Our slogan at officeinsight is “Giving voice to those who create workplace design and furnishings”; however the workplaces we usually consider are strictly offices. So when Bloomberg’s project for a new warehouse in London came to my attention, I thought it would be interesting to see how the design of a warehouse space might share planning ideas with workplaces that are strictly offices.
Bloomberg L.P. is a New York headquartered financial data service and business news company. It develops and shares real time investment data and business news. Those of us outside the financial and investment world know it best for its Bloomberg television channel and Bloomberg Businessweek, but Bloomberg’s history and a significant part of its business today is providing real time proprietary information to professional subscribers through the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg Keyboard.
You can think of a Bloomberg Terminal as the link to the proprietary and secure Bloomberg data network, but most often there is also a physical aspect to it. Many subscribers choose Bloomberg’s monitor arm with between two and six flat screen monitors along with the Bloomberg Keyboard – a regular keyboard that has been modified to make its use specific to the Bloomberg Terminal and intuitive to traders and investment professionals.
This physical aspect to Bloomberg’s business is what requires them to have warehouses near the financial centers they most often serve. The warehouses act as both distribution and repair centers for the Bloomberg Terminal with its myriad flat screen monitors, monitor arms and Bloomberg Keyboards, and as printing and distribution centers for Bloomberg’s print media.
Prior to this project, the company’s warehouse near The City of London was too small and cramped to efficiently handle the business with its clients in that financial center. The new warehouse, located in an industrial park near the Canary Wharf district and London is five times larger. Part of the total floor plate has been developed into a two story office space with the first floor housing the printing activities; the second floor the warehouse offices.
Woods Bagot was Bloomberg’s choice for design of the new warehouse. Having offices in New York and London with a track record of well established processes for collaboration, working around time zones and an effective process for information sharing between Woods Bagot offices as well as with its clients made the firm a winning choice for Bloomberg.
Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, head of global design at Bloomberg, said, “We had contact primarily with the New York office and they worked very closely with their team in London. Occasionally we had meetings with all of us around the table, both here and in London.”
Built in 2002, the warehouse building is part of the closest industrial park to The City of London. Understanding the company’s needs, the Bloomberg real estate team found the warehouse and assessed every possible angle before negotiating the tenant arrangements.
“Finding this site so near The City of London was such an important aspect for us, because most warehouses in the Docklands and Canary Wharf area of London have been converted to flats,” said Ms. Frattini Magnusson. “So very few warehouses are left for actual use as warehouses. Another positive aspect of this location is that it is near public transportation hubs which makes it a very easy commute for our people.”
Since the London warehouse is the hub for the entire EMEA Region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) for Bloomberg, allowing for growth was a key part of the design strategy. To that end, this space is five times as large as the one the company moved out of.
“We had a desperate need for a larger warehouse to accommodate all the state of the art, complex activities that take place there,” said Ms. Frattini Magnusson. “The design challenge was to come up with the best possible solutions for delivery, shipping and receiving activities which included consideration of very stringent security procedures to make sure that everything coming in is properly scanned to make sure nothing dangerous is received in the warehouse.
“At the same time our company is very concerned with our workplace philosophy that is about total transparency and the absence of segregation or separation of activities – again, in the spirit of having nothing to hide. This philosophy of openness and transparency is what gave rise to the Terminal in the first place because it was originally designed to create transparency in the bond market. And this idea of transparency has grown and permeated everything we do.”
The plan provides for 74 tech benches where Bloomberg Terminals are fitted out for installation and repaired if necessary. In addition there are 19 packing benches where Terminals, Keyboards and literature are packed for shipment to customers. At present, there are about 35 people working in the facility with plenty of room to grow.
The strict adherence to Bloomberg’s philosophy of openness results in some unusual design features in Bloomberg offices, the most striking being an absence of reception areas.
“When you enter a typical Bloomberg office there is no progression or barrier that secludes you from what’s happening,” Ms. Frattini Magnusson. “When you arrive in the office, you are right in the middle of what’s happening. Everything is very open and perceivable. So it was very important to us to try to replicate that sense of openness in this very different context. We wanted to eliminate any sense of separation between the offices and the warehouse and to create a space that would allow both groups to see what was going on in the others’ space. And I think we accomplished that goal in the project. From the offices you can see all the activity in the warehouse, and from the warehouse you can see what’s going on in the office.
And this is our goal globally – to create very democratic workplaces. Because we are all, irrespective of what we do or how many people we manage, what our rank is – everybody is sitting at the same size desk in an open environment, having access to everybody and all the things they need to be efficient and perform their job.”
That said, it is also a goal of the global design team to create a layer of regional differentiation among projects in a way that is sensitive to local influences and cultural differences. So while the mandate of openness is always present, it is not the goal of the Bloomberg global design team to make every office look the same regardless of local influences. In this project, perhaps the best example of sensitivity to the surroundings is the use of shipping container corrugated metal as the wall cladding and the use of materials and colors throughout that relate to the industrial quality of the surrounding area of London.
When I asked Ms. Frattini Magnusson about post occupancy evaluation for this project, she told me it wasn’t really a great one to study, because the former warehouse was so inadequate that the move up was such a huge improvement that there were very few issues that had to be addressed. In fact the only post occupancy issues the design team had involved acoustics, which they handled satisfactorily with the addition of acoustic panels.
Using color, supergraphics, shipping container corrugated steel, acoustic panels and adhering to Bloomberg’s philosophy of openness and transparency in the office spaces, Wood Bagot has created a warehouse that successfully bridges the several activities carried out there and does it in an aesthetically innovative and pleasing way.
