Saatchi & Saatchi

Great ideas, like beautiful flowers, require the safety of a germination process before sprouting and blooming. The design for the new Southern California office for Saatchi & Saatchi protects and celebrates ideas through their development in a metaphorical garden of diverse spaces connected via a meandering path.

As we dove into Saatchi & Saatchi’s world and learned about how their teams developed projects it became clear that the creatives needed a safe space to build and break and re-build ideas and concepts before formally pitching. The “idea” became its own constituent in the project—something to be considered spatially and solved for specifically. Whenever a design decision needed to be made, we returned to the question: “What is in the best service to protect the idea?”.

Our Client shared a desire to create a new home for the agency that supported exploration and fostered curiosity. The meandering path provides views across open “fields” (neighborhoods) and links up a series of protective seed pods (project areas/rooms) for safe and hidden idea generation; and garden walls to define the crops and showcase/pin-up the harvest. Apertures and strategic wayfinding allow the project to unfold rather than reveal itself all at once.

The warehouse shell provided its own inspiration. Originally developed in 1966 and designed by LA- based designer Craig Ellwood, the building features steel trusses at an industrial scale. As a single-level, 80,000 SF space with meandering circulation we knew we needed to ground the design with bold architecture that would act as orienting reference points throughout the journey. The creation of curated pods— the buildings within the building—in a range of scales, locations, and orientations establishes the path through the space.

These spaces provide the settings for this community of creatives to meet, discuss, collaborate, and advance the content that drives Saatchi and their clients’ business. The team also wanted to ensure that the sense of safety extended beyond idea creation and into the workforce. With a beautifully diverse population, it was important that the project reflected Saatchi’s strong culture and values of inclusivity.