Broomfield, Colorado, USA
Seeing the architectural experience through Croc’s design eye required understanding how they see fashion: as a fun, egalitarian, unexpected, comfortable experience and an authentic expression.
The architects took time to deeply align with Croc’s team, leading the architects to tag the project a ‘Home for Work,’ a comfortable, casual place that helps people feel at ease. A place where Croc’s team wants to come every day and contribute their best.
For this project, Crocs chose an untouched industrial flex core and shell building with over 20-foot ceilings, skylights, and a 360-degree window panorama flooding the space with natural light. We used that to provide an open, light-filled response to help their creative teams as well as their many complex business teams thrive.
The design team incorporated living walls, undulating shoe display walls, and flowing, interconnected workspaces as central themes to drive the concept.
Similarly, all aspects of lighting and the entire mechanical duct layout were carefully crafted to contribute to the story.
Privacy, needed in such a competitive industry, also had to be balanced with an open, dynamic, and memorable space that embodied their vision, substance, and product – no matter where they were seated.
Thoughtful layout of public and private spaces intentionally breaks up the largely open workplace and also promotes cross-departmental collaboration. Open ceiling huddle spaces, varieties of small gathering areas, and collaborative teaming nodes all connect in the center of the building in a multi-functional hub for social gathering, individual work, and team-building.
From punchy platform clogs to the unpretentious athleisure sneakers, these people love their company. The architects mirrored their passion with a human-centric, team-minded, warmly connected space. The result is a meaningful experience in a place that furthers their work and contributes to even better products for people.
In addition to iconic (and comfortable) footwear, Crocs’ success comes from its singular core. After years of significant growth, Crocs was looking to celebrate an exciting new chapter for their business, starting with a new 88,000 square foot corporate headquarters in their home state of Colorado.
The goal was to give employees a reflection of Crocs’ democratic, easygoing culture. Crocs is not a flashy company. They unapologetically embrace their optimistic, innovative, fun, simplicity minded ethos. We sought to interpret that culture and the product driving it architecturally; to approach the project with the same keen eye and people-purposed design that their products provide.
The renovation restores Commons to its historic role as a campus hub, drastically enhancing programming by bringing 12,000 square feet of space online that had sat unused for decades
because of building code restriction.
By implementing a new mechanical system and adding new elevators and accessible entryways, the architects brought this space up to code and used it to introduce 16 new classrooms and the Peer Learning Lab. This signature cross-disciplinary center supports peer-to-peer instruction, group collaboration, and individual study.
But as the college expanded northwards, Commons became the geographic center of campus—a condition at odds with its original design as a bookend building. The small back-of-house entry now featured prominently in the Bennington landscape, and the building—never meant to be transversed from north to south—had convoluted interior pathways that impeded pedestrian circulation between the campus’s two halves.
The renovation resolves this, remaking Commons as a gateway that joins the two halves of campus and establishes connections between the interior life of the building and the surrounding landscape in all four cardinal directions.
By adapting the back-of-house food preparation spaces into front-of-house open kitchens, the architects opened up central north/south and east/west passages through the building. A new double-height glazed entry on the north side acts as a beacon that brings visitors into the central spine.
The design of the entryway reinterprets the building’s original Beaux-Arts geometries in a contemporary architectural language, paying homage to the building’s heritage while lending it a distinctive new presence.
Throughout, the architects also upgraded the mechanical systems and introduced 21st-century sustainability measures to maximize energy efficiency and prepare the building to transition to geothermal energy sources. Before the renovation, there had been no cooling capacity in the building.
The renovation introduces these systems, improving the building envelope to allow two large energy recovery ventilators to be used. These ventilators—which currently run off the campus’s biomass steam plant—are configured to transition seamlessly to geothermal energy sources. Further sustainability measures include heat pumps on a single water loop that allow energy to be shared throughout the building, and low flow fixtures in the gender-neutral bathrooms.
Architects: Venture Architecture
Client: Crocs, Inc.
Photographers: Caleb Tkach
