Muse Office

2018 | Sunset Park’s Industry City

Muse office design comes from the idea that casual conversations between different team members lead to innovative ideas and smoother social connections. EGO stairs located in the middle of the office is inspiring symbolic space. As this stair is the only route to connect the first floor and the second floor in the office, workers can often meet unexpected meeting moments. Also, the paused moments in the between spaces can increase the openness and vitality in company culture.

The Client Analysis

Muse Office is a space for THE BE SIDE, a newly formed music publishing and music rights management firm led by 2 partners determined to leverage the latest thinking about the future of global business to connect customers and creators in Brooklyn and around the world.

Split roughly 50/50 the business has two primary sectors loosely defined in-house as the geek squad and the hype beasts: the first engineers, sells, and maintains apps to allow artists, agents, publishers and other content rights owners to manage the revenue generated by their music or the music they own or represent. The second sector is the actual management of talent, music publishing, marketing and creative services for a client list of famous and not-yet-famous musicians. The first is technology centric, the second-while leveraging that technology - is people centric, the second- while leveraging that technology - is people centric and includes visits to the offices and performances by their celebrity clientele.

The Site Information

The company has signed a lease for office space in Industry City in Brooklyn. In the last few years, Sunset Park’s Industry City, a 16-building complex along 3rd Ave., has become a hub for artist studios and manufacturing bases for local food purveyors and makers of all kinds, as well as outposts of large companies like Time Inc. The complex has seen increasingly more foot traffic, too, with popular dance parties in the summer and now the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg through the winter.

As stipulated in the lease the new design must maintain the structural columns as well as the perimeter walls and windows to maintain the uniformity of the building from the exterior. The building is landmarked and while the interior is not part of this designation, consideration to the relationship of interior partitions to the glass, spandrel, and mullion is of particular concern.

Concept Collage

Concept story

Muse office focuses on the core joy of TO BE SIDE's business value, which is introducing high-quality music, and artists to the public. The design weighs on communication space to bring up insight, inspiration, and diversity by mingling people with symbolic objects—undefined figures in the area project in thousands of ways depending on viewers. It reminds industry workers that the soul in music longs for things higher, purer, freer than those offered by fast pasted instant products.

The MOUSAI (Muses) were the goddesses of music, song, dance and the source of inspiration to poets. They were also goddesses of knowledge who remembered all things that had come to pass.
- In Greek and Roman Mythology

As for interpreting the temple in a modern way, Internal stairs connect essential think tanks, the geek squad, and the hype beast. It functions as the harbor where different team members meet and new ideas freely anchor and unnecessary thought leave. The stairs and frames bridge the first floor, and the second-floor physically and visually connect horizontal areas. People's traffic around the edge is involved as the scene of the stairs' inside.

Layout strategy

The center Ego stair mainly affects departments' layout. Under the centered vertical circulation scheme, which team occupies the square's surrounding sides is crucial. One strategy is to locate relevant programs apart in between the central stair. The creativity-driven group, a hyper beast on the first floor, is placed diagonally across the Ego pool on the second-floor corner. The group's traffic will shuffle between different departments to make frequent small talk moments.

Leaving Memo and sharing information is vital to follow dynamic working paste for the trendsetter in the music industry. A back-painted glass wall and a mannequin reflecting mirror extend the physical room to unlimited virtual imaginary spaces.

In the ego pool, people can freely assemble stools on the grid aperture to make flexible configuration. This commonplace is where thinking and communicating people become a statue of 'the museum.' Workers can speculate, read, talk, and create in the daylight.

The music library on the first-floor benchmarks Apple's customer experience strategy. As Apple makes millions of people freely play with their high tech designed products at their retail store, customers naturally absorb the Apple experience in their daily lives. Therefore the retail stores themselves become invaluable marketing effects. This music library is open to any Industry City visitors, including young bloggers, international travelers, town people. In this library, all music album is TO BE SIDE's historical archives and the presenter of sensitively curated music as the statement of current company's projects. People can use digital record players in the bathtub to explore diverse music, and pure white design space is the potential space that can exhibit seasonal goods or visual music arts.