Ayzenberg Group

Ayzenberg Group, a creative advertising agency that serves the video game industry, sought to expand its video editing capabilities through the addition of video edit bays, private offices, a common work area with critique spaces, and a flexible conference room. The new office orchestrates these spaces to allow and encourage interaction and interfacing between collaborators — essential to the company’s ethos.

Traditional video editing bays rely on orthogonal geometry that tends to impede face-to-face contact. We, in turn, developed a pentagonal plan to allow simultaneous sight lines between video editor, creative team, and video screen. This became the building block for the faceted geometry and angular expression throughout the project — shifted views and bent axes, manipulated perspectival space, and angular ceiling surfaces that baffle daylight to create bright or dim spaces and provide aesthetic variety.

The new critique space with its red rubber flooring ties the existing office together with the expansion to create a geographic and metaphoric heart for the workplace; acoustical tackboards allow informal pin-up critiques throughout. The black, white, and metal finishes and angular geometry of the new forms contrasts in productive and pleasing tension with the brick-and-wood texture of the existing building.