The design of White & Case’s new office encourages collaboration and mentoring in a modern workplace that emphasizes health and well-being.
Excerpted from Interior Design:
If New York lawyers have immortal souls, underneath it all, then law offices should have some soul as well. That’s the reasoning behind White & Case’s surprisingly uncorporate headquarters. This [workspace] sprawls across the top nine levels of a tower in Midtown’s Rockefeller Center, and every inch is superlatively composed and calming. Each detail subtly underscores a commitment to well-being.
You see it on the hushed practice levels, with their expanses of adjustable-height desks and wide corridors with floorboards in maple chosen for the poetry of the grain—one of many earthy elements deployed for a crafted quality. “It’s a feeling of being made, not manufactured,” HOK senior principal Tom Polucci says.
You see the same approach in the cafeteria floor’s squares of end-grain oak, each chunk showcasing the entire whorl of the oldest rings at the heart of a tree, like a mandala inked by Mother Nature. And in the fitness center, which has a full-time trainer, freshly laundered workout clothes, and an Empire State Building view. And even in the restrooms’ blond European oak enclosures and gorgeously figured marble counters.