Workplace

Mackay + Partners llp

At Mackay + Partners, we combine a keen commercial awareness with a quest for quality and design integrity. Twenty years of experience at the forefront of contemporary design has enriched our team with the talent, skill and confidence to challenge the usual. As a creative practice, we work on a variety of project types and scales, and always ensure our client’s objectives are exceeded.

Mackay + Partners is a progressive team. We aim to learn and evolve our ideas and knowledge through projects. In conjunction with our client, we examine the brief to expand the potential outcomes, pushing the boundaries of architecture and interior design to find the best solution.

To each project we bring a fresh perspective and plenty of enthusiasm. We enjoy what we do.

Workplace

By dictionary definition the Workplace is a place, building or room, where people are employed to perform a job or work, usually for money.

Previously, the Workplace represented a rationally organised space delineating hierarchical territories where management loomed to supervise those working in regularly laid out desks. Today’s Workplace reflects a combination of influences which are no longer defined by physical boundaries. Advancements in technology have been the driving force behind this shift in the workplace landscape, having allowed the dissemination of the workplace and the creation of an autonomous workforce. In combination with changing social attitudes to the physical place of work, the integration of cultures, company cultures and economies both local and global, the workplace is being challenged to allow greater flexibility and offer its constituents more.

Today, the Workplace encompasses not only a space, place, office, or building but also technology, the virtual world, and the values of the people and business working within in it.

Merck Serono SA

Mackay + Partners were commissioned, in May 2004, to complete the Interior Architecture of a new campus and international Headquarters for the Swiss based biotech company Serono.

The campus, designed by Chicago Architect Murphy Jahn, consists of six linked historical and new buildings. The campus offers the 1,200 person work force 40,000m2 of office and laboratory space, conference, auditorium, 400 seat restaurant, crèche, café, ‘speak easy’, library, and fitness facilities.

Mackay + Partners has created a series of overlapping schemes that links Serono’s corporate technological image and the contemporary expanse of the building’s glass and steel structure. The vast spaces have been divided by low level partitions, screens, and structures to create a more comfortable scale yet maintain the feeling of openness. Variations of light and colour within the scheme provide locations a sense of place different one from the other.

The pinnacle of Mackay + Partners’ design, however, has been its overall allocation of space creating hubs of activity within the floors. The creation of round double story ‘pods’ break-up the angularity of the original historical buildings and create visual interest as well as privacy.

CBS News Headquarters

CBS News headquarters in London comprises 22,000 sq ft of office, studio, and technical spaces.

The two main drivers of the new headquarters design where to reinforce the key media brand and create a sense of order. Mackay + Partners worked the logo repeatedly into the fabric of the office space by embedding the logo it into glass partitions and feature walls. Each office area and larger portion of the communal space is fitted with custom designed floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinets which appear as timber wall panelling and conceal the cupboards behind creating an elegant and uncluttered atmosphere.

CBS operation demanded a high technical specification and high quantity of services. Mackay + Partners reworked the ceiling void to provide space allocation for new and future air handling units which allowed the raised floor area to house cabling and provide future expansion.

Deloitte Consulting

Mackay + Partners interior design for Deloitte shifted the boundaries of what is normally expected of a corporate headquarters by introducing devices that would normally be utilised in hotel design. The reason behind this choice was that all consultants, managers and partners of the company had revolving briefs, dropping into the London base for individual work meetings or group projects.

We conceived of an interior that world allow staff to ‘book’ workspace over the internet but would also project Deloitte’s brand image. In addition, the design needed to attract Deloitte Consulting’s staff to make full use of the building and promote interaction between employees. Plans evolved through a ‘visioning day’, demonstrating to the company how premises could help communicate a brand and drive its business by running workshops and interviews with staff. The results helped to inform approaches from the functional needs through to the concept and idea of the workplace being a space that supports the value of oneself.

