John A. Hartford Foundation
The offices for the John A. Hartford Foundation are located in midtown Manhattan. The foundation-a leader in health-care, aging research, and education-required a flexible work environment that could be reconfigured easily to meet its changing needs. The program for the project included a reception area, library, exhibition
gallery, boardroom, meeting rooms, enclosed offices, and flexible workspace.
We defined the office space as a fluid landscape of overlapping meeting and work areas. Sliding walls, wooden screens, and shutters set into patinated steel frames move to allow work spaces to accommodate large formal presentations, small informal work sessions, or social gatherings. Screens and shutters also serve to manipulate natural and artificial light; the effects of such manipulation register on clear, patterned, mirrored, and opalescent glass.
The choice of materials was predicated not only on their ability to register the effects of light but also on how they weather over time. Patinated steel, beech, limestone, waxed steel, and oiled bronze-the primary materials used in the project-become richer with time and with use and suggest that aging can be a
positive process.
