Once a factory, this huge building is now the nerve center for Nortel, a North American telecommunications giant (photo: Gary Quesada/Hedrich-Blessing, courtesy Hok)

Near Toronto, a massive, new corporate headquarters is laid out like a city--with streets, public spaces, and neighborhoods. The urban metaphor helped designers forge a campus-like indoor office attuned to the needs of business in the ‘90s. Yet to some extent, it is still a skyscraper laid on its side. by Marc Spiegler This is a story about metaphors--specifically, the urban metaphor. As actual cities are being outstripped by prosperous suburbs, architects and space planners are talking about building the buzz of city streets right into their office projects, hoping to humanize the workplace and break down corporate mind-sets. Many companies slap the term "city" on what are essentially traditional configurations. But Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel dove headlong into the metaphor in Brampton, an industrial town near Toronto, converting an obsolescing factory into a massive corporate office spread. The environment boasts a wide "Main Street" that ends at a video wall in "Times Square," broad boulevards with quartzite and slate pavers, and trees whose branches reach toward the 23-foot ceiling. Then there's an array of amenities on site, ranging from a travel agency to psychiatrists (part of the Aralia Wellness Center that also offers massage and relaxation rooms). Of course, any metaphor collapses when you lean on it hard enough. Nortel's "city" is no exception. But that comes later. As metaphors go, Brampton's "city" is massive. Encompassing an area the size of six football fields, the main floor of Nortel's plant now accommodates 3,500 people. Built in 1963, the building, a manufacturing plant for the telephone switching devices that made the business a North American giant, had become a mere appendage to the company's Canadian operations. But five years ago a charismatic Quebecer named Jean Monty took over Nortel and began to transform the 70,000-person outfit. As the company became more global and production increasingly automated, the plant in industrial Brampton became less important. Meanwhile, Nortel's offices, scattered in corporate parks and high rises around Toronto, were bulging with new squads of knowledge workers. Aiming to resolve its pressing space issues, Nortel went to Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (HOK), one of the largest American architecture firms and a long-time consultant to the company. Initially, Nortel was merely seeking guidance on how to use the Brampton factory better; its new company headquarters were slated for high-profile corporate towers near Toronto's Lester B. Pearson Airport. But early on Nortel and HOK started thinking beyond merely reworking the plant, recalls architect David Dunn, Nortel's director of workplace planning. Company officials had intended to centralize Nortel's Toronto operations and suddenly they saw a chance to do so without building or leasing a new structure. "We realized, ‘Why not take everything to the Brampton site?'" Dunn recounts. "Quickly, the project's focus went from cost-reduction to showcasing the company's transformation." The idea took root with senior management, and suddenly HOK found itself charged with molding the future of Nortel's nerve center. Turning the 400,000-square-foot factory floor into office space was daunting to the 22-person HOK team led by architect Kathrin Brunner. While the space--once gutted--offered a massive tabula rasa, its sheer immensity posed a problem. "This could easily have become a relentless, disorienting workplace," Brunner explains. "I searched for other projects of this magnitude and I couldn't find much. In Silicon Valley, they've done several conversions and they're basically just seas of workstations. We wanted to infuse this workplace with the richness of city life." When the team considered the spatial constraints of the factory's walls and the wide range of departments, Brunner says, "the city was our obvious model. We thought about the morphology of medieval walled cities, with their defined points of entry. We wanted a hierarchical street system, with boulevards to get you through quickly, then some more hidden, ‘residential' paths that were quieter, and a loop system around the building to ease congestion." Putting extra pressure on them, Dunn says, was the "Hell no, we won't go" attitude on the part of many Nortel office workers, who were disinclined to move to a building they had always known as a production plant. "People took what they knew of Brampton and imagined they'd be sitting on the shop floor, with a lot of noise and institutional lighting," recalls Joanne Wong, a media manager. "I had planned to start telecommuting rather than making the