2013 BOY Winner: Midsize Office

Aural perfection isn’t just for concert halls anymore. Take this 50,000-square-foot operations center for Hyundai Capital America, the financial services subsidiary of the Hyundai Motor Company. Its sweeping openness challenged Gensler principal and design director Philippe Paré to make a statement that’s powerful. . .yet quiet. On a limited budget to boot. Nature imagery weaves its way throughout. A freestanding conference room’s sound-diffracting faceted enclosure, for example, recalls a boulder from a Flintstones cartoon. The enclosure is dark gray, which, along with white, dominates the color palette. Concrete and natural-fiber wall panels provide contrast between rough and refined. Given the vastness of the ceiling in the employee lounge and café, Paré chose to dampen sound and diffuse light with the help of 2,500 conical baffles—in white ripstop parachute fabric that reads as a diaphanous cloud. The café’s chairs, the Vegetal by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, are a sharp green. Alongside them is a living plant wall, supporting different flowers and plants seasonally. 

Project Team:
Neil Mclean; Lucas Roberts; Betty Yiu; Mirko Wanders; Daniel Segraves; Shawn Shin; Jennifer Wu; Sarah Gibbons.