Concrete Media
New York City
Specht Harpman

An environment tuned to the vagaries of dot-com hypergrowth

© Michael Moran

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

By James S. Russell, AIA

Concrete Media, a Web site developer of Internet-hosting services, bet on growth, moving into 40,000 square feet in the newly fashionable Starrett-Lehigh building, on Manhattan’s western edge, in late 2000. In Specht Harpman, Concrete found a firm that specialized in environments accommodating rapid change, since it has ridden the Internet start-up wave from its infancy way back in 1997.

Concrete needed better space because it had long outgrown its premises. It was forced to jam more people into an office suite that had been built for a previous tenant. There was no time to alter that earlier space or rethink it. When a high-ceilinged, light-bathed space became available in the Starrett-Lehigh building, it looked like everything their old office wasn’t and could never be.

The architects zoned the plan from inside to out. They placed most of the varying-sized meeting rooms on a raised platform, and terraced the rows of workstation benches down in two levels to the window walls opening to breathtaking views of the Hudson River. Rather than derive an aesthetic from the company’s tech-heavy mission, Specht Harpman took inspiration from the building and its surroundings. In the main conference room’s partitions, they picked up the thin-membrane configuration of the 1931 streamlined Moderne building’s steel sash (even tracking down the original fabricator, which is still in business). They turned the water towers that form Manhattan’s rooftop tankscape into meeting rooms. Only these "think tanks" have been fabricated by Long Island boat makers out of fiberglass, tinted milky "surfboard clear." The fiberglass enclosures were inexpensive to make yet brought the outside light into the meeting spaces.

Out of a long-neglected industrial space, the architects teased a workplace that has amenities any company might seek: beautiful light and a pleasing openness. Almost any white-collar endeavor could make good use of the combination of small but well-made workstations and varied spaces for meeting and socializing. "Flux is what it’s about," says Scott Specht. More than Specht or Harpman knew. The adaptability of the design will now be put to an unwelcome test. As this issue went to press, Concrete closed its doors, another casualty of the imploding dot-com economy.

See the June 2001 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of building:
Concrete Media
Concrete Incorporated New York Headquarters

Location:
Starret Lehigh Building
601 W. 26th St.
New York, NY

Gross square footage:
40,000 sq ft

Owner:
Concrete Incorporated

Architect's firm:
Specht Harpman
338 W. 39th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10018
www.spechtharpman.com