Custom Office Design Takes Slack Employees on a Wilderness Hike
In every instance the beauty is a reward for effort, a reinforcement of the idea that she who ventures away from her desk makes the most of her workday.
Studio O+A
Each day, employees at Slack’s recently-built San Francisco headquarters take a trip from Baja, Calif., to the Pacific Northwest—trekking through desert plains, scaling rocky mountains, swimming in waterfalls and streams, and wandering through forests.
The office communication platform and technology company commissioned local design firm Studio O+A to create an office around the concept that “every work project, like every hike in the wilderness, is a process of discovery.” The office is a series of “scenic surprises” around every corner, whether it’s a wall installation representing the typography of Lake Tahoe or a Milky Way ceiling brought to life through lighting installations.
The firm created a floor-by-floor evocation of the landscapes on the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT), where employees can experience a variety of nature scenes throughout their day as they travel up and down the building’s 10 stories.
“Hikers and campers know that a favorite trail or campsite is never the same place twice. At different times of year and as the years progress, it changes, offering new pleasures and new challenges every time,” says the design studio. “O+A’s design for Slack builds that capacity for change into the workspace.”
The office is designed to meet the needs of employees and adapt to shifting work schedules and new projects. The first-floor lobby is arranged with benches and tent-shaped couches for meetings or short breaks.
The next few floors imitate desert landscapes with baked earth colors, terracotta fixtures, artistically plastered walls that resemble desert sand and sediments, and cacti.
One meeting room on the second floor uses custom light fixtures and a Milky Way wall graphic—created by photography captured by Slack employee Adam Torres—to create the illusion of a desert night sky, while another, The Sunset Lounge, provides circadian rhythm lighting and white noise to counteract open office distractions.
Once on the fourth floor, employees have reached a mountain range, where sharp geometric wall shapes resemble peaks and summits. Workspaces and desks are divided with screens imprinted with mountain imagery and growing plants.
A library room on the 5th “Mountain Lakes” floor features a framed structure that emulates the bridges that cross mountain streams along the trail, and offers private cubbies, comfortable seating for meetings, and study nooks.
A soft blue color scheme and wall murals representing morning mist create a sense of stillness throughout the floor. In addition to the library, another bridge-shaped truss structure creates a lounge for informal employee meetings.
The office’s sixth floor is made to feel like a waterfall hike with a textured ceiling and lights that resemble water droplets, elevated, glass-enclosed conference rooms, a living green wall, water-like wall graphics, and a conference room cut out from the opening of a rock face.
On its “Forest” floor, meetings happen in open, circular structures designed to resemble the Fairy Rings of the PCT’s redwood trees.
Hallways are clad in wood paneling and more living green walls to bring the woodland to life, and natural green walls are accented by tree trunks surrounding lounge areas.
Conference rooms are again decorated in murals of Torres’ imagery—misty forests, tree top canopies, tree bark, and aerial topography shots.
Employees of the building’s 8th floor are exposed to a whole new kind of landscape in the Volcano tea lounge, where the decor sparks a fire with its glazed brick wall in wood and slate coloring and copper accents.
This floor also opens to an outdoor terrace with greenery and edible plants and herbs.
Slack’s creative team is housed on the “Glacier” floor, where color-changing glass panels in the hall, geometric light fixtures and glass accents, gray, triangular-shaped pinnable walls and white boards, and carved out seating nooks create an icy backdrop for the work day.
The final floor, “Summit”, uses foggy glass and rock-like concrete art forms to resemble the top of a mountain. While many of Slack’s floors have coffee bars, the executive floor lounge’s bar, encased in a marble design, keeps beer on tap for company events.
Angular steel arches frame a stairway to the highest point of Slack’s interior—the last climb of the journey to the top, where hikers arrive at the executive briefing center mezzanine to overlook snowy mountain peaks depicted behind open shelves.
