General Assembly Flagship Redesign

Redesigning and reinventing a global education company’s flagship campus.

Role: Global Creative Director
Company: General Assembly
Design Architect: Kora Architecture
Architect of Record/PM: De La Garza Architecture

Task

General Assembly, well known as one of the innovators of the tech bootcamp, wanted to update its flagship location, a 2-floor campus and corporate office in Manhattan, New York. The expectation was for this design to become a blueprint for all the other campuses across the world to follow as they updated their interiors over time.

Idea

Rather than just update, we took the opportunity to rebrand and redesign in a pivotal moment when the company was growing and changing. To project the idea that General Assembly is no longer a small startup, but an established leader in the BootCamp space. It aligned with a timely business pivot to focus primarily on reskilling individuals from the ground up. The focus of the entire design would center on one brand pillar: transformation.

Research

Research began with assessing the current set of campuses and seeing what tied them together from a physical and from a spatial sense

Current Campuses across the world

Pain Points

Lack of Continuity

Marterials, designs and furniture varied from campus to campus
Each space had been designed as a one off and in a mindset to get as many students into the space as possible.

Noise and workspace

The biggest student complaint was that the space was very noisey.
The space was a large, open area and we needed to create area for students to be able to meet, collaborate and work on their assignments.

Changing atmosphere

Now, in the later half of the pandemic, we needed to crawte a safe space for students with social distancing in mind, and also be aware that many students were searching for a space to get their work done = more students on campus needing more space.

Strategy

Our strategy was to preserve what we could, keeping the well-known elements of our interior and creating a more sophisticated and modern look while still taking into account the needs of the students, instructors and staff members.

Challenges

We had an extremely tight budget and timeline. We were working through the pandemic with many vendors who were working on heavy delays for construction, shipping and fabrication. Working with engineers, construction teams, designers, architects and internal staff

Uses to consider

Events, classrooms, meeting rooms, library, lounge, pantry, storage, staff workstations, conference rooms, phone booths, executive area