Creative Space

Creativity Equals Chaos Plus Comfort

When W+K's employees moved into the new space in early 2000, the impact was obvious -- and immediate. "The last job I had was in a nice building in London that had been well designed, but that felt more like a friendly bank," says Russell Davies, 34, who moved to the United States for the first time to become the planning director at W+K's Portland office. "The London space was typical in that the peasants worked out in the open, the middle class was in offices, and the overlords were in really big offices."

The W+K space is not entirely devoid of such class distinctions. Wieden and a few of his deputies work in beautiful offices on the top floor, in what the rank and file affectionately refer to as "the penthouse." But for the most part, the setup of the employees' workspaces depends not on what their titles are, but on what they actually do. Writers and others who do highly creative work have glass-walled interior offices with doors -- but no exterior windows. People whose offices lack a door sit closest to exterior windows, which feature commanding, wraparound views of Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, the Willamette River, and downtown Portland. Anyone who needs a period of privacy can reserve one of five closed workrooms scattered throughout the six-story space.

But peace and quiet rarely prevail. The dominant tone of the space is closer to controlled chaos -- which Wieden preaches as a virtue. "Right now, we have 250 people working here, but the building could easily hold 500," says 42-year-old Chris Riley, W+K's chief strategic officer. Riley, who was one of seven children, clearly knows about bedlam. "Since I'm very involved in business development, part of my goal is to get it really noisy in here. My vision of future success is when it becomes almost deafening."

There may even be creative benefits to the chaos. "People who study creativity say that the most excruciatingly creative thing you can do is to hold two contrasting thoughts in your head at the same time," says Kim Lilly, 38, a group account director who works on the Miller High Life account, among others. "It's something to think about when you're craving solitude and someone is playing the Grateful Dead. For us, to sit and listen to two simultaneous conversations about Nike and Gamers.com causes our thought processes to work a little bit differently."

If Wieden had any initial concerns, it was that people were treating the new space with too much reverence. "The beauty and pristineness can be intimidating," says Davies. "So we weren't sure whether we'd be able to make the building our own. The trick is to remember that it's a factory."

Cloepfil helped by supplying most staff members with 10-foot-long wooden work tables, rather than with standard-issue desks. The sofas in the quads on floors three, four, and five look like they might have been rescued from someone's den -- but they give the place a more casual look. Three direct-draw beer dispensers -- or "kegerators," one of which came from the old office -- get plenty of use, as does the new hammock on the roof deck. And the ultimate sign of comfort: People are beginning to write on the walls.

Great Art Makes Great Business

While Wieden+Kennedy's Portland-based employees have gradually grown more comfortable in their new surroundings, they still do not come close to filling the building. Wieden has given careful thought about who he wants to occupy the rest of the space. So far, a modern-furniture store has moved in, as have a couple of local nonprofits. A new restaurant serving Mediterranean food opened this past fall. But the very first organization to lease space was PICA, which signed up long before the renovation was complete.

W+K employees have been involved with PICA since Kristy Edmunds started it in 1995. Chris Riley has been a board member since the beginning, and Wieden joined soon after that. At the time when the agency was preparing to move into its new space, PICA itself had reached a crossroads. The organization, which has as its charter the establishment of little-known contemporary artists, didn't have its own permanent exhibition space. Instead, it did shows for a month or two in various empty warehouses around town. The constant search for space in some ways fit the museum's cutting-edge image but increasingly represented an insurmountable obstacle: The real-estate market was heating up, and landlords weren't leaving big buildings empty for very long.

For Wieden and his colleagues at the agency, inviting PICA into their building made sense for a number of reasons. The first and most basic one was strictly business: It would help the agency make great ads. "The problem for anybody who starts learning a craft is that over time, the craft creates its own boundaries," Wieden says. "The craft of advertising is enormously predictable. You can tell just by watching a block of commercials whether they're appearing during a soap opera or a sports event. But if you can get people to stop thinking about making ads and to start thinking about making pieces of communication, then something fresh is apt to arrive." That, he says, is what artists do best, and he hopes that their approach will rub off on his creative teams.