Uber’s Chicago Headquarters
SERVICES
Environmental Design
Brand Design
CREDITS
Creative Direction: Tristan Butterfield, Riley Atlas
Brand Designer: Cassidy Day
Interior Design Team: Jessica Gracey, Riley King, Jeffrey Lawrence, Laura Bishop
Created while under employment of Gensler.
CLIENT
Uber
Tasked with designing Uber's new Chicago office in the Old Post Office, we worked with Uber to first establish a guidebook and methodology for all architectural and graphic moves across the space.
The Old Post Office was a nexus of activity for the transport of mail throughout the country. It served Chicago’s great volume of postal business, with 19 million pieces of mail processed each day, allowing for new communications and connections all over the world.
Similarly, Uber serves the world with peer-to-peer ridesharing, food delivery, freight services, and new mobility systems. It allows for all things to get from point A to B. Regardless of what it contains, Uber sets it in motion.
Drawing parallels between the historic context of the site and Uber's diverse offerings, our team embraced movement as our central theme.
Moving the world, together.
Moving the world, together.
We distilled visual inspiration from the site, the company's services, and global culture to inform our design decisions.
Next, we used volumes in motion to define space, surface, and texture. By utilizing two simple volumetric forms: a cube and a cylinder we generated layers of function, form, and artistic interest.
The seven drivers, outlined below, then layered on top of our central concept of movement to provide meaning to every aspect of the project.
Our guidebook became a north star–documenting our methodology and acting as a guide for both the interiors and brand teams to reference for all architectural and graphic moves across the space.
Drawing no distinction between architecture, interiors, furniture, objects and branding, our multi-disciplinary team worked together to distill visual inspiration from the site, Uber’s services and global culture to inform our design decisions. It was important to us that, regardless of scale, everything we created followed this methodology.
The concepts for the digital feature wall all center around expressing analogue through digital. We are representing physical, tactile, analogue objects and rendering them through progressive digital technology.
Drawing inspiration from the original zipcode billboards found in the Old Post Office, each cantilevered conference room is marked with a number and name reflecting both past and present tenants. The zipcode highlights the significance of Uber’s new hub in Chicago.
Signage and wayfinding become important anchors across both floors, giving each space it’s own unique identity.
Due to the immense scale of this floor plate, we set out to create landmark moments as a method of wayfinding and orientation. Columns running along the main corridor follow a colorful ombre system, moving from the blue stair (plan west) to the red stair (plan east).
The two feature walls on the south side of the building will showcase graphic wheatpaste posters. Inviting the urban environment in, this approach emphasizes the human scale, allowing for more intimate moments and the discovery of new messages over time. The impermanent and cumalitive properties of this medium speak to Uber’s presence in this historic site.
