Creative Space

Your company's headquarters was designed with a thought behind it. Can you decode the design? Does the architecture portray the company's power? Does it showcase the company's hipness? Does it signal a democratic workplace? Does it designate top performers and chart the hierarchy?

Ask Dan Wieden, founder and CEO of Wieden+Kennedy, what he was thinking when he set out to create a new headquarters after his 18-year-old, $780 million ad agency outgrew its comfortable old space in downtown Portland, Oregon, and he'll tell you without hesitation. "For us, this wasn't about the riddle of figuring out the cubicles or making the office space different than the next guy's," says Wieden, 55. "The job was figuring out how we can help people live creative lives. I don't care whether you're a writer or in finance -- or simply coming to visit us. If we're helping people lead surprising, audacious lives, that will infect everything else we do here."

In an economy based on innovation, what better use can there be for space than to inspire creativity? To translate his purpose into practice, Wieden took three steps -- two of them fairly standard and a third that was, well, exceptionally creative. First, he decided to put his new headquarters in the right neighborhood, buying a historical landmark in Portland's Pearl District, a rapidly changing, mixed-use neighborhood reminiscent of San Francisco's South of Market in the 1990s or New York's Soho in the 1970s.

Second, he renovated the 90-year-old building, cutting out its core and creating a six-story atrium where everyone in the company could meet. Wieden awarded the design job to a relative rookie who reminded him of his own jump start to success, provided by Nike's Phil Knight, who 18 years ago trusted Wieden's young ad agency with Nike's account.

But Wieden's boldest move was to bring creativity into his firm's headquarters -- and he did it with one stroke: He invited into the building the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), an edgy, 5-year-old, contemporary-art organization whose mission is to establish a beachhead for overlooked, underhyped contemporary artists.

Wieden's aim was twofold. By tucking a fledgling cultural institution under the agency's wing, W+K could use its real estate to make a living contribution to its community. And, Wieden knew, having a bunch of artists roaming around the building might also contribute to the creativity of his own 250 employees -- as well as to his company's clients.

"I don't even know how to talk about these things without sounding like some kind of wigged-out Zen guy," Wieden says. "But companies like ours need to do whatever they can when it comes to establishing and maintaining a strong cultural core that's based on creativity. It's not altruism -- it's an investment. And in some ways, it's extremely selfish. The bet is that there will be concrete rewards and spiritual rewards for us and for our clients, who hire us to talk to people in a way that's both meaningful and surprising."

New Space Reaffirms Old Roots

A chance to create a new headquarters building is also a time to take some corrective measures -- to fix problems that can grow over time even in the best of operations. At W+K, for example, Wieden had noted that the growth of the company had brought with it the growth of bureaucracy. Such growth also meant that W+K could no longer bring everyone together at a moment's notice. "You need to be able to have your Woodstock when you want to," he explains. "What we wanted was a space divided up into quads, or 'mini-agencies,' that sat around a plaza -- a general meeting place for us to have our big community together."

To find the architect who could stage his Woodstock, Wieden threw a beauty contest for some of the West Coast's best-known design firms -- but none seemed to offer exactly what W+K was looking for. At the time, many of the agency's employees had found a hangout at Saucebox, a new restaurant in Portland. One day, somebody from W+K thought to call up the architect who had designed it -- which is how Brad Cloepfil, a 44-year-old architect who had recently set up his own firm, Allied Works Architecture Inc., after 12 years of working for others, got the job. "I've always made critical decisions based on intuitive chemistry," Wieden says.

To balance the risk of selecting an architect whose firm had never taken on a project one-tenth the size of its renovation, W+K hired an experienced engineering-and-construction firm. But Wieden did little to constrain Cloepfil's vision. "The day after they picked me, I came in and it was like I was a full partner in the agency trying to figure out how to rethink a 15-year-old institution," Cloepfil says.

For his part, Wieden found the excitement of taking a chance with Cloepfil to be a way to reaffirm the company's roots. "We realized that Brad didn't have very many people in the office there with him," he says. "But when Phil Knight hired us to be the agency for Nike, he took a big gamble on us. It seems right to find ways to return that favor. We started with nothing, and maybe we'll end up with nothing. But we're going to have a fucking great time in the meantime."