Children’s Institute Hub @ Long Beach

This collaborative office is a dynamic workplace for the therapists of a child-oriented social services non-profit. The landscape of clustered team-work areas, smaller spaces for focused meetings, gathering areas to encourage chance encounters, and decompression zones for quiet meditation re-thinks the open office model though intensive analysis of program structures, mobility patterns, team operations, and the organization’s mission. The client envisioned a regional hub with a shared workspace where widely dispersed teams of family service counselors for at-risk situations would overlap and reconnect with their colleagues when returning from in-home visits. In turn, this location offers a welcoming facility for clients to visit the counselors at work. The project site is centrally located in a service area dispersed across Los Angeles County and often traversed daily by the providers. The design response is an unorthodox field of team-centered zones that are open and collaborative yet defined within the larger whole using a system of strategically perforated office bars. Half of the project, licensed for on-site client services, observes state-required physical separation from the counselors’ workspaces but is connected through translucency, daylighting and geometry to reinforce the shared nature of achieving mental health. The investment in design works, according to one industry professional, to “destigmatize the organization’s provision of services and the service recipients” themselves, and demonstrates its power to enrich the way people work.