The context: the Red Bull Corporation’s North American Headquarters in Santa Monica was being totally designed from the ground up by HLW International.  Essentially a completely extreme architectural vision to be the new home for the world’s preeminent extreme sports drink company.  101 custom open offices were to populate an expansive floor plan situated underneath 30’ high industrial warehouse ceiling.  HLW’s design team with their acousticians had determined that a panel wall system had to be developed that would solve a significant portion of the entire building interior’s sound dampening.  An acoustical material called PEPP (porous expanded polypropylene) was to be wrapped on hollow office partition wall panels creating a charcoal grey monolithic look without any seams.  A ‘slip-in’ glass stacker was to nest into the top of all PEPP walls.  A contrasting upholstered white spline punctuated with overhead storage ran down the middle of all clusters.  With this conceptual design being bid on by millworkers, HLW was facing a 30% cost over run on their workstation design and significant engineering problems with the material manufacturing, panel joinery, and laborious installation procedures. 

Tangram Studio was charged to take the architect’s vision, a concept only, and develop it into a beautifully refined, functional and manufacturable product.  HLW’s floor plan dictated typical sizes of 12’ x 9’ and 8’ x 9’ creating serious shipping and handling issues relative to the monolithic nature of the design.  We began by breaking down the workstation’s into manufacturable elements each whose fabrication could be controlled by high tolerance CAD – CAM manufacturing equipment, and whose parts could be easily shipped, assembled, and installed.  The HLW design required Studio to utilize approximately 12 different precision fabrication processes from a global supply chain.  In order to execute the 101 stations over 3,000 discrete parts had to be produced without error and come together seamlessly during assembly. 

The engineering of the panel walls alone was a distinct challenge.  We had to find a precise yet economical way to cut and join over 1,200 different PEPP foam tiles into seamless surfaces on all panel walls.  By working directly with the PEPP material manufacturer we sourced sizes not normally available on the market to yield an economy of raw material sheets.   The PEPP foam, being a thermoplastic with an exceptionally low melting point, posed unique manufacturing problems.  Any milling or laser cutting would heat the edges and degrade the quality of joining the parts with a seamless tolerance.  In order to properly cut the material we engaged an aerospace waterjet cutting vendor who had decades of experience in precision cutting foam for aircraft interiors.  This vendor was able to cut all PEPP parts to the 1,000th of an inch without heating up the edges of the material.  This PEPP was then glued to a hollow torsion box sub wall made up of CNC milled birch plywood ribs and thin substrate skins milled hollow except for an engineered structural webbing.  Panels where edges in 11 ga steel trim laser cut with slots to allow tempered glass stacker panels to slide down into the panel core.  Finally panels were connected via powder coated, formed steel transition parts which allowed for quick fastening in during field assembly

Through all design engineering Tangram Studio took the challenge very seriously of retaining HLW’s design intent while producing the project on budget.

Design by HLW
Workstations by Tangram Studio
Photograph: Benny Chan of Photoworks
2007 Calibre Award Nominee