Office Space:
16-story S.F. headquarters is filled with art and innovation
Dolby Labs’ new headquarters is filled with art and innovation.
The decor inside the new Dolby Laboratories headquarters is a blend of technology, science and art — foundational elements that tell the half-century-old San Francisco company’s story.
Those elements flow from a neon light sculpture — an ode to the late Ray Dolby’s seminal noise-reduction circuit board — to a quirky wall filled with 600 pink, purple and blue plastic ears.
The themes also emanate from a 60-foot-long video monitor, visible to those who pass the building’s glasswalled Market Street lobby.
The new headquarters gave the company “an op-
portunity to create a building that reflects who we are and what we do,” said CEO Kevin Yeaman. “You get to reflect on how this intersection of art and science affects your life.”
Dolby, which celebrated its 50th birthday May 17, has scheduled three days of grand opening events this week, starting with a light show along the outside of the building Monday night and a Wednesday ribbon cutting with Mayor Ed Lee.
During an exclusive tour last week for The Chronicle, Dolby executives showed off the interior of the 16-story building, which also has three floors below ground.
The building will initially house about 750 employees, but has room for more than 1,000. Over the summer, the company moved workers from its two other buildings, the old headquarters on Potrero Avenue and another building on Brannan Street.
For the new space, the company commissioned 21 artists to create 36 works depicting technologies pioneered by Dolby that have transformed the movie, music and television industries.
Shawna Peterson of Oakland, for example, created a sixth-floor wall sculpture of bright white neon tubes, her interpretation of the invention that helped launch the company — Ray Dolby’s noise-reduction circuit board, which filtered out unwanted hiss in recorded audio.
Also on the audio theme, a whimsical wall of “Ears,” by Atlanta artist Nikki Starz, celebrates employees who have finely tuned “golden” ears to help with audio testing.
The ears contrast with the lab rooms and an in-house research library, also on the 10th floor, creating a “mashup of serious research study and pop ear art,” said Vince Voron, a Dolby vice president and executive creative director.
Then there’s the Knob Wall — a collection of 2,400 knobs and volume controls from old sound mixers and consumer electronic gadgets, created by Oakland architectural design studio Because We Can.
The wall challenges employees and visitors to find six knobs controlling 250 LED lights along the bottom. There’s also a knob that goes up to volume 11, a reference to a line from the mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap.”
On another floor, two walls are covered with waves of LED lights that change color as employees walk past. Experiential artist Pablo Gnecco of New York’s Studio Studio said the sculpture, titled “Moment V.1,” is “about human interaction and our movements.”
Another creation by artist Taylor Lee Shepherd of New Orleans turned discarded cathode ray tube television monitors into a wall of oscilloscopes, displaying squiggly lines he describes as “a visual interpretation of the voices, footsteps and sounds around them.”
The company knocked out portions of floors and ceilings in the building, a state insurance office until 2011. The more open floor plan is meant to encourage Dolby employees to roam the building, working in different places. There are also 18,000 square feet of outside terraces that offer sweeping views of the city.
“We wanted movement inside the building, so people ... have good energy as opposed to you (staying) in your cube and your dark space,” said Andrew Dahlkemper, senior human resources vice president.
True to the company’s name, the building will eventually have 100 labs. The 63,000 square feet of lab space will be used for a range of testing and research, including how emerging digital entertainment technologies affect human physiology.
During the tour, for example, scientists in a biophysical sensory lab placed a cap of sensors on one scientist’s head while he watched an action movie.
They’ve found that a viewer exposed to a scene depicting a bright fire will actually experience warming on their cheeks, even though there is no actual heat, said neuroscientist Poppy Crum, Dolby’s head scientist.
In another sensory immersion lab, scientists plan to study physiological changes while a subject is watching virtual reality, Crum said.
Dolby is also constructing six movie theaters, private screening rooms for productions that use Dolby technology.
One is a ground-floor, 200-seat Dolby Cinema, a reimagined movie theater of the future that the company wants theater chains to adopt. It includes an entrance corridor that turns a wall into a video preview of the film showing inside.
Employees, visitors and passersby will also be greeted by the 60-foot video wall in the lobby, showing an ever-changing, 24-hour landscape of scenes and colors. It was designed by Reza Ali, an Emeryville artist.
“It’s supposed to be a beautiful experience that helps you start the day in a zen kind of way,” Ali said.