-By Michael Webb, Photography by Tim Griffith and Terrance Williams

Cutting-edge style and technological innovation are hallmarks of DesignworksUSA, a design studio that is hired to create almost anything from a roadster to a cell phone to an airplane interior. The firm was acquired by BMW a decade ago—along with its satellite offices in Munich and Singapore—but it continued to devote half its time to other clients, and it recently celebrated its 35th anniversary. Unfortunately, the office environment failed to match the quality of the work. Seventy designers were toiling away in a poorly-lit 1980s building, with low ceilings and an inflexible grid of desks enclosed by 6-ft. screens. In 2002, five firms were invited to submit proposals for opening up the space and promoting creative interchange. "Daly Genik was the smallest, but they were the best listeners," recalls product design director Holger Hampf. "We liked the designers' inventive use of unpretentious and scavenged materials. They wanted to design an office their own staff would enjoy working in, and even though they had built nothing but houses and a charter school at that time, we gave them the job."

Design principal Kevin Daly had worked on larger projects for Frank Gehry, and his firm has since transformed a monumental aerospace facility into a complex of studios and classrooms for The Art Center in Pasadena. Working for a firm of designers was a challenge, and the architects collaborated closely with the clients on every move and constructed mock-ups in their Santa Monica office to test ideas. "We wanted to consider alternatives, and we went through many iterations," says Hampf. So when Designworks finally approved the upgrade last year, Daly Genik was ready; it gutted and rebuilt the 15,000-sq.-ft. space in only seven months.

"Our chief task was to find common ground within a complicated network of design cultures, each with a distinct approach," observes Daly. "Designworks was making the transition from classic stand-up drafting boards to a fully digital practice. There had to be a much greater degree of openness and interchange, and I wanted the space to be a rich, 3-D experience with constantly shifting perspectives." Hampf offers the client's view of the shift. "As designers, we are good with objects but have a hard time dealing with the scale of space," he remarks. "Daly Genik translated our inventiveness into complex surface geometries, with white surfaces as a blank canvas to throw everything into relief."

To amplify space and light, the architects tore out the 9-ft. drop-ceiling to increase the height of the work area to 22 ft. and reveal the original glu-lam beams. They cut 30 small skylights into the roof plane, and baffled the light from these to avoid the need for shades. Trenches cut into the floor incorporate a new wiring grid, and the carpeted concrete absorbs sound and provides a feeling of softness. The pattern of pixilated squares in warm tones was developed by Designworks for one of its clients, and it's a daily reminder of the firm's versatility.

Daly Genik saw the office as a little city, refreshing the concept of the office as townscape that Frank Gehry introduced 30 years ago at Mid-Atlantic Toyota and later for Chiat Day. The firm created tower blocks (three enclosed meeting rooms), a shopping zone (services, a material library, and a coffee counter), widely spaced neighborhoods of workstations, and a piazza in which to hold informal meetings on colorful bean bag seating. Five glass-fronted offices house executives, while everyone else has an identical, unenclosed workstation. Daly goes for the abstract; he says "We wanted to avoid the representational and do nothing in a literal way."

That goal finds expression in the trio of meeting rooms, which differ only in size. Each is faced in an asymmetrical grid of Tectum (a fiber insulating board that doubles as a pin-up surface), and the facades are torqued on two sides to give them a sculptural quality. The interiors are lined with drywall to a height of 8 ft. with exposed metal studs rising another 8 ft. above. A shallow-V canopy of white, painted, wood strips diffuses sound and breaks up echoes. All the office furniture and workstations were sourced from Vitra to achieve a harmony of proportion and detailing, elegance, and durability. The architects designed the maple ply built-ins. As a boundary for this community, a band of drywall is folded and angled around the perimeter of the space.

For designers everything is about process. The serenity and spaciousness of these offices instill a sense of calm and promote a culture of sharing. The subtly angled surfaces bathed in natural light stimulate fresh thinking. Research, development, social intercourse, and architecture become a seamless whole.

For a list of who, what, where, please see page 170.