DigitalOcean Offices – New York City

Firm
  • Client DigitalOcean,
  • size 18,000 sqft
  • Year 2016
  • Location New York City, New York, United States,
  • Industry Technology,
  • RA-DA has designed the new offices of cloud infrastructure and hosting company DigitalOcean located in New York City.

    DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers. They are now the world’s second largest web hosting provider, second only to Amazon.

    Nailing the culture of this relatively new company was key in our early explorations for the design. This was their first move into a formal office and they had not been through this exercise before. They had a clear sense of identity though so our task was to hone in on that and figure out how to articulate that in the architecture.

    After a series of concept studies, the client selected a scheme that we called ‘Secret Circuit’. The idea behind this scheme was to leave the space as open as possible and use a series of boxes to strategically and discreetly organize the space. The boxes provide private meeting and office space, to balance the open work plan. They envelop columns and are offset from one another creating negative space between them used for work zones, small meeting zones and lounge zones. There is a certain level of discovery as people move through the space, encountering different kinds of open space and enclosed volumes. This sense of a looser floor plan and organization fit with the culture of the young firm.

    Design: RA-DA
    Photography: Ralf Strathmann