RTO+P | Company Headquarters

Locating an internationally recognized ad agency from their high-rise location looking down at Philadelphia’s iconic city hall to a ground floor former retail space with wrap-around storefront windows, offered an opportunity to showcase the firm’s creative culture and eclectic art collection in their new public facing headquarters.  The heart of the project is a large collaborative lounge anchored by an elliptical shaped bar, clad in handmade glazed ebony tiles and topped by a white stone countertop.  The cast-in-place concrete structure of the existing building is sandblasted to remove a century of paint and grime highlighting the robust mushroom capped round columns arrayed in a diagonal grid throughout the floor plan.  Wide plank white oak flooring is laid in a chevron pattern in counterpoint to the pitted texture of the concrete ceiling above.  Each side of the room is bracketed by floor to ceiling, 3-foot-wide white oak panels separated by a thin brass strip between each panel.  Steel framed arch-topped openings lead through pivoting glass doors into conference rooms on one side.  On the opposite side, and open archway connects to a loggia of lounge seating and private offices with views to the exterior public promenade running between the building and the Schuylkill riverfront.