This Old House, 27 Stories High: The magazine builds a working home, by Jack McClintock, OldHouse Journal, January/February 2001

Think of a gigantic concrete box suspended more than 300 feet in the air above New York City . The box—134 feet long, 170 feet wide, and 12 feet high with windows all around—is empty except for two bathrooms and four elevators in the middle. No dividing walls, no fixtures, no furniture, no personality—a space so raw it stultifies the imagination. Now try to think of the box as home.

After two years in temporary quarters, This Old House magazine has moved into its own place, and a concrete box is what’s available for office space in a typical New York City skyscraper. “The dream location would have been a New England saltbox two and a half minutes from Norm Abram’s New Yankee Workshop,” says Eric Thorkilsen, the magazine’s president. But national publications need Manhattan, where the talent pool lives and advertisers buy display space. Thorkilsen and Stephen Petranek, the editor in chief, checked out the suburbs, but few likely mansions had the necessary 20,000 square feet or could be converted to commercial use. In the end, they decided to lease space in the city, engage a great architect and build in the character.

Architect Daniel Rowen was asked to take the gigantic boxlike space on the 27th floor of 1185 Avenue of the Americas and turn it into a working home for a staff expected to grow to 50, with all their computers, light tables, books, catalogs, sample tools and building materials, fresh pots of Starbucks and personal effects—including a toy basketball hoop, family pictures and design director Matthew Drace’s chrome-plated barbells. The floor layout had to be modern and efficient but nobody wanted a citified office. After all, the magazine is about old houses, and its workplace should remind the staff, gently but persistently, how an old house feels. Rowen agreed, provided he didn’t have to tack on crown moldings and lumberyard clapboard siding, creating a parody—a “cartoon,” he says—of an old house. He also insisted that the materials used to evoke a house would be authentic and appropriate for a midtown Manhattan skyscraper.

Rowen began with a simple design concept: an airy, loftlike space under a ceiling of exposed concrete. But after the office’s previous tenants vacated and workers ripped out the dropped ceiling and all the fixtures, Thorkilsen and Rowen entered the box, stared up at a hideous snarl of heath, water and drainage pipes and shook their heads in despair. The space they had chosen—sight unseen, because they’d inspected another, nearly identical floor instead of the actual one—turned out to be just below the building’s mechanicals floor. This was a double-height room filled with water pumps and air-conditioning units whose steam pipes and conduit overflowed in T.O.H’s space and choked the cavities between the ceiling beams. “It’s like buying a house,” says Petranek. “Things are never perfect.”

Determined to make the best of the situation, Rowen went back to the drawing board and focused on elements he could control. To begin with, he pondered a philosophical dilemma: how to subdivide the space equitably, minimizing the distinctions of rank among employs. In a house, Mom and Dad get the master suite—just as Thorkilsen, Petranek, vide president and publisher Tom Ott and books publisher Andrew McColough would inevitably get corner offices. Figuring out the rest of the interior wasn’t so easy . Petranek facetiously proposed that one way to create a democratic layout was to draw radial lines outward form the central elevator lobby to make a pie of 50 equally sized slices. But then each office would measure about 6 feet wise with a sliver of daylight at the end.

Like it or not, Rowen was stuck with some version of a time-tested pattern . Concentric bands of offices would surround the bull’s-eye of the elevator core: an inner band of windowless offices, then a band of corridor and an outer band of offices with windows. For all but the staffers with outside offices, a bit gloomy. But, Rowen thought, what if he could make the rooms more equal—and bring daylight through the outer offices, in the corridor and beyond?

Whatever he designed had to fit under the ceiling, which has to get under the pipes, so he started there. He didn’t want a sea of acoustical tiles. Instead he designed a high, smooth, sculpted ceiling of white-painted plasterboard with expanses of warm, neatly recessed lighting.

Rowen sketched an elevator lobby beneath the ceiling, then drew in a reception area, corridors, offices, workstations, conference rooms, a kitchen, a gallery, storage and even—romantically perhaps, but at Petranek’s insistence—a woodworking shop. Construction crews trooped into an empty concrete space, started out the windows at the panoramic city view and put of their ladders and scaffolds. Carpenters spray-painted wall positions on the concrete floor and, when the positions had been double-checked, put down metal tracks and erected steel studs. The crew used stud guns to shoot metal hangers into the overhead slab, then dropped ¼-inch threaded rods to the final ceiling height and attached tracks and clips to hold the plasterboard. As the carpenters moved on, electricians and plumbers roughed in wiring and pipe. Dust filled the air. Debris piled up, got shoveled into cans and was carted out. Workers put up plasterboard, taped it and plastered it, leaving wires sticking out of rough openings everywhere. A shape began to emerge. The box was becoming a maze.

