Universal HQ

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA.
Program: Offices, Health Club, Screening Rooms, Meeting Rooms, Parking.
Type: Invited Proposal, With OMA.
Size: 60,000 M2 / 650,000 SF.
Client: Universal Studios

The building contains Universal’s current and future divisions, offers them platforms to interact, laboratories to invent, silos for meeting rooms, places of assembly and relaxation. It is a corporate theatre where groups emerge, are disbanded, and regroup.

By dividing the program into horizontal office floors and vertical towers, the organization of the building becomes a diagram of the unique and the generic: specificity in the vertical direction, generic office space in the horizontal. No matter how turbulent the composition of the company becomes, the office floors provide the necessary flexibility, while the towers guarantee that a single entity is maintained.

At this scale of organization, architecture approaches urbanism. Universal is not so much an office plan as an urban plan, a map: the building as an organizer of different elements. The organizational diagram resonates more with a subway map than with a building plan.