Montroy Architecture helps Publicis Groupe expand their Philadelphia, PA presence in a new 40,000 sq ft office.
New York City-based architectural firm Montroy Architecture (MA) designed the new, three-floor U.S. office of Publicis Groupe’s health market division at the 130-year-old Bourse Building in Center City Philadelphia.
Paris-based Publicis Groupe, one of the oldest and largest advertising and public relations companies in the world, recently relocated its health and wellness arm to the Bourse after outgrowing its old space in the nearby Wannamaker Building next to Philadelphia City Hall.
The 40,000-square-foot office in Philadelphia’s Old City is MA’s second project for Publicis. The firm also recently designed 25,000-square foot offices for Kekst CNC, another Publicis subsidiary, at 437 Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
MA began working on the Philadelphia project when Publicis’ executives and employees were establishing their post-pandemic return-to-office routines, and the goal was to make the transition to a new, shared work environment as easy as possible. Reflecting this, the design incorporates multiple social areas and comfortable, hospitality-inspired elements.
The Bourse Building, located at 111 South Independence Mall East, is a Beaux Arts office property from the 1890s, designed by G.W. & D.W. Hewitt for George E. Bartol, a grain and commodities exporter. The property originally served as a commodities exchange and is one of the first steel-framed buildings in Philadelphia. It features a full-height central atrium that allows high amounts of natural light into Publicis’ offices and houses a public food court on the ground floor. The landlord during the lease agreement and construction was MRP Realty. Lupert-Adler Real Estate Funds and Keystone Development and Investment have since acquired the property.
The MA’s team assisted Publicis early on, prior to lease signing, while the space selection was still ongoing. The designers reviewed shortlisted spaces for functionality and helped with lease negotiations, while the contractor MMB’s s construction personnel evaluated the constructability, available building systems and pre-existing conditions.
A Shift in Strategy
Publicis’ new office represents a significant change in the company’s workplace strategy. The new space has a smaller footprint and offers employees a hybrid work model, so the designers focused on accommodating these changes through increased number of social spaces, hospitality- and residential-inspired design elements, and increased flexibility in both space design and furniture selection. The same time, the architects followed the client’s desire for maintaining the sense of the company’s culture through branding, color selection and organizing the space for teams working on specific clients.
Versatile Design to Attract Employees back to the Office
The new buildout at The Bourse includes a private entrance, dedicated outdoor patio and elevator lobby along with space on parts of the first floor, an entire fifth floor and a partial sixth floor. Instead of private desks, workers are hotdesking.
That users and guests enter the space through a private, first-floor entrance leading to a lounge and club area, where Publicis entertains clients and employees can work or relax. The lounge features a long, wooden bar with yellow accent panels and brass footrests, a white marble countertop, green porcelain tiles around an arched inset for shelves behind the bar, and dark wooden bar stools with forest green upholstery.
A long wooden table, white upholstered lounge chairs and red leather wingback chairs help round out the main seating area, which also features custom-designed wooden shelving and wall panels, and a mix of original and reproduced plaster moldings along the walls and ceiling beams. The bar serves coffee during the day and drinks in the evenings, and the private patio out front has tables for outdoor socializing and events.
Aged wood plank flooring reinforces the vintage feel of the club, which features a modern seating area in the back. The rear of the space is a media lounge and library, with two tufted, leather couches facing each other in front of a multi-panel LED screen, which can be used for meetings, presentations or playing videos during an event. A new private glass vestibule connects the lounge to a private, Publicis-dedicated elevator, which takes guests to the company’s workspace on the fifth and sixth floors.
Upstairs, on the fifth floor, MA focused on the flexible work mandate and developed a floor plan with a mix of workstation areas, lounge seating and meeting rooms ranging small two-person meeting rooms to boardrooms that can seat 30 and a multifunctional café that can serve as a meeting and company-wide teleconference spot for hundreds of participants.
To increase flexibility, the architects selected furniture systems that are fluid and movable. The hallways feature several social areas for informal meetings and work, such as a mini-lounge with a mid-century, yellow leather couch and two black leather armchairs arranged in front of a wall of windows overlooking the atrium.
The floor plans include dedicated work areas for each of Publicis internal single client-focused agencies along the narrow ends of the building, each of which has its own color scheme.
On the fifth floor, desk areas are arranged around a massive pantry and cafe, which is outfitted with a long, white bar, custom-built dark gray cabinetry hosting a coffee machine and other appliances, white cafe tables and a mix of yellow and black chairs. Like much of this floor, the ceiling and ductwork are exposed and painted white, and long, horizontal LED light fixtures by Prudential Lighting help brighten the space. In keeping with the desire to preserve some historical elements, some areas feature the building’s original exposed brick walls. One brick-walled meeting area with floor-to-ceiling glass doors includes a hand-painted sign with an arrow announcing “free library.” Both sides of the fifth floor office connect in the center via an original internal bridge suspended over the atrium’s food court.
