The office of Armenian software development company BigBek is located in Yerevan’s Soviet era automotive manufacturing plant called ErAZ (Erevanskiy Avtomobilny Zavod) which is now transforming into office spaces for Armenia’s intensively growing IT community. The main goal of this project was to create an open workspace for up to 30 employees with a strict functional division in only 177 square meters. Besides the main workspace, the client asked for a lounge zone, a small kitchen and a meeting room. To keep the space as open as possible we made a decision to divide the functional zones without physical barriers, by creating optical ones.

Each zone has its own color which makes visible borders between them. The location of each listed above zone was dictated by the shape of the floor plan. The bright colors, geometry and brutal concrete ceiling of this interior are creating a dynamic, playful and creative atmosphere for work. The first decision we made during the design process was to keep the old Soviet era prefabricated concrete slabs exposed, to highlight the industrial charisma of the building. The kitchen is envisioned like a projection of a yellow box into the corner of the space.

Its bright, saturated yellow outline creates an invisible volume in the space which interacts with the magenta colored meeting room, the only physical volume in the interior. We’ve tried to make the main lighting design as minimal as possible using cross-like organized 1.5m long LED tubes which are graphically interacting with the intersecting colors of the wall in the back of the office. Armstrong’s linoleum flooring had a big impact on the final result of the project as it gave us freedom to implement our primary ideas in this interior. We found all the needed colors for the division of different zones of the interior as we envisioned it. The technical characteristics of the material and its durability are satisfying for commercial use.

Design: SNKH Architectural Studio
Photography: Sona Manukyan & Ani Avagyan

http://www.archdaily.com/802291/bigbek-office-snkh-architectural-studio