Project Details
- Project Name
- Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre
- Location
- Canada
- Architect
- Clive Wilkinson Architects
- Client/Owner
- Microsoft Corp.
- Project Types
-
Office ,Commercial
- Project Scope
- Interiors
- Size
- 142,000 sq. feet
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $16,510,000
Los Angeles–based Clive Wilkinson Architects (CWA) began working with Microsoft three years ago, when the tech giant contracted the firm “to look into how to develop their workplace for the future,” says principal Clive Wilkinson, FAIA—in particular around areas of collaboration. CWA developed guidelines for a more engaged workplace, and when the opportunity arose to deploy them in a new satellite hub in Vancouver, British Columbia, it jumped at the chance.
Designed and built out in 15 months, the new Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre occupies the top two floors of a recently reskinned former department store. Part of the goal for the new space was to have a much more open office floor plan than existed at the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, but navigating such a shift in office culture is tricky. “Microsoft is a very large company,” Wilkinson says. “It’s a bit like dealing with a country—there are lots of different population groups and cultural areas.” In Vancouver, there are three working groups: two focused on gaming and a third on software development.
Lead designer Sasha Shumyatsky says that the aesthetic for the flexible workspace was a study in analyzing Microsoft’s corporate identity, which isn’t always easy to pin down. “They are comfortable with their legacy brand flexibility,” he says. “They’ve been less concerned than companies like Apple about consistency in the brand, so we persuaded them to take it more seriously. We wanted to leverage characteristics of Microsoft’s Redmond campus, which is in a forest.”
In Vancouver, that translated to a theme of branches and boulders that plays out in the 142,000-square-foot interior. For the “branches,” open wood-slatted ceiling planes have integrated light fixtures that obscure the mechanical systems above. Making up the “boulders” on the “ground” are collaborative meeting pods interspersed along circulation routes. Wood tones appear throughout, and the firm used pops of color from carpets and furniture to “create zones and character,” Shumyatsky says. The team widened the opening for an existing escalator and replaced it with a sculptural stairway.
To encourage interaction between the working groups, amenities such as a coffee bar, dining spaces, and a maker space called the Garage are threaded through areas of bench seating. The notion of an open-office plan for the high-tech industry is hardly a new one, but for this client it pushed the envelope of where their workspace can and should be: “They were keen on doing something innovative, but they had to be conscious of benchmarking against company standards,” Wilkinson says. It was a very adventurous project for them, and I think you can read Microsoft’s future into this.”
Project Credits
Project: Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia
Client: Microsoft Corp.
Design Architect/Interior Designer: Clive Wilkinson Architects, Los Angeles . Clive Wilkinson, FAIA (design director); Sasha Shumyatsky (lead designer); Meghan Kelly, Danielle Shaffner, AIA (project managers); Ying Song, AIA (project architect); Amelia Wong, Reiko Wei (architectural assistants)
Executive Architect: Perkins+Will, Vancouver
M/P Engineer: AME Consulting Group
Electrical Engineer: AES
Structural Engineer: Read Jones Christoffersen
Project Manager: Jones Lang LaSalle
General Contractor: Kindred Construction
Lighting Designer: Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design
Size: 142,000 rentable square feet
Cost: $22.23 million Canadian (approx. $16.51 million)