Shunning the old corporate hierarchical structure of office interiors, global pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche adopted a "universal plan" for its new research and marketing facility in New Jersey. Featuring one-size-fits-all workstations and "neighborhood" group work areas, the new floor plan was designed to enhance teamwork, communications and organizational flexibility.

For more than 60 years Hoffmann-LaRoche's Building One, a stately, Art Deco centerpiece at the company's U.S. headquarters in Nutley, New Jersey, was a proud symbol of Roche's prominence in the pharmaceutical industry. By the early '90s, however, the building's infrastructure couldn't accommodate the latest information technology and its traditional compartmentalized layout wasn't conducive to teamwork.

"The old hands-off process, where you complete your part of the job and hand it off over the transom, is over. Now it is a matrix workplace," explains Don Raney, director of the Roche Center for Architectural Planning, Design and Real Estate Services, in charge of creating a new Building One.

In today's fiercely competitive pharmaceutical industry, employees need to work closely in cross-functional teams to move from drug development to market faster. The new Building One, completed last fall, was designed to do just that by dispelling the notion of office space hierarchies and adopting a one-size-fits-all "universal" office plan. From vice presidents to secretaries, all Roche employees in Building One are assigned the same 75-square-foot workstation.

"With only one kind of space, you have tremendous flexibility," explains Patric O'Malley, vice president of Gensler in New York, the lead interiors architect for the Roche building and the country's largest office space planner. "If you need to reconfigure teams, you just pack your stuff in a box and move." By Roche's own calculations, a "shopping cart" move costs $37 versus an average employee move cost of $1,250. That's an important consideration since some 28% of Building One's 900 occupants may reorganize in different team configurations each year as one project goes on hold during clinical trials or while awaiting government review.

Adoption of the universal plan also opens up a huge amount of various-sized spaces for group meetings. Building One has more available meeting space than the rest of the 125-acre Roche campus combined.

At the same time, the building design incorporates enhanced quality-of-life features. Individual workstations have climate controls and some conference rooms have been turned into soaring two-story, sunlit glass-walled meeting "studios." Even the ubiquitous water cooler has been replaced with coffee bars.

"The important thing to remember is that this is not a space optimization plan," says O'Malley. "This design is really about creating a high-performance workspace."

Aware that the plan was a "sweeping change," Raney formed an executive planning committee and conducted focus groups to involve employees in the design process. Up until the last minute some of the executive committee harbored mixed feelings about uniform-sized offices and considered including a "leadership floor" for top executives.

To address reservations, Raney and Gensler focused on the issues of privacy and individual control. The original plan for the workstations did not call for doors and specified that unit walls be low enough to allow for easy recognition of which employees are in and which are out traveling. O'Malley says, "We had very interesting issues about privacy. But we also wanted to communicate a high level of ambient information. We achieved this through the use of seven-foot glass walls and lockable sliding doors." The design also included features like adjustable personal climate and noise controls to make the studies feel more customized and the units include shelf space for personal photographs and mementos. As much as team members move around, they can always recreate a comfortable, familiar work space.

The workstation design, created by Univor, Milan, also allows for the use of a "non-handed" computer mouse, and employees can change the gels over the light next to their computer according to their own perceived glare levels. Each unit contains motion detection devices to shut everything off when no one is around. At the end of each workstation cluster, "power chimneys" rise as columns to the ceiling with all power and data being distributed through the ceiling. That results in large cost savings, since power distribution does not have to run through the floor and all work can be done within individual work spaces.

In addition to incorporating the latest technology, Raney sought to enhance work conditions by bringing in Croxton Collaborative as a "green" consultant. Materials that are dangerous "outgassers" were avoided, and a special HEPA air filtration system keeps the building's air cleaner than the New Jersey fumes outside. "There's a quality revolution happening in building and design, "says Randolph R. Croxton. "More and more studies show a strong correlation between productivity and good design in the workplace. Glare, bad lighting, employee discomfort, indoor air quality: these are the things that require an additional expenditure of energy for employees just to cope. When you get those things right, you can see an unbelievable reduction in employee errors, absenteeism, illness."

Those concerns are further addressed in the choice of color palette which only uses earth tones in the specially mixed wall paint, wall and furniture fabrics and carpeting. New York painter Donald Kaufman, who is currently working with Richard Meier on the new J. Paul Getty Museum, created the rich shades which do not incorporate black pigments. "The colors are meant to express a hierarchy of design within the architecture," he says. "They're not meant to be inherently decorative but to mix in with the architectural systems in place. The space around the edge of the building uses lighter, cooler colors. As the colors move toward the center, they become more dense and earthier."

Perhaps the most immediately distinctive feature is the light, airy quality of the work environment, even on a cloudy winter's day. The glass-walled facility is the first in the Western hemisphere to use specially made glass, with horizontal prisms that bend natural light up to a highly reflective, specially made sound-absorbent ceiling. As a result, outside light is drawn 40% deeper into the center of each floor. There are no light fixtures on the ceiling. Instead, office lighting is beamed upward.

"The result is you have a very serene workplace," says O'Malley. "Most other offices have a dappled effect where the room goes from dark at eye level to light where fixtures are usually mounted on the ceiling. Here your eye is drawn upwards in space. It's very relaxing."

Ultimately, Raney claims, he envisioned creating a "high-rise village," combining 70% of the space for "team tasks" and 30% for "at desk tasks." "We started the design with a strong sense of community," he explains. "The study becomes your personal home within a neighborhood. People have addresses and they have a front door to their study, which they can lock and close out the world. But then they can step out into the streets [corridors], and move fluidly up and down through a central staircase as well as left and right. On the south side of each floor, we've let the studio become a town square. On some floors, they've become libraries where you can sit informally. Some floors have even created a private little bay area in the studios by positioning book shelves to form a wall. They've placed seating in there and it's a great, quiet place. Facing outside, it, in effect, lets people step out of the building. The best kind of planning is like that, when it happens naturally by the people using the space."