Mother, London

Category

Workplace

Location

London, UK

Year

2004

Area

42,000 SF

Photographer

Adrian Wilson, Francisco Radino

Since its inception in 1996, Britain’s top advertising agency, Mother, had all of their staff work around a table. As the company grew, so did the table. For their new workplace housed within a 42,000-square-foot warehouse in Shoreditch, Clive Wilkinson Architects proposed constructing a table with a capacity of 200 people.

To access the third floor, the Design Team planned a new concrete staircase cutting through the building to connect the floors. The 4.2-meter-wide staircase turns into the agency’s concrete worktable and circuits through the upper floor like a racetrack, becoming perhaps the world’s largest table at 250 feet long. To mitigate sound in the hard factory space, we designed 2.1-meter-long lamp shades padded with 75mm of acoustic foam. The 50 light fixtures were covered with unique patterns of Marimekko fabric selected from the Finnish textile manufacturer's archive, achieving the effect of a large art installation. The inspiration for the concrete table was the iconic 1920s Giacomo Matte-Trucco roof top race track for Fiat Lingotto in Turin — making a monumental statement about the most ephemeral of arts: advertising.