When I first met the legendary Jay Chiat at a design meeting in February 1990, he asked me, "What size of house did you grow up in?" I had just been introduced to him by my then-employer, Frank Gehry, who told Jay that I would be the project architect for the interior of his agency's new building in Venice, Calif. I was taken aback but said I'd grown up in a large house, to which he replied: "Good, I don't want anyone designing my building who grew up in a small house." From that moment, I realized that admen were different.

I also quickly discovered that admen think more about physical space than most architects. They understand the impact of their surroundings on creative work. I realized that these are dream clients for creative architecture: people with whom one can experiment and test ideas and grow solutions out of problems in a collaborative, organic way. I felt my own profession had become too ideologically biased and technologically fixated.

During that time of working in the orbit of Jay Chiat and Frank Gehry, I developed an understanding of the world of work that challenged many of the glib assumptions that pervaded office design back then, and to some extent still do. Someone in the dark industrial past had determined that office space could be minimized based on cost and that highly flexible humans could be coerced into adapting to crude workplace "solutions" of cubicles and dumb offices. Since the cost of human adaptation could not be measured, it was assumed to have no cost. Fortunately, modern management theory recognizes that companies unknowingly impose counterproductive obstacles to employees.

For advertising, creativity is everything. You live and die by ideas. The importance of creative workspace had grown out of advertising people re-examining their work processes in the face of a dramatically changing media landscape. Several cutting-edge agencies like Chiat/Day began this process back in the '80s, with some larger companies following suit. In the '90s, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Wieden + Kennedy and Fallon were all rethinking their processes. Today, important schools like VCU Brandcenter have also absorbed this thinking.

Creative interaction and teamwork rely on a dynamic physical configuration, so new models were needed to support the process. As workspace came to be used as a kind of "playing field" for the collaborative exchange of ideas and testing of propositions, there was an acknowledgement that the environment itself needed to embody the creative process, or at least stimulate and provoke innovative thinking.

Jay Chiat once said he was not interested in making his people comfortable, since they would just go to sleep. He wanted them to be provoked into doing great things. Disruption theory, called different things by different agencies when it emerged in the '90s, served to reinforce the notion that you cannot change convention by adopting conventional processes. For a creative breakthrough, a disruption of mind-set was needed, and "structured disruption" was seen as a powerful group brainstorming tool.



As architects, we interpreted this as a need to embody disruption in the visual environment. It led to a language of raw space (stripping away convention), flexible and fluid movement and planning ("flow"), and considered strategic "events" in the unfolding experience of using a workspace (associative disruptions). These events could be an unexpected park or basketball court in the middle of a building, as in our design for TBWA\Chiat\Day's Los Angeles office (1998) or the collaboration tents of JWT in New York (2006), which are inscribed with the first lines of famous novels.

Probably the most radical version of this notion was our design for Mother in London in 2003. As a leading British creative house, Mother had always had employees working around a table. From the beginning, when there were just six people in a kitchen, Mother convulsively grew the table as it grew staff. When we started working with them, their existing wooden table accommodated 60 people. To cope with expansion, they acquired a large portion of a warehouse in east London and gave us a brief to design a table for 200 people.

The 14,000-square-foot space offered the opportunity to create one large table, but it needed to be stretched considerably to accommodate 200. Somehow the image of the 1926 Fiat factory in Turin came to mind, with its circular rooftop racetrack for testing cars. It offered a model simultaneously functional -- a big loop of flat worktop for connecting everyone -- and utterly inappropriate. To "cement" the disruption, we built the table in three-inch-thick concrete. The table alone, of course, only supports limited activities; it is balanced out by a wide variety of open breakout spaces that encircle it. People can focus on mostly personal work on the table and move away to interact with their team or make private phone calls.

One lesson from the Mother project exemplifies a new kind of thinking: Space is profoundly linked to brand and work product, and the mobility of people is an essential factor in planning space. For some, the radical openness of Mother is too much; you must be something of an extrovert to feel grounded there. However, there is a growing acknowledgement that the kind of energy that can emerge from closely connected teams is transforming the creative landscape.

Individual creativity, once lionized, is too introspective and slow compared to the warp speeds that can be engendered in teams that are working in a state of "flow."

--Clive Wilkinson founded his own eponymous architecture firm in 1991. Since then, he has worked with major ad agencies including TBWA\Chiat\Day, JWT and Mother to create spaces that nurture creative work.