Reworking the Workplace
ask doug wittnebel whom he considers
among the world’s most influential workplace
designers, and you’d expect his answer might be Clive Wilkinson, the celebrated designer
of Googleplex, Google’s modernistic Moun-
tain View headquarters. Or going back further, maybe Frank Lloyd Wright, whose modern
layouts for the Larkin Building or the Johnson Wax Building predated the current benching
seat layouts of many technology companies. Instead, Wittnebel, a design director in the
San Ramon office of Gensler, a global design firm that’s been a leader in workplace de-
sign innovation for decades, looks up from
his iPad and says simply, “Conan O’Brien.” Surely you don’t mean Conan O’Brien, the comedian and late-night talk show host?
“Yeah, actually I do,” says Wittnebel with a
smile. “Not in the sense that he designs for the workplace, but rather from the strong
public reaction to a bit he did a few years
ago at Intel. Since then, our clients invariably come to us and say, ‘Whatever you do, we don’t want that!’”
The bit Wittnebel refers to is now part of
Silicon Valley lore. In it, O’Brien is given a
guided tour of Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters, where he’s introduced to the classic
old-school Valley workplace—a monotonous, soul-numbing maze of high-walled cubicles,
where employees identify themselves by what pillar they’re near (“I’m an E-4”), and first-time visitors need a trail of bread crumbs to find their way out.
It’s the kind of workplace design Wittnebel is only too happy to see being torn down, one gray cubicle wall at a time.
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Gensler’s San Ramon Office at BR 1
New office designs foster collaboration and creativity
“Workplace design today is much more reflective of social and technological dynamics,” he says. “We carry our office in our iPads. So the
actual physical location is less a place to work as it is a place to meet, to gather and collaborate. It’s more about sharing than staking out a space and saying, ‘This is mine.’”
It’s a new way of designing that has profound 17