gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Movin’ on up

CBC.ca is movin' on up, again. To a de-luxe "CBC City" in the sky.

Not the sky, exactly, but the 9th floor of the Toronto Broadcasting Centre, which is high enough. (In the 10 years I've been doing new media for CBC, we've been on the 2nd floor, then the 8th, then back to the 2nd, now up to the 9th. I was going to title this post something to do with a pendulum, to counterpoint last week's "The pits...", but it seemed overwrought.)

CBC.ca - or the "digital media group", as I've just discovered we are being called - is on the vanguard of an enormous redesign project for the 1.72 million square foot TBC. Our move is one of several pilot projects, and we were picked because (among other things) we aren't tied down to large immovable objects like studios.

The massive, long-term renovation effort, dubbed the "Workplace Revitalization Project," is - to gush uncharictaristically - simply amazing. It's smart, consultative, and geared to an understanding of the way broadcasters work. And most of all, it's based on a vision.

Before I get too excited, it should be stated that the impetus for the project is in large part to make money by renting out even more of our building to paying customers. CBC has a Real Estate Division that has, in recent years, earned the distrust of employees by turning the public broadcaster into a landlord, profiting by shaving inches off my meager workstation and giving the impression of wagging our collective dog rather vigorously.

Unless we're being had, it would seem the tides have turned just a little.

The most surprising thing about the vision for the redesigned TBC is the frank admission that it's an effort to right past wrongs.

The Canadian Broadcasting Centre (TBC to us, to specify the Toronto location) was supposed to fix the problems of conducting Toronto operations from more than two dozen smaller locations. It was supposed to be modern, comfortable and efficient. It was supposed to be a place where employees could collaborate, and where the broadcaster could interact with the public.

Through a combination of cutting corners and bad decisions, it failed.

In a pitch to employees last week (which felt, reasonably convincingly, like we were being wooed to buy a cool urban condo) the revitilization project was called "the first opportunity since the building opened to realize the vision of its original designers."

My biggest beef with the TBC as it now stands is that the dim, bland and confusing interior design doesn't mesh with the interesting, glassy exterior. There are plenty of windows on the outside edges of the building, but offices and hallways were built in a ring around the circumference, blocking both natural light and traffic from the interior elevators (here's the hallway by my desk. Inspiring!)

It's so confusing that the building originally had wayfinding touch-screen computers by each elevator - put in the name of the person you are looking for, and it'd draw you a map. Then they stopped updating the directory, rendering the screens useless, and they were removed.

(For more of the TBC's historical background, see the excellent Teamakers article Home sweet deconstructivist home.)

Words and pictures don't do justice to how lousy the hallowed halls of the CBC actually are. So I created a video of the walk from the elevator to my desk, below. (As far as YouTube goes, it's astoundingly lame, but gets the point across.)

[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=OSw5rD7tNeA[/video]

The same design principle was, unfortunately, applied to the atrium: it's 10,000 square feet of natural light, but a ring of walkways and offices cut it off from the interior where most of us work. And that's why there's not one place in the building where you can see from the atrium to the outside windows. Instead, you walk the zombie-rific hallways as in the video above.

As Robert Fulford once wrote about the atrium:

The architects aren't total idiots; they didn't plan it this way. They designed interior windows, so that many employees who are not important enough to have outside offices would look onto the atrium- a nice second prize. But along the way, when the budget had to be cut, someone pointed out that windows cost more than walls. So most of the windows were eliminated and most of the atrium's meaning disappeared.

But the new designers - DEGW, who have done this work for the BBC for the past decade - are attempting to fix all that.

The new interior spaces are designed to flow from outside to inside, not in meadering corridors around the circumference and "walled fortresses" within. Areas will be designed specifically for individual workgroups, who'll even get a little dollhouse kit of pieces to play around with first. There's an emphasis on "neighbourhoods" and collaborative spaces where you can actually have a conversation with colleagues (right now, you either stand at someone's cubicle, or attempt to book a boardroom.) There might even be a place to have a coffee or eat lunch.

(Both things used to exist. The TBC had a great cafeteria on the 6th floor, which offered a place to buy or bring lunch and a place to talk to colleagues or guests. They ripped that out to put in offices. And the "coffee stations" around the atrium used to actually have coffee - free coffee, no less, with a grinder! But then someone figured that cost too much, and put an end to it. They were replaced with coin-op machines that dispensed a brew so foul that those machines were also removed. So now 1,000 employees leave the building for 15 minutes, twice daily. Tell me that's saving money....)

There's also a concerted effort to redo the ground floor and exterior of the building, to make sure they reflect CBC's "mission to Canadians" and "contribute to urban culture" - making sure the whole building "is consistent with CBC/Radio-Canada brand."

As you can see, the ground floor is currently under-utilized. (And those sofas were provided by the design school.)

Speaking of other TBC clients, another change being considered is renting out office space in a vertical block, using a single elevator, instead of the current horizontal sprawl that makes whole floors inaccessible. And they are even considering addressing one of the my greatest complaints: there's no stair access to the ground floor (except in emergencies.) Such an entrance may be built - hell, they're redoing all the other ones - but there's still no uptake on my waterslide idea. Too bad - I bet from the 9th floor you could build up quite a head of steam.

That 9th floor space is, I suspect, part an area that will soon be vacated by the Corp's exquisite, but doomed, costume department (see Prop chop, Feb. 10.) I'm going to lobby very hard for them to leave some costumes for dress up, but we'll see.

The good news on that front is that we've been told that it's unlikely that any large numbers of "living human beings" will have to move their workstations to the dismal basement space vacated by the design department. Rumours to that effect had been flying, and I may have helped propogate them - but this was the first time they were ever denied.

So, A+ for presentation and vision. The proof will be in the pudding, but I'm happy to be part of the test batch.