There’s a building at 57 Great Jones Street in New York City that continues to draw me into its sphere. I had found the book, found the neighbourhood sake bar, and I had the secret number. Now I wondered what had gone on behind these storied walls. What impact did the physical nature of the building have on the creativity that went on inside it? This is a story about the power of connection and collaboration. It’s a story of things moving full circle and it’s a story of exploring different methods of creative practice.
I found a job in Tribeca and every day I would walk 30minutes each way, crossing the downtown avenues. Past St Mark’s church, heading diagonally up Stuyvesant Street. Past the truncated building at the corner of 10th St. Through Astor Place and left on Broadway before making a quick right on Waverly Place. Sometimes I would detour past 57 Great Jones St, longing to see inside. Every day I crossed Washington Square Park diagonally, from corner to corner. Bleecker to Carmine, before taking a left on Varick where the We Work was located. This was at the height of WeWork, just before it would reach a valuation of $47 billion, making it one of the most valuable start-ups in the US at the time.
The WeWork building was decked out in all the latest co-working paraphernalia. Sound booths, meeting rooms of various sizes and slogans like ‘do what you love’. But the most interesting and creative aspect of the building for me was that I could see the Tribeca water towers from my desk, I could watch the snow falling while I detailed roofs, and there were dogs. There’s no argument that dogs are the ultimate creativity inducers.
I first encountered the concept of co-working when I rented a single desk in a larger office in 2012. I had moved from Brisbane to Sydney to start a Sydney office for a Brisbane company. Before this, my experience of professional workplaces was limited to one. That office was in a suburb of Brisbane and every lunchtime, someone would go and buy groceries, and we would make and eat lunch together. That was my life for about 5 years. Then in 2012, I found myself in Surry Hills, untethered, with a smorgasbord of lunch options around me. I shared the office with an interior designer, an owner of a marketing agency, a woman in the wellness business, and an exhibition designer. I loved having my eyes opened to the way other people worked, their conversations were different, but we were still able to share and understand each other’s commiserations and celebrations. My world was being layered with notes from other people’s worlds, expanding my frame of reference.
I was renting a desk in a renovated warehouse once known as the Herman Building. Constructed in 1927, it was the original company building for HPM Industries. Haughton Design now SHED Architecture had undertaken a renovation of the buildings around 2005. I shared a desk in a room next to the office of Koichi Takada Architects and the lighting supplier, Euroluce occupied the warehouse style ground floor. I was surrounded by creativity, both in business and the layers of history around me, heightening my aspirations. In New York City, simply walking past the layers of graffiti on the façade of Great Jones Street made me feel like I could do anything I set my mind to. This made me wonder, does creativity expand when the walls and floors tell tales of history?
There are many examples of buildings contributing to the creativity inside them. In Apple TV’s ‘The New Look’ we see the moment where Christian Dior enters 30 Avenue Montaigne, the building that would become fundamental to the heart of Maison Dior. Dior cannot settle for the soulless spaces that are presented to him, it is not until he experiences love at first sight in the radiating light of the mansion, with its grand staircase, that he immediately knows this is the one.
I experienced something similar when I visited the advertising agency, Argonaut, whose offices were located within the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. The agency moved into the space in 2013 along with a restoration and renovation by Huntsman Architectural Group. It wasn’t so much the physical space that stopped me in my tracks, it was the history associated with the space. Built in 1911, the Grateful Dead played here, and it was here that Janis Joplin made her first public appearance. It was fitting that an advertising agency should now occupy the Avalon Ballroom. In the late 1960s psychedelic posters emerged as advertisements for dance concerts in San Francisco. The Avalon Ballroom was one of two dance halls that supported the development of the posters. The Grateful Dead’s iconic Skull and Roses poster was created for the Trips Festival, held at the ballroom in 1966.
There is something about these spaces that lend themselves more towards living than working. ‘Living’ is living a creative life rather than simply enduring the mundanity of ‘work’. 901 Washington Boulevard is another example. It was here that Charles and Ray Eames developed their business of life approach. At the Eames Office, started in 1940s LA, projects took on working titles and the space took on a look and feel that swung between ‘shop’ and film studio set. Jehane Burns remembers;
‘Every surface seemed to be levels deep in eloquent things and images; residues of projects, things left by friends, things kept because they worked well or because they didn’t; models, mock-ups, doodles, diagrams and charts of every kind and scale; drafting boards, cameras, a wood-shop; an understated but cherished kitchen. Pools of light and shadowy corners; buff, faded pink and raw umber. Informal, accumulative, but full of breathing-space; controlled so as to work well: for work, for hospitality, for collaboration.’
After returning from America, I worked with Those Architects and we shared a row of desks within a larger firm, H & E Architects. The building had been a Municipal Building, built in 1914, but it now houses a variety of creative businesses. The high ceilings and large arched windows somehow allowed for loftier ideas. The building was at the end of its life, about to be transformed by a new development. I remember feeling as though I was holding the hand of this building through its last days. The lights were out, the ceiling was leaking, it felt like slowly, the building was disappearing. Even in decline, perhaps more so in decline, it inspired creativity in me. Later, we moved to a newer building where the ceilings were lower, and the space felt constrained. The saving grace was the view over the Readers Digest building with its concrete joints pieced together like dinosaur bones, connected by whimsical cast iron elements.
Throughout my career, I have shared desks in many places, I have been a part of smaller practices renting space in the corner of larger offices and I’ve experienced small and large co-working spaces. Inside these buildings that have had many lives, we create new lives, new businesses, new connections. These experiences have informed how I want my workspace to be designed.
Back in New York City, I called the number on the card that I had found in the Sake bar. We ended up going to Bohemian twice, once for a special occasion and another time with friends. These full-circle moments are true magic. One single event, picking a book from a bookshelf, created ripples of discovery. But Great Jones Street wasn’t quite ready to close the circle yet.
