Copley Square

A vibrant office space overlooking Trinity Church and Copley Square, Boston

Offices for Maritime Software Developer

Veson Nautical’s new office occupies the fourth floor of 500 Boylston Street, designed by John Burgee with Philip Johnson in 1989. The building’s six-story base defines a large formal courtyard fronting Boylston Street and a nineteen-story office tower rises above the building lobby. The irregular office floor plate was developed as a kind of urban plan, with a hierarchy of boulevards, streets and open spaces. At strategic locations, narrow passages intersect the grid of the plan and provide dramatic framed views of Trinity Church and 500 Boylston’s courtyard.  The layout enhances the unique shape of the plan, in which several curved bays articulate the building perimeter. Wherever possible, the exterior walls of the space were left clear of offices to allow for more intimate connections to the outside world. The curved bays, which terminate internal view corridors, are treated as informal locations where social interaction and collaboration can occur.

The metaphor of city planning is carried through in the arrangement of discrete offices, the adjacencies of support staff, and locations of gathering spaces.  As in the city, Veson’s design is a delicate balance between the private and public realm.  While programmers require quiet, private, internalized offices, they also need intimate spaces in which to work together and explore new possibilities. To this end, a variety of different scaled gathering, or “civic” spaces, have been distributed throughout the plan that encourage a culture of interaction and innovation.

At the heart of the office is an ensemble of three linked programmatic elements; the sixty-foot-long entrance gallery with curved ceiling overlooking 500 Boylston’s courtyard, the main conference room, and an open kitchen with a large open conference area. Each of these spaces is programmatically flexible and allows different sized groups to utilize them.  The glass fronted conference room is treated as an extension of the lobby space, is divisible with an operable panel wall, and can open up to the lobby during larger events. The kitchen island can be used as a laptop bar, and the adjoining open conference area will be used for Veson’s many office-wide gatherings.

The architectural character of the space, a juxtaposition of refined, sharply defined elements and raw, exposed ceilings is meant to reflect both the precision and innovation inherent in Veson’s work.

Project Team:
Architecture & Interiors: Studio Watt O’Keefe
Furniture: Environments at Work
Mural Artwork: Malcolm Hill NYC via D’Aquino Monaco Associates
Builder: StructureTone
Mechanical: Cosentini Associates
All images by Richard Mandelkorn
Client: Veson Nautical Corporation