Description
Often the building of a new headquarters goes hand in hand with a corporate reorganisation. Architecture can promote such reorganisational renewals. In 1968, SEI Investments began with the development of computer-supported training programmes for bank employees and now has become a leading global provider of asset management and investment technology solutions. Business grew, but the business model stagnated. In order to maintain its success, SEI had to be able to react more quickly to the market, to become more innovative and more customer-oriented. For these reasons, at the beginning of the nineties, a flat hierarchy was introduced along with a radical changeover to teamwork and increased middle management participation. As a result, the corporate culture was profoundly changed.
The new campus, planned by Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, supported this transformation. Half an hour from Philadelphia, the complex of five two-story buildings with façades that look like greatly enlarged pixels reminds one of a farm built of Lego bricks. The site is a gradually ascending one, and the buildings are arranged parallel to the old train track, which has been turned into the access road. They are interconnected by bridges and underground passages. The office areas are housed in the “barns” while the special functions, like the entrance area and the service areas have been placed in “silos.” In addition to the subdivision of the built volume into several buildings whose forms adapt to the landscape, elements like the verandas or the glass connecting buildings contribute to the human dimension of the campus. The buildings consist of simple structures which have been left visible, and which are evocative of barns on the inside too, and in spite a building depth
of 21 metres, are naturally lighted by large windows and skylights. The office areas are provisioned by a network of media connections suspended from the ceiling on springs so that the movable workstation can be connected to the computer network anywhere.
Staff are provided with a climatic shell, a workstation on wheels and infrastructure. Teams come together spatially and organisationally according to the task at hand. In this way, a large number of employees can reorganise very rapidly. With a flat corporate hierarchy, there are neither subordinates nor directives. All that counts are the team leaders’ powers of persuasion; they have to convince their team members to support them in carrying out the tasks they have been given. This way, ideas can come quickly to the fore and be verified by the team for viability. According to management, this increases efficiency, because the staff work on tasks that they know and like.
The campus supports the corporate reorganisation through its flexible space and its network of infrastructure nodes. The architecture becomes a service provider by contributing to the attainment of the corporate goals.
Drawings
Ground floor
Typical office floor plan
Section
Axonometric view of the media connections hanging from the ceiling, which form the core of the project
Photos
Exterior view: the plain façades remind one of greatly magnified pixels and create a colourful contrast to the rural idyll
Interior view: SEI provides its staff with space, docking stations and work stations with peripheral devices
Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.