This was an amazing opportunity. We'd only been in business for 3 years when we were asked to submit our qualifications to design and construct the main lobby for Oracle's new Corporate Headquarters. We, of course, didn't have any, so we instead came up with a complete design, with elaborate drawings and a small model of our idea. Amazingly, we managed to convince Laura Seccombe (Oracle's Interior Designer) and Larry Ellison that as cool as this design was we could also build it. It was a huge break for us, eventually leading to us designing the desks for the executive office, another lobby, and Mr. Ellison's San Francisco residence. I will never be able to thank them enough for that support. Gensler was the architect for the campus, and they had a grid of 30 inch square green granite floor tiles in the lobby. We came up with this idea of taking some of those 30 inch squares and turning them into granite blocks that would then support the seating off of narrow steel beams spanning between the blocks. It was as though some of the granite tiles had been extruded upwards out of the floor, but in the process they had fractured- leaving polished and split faces of the stone. The reception desk is a large stainless cylinder, recalling the circular plan of the buildings themselves, with a greenish-blue cast glass reception top. This glass looks a lot like ice and combined with the split granite blocks reinforces a kind of elemental, almost glacial character within the space. It is a very powerful, very assertive statement- and I think it captures who Oracle (and Larry) are.
Client: Larry Ellison
Project Lead: Olle Lundberg
Contractor: Lundberg Design
