Hashtag Cool-porate Campus?

Instagram-ready offices are really hitting their stride. Why? Because they are designed to encourage Millennial employees to forget they’re in an office park and, it seems, the Millennial workforce responds best to blurred environments that mimic their non-professional lives.

Perkins+Will has overhauled the North American headquarters of consumer goods company Unilever with new communal areas designed to challenge workers’ perceptions of the traditional suburban office park. Unilever has long had its headquarters in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. But increasingly the company has needed a more dynamic work environment to help recruit employees.

Perkins+Will was charged with rethinking the corporate campus, which accommodates about 1450 employees and several hundred independent contractors. The goal was to create a showpiece headquarters that would be “smart, sustainable and Instagramready with a feeling like you were in Manhattan”, say the architects.

Rather that razing the site and starting fresh, the architects chose to renovate four existing 1960s and ‘70s rectilinear buildings. They also added a lofty central atrium that rises 12 metres on the site of a former courtyard. “The [30,000-square-metre] renovation included interiors, as well as the construction of an entry pavilion and common area that stitched together the open space between individual buildings to create an entirely new, enclosed structure.”

The existing buildings have been revamped with open workspaces, huddle rooms, lounges and lockers. The central volume houses The Marketplace where employees can shop, work and socialise. Additional amenities include coffee stations, a fitness centre, hair salon and cafeteria. The building features a range of smart technologies including thousands of sensors that measure light, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and human presence.

If this is what companies are facing to attract and retain talent, the challenge for designers is then to find new ways of making the workplace a compelling and hashtag-worthy experience.