Los Angeles, California, USA
Following a national competition, this project is a dramatic transformation of NBCUniversal’s historic working studio lot. In collaboration with Field Operations for landscape, the design uses landscape as connective tissue to link the new office building and the zoetrope-inspired amenity center.
NBCUniversal Campus Project by LEVER Architecture, won an American Architecture Award 2025 from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
After a century of growth and infill, the Universal Studios lot had become a disparate collection of office buildings, studios, and warehouses that lacked identity and connection to landscape. Studio executives wanted a design that created a sense of place and offered state of the art facilities to inspire innovative ideas and storytelling. LEVER, with Field Operations, created a vision for the campus rooted in community and its connection to the native Southern California landscape.
A landscaped paseo running the length of the studio lot transforms the campus from a series of discrete, atomized workspaces into a unified and interconnected creative campus. The new design establishes a social heart on campus—an iconic central green bookended by a campus amenity center (The Commons) and an office building (One Universal).
By blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor, and by organizing both new and historic buildings around desirable, shared, outdoor amenities, the design leverages the pleasant climate of Southern California and fosters creativity and innovation by encouraging people to leave their cubicles and studios to invite chance interaction and collaboration in the public realm. The new central green, the focus of the campus, is surrounded by numerous pedestrian-oriented plazas and promenades, garden workspaces, and outdoor dining and gathering options.
Two major new buildings define the landscape intervention in the heart of the campus: The Commons, a 83,000 sf amenity building, located directly across the central green, is the heart of the re-envisioned campus. Previously, the Universal campus had limited dining options and lacked adequate space for gatherings and events. The new amenity center, with a design inspired by the birth of the moving image and early circular zoetropes, creates a social home for all staff working on the lot.
The ground-floor commissary connects to the green paseo and overlooks the central lawn with a series of shaded, outdoor court spaces. A 230-seat special event theater, with state-of-the-art projection and audio, floats above the main commissary and is flanked by two 114-seat, studio-quality screening rooms. The building is topped by a highly flexible and reconfigurable event center, capable of accommodating conferences and major events ranging from 20 to 1,000 people. A continuous outdoor promenade wraps the event center with views of the entire campus. A screen or “veil” composed of thousands of custom extrusions, unifies the diverse and highly-technical program into one form, and provides shade to the outdoor courts that connect to the new landscape and campus experience.
One Universal, a 350,000 sf office building conceived as a stepped hill town, navigates a 90 ft vertical grade change and anchors the southern end of the new paseo. The double-height building lobby opens seamlessly onto the central lawn, and contains amenities that promote impromptu interaction across the campus. Halfway up the building, a continuous, common “flex” floor features a café and shared meeting spaces, including conference rooms and two state-of-the-art screening rooms.
The exterior balcony running the length of the flex floor completes the space by providing a diversity of seating areas as well as outdoor conference rooms—all of which have views of the campus, the greater San Fernando Valley, and the distant San Gabriel Mountains. The office building features the first timber curtain wall in a Type 1 building in Los Angeles.
On-site renewable energy offsets 21% of One Universal’s energy demand and 30% of The Commons’ energy demand per year
Architects: LEVER Architecture
Design Team: Thomas Robinson, Doug Sheets, Thomas Robinson, Doug Sheets, Doug Miller, Don Lee, Hayley Coughlin, Cecily Ryan, Nate Lambdin, Kevin Clement, and Blair Cranston
Associate Architect: House & Robertson Architects, Inc.
General Contractor: Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Company
Client: NBC Universal
Photographers: Ema Peter
