Deep in Utah's high desert, Adobe is putting the finishing touches on its latest outpost — a low-slung but stylish 280,000-square-foot compound.
Sadly, the circumstances surrounding the building sound more mysterious than their reality, even with the NSA's new data center as a close neighbor. The location in the south suburbs of Salt Lake City is an up-and-coming region for tech business sometimes called "Silicon Slope." Adobe's new campus will operate as the company's digital marketing division.
The building itself, however, is unlike anything Adobe has ever built before. The company has hired designers from Rapt Studio to make sure the building design is integrated into the space at the deepest level, ensuring that, despite being an office building at its core, this isn't just one more massive tech campus.
David Galullo, CEO, and Cory Sistrunk, design principal, talked us through Rapt's approach to the project, offering a look inside both the facility and their design methods.
"We pride ourselves in not having kind of a Rapt look, but instead we try to make sure that we’re asking the right questions, that we’re pushing on a client to make sure that we’re getting exactly who they are, what their culture is, and what they’d like to be, and that our designs actually point in that direction," says Galullo.
He and Sistrunk use forceful language. They're enforcing their design ideals, pushing the company to capitulate, and capturing the attention of the employees.
"It's not something that you do just lobby, or in a huge communal space," Galullo says. "It's something that just permeates the entirety of the project."
Rapt hired Miles MacGregor, a street artist from LA known as "El Mac", to create a 75-foot mural of a girl drawing on a table.
"We tried to formulate the new Adobe, but in telling that story, we built a space where there are walls that speak to the history," says Sistrunk. "The concept's there that there's this innocence that children have around the idea of creativity that we want to remind people of."
Near the entrance, Adobe had a sort of lounge installed with touch panels, where clients and employees can chat about ideas.
"There's an area, we actually put a gas fireplace in, and it's kind of the hearth of the customer experience," says Galullo.
Rapt developed plans for the building in concert with WRNS Studio, the architects responsible for the design of the exterior, says Galullo.
"There was a healthy push and shove between the interior and exterior that allowed the building not to be designed just as a beautiful piece of architecture ... but was designed as an integrated interior-exterior," he says. "Because of that, the design aesthetic and the program bled through from the interior to the exterior and back in again."
Of the campus's 280,000 square feet, 80,000 is common areas, including an atrium, a cafe, a basketball court, and a fitness center. An additional 120,000 square feet have been green-lighted and are in the planning stages, while the site itself can hold a campus up to 600,000 square feet.
Often, companies will have different designers working on different aspects of their brand, from website to office to products.
"More and more of our clients are finding a disconnect between the various pieces of their consultant base and how they deliver design services," says Galullo. "It’s what really brought Adobe to us, and allowed us to bring a project to them that was not just a cool interior, but really did have a lot to do with the development and fostering of a culture and a brand and making more meaningful connections between that and their staff."
Both the interior and the exterior was developed around poured concrete, says Galullo.
"There's a certain genuineness around that, that we didn't spend a lot of money bringing stone tiles and suspended ceilings and all of that into the open areas," he says.
Only a small portion — less than 1 percent — of the building's budget went toward brand and culture, says Sistrunk.
Often, this kind of immersive environment is usually put on hold or not accomplished because people would view it as very expensive," he says. "And that's another part of the design challenge that we really like. You don't have to make an immersive experience something that’s astronomically expensive."
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