Contract Magazine - May 2018 - 85

Studio O+A revisits its original design
for the offices of a fast-growing tech company

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Cisco Meraki
Architect and Interior Designer
Studio O+A
Client Cisco Meraki
Where San Francisco
What 55,646-square-foot
fourth-floor expansion
Cost/sf Withheld
at client's request
For a full project source
list, see page 100 or visit
contractdesign.com.

How do you create a workplace that can expand
gracefully as a company grows? San Franciscobased Studio O+A confronted that design challenge
head-on when working for a repeat customer: wireless
networking company Cisco Meraki. Studio O+A,
which designed the office a few years ago, was recently
commissioned to handle the expansion. "It's rare
to have the chance to go back and revisit a project,
but here we had a great opportunity to see how we
could improve things after a few years of occupancy,"
says Studio O+A's co-founder Primo Orpilla.
Before tech behemoth Cisco acquired it in
2012, Meraki was a quirky startup of engineers who
liked to hold meetings in a yurt inside their vintage
warehouse office in San Francisco's Mission District.
Rapid expansion led the company to seek new digs
in a modern six-story office building in the city's Mission
Bay neighborhood. In 2013, Studio O+A designed the
first two floors of Cisco Meraki's new office, and later
a third. Last year, it came back to tackle a fourth floor.
Workplace 1.0
In the initial project, Studio O+A emphasized a range
of working environments, part of the de-corporatizing
approach to design that the firm has become known
for. "We wanted the employees to have as much control
and choice over their environment as possible," Orpilla
says. "They can reconfigure their workstation to be
in a line or a horseshoe shape. They can also take their
work and move to different parts of the building."
On the "L"-shaped floors, the design team
interspersed desk areas with open lounges, sunken

conversation pits, and yurt-inspired octagonal
booths. To retain a sense of Meraki's original environment within the sleek new setting, they incorporated
a number of wood finishes, even adding an exposed
wooden ceiling to the lobby and custom tables from
MASHstudios. The color palette emphasizes aqua
and teal to complement the views of San Francisco Bay.
Iterative improvement
Cisco Meraki grew rapidly, and many of the
office's lounge areas became co-opted by desks.
As employees "hacked" the space to create their
ideal environment, it also became cluttered; tall racks
of networking equipment, personal furnishings, and
team flags hanging from the ceiling mingled together
with workstations in idiosyncratic configurations
that would give most facilities managers pause.
So when Studio O+A returned to design the
expansion in 2017, it anticipated the company's future
increase in headcount. The nearly 56,000-squarefoot floor currently holds about 400 people but
is designed to accommodate up to 500. "The idea
is still to provide the flexibility of different work areas,
but we had to plan ahead for filling in those spaces,"
says Joseph Rodriguez, design director at Studio
O+A. "So instead of putting those different work
environments among the workstations, we put them
along the main circulation routes. There are a dozen
places that they can infill, but it's also very clear
where they can't."
The circulation routes are strongly defined
by lining up the meeting rooms and enclosed booths,
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