Hungry Man Productions is one of the world’s foremost producers and marketers of commercials, those ads you may see on your TV and other screens. Perhaps you’ve enjoyed the off-beat wit of their current commercials for Geico (with the ever-sliding soccer hero or the expanding cowboy belt buckle).
The firm has offices in New York, London, Rio and Sao Paulo, but it was its Los Angeles headquarters that presented a design challenge to Freelandbuck Architects of L.A. and N.Y.C. The production company was already occupying 8,000 square feet in an industrial structure, but was not happy with its lack of privacy and the acoustics of its yawning metal-enclosed space.
Freelandbuck came up with a concept of private cubes dispersed among shared open spaces. They then developed the design in a way that reflected the subtle humor for which Hungry Man’s output is known. The feigned randomness of the cubes’ placement is actually carefully calibrated to support important relationships between key individuals while subtly shaping breakout areas to support teamwork. The irregular angular layout was also inspired in part by irregularities in the original volume, which had some variation in roof pitches and one corner lopped off to fit the available building area.
Given the tall volume of the structure, the architects stacked some additional cubes on top of the floor-level ones to be used for display of objects or images.
One overall design strategy was that nothing new be allowed to touch the original envelope, except for a few things necessarily mounted on walls or framing members.
As for the design of the cubes themselves, their simple steel-stud frames are clad in medium-density fiberboard with a subtle variety of surface patterns produced by computer-controlled milling. These patterns pick up cues from the corrugated metal cladding of the enclosing structure and comment as well on their own angular arrangement in the space. Each exposed side of a cube is an abstracted view of a few of them set at odd angles, rendered in grooved material oriented at different angles.
For lighting, the offices get ample California sunshine through skylights in the roof and in the tops of cubes – supplemented by task lighting. After dark the space as a whole is lighted unevenly but adequately by hanging fixtures.
The chairs seen in the photos, inspired by those depicted in Roy Lichtenstein paintings, are simply stand-ins made of printed poster board and foamcore. They were placed in the breakout area and an upper cube before furniture and displays intended for those spaces were in place. The actual furniture throughout the office – most of it existing – was not chosen by the architects.
Freelandbuck, recently identified as one of Architect magazine’s “Young Progressives,” designs houses and other moderate-scaled buildings, commercial interiors and speculative installations, often featuring computer-generated three-dimensional patterns and constructions.