The hotel experience begins in the cavernous reception, with its 4.8 meter floor-to-ceiling height. The terrazzo floor peels away to form a sensuously curved reception desk where staff are offered hotel-styled facilities such as travel and accommodation reservations. Each office floor has service pods, casual seating hubs and touchdown strips. The furniture was chosen to continue the feeling that you were a guest of a special place.

M & C Saatchi

M&C Saatchi location, in Golden Square, features two buildings dating from 1914. Mackay + Partners designed an atrium between the existing buildings which spirals upward, incorporating each level of the building into its architecture. The new entrance allows the main interior gallery to be the focus of the street level observation. Frameless structural glass was the key to the dramatic atrium enclosures.

The final resolution of Mackay + Partners scheme optimizes stillness. It is a testament to the design that this initial sense of calm still resides within the series of spaces emanating from the reception area.

Our work with M&C Saatchi brought Mackay + Partners several architectural awards and has become the benchmark against which our practice continues to be measured.

McCann Erikson

The fast moving nature of the marketing services industry created particular challenges for us when we were commissioned to design the interior of these London offices. Unclear for most of the project as to whom the end user would be, the solution was to create a generic office with enough built-in flexibility to withstand further changes of configuration and occupancy.

Mackay + Partners aimed to give the interior a robust personality that suited the industrial, exposed concrete aesthetic of the building and would be strong enough to withstand the ‘churn’ of internal reconfigurations. McCann Erikson chose simple and muted colour palette of black, grey, and sliver but supplemented these with four accent colours providing visual highlights throughout the five storey building.

20/ 20

Focus is no casual pun on the manner in which 20/ 20, a leading optical retailer, approached the procurement of their workplace. After 2 years of searching for an appropriate space, Mackay + partners we contracted to bring to reality a work environment that has since become a ‘living organism providing an ever-changing backdrop to the people – our greatest asset – who come and go every day’ (Bernard Dooling – 20/ 20).

The workspace, and the process of design, centered on the way 20/ 20 operate, its’ manner, mechanics and function. The idea was not to alienate but provide a place that encourages people to work and be more about how people work rather than what they specifically did.

20/ 20 office remains open and transparent with no cellular offices however, offers nodal points for meetings or quiet work. The central café operated by 20/ 20 has become the area most utilized and with it, the most productive.

Valtech Consulting

It has often been our belief that we can learn from other like minded companies, and that we can in return educate each other over how the value of a good design can stimulated one’s environment. Valtech are a forward-looking global consulting group that specialize in e-business, training and technologies. The approach Mackay + Partners took aimed to reflect Valtech’s working patterns and their company outlook, as well as introducing a spatial and material narrative that evoked the journeys and environments of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’. In this way, we could be playful with representation, orientation and scale throughout the space that has become as much about play as it is about work.

Clerkenwell Workshops

Built as a Victorian book depository in 1820 for the new Central London Schools, the Clerkenwell building was converted into one of London’s first workshops for small, local businesses in the early 1960s.

Workspace Group Plc bought the in 2004 with the intention of retaining its use as a centre for creative work. Housing small and medium sized enterprises, the intention was to keep the Workshops ‘locally focused’ and nurture a range of small businesses that would continue to flourish and improve the quality and diversity of the area.

As architects for the project, Mackay+Partners has kept the building’s internal refurbishment simple, exposing the original Victorian fabric. To accommodate a variety of tenants, the curved building to the street has been ‘opened-up’ to provide larger units, whilst the rear building has retained the mix of smaller units.

Mackay+Partners has designed the courtyard to become the heart of the Workshops. A new stair, access decks and luminous translucent lift will provide access to both buildings. All of which is covered by a transparent ETFE roof providing year round protection to the walkways. At ground level, a new 300 sq metre iroko deck will offer a communal space for the tenants of the Workshops and the greater Clerkenwell Community.

Mackay + Partners LLP63 Gee StreetLondonEC1V 3RS

T 020 7608 1177F 020 7168 8000www.mackayandpartners.co.uk