The light fixtures are contemporary in design and were selected to offer a visual contrast to the exposed brick or original moldings. In meeting areas, that might mean a suspended, circular LED disk, or in the downstairs lounge, it meant suspended glass globe lamps and circular LED strip lights of varying sizes. The project features tubular Pru1 Linear, 2” linear BionicPro2 and Gaze Soft Edge round lighting fixtures, all by Prudential Lighting.
Many of the conference rooms include nearly floor-to-ceiling glazing along the walls to let in natural light. In many cases, the glass wall panels look out over the building’s internal glass atrium, which cuts through all nine floors and features a large skylight, allowing sunlight into the inward-facing offices. Some of the glazed conference rooms feature wooden slat acoustical panels along the ceiling for sound dampening, with built in horizontal LED light fixtures.
Rounding out the fifth floor is a broadcast room for interoffice video production, broadcasting, postproduction and editing. The space is soundproofed and features bleacher-style seating for meetings.
Upstairs on the sixth floor are more work spaces, including meeting rooms, as well as a smaller, more stylish kitchen and café area. The café’s rounded alcove with a bright yellow/golden wall offers a spot for casual meetings or eating lunch on a green velvet banquette, with square, wooden black cafe tables and black chairs. Geometric black-and-white tiles cover the floor and the sides of the bar in the kitchen, which also has a polished, black marble countertop and black cabinetry for appliances and storage. Golden bar chairs and suspended glass bulb lights help add trendy touches to the pantry. More shared spaces are located on this floor, including wellness and lactation rooms, lounge areas and phone booths.
Products
Furniture manufacturers: workstations are combination of fixed height and height adjustable desks by AIS and Workspace48. The majority of ancillary furniture is Blu Dot with addition of Poppin pieces. Tables are by Nucraft and OFS Kintra, phone booths by Zenbooth, and conference tables are AIS Calibrate. The ground floor space features a mixture of lounge furniture by Arhaus, West Elm, Pottery Barn, Bright Chair and custom-fabricated millwork.
Lighting: tubular Pru1 Linear, 2” linear BionicPro2 and Gaze Soft Edge round lighting fixtures, all by Prudential Lighting.
Glazed office and conference room walls/partitions: Pure 54 glazed privacy partitions by Planet Partitioning
A Historic Surprise
During demolition of the first floor space, MMB Contractor’s crews discovered original plaster crown moldings and floor trims as well as a blacked out window. Publicis, MA and the landlord decided to preserve those details and even reconstruct the ceiling in the back of the first floor lounge to match the original ceiling over the bar and cafe area. The initial design for suspended ceilings in the lounge was abandoned in order to showcase the discovered original look in an architectural nod to the building’s history.
Other historic elements that required repairs were the brick pier walls on the fifth and sixth floors. Upon removing gypsum board walls during demolition, the crews discovered that sections of walls were previously repaired and filled in with unattractive concrete masonry units (CMUs). As these walls played an important interior design role, the project team decided to restore them. This called for a search for brick matching the original color and dimensions. The team eventually selected Columbia Smooth brick from Diener Brick Company.
The “aging” of the new brick to match the original piers material called for experimentation and creativity. The builder tested applying several processes to the brick in order to make it look older and fit the aesthetic a little better. The builders tried limewashing and spreading grout and plaster. Ultimately, they covered covering the new brick with a small amount of plaster mix and then scratching it off to give the surface an older brick look.
The piers also required innovative solutions during installation of Pure 54 glazed privacy partitions by Planet Partitioning. Securing the framing systems directly to the existing brick walls in several locations called for modifying the surface of the walls at the point of connection. From a technical standpoint, it created some challenges, but the same time resulted in a beautiful and clean aesthetic.
As part of the fit-out, MMB also significantly upgraded the HVAC system throughout the space. The contractor installed approximately 70 variable airflow (VAF) units to allow for personalized climate control in small zones as well as two new HVAC systems on the first floor, which are hidden in the lounge’s ceiling. To serve the MDF/IT/low voltage -room, MMB installed three mini-split units.
Contributors:
Contractor: MMB Contractors
Furniture supplier: Creative Office Resources
MEP engineer: Bala Consulting Engineers
Partition supplier: Lewis Stevenson Office Solutions
Design
Montroy Architecture’s team included principal Daniel Montroy, project manager Sarah Bigos, job captain Thomas Yeh, designer Jessica Gross, technical designer Adithi Vellimana and job captain Tammy Huang.
Photography
Ola Wilk
