Sedgwick Rd.
Seattle
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects

An ad agency gets a lift with an office that fosters creativity and openness

© Marco Prazzo

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Sheri Olson, AIA

In 2001, the Seattle subsidiary of New York–based ad agency McCann-Erickson moved and recast itself as Sedgwick Rd., the name of a Port Orchard, Washington, street leading to a ferry dock. Sedgwick Rd.’s old quarters in a downtown Seattle office tower mimicked the buttoned-down layout of McCann-Erickson’s Madison Avenue offices, with executives seated along windows and staff located in the center.

The new office is on the edge of downtown, in a 1926 brick building unremarkable except for a two-and-a-half-story machine shop with multipaned clerestory windows and a delicate scissor truss of welded steel angles.

The building was already under renovation by the owner to add a fourth floor, and the machine shop floor was piled high with discarded beam cranes, steel-clad doors, and old window frames. The architects immediately saw treasure in the trash.

The architects measured and catalogued what had once been debris. "Frankenstein" is a pet name for a series of mobile panels—mounted on wheels and built using recycled welding doors, wood windows, and steel beams—that are reconfigured almost daily to create different meeting spaces in the old machine shop.

Former tool rooms on the shop’s south side now house editing rooms, meeting areas, libraries, and a bar for officewide events. Deceptively heavy-looking steel doors pivot open at a mere touch, opening these smaller rooms to the central area.

In the office space overlooking the machine shop, boundaries are not firmly drawn between departments. Instead, desks are clustered or stretched along a sinuous line, freeing up valuable daylit spaces for informal gatherings. An oversize stair cranks around columns and between trusses connecting the first and second floors.

See the July 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Sedgwick Rd.

Location:
Seattle

Gross square footage:
33,000 sq ft

Owner:
Manning Family, LLC

Client:
Sedgwick Rd. www.sedgwickrd.com

Architect:
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects
108 First Avenue South, Fourth Floor
Seattle, Washington 98104
www.olsonsundberg.com