Endeavor / 2004

Beverly Hills

Site: Beverly Hills Triangle
Program: Talent Agency Offices and Screening Room
Size: Offices 57,000 sf / Screening Room 4,000 sf
Graphic Des: 2 x 4
Status: Completed 2004
Exec Arch: IA
Photos: Benny Chan / Fotoworks

Located within a 1961 Charles Luckman building in downtown Beverly Hills, this interiors project consists of 63,000 sf of offices for nearly 200 people and an 80 seat screening room. WME / Endeavor is now the largest talent agency in the world and the company represents a wide range of writers, directors, and actors including Martin Scorsese ¹ and Paul Thomas Anderson.

OFFICES
The client program and spatial organization is based on the dimensions of the existing concrete building and the necessary visual and acoustical connection between the agent and his/her assistant. All partners and agents have window offices along the perimeter with their assistants situated within the adjacent open office space. The circulation itself was entirely predetermined and has to provide access to all offices between the agent and their assistant. Due to sight lines and computer screen visibility, the shared workstations are situated directly in front of the doors, with each assistant looking diagonally into the agent’s office.

STRATEGY
Given the straight forward planning dictated by the building, the more expressive aspects of the project can be found in ceiling / wall deformations surrounding the main lobby and conference room areas, and in the core elements that float within the field. The main premise of the open office space was to allow for daylight to reach into the assistant’s area. The sectional rise toward the perimeter and a band of clerestory glass creates natural lighting conditions which significantly enhances work life and the collective spirit of the agency.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

As the long slab building is broken into two legs by the main vertical circulation core, the double floor office is completely divided into four distinct zones (two per floor). Given the repetitious nature of the office layout, a wayfinding or coding system became a necessary element to the design. Each of the four zones is given a general color range (Magenta, Cyan, Orange and Green) to orient the agents and their visitors. Walls perpendicular to the length of building are saturated with these colors, including special wallpaper graphics on the secondary cores.

Taken from macro images of TV grain, around the idea of overexposure, these images were developed in collaboration with 2X4, a New York based graphic design company. In addition to color coding the open offices, symbols were introduced for certain support programs as washroom, kitchen, electrical closet, janitorial, etc.

SCREENING ROOM

Occupying 54 ft of street frontage on Camden Drive, the screening room consists not only of a high performance space for viewing films, but also a large pre-function lobby area, a kitchen/bar, and a major façade to the street. Our ambition was to make what is essentially a private space become more public. This serves two purposes: One is to create as much spatial depth as possible in the entry sequence so as to break down the flatness of the “storefront” conditions surrounding it. The other is to create a public identity for Endeavor in a way that the offices cannot.

The folded aluminum panel façade and the smooth, white undulating ceiling and wall surfaces that form the first 10 ft of the space allows passersby to peek in, through, and around these surfaces to catch fragments of the floor and ceiling surfaces inside. This sense of voyeurism or of spectatorship is analogous to cinema watching or even stargazing.

Inside, the ceiling surface splits into 3 major bands that each has its own programmatic performance and sectional profile. The exterior wall of the screening room is wrapped with wallpaper designed by 2X4. The interior of the screening room is a deeply saturated red world consisting of different materials and textures of paint, carpet, and fabric.

Yes, the interior of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey was a reference.

Project Team: Neil Denari, Duks Koschitz, Jae Shin, Stefano Paiocchi, Betty Kassis, Matt Trimble

1 The first film screened was a progress print of Scorcese’s The Aviator.