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Places: Graphic design firm's new digs reflect workplace mentality
Saturday, September 09, 2000 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Correction/Clarification: (Published Sept. 11, 2000) The last name of Rick Landesberg and his graphic design firm, Landesberg Design Associates, were misspelled in photo captions in a column Saturday about the firm's new location.
The last thing I was looking for was a big cinderblock rectangle," said Rick Landesberg, sitting at the conference table inside the big cinderblock rectangle at 1219 Bingham St.
"I was looking for the classic industrial loft, the carriage house, that sort of thing. I'd pass this place almost every day walking to lunch and never thought about. Then one day I saw the garage door as a big window," and that was it.
Not what you'd call love at first sight, but with a little help from his friends -- John Martine, architect for the renovation, and Mason Radkoff, construction manager -- the cinderblock South Side garage became the right match for Landesburg's growing graphic design firm.
"Before" pictures show the garage, then the home of Triangle Messenger Service, as a crowded, grungy space straight out of "Taxi." Landesberg Design Associates had spent 14 years just around the corner, in 1,000 square feet above photographer Mark Perrott's studio.
"For years and years, it was four or five people," Landesberg said. "Right before moving, we grew to seven people. We had to build up the work to justify the move."
Landesberg's firm produces some of the most dynamic, creative, eye-catching work in the business. Clients include the Rockefeller Foundation, United Nations, Carnegie Museums, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and many local foundations, corporations, arts groups and other nonprofits.
A Philadelphia native with a fine arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art, Landesberg followed his heart and his then-girlfriend, now wife, to Pittsburgh and started his firm here 18 years ago.
"We don't have a design style, but we have an aesthetic," he said. "Yes, it makes sense, but there also has to be a sense of play.
"I think of the work we do in two ways. They solve problems; they're functional, like a good kitchen knife or a hacksaw. At the same time, they're expressive. There are opportunities for expression everywhere, and part of a designer's job is to seize those opportunities to do expressive, functional, useful things -- unexpected, but logical.
"For me the classic design question, regardless of media, is what is something about, not about what it looks like. We thought about what our work space should be about. What should its qualities be?"
The Landesberg Seven -- Rick, Amelia, Caroline, Anita, Debra, Joe and Vicki -- came to a solution much the way they work for clients: collaboratively.
"We had a couple of sessions in which we tore out pictures from architecture and design magazines and put them on the wall and talked about what we wanted," Landesburg said.
What they wanted was a building that looked on the outside and felt on the inside that it had evolved over time.
They wanted the feel of an old, industrial space that contrasts exposed steel against woodwork and moldings, but they also wanted a psychologically warm space -- and one that wouldn't look outdated in five years. They shared their ideas with Martine, and he came in to watch them work.
"They were each working on their own projects, which you would think would require more privacy," Martine said. "Yet there is a lot of cooperation and the need to communicate."
"First we got rid of walls; then we got rid of cubicles," Landesburg said. "It's a flexible space that can evolve as we progress. If someone wants privacy or semiprivacy, you can have a plant or [hang] a kimono."
So far -- they've been in their new digs for almost a year -- no one has felt the need to do so, perhaps because when the need for privacy arises, they can retreat into a tiny room with a sofa, a tall bookcase, a phone and a door -- the firm's library.
"I wanted a place where you could shut the door, lie down, do research. This is the hiding place. If someone comes in here and shuts the door, there's no question," Landesburg said.
Along the same wall, an existing steel loft was repositioned; the space under it contains the resource area, housing the copier, printers, light box, paper samples and other shared materials.
Embracing an industrial aesthetic also resulted in an exposed corrugated metal ceiling that adds visual interest and movement, with its zigzagging steel trusses, ductwork, galvanized steel light fixtures and ceiling fans.
At the rear of the 2,300 square-foot space, the floor ramps up to a platform; bear right to the open conference room or left to the homey kitchen, cozied up with a chrome and formica table and reproduction vinyl-covered chrome chairs from Crate & Barrel. Beyond the kitchen, more office work space overlooks the floor below.
The group chose cool shades of green for the interior because the office is warmed by natural light from newly punched windows along two walls and the transformation of the facade's old garage door into a sequence of windows framed by steel I-beams and beaded-board paneling.
"We did a number of iterations on the front -- the scale of windows and their proportion to each other," Martine said. "The client wanted to do something that evoked an industrial look, something that wasn't symmetrical, that looked like it might have been put together over time. We agreed from the very beginning that we wouldn't try to fancy up the block or even paint it. The gray is a wonderful sort of nice color with variations in it."
The result is a building that's much like the firm's work -- clever, hip, orderly and unexpected.
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