serial consign

This most recent edition of Metropolis has an interesting piece on the intersection of the practices of anthropologist and researcher Karen Stephenson and Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects. Stephenson was hired by Chronicle Books as a "organizational consultant" to assist in the spatial design of their new office. The size of the publisher's staff had doubled over the past decade, and the company had simply made do with the limitations and layout of their previous location. In planning the conversion of their new space (a four-story former ironworks), Chronicle creative director Michael Carabetta brought Stephenson on board to help schematize an idealized office workflow as the basis for a programme for Mark Cavagnero Associates to work with. Stephenson is a Harvard-educated anthropologist turned management guru who has enjoyed widespread recognition ever since being profiled in Designs for Working, a 2000 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell.

The diagram above illustrates the departmental breakdown of Chronicle Books and maps the connectivity between various teams. It is worth noting that the editorial department (marked "second floor") only comprises about 20% of the Chronicle labour force, and the crux of "tuning" the organization is in streamlining relationships between semi-related support activities such as design and marketing or publicity and contracts. A number of key relationships have been identified with arrows and we can assume that the connection between design and editorial, design and sales and sales and accounting have been selected as primary factors in the architectural interpretation of the programme.

It is always interesting to see how an elaborate network diagram is translated into architecture. While cross sections are seldom as sexy as complex social maps, the essence of the original study is implicit in the above section of the new Chronicle Books facility. We can see quite clearly how the original mapping of social interactions has resulted in the vertical and horizontal distribution of the Chronicle departments and even how this has informed the location of circulation. All in all, the project is a concise little case study on the relationship between social mapping and architectural design.

If you're interested in learning more about this project be sure to take a look at this month's Metropolis. You can learn a little more about Karen Stephenson through a CNN piece on her from 2006 and her list of publications also features several PDFs for download.