"New ideas require old buildings."
It's a phrase repeated so often it's in danger of becoming a meaningless chestnut, as in "a stitch in time saves nine."
But to some tenants, especially those who deal with very new stock-in-trade, there is still meaning to be found in the famous Jane Jacobs axiom.
Some, such as the almost-four-year-old software developer Slack, take the phrase a step further: In addition to housing their offices in brick-and-beam heritage buildings in the downtown cores of Vancouver, San Francisco, Melbourne and other cities, it's company policy to co-exist with the ghosts of old products as well as old workers.
Therefore, in Toronto, Slack now calls the Quality Knitting Building home.
"They fell in love with it because it had a history to it of making something, something physical, not something so ephemeral," says architect Heather Dubbeldam. "Part of the company's values are craftsmanship [and] taking care in what you do."
Slack has developed a platform for workplace communication; a way to manage an office's various streams of information in a way that's meaningful to the individual user; a system that allows one to juggle various projects and even apps in one place. This means Slack's young work force spends a lot of time juggling virtual ones and zeros rather than making physical products.
But take a look around: Millennials are behind the farm-to-table trend, the resurgence of home pickling, craft beer and the Marker Faire. They've grown up in a virtual world and, rebellious by nature, they want to touch stuff. So, project manager Scott Sampson of Dubbeldam Architecture + Design ensured that the three full floors at 171 John St. were textured, colourful and supremely stroke-worthy.
The ceiling and wall in the reception area are covered in felt off-cuts.
Shai Gil
The fifth-floor reception area, for instance, with its low, angled ceiling and wall dressed in stripy, felt off-cuts embraces visitors (and staff) like a warm blanket. The brainchild of Kathryn Walter of Felt Studios, it was created by hand and assembled with such exacting standards, even the sprinkler heads are camouflaged: "It's a film with a photograph of the adjacent felt, isn't that amazing?" Ms. Dubbeldam observes. "Because you're not allowed to paint sprinklers, but you're allowed to put film on it."
Continue to examine the long strips of felt and you'll spot thin, coloured cables racing along channels; these cables continue throughout the space – sometimes zooming down onto white walls, sometimes stapled to the wooden ceiling beams – as a way to both symbolically tie the various office areas together and to pay tribute to the long lines of yarn that once came down to feed industrial knitting machines.
It doesn't hurt that Slack manages different "threads of communication," says Ms. Dubbeldam said. "You'll see, all over the place, there are these linear geometries of lines everywhere, and it starts here."
Coloured cables travel throughout the office space, paying tribute to the yarn that once fed the industrial knitting machines in the building.
Shai Gil
The cables, in orange, red, blues and greens, while paying tribute to Slack's company colours, also establish a kind of map-like key or legend to the space; take a walk, and you'll find cool little employee cubbies carved out of walls painted in the same shades, whole chairs upholstered in the same reds or blues, or you'll notice the coloured piping on a sofa or the soundproofing fabric of a meeting room (which are cheekily named "Knit," "Purl," "Jacquard" and so on). You'll also find a lot of grey to "neutralize" all of the orangey-yellow found on the original wooden ceilings, floors, and brick walls.
What you won't find at Slack are pool tables, foosball, mini-golf or massage chairs as with other high-tech firms, Ms. Dubbeldam says. "They're serious about people working hard when they're there during the day and then going home and having a life; that's one thing they told us from the very beginning."
Unlike other tech firms, Slack doesn’t have pool tables or mini-golf, which reflects the company’s mentality that employees should work hard at the office and have a life a home.
Shai Gil
The rapidly expanding company also told the Dubbeldam team that, besides wanting things such as breakout areas or "many individual quiet spaces," its "Workspace Manifesto" (as penned by director of global facilities Deano Roberts), encourages the use of "local designers and artists to make each office reflective of Slack's mission and the local community." So, some furniture was supplied by Derek McLeod Design Inc., the large, changeable pegboards were custom-milled by Atelier Kozak, and the lighting – much of it recalling the zig zag stitch pattern on sewing machines – was done by lighting designer Marcel Dion.
Coffee is a big deal at Slack. In addition to the commercial espresso machines found in small employee kitchen areas, Dubbeldam has dedicated a massive amount of real estate to the mighty bean: on the third floor is a sleek, Scandinavian-inspired café with acres of counter space (complete with a knock box for grounds) and banquette seating for employees.
The café on the third floor has plenty of counter space and seating for employees.
Shai Gil
"Starting in Vancouver and San Francisco, it seems to be trickling throughout the entire global offices," says office co-ordinator Lauren Woodhead about Slack's caffeine obsession. "And we order from local roasters." When Slack Toronto reaches a certain number of employees, there's talk of hiring a barista to provide sustenance.
And because Dubbeldam thinks sustainably, the former tenant's walls were left where possible, and products that use recycled materials, such as Interface's fuzzy carpet tiles made from old fishing nets, were sourced.
While the thrumming of 20th-century knitting machines is long gone, Slack's tightly tailored new Toronto operation loudly trumpets what tech firms will look like well into the 21st.