move; but as I heard more about the facility I became less interested in working from home." To keep the employees involved (and relatively unrebellious), Nortel circulated a special monthly newsletter aimed at assuaging their concerns. In addition, one member of each department was designated as a conduit to the team headed up by Dunn and Brunner, consulting on issues that affected the department and bringing news of the project's progress back to coworkers. This focus on individual departments was pivotal. Corporate headquarters tend to be dominated by planning that reflects a lowest-common-denominator philosophy. Spaces are laid out so that anyone can work there--but they are rarely tailored to the particular needs of those who actually do, handicapping each department differently. Instead, Nortel and HOK tried to create an environment that allows--and encourages--radically different uses of space. "The only ‘hard' parts of the design are the public areas outside the blocks of offices," explains Brunner, referring to the architectural components. "Everything else is ‘soft.' " Ground-to-ceiling walls, formerly fire walls on the factory floor, define each section, and these won't move. But everything else within each area was designed with easy rearrangement in mind. Wiring, for instance, is strung overhead from a trellis network instead of being run through the walls or below the floors. The designers hoped each group would mold its space to suit its style of interaction--much as the different zones of a metropolis take on the character of the people who live and work within it. Not surprisingly, the team tagged each department a "neighborhood," extending the urban metaphor. There's no doubt that Nortel Brampton can feel city-like. Granted, only the Swiss might manage to keep an urban environment so devoid of grime and detritus. What's more, the energy level rarely approaches a city's hustle and bustle, with the possible exceptions of lunchtime and the workday's start and close. Plus, despite the extensive use of stone and trees--materials and features you'd expect to find outdoors--you're still inside. The site's urbanity--to the extent that it exists--lies more in unexpected aspects like the irregular design of Main Street and the interspersed coffee shops. But the architectural vocabulary is limited; it all has a cleanly coordinated look, much as the elements of a mall or airport look alike regardless of their function. Colors are harmonized, calm tones and textures blend together--and, naturally, whether it's the vinyl flooring on the "side streets" or the clean Sheetrock walls of facades along Main Street, everything is exactly the same age. And, with virtually all the structures being of consistent heights, a distinctly nonurban uniformity prevails. At a human level, though, the city metaphor holds up. Nortel network analyst Frank Mattucci says he runs into the same people every day at the coffee bar closest to him, and over time nodding acquaintance leads to lengthy exchanges. He also explains that sometimes Main Street emulates a small-town drag all too well: "If I'm in a hurry I'll go some other way, because you just bump into too many people you know when you walk down it." But when they're not in a rush, the Main Street environment can be convenient. Like a city--or at least a well-appointed shopping mall--the Brampton facility offers much to make employees' lives less hectic. Among the food counters and cafés are a host of service businesses, such as a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada (complete with mortgage officers) and a dry cleaner. Nature-inspired restorative spaces are also included, such as the "Zen garden," with stone benches and a weeping Japanese maple tree. "Sometimes it seems like they give us all the luxuries so we never have to leave," jokes Nortel technical consultant Chudi Igboemeka. (That's just as well, given the fact that the area surrounding Brampton has a dog biscuit factory but no mini-malls. "By the time you get to your car, de-ice it, and drive to a store around here," says one employee, "your lunch break would be well near over.") Playing the city metaphor to the hilt, there's even a "wrong side of the tracks"--the shipping bay, nicknamed Docklands (though presumably not after London's Docklands, a gentrified industrial area). A 20-foot-tall Nortel-commissioned mural featuring muscled hipsters and nubile honeys evokes an aesthetic reminiscent of urban graffiti. But there's no grittiness here, and all the airbrush-and-aerosol work hews to the "shipping and receiving" theme dictated to the artists. The mural is to an actual city what Monopoly money is to bank notes: on the surface, it's evocative; when probed, it's gossamer. Flipping through the HOK publicity package that touts the Brampton project, one is virtually