Office X, Istanbul

Office X is an interior office project located on two floors of a plaza in Levent and serves to 200+ company members. Hosting mainly closed offices and unused high-capacity meeting rooms, the old office of the company had an outdated and traditional layout of working spaces. Consisting mainly of consultants who got used to working in these closed rooms, the directory claimed that they could work in open offices due to their absense and mobility during the day.

The first floor, of which one fourth is leased, serves as the client entrance and consists mostly of meeting areas whereas second floor, which has its direct entrance for the employees, serves as the operational part of the office. Users arrive at the office by either using the carpark elevator which continues till the 30th floor, or the pedestrian elevator which stops at the first floor. Benefiting both ways, floors are connected with a staircase which also serves as the reception desk.The client service staff, a.k.a consultants work in open workstations which are scattered all around the second floor. These workstations have no particular owners since consultants don’t need user-specified desks. There is a clean desk policy applied and users have lockers with reservations for storing their personal belongings. Additionally, all users have pigeon halls for individual mails which they can grab from at all times.

In terms of layout, all operational and auxiliary departments are located on the second floor. The rooms and open offices on the facade and partner rooms on the core are seperated with an endless corridor which does a loop on the full floor. Generally, there is a spatial open-close balance while placing departments alongside this loop. For example, close offices face semi-close executive assistants where open consultant workstations face closed partner rooms. Above the open offices and the corridor, there is an open ceiling with white trapezoidal sheets and dark grey beams, where the ceiling height is used at its most. Above the core functions, a lower ceiling height is used for the balance of the space. At each ends of the floor, there are team rooms which take up 8 to 10 people. There are also breakout areas located at the ends, where one hosts the main kitchen with lounge areas and hot desks.

Addition to the fixed architectural features of the office, the movable objects on the floor act like cell organelles, independent from their current places. Phone booths, seatings, poufs and furniture act as supportive items. The language of these items are comparatively funky and colorful, balancing the grayscale hues and industrialism of the architectural features, such as the open ceilings, steel beams and black-white storage units and desks. However, there is a much more corporate, subtle but effective language on the first floor.

The first floor is the welcoming floor which consists of the reception and welcoming area, a staircase, different sized meeting rooms and one dividable multifunctional meeting room. The floor is two-colored french herringbone stone, which is in a unity with the monoblock reception desk from the same stones. The stair is a steel structure system, with stone steps, wood covered walls and fragile railings. There is a storage system under this staircase used by the receptionists. All meeting rooms have liquid crystal glass, on which transparency can be adjusted.