The outer perimeter was ringed with 38 windowed offices. Some had three windows; some had two; but they were all as nearly identical in size as the building’s steel columns permitted, and the corner offices—although they had two windowed walls and twice the view—weren’t much larger than the others. Petranek’s corner, for instance, was about 250 square feet, a quarter of the size of an editor in chief’s office as some magazines. Rowen’s next step was more radical, and it produced an even bigger bang. All the offices sported big holes in their corridor walls—holes twice as wide as door. When doors arrived, everyone saw why. They were French doors, and each office got a pair of them.

Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. The French doors made the space tranquil, cozy, even a bit domestic—a place to sit down, read a book, pet a dog, cook a hearty soup, pick up a handsaw and launch a household project. Even with the French doors shut, sunlight poured through their glass panes and flooded the corridor, where gray carpet softened the glare. The carpet was industrial, but the effect was residential. And the French doors demolished elitism. Anyone could walk down the hall, glance into—and through—any office and see the sun, the Chrysler Building, the East River, a passing cloud. Thorkilsen was delighted. “We had limited money, so we had to choose a couple of spots to make our move and send our message,” he says, “The doors do that.”

A traditional New York office has a band of small, windowless offices just inboard of the corridor, but instead Rowen designed 40 workstations halfway open to the corridor to admit more light. Partial walls let the eye travel a long way, adding to the sensation of openness. “I like a calm space,” Rowen says. “People will bring their own things to the office, and that will become the ornament. I like to frame it in a handsome, organized manner.”

When it was time for furniture, Rowen turned to Jonas Milder, a German-born designed of custom cabinets. Milder made built-in desks, shelves and storage units of fine Finnish birch plywood. A 6 ½-foot desktop module could serve as a wall-hugging countertop or turn 90 degrees to become an L-shaped desk. With its unfinished plywood edges and satin-chrome legs to remind the eye of expensive tools, the furniture seemed part of an oddly elegant workroom, half study and half shop. And that was apt, because the 27th floor was about to become a combination construction site and office. The T.O.H. staff had already moved twice to temporary quarters. The lease had expired again and, ready or not, everyone had to move. Editors and art directors unpacked boxes as tradesmen drilled, sawed and pounded. “The core was largely unfinished, with no carpet, no paint and no furniture,” Thorkilsen says, Every trip to the bathroom or coffeepot gave staffers a glimpse of the bone, blood and muscle that power a building and hold it up. “It’s like an X-ray,” says Adam Campagna, the project architect. “You learn more when it’s still a skeleton.” Staff members also got a taste of what a T.O.H. home owner goes through. At the same time, workers were enjoying themselves, glad that T.O.H. appreciated them. With a cheerfulness not always observed on Big Apple construction jobs, they worked long days to meet the deadline. “Everybody wanted to meet Norm, but he never showed up,” says Michael Goldberg, the project superintendent. What most fascinated the workers, he adds, was the combination of residential and commercial elements.

The commercial part comes as no surprise, of course. It begins downstairs in a very palpable New York City, a vast generic lobby where office workers swarm into elevators. The doors slide shut and, when they slide open again, a visitor finds himself standing on T.O.H.’s Pennsylvania bluestone porch. The walls have a traditional feel, suggesting white-painted clapboard. On the other side of a pair of French doors, comfortable-looking furniture rests on a bright pine floor that gleams golden under cheery halogen lights. It could be a quiet living room in Maine, The floor is heart pine from logs more than a century old, salvaged by divers from Georgia and Alabama rivers, then dried and milled into strips.

Rowen’s bluestone elevator lobby and white-painted walls don’t try to ape the real thing. Yes, the walls suggest clapboard, but they are actually medium-density fiberboard cut to order with a custom-shaped bead and installed horizontally. And the bluestone isn’t cut in random shapes as for a true patio. “That would be the cartoon,” says Rowen, who chose 11 ½-by-17 ½-inch rectangles to create a refined, commercial application of a residential idea.

As the 27th floor neared completion, the raw, echoing concrete box disappeared behind comfortable surfaces. Every day, fewer folks wearing clanking tool belts passed back and forth on the other side of the French doors. Calm settled in. T.O.H. staffers sat, perched, sprawled in their offices and at their workstations, looked around, visited one another, admired the light, the views through the doors and windows, the handsome cleverness of Milder’s furniture. They uttered words like “tranquil” and “magical” and “family feeling.” Writers, editors, and art directors ensconced themselves happily behind French doors and began putting out the next issue of the magazine.