A Tour of PwC’s Elegant New Office in Paris

PwC, a global consulting firm that offers assurance and tax services, recently hired architecture and interior design firm Vincent & Gloria Architectes to design their new part office, part experience centre in Paris, France.

“Breaking the corporate style specific to the tertiary world, the company has invested a beautiful Haussmannian mansion. More than just a simple workspace, it is an innovation laboratory, a place of collaboration and co-creation, immersive and creative.The visitor is invited to live a customer experience: a black wire guides him on the whole site, it runs on the walls, the floor and the ceiling. It sometimes interrupts to indicate the name of the rooms or to become communication medium. It links the different spaces that illustrate the stages of the process of reflection and creation of Design Thinking projects: Exploring, Creating, Realizing. The uses have been studied to be reinvented in order to create adapted and disruptive spaces. Directing ideas has been breaking codes.

Visitors are not greeted conventionally in a lobby but directly by the teams in the living areas. They meet there, they exchange, they work differently.
These are the Social Hub, Social Plug, Hub, Agora … Audacious and offbeat, modern and colorful interventions relate and strengthening the Haussmannian heritage character of the places found within the framework of the rehabilitation project.

Visitors are not invited in conventional and corporate meeting rooms but in co-creative rooms.In the User Lab, problems are observed, designed as an apartment where we study the behaviour of users to bring out the issues.
In the Flash room, the avenues of reflection are explored. Empty and modular room, an anamorphic flashing evokes the idea that coming up..In the Jungle Room, they explore to find the way to the good ideas. The immersion is total: jungle wallpaper on the walls creates the perspective and decor, a plant composition dotted with bright spots on the ceiling creates the canopy. We opted for wood and green laminate furniture.

In the Dream room, ideas are emerged.In the Crystal room solutions are developed. In the Fab Lab, models are prototyped. In the Sigma Room, works are exposed. Projects are developed in small working rooms called War Rooms. A colored square on the ceiling is reminiscent of the post-it with which teams work and a black and white graphic floor animates the space. The furniture is light, heterogeneous to promote mobility, exchange and dynamism. Open Space is a quieter place. We favor clear tones, streamlined furniture and sobriety in the treatment of the existing where the intervention is minimal. The walls and ceiling remain white, the parquet floor is preserved,” says Vincent & Gloria Architectes

• Location: Paris, France
• Date completed: March 2019
• Size: 14,272 square feet
• Design: Vincent & Gloria Architectes
• Photos: Arnaud Schelstraete