beaten over the head with the city metaphor. In the beautifully printed brochure, a story unfolds: "‘So, what do you think of our city?' asks [the] tour guide as he greets the latest visitor to the company's newly renovated Brampton Centre outside Toronto. ‘Well, I've always liked Toronto,' replies the impatient guest... ‘No,' says the guide with a smile, gesturing toward the cascade of natural light and multicolored materials, trees, piazzas, park benches, and bustling street activity that engulf us, ‘I mean our city.' " The pamphlet also describes "zoning bylaws" that will guide how neighborhoods evolve, even suggesting that Nortel's divisions would form a "city council" to deal with spatial issues and common areas. But when I read these sections to Kelly Norgate, a Nortel media manager, she looks a bit stunned. Diplomatically, she suggests that's not exactly how future decisions will be made. "We have divisions that oversee those bigger issues," she says. Clearly, it's a strong-mayor system. Ultimately, Norgate says, it's a mistake to overemphasize the urban concept. "For one thing, we don't have any bars here," she jokes. But in her joke lies an essential truth: "Everyone here is at work. When they finish, they don't stick around and socialize. Brampton's a lot of things, but mostly it's where I work." To that extent, the building is as much a 25-story skyscraper gone horizontal as it is anything else. And Norgate's not alone in having tired of the "city" model. Though lead architect Kathrin Brunner describes the metaphor as a great leaping-off point that helped her team come to grips with the proj-ect's massive scope, she says the concept grew old: "At the end, I couldn't use the term anymore. We had to keep reminding people that it's an enclosed space." Having dispensed with the city met-aphor, what's left? A huge, adaptable set of offices, tailored to the knowledge workers underpinning Nortel's recent success. Their needs have driven the former factory's recasting; given the rabid head-hunting that dominates the information-technologies job market, Nortel knew it had to create an environment that would make people want to stay. With towering ceilings and flooded by sunshine from 19 skylights, the office space created by HOK and Nortel hardly spells corporate hell. In the airy cafeteria, Chudi Igboemeka and Frank Mattucci whip out a chessboard and steal bites of sandwiches between a flurry of moves and taunting remarks. They could easily be in a slightly starchy college lunchroom. "When people come out of school, it's intimidating to go to a white-shirt-and-tie office," says the twenty-something Igboemeka. "You come here and it's cooler, a lot more laid-back. And when you bring guests in they say, ‘Wow, you work here?'" Not that long ago, one might have expected to find a Nortel employee of Igboemeka's age on a too-bright shop floor, definitely not in a "cool" place. But over a relatively short period of time, the proportion of Nortel's information technologies types has rocketed from a quarter of its employees to three times that. The company is still reeling a bit, experimenting with how best to accommodate its new legions. A model of the new-style Nortel executive, Eugene Roman speaks of employees as "cybernauts" and says he spends perhaps an hour a day in his office. When he was first promoted to vice president, Roman's initial inclination was to stay down on the floor; it was his employees who kicked him up onto the executives' "Mahogany Row," telling Roman they needed him walking the hall of power on their behalf. Ideally, executives would be in the "city" rather than inhabiting a wood-paneled annex, David Dunn says: "At one point, after we decided to build the executives' wing in the traditional way, they said, ‘We should be sitting right in the middle of the city.' Unfortunately, it was too late to fit that much more real estate onto the floor." Roman stresses that meeting spaces have taken on a crucial role as teamwork becomes ever-more important to Nortel. "In the future, all the real work will happen in the conference rooms, and this building is designed around that," he says. "In the old skyscrapers, we had one floor of conference rooms and you had to book them in advance. The attitude was that if a room wasn't being used at all times it was a waste of money. Here, we can get together spontaneously because there's so much more common space." Indeed, the north end of the building features a 12,000-square-foot conference center that's almost never fully booked, in part because each division also has its own meeting spaces. Eschewing micro-management, Nortel turnaround whiz Jean Monty had encouraged each division to work more autonomously. In October, Monty moved up to head the holding company that owns Nortel, but his guiding principle remains: Given