<p>With their design concept for fischerAppelt’s new office building, the architecture firm Gonzalez Haase AAS has nonchalantly shown how to serve the needs of an agile working environment while remaining true at the same time to its own minimalist and conceptually grounded approach.</p>

<p>As you enter the ground floor of the six-story office building, you find yourself in a mirror cabinet of reflective slats, which break up the color progression of the wall into rainbow colors. Thus, already here, visitors are shown a spectrum of design choices—the determined selection of colors, the targeted deployment of materials, and the precise arrangement of light—that are applied in different variations to correspond to the programs of the individual stories. Even in the stairwell, almost imperceptible at first glance, the progression of black-and-white refers to the different priorities of each story: on the ground floor, the color scheme remains predominantly black; as you climb higher, the walls of the stairwell increasingly transition to gray, turning white at the uppermost story.</p>

<p>For the individual stories, Gonzalez Haase AAS tailored and designed every detail afresh, floor by floor—beginning with the light, the colors of the ceilings, floors, and walls, and continuing to how rooms are partitioned, furnished, and stocked with built-ins. While each story has an identical floor plan, each has a wholly independent atmosphere, tailored to the different work processes of a creative agency. These distinctions are achieved through measures that are often minimal, yet utterly decisive.</p>

<p>Visitors to the agency are received on the fifth floor. There, they find the secretarial, administrative, and management areas, as well as spaces for presenting the agency’s services. The colors of this floor are kept entirely white; furnishing and built-ins are conceived as segments that suggest both flexibility and continuity. Mirrors alternate with opaque white surfaces on the column paneling, a distinctive signature of Gonzalez Haase AAS; the paneling is also used as glassed-over privacy screens for the individual offices.</p>

<p>The creatives are housed on the third and fourth floors: here, at workbenches, in cutting rooms and conference rooms, ideas are generated; concepts are developed and tested. The third floor is kept black; mirrors are mounted in corners, so one’s own reflection disappears inside or only halfway enters the picture, and the rooms seem to close themselves off. Whereas on the fourth floor, dominated by the color red, the mirror installations seem to double everything.</p>

<p>The sixth floor, the attic story, is a shared recreation space that can be used for informal meetings, events, working, or eating lunch. Here Gonzalez Haase designed the ceiling as a “green screen,” a color suggesting a place of openness where nothing is predetermined.</p>

<p>To offer the agency a chance of telling a story about the new premises, Gonzalez Haase AAS embedded something of a hidden script inside their design, inspired by figures from Alice in Wonderland. The executive floor refers to the caterpillar Absolem; the attic floor refers to the March Hare; the third floor refers to the Cheshire Cat; the fourth floor refers to Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But this script does nothing to determine the atmosphere of the rooms; this is achieved in how Gonzalez Haase AAS handles light, material, and architecture to lend each space its own individual and yet holistically cohesive character.</p>

<p>The architect Judith Haase and scenographer Pierre Jorge Gonzalez met in 1996 near New York, at theater director Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Both were involved in its renovation. When they opened their own office in 1999 in Paris and Berlin, they had already gathered experience in stage design, exhibition design, and architecture. They were profoundly shaped by the Minimal Art they discovered for themselves in New York and which forms the foundation of their design thinking.</p>
