THE PLAN 505 Eighth AvEnuE

When the nonprofit Common Ground chose to shed aging space on the 15th floor of 505 Eighth Avenue, the affordable housing advocates tapped Newmark Knight Frank director Allen Gurevich to find new offices. After a search across Manhattan, however, Mr. Gurevich ended up close to home: inside the buildings 12,000-square-foot fifth floor. More challenging for Common Ground, however, was building out a new, state-of-the-art space despite the budget constraints of a typical nonprofit. To achieve its requirements, officials at Common Ground turned to Marc Gordon, a partner at architecture firm Spacesmith, to do more with less. Messrs. Gurevich and Gordon reviewed the new floor plans with The Commercial Observer and explained why, exactly, Common Ground chose to relocate to the fifth floor last week.
While the number of private offices on the floor was reduced, Common ground did choose to add an additional conference room. After discussing the nonprofits needs with Mr. gordon, however, it became clear that at least one oversize conference room in the old space was rarely used to full capacity. they had a very large conference room, which i think was kind of inefficient because if you had a small group that you had to meet with it would end up being in a large conference room, said Mr. gordon. So we opted to use the area in more efficient ways instead of dedicating it to a conference room that may have been used once a month to its full capacity. As for artificial light, Spacesmith chose soft pendant lighting in which as much as 80 percent of the light is bounced from the ceiling. Such indirect lighting, said Mr. gordon, is ideal for offices that take advantage of an open plan. And that gives a very soft feel to the lighting, he said. its not harsh. theres no bulbs that your eye can see directly.

in an effort to reduce the number of natural-lightobscuring perimeter offices, which Mr. gurevich estimated at approximately 20 on the 15th floor, architects first had to convince Common ground executives to forgo cushy private offices. in the end, Mr. gordon convinced the nonprofit to rotate some employees into a bullpen while persuading its executive director and other top officials to relocate from corner offices. We deal a lot with corporations that have very entrenched ideas about how theyre supposed to operate, said Mr. gordon, who estimated that the fifth-floor space has six fewer private offices than before. And when people have been living in their spaces for quite a bit of time and they have an office its very hard to transfer them to an open-plan workstation.

While high-walled cubicles and perimeter offices thwarted natural light in Common grounds longtime 15th-floor space, Mr. gordon and Spacesmith developed a schematic that reduced the number of private offices while building out interior glass walls. Meanwhile, new workstation walls shrunk from nearly five feet to approximately 44 inches. there wasnt a lot of natural light penetrating the space, said Mr. gordon. So when we designed the new space we made sure that we addressed the situation by creating a very open plan, which was bright and brought in a lot of natural light.

Because no nonprofit wants to project an ostentatious design, Spacesmith architects took steps to create a modest space without cheapening the layout. indeed, painted gyp board, or standard sheet rock, was used to build out the interior walls while inexpensive Floorazzo floor tiles were used as a substitute for more expensive terrazzo. nonprofits are always challenging, but, at the same time, rewarding because when we do a project like this its never ego-based design, said Mr. gordon. its really client driven.

Another strategy to keep costs down was to keep the existing restrooms and a pantry in the same location as previous tenants did to avoid the cost of new plumbing lines. We reconfigured the restrooms and the pantry is in about the same location, said Mr. gordon. it was a fairly lowcost project by new York standards, and to expedite that we try to use existing infrastructure within the space as much as we could.

30|February 14, 2012|The Commercial Observer