a budget and expected results, managers and employees have the leeway to make it happen as they see fit. In a sense, then, the effort that HOK and Nortel put into adaptive neighborhoods extends Monty's idea, making physical the idea of semi-separate entities working under one corporation's umbrella. "There's no right answer to the workplace," Dunn explains. "The workday now is all the time--and much of it is spent collaborating, so we need a whole range of offices."" But despite Dunn and HOK's efforts, most of the neighborhoods have yet to assume different personalities, still resembling planned developments more than any truly urban enclave. In fairness, it's hard to imagine what more Nortel could have done to encourage divisions reshaping their own real estate. The spaces are built for this, workshops have been held, banners and icons hang high in the rafters over each area--like pennants over ranks of knights--encouraging intra-division identity. In the "Short Circuit" diagonal route that leads from the employee entrance toward the cafeteria, there's a display of Herman Miller office modules that runs the gamut of possible configurations, an exhibit aimed at jump-starting workers' thinking about how to redefine their environment. On a less direct level, HOK's designers added whimsical touches like the totem pole on Main Street and the trees and paintings at "Creativity Corner," meant to nudge employees toward thinking "out of the box" by undercutting the traditional corporate ambiance. And yet row upon square-angled row of cubicles--lined up neatly into little private spaces and looking much like what you might expect at any corporate powerhouse--define the floor with near-military regularity. A few exceptions exist, such as the human resources department, which is clearly charged with setting an example. There, the assistant vice president who heads the section sits in clear view and desks lie in snaking cul-de-sac arrangements. As office layouts go, it definitely falls outside the norm. Unfortunately, it's also unique within the facility: Walking through most sections, one sees few clues that the departments differ functionally from their neighbors. For the designers, who spent so long trying to create adaptive neighborhoods, the predictable layouts that have arisen spark some frustration--but little surprise. "Without question, some people still have that sense of ‘stripes'; their identity is based on their address, not connectedness to their team," Dunn explains. "After 20 years of people having the idea drummed into them that their office is an entitlement, they get that deer-in-the-headlights look when told, ‘Here's your space, do what you want.' The corporate legacy is like a millstone for them." Monty and his successor, president John Roth, encourage the flattened hierarchy and employee-driven change that most forward-thinking companies now espouse. But it's naive to think that years of corporate conditioning will suddenly evaporate with the wave of a manifesto memo. Before Monty arrived, Nortel reportedly functioned much like a Canadian cousin to IBM: Rigid thinking and top-down decision making pervaded the company culture. So, while it's all well and good to tell a veteran of those years to use space innovatively, who can be surprised when the old-timers gravitate to the arrangement they've always used? Nortel leaders hoped each neighborhood would grow and change in much the same way that a species adapts over time through successful mutation. But at the moment, nobody seems to be in a rush to play the mutant. Clearly, the idea of individualized neighborhoods will take time to succeed. As it stands, Nortel's space resembles a town that has been re-zoned but not developed. In time, there may well emerge employees in each division who study the work flows and personal interactions, bring an urban planner's vision, and are able to convince their peers to revamp their space. Just as in a real city, economic factors will play a huge role in shaping the "neighborhoods." Yet the economy in question hinges less on money than on time, the currency that counts most among employees fighting to pump out new technology or streamline a global entity. Given the sheer hours involved in rethinking an office bay, any radical alterations will demand clear-cut return on that investment, just as no businessman develops property without anticipating a profit. "This project is still evolving," Brunner says. "Over time, people will see the advantage of reducing personal workspaces to get more common spaces. Eventually, we hope they might even create some less formal spaces, like a lounge area or a room with a pool table." Hell, maybe they'll even put in a bar. MARC SPIEGLER, who writes about politics, business, and media for Chicago magazine, is now a Metropolis contributing editor.