asymmetrical use of
stained and painted anigre. A symbolic contrast occurs
between natural/sustainable and luxury/decadence
with a Tom Hardy sculpture set at the foreground of a
limestone wall.
