Jenner and Block Winner
Interior Architecture Award, Honor Award
The Chicago headquarters of an elite national law firm occupies the top 14 floors of a new 45-story office tower in the city’s River North neighborhood. Comprising 417,000 rentable square feet, the space accommodates approximately 500 attorneys and 600 support staff in a highly collaborative work environment with a state-of-the-art information technology platform. Attorneys anchor the high-rise floors, with administrative teams located in the tower’s mid-rise. The building’s top floor features a conference center with premium-height spaces and panoramic city views, providing an ideal backdrop for client meetings and frequent social and pro-bono functions.
The design objective was to create an environment that facilitates a nimble, high-performance culture while enabling a collaborative and highly interactive work process. Spatially, the design integrates these objectives through the extensive use of glass to create layers of transparency throughout the space—from floor-to-ceiling glass attorney office facades to translucent glazed conference walls.
The typical attorney office floor is organized by a flexible, modular planning design, allowing for interchangeable blocks of secretarial and paralegal work configurations with case room clusters. These internal support spaces are conceived as demountable assemblies, allowing for rapid reconfiguration to meet the dynamic demands of fluid case load requirements.
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slide 2 (view @ reception towards backlit onyx wall): In the reception area, both legacy and metaphor are composed in slabs of travertine, backlit onyx panels and leather-like full-height door panels. The layered planes of timeless materials correlate classic modernist design with clarity in legal thought and practice. --------------------------Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing Photographers
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slide 9 (view @ attorney office/flex zone): The majority of the attorney office façades are composed of frosted glass screens in aluminum frames, with an interior “flex” zone including paralegal/case room/secretarial clusters. Assembled entirely from modular furniture and demountable glazed assemblies, the flex zone creates a unified, egalitarian aesthetic and allows for rapid reconfiguration in order to adapt to changing caseload requirements. Sustainable lighting is integrated into systems planning, as well in service of the firm’s LEED-CI certification objectives. ------------------------© Christopher Barrett Photographer
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slide 1 (view @ conference center reception elevator lobby): The relocation of an elite law firm’s headquarters to a new build-to-suit high-rise development offered the opportunity to, in the client’s words, “create a stage upon which we perform in the service of our clients, projecting the illusion of perfection.” The elevator lobby’s luminous glass and travertine walls, floating wood ceiling, and marble floor frame guests’ first impressions of the space, with the panoramic city view beyond.--------------------Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing Photographers
- Architect
- Goettsch Partners
- Client
- Jenner & Block LLP
- Consultants
- C.E. Anderson & Associates
- CharterSills
- CMS Innovative Consultants
- Colliers International
- Development Resources, Inc.
- Kraft Kennedy & Lesser
- Robert Pacifico & Associates, Inc. of Illinois
- Shiner + Associates
- The Carter Group
- WMA Consulting Engineers
- General contractor
- Pepper Construction
- Location
- Chicago, Illinois
- Category
- Commercial
