Walt Disneys new headquarters in New York is like a city contained within a single block. By the end of this summer, around 5,000 people will work from within the stately 1.2-million-square-foot skyscraper, and the company ambitiously designed it to create a sense of flexibility and appeal for every single one of them.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
Thats a tall order, because the entertainment corporations portfolio is more diverse than ever. Today Disneys work includes studio films and theme parks, but also broadcast news, radio, podcasts, streaming, digital media, and magazines. The media roster, largely based in New York, includes ABC News, ESPN, Hulu, and talk shows like The View, Live with Kelly and Mark, and the Tamron Hall Show. The brands were previously spread across multiple buildings in Manhattan and are now all relocating to the new building. So instead of referencing Disneys cinematic archives (which made sense when creating a workplace for Imagineers) the design firms behind the buildingSOM on architecture, Gensler on interiors, and SCAPE on the outdoor areaslooked to the core of its business in New York and designed a building that can move right alongside the fast-evolving nature of media.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
Compared to Burbank and Orlando, New York Disney culture is so driven by news and sports and information as opposed to entertainment, says Colin Koop, a partner at SOM. The feeling of this building is meant to bring a cohesive culture across many business segments. To that end, SOM and Gensler designed the building to be durable enough, aesthetically and functionally, to house all of its New York operations under one roof now and in the future. They created a space where everyone, no matter if they are an assistant on a radio show or a gaffer on a broadcast set or a developer on a streaming service, can do their best work.
Disney has a history of flexing its ambition through architecture. The elegance of 7 Hudson Squarealso known as the Robert A. Iger buildingmight be surprising in comparison to the companys previous corporate image, which leaned heavily into fantasy. In the 1980s and 1990s, under the leadership of then-CEO Michael Eisner, it practically collected postmodernist buildings by the eras heavy hitters. Remember how Michael Graves used 19-foot-tall statues of the Seven Dwarfs as columns? Or Arata Isozakis homage to Mickeys ears? Disneys corporate strategy, which involved a web of interconnected platforms centered around its films, has diversified quite a bit since the early 1990s when those buildings were commissioned (and when the media landscape was much simpler than it is now).
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
LESS GLASS, MORE PERSONALITY
For a long time, New Yorks 21st-century energy-efficient buildings have shared a similar look: those ubiquitous mirror-like glass facades, like the towers in Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center. However, on the outside, Disneys headquarterswhich is sheathed in viridian terra-cotta tiles and bird safe glassis a spiritual descendant of sophisticated, materially rich, and lustrous Art Deco designs like the peacock-green McGraw Hill building.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
Because of zoning and setback laws, the building actually looks like a collection of gridded towers. The 22-story structure has bronze-framed windows at street level and polished champagne brass awnings and decorative elements over its entrancesmaterials that resonate with the surrounding context without replicating it, says Colin Koop, a partner at SOM, one of the firms behind the building. There are restaurant and retail storefronts on the street level (which is rare for a corporate headquarters to have); offices, newsrooms, and a screening theater in the floors above; and three live-audience studios down below. When did the building open?
While the street view of the building is impotant, its also impressive under the hood. Disneys HQ is one of the first large-scale projects to be completed since New York passed Local Law 97, a policy that requires buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The building is all electricthe most noticeable difference between a conventional structure is there is no cooking gas for the kitchens and restaurantsand received a LEED Platinum rating thanks to a suite of features like rooftop solar panels, windows outfitted with automated daylight sensors that adjust their tint (which helps reduce heat gain), and a direct outside air system and heat pumps for ventilation, which is more energy efficient than a standard HVAC setup.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
That cocktail of systems is becoming very widely adopted now, Koop says. (A bike room with showers also helps employees choose low-carbon transit to work.) While the building is bright and light inside, windows compose less than 50% of the facade, another move that helps reduce energy use.
Every developer and broker will tell you that tenants only want a glass building, Koop says. I enjoy an all-glass view as much as the next person, but I do think that you can create that sense of openness in different ways. For example, the company decided to keep conference rooms and private offices toward the core of the building, and workstations and lounges near the windows, so light is more free-flowing and equitably distributed.
That energy efficiency also helps if theres an extreme weather event that cuts off power to the building. It can run off the grid for days thanks to multiple generators on the roofa necessary feature because of the newsrooms in the building. There’s a tremendous amount of resiliency in this building, Koop says. It cannot go black ever.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
CAMERA READY FOR ANYTHING
The broadcast and production needs, which are the most technically complex of all the teams that will use the building, determined a significant part of the structures engineering. In order to achieve the vast, column-free spaces necessary for the studios located in the basement, SOM suspended the core of the sublevels, which are located beneath the nearby Holland Tunnel and subway lines, from a truss on the second storey. This building is like an iceberg, Koop says.
Because of the site, the broadcast architecture required extensive soundproofing and vibration insulation. A band could perform in each of the three 20,000-square-foot studios at the same time and the audience wouldnt be able to hear whats happening in the adjacent space. The studios’ sets themselves are essentially giant LED screens, which enables producers to change up the look and feel without a full build-out. One central control studio manages the setsa practical and resource-saving move.
[Photo: Garrett Rowland/Disney]
You can get production moving faster with more variety in any form you want, says Stephen Newbold, an architect at Gensler who specializes in design for the entertainment and media industries and spearheaded the broadcast architecture and interiors. This approach is a departure from a legacy where each show operated like little islands with its own studio and set of technology, Newbold adds. We can’t do that in today’s media world. Everything’s got to connect. Everything’s got to be agile.
The design teams had to create an additional, separate entrance for the studios 600 daily talk show attendees as well. The audience entry point leads to waiting zones inside the building where people can queue up instead of crowding the sidewalkanother detail that helps the building remain respectful to the street life in Hudson Square, which is a growing tech district.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
SOM and Gensler also emphasized wide-open spaces on the newsroom floors, which, like the underground production studios, have a rather acrobatic structural support system. There, the radio station WABC and broadcast show ABC News will operate from a centralized area. That enables us to not only deliver in todays increasingly more complex news environment, but also equips us to evolve with future advancements in technology, new formats, and the continued transformation of our business, says Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
Shape-shifting on demand
Flexibility extends elsewhere in the building. The buildings 300-seat theater can be pitch-black for film screenings, or Disney can slide open shades to let daylight in during a long lecture or meeting. Similarly, the Great Halla communal town-square-like space on a centralized amenity floor that includes a private Starbucks, cafeteria, Disney store, and a librarycan be cleared out for events and parties. Its supposed to have 10 lives in every day, says Johnathan Sandler, a principal at Gensler.
The same is true for the offices, meeting rooms, and phone rooms, which are all outfitted with tools for remote conferencing. With just a change of furniture, every conference room could be an office and every office could be a conference room as the business needs change. The design team has already tested this flexibility. The ratio of phone rooms jumped 20% because of the pandemic. The expectation now is that almost any meeting, even if it’s in person, is going to have some virtual participant joining, Sandler says, noting that as more teams move into the building, they continue to fine-tune the mix.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
As in many new offices today, part of the reason for a wide array of interior spaces is to also allow people on-site to have more choice in where they work. This wasnt the case in Disneys New York buildings before. Meanwhile, the amenities on offer werent consistent, particularly for people with production roles.
It was very important to make sure that everyone, regardless of who you were or what you were doing in the building, had this really superlative experience, Sandler says. It doesn’t have to be just based on your function. A lot of it’s just based on your personality. The hope is really that people will treat this as a vertical campus.
[Photo: Dave Burk/Disney]
