When Digitas, an interactive and direct-marketing agency, opened in Chicago three years ago, it slipped into ready-made offices at Illinois Center. And, of course, the creatives were restless: The space wasn’t their own. So when another space became available nine floors up, the agency jumped at it and hired Perkins & Will to sculpt it into something looser and more open-despite the fact that the new offices were half the size of the old. Senior designer Jason Rosenblatt clearly had to invent space, and he did that most splendidly in the entry. He “found” a large meeting room by overlapping four smaller spaces. The reception area, conference room, breakout meeting room (shown here) and lunchroom become one, thanks to doors that pivot and slide. A ceiling-mounted projector and drop-down screen help with sight lines. Double arcs of laminated glass provide a translucent divider that adds necessary shards of color. Above are imagined pieces of sky–cloudlike cutouts, cove lit. “These are creative people,” says Rosenblatt. “The architecture has to reflect that.”
