Open for business

September/October
2013
Open for business
Two off-the-wall offices
NeoCon on the rise
Designers at work: a portfolio
Including IDC’s Dimensions
/13 4:22 PM
Open for Business
Wild blue yonder
For Montreal-based digital agency Blue Communications,
Anne Sophie Goneau and Jean Guy Chabauty design a
compelling, creative, collaborative arena.
—By Rhys Phillips
All together now True-blue couches centre the room and serve as the flexible meeting zone.
Photography by Stéphane Groleau
September/october 2013 CANADIAN INTERIORS 39
This page Along one side of the space is a 36-foot-long communal table, a multifunctional and laboratory-like island for
collaborative work. The presence of a stuffed hammerhead shark, painted white and mounted high on the wall, is entirely
benign. Opposite Custom-designed staff desks are constructed of environmentally responsive honeycomb cardboard, covered
with 1/8-inch plastic, supported by bent steel. Inset In the entrance vestibule, a neon logo asks/declares “Why Not Blue.“
The protracted economic uncertainty since 2008 has unfortunately refocused attention onto how modern economies have operated
rather than on the profound epochal change underway. This
misdirection is happening as, among others, economist Jeremy
Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Wired editor and
entrepreneur Chris Anderson (Makers, The New Industrial
Revolution) have already sketched out a very different socioeconomic future. The exponential progress of digital technology
– and the imperative emergence of green-based energy – is
engendering a revolutionary “distributive communication
network” that, along with radically different ways of “making
things,” will dramatically change how we work, play and live.
London’s Design Museum’s current exhibition, “The Future Is
Here: A New Industrial Revolution,” offers a small glimpse into
how digitalized manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing,
laser cutting and generic, multi-axis robots are increasingly
40 CANADIAN INTERIORS September/october 2013
operational. In turn, digital communication, particularly the
Internet, provides the platform for rapid, highly efficient technical advances through open sourcing. In addition, rapidly maturing digital networks have thoroughly radicalized distribution
options and access to funding. As well, it has opened up to event
the most modest “DIY maker” access to inexpensive product
testing, design improvement through open engagement, demand
assessment and alternative marketing. Some of the specific
digital tools responsible include social media, crowdfunding and
open, flexible technical communities on a world scale.
Since 1998, Sophie Lymburner has built her Montreal-based
Blue Communications into a multi-award winning “digital agency
… that creates branded websites and applications, content
strategies, social media, and IT development [in order to] connect
brands with people who connect to each other in the digital
space.” For example, Blue created a customizing app for Lands’
End Business Outfitters Uniform Design Studio that permits
users to drag and drop desired gear into their “canvas,” mix and
match combinations and insert their own brand logo.
When growth demanded a move from the firm’s cramped and
conventional closed offices, Lymburner choose to relocate to
2,750 square feet of open space on the eighth floor of the iconic
brewing tower of the old Dow Brewery. LEED-designated, the
building is located in the city’s emerging adaptive-use industrial
heritage neighbourhood of Griffintown. While the space offered
high ceilings and panoramic views of Montreal through mammoth windows, it was still raw, cluttered, not-to-code and
unfinished. As a result, designer Anne Sophie Goneau was tasked
to convert this “scrap space” into a creative, collaborative arena
with flexibility to morph into a dynamic corporate events venue
at night, even complete with a DJ.
With limited time, Goneau joined forces with her old patron,
September/october 2013 CANADIAN INTERIORS 41
This page At left is the meeting room, an almost seamless glass box that appears to float within the larger volume, providing
acoustical if not visual privacy when needed. Setu office chairs from Herman Miller surround an Eames conference table.
Opposite In the meeting zone, Artemide’s Tolomeo lamps add a bit of disorder and spatial distortion, “like the chaotic
placement of park trees,” in the words of designer Goneau. Their human scale emphasizes the office’s exceptional height.
veteran Montreal designer Jean Guy Chabauty. Their mandate,
she says during a joint telephone interview, was to create a series
of work zones that avoided walls to ensure a stimulating environment that encouraged communication. Access to natural light
and city views, a comfy area for informal interaction and plenty
of visual projection planes were also required.
In response, the space, with its soaring 30-foot-high bare
concrete ceiling, was stripped to its basic elements, the walls,
mechanical pipes and conducts painted pristine white, the tall
windows left unadorned and the concrete floor simply varnished.
To enhance the initial experience of the almost glowing “less-ismore” result, a tightly compressed entrance vestibule, bare
except for a blue-neon logo asking/declaring “Why Not Blue,” was
introduced. The billboard floods the small space with an eerie
bluish glow that ensures a distinct jolt on encountering the
voluminous, light-filled box beyond.
42 CANADIAN INTERIORS September/october 2013
Everything is white except for true-blue sectional couches,
custom designed by Goneau and Chabauty, which centre the
room and serve as the informal but comfortable and flexible
meeting zone. Around this seating, Artemide’s freestanding
Tolomeo lamps, says Goneau, add a bit of disorder and spatial
distortion, “like the chaotic placement of park trees.” Their
human scale also helps emphasize the office’s exceptional height.
Along one side is a 36-foot-long communal table, a multifunctional and laboratory-like island for collaborative work. (Not
incidentally, it also doubles as a staff kitchen and bar for
evening events.) The island, with its retro-like lab stools by Jeff
Covey, is custom designed by the designers and constructed of
environmentally responsive honeycombed cardboard, covered
with 1/8-inch plastic. Elsewhere, custom designed staff desks
also incorporate the same unconventional material while
supported by a white painted structure of bent steel.
Frozen in motion, painted white and mounted high on the wall
above the island is a stuffed hammerhead shark, its broad mouth
somewhat ominously agape. While some might see a reference to
the swimming-with-sharks world of television’s Mad Men, here
the intended image is more benign (to be fair, while hammerheads have been known to attack humans, there are no known
fatalities). The shark’s tail overlaps a sizable frosted glass mirror
that represents an aquarium. In other words, say the designers,
the tableau expresses creativity escaping conventional constrictions to float in a sea of the imagination.
While the firm believes creativity best flourishes in a somewhat chaotic open environment with frequent opportunities for
casual convergence, a modicum of privacy is sometimes required.
An almost seamless glass box that appears to float within the
larger volume provides acoustical if not visual privacy when
needed. Inside, Berlin-based Studio 7.5’s Setu office chair for Her-
man Miller, designed to LEED standards and ubiquitous
throughout the office, surrounds an Eames conference table.
Beside this meeting room and tucked into the building’s corner is
Lymburner’s enclosed but also transparent executive office, made
just a wee bit cozier with a baby-blue Herman Miller coach and
shag rug.
Anderson’s book provides a fascinating insight onto an
emerging digital industrial revolution that suggests a new
“maker” economy characterized by ordered chaos. Increasingly
there is an almost oxymoronic blend of intense, open and
creative collaboration forming and reforming across geographic
and occupational boundaries but also driven by a culture of
individual entrepreneurship. Blue Communications’ corporate
office suggests a digital company stripped back to core elements,
generic for flexibility but still oddly compelling enough to bring
home the brand. c I
September/october 2013 CANADIAN INTERIORS 43